conspiracy theories

→ April 12, 2026
→ By keith
→ 4 Comments

Stick to baseball, 4/12/26.

For subscribers to the Athletic this week, I posted my ranking of the top 50 prospects for this year’s draft, although unfortunately one of them, Jacob Dudan, is now undergoing Tommy John surgery. He threw 110+ pitches five times in his last six starts, after throwing just 30 innings last year as a reliever. I’m sure that’s just a coincidence. If I added another name, it would be Virginia Tech’s Brett Renfrow or Arkansas’ Ryder Helfrick.

I swear I’ll get a newsletter out next – I’ve had a mad week of travel, so I’ve had very little time to just sit and write freely.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: By now, you’ve probably seen the New York Times piece that claims that Satoshi, the pseudonymous inventor of Bitcoin, is actually a British cryptographer named Adam Back. I have some issues with the article, particularly the way it centers the author’s search and feelings rather than Satoshi/Back or why finding him might be important, but in general I think it’s an excellent piece of reporting. (And I have no opinion on whether he’s right.)
Two Congresspersons from Arizona conducted a surprise inspection of an ICE concentration camp there and found the detainees packed “like sardines,” with rooms meant for 24 people holding up to 40, no beds, and no showers. Anyone responsible for this should be put on trial, with life in prison the sentence for anyone found guilty for creating, carrying out, or enabling this inhumane treatment.

The online left is, unfortunately, also prone to believing in conspiracy theories. Brandy Zarozny details one of them, a man named Sascha Riley who has been pushing a fantastical (and probably delusional) tale that, as a child, he was sexually assaulted by several prominent Republicans, including the current President. Riley seems to be unwell, making this all kind of sad beyond just the maddening aspect of people believing so ardently in something untrue.

Four women have come forward to accuse Rep. Eric Swalwell (D), also a candidate for Governor of California, of sexually assaulting them. Several Democrats have called on him to end his campaign, but I have yet to see a single one calling on him to resign from Congress – which he needs to do.

NPR has a wonderful, interactive piece on life on Tristan da Cunha, the world’s most isolated inhabited place.

Washington state has held a man with an intellectual disability in inhumane conditions for 23 years, all for a crime he can’t understand. He’s been assaulted and bullied by other prisoners and residents of the house where he lived on conditional release at one point.

The Times also ran a positive profile of an AI-driven startup that’s peddling GLP-1s and other prescription drugs – but that company is doing so with fake ads and other very sketchy practices that the original story didn’t mention, according to this exposé by Futurism’s Maggie Harrison Dupré. Medvi is just a pill mill that may be violating FDA rules as well, which is noted now in a correction below the original article.

Trump’s Health and Human Services Department is funneling millions of dollars in taxpayer money to so-called “pregnancy crisis centers,” anti-abortion facilities that are nearly always backed by Christian groups.

Former Republican Senator Ben Sasse, who has stage 4 pancreatic cancer, spoke to the Times’ Ross Douthat about the disease and his choice to be so public about his journey. I don’t wish this fate on anyone. I also don’t think it exempts him from answering for, say, opposing efforts to fight climate change or fighting against LGBTQ+ or reproductive rights. Indeed, isn’t that the time to ask questions like that? Would you do anything differently? Are you thinking less about the here and now and more about the world you’re leaving behind?

The right-wing news outlet Dallas Express ran smear stories about the minor child of a Democratic Texas state rep under a fake byline. It’s just another example of how dark money has poisoned the online information ecosystem.

Author Alex Preston used an LLM to write a book review that was published in The New York Times, and he got caught. The Times has dropped him as a freelancer. Also, write your own shit, people.

The Department of Defense sent U.S. soldiers into harm’s way in Kuwait ahead of the Iranian missile attack that killed six service members and injured 30, and they were totally unprepared for the strike, according to survivors – directly contradicting the lie put out by Pete Hegseth.

The Chronicle of Higher Education interviews historian and law professor Dr. Annette Gordon-Reed about her new book and, more salient to us, how the right’s attacks on education and historical research are designed to lead academics and writers to self-censor.

An editorial in the National Catholic Reporter states quite clearly that Catholics who support this Administration are choosing between complicity in the war on Iran, with its attacks on civilian infrastructure and vulgar, hateful language towards the Muslim nation, or the true tenets of their faith. The Administration has couched the war on Christian nationalist rhetoric, but there is no squaring that with the nonviolent Christ of the Bible.

