environment

→ 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

→ July 21, 2024
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 7/21/24.

The draft is over, let us go in peace. I wrote a lot of words about it this week, including an analysis of every first-round pick, some general thoughts on Day One of the draft, and team-by-team draft recaps for all American League clubs and all National League clubs. Prior to the draft, I posted a final mock (where I got 9 of the 30 picks right, and am still mad about two I changed from the previous version) and updated my ranking of the top 100 prospects in the class while also posting 25-odd more scouting capsules for guys outside of the top 100. I also wrote up some thoughts on last Saturday’s Futures Game. That’s all for subscribers to the Athletic. On this site, I held a Klawchat on the Thursday before the draft.

I sent out a new edition of my free email newsletter on draft day. You can sign up here for more words from me.

I’ll be back in Chicago on Monday to appear on Stadium’s Diamond Dreams and other programming. You can watch via the Stadium app (visit watchstadium.com to download) or if you have the sports package on Youtube TV, Roku, etc.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: This LA Times article frames a good story very oddly. There’s a mentally ill man living in a million-dollar home in the north San Fernando Valley, strewing his property with all manner of junk, including over 100 vehicles, posing an environmental hazard to the area and obviously creating an eyesore and a safety issue for neighbors. The story centers the neighbors who bought their home for $1.2 million, unaware of the hoarder next door, and local authorities are unable or unwilling to help. The real issue here is that there’s a person here in dire need of mental health treatment, not that the neighbors can’t sell their house.
Three (!) excellent pieces from ProPublica this week. A secretive organization of wealthy Christians called Ziklag is pouring money into elections to help push their vision of theocracy. Members include the Uihleins, the owners of the U-Line company and major backers of the Federalist, and the owners of Hobby Lobby. Arizona Republicans told voters allowing school vouchers to pay for private-school tuition would save taxpayer money, but instead they’ve destroyed the state’s education budget that’s being covered by cuts to water conservation programs and other essential initiatives. Many judges decline to recuse themselves from cases where family members have financial interests and there’s no real way to force them to do so.
I saw this Foreign Affairs editorial, on how the U.S. President has always been above the law in the eyes of the rest of the world (and not in a good way), before realizing it written by a college classmate of mine, Yale Law Prof. Oona Hathaway.
An L.A. journalist who wrote about officer gangs within the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department found himself the subject of surveillance and harassment from the LASD in apparent retaliation for his work.
This summary of what you need to know about J.D. Vance comes from Teen Vogue, which appears to once again be one of the few outlets willing to cover this election and the threat to our democracy honestly.
Texas Monthly looks at Major League Rugby’s plans to grow the sport – at least in Texas.
First it was crypto, now it’s AI, but one new technology after another is driving huge upticks in energy consumption. The solution is a use tax – if Meta wants to force AI search on all of its users, make them pay more for the energy they’re consuming.
A Senate committee report on working conditions at Amazon found that 45% of Amazon warehouse workers were injured on Prime Day 2019 as they tried to cope with the massive volume of sales. When I pulled this story up, there were three links to other stories on CNN on the right side of this column pushing deals on amazon, so … yeah. (Full disclosure: I did purchase about six items on Prime Day.)
Political violence in America is not new; serving in public office comes with it the constant threat of people who want to kill you.
The Wall Street Journal’s Lindsey Adler wrote about Paul Skenes’s splinker, the pitch that has made Skenes one of the best pitchers in baseball and a huge sensation beyond the sport’s core fans.
Scientific American weighed in on how the need for speed is driving an increase in Tommy John surgeries. I’m with Brian Bannister here, firmly.
Bad-faith politicians and pundits, mostly on the right, have attacked California Democrats for “watering down” a sex-trafficking bill, but Reason explains why these changes are good policy and not, as the opponents claim, about protecting sex criminals.
Rep. Cori Bush wrote about SCOTUS’s right-wing coup and how to fight back, although 1) that would require that Democrats gain control of both houses of Congress and hold the White House, and 2) the Court has held power to invalidate certain laws for over 200 years, since 1803’s Marbury vs. Madison, and undoing that seems like a large undertaking.
Repairing the hole in the ozone layer remains one of the great achievements in global science policy of the last 50 years, so of course we’re now about to screw it up through pollution from all of the satellites that are falling back to earth as they run out of juice.
Influential Portland chef and restaurateur Naomi Pomeroy, a James Beard winner who competed on Top Chef Masters back when I used to watch the show, drowned while inner-tubing near Corvallis.
Workers at Bethesda Game Studios, publishers of Fallout and Elder Scrolls, voted to unionize this week.
Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg was on Real Time with Bill Maher and offered a two-minute takedown of Vance.
A St. Louis-area woman made a false sex-abuse claim against her son-in-law’s political rival to try to sink his primary campaign for a state House seat.
Three board game-related Kickstarters of note: Lucky Duck Games, publisher of Chronicles of Crime and Tang Garden, has a KS up for The Flames of Fafnir, a “competitive tower-defense game, with a traitor mechanism” that promises a “physics-based” element.
Sinister Fish has a has a Kickstarter up for Yonder, a “fantasy worker-placement game” from the designer of Villagers and last year’s Moon.
And another Kickstarter to help fund the 8^th African Boardgames Convention (AB Con) in Abuja, Nigeria. AB Con 7 was self-funded and held over two days, a first for the convention, and their goal is to build out to a four-day con with space for at least 3000 attendees.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: amazon, arizona, baseball, board game news, california, climate change, environment, links, longreads, los angeles, missouri, police, rugby, scotus, stick to baseball, top chef, unions

