environment

→ December 20, 2025
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 12/20/25.

I got sick out of the winter meetings, so I’ve been slacking on the Saturday posts (and blogging and my newsletter in general). Here are the breakdowns I’ve written for subscribers to the Athletic in the last two weeks, at least:

Over at AV Club, I ranked the ten best new board games of 2025, and reviewed the games The White Castle Duel and Trinket Trove.

I have a few writing things to get done this weekend but I really hope to get another (free) newsletter out before Christmas Day. You can sign up here.

I also appeared on the Cubs Weekly podcast with my friend Lance Brodzowski to talk some Cubs prospects and what it might take to get Mackenzie Gore (very, very hypothetically).

And now, the links…

Longreads first: A Mother Jones journalist asked the Pentagon about Pete Hegseth’s mentor. Serial fabulist Jack Posobiec responded with threats.

ProPublica looks at the deaths that resulted from the USAID cuts that Trump, Musk, and company celebrated with cake.

New Humanist looks at Finnish schools’ efforts to teach critical thinking so students can better detect fake news and misinformation.

Brown alumna Lucy Feldman writes in TIME about why the mass shooting at the university hit her (and so many Brown graduates) so hard.

Also in Mother Jones, serial plagiarist and Russian operative Benny Johnson has become a major propagandist and content creator for the White House.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) diverted taxpayer funds for child welfare and health care to pay for his own consultants and advertisements, according to a report in the Tampa Bay Times.

My Congresswoman, Rep. Sarah McBride (D), spoke out about her experience as a trans woman as the House prepared to pass two bills designed just to make trans peoples’ lives hell.

Ohio Republicans are trying to groom and indoctrinate kids by putting the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms.

Meanwhile, Oklahoma’s Supreme Court struck down that state’s social studies curriculum that mandated all kinds of Christian nonsense, noting that the changes were rammed through without adequate debate or public notice.

Colorado Gov. Jared Polis (D) encouraged his Twitter followers to follow accounts belonging to a white supremacist and someone who has posted CSAM, and he doubled down when Westword called him out on it.

U.S. students read fewer books than ever; the article points out that teachers assign fewer full-length books, in part because of the belief that kids won’t read them, but that’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. Other potential causes are state book bans and don’t-say-gay laws, social media, AI, and a privately produced reading curriculum called StudySync that leans more on excerpts.

An ICE supervisor in Cincinnati was arrested for trying to strangle his partner, who is at least 22 years his younger as well.

ICE arrested a woman in Minnesota merely for observing their agents arresting someone and asking what they were doing.

Plastic pollution is on track to double by 2040, entering the soil, the oceans, and of course, our bodies.

A proposed data center in Chandler, Arizona, won’t disclose how much water it expects to use. You know, in a desert.

NPR looks at Syria a year after the fall of Assad.

Two board game crowdfunding efforts of note: Grassfed is “a farm to tabletop” game from the publishers of Ascension and Shards of Infinity, and Chess Joker is a new game from Carl Chudyk, co-designer of Glory to Rome and designer of Innovation.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: arizona, board game news, books, climate change, delaware, environment, florida, immigration, lgbt rights, links, longreads, ohio, oklahoma, stick to baseball, syria, the swamp, trans rights

→ November 1, 2025
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 11/1/25.

My ranking of the top 50 free agents this offseason will run on Monday over at the Athletic, and I’ll do a Q&A that day or the day after, depending on my schedule.

Over at Endless Mode, I reviewed the new two-player game Leaders, which is pretty meh in his basic mode but really shines in expert mode, where players get to draft the character tokens they’ll use in the game versus the semi-random setup in the original.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: ProPublica goes deep on the delusional born-again Christian in charge of the North Carolina Supreme Court.

The best piece I’ve read this week, and one of the best all year, is this New York Times investigative report on the underpowered fight against sex trafficking on Figueroa Street in Los Angeles. It’s a very humanist look at the real victims here, the trafficked girls, and how they end up coerced into sex work.

