Over on the Athletic this week, I looked at nine September(ish) callups of note; posted a minor-league scouting notebook on Jarlin Susana, Joseph Dzierwa, and other O’s and Nats prospects; and posted a draft scouting notebook covering both the PG All-American and Under Armour games.
I sent out a new issue of my free email newsletter this week. For socials, I’m still mostly on Bluesky, Instagram, and TikTok, and posted a new video to the latter two sites this week about the top three prospects recalled in the last week.
And now, the links…
- Longreads first: Texas Monthly goes very long on the war over the Rio Grande River’s water, with the potential for taps to run dry as early as next year. This is Pulitzer-worthy material.
- ProPublica exposes how Texas AG and Senate candidate Ken Paxton (R) may be violating federal ethics laws. It also sounds like he may be committing mortgage fraud, too?
- Semafor exposes the rise of paid actors using AI scripts in unlabeled and often misleading videos that push outrage bait, often targeted at specific Democratic politicians and candidates, across social media.
- The Trump Administration continues to weaponize the IRS to attack its enemies, threatening to revoke the tax-exempt status of six universities if they don’t bend the knee to his whites-first policies.
- ICE gave a 20-year-old Haitian immigrant and Wright State student, here legally, an ankle monitor. He killed himself a few days later. I’m unclear whose interests were served here.
- Texas Monthly also has the scoop on TCU revoking the Star-Telegram’s media credentials for (checks notes) reporting on something that happened in TCU’s locker room. I didn’t know frogs were that petty.
- Dan Ariely, the best-selling author of Predictably Irrational and the inspiration for the network procedural Irrational, is facing a new round of allegations of research fraud after a review of the data used for a major 2002 paper on procrastination found evidence of fabrication.
- A Yale study estimates that universal health care in the United States would save 114,000 lives and $1 trillion every year. So why is the mere suggestion of it supposed to be some sort of political poison?
- NPR asks what happened to the U.S. campaign to end child marriage? The answer is “Republicans.” And, more specifically, evangelical Christianity’s hold on the party.
- The University of Wisconsin-Madison forced out a professor who (allegedly) slept with and harassed some of his students, so of course Arizona State welcomed him with open arms.
- A German court has found that the AI music software Suno is basically a big plagiarism engine, and now Jason Isbell and other U.S. musicians have filed a suit of their own, this time charging Suno with unlicensed imitation of their voices rather than straight copyright infringement. And now the Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada is suing Suno too.
- Bari Weiss’ CBS News pushed out a story that appeared to tie Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed to the 9/11 attacks.
- California’s legislature passed a bill designed to support – or even save – community news outlets through public investment.
- The police chief in Senatobia, Mississippi, where an officer shot and killed a 1-year-old while pursuing a woman suspected of shoplifting, has been fired. Harold Vanderford had also used racist slurs about Black people in text messages, and tried to resign before he was fired. Maybe Arizona State will hire him?
- The widow of a U.S. airman killed in Trump’s illegal war on Iran had to go to social media to get death benefits because, in her words, the military claimed it wasn’t a war, so she wasn’t entitled to the benefits that accrue to the surviving spouse when a soldier is killed during a war.
- The United States was the only nation to vote against a UN resolution to change its official map to one that reflects Africa’s true size.
I have been getting a lot of text please for money from Democrats here in New york. It seems that they have two stances. Number one of course is Trump is bad. Number two seems to be that they are all hiding behind boasts of military service. I got one congresswoman wannabr who’s bragging about six deployments in afghanistan. So basically she’s bragging about killing people for a lie.
That’s Cait Conley you’re referring to. Interesting way to interpret someone talking about how she served her country while most members of the GOP run from doing anything civic-minded. Serving in the military is not a fault.
Why would it be persuasive for a candidate to tell me he or she served 6 tourns in Afghanistan? Serving 6 tourns (or any number of tours) in a war that we never should have been involved in doesn’t sound like much of a selling point to me.
@Jake On one hand, we are the most propagandized citizenry on Earth, so I don’t think it is useful to hold every military member ultimately and fully responsibility for the sins of empire.
