abortion — Page 2

→ September 14, 2024
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 9/14/14.

Light week here for writing and links, although it looks like I’ll have two columns at the Athletic this upcoming week.

Over at Paste, I reviewed The Vale of Eternity, a card-drafting game that’s a lot harder than it looks, especially because of its quirky mechanism of handling coins when you buy and sell cards.

I also sent out a new edition of my free email newsletter on Saturday. You can sign up here.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Ted Chiang, author of the short story that became the film Arrival, wrote about the false promise of AI for creating art in the New Yorker.
Magnetic “therapy” is not backed by any evidence, but parents of autistic children are turning to it anyway out of desperation and denial.
States are using flawed drug test results as the justification for taking children away from their parents, according to this investigative report from the Marshall Project.
Cloud storage and AI are driving massive increases in energy usage, but the tech firms behind them are fighting efforts to make them pay their fair share. Large language model algorithms are very energy intensive; they shouldn’t be so freely available when they have such high hidden costs.
Idaho’s abortion ban is putting the lives of women at risk and forcing doctors to ignore their training, similar to what we’ve already seen in other states that couldn’t wait to put a giant foot down on women’s necks after Dobbs.
Texas AG Ken Paxton is suing to ensure the state can access medical records of Texans who go out of state for abortions, gender-affirming care, or other medical treatment that is none of the state’s business.
Two Florida voters who signed a petition to get abortion access on the ballot found themselves visited by Gov. DeSantis’s voter intimidation unit.
A town council member in Jefferson County, Colorado, shot a 17-year-old teen in the face, through the windshield of the victim’s car, as the boy and his friend were looking for a place to take homecoming pictures. The victim is hospitalized in serious condition and Brent Metz is facing multiple charges.
I enjoyed Will Bunch’s evisceration of Donald Trump’s performance at the debate on Tuesday against VP Kamala Harris.
A fishing village in Kenya that has also become a popular tourist destination is disappearing as sea levels rise due to climate change.
The Times reports on the efforts to rebuild the Libyan city of Derna a year after two dams failed and the city flooded, killing over 4000 people. Libya has two rival governments in place, and the one funding the $2 billion effort has given power to run the program to the son of a powerful warlord, raising fears of corruption and more shoddy work.
“Debate in nuclear-armed former colony fails to reassure global community.” Hat tip to Craig Calcaterra and his essential Cup of Coffee newsletter for alerting me to this satirical gem.
The most recent edition of the Times’ Modern Love column is a gut-punch.
The Kickstarter for Pantheum: Demigods of Olympia, an intriguing game from a new publisher, is about to clear $100K as I write this on Friday night.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: abortion, africa, board game news, florida, guns, idaho, kenya, links, longreads, pseudoscience, stick to baseball, texas, voter suppression

→ September 7, 2024
→ By keith

Two new posts for subscribers to the Athletic this week – one just on Red Sox prospects I saw recently, including their top 3 prospects plus 18-year-old Franklin Arias; and another on prospects from several other orgs, including Jarlin Susana (Nats), Vance Honeycutt (O’s), and Parker Messick/C.J. Kayfus (Guardians). This past week’s schedule really did me no favors, unfortunately, and nearly all of the teams close to me missed the playoffs.

At Paste, right at the end of August I had a review of the game Rock Hard 1977, designed by former Runaways bassist Jackie Fuchs (Fox); and a related ranking of the five best thematic games I’ve played.

And now, the links…

Louisiana hospitals are pulling misoprostol, a life-saving medication used in cases of post-partum hemorrhaging, off emergency response carts because of evangelicals’ control of the state’s government. A new law in the state reclassified the drug as a Schedule IV controlled dangerous substance, which is not even remotely backed by evidence.

The public interest group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, along with a retired federal judge and two constitutional lawyers, filed a brief arguing that Judge Aileen Cannon should be reversed and removed from the case involving criminal charges against Donald Trump. I doubt this goes anywhere in any time to matter, though.

After the 2020 election and the January 6^th insurrection, several big tech firms kicked Trump off their platforms and major media outlets appeared at least to push back on his constant falsehoods, but those guardrails are largely gone as those for-profit entities see dollars in a competitive race.

Michael Hiltzik isn’t in that camp: he calls out Trump’s blatant lying and pandering to transphobes after the convicted felon lied in an interview with a co-founder of the hate group Moms for Liberty about schools essentially kidnapping kids and turning them trans.

By now you’ve probably seen that right-wing media platform Tenet Media was funded by the Russian-owned media firm RT to spread pro-Russian propaganda and interfere with U.S. elections. Tenet’s podcast/video hosts include(d) Tim Pool, Lauren Southern, Benny Johnson, and Dave Rubin. Here’s the BBC with more, and Matt Gertz offering commentary where he points out that the hosts who claim they were unwitting “victims” have no one to blame but themselves, citing Pool’s video rant on how Ukraine was “the enemy of” the United States.

Donald Trump shared a post from a Twitter account that has denied the Holocaust and said that Hitler was right, as well as routinely using the n-word and claiming that Jews were behind 9/11.

Trump is now losing ground in states where he was competitive or safely in the lead, including New Hampshire, North Carolina, and Florida.

Trump’s rants, online and in rare interviews, are growing increasingly incoherent, so why does the mainstream media “sanewash” them for him? Use his own words and let readers or viewers judge, rather than making these irrational comments sound normal.
Haaretz called out Tucker Carlson for hosting a Holocaust denier on his Twitter video show, and Elon Musk for amplifying him.

Vaccine opt-outs continue to climb in Florida schools, including life-saving vaccines like MMR and TDaP. The inevitable outcome of this is kids hospitalized or killed by ignorance, made possible by the state’s governor and surgeon general coming out strongly against vaccinations.

A Minnesota police officer with a long history of driving misconduct, including causing four crashes while on duty and driving 135 mph in a 55 mph zone without using his siren or lights, hit another car while driving 83 mph, killing an 18-year-old passenger. Shane Roper had been suspended twice for his driving but was still on the force and allowed to drive a police car.

Author Kurt Anderson wrote that while they were in college together, RFK Jr. sold him cocaine, which doesn’t exactly dovetail with Trump’s sort-of policy intention to execute drug dealers.

Stanford has gutted its creative writing program, which was founded in 1946 by Wallace Stegner, terminating the current positions of 23 of its lecturers and moving them to short-term contracts.

25^th Century Games has a new Kickstarter up for a fresh printing of their new edition of the Reiner Knizia game Ra, along with a new game from Knizia called Ratzia.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: 2024 election, abortion, anti-semitism, disinformation, florida, links, louisiana, minnesota, police, russia, stanford, stick to baseball, trans rights, vaccines

→ August 31, 2024
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 8/31/24.

I’m back to work this week, having gone to Delmarva on Wednesday night to catch Boston’s latest teenaged phenom, Franklin Arias, and will have a long scouting notebook up in a day or two covering that and three other games I haven’t written up yet. I’m a little at odds and ends for next week, as it looks like the schedules of the local teams are pretty unfavorable, and I may have to wait and see on the playoffs.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the board game Rock Hard 1977, designed by Jackie Fuchs, a four-time Jeopardy! champion who happened to be the bassist for the influential rock band the Runaways under the name Jackie Fox. It’s fantastic, and spurred me to rank my five favorite thematic board games (meaning games where the theme is great and well-integrated with game play).