Suriname has long been a carbon-negative country, as the nation’s share of the Amazon rain forest absorbs more carbon dioxide than the poor population of the country can produce. That may change as the country pursues an offshore oil-drilling initiative, claiming they’ll use the funds to build a sustainable green economy.

Salon’s Amanda Marcotte explores how the far-right group the Proud Boys invented antifa.

Radley Balko explores how false accusations of child molestation destroyed a preschool teacher’s life, even after they were ruled unfounded. Jordan Silverman ended up losing custody of his sons and saw his health and career wrecked by the allegations and vindictive parents who wouldn’t accept the official ruling.

The Intercept reports on a Tennessee man who was jailed for posting memes mocking murdered right-wing demagogue Charlie Kirk. The great Phil Williams of News Channel 5 interviewed the sheriff involved, who did not acquit himself well and seems unaware of what the Constitution says.

Videos circulating online appear to show mass executions in Sudan’s Darfur region after the Rapid Support Forces, a breakaway faction of the country’s military, took control. Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab estimates that the RSF killed 10,000 people in three days.

The BBC looks at the probably stolen election in Cameroon, where dictator Paul Biya, who has ruled the African nation for 43 years, claimed victory and a new term that will run until he’s 99 years old. An opposition leader who also claimed victory has led the country, and there have been protests for at least the last three days.

The lab-leak conspiracy theory was already dead, but here’s another nail for its coffin: Scientists found another Covid virus in Brazilian bats, proving that the mutation that allowed SARS-CoV-2 to infect humans is a natural phenomenon.

The Guardian obtained a leaked document showing that Amazon sought to hide how much water its data centers use. Crypto, AI, they’re all disasters for the environment.

Get your flu shot.

Bacteria are evolving to become resistant to antibiotics faster than we’re developing the drugs.

Meanwhile, Florida is trying to kill its own citizens by ending all childhood vaccination mandates. It took less than a year for rollbacks in vaccination rates and mandates to lead to measles outbreaks. Florida is going to be the epicenter of outbreaks of multiple diseases within the next twelve months, and there’s no keeping them within the state’s borders.

I mentioned last week how Indiana University had shut down its student newspaper because the paper dared to print the news. Many alumni pulled their donations in response, and the school relented. You have the power to do something, somewhere.

Middlebury College student Lia Smith, a trans woman, was found dead last week after she committed suicide. Middlebury had kicked her off their swimming and diving team as they complied in advance with the Administration’s war on trans people.

A white man in Alabama planned attacks on multiple synagogues and possibly public figures, and then planned to commit suicide by cop, according to officials involved in his arrest this past week.

The Guardian also has the details on a maybe-new scam where moped riders bump a potential mark’s car and then demand to see the victim’s driver’s license and/or insurance documents so they can open up new insurance policies in the victim’s name and submit bogus claims. I say “maybe-new” because this sounds like a twist on several other scams involving staged accidents.

John Roberts’ legacy as Chief Justice may be determined by one ruling he made in 2024 – and it’s probably not the legacy he thinks he’ll leave.

Board game news: The Kickstarter for Cascadia: Alpine Lakes, a standalone follow-up to the Spiel-winning Cascadia, is already over $200K and has a month to go.

The Kickstarter for Wonderland’s War Duel, a two-player version of the acclaimed (and very hard to find) 2022 game Wonderland’s War, has just five days left.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: africa, anti-science, board game news, coronavirus, environment, first amendment, health, indiana, links, longreads, north carolina, scams, scotus, stick to baseball, tennessee, trans rights, vaccines

→ October 25, 2025
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 10/25/25.

I ended up unable to do a links post last weekend because I was out scouting the Arizona Fall League (which also prevented me from doing something else on Saturday morning), so we’re back now and at least I can post my AFL wrap-ups. I broke them up into one post on the notable pitchers and another on the notable hitters I saw in the eleven games I attended, but of course I couldn’t see everyone.

Over at Endless Mode, I reviewed the games Twinkle Twinkle, a solid family-level tile-laying game; and Duel for Cardia, an excellent two-player capture-the-flag game that gets a lot of mileage out of its two 16-card decks.

