frauds

→ May 17, 2025
→ By keith
→ Leave a Comment

Stick to baseball, 5/17/25.

I had one piece for subscribers to the Athletic this past week, a minor league scouting notebook on some Yankees, Nats, Rays, and Orioles prospects; it’s rained just about every day since then, so I haven’t been to a game since Sunday (despite trying, twice, only to have the games cancelled after I was at or nearly at the park).

I did finally send out a new issue of my free email newsletter this past week, and I’m going to try to get back to doing that weekly now that my spring travel appears to be done. I think I ended up in 15 different states this spring, seeing over 70 guys who are legitimate draft prospects along the way, and of course I’m still annoyed at a few I missed (like Gavin Kilen, who was hurt the weekend I went to Knoxville).

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The Trump Administration pressured African countries to give more business to Elon Musk, according to this report from ProPublica. All of the other stuff is a distraction – all of the funding cuts, the hate laws, the executive orders are there to suck up the oxygen so we don’t notice that they’re using the power of the federal government to enrich themselves. Like with this Amtrak project that Musk’s Boring Company is probably going to “win.”
Meanwhile, Musk’s attempt to take over the Copyright Office flopped because of opposition from conservative media companies and content creators, who, as it turns out, do have some principles when it comes to protecting their own bottom lines.
A preprint that appeared last fall that claimed that materials scientists who had access to AI tools were substantially more productive – and that received publicity from credulous reporters at the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere – was almost certainly a complete fabrication. MIT issued a press release this week saying they had “no confidence in the veracity of the research contained in the paper” and that the author, former graduate student Aidan Toner-Rodgers, was no longer affiliated with the school. The link above argues that the paper was full of red flags, including impossible access to corporate data and too-good-to-be-true results.
Alex Shephard says in the New Republic that Trump is the most corrupt President the U.S. has ever seen.
Political scientists who study the decline of democracies say that the United States is sliding towards autocracy in the way that other previously-free countries like Hungary and Turkey have done in the last twenty years.

A pharmacist at Oak Valley Health in the Toronto area turned out to be one of the people behind the now-shuttered MrDeepFakes.com, one of the biggest sites for nonconsensual pornography. May he never know another moment of peace.

Another tick-borne disease is on the rise in the U.S., including the mid-Atlantic. Babeosis mimics malaria symptoms and is carried by the same species of tick that spreads Lyme disease.

Moderna’s combination COVID and flu shot outperformed current vaccines against both viruses in trials. Will the denialist in charge of HHS stop its distribution in the United States?

Doctors at CHoP & Penn Medicine used gene therapy to cure a newborn of a rare, often fatal metabolic disorder called CPS1 deficiency. It’s the first successful application of a new type of gene-editing protocol that could save thousands of lives if it can be adapted for broader use.

Bad headline, good story: Scientists are trying to figure out why the universe didn’t annihilate itself due to the interaction between matter and anti-matter in the moments right after the Big Bang. If it had, though, maybe we wouldn’t be keeping a dead woman on life support to comply with a theocratic abortion law.

A prison guard in New York admitted that he cleaned up the blood after his colleagues beat inmate Robert Brooks to death. This week was the first I’d even heard about the story.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: frauds, health, links, longreads, medicine, physics, stick to baseball, the swamp, vaccines

→ April 5, 2025
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/5/25.

One piece from me this week at the Athletic, but it’s a long ’un, as I rounded up all of the draft prospects I’d seen in the previous three weeks, covering Arkansas/Vandy, Arizona State, and high school prospects from Arizona, Florida, Alabama (Steele Hall), Nevada (Tate Southisene), and New York. I also held a Klawchat on Wednesday.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Sarah Harman writes about how she spent years hiding the fact that she was a mother from her colleagues and bosses at the TV network where she used to work because she understood the discrimination, overt and covert, that targets mothers and pregnant people in the workplace. It’s especially sobering to read this when anti-discrimination laws are being rolled back willy-nilly.

Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, a crank and anti-vaxxer, has a faculty post at the public University of Florida. He’s barely done anything since he got the job, according to an investigative report in The Alligator. I thought we were supposed to be rooting out corruption and waste.

A Republican judge in North Carolina ruled that 60,000 voters whose ballots have been challenged by the Republican who lost a Supreme Court election there in November have just 15 days to prove their ballots are valid. This is a blatant attempt to overturn a fair and free election. Stop the steal, folks. ProPublica wrote more about this case in January.