Board game news: Bitewing has a new Kickstarter for two more games in its travel-sized game series, Arribada and Seagrass.

I’ve never played Ostia, which is on the heavier side and has also been hard to find in the U.S., but folks are excited that Crafty Games is going to publish/distribute a fresh edition this fall.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: artificial intelligence, board game news, california, carceral state, conspiracy theories, iran, links, longreads, metoo, religion, stick to baseball, texas

→ September 14, 2025
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 9/14/25.

I had two articles for subscribers to The Athletic this week, my annual look at players I got wrong (which, of course, generated a bunch of comments from people who said I was wrong about players who had a decent half-season) plus a preview of the Arizona Fall League rosters (which seem to have changed already since I got the preliminary ones, alas).

And now, the links…

In The Atlantic – not my employer – Charlie Warzel writes that the Epstein birthday book is “a nightmare” and shows that the conspiracy theorists were at least partly right. It appears many, many of Epstein’s friends knew of his crimes against children and joked about it.

The Times ran an editorial by Ezra Klein with the headline that Charlie Kirk was “practicing politics the right way.” Here are some rejoinders to Klein’s take from 404 Media, from Mother Jones’ David Corn, from The Nation’s Elizabeth Spiers, and from the Times’ Jamelle Bouie.

Zeteo posted a story with 17 quotes from Kirk, with sources, but no additional commentary.

Also from Mother Jones, right-wing provocateurs immediately called for retribution against the left, including violence, after Kirk’s death, before any details about his alleged killer emerged.

They were also targeting and doxing people they thought were celebrating Kirk’s murder, including getting many people fired, including a professor at Austin Peay University who allegedly just posted a quote from Kirk.

A child in the Los Angeles area contracted measles as an infant, before they were old enough to receive the first dose of the MMR vaccine, some years ago, and died this month of the side effect known as SSPE, which can show up a decade after the measles infection and causes dementia, dystonia, and eventually cardiac or respiratory arrest. I wonder if 1) this child was infected during the 2014-15 epidemic and 2) if they got it from an unvaccinated person, which seems almost certain.

Texas A&M fired a professor and two administrators after the professor distributed materials that indicated recognition that there are more than two genders (which there are), claiming they were complying with Texas law (that does not exist) and President Trump’s executive order (which I don’t think binds them to do anything).

A Tacoma man who went to the house of a QAnon follower to serve her an order to leave the foreclosed house where she was living was cleared of wrongdoing after she shot at him and he returned fire, killing her.

The disposable face masks we all used during COVID-19 – and some of us still use – are leaching chemicals into the ground and oceans, as there is still no real process in place to capture and recycle them. I did buy masks several times from a company called VIDA that will take them back for recycling, although I don’t know what they actually do with them.

Massive protests in Nepal, including the burning of government buildings and the chase of a half-naked government minister into a river, led to the resignation of the Prime Minister and the appointment of Shushila Karki as the first woman to lead the landlocked Asian nation.

Israel continued its assault on Gaza City, striking a hospital and killing at least 12 children.

A rare happy story: A couple wondered for years who the awkward-looking guy in a bunch of their wedding photos was. They finally found him, and the reason why he was in the pictures is wonderful.

I really enjoyed the tiny-box game Soda Jerk when I played it at Gen Con; pre-orders just went up at Allplay. (I don’t get any commission from this.)

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, conspiracy theories, environment, first amendment, gaza, links, measles, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ August 17, 2024
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 8/17/24.

I’m on PTO from the Athletic this week and next, so there won’t be any new content from me over there until the week of August 26^th. I had some plans to hit a Blue Rocks game last week, before my PTO, but 2+ inches of rain in our area scotched that (although they did play on one of those days, which flabbergasted me because that field doesn’t drain well). I was on the road a ton this week – something like 23 hours in the car in the last five days – so I don’t have as many links as usual, either.

I’ve got a review filed to Paste for Rock Hard 1977, the board game designed by Runaways bassist Jackie Fox (Fuchs) that was also my #1 new game from Gen Con this year.

I do have a newsletter half-written, so feel free to run over and sign up (it’s free) before I finish the damn thing already.