→ July 13, 2024
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 7/13/24.

I posted a third projection for Sunday’s first round of the MLB draft, and updated my Big Board of the top 100 prospects in the draft class, both for subscribers to the Athletic. I also took your questions here in a Klawchat on Thursday. On Saturday, I’ll have a new post with smaller scouting reports on about 20-25 more players in the draft class, guys whose names you might hear Sunday or Monday but who didn’t make the cut for the top 100.

At Paste, I reviewed Neotopia, a perfectly cromulent filler game for family play that didn’t bring anything new to the tabletop. I do like the way the scoring forces players to think about balance throughout the game, though.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Gateway Church founder Robert Morris blamed his 12-year-old victim for the sexual abuse he inflicted on her. And so did Morris’s wife, according to the victim, Cindy Clemishere, who courageously came forward a month ago with the story, leading to Morris’s abdication and the resignations of four other Church leaders. No drag queens, no trans people, just a pastor and the leaders of a giant, tax-exempt religious organization.

Texas Monthly exposed how the Texas Senate has buried sexual harassment claims against its members and senior staffers even after it revised its policies to supposedly address the issue.

Also in Texas – what a great government they have down there! – the state has spent years siphoning public funds to so-called “pregnancy crisis centers,” usually religious groups that try to convince pregnant women not to have abortions, but there’s no evidence it has had any effect at all, aside from violating the principle of separation of church and state.

Vaccine denialist and antisemite Robert F. Kennedy Jr. helped spawn a measles outbreak in Samoa that killed several children. He’s denying that, too.

Vaccines save lives. We need new strategies to increase vaccine uptake and counter bullshit from bad actors like RFK Jr.

Donald Trump is Unfit to Lead: He Is Dangerous in Word, Deed, and Action. The NY Times editorial page belatedly gets the point. Biden may not be fit to be President. Trump is a threat to our democracy.

Trump is also lying to the press and public by saying he doesn’t know about Project 2025. We’ll see if Inquirer columnist Will Bunch’s belief that Project 2025 is poison for Trump’s candidacy is valid.

A Russian Kh-101 cruise missile struck a children’s hospital in the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, killing at least two children. Trump has said he would encourage Russia to “do whatever the hell they want.”

It doesn’t matter what Trump says or does, though. His supporters don’t waver. If they think an action is bad, and Trump does it, they change their opinion of the action. If that’s not cultlike behavior, well, I don’t have a better word for it – and the media needs to cover his campaign accordingly.

A former student of the Kyrene School District in southeast Phoenix is suing the district for failing to address a long string of antisemitic bullying incidents that already resulted in a citation from the U.S. Department of Education.

Meanwhile, Arizona’s public schools chief is trying to push the right-wing PragerU materials into classrooms, promoting the misinformation group’s content on the department website, by claiming that teachers have only been presenting the “extreme left side” in classrooms. I’m very glad I didn’t raise my daughter there.

Our brains are wired to see patterns – even when they aren’t there. Which, coincidentally, is the theme of a single released last month by Mercury Rev.

Voters in Jackson County, Missouri, resoundingly rejected a sales tax hike to use taxpayer funds for stadium projects for the privately-owned Chiefs and Royals just three months ago, so, of course, the owners are just going to try to put it up for another vote and threaten to move the teams out of state.