We are now living in a police state.

South Dakota taxpayers ponied up over $600,000 to pay for then-Gov. Kristi Noem (R)’s travel, including a junket to Paris, a trip to Houston for cosmetic dental work, and a bear-hunting trip in Canada.

Canary Mission is a decade-old group that’s been doxing university students and faculty they deem antisemitic, using whatever definition they want, and now ICE appears to be using their information to find deportation targets.

The UN says Israel killed 15 Palestinian paramedics and rescue workers, and then buried the evidence in a mass grave. They killed their victims one at a time. Israel, as always, claims they were terrorists. CNN also reported on the story.

The Guardian’s Timothy Snyder writes how JD Vance’s ridiculous posturing in Greenland was more than just embarrassing – it was a huge strategic blunder.

Sen. Jim Banks (R-IN) told a laid-off HHS employee that they “probably deserved it.”

Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) quote-tweeted and mocked a trans woman, which of course sent a flood of hate the woman’s way. There was no reason for Mace to do this. It’s just petty, hateful behavior from someone who talks a lot about how much she loves Jesus.

The gutting of federal science agencies will likely have dire economic consequences, warn many independent economists.

A Michigan woman was assaulted at work and reported it to the police. The police then alerted ICE that she was in the U.S. illegally, and she’s almost certainly going to be deported. If the police can do this, then people in the U.S. without authorization won’t go to the police when they’re victims of crime, and that makes them perfect targets.

A curbside happy hour that started in the pandemic in DelCo, Pennsylvania, is still going strong five years later.

That left-leaning tabloid … uh, The Economist described Trump’s tariffs as “mindless” and said they’ll cause “economic havoc.” I mean, yeah. Any first-year econ student could tell you they’re going to hurt the U.S. more than anyone else. This is the same publication that said France should allow the far-right candidate Marine Le Pen to run for President again, just to give you some sense of their perspective.

These economically destructive tariffs are going to cause carnage in the board game industry, where most of the manufacturing takes place in China and small businesses don’t have the margins to absorb the tariffs – nor does anyone expect consumers to spend more money to end up with fewer games.

Stonemaier Games is releasing a new edition of Tokaido, an all-time top 100 game for me and a classic from the designer of 7 Wonders.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, Economics, florida, frauds, gaza, indiana, links, longreads, pennsylvania, police, police state, south carolina, south dakota, stick to baseball, women's rights

→ January 12, 2025
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 1/12/25.

I took a month or so off from these Saturday posts, mostly because I was busy just about every weekend in December – PAX Unplugged, hosting two holiday parties, getting ready for Christmas, then traveling. I do plan to return these to their normal format, but for now I’m doing a briefer one just to get one posted after I was out of town for the weekend (we went to NYC to see friends and to watch SIX).

I did have one story up this week for subscribers to The Athletic, covering the Gavin Lux trade and associated signing by the Dodgers of Hyeseong Kim.

Over at Paste, my review of the excellent board game Tower Up went up this past week; that game appeared on my list of the top ten games of 2024.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Defector’s exhaustive history of the barely-a-company Color Star, which first appeared on anyone’s radar when they signed a partnership deal with the 76ers in 2021 that the team quickly rescinded, is completely bizarre and an amazing piece of investigative work. The short version is that the company looks like it’s been running some kind of stock scam for at least five years, and has never produced any actual product or service.

The New Yorker has the story of one author’s copyright infringement lawsuit alleging another author, an editor, and a publisher stole the plot and many key details from of one of her unpublished novels, which delves into the question of how far you can copy an idea before it might cross into infringement, but also explains the anti-literary world of “romantasy” and other fast-fashion books that are written to chase trends on TikTok and other social media.

ProPublica published an exposé from and about a man who, on his own, infilitrated multiple right-wing militias, collecting data on members and recording conversations with leaders. He believes they’ll take the country down if they’re not stopped soon.

Dogs who press buttons to ‘talk’ to their owners are all the rage on Instagram and TikTok. Is there any science behind this? I’m a strong skeptic here, and I think the experts quoted in this New York Times Magazine piece lean that way as well, although there are experiments underway to try to understand better what dogs really can understand and express.

Some idiot flew a drone into forbidden airspace over the Palisades wildfire last week, and it crashed into a Super Scooper firefighting plane, disabling it.