I’ve been holding off on a newsletter until that review went up, so I’ll try to get one out this weekend. You can sign up for free in eager anticipation.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Brandon Anderson founded a group dedicated to abolishing the police, only to siphon funds from it to pay for luxury travel and clothing for himself. The employee who caught him was faced with a dilemma: Report her boss to the very police they were trying to abolish, or let him continue to defraud supporters?

“The truth is that Staten Island kind of sucks.” I’d argue that’s half-right; Staten Island just sucks. It’s the worst of the five boroughs, lacking the culture or diversity of the other four – and it doesn’t have the subway. New York should just hand it to New Jersey. The two states should build a bridge from Jersey City straight to Brooklyn. But this Baffler longread argues that it sucks because it’s Trumpy and xenophobic, and that there are other “little Staten Islands” around the rest of the city, too. And now they’re talking about seceding from the rest of the city on which they depend for their financial existence.

Here’s more on Trump’s plans for a second term as detailed by Project 2025, with notes on the just-released videotapes that describe how Trump has been to the organization’s offices and “blessed” the project, and vaccine developer Paul Offit’s piece on how damaging Project 2025 would be to public health.

A new pre-print found that sports betting led to higher credit card balances, reduced net investment, and more spending on the lottery, with the effects stronger among “financially constrained households.” That is, introducing sports betting in a state/city disproportionately impacts the poor – those who can least afford the losses and negative externalities associated with gambling.

The City of Philadelphia released a farcical economic “study” that purports to show that building a new sports arena in Chinatown will benefit the city even though the 76ers already play in a perfectly usable facility that doesn’t require destroying a historic neighborhood and displacing residents.

The city of St. Petersburg suspended its HR director for approving $250,000 in bonuses for city employees involving in the boondoggle of helping fund a new stadium for the Rays. The city has since rescinded the bonuses.

Defector has an excellent piece on the toxic nature of modern fandom and how it has already driven Chappell Roan to threaten to quit music.

Falun Gong, the Chinese cult that produces the right-wing fountain of false information known as the Epoch Times, has gradually taken over a small town in upstate New York … and the residents aren’t exactly up in arms about it.

Once upon a time, Chipotle was the “good” fast-food outlet, trying to use better quality ingredients and cultivate relationships with farmers, but ultimately, the profit motive has won out – they’ve been accused of denying raises to unionized workers at a Michigan location in violation of federal law.

Lionsgate put out a trailer for the new Francis Ford Coppola film Megalopolis that included a bunch of fake quotes from movie critics blasting some of the director’s older and more acclaimed movies. Megalopolis looks like it’s going to be a giant disaster, after mostly bad reviews at Cannes and multiple stumbles already from the studio and the director.

Turning Point, the right-wing group headed by Christian nationalist Charlie Kirk, is spending millions of dollars in swing state Wisconsin to support Donald Trump.

The Observer’s Carole Cadwalladr writes of how Elon Musk helped incite the racist riots in the U.K. – and may very well plan to do the same here this fall. At their sister publication, the Guardian, Robert Reich suggests six ways to try to reduce Musk’s power.

Dozens of fake accounts on Twitter used photos of real women in Europe to pose as Trump supporters and post right-wing propaganda, according to a study from CNN.

Meanwhile, Judge J. Michael Luttig, a conservative jurist appointed by President George H.W. Bush, endorsed Kamala Harris for President while calling Trump’s candidacy an existential threat to our democracy.

Tom Nichols excoriates the ongoing decline of the conservatives who threw in their lot with Trump – including Rich Lowry, who published an editorial in the New York Times claiming Trump could win the election on “character.”

Ohio Republicans, who have repeatedly shown themselves to be some of the worst enemies of democracy, have approved language for an anti-gerrymandering ballot question that is designed to confuse voters into voting their way. Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, who voted seven times to use district maps that were ruled unconstitutional by courts, drafted the confusing language.

Why is Missouri using taxpayer money to subsidize an anti-abortion group that operates in Illinois and beyond? Missourians have helped fund Coalition for Life and similar nonprofits with over $11 million in tax credits, much of which now flows out of state.

Arkansas banned abortion and touts itself as “pro-life,” but has some of the highest maternal and infant mortality rates in the country, which sure sounds like a preventable problem if life was something they actually cared about.

A cop in Massachusetts raped a girl he met through the state’s program for kids interested in law enforcement careers and then murdered her when she became pregnant, according to charges filed last week. The article I linked refers to “sex acts” before the victim, Sandra Birchmore, was 16 years old, but doesn’t use the correct word for it: rape. This is statutory rape and we need to stop normalizing it by avoiding the term.

A Republican judge in North Carolina is refusing to recuse himself from two cases involving his father. That ought to be an impeachable offense.

Fox News is touting RFK Jr’s endorsement of Trump despite his history of lying about vaccines, which helped kill 83, mostly kids, and sicken thousands in a measles outbreak in Samoa in 2018.

Mainstream news outlets complaining about the DNC’s credentialing of over 200 content creators are authoring their own extinction, according to Mark Jacob, whose newsletter covers the way right-wing propagandists have run rings around the MSM. Jacob argues that journalists need to refocus on real journalism, like investigative pieces, now that the subjects can often go around them to talk directly to their audiences/customers.

For example, the New York Times’s Edgar Sandoval reports on dubious “voter fraud raids” conducted in Texas against Latino Democrats, an apparent attempt at voter intimidation by Texas AG Ken Paxton.

A conservative alumni group at the University of Virginia has pressured the school into suspending campus tours given by a student-run service because they talked about how Thomas Jefferson owned slaves and raped them. Really.
The denialist group Biosafety Now, which continues to push the debunked lab-leak theory and includes a wide number of prominent anti-vaxxers, has added economist Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, whose advice to then-President Trump on the pandemic was disastrous, to its board. This same group has worked closely with Republicans in Congress to push false claims that China is responsible for creating SARS-CoV-2 and should be held responsible for damages.

Bhattacharya is also organizing a forum at Stanford for COVID minimizers and denialists, including those who called for wide infection to achieve herd immunity and architects of other fiascos like Sweden’s hands-off approach. Stanford’s new President will even speak at the event.

The Kickstarter for Everdell Duo, a two-player version of one of my favorite games of all time, has 12 days left to run and has already raised over $280,000.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: abortion, arkansas, coronavirus, cults, denialism, gambling, links, longreads, Media, missouri, movies, new york city, ohio, police, project 2025, social media, stadium scams, stick to baseball, texas, vaccines, virginia, voter suppression, wisconsin

→ June 29, 2024
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 6/28/24.

I posted my second mock draft for 2024 on June 19^th, and on Friday posted a scouting report on Japanese first baseman Rintaro Sasaki, who’s playing in the Draft League this summer and will play for Stanford in the spring. Both are for subscribers to The Athletic. I also held a Klawchat the day of the mock draft.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Pixies, a great small-box game for family play, good for kids as young as 7 but solid enough for the adults to enjoy.