Many species of tropical frogs are endangered because of a fungus that causes the disease chytridiomycosis; it turns out the fungus is heat-sensitive and a sort of ‘sauna’ can help kill the fungus and save the frogs.

Plaid Hat Games introduced a Kickstarter for Wandering Galaxy, a board game set in the Crossroads universe.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: arizona, board game news, environment, links, longreads, metoo, neuroscience, religion, science, stadium scams, stick to baseball, texas, trump, ukraine, vaccines

→ 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 1, 2024
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 6/1/24.

Nothing new this week at the Athletic, but I have a top 50 pro prospect rankings update slated for Monday the 3^rd.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the roll-and-write game French Quarter, from the designers of Three Sisters and Fleet: the Dice Game. I think it’s fantastic, although it’s harder than any of their previous games to play well.

I’ll be back on Stadium on Monday at 2 pm ET for Diamond Dreams and somewhere in the 2:30 pm show Unpacked for one more segment. We’ll discuss some of my new rankings on the first show and have an interview with Colt Emerson lined up.

A million bonus points if you know what today is, by the way. I’ll accept two answers, although one is more obvious than the other.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: You’ve probably seen this Guardian longread on the so-called “pro-natalist” family who, among other things, think nothing of physically abusing their children in the name of “discipline.” My issue with the piece is this: The parents claim that their parenting is “evidence-based,” yet they then do many things, including smacking their children, that are unequivocally contrary to all available evidence – and the piece’s author does not push back in any way. That is your job as a journalist.

This New York Times retrospective on Cass Elliot and the vicious hoax about how she died is an empathetic and thoughtful look at a major figure in pop music history who was, unfortunately, best remembered for that false rumor.

WIRED has the story of Jane Willenbring, the victim of sexual harassment by disgraced Professor David Marchant while they worked in Antarctica, whose willingness to come forward led to Marchant’s firing and the renaming of the glacier that once bore his name.

Two stories on the 19^th century state of Mississippi: In DeSoto County, a hospital transfers some patients to jail while they await mental health treatment, with the results you would expect. Meanwhile, Mississippi Today also obtained transcripts of WhatsApp messages from the soi-disant “Goon Squad” of racist, abusive cops who terrorized a central Mississippi County – including torturing two Black men and shooting one in the face – for a generation.

A new working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research found a strong positive correlation between public school expenditures and Black student achievement during school and later in life. They used data from that same backwards country of Mississippi, which has been busy trying to find ways to spend less on education.

A new paper in Nature shows how researchers used machine learning to help explain how insect wing hinges work. We know of four separate times when a species has developed the ability to fly, but insects are the only case where flight evolved without muscles or nerves in the wings.

Quanta has the story of two groups of physicists using machine-learning to try to understand the nature of the ‘missing’ dimensions required by superstring theory.

Splinter’s Jim Vorel looks at the slow death of QAnon and the even more virulent strains that have replaced it. There’s a strong sense of “When Prophecy Fails” here – when people realized they believed in a con, they don’t just come to their senses; they look for another con to believe.

Greenpeace sided with the anti-science crowd and blocked the introduction of the nutritious Golden Rice variety into the Philippines, claiming, among other things, a “human health risk” that has never been demonstrated with any genetically-modified foodstuff.

A nurse at NYU’s Langone Health hospital mentioned the genocide in Gaza during her speech accepting an award for her compassion in caring for mothers who’d lost their babies. The hospital fired her. They’ve said she was warned before “not to bring her views on this divisive and charged issue into the workplace.” The hospital took its name from Republican billionaire donor Kenneth Langone, who has previously compared critics of rising income inequality to Nazis.

UC-Irvine law professor David Kaye writes in the New York Times that we should allow the International Criminal Court to do its job after the Court announced charges against the leaders of Hamas and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu. The U.S. has remained outside of the ICC for twenty years, even though we could do the most good by accepting its tenets and supporting its efforts to pursue war-crimes charges – as we have asked the ICC to do against Vladimir Putin.

Many students walked out of Harvard’s commencement last week, spurred by the University’s corporate board’s decision to overrule a faculty vote that would have allowed 13 students to graduate after they’d been suspended for their actions in the campus protests over the Israeli war on Gaza.

Even before Friday’s verdict, Greg Sargent noted that Trump’s anti-media rhetoric had turned more dangerous with the convicted felon’s apparent endorsement of a rant about how he’ll “get rid of all you fucking liberals.”