And now, the links…

The plastics industry is pushing to change the rules on what they can label “recyclable” – in short, if something could, hypothetically, be recycled, they want to label it as such, regardless of whether such recycling is readily available or feasible. I see this crap already with things labeled “compostable” that require access to industrial composting, so you can’t just throw it in your home compost bin or pile.

Israel has destroyed every university in Gaza. The Nation’s Sondos Fayoumi spoke to many of the students at those universities whose dreams have now been shattered.

Donald Trump’s nephew Fred has a son with a severe disability. He wrote how, while President, his uncle said that people like his son “should just die.”

The Queens Criminal Court vacated 46 convictions after the DA found that NYPD officer James Donovan fabricated testimony. That’s the good news. The bad news is that Donovan pled guilty to a minor perjury charge and was allowed to retire, with 30 lost vacation days his only penalty.

The chief of police in Millersville, Tennessee, is under investigation by the state for all kinds of malfeasance, and when Channel 5’s Phil Williams spoke to him, the chief called Williams a pedophile.

My friend Tim Grierson interviewed Carol Burnett for the LA Times. I am so jealous.

Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins lied about Algerian boxer Imane Khelif, and then lied about why Facebook took his page down, only admitting his error on the second point a few days later. Khelif is now suing several prominent online figures, including J.K. Rowling and Elon Musk, for cyberharassment for their roles in spreading the false claim that she is not a woman.

We’re already seeing some of the pernicious effects of the SCOTUS ruling that overturned the Chevron doctrine, as the U.S. Air Force is declining to clean up drinking water it polluted with PFAS in the Tucson area. Yes, a government agency is saying they can pollute your drinking water and then they have no responsibility to remediate it.

A trans panic law in Idaho banning children from receiving medical care without a parent’s consent now means that a child raped by their parent can’t undergo rape-kit testing for potential criminal charges. It was never about protecting children.

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune’s editorial board published a reality check on the so-called “Tampon Tim” meme, although I don’t see why one is necessary. If putting tampons in public school bathrooms triggers you, you are the problem.

Michele Morrow, the Republican running for the North Carolina Superintendent of Public Instruction post, said in January of 2021 that Trump should set “the Constitution to the side” and stage a military coup. Between her and Holocaust denialist Mark Robinson, the Republican candidate for Governor, no red state needs to turn blue faster than North Carolina this year.

NPR fact-checked Trump’s so-called news conference on August 11^th and found 162 lies and distortions.

These weirdos’ attacks on Vice-President Harris for not having kids will only backfire on them, writes Jess Grose of the NY Times. I think it already has, to some extent.

In August of 2023, the police chief of Marion, Kansas, raided the offices of the local paper, the Marion County Record, in a clear violation of press freedom. One year on, no one has been charged, lawsuits are still pending, and the paper still hasn’t been cleared of any wrongdoing.

The LA Times’s Michael Hiltzik writes that the lab-leak conspiracy theory is an attack on science and an active threat to public health.

Speaking of conspiracy theories, the New York Times’s Stuart Thompson explains that when they’re debunked, their adherents either double down in their belief or move on to a new hoax. This is a well-studied phenomenon going back to the Seventh-Day Adventists, whose prophecy of eschaton failed … so they just kept changing the date, rather than admit the whole thing was a fraud.

A white man in London attacked a mother and her eight-year-old daughter, stabbing the child eight times, until a Pakistani security guard ran over and saved her.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: conspiracy theories, coronavirus, environment, hoaxes, idaho, kansas, links, longreads, north carolina, police, stick to baseball, tennessee

→ 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

→ August 26, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 8/26/23.

Three new pieces this week for subscribers to the Athletic: Some thoughts on Shohei Ohtani’s free agency in the wake of his torn UCL; a post mortem after the White Sox fired Kenny Williams and Rick Hahn; and why college conference realignment is probably bad for college baseball.

At Paste, I reviewed the board game Hickory Dickory, which has a very cute theme and some clever mechanics but I think might just be overdesigned in the end. I do like it, just with reservations.