I’ll be back on Stadium on Monday at 2 pm ET for Diamond Dreams, assuming American Airlines doesn’t wait six hours and then cancel my flight like they did this past week. So much for my idea that flying the night before would help make travel easier.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Sellout Crowd tried to create an Athletic-like site for Oklahoma sports news, but it appears the founders’ claims of funding weren’t true and the writers, many of whom left established jobs to join Sellout, weren’t paid for months.
Ethiopian President Abiy Ahmed won the Nobel Peace Prize for ending his country’s long war with its former province Eritrea … and then started a campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Tigrayan people. The Guardian looks at how he beguiled – or fooled – the western world.
Extremely important: Scientific American has a piece on how the dual-heart cardiovascular system of a Time Lord might work.
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation has the story of three former conspiracy theory believers who found their way out of hoax-world.
An economist whose work on gun rights and laws is often cited by opponents of gun regulations has failed to disclose his financial ties to the gun industry and the NRA, according to an investigative report by the New York Times.
SCOTUS declined to hear a challenge to Connecticut’s termination of religious exemptions to the mandatory vaccination laws for schoolchildren (which only applies to new schoolkids – older ones can be grandfathered in, regardless of how fraudulent their exemptions were). This is good news for public health: You can choose not to vaccinate yourself, but you shouldn’t have the right to harm your kids or those around them.
Did you see the headlines claiming that lab-grown or plant-based meat alternatives caused heart disease? Not exactly. It turns out that the study behind that didn’t distinguish between types of “ultra-processed” foods, so it included items like ketchup, potato chips, soda, and vodka alongside these so-called vegan “meats.” The lesson, as always, is to think critically about any sensational reporting.
Vaccine developer and scientist Paul Offit debunked the New York Times lab-leak op ed point by point, showing just how badly that piece’s author lied and misrepresented the facts to support her point of view. Over at The Nation, epidemiology professor Gregg Gonsalves and immunology & microbiology professor John P. Moore also called out the Times for its coverage of COVID-19, including the same debunked lab-leak story, authored by someone who “has never worked on infectious diseases or the science of how viruses enter the human population.” Even the Toronto Star weighed in.
The British Medical Association’s BMJ Public Health journal published a study that seemed to claim that excess mortality in Western countries from January 2020 to December 2022 was linked to COVID-19 vaccines. The paper had very serious problems, sparking calls for a retraction from other scientists. The BMJ finally placed a semi-correction called an “expression of concern” on the paper two weeks ago, but that’s far too late after right-wing media pounced on it and claimed it showed these very safe, effective vaccines were the cause.
A Texas woman tried to drown two Palestinian children, including holding a 3-year-old’s head under water, after she made racist remarks to their mother. I’ve seen all kinds of reports online about the accused’s ethnicity or religious background, but none of it appeared real or properly sourced.
Texas’s draconian abortion ban has led to a 13% increase in infant and newborn deaths, many of them nonviable pregnancies or pregnancies where the fetus had some congenital abnormality that would lead to death shortly after birth. I see this as nothing but an increase in suffering.
A Kentucky woman who was raped and impregnated by her stepfather when she was just 12 years old is now campaigning with Dr. Jill Biden. In many red states today, she’d be unable to get an abortion.
What’s been killing off monarch butterflies? Looks like it’s neonicotinoids, an insecticide that is also a prime suspect in colony collapse disorder, which has led to large die-offs of bees across the world. Both bees and monarchs are important pollinators on which we rely to keep our food supply going.
Trump’s “spiritual advisor,” megachurch leader Robert Morris, resigned after it came out that he groomed and molested a 12-year-old girl. The victim told church officials of the abuse, but they allowed him to remain in his position for over 30 years. A senior pastor at a Baptist church in Florida was arrested for possession of child pornography. Michigan state Rep. Neil Friske (R-) was arrested after chasing a stripper down the street while waving a gun. No trans people or drag queens were involved in any of these cases.
Meanwhile, Trump’s former national security adviser conceded that Trump lost the trade war with China. One of the few topics where you get wide agreement from economists is that tariffs are bad, but Trump is promising to enact huge tariffs if he’s returned to office.
A right-wing group is compiling a hit list of federal employees to fire if Trump takes office, as they might interfere with his Project 2025 plans. Totally normal stuff for a liberal democracy.
A Houston doctor has been indicted for leaking documents, including patient names and treatment information, related to gender-affirming care at Texas Children’s Hospital. Eithan Haim has been accused of accessing this information through the hospital’s electronic system without authorization. He’s claiming he’s a “whistleblower” and that gender-affirming care is some form of “abuse.”
The mother of a trans girl who was playing girls’ volleyball at her Florida high school has said the state’s investigation has destroyed her daughter’s life. What a fantastic use of state resources!
This is how you cover a candidate who peddles falsehood after falsehood: CNN’s Daniel Dale goes through 30 lies from a Trump rally in under 3 minutes.
Indie no more: Barnes & Noble is buying Denver bookstore mini-chain Tattered Cover, which has struggled for several years, filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in October and closing three locations. B&N has pledged to keep the five remaining stores open under the Tattered Cover brand and keep “substantially all” of its current employees. Tattered Cover became the nation’s largest Black-owned independent bookstore in 2020 after a sale to Bended Page LLC.
Booker Prize-winning author Arundhati Roy is facing prosecution in India for remarks she made in 2010 on the disputed territory of Kashmir. The United Nations Human Rights Office has called for India to drop the charges. The Washington Post ran an editorial on Thursday saying the prosecution is a sign of Prime Minister Modi’s weakness.
California is returning about 2800 acres to the Shasta Nation, over a century after the United States stole the land as part of the Klamath River Hydroelectric Project, damming the Klamath River and creating an artificial lake. The project also nearly wiped out the native salmon population from the region, but the lake and the two dams that created it are now gone.
A so-called “wilderness therapy” program in North Carolina was shuttered in February after a 12-year-old boy died there, leading the state to revoke its license. Now the coroner has declared his death a homicide after the autopsy revealed he died of asphyxiation while sealed in a bivy to sleep and had no way to extricate himself from the contraption.
The Scottish brewpub chain BrewDog had advance warning that a group of neo-Nazis planned to visit its flagship Waterloo bar, and when they arrived and a staff member of Asian descent complained, BrewDog fired her, according to a story in the Guardian. The brewer has been embroiled in numerous controversies, including their apparent failure to pay fair wages to employees.
Board game news: Bitewing Games has a Kickstarter up for Iliad and Ichor, two new two-player games from Reiner Knizia.
John D. Clair, designer of what I think is the original “card-crafting” game Mystic Vale, has a new card-crafting game in the works called Unstoppable, with a Kickstarter live now and way past its funding goal.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: abortion, board game news, bookstores, california, conspiracy theories, coronavirus, environment, frauds, guns, india, links, longreads, nobel prize, stick to baseball, texas, trans rights, vaccines

→ June 8, 2024
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 6/8/24.

For subscribers to the Athletic, I updated my ranking of the top 50 prospects currently in the minor leagues and then wrote about five prospects who’ve fallen off so far this year. One of them, Adael Amador, is actually in the midst of a hilarious run where he’s hit 6 homers in his last 9 games after hitting just one in his first 37 games … and he’s still only hitting .194/.337/.329!

I’ll be back on Stadium on Monday for Diamond Dreams at 2 pm ET, one segment on Unpacked at around 2:40 pm ET, and possibly a segment on The Rally in the 5 o’clock hour.

I’m at Disharoon Park again today for game 2 of Kansas State vs. Virginia, so I’m rushing to get this posted. So now, the links…

So much from ProPublica this week I’ll give them their own section: Several of Trump’s witnesses in his various trials have received substantial financial benefits from his media company, including raises and promotions. PP’s investigations into how Illinois schools worked in tandem with police to punish students have now led to two civil rights complaints. Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has not fulfilled her promise to stop Nestlé from taking groundwater for free while Flint and other towns lack for clean drinking water.