On the other hand, if you’re asking the public to select you to lead them, I think it is incumbent on you to display and communicate sound judgment. If you have displayed little to no understanding of and/or remorse for your complicity in American crimes against humanity, then how am I supposed to trust you to represent the interest of the people?
I highly doubt that any of us are the target audiences of these ads. In any rate, if you consider a candidate publicly noting that she served her country as disqualifying and a reason to vote for a sycophant like Mike Lawler, that’s certainly a choice.
@Jake Asking that the democratic party not put unrepentant war-mongers is not the same thing as support for the republican candidate, and I think you know that
@FrankJones The Afghanistan war devolved into a disproportionate response but I think you’re the first person I’ve seen claim that we never should have been involved in the first place. What would your response to 9/11 have been?
I’m really the first person you’ve heard say that in the last 25 years?
I’ve met lots of people who have said that a years-long war with tens of thousands of civilian casualties is not an appropriate means of capturing one individual.
What would I have done? I don’t know. Sanctions, negotiations, and other political means? Or, use the trillion dollars a year we spend on military to figure out a way to have captured him in a less destructive manner.
Re: Yale study “Their spending analysis also does not account for transition costs, administrative job losses, or how providers might respond to Medicare payment rates.” That’s a Grand Canyon sized asterisk, they aren’t even attempting to model out what would happen in the real world.
There are dozens of countries that have various models of universal healthcare and none of them are insolvent, and in fact many of them are doing better than us in area like life expectancy and wealth inequality. Is that “real world” enough for you?
Ok which country’s system would you like to emulate because it’s overwhelmingly likely you’re thinking of one that taxes its residents substantially more (and no, not just the rich, that wouldn’t come close to covering it). Americans hate taxes so much that not even the DSA dares proposing we do that, they’re just parroting an innumerate old man screeching about millionaires and billionaires without proposing a plausible solution that has any chance of being implemented in America.
We are currently implicitly taxed more through reduced wages under the current model that we would be explicitly taxed in a universal model like m4A. So not only do we get worse coverage, but we pay more. If you dislike taxes, you should support universal coverage, which would reduce tax burden.
https://www.mercatus.org/economic-insights/expert-commentary/medicare-all-explaining-math
“Economic evidence consistently shows that employees effectively pay these taxes in the form of reduced wages and salaries. A Tax Foundation report, for example, says, “[T]here is hardly such a thing as the ‘employer-side’ payroll tax, because almost the entire burden of the payroll tax is passed on to employees in the form of lower wages.””
I must be going insane, did you read the article you linked in full? Hint – it validates exactly the argument I’m making, so thanks I guess?
Yes, that post seems to take Kevin’s side in this.
Americans don’t like paying taxes. Americans also don’t like paying through the nose for health care, including health insurance that increasingly covers less at higher cost. The solution to the latter involves getting over the former. That is a question of policy and a question of marketing.
If you think the Yale study has a $1 trillion hole in it, then I’d like to see those calculations. Yes, we will need higher taxes to pay for universal health care. We pay that cost now on the back end, between higher direct outlays for insurance and actual health care, reduced health outcomes, and earlier deaths.
The point I am making, which the article *from a right-wing think tank* directly supports, is that we already lose more through reduced wages in the current system than we would pay extra in taxes for universal healthcare. We are already “taxed” more for the current system through a different name! If you want to be taxed less for your healthcare, the answer is universal healthcare.
New site design is cool, but did I miss an announcement from your About page?
I’m excited to announce my third book coming in 2027. Even the title is TBD, but it’s going to be a fun one.
The em-dash counter on the home page was chef’s kiss.
He says they’re all his, but that can only mean he’s taken possession of mine. Need him to show me where I waived those rights…
Klaw- was Doug Eddings’s episode of Ump Show the most racist in recent memory? I think so.
On another note- Chuck Schumer’s daughter is now chief lobbyist for Open Ai in DC. Because the Democrats are just a scummy as the Republicans.
I can’t believe we’ve already come full circle to “both sides are just as bad” thinking. Depressing.
I can’t begin to imagine thinking that the Democrats are as bad as the GOP at this point. Purity tests like this are exactly why we’re losing our republic.