I sent out another issue of my free email newsletter about two weeks ago, so I’m due for another one now that I’ve written some more stuff.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: You’ve probably seen the Politico story on the incredibly racist, anti-Semitic, and generally hateful group chat featuring a bunch of adult Republicans, including a state Senator from Vermont who’s since resigned.

Charlie Warzel writes in The Atlantic (not my employer) about how AI slop is taking over the internet, stifling or threatening to stifle real creativity. He’s casting about a little for an analogy; it’s just Cory Doctorow’s enshittification write large. (Link is free to read.)

Mother Jones exposes the hacking software company First Wap, whose products use SS7 to track phone users anywhere in the world, without requiring that they click on a malicious link or otherwise put some sort of tracking app on their phones.

ProPublica found that ICE has held at least 170 U.S. citizens against their will so far, in many cases physically abusing them, and I’m sure that’s an undercount. The site also reported that Kristi Noem took campaign donations from a dark-money group for her personal use.

The Athletic (my employer) has a story by Carson Kessler and Gabby Herzig about catfishing scams that convince men they’re talking to top women golfers, eventually conning them out of thousands of dollars and posing new safety risks to the athletes from men who think they have romantic relationships with them.

An Arizona wannabe influencer tried to extort a local bakery, JL Patisserie, for a collaboration fee, or at least a bunch of free food, in exchange for a favorable video. The bakery declined; the woman showed up anyway, and then posted a negative review that had some false claims in it, so the bakery posted a point-by-point response … and then all hell broke loose. I went there and got a chocolate-pistachio croissant for $8.50; it was probably the best croissant I’ve ever had, and I’ve been to France three times.

Starving children screaming in agony: the inevitable result of the Trump Administration’s devastation of the USAID program.

Sen. “Cancun” Ted Cruz is targeting Wikipedia, claiming the site – which has extensive rules on reliable & verifiable sourcing – has a “left-wing bias.” Well, if you’re saying facts have a left-wing bias…

Christian Pastors Gone Wild: A Utah youth pastor says young black men should be executed and cites the Bible in his arguments … a former South Carolina pastor was sentenced to 20 years in prison after authorities found over 5000 CSAM images on his phone … an Ohio pastor who said that being gay was a “health risk” and that gay literature made him “sick” has been arrested and charged with raping a 14-year-old girl. No trans people or drag queens were involved in any of these stories.

Indiana University fired its student newspaper’s advisor, then shut down the newspaper entirely because the students were publishing … news. Purdue students stepped up and distributed 3000 copies of their own paper, with the front-page headline “We Student Journalists Must Stand Together,” on IU’s campus.

The Guardian reported on the justified backlash against comics who took the Saudi dictators’ money to play the Riyadh comedy festival.

Former anti-vaxxers told Raw Story that they’re “horrified” by RFK Jr’s gutting of the American health system, including eroding Americans’ trust in vaccines (which are, again, highly safe and effective). Meanwhile, measles cases continue to rise across the U.S.

And hundreds of anti-science bills have hit state legislatures as evangelicals and ‘do-your-research’ loons try to make America die of preventable diseases again.

A viral story about an Olive Garden waitress who threw breadsticks at customers is fake … but uses the identity of a real person, with her picture, and it’s made her life needlessly difficult.

Texas police who said they used a network of license-plate cameras to try to track the safety of a woman who’d self-administered an abortion. Turns out, of course, they were actually trying to track her so they could charge her with murder.

Professor Lisa Moore, who heads the Department of Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at the University of Texas, writes that she doesn’t recognize the place where she’s worked and taught for 35 years.

Two Harvard professors wrote that the school must reject the Trump Administration’s so-called “compact” and take a public stand against it.

This is how you report on the President: “Clueless Donald Trump, 79, Humiliated After Dodging Legal Question.”

Did President Trump push Israel to accept a ceasefire to protect his own financial relationships with the Qatari emirate?