AIPAC is pushing huge amounts of dark money to defeat members of the so-called “Squad” in the House of Representatives. More than half of that money is coming from CEOs of major U.S. corporations. The Squad members’ crime? Opposing Israel’s assault on Gaza.

The theocracy in Texas remains strong, as the state’s Supreme Court rejected a challenge to Texas’s draconian anti-abortion laws, with the backing of the state’s right-wing Attorney General Ken Paxton. When the Astros offered me a front-office job in 2012, one of the many family-related reasons I turned it down was that I did not want to raise a daughter in a deep red state. This is why.

No, COVID-19 did not come from gain-of-function research, and the evidence overwhelmingly points to a natural origin.

You may have seen the piece in the New York Times op-ed section claiming evidence for the lab-leak hypothesis, written by an author who is not a virologist or epidemiologist and who has been flogging a book (co-authored with a climate-change denier) pushing the lab-leak deal for several years. Scientists have been picking it apart all week: Evolutionary biologist Kristian Andersen posted this thread on BlueSky debunking Alina Chan’s terrible editorial, virologist Dr. Angela Rasmussen did the same on Twitter, and biochemistry professor emeritus Larry Moran also debunked her points in a concise blog post. Chan is wrong, and we have copious evidence showing she’s wrong, but she persists – and she got a giant platform to sell her view.
House Republicans moved on from attacking Anthony Fauci to smearing Dr. Peter Hotez, a prominent voice in the pro-vaccine and pro-science movements who co-developed a low-cost vaccine against COVID-19.

Dr. Thomas Cech won the 1989 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work with the late Sidney Altman on the catalytic properties of RNA. Dr. Cech wrote a long piece for CNN on RNA, COVID-19 vaccines, and the promise of further health gains from mRNA research.

Haaretz reported on how the Israeli Diaspora Affairs Ministry waged a disinformation campaign to influence U.S. lawmakers over their war on Gaza, using fake accounts and websites to spread bogus pro-Israel sentiment. Meanwhile, Gaza’s hospitals are on the brink of collapse and Palestinian children are dying, and Palestinians are finding mass graves where Israel withdraws their forces, all while the West fiddles.

The Columbia Law Review published a massive story from a Palestinian researcher on the Nakba that had been killed by the Harvard Law Review, but the CLR’s board of directors didn’t like it so they took down the journal’s entire website.

Climate change and ocean acidification are already harming marine biodiversity, threatening our food supply and reducing the amount of oxygen available in our atmosphere.

Matt Eddy, the father of a HS graduate at Baraboo High School in Wisconsin, rushed the stage at graduation to prevent the school’s Black superintendent from shaking his daughter’s hand. This is the same school where a group of white students gave a Nazi salute and then claimed they didn’t mean it like that or some other bullshit.

Hamilton Nolan explains that allowing the rich and powerful to opt out of public systems, like mass transit and public education, allows those systems to atrophy and discourages government from repairing them. I think it’s more complicated than that – if you have the money to afford life-saving medical care, should the government prevent you from receiving it? – but his point about mass transit seemed quite relevant given our country’s dismal record on that front.

Sheri Tenpenny, the Ohio doctor and longtime antivax crank who claimed the COVID-19 vaccines made people magnetic, is now being sued by the IRS over $650,000 in unpaid taxes.

Judge Clarence Thomas admitted that he took more trips on Harlan Crow’s dime and failed to report them. Is there any good reason why he’s still on the Supreme Court?

Two Trump-appointed judges ruled that a venture capital fund’s program to provide grants to Black women-owned small businesses violates the Civil Rights Act of 1866.

If Trump wins election, Republicans want him to prosecute Democrats as “payback” for his felony conviction in New York. This should be a way bigger story, but the mainstream U.S. media shows time and again it is not up to the task of accurately covering Trump’s campaign and his threats.

Jared Kushner’s investment fund is in bed with the Serbian government – which is aligned with Russia and denies its role in the Bosnian genocide – in a construction project that will include a memorial to “victims of NATO aggression.”

Rep. Troy Nehls (R-TX) is wearing military medals he did not earn, and even his Republican colleagues are calling him out for it.

Two new Kickstarters of note: Rock Manor Games, owned by my friend Mike Gnade, has a Kickstarter up for a video-game adaptation of their cooperative game Maximum Apocalypse that just funded a day or two ago.

A new tile-laying game from the master designer Reiner Knizia called Rebirth is also up on Kickstarter and extremely funded.

JK Simmons is a board gamer! He mentions Wingspan, Clank!, Thunder Road, and more in this interview with Seth Meyers.

Rascal News, a new subscription site dedicated to tabletop gaming, writes about the consolidation in the space and the threat of AI-generated nonsense. There are still some independent voices in tabletop writing – I would like to think I’m among them – but we’re scattered and we don’t have the same sort of community that exists in, say, the prospect-writing space.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: abortion, board game news, climate change, conspiracy theories, coronavirus, gaza, israel, links, longreads, michigan, scotus, stick to baseball, texas, the swamp, vaccines, wisconsin

→ May 4, 2024
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 5/4/24.

Two new pieces for subscribers to the Athletic this week, a breakdown of the Luis Arraez trade and scouting notes on Justin Crawford and other Phillies, Orioles, and Mets prospects. I’ve also got a draft scouting notebook going up on Sunday with notes on J.J. Wetherholt, Hagen Smith, Peyton Stovall, and Ryan Waldschmidt. And I held a Klawchat on Thursday.

I sent out a new edition of my free email newsletter last Saturday, so I should do another one in a day or two, in theory.

I’ll be back on Stadium on Monday at 2 pm ET for Diamond Dreams and then for one segment of Unpacked at 2:30 pm. The shows re-air throughout the week, roughly twice a day, as far as I can tell. You can watch via the app or with certain subscriptions to Youtube, Fubo, Roku, etc.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The Columbia Spectator, with the help of New York magazine, has a detailed look at the protests, the encampments, the police overreach, and more on campus, through hundreds of interviews with students and faculty across the religious and ideological divides.

In the Atlantic, Tyler Austin Harper writes of how colleges positioned themselves as activist havens when speaking to prospective students, only to find that those students believed them.

The LA Times has the story of a man who engineered the theft of millions of gallons of water from California’s limited resources, while enriching himself and his friends and lying on his income taxes.

ProPublica reports on the EPA’s decision to ignore its own scientists and approve a plastic fuel additive that is nearly guaranteed to cause cancer in anyone exposed to it regularly over a lifetime. Well, a shortened lifetime, I guess.

The Washington Post ran a long piece on the effects of sea level rise on the coastal U.S., much of it in states whose elected officials have denied climate change and fought efforts to mitigate it.

A research study by the Australian government’s Institute of Criminology examined how anti-COVID protests brought together numerous anti-government forces, including those beholden to conspiracy theories and extremist anti-authority sentiments (like so-called “sovereign citizens”).

Amos Goldberg, a Holocaust and genocide researcher at Hebrew University, writes about the assault on Gaza: “Yes, it is genocide.”