The Washington Post sat on the story of Samuel Alito hanging pro-insurrection and pro-nationalist flags at his house for several years. The New York Times has been reporting on the story now, including this very measured piece on what seems to have happened, including disputes over the order of some of the events in the neighborhood dispute.

The Republican candidate for Governor in North Carolina is a QAnon-touting, Holocaust-denying, antisemitic, anti-LGBT conspiracy theorist. Will he cost Trump a swing state he won in 2020?

A passenger on a United flight into Fresno this week has tested positive for measles. This should be a criminal offense – they put many, many other people at risk through their actions, like driving drunk.

Michael Hiltzik writes in the LA Times that now Democrats are just as bad at Republicans in putting political concerns over science, as Rep. Raul Ruiz (D-CA) continues his sham hearings promoting the debunked lab-leak hypothesis.

RFK Jr.’s turn into vaccine disinformation came after he spoke to and then totally ignored Dr. Paul Offit, co-inventor of the rotavirus vaccine.

Pope Francis apologized for using the Italian equivalent of the f-slur and saying there was too much of that in the priesthood when arguing against allowing celibate gay men to take orders. I think there’s too much emphasis here on the word choice and nowhere near enough on pretty much everything that lies behind it.

Two board game Kickstarters of note this week: 25^th Century Games (who published French Quarter) just put up a new crowdfunding effort for a four-pack of smaller games that you can back as a bundle or individually.

Luthier is the latest complex game from Paverson Games, publisher of last year’s excellent heavy game Distilled. There’s a full site up for the game but the crowdfunding link isn’t open yet. I saw Luthier at PAX Unplugged; it’s gorgeous and huge, but my guess is it’s too long a game for my personal tastes and attention span.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-science, board game news, environment, gaza, harvard, links, longreads, measles, metoo, mississippi, physics, police, religion, scotus, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ May 25, 2024
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 5/25/24.

One new post this week for subscribers to The Athletic, my ranking of the top 100 prospects in this year’s MLB Draft class. The Vance Honeycutt defenders have logged on, but they always seem to log back off when I explain why they’re too high on their guy.

I’ll be back on Stadium, in studio again, but on Tuesday this week due to the holiday and some travel on my end. Diamond Dreams airs at 2 pm ET, and I’ll likely do one segment as usual on Unpacked around 2:40. Both shows re-air often during the week, usually twice a day as far as I’ve been able to tell. You can watch via the app or with certain subscriptions to Youtube, Fubo, Roku, etc.

I sent out a new edition of my free email newsletter this week, talking about my longtime hobby of playing the guitar and how beneficial I find it even though I’m usually playing for nobody but myself, as well as a little note on the adult I have successfully created after 18 years of hard work.

And now, the links…

ProPublica has the story of how a scientist within 3M showed decades ago that perfluorooctanesulfonic acid, known as PFAS, was a “forever chemical” that stayed in our bodies and the environment, but the company lied to her and the public about its effects.

Writing in the Boston Review, UCLA History Professor Robin D.G. Kelley exposes how the university stood by while peaceful pro-Palestine protesters were assaulted by white supremacists and so-called Zionists, along with outside agitators, and then charged the students with crimes. He also claims that UCLA Chancellor Gene Block has presided over a culture of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim sentiment while stifling any speech, including in the classroom, that might be considered derogatory of Israel. Block testified in a sham hearing before Congress, where Rep. Ilhan Omar (D) pointed out that he chose not to act to prevent the violence.

Some new data has changed cosmologists’ views on the nature of dark energy and the eventual fate of the universe.

NBC’s Brandy Zarozny goes inside the truly broken worldview of Nicole Shanahan, the VP candidate on RFK Jr.’s quixotic Presidential campaign.

Nature looks at the growing problem of harassment of scientists and how institutions are ill-equipped or unwilling to fight it. One solution I don’t see employed enough: Threats of physical violence are illegal in the United States, usually as federal crimes. Put resources into tracking those people down and prosecuting them.

A panel of experts on international law published an op-ed in the Financial Times supporting the ICC’s decision to pursue charges against Israel and Hamas for war crimes.

From March, this video from Rabbi Daniel Bogard looks at why American Jews feel connected to Israel; it’s part one of a very informative series on American Jewish culture and identity at a time when that has become incorrectly equated with Zionism.

Will Bunch writes that in the war on our democracy, we’ve already lost Texas. Marc Elias goes further, pointing out that we have no excuse when Trump has warned for years that he wants to take our democracy down.

South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem (R) claims that she “support(s) babies, moms, and families,” but ProPublica details just how much she has denied support to those same groups – while, of course, killing her dog for not being the goodest boy.