As Trump spends $130 million or more on the vanity-project ballroom at the White House – which he is not allowed to do without Congressional approval, not that they’ll stop him from doing anything – a typhoon destroyed villages and killed at least one person in Alaska.

Data centers make bad neighbors. If they’re trying to build one near you, speak out against it.

An El Paso family claims a Border Patrol agent shot and killed their dog during a search; the incident took place in September and ended up in the national news earlier this month, but I can’t find any more recent update.

Kevin Howley, a writer and media critic, writes about the harm of the “fact-free anarchy” that has taken over public discourse in the U.S. with the full complicity of the mainstream media.

Defector has a good laugh at the Free Press writer – I’m not calling them journalists, sorry – Olivia Reingold, who is complaining that most of her friends are shunning her after she wrote a story claiming that the Gazan babies who died of starvation were actually sick with other things, so it wasn’t that big of a tragedy. I need a quantum violin to play for her, because anything else would be too large.

The hosts of a left-wing podcast called out Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) for his votes for Trump appointees and generally clubby attitude towards the rise of authoritarianism.

Your brain adjusts to doing things you think are morally wrong, so that doing the same sort of thing again becomes easier and easier. The good news is you can go in the other direction by doing the right thing, and make it easier to be honest or brave or otherwise virtuous.

Raas: A Dance of Love is an upcoming board game from two Indian designers, now up on Gamefound; it’s the first game I’ve seen that uses an aspect of Indian culture and is also designed by people from the subcontinent.

Boardgamegeek has an entertaining designer diary from two of my favorites, the folks behind the new game The White Castle Duel, as well as the original The White Castle and The Red Cathedral.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: arizona, board game news, environment, frauds, indiana, links, longreads, neuroscience, religion, stick to baseball, texas, the swamp, vaccines

→ 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 16, 2025
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 8/16/25.

Over at Endless Mode, I reviewed the light but very fun game Wine Cellar, which scales really well up to 8 players, an unusual player count for anything that’s not a party game. It’s out of stock at Miniature Market but the bad place still has it.

My free email newsletter went out last weekend, and I’ll send another one out whenever my next piece at the Athletic runs (I do like to time them so that they serve the function of catching readers up on things I’ve written).

And now, the links…

Longreads first: My new colleague Nathan Fenno detailed the highly disturbing story of the stalker who has hounded former Rams lineman Aaron Donald for years.

A Facebook/Meta AI chatbot engaged in flirty conversation with a 76-year-old man who was suffering from cognitive decline, eventually giving him an address in New York City so he could come “meet” her. He fell while racing to catch a train and died from his injuries.

The New York Times exposed how the AI bubble is going to drive up energy costs for everyone. Not mentioned is how it’s probably going to drive water shortages as well. If you’re searching for something on Google, by the way, you can disable the automatic AI-generated tosh that appears at the top of the results just by adding “-ai” to the end of your search terms.

Brandy Zarozny exposes the chaos and infighting at HHS under RFK Jr., who didn’t even tell his own staff – or maybe even the President – before announcing that he was killing funding for further research into safe, effective mRNA vaccines.

One woman in Oregon is using an old law aimed at stopping nuclear power plants there to fight green energy projects like wind and solar. Nuclear power was and is much safer and far more efficient than its critics (mostly on the left) claim it is, so while this is just bad for humanity, it is a bit of perverse justice to see the same side that fought nuclear plants hoisted on their own petard.

Scientists have found ‘sex reversal’ in five different species of birds in Australia, including one bird that was genetically male but laid eggs. Taxonomy is a human creation. Nature is too complex to make our artificial categorization schemes as accurate as we pretend they are – which makes the war on trans people even more disgraceful than it is just on humanist grounds.

A professor at Southeastern Louisiana University whose research uncovered high levels of heavy metals, including arsenic and lead, in and around Lake Maurepas was abruptly terminated from the project without explanation, even though she is the only analytical chemist at the entire college.