Sam Thorpe, a Jewish economist who works as a Senior Research Assistant for the Brookings Institute’s Tax Policy Center, wrote in a series of tweets that it is possible to be Jewish and oppose the actions of Israel in Gaza. He argues that it is imperative for believers to do so, as his faith teaches that all humans are made in the image of God.

Meanwhile, Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich called for the “total annihilation” of Gaza, after which Haaretz called for his firing.

Of course, the American media are more caught up in covering campus protests, and not even getting the angle right, such as the Indiana State Police’s excessive use of force – including setting up a sniper on a nearby building! – against protesters at IU. This link has an interview with ISP Superintendent Doug Carter, who doesn’t seem to have the foggiest idea of what freedom of speech means.

The LA Times’ Michael Hiltzik wrote that college presidents who rush to call in the police haven’t learned a damn thing since the 1960s. Today is the anniversary of the police murdering four students at Kent State who were protesting U.S. involvement in Vietnam, by the way.

Credit goes to the Philadelphia police, however, who declined Penn’s request that they come clear out student protesters unless the school could provide evidence of imminent danger.

CNN’s Dana Bash went on air and parroted a bunch of pro-Israel talking points while comparing pro-Palestinian protesters to Nazi forces.

Ken Klippenstein resigned from The Intercept and revealed some of how management there sought to spike stories critical of Jeff Bezos and other rich, powerful targets, all while apparently paying themselves more while laying off editors and journalists. I’ve linked to quite a bit of Ken’s work here and will probably sign up for his newsletter now that he’s going solo.

Andrew Huberman’s podcast is one of the most popular in America. It’s also rife with false information.

Florida has removed over 22,000 children from its version of the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) this year, defying a federal law designed to protect them. I never though the wolves would eat my face!

Meanwhile, Florida’s farmers are suffering from a lack of labor thanks to the state’s draconian law attacking businesses that used undocumented workers, as are construction businesses, restaurants, and hoteliers, all major industries in the state.

Rep. Mike Collins (R-GA) shared a video of white University of Mississippi students making monkey noises and shouting racist chants at a Black protester, saying “Ole Miss taking care of business” (while using the racist-derived nickname for the school). Collins has previously shared posts from neo-Nazis and suggested murdering migrants, so we shouldn’t be surprised.

Chicago won’t discipline nine city police officers who were (are?) members of the right-wing extremist Oath Keepers group, after the mayor and CPD superintendent had promised to do so.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled that North Carolina and West Virginia can’t deny gender-affirming medical coverage to transgender people. North Carolina sought to specifically deny it to state employees and their dependents, while West Virginia sought to do so for people enrolled in Medicaid.

Arizona’s Kari Lake, running as a Republican for the seat that Krysten Sinema is vacating, is touting State Sen. Sonny Borrelli’s endorsement of her, even though Borrelli – the Arizona Senate Majority Leader has a history of domestic violence allegations against him and said just this March that women should put an aspirin between their knees as a method of birth control.

A second Boeing whistleblower has died. Joshua Dean, who was 45, died of a MRSA infection this week; John Barnett, 62, died in March in an apparent suicide, although friends and family have raised doubts that he took his own life.

The Guardian looks at how many bands make little to no money, even taking losses, from touring. With record sales in the toilet and tours unprofitable, what career is there in making music if you’re not a superstar?

I thought Netflix’s Baby Reindeer was outstanding, and am pulling for the two stars to earn Emmy nominations for their work, especially Jessica Gunning (who plays Martha). NPR’s Glenn Weldon argued that the series bungled its depiction of queerness; I didn’t interpret it this way, but I’m also straight and perhaps not the right person to answer this question.

Two new studies on the economics of sports and sport stadium financing: One that showed that policing becomes more aggressive where there are public subsidies of sports facilities, apparently to help make up for budget shortfalls; the other showed that sporting events lead to an increase in crime, and thus to an increase in spending on policing, two ways in which public subsidies for sports stadiums negatively impact the local economy.

ProPublica reports on a new effort at the IRS to identify illegal tax avoidance schemes by sports-team owners. It would appear these owners are happy to take taxpayer money, but not to pay back in the legally required portion of their profits.

Paris claimed it was going to use the Olympics as a spur to revitalize one of its poorest districts, Seine-Saint-Denis; instead it appears they’ve evicted impoverished residents and decreased the region’s air quality. The district was the site of the 2005 riots against the police that inspired the Oscar-nominated 2019 film Les Misérables.

Antiabortion zealots are trying to force the Amarillo, Texas, city council to pass a ridiculous, unenforceable ordinance forbidding the use of city streets for the purpose of leaving the state for an abortion. Find someone who loves you as much as these people love depriving other people of their rights.

Utah passed a transphobic bathroom law, and in the first week in which the site to report alleged violations was live, they received almost 4000 bogus reports and left a bunch of information unprotected for anyone to access.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: abortion, arizona, chicago, climate change, colleges, environment, florida, gaza, links, longreads, misinformation, mississippi, Music, olympics, paris, police, stick to baseball, taxes, texas, trans rights, utah, water crisis

→ April 13, 2024
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/13/24.

I’ve got some new content coming up this week, with a new draft ranking due to run on Thursday and a draft scouting blog probably running Monday or Tuesday.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the collectible card game Star Wars: Unlimited – Spark of Rebellion, which I enjoyed even though I’m not generally a fan of deckbuilders.

I sent out a new edition of my free email newsletter, detailing a rather ridiculous dinner I had at the bar at The Publican, an acclaimed Chicago restaurant where, to say the least, one does not belch as loudly as one can.

I’m going to be on a new TV show, Diamond Dreams starting on Monday, April 15^th, on the streaming channel Stadium. The show is a half-hour look at prospects around the minors and for the draft, and will be followed by a show on collectibles where I’ll also offer some comments on the prospects they’re discussing. You can watch via the app on pretty much any platform.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: How Elon Musk convinced MAGA partisans that hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) was a treatment for COVID-19 – which it absolutely is not – and set off four years of online misinformation around the pandemic.

Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote in the New York Times about how “colorblindness” has been hijacked by the white-grievance movement, in direct opposition to the original intent of the term, which meant ending racial discrimination against people of color.

Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer wrote about how the Key Bridge disaster demonstrated the importance of immigrants to our society.

A hardcore conservative group is making it harder for Idaho school districts to renovate or upgrade their facilities.

There’s a big scam going around that has tricked a number of content creators into ceding control of their Facebook pages. It starts with what seems to be an invitation to appear on a big podcast, which of course is very appealing to most people trying to build their online audience.

Over half a million Arizonans signed a petition to put codifying abortion rights on the ballot this November. It’s part of a Democratic strategy to drive voters to the polls in purple states – and also, by the way, a basic human right. This comes on the heels of the GOP-packed Arizona Supreme Court reinstating the state’s 1864 abortion ban – yes, a law that predates Arizona’s statehood by almost 50 years.

The Guardian revealed that Boise State Professor Scott Yenor ran Action Idaho, an extreme right-wing site that attacked LGBTQ+ rights and accused Republicans of being insufficiently conservative. Yenor now also works for the Claremont Institute and just a month ago wrote a piece for the Federalist that said DEI had to die for Western civilization to survive.

ProPublica explains how authorities are trying to crack down on gift-card crime rings, where consumers often end up buying gift cards that appear new but that have already been drained of value by crooks.

Maria Bustillos writes in The Nation about the rise of journalist-owned news outlets amidst the ongoing bloodletting in the industry.