OpenAI’s brazen appropriation of Scarlett Johanssen’s vocal likeness “gave away the game” on AI, according to The Atlantic’s Charlie Wetzel: AI advocates will do whatever the hell they want, and we can’t stop them.

Thousands of kids were prescribed the utterly useless and often harmful HCQ and ivermectin for COVID-19 infections, with Arkansas and Oklahoma doctors leading the way.

International negotiations on a treaty to try to prevent the next pandemic broke down due to nationalist and anti-science sentiments. The World Health Organization’s Global Health Law director argued that “Donald Trump is in the room” and if Trump wins he’d likely “torpedo” any future negotiations.

Police in Fontana, California, used “psychological torture” to get a man who reported his father missing to confess to stabbing and killing him … except his father was still alive and unharmed. The city will now direct nearly $900,000 of taxpayer money to Thomas Perez, Jr., for the pain and distress inflicted on him, during which police also told him they were killing his dog and led him to try to hang himself in custody. What I don’t see is whether any of these officers were fired or even disciplined.

A public safety officer at the College of Staten Island has been suspended for saying on camera “I support killing all you guys” to pro-Palestinian protesters.

Theresa Claiborne, the first Black woman to fly in the U.S. Air Force, retired this week from her job as a pilot for United Airlines. Note her comments on how children would react to seeing her in uniform in airports. Representation matters.

Two board game crowdfunding efforts of note: Stupor Mundi, the newest title from the designer of Darwin’s Journey and Newton, funded in about four hours; it looks like it might be a little lighter in weight than Nestore Mangone’s previous releases.

And Feudum, a 2018 game with a listed weight on Boardgamegeek of 4.58 out of 5 (!), has a crowdfunding page for a new edition that is over $300K raised. I actually hadn’t heard of this game, probably because anything of that weight and a playing time over two hours is of little to no interest to me.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, environment, gaza, israel, links, longreads, new york, physics, police, south dakota, stick to baseball, texas, vaccines

→ May 4, 2024
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 5/4/24.

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

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

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

And now, the links…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

→ January 6, 2024
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 1/6/24.

I took a few weeks off from these posts around the holidays, but I did write one piece for subscribers to The Athletic over the break, looking at the Chris Sale trade and Lucas Giolito signing.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the games Daybreak, a cooperative game about fighting climate change; and Wandering Towers, the best new family game of last year. Both games were on my ranking of the ten best new board games of 2023.

My free email newsletter will return today (most likely). Several of you have pledged to support me if the newsletter were to go paid; I have no immediate plans to do so, but if that happens 1) I’ll give everyone a ton of notice and 2) I’ll move it off Substack.

And now, the links…

Writer Tom Scocca’s piece in New York about his sudden, unsolved medical mystery is the best thing you’ll read all week. It’s well-written, of course, and combines the deeply personal with an inherent attack on our broken health-care system.

President Biden won’t just be facing Donald Trump or another GOP opponent in the 2024 election – he’ll be opposed by the News Corp misinformation machine, too. (Related: The Washington Post’s Philip Bump wrote of how journalism needs to defend itself in the face of bad-faith actors. He might start with his own paper’s opinion section.)

The New Yorker looks at board games with serious themes, profiling Amabel Holland, a trans woman who co-owns the publisher Hollandspiele and designed the Iron Rails series of games.

Parenting is hard. It’s been harder thanks to the pandemic. That and other factors have led to the rise of the “accidentally permissive” parent, especially in my age cohort.

Stuart Thompson of the New York Times looks at how anti-vaxx ghouls latched on to the death of a 24-year-old man, who showed no symptoms of myocarditis after his COVID-19 vaccination but whose parents think the vaccine gave him myocarditis anyway. George Watts, Jr., had an enlarged spleen – over six times the normal size for that organ – which is a sign of long-term heart failure, chronic inflammation in his brain, and signs of late-stage pneumonia in his lungs.

mRNA vaccines do not cause cancer, and there is no such thing as “turbo cancer.”

Measles is on the rise around the world thanks to vaccine denialists and misinformation peddlers like RFK, Jr.

Rep. Ilhan Omar (D) has introduced two bills to block military aid to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates due to both nations’ atrocious human rights records. Omar is Muslim, and Islam is the official religion of both nations. Just imagine a similar scenario with Judaism or Christianity instead of Islam.

Meanwhile, Israel has censored its press on eight topics relating to the war on Gaza.