ICE kidnapped a woman here legally from New Zealand and her six-year-old son when they re-entered the U.S. after dropping her two older children off at the Vancouver airport, holding them for nearly a month now in isolation at an ICE prison. (UPDATE: On Saturday evening, ICE released the pair.)

The staff at an English pub threatened to walk out if the restaurant accepted a reservation from Vice-President JD Vance, so they turned him away. It’s even more humiliating because Kamala Harris ate there a few weeks earlier.

The cases before the Supreme Court on states’ powers to discriminate against trans athletes are about much more than just sports. The seat has been open for years because Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-MS) blocked a nomination by then-President Joe Biden, just because she could.

The same bigoted judge from Mississippi who denied a trans teen’s right to change his legal name and repeatedly misgendered the teen in his ruling has now been nominated for a US District Court judgeship.

A Texas DA who incorrectly charged a pregnant woman who took abortion pills with murder paid for his own mistress to have an abortion in the 1990s. The charges were dropped a few days later, but the woman is suing authorities over the incident.

There was a global summit on plastics pollution this past week, where talks on a pact to fight the issue broke down (something that plastic doesn’t do!). I didn’t see this in any U.S. press, probably because our current government is cutting every effort to help the environment.

Such as the White House’s decision to stop a wind-power project, claiming it was based on “flawed science,” and then redacting the entire 27-page report that purports to explain their logic.

Two very exciting games I saw at Gen Con went up on crowdfunding sites this week: The Voynich Puzzle, a crunchy worker-placement game based on the unsolved Voynich manuscript; and Camp Grizzly, a co-op title based on 1980s slasher films that is a reprint of a game so hard to find that full copies have gone for $600.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: abortion, artificial intelligence, board game news, environment, football, immigration, links, longreads, mississippi, oregon, science, stick to baseball, texas, the swamp, trans rights, vaccines

→ June 28, 2025
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 6/28/25.

For subscribers to the Athletic this week, I had a scouting notebook on Jesus Made, Luis Peña, Trey Yesavage, and some Orioles and Brewers low-A prospects, and a post on the 2025 draft prospects who might be the first to reach the majors.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Conservas, a solitaire push-your-luck game that brings environmental sustainability into its victory conditions.

I also sent out another edition of my free email newsletter on Monday.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The fast-fashion craze is a huge drain on the planet’s resources, although this Scientific American feature also examines some entrepreneurs fighting to make clothing more sustainable.

In the New Yorker, Rivka Galchen examines the enormous cost we’re about to face from rising vaccine denialism (or “skepticism”).

The New York Times tells the stories of people caught up in measles outbreaks from Texas to North Dakota, all preventable, all the result of scam artists and lunatics spreading lies about vaccines.

Kate Shemirani was a nurse in Britain who lost her license for spreading false information about COVID-19. Her anti-medicine insanity ran so deep that her 23-year-old daughter just died of a treatable cancer because her mother opposed her getting chemotherapy. Shemirani’s two sons blame their mother and are urging social media sites to crack down on misinformation.

Gregg Gonsalves writes in The Nation about the cowardice of Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), a physician who voted to confirm RFK, Jr., knowing full well what the noted anti-vaccine crank would do as head of the HHS.

A presentation for this week’s meeting of CDC vaccine “advisers” cited a study on thimerosal in vaccines and autism that does not exist. (There is no link between thimerosal and autism.)

Vanity Fair profiles Iowa state Rep. J.D. Scholten (D), who is running to unseat Sen. Joni “We all die some day!” Ernst (R) while also pitching for the independent Sioux Falls Explorers.

Haaretz spoke to IDF soldiers who say they were ordered to shoot at unarmed Palestinians trying to get food and other aid.

The University of Florida’s law school gave an award to a paper written white-nationalist student in which he argued that Constitutional rights only apply to white Americans.

Harvard hired a researcher to examine the school’s historical ties to slavery … but when he found too many, they fired him.

Everything is bad – it’s just as terrible as you imagined and probably worse – but a three-judge panel struck down a Louisiana law requiring public schools to display the Ten Commandments. Your religion is yours; don’t force it on me or my kids or anyone but your own.