On the Keith Law Show, I spoke with Joe Posnanski about his upcoming book Why We Love Baseball: A History in 50 Moments, which comes out on September 5^th. You can listen & subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Quillette has a lengthy explanation of the failed lab-leak hypothesis around COVID-19’s origins, and the people who still refuse to accept its failure.
Vanity Fair gives the previously untold story of a Texas mom who was abducted by a serial killer in 1981 and talked him into letting her go by leaning on her deep religious faith.
Writing in the New Yorker, Ronan Farrow has an unflattering profile of Elon Musk and the billionaire’s increasing influence over public policy.
ProPublica provides the coda to their coverage of Illinois student Amara Harris, who was given a ticket by police when she was accused of stealing a fellow student’s AirPods. She won her case when a jury in Naperville determined that she did not knowingly take the AirPods (she thought they were hers and returned them when approached), and the story highlights the use of police in schools for incidents that could be handled first by school officials.
The man who shot a California store owner for flying a Pride flag was a far-right conspiracy theorist who followed the religious zealot Matt Walsh and espoused false-flag hoaxes and climate change denial.
Oppenheimer left out a key part of the history of nuclear weapons: the exploitation of Congolese people who mined the uranium ore by hand, including a massacre of workers who tried to bargain for higher wages in 1941.
This 2022 article from Vice explains productivity cafes, a Japanese trend of coffee shops and bars where you tell the employees the task you’re trying to finish when you enter and they won’t let you leave until you’ve finished (e.g., writing a chapter).
FIFA just temporarily suspended Luis Rubiales, the President of the Spanish football federation, after he kissed Spanish player Jenni Hermoso on the lips without her consent and subsequently claimed that she did consent in the wake of calls for him to resign.
A Maine hospital is threatening to sue a 15-year-old college student for defamation over his petition calling for increased patient safety at their facility. FIRE has stepped in to demand that Northern Light retract the threat, citing Maine’s anti-SLAPP law.
Guitar legend Carlos Santana went on a bizarre anti-trans rant during a recent concert in Atlantic City.
A goal that seemed impossible just a few years ago is in sight – we might be able to eradicate wild polio in the wild, which would make it just the third disease we’ve eradicated after smallpox and rinderpest.
Delaware has joined the growing list of states and cities prohibiting restaurants from using polystyrene containers, which don’t break down in landfills and can leach chemicals into the water supply.
The Baltimore Banner once again calls out Orioles owner/failson John Angelos for how his antics are overshadowing the team’s incredible season. We’re now over seven months past his promise to open the team’s books.
Tiny forests of native flora can help increase biodiversity and grab some carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, growing even on spaces that might seem too small to support this kind of horticulture.
One version of a single gene may increase your chances of developing long COVID after infection.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: baseball, biodiversity, conspiracy theories, coronavirus, first amendment, illinois, links, longreads, maine, metoo, soccer, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ April 15, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/15/23.

I haven’t written in the past week-plus due mostly to getting sick, something that wasn’t COVID-19 but might as well have been for this stupid cough I’ve still got. I did get to a couple of HS games in the Boras Classic in Orange County this week and will write that up after I get to another HS game on Wednesday.

My own podcast returned this week with guest Ozan Varol, author of How to Think Like a Rocket Scientist and the new book Awaken Your Genius. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I did appear on two other podcasts this week – Sports Sometimes, with my friend Chris Crawford; and the board game podcast Meeple Town, with Dean Dunning. (Not Dane Dunning. That’s Calcaterra’s bit.)

You can also get more of my words by signing up for my free email newsletter, which went out again on this past Monday.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: This New Yorker profile of Pinky Cole and her fast-growing vegan burger chain Slutty Vegan probably isn’t as complimentary as the subject hoped it would be; if anything, it makes it sound like the quality of the food there is entirely secondary to the owner’s ambitions. It also highlights some of the challenges in bringing a broader audience to vegan food, given the latter’s reputation.

WIRED has a great look at how Bookshop has thrived against the behemoth of Amazon and stayed largely true to its original mission.

Brandy Zadrozny tracked down and interviewed the “Tennessee nurse” who became the target of anti-vaxxer conspiracy theories in late 2020. Tiffany Dover was one of the first people to receive the COVID-19 vaccine but fainted on camera – a common side effect of all sorts of injections, including vaccines – leading anti-vax nut jobs to claim she’d died and harass her workplace and her family. She’s alive and well, although no longer at that job.

Russian troops have kidnapped at least 19,000, and perhaps as many as 150,000, Ukrainian children and put them in Russian schools, indoctrinating them with pro-Russian propaganda and in some cases adopting them out to Russian families. The New York Times found several women who traveled thousands of miles to get their children back.