On the coordinated attacks against now former Harvard President Claudine Gay: It was never about plagiarism, but about DEI (from Don Moynihan); American Jews’ moral panic over Gay’s and two other college Presidents’ answers to Congress is misplaced (from The Forward); and Gay’s own editorial in the New York Times on what happened, which I thought was far too reticent.

Why do pundits like Jonathan Chait and Nate Silver say outrageous things? Because it’s effective, at least when you consider that attention is their goal.

The science is clear: Masks work to reduce the spread of COVID-19 and similar viruses, no matter what the misinformation merchants tell you.

The Guardian looks at the unfunny punching-down comedy specials from Dave Chapelle and Ricky Gervais. Chapelle was so groundbreaking at his peak that it’s sad to see him pitching with an 80 mph fastball now.

A list of all 673 books removed from classrooms in Orange County, Florida. I don’t know how anyone with the means to move could still live there. Even if you send your kids to a quality alternative school, your tax dollars are supporting this anti-education.

Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds (R) declined federal food aid to provide lunch to schoolchildren over the summer, making a specious argument about obesity. This is free money for the state, and they would rather turn it down than feed poor children in Iowa.

NYC Mayor Eric Adams (D) has drained the city payroll of over $24 million to pay for 293 “special assistants,” many of them major donors to his campaign.

Adams (still D) also tried to kill a bill that requires police to report when they stop anyone on the street to ask for identification, promising to restore budget cuts to other programs if council members voted against it. The bill passed anyway.

Overtime pay for NYPD officers working the city’s subway stations went from $4 million to $155 million between 2022 and 2023, reducing “major crimes” by 2% but primarily leading to more arrests and fines for fare-jumping. That’s a lot of money to fight a handful of skipped $2.90 charges.

New York bookstore Bluestockings is facing eviction for providing Narcan to save people who have overdosed on opioids.

Amanda Todd was 15 when she killed herself in 2012 after three years of cyberstalking by a Dutch man who blackmailed her with threats to send nude images of her to her friends and family. He was sentenced to 13 years by a Canadian court, but a Dutch court cut the sentence in half to match that country’s legal standards.

The Las Vegas Business Journal announced a new editorial policy that it will not publish economic impact estimates for stadium projects and other events unless they can see the methodology and criteria used to reach those estimates (which, in my view, are usually bullshit).

Francis Howell School District in St. Charles, Missouri, has seen white conservatives take over its school board; the board recently backed off a plan to eliminate all Black History and Black Literature courses after massive opposition, including from the NAACP. The same white conservatives are trying to ban trans students from using the appropriate bathrooms. School board elections matter, folks.

Speaking of Missourah, a St. Louis cop crashed his car into an LGBT bar, Bar:PM, and then cuffed one of the owners, who was later charged with a felony. The police didn’t do a toxicology test on their colleague, and now they’re trying to hush up any investigation and refusing to release body cam footage to the public.

Shoegaze had its moment in the early 1990s as a subgenre of alternative music, mostly heard from British acts like My Bloody Valentine, Ride, and Slowdive. It’s had a huge comeback thanks to TikTok.

The data from Insomniac Games released by hackers shows that big-game video game development is not sustainable, per Nathan Grayson of Aftermath, a great new site covering video and tabletop gaming.

I own a fantastic sweater and very warm hat from Quince, specialists in inexpensive cashmere clothing items. It turns out that cheap cashmere has a stark environmental cost.

The seams on a baseball have a higher-than-expected effect on the trajectory of the ball in flight.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, board games, Economics, environment, florida, harvard, iowa, journalism, links, longreads, misinformation, missouri, Music, new york, new york city, parenting, police, science, shoegaze, stick to baseball, vaccines, video games

→ December 2, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 12/2/23.

I had one new post for subscribers to The Athletic this week, looking at the free-agent signings of Sonny Gray and Kenta Maeda plus some thoughts on what the Twins might do next. Some readers got very mad that I don’t think Chris Paddack will be a mid-rotation starter when he hasn’t been anything close to that since 2019.

Over at Paste, I ran through eight new board games that would be great stocking stuffers. I’ll do my year-end post for them the week of December 11^th. Also, here on the dish, I updated my ranking of my top 100 games all-time.