David Chang’s Momofuku company is trying to trademark the generic term “chili crunch” to describe a staple Chinese condiment best known as chili crisp – and they’re suing smaller firms to try to have their way.

Why is Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey (R – and not the former pitcher) doing the bidding of Elon Musk by suing Media Matters for reporting on Twitter’s failure to police hate on their site?

Voters in Enid, Oklahoma, removed Judd Blevins (R) from the city council after his ties to white supremacist groups were exposed.

The BBC has a first-person narrative from a woman who found deepfakes of herself online – and eventually learned it was a close friend of hers who made them.

This Twitter thread has some solid details on the IDF’s attack on the World Central Kitchen convoy in Gaza that killed seven WCK volunteers. I don’t know why those seven deaths should lead to more calls for a cease-fire when the 30,000+ Palestinian deaths before that haven’t … of course I do, let’s not kid ourselves.

Marisa Kabas of The Handbasket reposted a piece from the Kansas Reflector critical of Meta’s ad policy around climate change, and moments later, Meta removed all links to both sites from Facebook and Threads. After an outcry, Meta reversed the decision and blamed a “security error,” but, come on.

Landfills emit far more methane than previously believed, more bad news for the planet as methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

Before voters wisely rejected a stadium tax proposal to replace the two perfectly fine sports facilities outside of Kansas City, the KC Studio had a sensible op ed on what a waste tearing down Kaufmann Stadium would be.

Former SCOTUS justice Steven Breyer wants everyone to get along, like his former colleagues on the high court, even though some of those colleagues are busy destroying Americans’ basic civil rights, writes Elie Mystal of The Nation.

The BBC reports on exploitation of workers in Brazil who harvest the common ingredient carnauba wax, bordering on slavery.

Cleveland Plain-Dealer editor Chris Quinn explains why the paper treats Donald Trump differently from other politicians & candidates. Hint: It’s because he lies.

The Atlantic’s David Graham describes the “Trump two-step:” say something outrageous, claim that’s not really what he said or meant, and then quietly embrace the original statement.

The New Republic’s Greg Sargent details just how entrenched election denial, January 6^th denialism, and other insane conspiracy theories are within the Republican party right now.

Mehdi Hasan wrote in the Guardian that Justice Sonja Sotomayor needs to retire from the Supreme Court so President Biden can appoint a replacement, avoiding the possibility that Trump would get to appoint a fourth justice and give the court a 7-2 majority that would likely last decades. I’m not sure if I agree, but he at least offers a solid argument.

Fox News and several right-wing podcasters, including beanie-wearing Tim Pool, are now facing a lawsuit from a man they all falsely identified as a mass shooter. The man’s lawyer previously represented two Sandy Hook parents in their lawsuit against Alex Jones for his false claims that that mass shooting didn’t happen. Fuck ’em up, Socrates.

The Tampa Bay Times published a rare editorial pointing out that public subsidies for sports stadiums don’t work out for taxpayers, as the Rays try once again to soak Floridians for a new facility.

Here’s a great summary and index of economic research showing how consistently these sports stadium deals fail to live up to economic promises. If you’re writing about the topic, or know a journalist who is, this is invaluable, because the pro-stadium forces will always trot out fabricated numbers from consultants who give them what they want.

The PEN America awards are in a bit of a shambles after a number of high-profile authors withdrew their works from consideration or declined prizes in protest of the organization’s perceived bias towards Israel. The authors include Lorrie Moore, who just won the National Book Critics Circle’s Fiction award for I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home.

A senior editor at NPR wrote a bad-faith, error-filled critique of the public radio outlet on Bari Weiss’s blog. NPR responded, defending its hiring practices and its philosophy. You can find many takedowns of Uri Berliner’s original piece, but one fact that got me was that he accused NPR of downplaying or ignoring the lab-leak theory behind COVID-19’s origins, even when the evidence in favor of a zoonotic spillover kept mounting.

WFLA has the story of a young boy with autism who can no longer receive health services because Florida kicked him off Medicaid. We need more stories like this, showing everyday people getting badly hurt by state policies that cut funding for essential services like health care, education, and even school lunches for underprivileged people.

A former youth minister at a Baptist church in Bixby, Oklahoma, has been charged with sexual exploitation of a minor as well as possession and distribution of child pornography. No drag queens were involved.

Chicago police killed Dexter Reed during a traffic stop where he fired first, injuring one officer, after which the cops fired 96 rounds in less than a minute. The Sun-Times reports that the five officers involved in the incident have been investigated a total of 41 times since 2019, and that the area where they stopped Reed has a disproportionate number of traffic stops. The cops have said they pulled Reed over because he wasn’t wearing a seat belt.

The brightest cosmic explosion scientists have ever seen has now led to new questions about how some of the universe’s heaviest metals are formed. The supernova occurred about 2.4 billion years ago in a galaxy far, far away, producing a huge burst of gamma rays but none of the elements like gold or platinum that scientists expected to find.

Delaware State Senator Sarah McBride is running to be our at-large Representative, vying to become the first trans person elected to Congress. She’s one of at least three Democrats hoping to win the primary, which is tantamount to winning the election in our very blue state. Full disclosure: I’ve met Sen. McBride and we often see each other at our local Brew Haha coffee shop.

Is social media really driving a surge in mental illness among teenagers, as Jonathan Haidt claims in his new book? The evidence is mixed at best, according to this review in Nature.

Eric Hovde, who is running for Senate in Wisconsin as a Republican, is now facing backlash over his comments from a previous campaign where he called for cutting Social Security and Medicare benefits, attacked single mothers, said alcohol should never have been legalized, questioned whether farmers work hard, and lots of other great stuff.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: abortion, arizona, chicago, climate change, delaware, Economics, election denial, florida, gaza, idaho, links, longreads, Media, mental illness, misinformation, missouri, physics, police, scotus, social media, stick to baseball, wisconsin

→ March 30, 2024
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/30/24.

I had two new posts for subscribers to the Athletic this week, my annual season predictions post and scouting notes on the Nationals’ Futures Game at Nats Park. I wanted to do a chat, but about 20 minutes before I was going to do it, our Internet went down for four hours. Good times.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Wyrmspan, the new standalone sequel/spinoff to Wingspan, adding a few rules changes to make it more complex while also replacing the birds with dragons.

I spoke to my friend Tim Grierson this week for RogerEbert.com about baseball movies, good, bad, and horrendous. I also appeared on WGN-TV to talk Cubs/White Sox.