Your energy bill may be going up because of the AI bubble as energy companies rush to build more infrastructure to support these greedy tech companies.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R, of course) refused $450 million in federal funds that would have provided food to school-aged children over the summer. Just like Jesus intended.

Roll20-owned site DriveThruRPG, a major store to download new and classic role-playing games, removed a game called Rebel Scum from its catalog because the anti-fascist game is “too political.”

I really hesitate to share anything made by AI, but this satirical newscast is one of the funniest things I’ve seen in months.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, environment, gaza, harvard, iowa, links, longreads, louisiana, stick to baseball, texas, vaccines

→ June 14, 2025
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 6/14/25.

For subscribers to the Athletic this week, I published my second mock draft of 2025 and held a Q&A that afternoon. I also posted a minor-league scouting notebook on Travis Sykora, Carson Benge, and a few others from that Nats-Mets high-A game. I did see Trey Yesavage’s double-A debut this week but am holding off until I get to at least one more game somewhere so I have enough for a column (Aidan Miller didn’t play in that game so it was really light on prospects).

I appeared on Kauffman Corner with Soren Petro and Rany Jazayerli to talk about the Jac Caglianone callup, the Royals’ 2024 draft, and briefly about this year’s draft class as well.

You can subscribe to my free email newsletter for more content from me, which I’ve sent out three times in a month, not quite at my goal of returning to weekly issues but getting closer!

And now, the links…

The New York Times published a video feature on a Palestinian girl who escaped an Israeli air strike, finding her in a Gazan hospital and telling her story.

Also in the Times, this longread on AI chatbots leading users down conspiracy-theory rabbit holes and convincing them of some truly insane things is a horrifying look at where we’re heading. (More links on AI below.)

Dr. Angela Rasmussen writes about the Bethesda Declaration, an attempt by scientists to rally support for the NIH against the illegal impoundment of funds by its new head, Jay Bhattacharya. There’s a link to sign the petition at the end of her essay.

Trump announced plans to open an Office of Remigration, using a term associated with ethnic cleansing throughout history. Mainstream media outlets have said little to nothing about the choice of names.

Trump also cancelled an agreement between the federal government, Washington, Oregon, and local indigenous tribes to protect the Columbia River Basin and restore salmon populations, claiming that it advanced the “green agenda” and other nonsense. The press release sounds like “environment + Biden = bad.”

This was the week for lazy columns saying that Bluesky is “failing” or something similar despite the platform passing 35 million users and publishers saying repeatedly they’re seeing better engagement there than on Twitter. This blog post on Tedium does a solid job of reacting to those columns without overreacting, making what I think is the key argument: it’s about community, and what Bluesky has in its favor right now is a sense of community that’s been absent from other social media sites for some time.

NYPD Chief of Department John Chell pleaded guilty in 2013 to departmental charges of misconduct, but that undersells it – he committed tax fraud by using a false identity to hide money he took in from a side hustle. It’s at least the 11^th investigation into his actions since he joined the force. He’s the highest-ranking uniformed official in the NYPD. Why is he still employed?

South Carolina State Rep. RJ May (R), who has previously ranted against drag queens in schools and made false claims about gender reassignment surgery for toddlers, was arrested and charged with distribution of child sex-abuse material. The charges were significant enough that he was denied bond. He founded the state’s Freedom Caucus.

A Texas man has been charged in a case where he poisoned his pregnant girlfriend with abortion pills. The charges aren’t related to her, though; he’s only been charged with murder for the death of the fetus. The girlfriend’s life and body don’t matter. Texas has a religious-based “fetal personhood” law, under which Justin Banta, who works for the U.S. Department of Justice, has been charged.

Wikipedia toyed with putting AI-generated summaries atop some of its articles, but pulled them down after a strong negative response from editors on the site. I don’t even care why they did it – we don’t need AI-generated stuff everywhere and too few people are talking about its environmental cost.

Along those lines, here’s an AI-generated video that shows just how dangerously deceptive these videos have become, and how we’re likely to see them used for phishing and other scams now.