That same lunatic judge in Texas who decided he could overrule the FDA on drug safety is now going to hear an even more unhinged case around press freedom, as several anti-vax groups are claiming four major media outlets conspired with tech companies to suppress their “business” of spreading bullshit. There’s new evidence that their misinformation campaigns are working, too, as a new survey found an increased percentage of women think the flu and COVID-19 vaccines aren’t safe during pregnancy. Meanwhile, the dubious ruling on mifepristone has galvanized the pharmaceutical industry, who realized the leopards might eat their faces, too.

The declining constituencies of these cultural conservatives, with religiosity experiencing an inexorable decline in the United States and across the west, is leading more and more Republicans to pursue autocratic policies and even espouse political violence.

Brandon Johnson won last week’s mayoral election in Chicago; one core part of his platform was a public health model for improving safety, rather than the standard police-centric model (more cops, more funding for cops, more prisons). There’s good evidence the public health model can work, and a lot of evidence that the police-centric model does not. When people say “defund the police,” this is what they mean – and what they should be saying instead.

Chicha is a fermented drink of indigenous peoples in South America, and is making a comeback in Colombia even though it’s still officially illegal there.

Texas Rep. Bryan Slaton (guess) introduced a bill to ban kids from attending drag shows and has ranted about LGBTQ+ people “grooming children,” so it was no surprise at all to learn that an intern filed a complaint against him, saying that they had an inappropriate relationship and he served them alcohol even though they were younger than 21. Slaton, who likes to post Bible passages on his Twitter account, also proposed a bill to give property tax cuts to straight, married couples who’d never been divorced. To their credit, two Republican lawmakers in Texas have already called for Slaton to step down.

Former federal prosecutor Barb McQuade explains why white-collar crimes like those for which Trump has been indicted can’t just be ignored.

Crimes like those for which Rishi Shah and other executives of Outcome Health, accused of a billion-dollar fraud, were just convicted. The New York Times’ Erin Griffith looks at just how many startup execs are facing or have faced criminal charges and asks if this is the end of “fake it till you make it” in Silicon Valley. (I doubt it.)

Justice Clarence Thomas doesn’t have to take an actual bribe for his relationship with Nazi memorabilia collector Harlan Crow to compromise both himself and the institution of the Supreme Court.

All those conservative commentators rushing to defend Thomas and Crow? Yeah, a lot of them rely on Crow for their paychecks in one way or another, Ilya Shapiro, Jonah Goldberg, David French, and Charles Murray among them. Whatever you may think of the first three, if Charles Murray comes to your defense, you may want to ask him to pipe down.

Speaking of Goldberg, I did appreciate his longish essay in his Dispatch newsletter on how the rising generation of Republicans are becoming, in his words, jerks, taking their cues from Trumpism and the old-conservative God complex model of government (government should enact God’s will, and only we know what God’s will is). He argues that it’s not just bad for the Republican party, but bad for these kids as humans.

The Campaign Legal Center has asked DoJ to launch an investigation into Thomas’s free trips. And that was before ProPublica revealed that Crow also bought property from Justice Thomas, who didn’t disclose the transaction.

A unanimous vote by the Nashville Council has returned Tennessee Rep. Justin Jones (D) to his seat in the state legislature after he was expelled for ~~protesting while black~~ a supposed violation of ‘decorum’ rules. Rep. Justin Pearson (D) has also been restored to his duly-elected position.

Llano County in Texas was going to close its libraries, but the heavily Republican government there backed down after public pressure amplified by national media attention. They’re counting on us to stop paying attention.

Cosmic background radiation left over from the Big Bang is helping scientists map out dark and otherwise undetectable matter across the universe.

The city of Asheville promised to spend a bunch of taxpayer money to fix up the stadium where the privately-owned Tourists ballclub plays. Now they’re taking money away from a previously promised improvement to pedestrian areas in the South Slope neighborhood to help pay for the stadium fixes. Asheville already has two L’s in it. I think they’re taking another one.

Board game news: There’s a deluxe and co-op edition of the great abstract, two-player game Santorini up on Kickstarter.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, book banning, colombia, conspiracy theories, frauds, links, longreads, north carolina, physics, police, russia, scotus, stick to baseball, tennessee, texas, trans rights, vaccines, vegan

→ March 4, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/4/23.

I posted an early draft ranking of just 30 names, enough for a typical round, for subscribers to The Athletic. I’ll expand that list a few times and eventually get to 100 by May or so, but I’d like to at least see all the high school players get started.