I did indeed send around another issue of my free email newsletter, which you should definitely subscribe to if you enjoy my ramblings.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: This Atlantic piece on the campus climate shift around the Israel-Hamas war by Stanford student Theo Baker, who wrote the story on former Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne’s role in faked research that led to his resignation, is one of the best things I’ve read this year. Baker takes a stance while maintaining balance throughout the piece, and this quote sums up the situation in Palo Alto and many other campuses that are caught between protecting freedom of expression and ensuring a safe environment for students: “The real story at Stanford is not about the malicious actors who endorse sexual assault and murder as forms of resistance, but about those who passively enable them because they believe their side can do no wrong.”
New York looks at the toxic personal history of pop-neuroscientist Andrew Huberman, who seems to have a history of psychological manipulation of the women in his life.
New York also has a story from John Herrman on how the pornbots all over Twitter actually try to scam users.
The American Prospect’s Maureen Tkacik looks at how Boeing drove its best engineers out of the company, leading to the small problem of its planes falling apart or crashing. They had the help of the federal government, which has increasingly outsourced regulation of private companies to the companies themselves. It’s wrapped within the story of longtime Boeing employee turned whistleblower John Barnett, who was found dead recently of a gunshot wound to the temple – between days of his deposition in his case against Boeing.
Washington, D.C., Attorney General Brian Schwalb has been investigating whether Leonard Leo’s nonprofits violated their tax status by paying his for-profit companies for various services. Republicans aligned with Leo, who helped Trump pack the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary with extreme conservatives, are now attacking Schwalb for doing his job.
The same is happening to people trying to combat online disinformation around vaccines and COVID-19, as this Atlantic story on the mostly futile efforts to get state medical boards to sanction doctors who spread false information explains.
Billionaire Republican donor Jeff Yass now owns a sizable share of Donald Trump’s Truth Social after it merged with a shell company in which Yass’s investment firm owned about 2%.
Remember how a number of kids who caught COVID-19 pre-vaccines ended up near death with MIS-C, a major inflammatory reaction to the virus? Vaccination significantly reduces the risk that kids will get it.
Long COVID is becoming less common thanks to the vaccines, but many people are still dealing with its long-term effects.
Police in Raleigh, North Carolina, raided the wrong house in April 2021, confusing one Arab family with another in the same neighborhood. Now the cops are refusing to share bodycam footage in the family’s lawsuit, claiming it might “damage officers’ reputations.” Duh.
Author Vernor Vinge, who won three Hugo Awards for Best Novel, died this week at 79. I didn’t love his writing, but he ranks among the best sci-fi authors for his ability to foresee the growth of technology and its rising role in the social order.
Elon Musk tried to use the Center for Countering Digital Hate for reporting fairly on Twitter’s failure to police antisemitic content, and he lost the case in embarrassing fashion. This wasn’t the only bad news for Twitter, as the site has seen its user base collapse in the last six months.
New research found increasing numbers of Americans leaving their religions and citing anti-LGBTQ+ policies and doctrines as well as the endless cycle of sex-abuse scandals in churches as the main reasons.
A study published in JAMA says that Texas leads the U.S. in rapes and rape-related pregnancies in the wake of the overturning of Roe and that state’s mad rush to ~~control women~~ enact an abortion ban.
The wife of the judge in the mifepristone case now before the Supreme Court was herself paid by the anti-abortion group suing to subvert the FDA’s authority.
New Hampshire Public Radio spoke to a 15-year-old trans girl in New Hampshire whose ability to play soccer is now under attack, as House Republicans in the Live Free or Die state just passed a bill to ban trans girls from playing middle or high school sports. These bills & laws “solve” a problem that doesn’t exist while ruining the lives of a very small number of vulnerable children.
The Republican assault on higher education continues in red states across the south and west: Tennessee Republicans wiped out the HBCU Tennessee State’s board so the Governor can stock it with his appointees, over the objections of Black legislators. South Carolina Republicans passed a ban on DEI initiatives at public universities. The University of Kentucky’s President is moving to dissolve the faculty senate and move its policy-making power to the Board of Trustees. Meanwhile, the NAACP’s CEO Derrick Johnson is urging Black student-athletes to reconsider their college choices in the face of these attacks on higher ed, explicitly targeting Florida schools in a statement earlier this month.
Tabletopper Games has a crowdfunding effort for a new semi-cooperative game, Under Our Sun, with an interesting world-building theme.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: abortion, board game news, colleges, coronavirus, kentucky, links, longreads, misinformation, north carolina, police, science fiction, social media, south carolina, stick to baseball, tennessee, texas, the swamp, trans rights, vaccines

→ March 2, 2024
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/2/24.

Nothing new this week at the Athletic, but I’ll have two draft-related pieces coming up next week.

At Paste, I reviewed Dragonkeepers, a new family-level game that I found really disappointing, with the wrong mixture of complexity and randomness.

I’ll have a new newsletter out in the next day or two, but you can sign up here – it’s free and always includes links to everything I write.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Color me shocked, but self-help ‘guru’ Jay Shetty has fabricated or embellished much of his background, according to this investigative piece by The Guardian.
Slate’s Chris Molanphy breaks down what the country chart success of Beyoncé’s “Texas Hold ‘Em” does and does not mean in actual impact on radio and with country listeners.
Will Leitch wrote about the culture-war takeover of the murder of Laken Riley, a University of Georgia student who was killed on the same running trail Will and his wife often take in Athens. Because her alleged killer entered the U.S. illegally, the case is now part of the yelling about the so-called “crisis” at the U.S-Mexico border – even though immigrants commit fewer crimes than U.S.-born people.
Florida’s measles outbreak is due to the state’s active campaigning against childhood vaccinations, so, of course, Fox News is blaming it on migrants.
The state of Indiana has blocked funding to the Kinsey Institute, the world’s top sex-research center, as part of that state’s war on LGBTQ+ rights.
Texas executed Ivan Cantu even though the foreman of the jury that convicted him wrote that he believed the sentence was unjust, as the prosecution hid key evidence that may have bolstered Cantu’s claims of innocence. Just another day in the Lone Star State.
What do you expect from a state where the party that controls all branches of government keeps cozying up to a prominent white supremacist?
A Dallas-area high school canceled a student production of The Laramie Project, about the killing of Matthew Shepard by two bigots because he was gay, after the district passed anti-LGBTQ+ rules last year.
Climate change is driving a surge in cholera cases in central Africa.
An unvaccinated nine-year-old boy in Singapore contracted COVID-19, developed myocarditis from it, and suffered a stroke. His mother says she declined the vaccine for her son because she was worried it would cause myocarditis, a good example of the harm that unfettered disinformation is doing to public health.
Some good medical news: An mRNA ‘vaccine’ to fight pancreatic cancer has entered stage 2 trials. I put the word vaccine in quotes because it’s not a preventative vaccine, but is tailored to specific recipients’ cancers to help train the immune system to fight the rogue cells, particularly those that remain after surgery or chemo.
You would think Arizona, the sunniest state in the U.S., would encourage residents to add solar panels, but the state is bowing to one of its major energy utility companies and adding a “punitive” charge to customers with solar panels. The Arizona Corporation Commission approved a request from utility APS despite failing to evaluate the full impact of these price hikes on consumers.
Missouri’s Attorney General is suing Planned Parenthood for “trafficking” minors to get abortions outside of Gilead.
The death of nonbinary teen Nex Benedict in Owasso, Oklahoma, after several girls beat them to the point where they blacked out, has received a lot of unclear and I think contradictory coverage from major outlets so far. Assigned Media has a solid summary of what we do and don’t know so far and a piece criticizing traditional media for accepting the police & school’s narratives without questioning them.
A married couple in Oregon who taught at Damascus Christian School have been charged with sexually abusing a child there. No drag queens or trans people were involved.
The BBC spoke to several Iranian women who are still protesting the theocratic regime’s requirement that they wear hijabs in public.
Mehdi Hasan announced his new media venture, Zeteo News, which sounds promising, although we’ve certainly seen and heard similar pitches before that haven’t panned out. His work with MSNBC was excellent and I expect him to continue to challenge disinformation and bigotry. I hope there’s enough support to allow him to build the news organization he envisions.
A Beverly Hills middle school is grappling with the spread of AI-generated nudes of students. This issue isn’t going anywhere and I doubt passing laws against the practice is going to do much at this level.
I know you’re shocked, but the construction of Elon Musk’s long-promised Hyperloop in Las Vegas is rife with safety violations.
Two twins from the country of Georgia were sold at birth and separated; they found each other as teenagers thanks to a TV talent show and to TikTok. Amy and Ano are two of thousands of babies who were stolen from hospitals in the Caucasus nation, their mothers told their babies had died, and sold to new families who were often unaware the adoptions were illegal.
Board game news: An expansion for the Restoration Games title Thunder Road is now on Kickstarter and has already cleared $1 million.
A roll-and-write game based on the wonderful board game Cascadia is also on Kickstarter and fully funded already.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: abortion, arizona, board game news, climate change, country music, death penalty, frauds, las vegas, links, longreads, missouri, oklahoma, social media, stick to baseball, texas, vaccines

→ February 24, 2024
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 2/24/24.