When this year’s high school graduates in Oklahoma started pre-K, the state ranked 17^th in the nation ine education. Now they’re ranked in the bottom three.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: abortion, artificial intelligence, environment, gaza, links, oklahoma, social media, south carolina, stick to baseball, texas

→ May 31, 2025
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 5/31/25.

For subscribers to The Athletic this week, I re-ranked the top 50 prospects still in the minors, updating the list to reflect various graduations and some of the new information from the small sample of 2025 so far. I also did a Q&A on the site to answer questions about it.

I’m due for another newsletter but got a little caught up with the top 50; you can subscribe here for whenever I send the next one out, hopefully over the weekend.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The Seattle Times does a deep dive (pun intended) on how humans have pushed the Columbia River to its limit through overfishing, hydroelectric power projects, irrigation projects, and mismanagement.

A sheriff’s deputy in King County, Washington, has been arrested and charged with raping a teenaged girl in the department’s Police Explorer program – at least the second such incident I’ve read about in a program of that sort, along with another cop in Massachusetts who killed the girl he raped and staged it as a suicide.

A Mississippi man left his citizenship hearing only to have ICE arrest him and threaten to deport him. Kasper Eriksen is a Danish national, married to an American woman with four kids and another on the way. He’s still in custody, but the family has no money coming in because he’s their sole source of income. Abolish ICE.

Utah Republicans ordered a study on gender-affirming care for trans youth, and it says they’re all full of shit and should leave trans kids alone. Of course, the same politicians are lining up to dismiss the study.

Elon Musk’s legacy in Washington is “disease, starvation, and death,” writes Michelle Goldberg (accurately) in The New York Times. Musk’s decision to unilaterally shut down USAID programs has killed thousands, and may end up killing many more, around the globe.

Trump’s crypto scam – I mean, that’s redundant, all crypto is a scam – is a $4 billion self-enrichment scheme, explains the Philly Inquirer.

Trump pardoned a tax cheat after the man’s mother paid the $1 million to attend one of Trump’s fund-raising dinners. I’ve said this before, but this is the most corrupt Presidency in the history of our country and nobody is doing anything to stop it. Well, Sen. Angela Alsobrooks (D-MD) is trying, at least.

Sen. Jodi Ernst (R-Iowa), who is up for re-election next year, responded to a constituent’s question about SNAP and Medicaid cuts by saying “we’re all going to die.” This clip should appear in every Iowa Democrat’s campaign ad from now until November 2026, regardless of what office they’re running for.

A Texas cop searched national license-plate cameras to track a woman who he said “self-administered” an abortion.

Ohio State Rep. Rodney Creech (R) was accused by his own daughter of sexually abusing her, yet his Republican colleagues – who knew of the investigation – backed him for re-election last November. Let me repeat that: Ohio Republicans backed a candidate who may have molested his own daughter.

As a man who often eats alone in restaurants, I loved this Times piece on how weird people get when women dine alone. Some of it was familiar to me, but of course much of this never happens to me because I’m a man. People in restaurants or bars who serve me or sit next to me often just assume I’m traveling for work. Clearly that is not the assumption people make about women. Also, eating alone can be a wonderfully restorative experience.

Zohran Mamdani’s poll numbers are rising and he appears now to only trail the $60 million man Andrew Cuomo – who resigned as Governor after multiple women came forward to say he sexually harassed them in the race to be NYC’s next Mayor.

In The Harvard Crimson, Yona Sperling-Miller ’27 offers to fight our A-1 Secretary of Education Linda McMahon in a televised cage match, with the winner getting the $2.7 billion in federal grants that the Administration is threatening to cancel. This wonderful piece is simply titled, “Come at Me, Bro.”

This short excerpt from Marcus du Sautoy’s new book Blueprints: How Mathematics Shapes Creativity on how prime numbers have helped create some memorable pieces of music made me add the book to my wishlist … although it’s not out until September.

25^th Century Games has a new Kickstarter up for two space-themed games, Observatory and Star Gazers.