No podcast this week as the guest I had lined up had to reschedule. Feel free to sign up for my free email newsletter, as I’ll be sending another one out this week.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The Financial Times has a deep dive into how Putin blundered into Ukraine and has continued isolating himself from would-be advisers who might have helped him out of this mess. The writer posits that Putin may try to hold on until January of 2025, hoping we elect a Republican as President and thus pull our military support of Ukraine.
Anything Elizabeth Kolbert writes is a must-read for me; her latest piece in the New Yorker covers how our mining of too much phosphorus and subsequent waste of much of it is choking our oceans while leading towards a bottleneck that threatens our food supply. The article also describes the world’s longest conveyor belt, a 61-mile track in the illegally annexed territory of the Western Sahara.
A former employee came out with claims about malfeasance at a St. Louis medical center that treats transgender youth, telling her story to a newsletter author who doesn’t engage in any sort of fact-checking of stories. The Missouri Independent and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch both investigated and found no corroboration, finding instead that parents had nothing but praise for the center and the treatment their children received. Newsletters are fine for some types of content, but not for actual news.
The New Republic profiled Dr. David Gorski, who has also blogged as Orac, and his battle against pseudoscience, quackery, and so-called “alternative” medicine online. (There is no such thing as “alternative” medicine. If it works, it’s medicine.)
I enjoyed this Slate story on the 25^th anniversary of Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea and the bizarre, cultlike fandom that album has generated. The title track from that record remains one of my favorite songs to play & sing.
The cesspool of Twitter had a debunked conspiracy theory trending earlier this week about Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs. It’s just one of several that Republican legislators there continue to push as they’ve seen the state turn increasingly blue.
There is no “lab leak theory.” There are a bunch of conspiracy theories, but no single, testable theory of how COVID-19 was supposedly engineered in and escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China. And the available evidence points to a zoonotic (natural) origin.
If you saw anything about Washington, D.C., attempting to update its criminal code this week, with hysterical tweets about reducing penalties for certain crimes like carjacking, there’s a lot more to the story. Most of this would be solved by just making the district a state with the same autonomy as the other fifty have.
Arkansas’ new education plan, which includes an extremely broad voucher program, is full of sops to banks and charter-school operators, and it’s also likely to gut public education in the state while favoring higher-income families. Sounds great!
Tennessee jumps on the bandwagon by banning drag shows. There is no evidence any drag show has ever harmed anyone. There is, however, copious evidence that guns have. The choice to ban harmless entertainment should tell you everything about this legislature.
Board game news: Restoration Games announced that they’re retiring the first two Unmatched sets, Cobble & Fog and Robin Hood vs. Big Foot, later this year, with no plans to reprint them.
The Gamefound campaign for Huang, a new game from prolific designer Reiner Knizia, is fully funded with five days to go.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-science, arizona, arkansas, board game news, conspiracy theories, coronavirus, links, longreads, pseudoscience, russia, science, stick to baseball, tennessee, trans rights, ukraine, washington

→ September 17, 2022
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 9/17/22.

My one new post this week for The Athletic is a scouting notebook looking at some Yankees and Red Sox prospects, including Jasson Dominguez, Yoendrys Gomez, and Cedanne Rafaela. I’ve had to push some things off, as I got sick on Tuesday and it turns out that my COVID number is finally up.

My guest on The Keith Law Show this week was Dr. Justin E.H. Smith, author of the book The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is: A History, A Philosophy, A Warning, which you can buy here on Bookshop.org. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

My free email newsletter returned today after a long hiatus, describing my COVID experience so far and linking to a lot of the stuff I’ve written over the last few weeks.

And now, the links…

Hasidic private schools in New York City fail to provide even the most basic secular education to students, but have taken in $1 billion in taxpayer money, according to an extensive New York Times investigation. It would appear that various Mayors and Governors have declined to fully examine the issue for fear of alienating the Hasidic voting bloc.

“Satanic panic” is back, thanks to QAnon, right-wing influencers, and major media members like Fox News hosts.

The chairman of the Alabama GOP refused to show his photo ID to vote, and then had the poll worker who asked him to show it fired. It appears this is part of a larger pattern of behavior for John Wahl and his family, who hold substantial power through their Anabaptist sect.