On the Keith Law Show this week, I spoke with Nik Sharma, author of the new cookbook Veg-Table and the also wonderful cookbooks Season and The Flavor Equation. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

My free email newsletter is moving from Tinyletter (which Mailchimp is shutting down) to Substack. If you already subscribed as of Tuesday of this past week, you’re fine – I was able to export the subscriber list and import it to Substack with no issues.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The best headline of the week, and maybe the best obituary of the year, comes from Rolling Stone: “Henry Kissinger, War Criminal Beloved by America’s Ruling Class, Finally Dies.”
Republican state laws targeting LGBT people, pushing book bans, and wiping out reproductive rights are already leading to a brain drain from their jurisdictions.
The New York Times had a fascinating profile of Stephanie Courtney, the actress who plays Flo in Progressive’s commercials.
Tim Grierson interviewed the directors of the three seminal nuclear war films of 1983-84: Testament, The Day After, and Threads.
The Harvard Law Review asked a human rights attorney getting his doctorate at the school to write about the ongoing massacre happening in Gaza for the review’s blog, then refused to run the piece, for what seems to be fear of a backlash from faculty and members of the public sympathetic to Israel. The Nation ran the column instead.
Conspiracy theories around health and wellness ran rampant during the pandemic, and the far right and the far left have found common ground in them.
You probably saw this, but Futurism caught Sports Illustrated running AI-generated articles under fake bylines with stock AI-generated photos of the writers.
Paul Lynch won the Booker Prize this year for his novel Prophet Song, which I have not yet read, but I found this commentary on how the book is dismal and a sign of the Booker’s decline quite interesting – many literary awards seem to overvalue factors like the social importance of the subject, rather than just awarding it to the best book.
The head of the Florida GOP has been charged with sexual battery by a woman who claims she was involved in a threesome with him and his wife, who was part of the state’s Moms for Liberty chapter and worked to support the state’s “Don’t Say Gay” anti-LGBT bill.
Oh, and the (male) outreach director for the Philadelphia Moms for Liberty chapter served time in prison for sexually abusing a 14-year-old boy.
Meanwhile, a failed candidate for the school board in Downingtown, Pennsylvania, posed as the non-existent “Society of College Medicine” to challenge books in the district.
Americans’ desire for avocados is driving deforestation and violence in Mexico.
Penguin Random House, the largest teachers’ union in Iowa, and four authors (including Jodi Picoult, who went to the same elementary school I attended) are suing to overturn Iowa’s book-banning law, on the heels of another lawsuit over the law filed by the ACLU.
Meanwhile, Ohio Republicans are threatening to target judges, possibly with impeachment, who rule in favor of voters’ choice to enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution.
Teen girls targeted by AI deepfakes have little recourse through the law beyond ordinary cyberharassment complaints, which do little to address the lasting damage these pictures and videos can do.
The Columbia Journalism Review looked at how two major newspapers covered political races and issues in 2016 and 2022.
Measles cases are rising around the world thanks to anti-vaxxers and the online proliferation of false information about vaccines.
A woman in Texas who claimed reading one book with a “a single kiss” when she was 11 years old led to her to become a pornography addict actually works for a right-wing publisher that’s trying to compete with Scholastic to sell books to schools.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: book banning, booker prize, environment, florida, iowa, links, longreads, ohio, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ November 11, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 11/11/23.

Nothing new from me at the Athletic as I wait for some real news, a trade or signing, that I can break down. I’ve also begun the offseason prospect work, although those rankings won’t run until late January or early February.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the wonderful game Fit to Print, which has a real-time aspect like Galaxy Trucker where players grab various tiles, then some tile-laying like Patchwork, as players try to fill out their woodland newspapers – with some hilarious text and art on the tiles – with articles, photos, and ads, playing over three rounds to represent three days of issues.

On the Keith Law Show, I spoke with Robert Kolker, author of Hidden Valley Road and The Lost Girls, primarily about the first book, which deals with a family where six of their twelve children developed schizophrenia, although we touched on his update to the latter since the case may have been solved. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I also appeared on NPR’s Marketplace, talking about Moneyball and the data revolution in baseball in the last twenty years. You can catch it on iTunes on the Marketplace Tech podcast.

I sent out a new edition of my free email newsletter last Saturday and will do another this weekend as I try to make this a weekly thing, although I might shift to Monday since that tends to be the slowest day of my week (in more ways than one).