Only two days remain in the Restoration Games Kickstarter for Battle Monsters: Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah, a remake/update of the 1992 game Battle Masters.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, environment, harvard, immigration, links, longreads, math, mississippi, new york, ohio, stick to baseball, the swamp, trans rights, utah

→ April 26, 2025
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/26/25.

I had two posts for Athletic subscribers this week, a draft scouting notebook on Ethan Holliday, Eli Willits, and JoJo Parker; and a minor league scouting post on some Mets and Orioles prospects in high A. I’m very worried about what I saw from Carson Benge. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

I’ve updated the top 50 pizzerias post from yesterday to reflect two places that closed (one just within the last five months).

And now, the links…

Harvard is fighting back, suing the Trump Administration over the latter’s (likely illegal) attempts to cut funding to research programs the school conducts on behalf of the government. The Times has more on the conservative twits on the Harvard Board of Oversees who wanted to make a deal with Trump – even though Columbia tried that and it got them nothing.

Vox has the story of grid-scale batteries and how they might help green energy sources replace more fossil fuels … if the Administration doesn’t stop it.

The damage from President Trump’s irrational and ever-changing tariff … uh, are they even policies? … may be irreparable and will certainly last well beyond his term.

Trump has also deported at least two U.S. citizen children with cancer. This appears to be on top of the illegal deportation of a two-year-old girl, also a citizen, with “no meaningful process” in the words of a federal judge in Louisiana.

It looks like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) may have misappropriated public funds, moving $10 million earmarked for … into his personal campaign fund.

A former Tesla engineer says that when she pointed out a safety issue with the breaks in the company’s cars, Elon Musk threatened to deport members of her team.

Mississippi was on a heater last week in its effort to prove it’s the most backward state in the union. Their Supreme Court ruled that a transgender teen can’t legally change their name until they’re 21, because that’s the age of majority in that state. (For reference, the age of consent in Mississippi is 16. Real consistent there, fellas.) And then their Governor declared April Loser Heritage Month.

The Guardian has a story on former Royals minor leaguer Tarik El-Abour, who played four games in the Arizona Rookie League in 2018, making him the first player in the history of affiliated ball who was known to be autistic. (I don’t know what the best phrasing is for that, but I hope the point is clear.) El-Abour responds to the hateful, ignorant comments from the Secretary of Health and Human Services where he painted autistic people as a burden on society.

A group of scientists have banded together to form the Vaccine Integrity Project with the goal of countering vaccine misinformation coming from our own federal government. It comes as the Administration replaced the official site for information on COVID-19 with a page promoting the debunked lab-leak theory of its origins.

Texas’s House passed a school vouchers bill despite broad opposition from the public, because Trump bullied a number of legislators into voting for Gov. Abbott’s pet project. The program seems very likely to drain funds from public schools that need it and allow wealthy Texans to send their kids to private schools on the taxpayers’ dime.

The six brownshirts who forcibly removed a woman from a town hall in Idaho last month have been charged with various crimes, five of them with battery and four with false imprisonment.

Two German backpackers were handcuffed, held in dirty holding cells, and deported from Hawai’i because customs officers thought they were sneaking into the U.S. to work. Travel into the U.S. from overseas is tumbling. I’m not clear how cutting the billions foreign tourists spend here is supposed to help our economy.

In a largely symbolic move, two Delaware legislators, including my representative Krista Griffith (D), introduced a bill to inhibit local attempts to ban books from school or public libraries.

Thanks to the reader who pointed me to this Times story about the massive monthly board game night in NYC hosted by Richard Ye, which topped 500 people in March.

Greater than Games has effectively shut down as a result of President Trump’s futile tariff war. Their most popular game is Sentinels of the Multiverse.

Bitewing Games has a Kickstarter up for two travel-sized board games, Gingham and Gazebo, the latter of which is from designer Reiner Knizia.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, delaware, Economics, environment, florida, harvard, immigration, links, longreads, mississippi, police, stick to baseball, texas, 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

Archives