Marcus Mumford spoke to the L.A. Times about his new album and its discussion of the abuse he suffered as a child.

The Denver Post argues that Rep. Lauren Boebert is a Christian nationalist, and part of a dangerous movement that threatens American democracy..

Years of investigations by the Kansas City Star and other outlets appear to have resulted in the arrest this week of a former Kansas City, Kansas, detective who stands accused of raping two women, taking money from drug dealers, and framing innocent people. It’s unbelievable how long people were aware of what Roger Golubski was allegedly doing, yet he was able to continue to do it, and even retired from one department and got a job with another.

Portland, Oregon, police had evidence two years ago in the case of the 2019 killing of a prominent anti-fascist activist, but sat on it for two years before making an arrest in August.

Why on earth are some Gen-Z folks starting to talk up the Unabomber’s manifesto?

People pushing the lab-leak conspiracy theory, including Jeffrey Sachs (an economist with no background in science), are doing great harm by advocating a belief that is contrary to all available evidence.

A Black protester in South Carolina is likely to give birth in jail, where she’s serving a four-year sentence for being mean to cops. She was convicted of “breaching the peace in a high and aggravated manner.”

The man accused of killing Eliza Fletcher was investigated for a 2021 rape, but the Memphis DA’s rape kit backlog is so long that the results didn’t come back until September 5^th. You would think this would lead to calls for increased funding to process rape kits.

A Detroit-area man who killed his wife and shot his adult daughter had fallen into a QAnon rabbit hole, according to other members of his family.

…as international experts warn that right-wing extremism is becoming more mainstream.

A lawsuit against the state of Texas includes evidence from a mother whose 13-year-old trans son was pulled out of class and questioned for over an hour by state “investigators.”

The co-chair of the Michigan state GOP referred to Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg as “a weak little girl.”

The Uihlein family, owners of the U-Line shipping materials company, have helped pay for fake-newspaper mailers blasting Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker while trafficking in transphobic and homophobic rhetoric. Don’t buy from U-Line.

Fred Franzia, the winemaker behind the popular $2 wines known as Two Buck Chucks, died this week at 79.

Candace Owens claimed that British colonization of Africa was actually a good thing for the colonized people.

An Iowa law on restitution for victims of violence means that a woman who, at age 15, killed the man who raped and trafficked her, owes his family $150,000. It is, literally, a law of unintended consequences. A GoFundMe for the woman has raised nearly three times that amount already.

Students and staff at Seattle Pacific University are suing the school over its anti-LGBTQ+ hiring policies.

Jennifer Rubin writes in the Washington Post that the Christian right is ignoring the biggest threat to their existence: Declining religiosity in younger generations. The younger you are, the less likely you are to identify as Christian, or as religious at all.

There’s a campaign afoot on the right to penalize businesses that work towards environmental or social goals, much like Florida is trying to penalize businesses that don’t support Gov. DeSantis’s agenda. The party that claims to support free enterprise isn’t adhering to the “free” part of it.

Noted liberal rag (checks notes) Bloomberg has an op ed arguing that the Texas judicial ruling that companies could decline to cover PrEP treatment for employees takes religious freedom too far.

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp said he’d be open to banning contraception in the next legislative session.

The American Library Association reported a huge increase in book-banning efforts across the country so far in 2022.

Khruangbin’s new album is a collaboration with Vieux Farka Touré, reimagining the songs of his father, the legendary Malian musician Ali Farka Touré.

Board game news: You can pre-order the latest game in the Unmatched series, Houdini vs. The Genie.

Sagrada: Artisans, the legacy version of the great dice-drafting game Sagrada, is now on Kickstarter and already funded.

Age of Inventors, an economic/resource management game from a small Greek publisher, is also on Kickstarter and also funded this week.

Dune: War for Arrakis, an asymmetrical area-control game pitting the houses Atreides and Harkonnen against each other, is also on Kickstarter, and fully funded even with a higher goal. It seems like it’s designed primarily for two players, but with 3 or 4 the extra players control “sub-factions” loyal to one house or the other.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: alabama, board game news, conspiracy theories, cults, free speech, georgia, iowa, kansas, links, longreads, oregon, police, south carolina, stick to baseball, trans rights, vaccines, wine

→ June 18, 2022
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 6/18/22.