My entire prospect rankings for 2024 are now up for subscribers to The Athletic, including:

I held a Klawchat earlier this week to take questions on the lists and more.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Apiary, the latest game from publisher Stonemaier Games (Wingspan, Scythe, Tapestry); The Search for Lost Species, a deduction game and sequel to my #1 game of 2020, The Search for Planet X; and The White Castle, my #1 game of 2023, designed by the folks behind The Red Cathedral.

I also sent out a new edition of my free email newsletter last week, about how we had to put our cat, Hexie, down when a blood clot traveled to his descending aorta and paralyzed his hind quarters. It’s been tough.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Religious zealot and billionaire Tim Dunn is behind the Texas GOP’s hard shift to the right as he tries to remake the state into a Christian theocracy. Imagine if a Muslim billionaire used his money in a similar way. It’s certainly not about following the teachings of Jesus – as does this Catholic charity in El Paso, which is now facing closure at the hands of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.
I’ll also just mention here that religious ‘nones’ are now the largest single group in the U.S. The term refers to anyone who does not identify themselves as affiliated with a church or religion, including atheists, agnostics, ‘spiritual but not religious’ people, deists, and others.
The New York Times had an excellent story on the athletes recruited to The New School in Florida, as the state pours money into the once-liberal institution to try to turn it into a southern version of Hillsdale College. The kids are going to be all right, despite the adults’ best efforts.
Gary, Indiana, has an ongoing lawsuit against gun manufacturers over their tacit allowance of illegal gun sales. The Indiana Republican Party is trying to pass a bill that would invalidate the suit and protect gun manufacturers from liability.
A former minister in the Christian cult The Truth admitted to molesting a young boy through his role in the ‘church,’ part of a decades-long pattern of abuse and cover-ups in the home-based movement, also known as Two by Twos.
A doctor who went to Gaza to help victims of Israel’s ongoing assault wrote in the LA Times that what he saw “wasn’t war – it was annihilation.”
In the face of growing hate towards Palestinians, some chefs and restaurant owners who come from or trace their ancestry to Palestine are choosing to emphasize their identity
The 76ers’ proposed downtown arena is likely to cost the city millions in lost tax revenue while also risking Philly’s vibrant Chinatown neighborhood. Let the owners pay for it themselves.
There’s a huge measles outbreak in Florida thanks to parents rejecting universal medical advice and skipping the MMR vaccine. Florida’s Surgeon General is telling parents they can still send their unvaccinated kids to school. Measles is the most contagious virus that infects humans, and it can kill children and adults, either during the infection itself or up to a decade later due to an incurable neurological condition called SSPE. This is abject insanity. The MMR vaccine is safe, effective, and led to the (temporary) eradication of measles from the Americas, until Andrew Wakefield and the fucking idiots who follow him brought it back.
KFF Health News looks at how these fringe anti-science views became so dominant in American politics, and what it might mean this November.
Meanwhile, vaccine denialists are everywhere, downplaying the severity of measles. I see it every day on the disinformation hellhole of Twitter. Measles kills, maims, deafens, and more. It can lead to weeks of hospitalizations. I would love to see health insurers insist on vaccinations for coverage, because why should my premiums go up just because someone else was too dumb or misinformed to make the right choice?
West Virginia Republicans saw this outbreak and decided to exempt private schools from the state’s strict vaccination requirements, because I guess having the nation’s highest death rate from opioids wasn’t good enough!
Timor-Leste (formerly known as East Timor) is battling simultaneous outbreaks of three mosquito-borne diseases: Zike, dengue, and chikungunya. We need more releases of genetically modified mosquitoes and mosquitoes infected with Wolbachia bacteria to reduce their numbers before these diseases spread further.
Tim Burke, formerly of Deadspin, was indicted in Florida for allegedly hacking Fox News video streams of Kanye West and Tucker Carlson … that Burke says were unprotected by passwords or other encryption. This is a freedom of the press issue. You could contact your Representative or Senator, especially if any serve on their respective Judiciary Committees, as I’ve done. An attack on any journalist is an attack on all of us.
A Texas attorney poisoned his pregnant then-wife with abortion pills, which didn’t cause the pregnancy to terminate but caused enough damage to the fetus that their daughter has developmental delays. He was sentenced to merely 180 days in jail, because abortion bans are not about saving babies (or fetuses), but about subjugating and controlling women.
Abortion rights are a consistent, winning issue for Democrats, writes Ilyse Hogue in the New Republic, and the party needs to lean into that more.
We got an answer, belatedly, on the Hugo Awards’ exclusion of certain works, notably those by Chinese or Chinese-American authors, and it was craven submission to Chinese government involvement. Dave McCarty, a sci-fi fan who was head of the Hugo Committee for 2023, and others resigned and/or were censured. One of the winners, Adrian Tchaikovsky, has already said he will no longer cite or list the award among his honors.
This satirical column from The Crimson mocks national reporters’ obsession with campus life at Harvard.
Posts from the transphobic ‘activist’ LibsOfTikTok led to at least 21 bomb threats against schools, libraries, small businesses, and more. Twitter has done nothing to shut Chaya Raichik down, despite the real-world consequences to her actions.
Pamela Paul wrote an anti-trans editorial in The New York Times. It was riddled with inaccuracies.
The co-founder of the anti-LGBTQ, book-banning advocacy group Moms for Liberty engaged in threesomes with her husband and another woman. Bridget Ziegler is on the school board in Sarasota County, Florida, and her husband Christian (heh) was the former head of the Florida Republican Party. MfL’s influence appears to be waning as more people catch on to their radical agenda.
Seattle cops raided several LGBTQ+ bars in the city, taking photos of patrons, citing regulations banning “lewd conduct.” Owners and patrons fought back, and the state’s liquor board, which oversees such businesses, agreed to knock it off and end this collaboration with the police.
New York’s Nassau County issued an order banning teams with trans athletes from using public fields or arenas, yet another pointless, cruel rule pandering to bigots, a solution in search of a problem.
Republicans smeared Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) over comments she made – but they used a bogus translation to do so.
An old indie blog called The Hairpin that closed in 2018 has come back to life as a zombie clickbait farm.
A mother of four was shot and killed while driving to work in Philadelphia in November, and her family says the police aren’t doing enough to try to solve the case.
There’s a Kickstarter open for Conservas, a new solo bag-building game from designer Scott Almes (Tiny Epic Galaxes, Beer & Bread).

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