Two longreads from ProPublica: The first is an appalling story of how white Louisiana judges on the 5^th Circuit decided to deny all petitions from prisoners who couldn’t afford attorneys, many of them Black men who claimed they were unjustly convicted – over 5000 such petitions in total, over a period of 12 years. It first became public when the staff director for the court wrote a confessional note before killing himself, but the judiciary managed to clamp down on the story and there have been no consequences for any of the judges or others involved. Oh, those prisoners still had to pay the $300 fee to file those petitions that judges wouldn’t even read. Many of the affected prisoners are still incarcerated.
The second looks at the twenty farming families who use more than half of the water taken from the Colorado River by farms, and 1/7 of all of the water that flows through the river’s Lower Basin each year.
Climate change is pushing the insects that spread tropical diseases further north, into Europe and the United States. Europe had as many cases of dengue in 2022 as they did in 2010 through 2021 combined. California just reported two cases of local transmission last week.
Jonathan Freedland of the Guardian wrote the best piece I read this week on the Israel-Hamas war, arguing that both sides have to fight their own extremists to get us to a sustainable peace.
BlueTriton, the company that owns Poland Spring, quashed a bill in Maine’s legislature to cap the length of water-pumping contracts at seven years. A lobbyist for BlueTriton wrote an amendment that friendly legislators introduced, killing the bill.
Just a day before they got spanked in school board elections in Iowa and Pennsylvania, the pro-censorship group Moms for Liberty demanded that Florida cops arrest a school librarian because there was a fantasy novel that they alleged had risqué content available in the school library.
Hold your surprise: Nine of the 12 members of a Congressional committee that advises the nation on its nuclear strategy have financial ties to weapons manufacturers.
Wounded Falling Bird Ron DeSantis (R) removed commissioner Oren Miller from office in The Villages from office in 2021 after Miller fought a property tax that benefited a local developer, then forced a bogus perjury charge against Miller as well. A three-person panel of Republican judges not only threw out the conviction, they ordered the lower court to find Miller “not guilty.”
Also in Governor WFB’s Florida, the plan to remake the tiny, once-liberal New School into a bastion of conservative something will cost taxpayers $600,000 per student.
The NY Times’s Katherine Miller looks at Nikki Haley’s campaign, and how her fight against Trump may turn “brutal.”
Did anyone else notice that Trump threatened to call in troops to put down protests and arrest dissenters if he wins the Presidency next November?
A student at the University of Pennsylvania who had Long QT syndrome, a form of cardiac arrythmia, died after having a Charged Lemonade at Panera, as she was unaware that it contained as much caffeine as four cups of coffee. Her family is suing, and Panera has added new warning language around the drinks. I go to Panera probably 4-5 times a year, and I’ve seen those drinks, but I had no idea they had that much caffeine, which is more than I have ever had in a single day in my life as far as I know.
Parents demanding that their kids skip once-mandatory childhood vaccinations are doing so at the highest rate ever, raising the risk of outbreaks of preventable diseases like measles and mumps.
Yusef Salaam, one of the falsely accused Central Park Five who was arrested at age 15 and served nearly seven years in prison before his exoneration, was elected to the New York City Council on Tuesday.
Your second COVID-19 infection increases your risk of getting long COVID, and it appears to also increase the odds that you never fully recover. Less than 10% of Americans have gotten a COVID-19 vaccine booster this fall. I did, and you should too. Also, now I’m magnetic wheeee!
Paper straws are everywhere in the UK, but they’re not clearly better for the environment than plastic ones. How about you just skip the straw if you’re able and we save them for folks who require them?
Israel has killed yet another Palestinian journalist, appearing to target Mohammad Abu Hasira this week, running the count of journalists killed in Gaza to at least 37.
Director of the National Counterterrorism Center Christine Abizaid used Hamas’ terrorist attacks on October 7^th as an argument to urge Congress to renew FISA Section 702, which allows our government to spy on us if the purpose is to gather “foreign information.”
The Last Dinner Party have been anointed a Next Big Thing by many critics. The BBC talked to the quintet about what that’s been like, including weird accusations that they were a fabricated band like a K-Pop act.
Board game news: There’s a new site devoted to video and board game content called Aftermath. It’s a writer-owned subscription site that hopes to follow the Defector model, and includes Luke Plunkett, who spent many years at Kotaku, and whom I met on the Shelf Stories podcast this summer.
The Kickstarter for Undergrove, the newest game from Wingspan designer Elizabeth Hargrave (co-designed with Mark Wootton), is already over $250K in just three days.
Alley Cat Games has a Kickstarter for a fresh printing of the 2017 game Calimala, designed by Fabio Lopiano (3 Ring Circus, Merv).

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, climate change, environment, florida, links, longreads, louisiana, maine, Music, new york, stick to baseball, vaccines, water crisis

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