For subscribers to the Athletic, I updated my Big Board, ranking the top 100 prospects in this year’s draft class. I also held a Q&A on the site to answer questions about it, in which I was accused of “not doing my homework,” of course. Look for a mock draft this upcoming week, most likely Tuesday.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the game Fantastic Factories, a fun engine-builder very similar to the great game Gizmos, but with the added twist of dice-rolling.

I sent out a new edition of my free email newsletter last weekend, talking about going back to the Cape League for the first time in years, only to have a travel fiasco in multiple parts keep me from getting there. Also, my two books, Smart Baseball and The Inside Game, are both available in paperback, and you can buy them at your local independent book store or at Bookshop.org.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: A Black educator was hired by a Georgia school district to be its first DEI officer. White parents decided she was implementing critical race theory, forced her out of the job, and then harassed her out of her next job elsewhere. This ties into efforts by anti-CRT people to run for school boards across the country (as detailed in the article).
The Southern Poverty Law Center has added Jack Posobiec, the primary source for the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, to its list of extremists.
The federal prison in Thomson, Illinois, is one of the deadliest such facilities in the country – after the feds moved it from Pennsylvania, where similar violence against inmates occurred.
A 1977 memo to President Jimmy Carter outlined the risk of climate change from CO₂ emissions. Its predictions have largely come true so far.
Former NFL and USFL star Herschel Walker, who is now running against Sen. Rafael Warnock in Georgia for that state’s Senate seat, has acknowledged having two ‘secret’ sons, even though he has made criticizing absentee fathers a core point in his platform.
Meghan Stabile, a music promoter who was known for her work in both the jazz and hip-hop genres (and bringing the two together), died by suicide this week at age 39.
The New Republic documents the rise in Pizzagate-like conspiracies, mostly targeting LGBTQ+ people, across the United States, with the threat of violence to follow. One example occurred in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, this past week, at a Pride event that the Patriot Front targeted. Ben Collins has a story on several such threats to LGBTQ+ events over at NBCNews.com.
Texas agencies are fighting records release requests related to the mass shooting at an Uvalde elementary school. They’re also refusing to release bodycam footage because it “could expose law enforcement weakness.”
A police detective in Miami stole $1300 during a drug bust, and wasn’t sentenced to any jail time.
Simone Gold has been spreading COVID-19 misinformation for two years, and founded the group America’s Frontline Doctors, which has pushed HCQ and ivermectin despite the complete lack of any evidence that they do anything against the virus. She also was in the Capitol on January 6^th, and after pleading guilty, argued that her medical credentials should exempt her from prison. The judge didn’t buy it; he gave her 60 days.
A Wisconsin school district investigated a Title IX complaint that several middle school students were harassing a nonbinary classmate by using the wrong pronouns, which led to national coverage of the investigation by right-wing outlets and a bomb threat that led the district to move to virtual learning for the last two months of its school year.
Jamelle Bouie writes in the New York Times that the complacency of the Democratic “gerontocracy” is alienating younger, more progressive voters.
The governing commission in Otero County, New Mexico, refused to certify local election results, citing the disproven claims about Dominion voting machines from the 2020 election.
The Washington Post profiles a woman in Georgia also pushing claims of electoral fraud, known online as “Burnitdown.”
An Alaska salmon processor has been fined nearly half a million dollars for repeated environmental violations.
USA Today retracted 23 articles written by Gabriela Miranda after finding she misattributed quotes and might have fabricated sources. She has also resigned from the paper.
A Pennsylvania court vacated a murder charge from 1931. Alexander McClay Williams, a Black teenager in Glen Mills, was convicted by an all-white jury of stabbing his teacher, and was executed six months later.
Michele Catalano, whose now-defunct blog asmallvictory was one of the first I ever read regularly, wrote on her Substack about her current experiences with depression.
Board game news: Cheese Factory, a quirky, light engine-builder, is already funded on Kickstarter.
Bot Factory, a midweight game from designer Vital Lacerda (known for long, complex games like Lisboa and Kanban), is about halfway to its $100,000 goal.
Return to Dark Tower was a huge success on Kickstarter and has been met with acclaim on its release. There’s now a licensed RPG based on the game that’s already 400 funded.
Board game designer (Continuo) and “eccentric bridge player” Maureen Hiron died this week at age 80.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, climate change, conspiracy theories, frauds, georgia, links, longreads, mental illness, misinformation, new mexico, police, stick to baseball

Archives