Greg Sargent & Kyle Cheney discuss Rep. Jamie Raskin’s (D) pointed and very accurate criticism of the phone call between SCOTUS Justice Samuel Alito and President-Elect Donald Trump.

Editorial cartoonist Ann Telnaes quit the Washington Post after the paper refused to run a cartoon she drew that depicted billionaires bending the knee to the incoming President. She explained why on her Substack.

Coffee futures prices hit record highs in December and haven’t come down much thanks to below-average rainfall in Brazil and bad weather in Vietnam, the two largest coffee producers in the world. Between weather, climate change, and rising demand, coffee futures prices are up over 75% in the last year.

Are we ready for the next pandemic? Of course not!

This story is a bit out of date, but I’m going to share it anyway because it touches on two topics of particular interest to me, board games and the enshittification of social media: Facebook banned ads for the Kickstarter for an upcoming board game called First Monday in October, which is about the Supreme Court, claiming the ads’ content could somehow influence how people voted in elections.

The now-fired fact checker group that worked with Facebook for the past nine years published an open letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg about the likely consequences of his decision to end fact-checking on the site. Do not comply in advance.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, coffee, frauds, links, longreads, science, social media, stick to baseball

→ 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

→ March 2, 2024
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/2/24.

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

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

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

And now, the links…

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

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

→ October 28, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 10/28/23.

Nothing new from me at the Athletic this week as I’ve been working on my top 50 free agents rankings, which will run on Wednesday. My only new content outside of this site was a review of the game Forest Shuffle over at Paste Magazine; it’s got some lovely art but it’s a heavy thinker for a game that’s entirely made up of a large deck of cards. I do like it, though.

My guest on the Keith Law Show this week was Dr. Lee McIntyre, a philosopher at Boston University who discussed his new book On Disinformation: How to Fight for Truth and Protect Democracy. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Robert Kolker, author of Lost Girls and Hidden Valley Road, revisits the topic of the former book, the recently-solved Long Island serial killer case, in a long story on how Suffolk County police botched the investigation for over a decade thanks to infighting, corruption, and incompetence. The story mentions the murder of John Pius, which happened in my hometown when I was about five. Kolker is going to appear on my podcast in November to discuss Hidden Valley Road, about a family with ten sons, six of whom developed schizophrenia.
The CBC has a long investigative piece on singer Buffy Sainte-Marie’s claims to indigenous heritage, which appear to be false based on her birth certificate showing two white European-descended parents. Sainte-Marie’s public and commercial image were very closely tied to her claimed native identity, including a much-loved appearance on Sesame Street in1975.
Vermont’s Woodside Juvenile Rehabilition Center was closed in 2020 after years of allegations of abuse and neglect of the young people in the center’s care. Seven Days has the harrowing story of one young woman whose life was destroyed by her time at the facility.
Another police misconduct story, this one from Dallas, where a Black man who had the same name as a suspect at large found himself assaulted by cops and then arrested on a bogus charge, triggering a cascade of events that cost him his job and his house. He’s suing the police department and the city, neither of which has compensated him in any way for the actions of their officers.
I’d never heard of the pop artist Devon Rodriguez, but I have now, after an art critic who reviewed his work found himself the target of an online mob stirred up by Rodriguez himself, who appears to have skin thinner than tengujo paper.
A site aimed at helping people commit suicide, even connecting them with people who’d sell them the drugs to do it, was ignored for years by UK authorities, leading to 50 or more preventable deaths.
CVS revealed it won’t sell cold medicines with phenylephrine, since the so-called decongestant doesn’t actually work. So why are they still selling so-called “homeopathic” remedies that also don’t work?
My editor at Paste, Garrett Martin, visited Dubrovnik, Croatia, recently, and writes that it’s lovely and is being strangled by tourism.
Clarence Thomas took a loan from a friend for $267,230, and then the friend just flat-out forgave it before Thomas paid down any principal. Thomas, of course, never reported this on financial disclosure reports.
Dr. Hala Alyan, a Palestinian writer and clinical psychologist, writes in the New York Times on how Palestinians are, in her words, expected to “audition” for empathy and compassion.
Also in the Times, Jamelle Bouie writes that the rightward shift as voters get older is happening less with each succeeding generation. One effect of making it harder for people to buy houses (and thus get mortgages) is that they don’t experience the drift towards fiscal conservatism/desire to pull up the ladder behind them. Oh well!
The skin disease leishmaniasis is now endemic in the United States. It’s spread by sandflies, and their habitats are expanding thanks to climate change.
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson wants to ban no-fault divorce. This is disastrous for people in abusive marriages, but also, my marriage is none of your fucking business.
Historian Kevin Kruse is leaving Twitter, which matters because he was one of the more prominent voices countering political disinformation on the site, which, as he says, is undergoing enshittification and becoming a white nationalist utopia like Truth Social and Gab. NBC has a story on how LGBTQ+ people are leaving Twitter as well, citing the site’s increasingly toxic atmosphere and Musk’s decisions to allow deadnaming, misinformation, and hate speech to run rampant on the platform. I’ll be there as long as many of you are, but I’m on Bluesky (@keithlaw.bsky.social), Threads (@mrkeithlaw, same as Instagram), and Spoutible (@keithlaw) as well.
The Times had a good story on how sports Twitter is still hanging in there, relatively speaking.
Dr. Peter Hotez, author of the new book The Deadly Rise of Anti-Science, received the inaugural Anthony Fauci Courage in Leadership Award from the Infectious Diseases Society of America.
Board game news: The Kickstarter for Nocturne, the latest game from the publishers of Cascadia and Fit to Print, is live now and already at $64K with 41 days to go.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-science, board game news, frauds, health, links, longreads, mental health, police, pseudoscience, scotus, social media, stick to baseball, texas, true crime, vermont

→ October 7, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 10/7/23.

I’ve had one post up for subscribers to the Athletic since the last roundup, with my hypothetical postseason awards ballots for 2023. I do have another story filed for Sunday, so keep an eye skinned for that.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Votes for Women, a (mostly) two-player, asymmetrical game about the fight for women’s suffrage. It’s fantastic, and I also love that this review went up the week that Glynis Johns turned 100.

On the Keith Law Show this week, my guest was MLB’s Sarah Langs, talking about the season that was, who she would vote for in the various awards, and what excited her about this year’s playoff teams. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Rolling Stone’s Sean Williams writes about being conned by a con artist who tried to get the journalist to write a long profile/feature on him to further a movie deal, only for Williams to discover that the fraudster had as many as 200 victims of various romance and other scams over the last forty years.
The Washington Post looks at how climate change increases the demand and need for air conditioning, which in turn contributes more to climate change. Cooling a world that’s getting hotter requires increasing levels of energy, and we still rely far too much on energy-production methods that pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
An effective vaccine against tuberculosis would save millions of lives; it’s the deadliest infectious disease in the world, killing 1.6 million people a year. When pharmaceutical company GSK developed a vaccine for it, they chose instead to use the technology for a shingles vaccine, keeping the TB vaccine off the market for years.
Workers in California who cut stone countertops are coming down with silicosis, an incurable and terminal disease.
Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull gave a very candid interview to the San Diego Union-Tribune ahead of the band’s concert last month in that city.
Dr. Peter Hotez warns that antiscience conspiracy theorists are growing in power and organization, threatening public health and the scientists working on projects like new vaccines – such as the brand-new vaccine against malaria, potentially one of the biggest global health breakthroughs in decades.
SARS-CoV-2 infects coronary arteries and arterial plaque, which increases the risk of heart attack and stroke in people who have or had COVID-19.
NBC News’s Ben Collins may have found a clue to why Elon Musk bought Twitter only to destroy it. Musk also wiped out the company’s election integrity team and cut the group targeting disinformation on the site.
Rumble host Stew Peters called for the execution of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce. Media Matters found ads for the NFL appearing on Peters’ Twitter account, including one near a link to the video of his death threat.
Fact-checking had a big moment between the 2020 election and the pandemic, with news organizations hiring more fact-checkers and more independent groups combating misinformation online, but nothing has really changed and now the effort has stalled.
Italy’s right-wing government has moved to erase LGBTQ+ people, especially parents, from their society.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) has spent millions of taxpayer dollars defending his “anti-woke” laws targeting LGBTQ+ rights, public education, Disney, and more, only to lose repeatedly in the courts.
Harris County, Texas, taxpayers are in a similar boat, having paid over $1 million to people roped into County DA Kim Ogg’s (D) prosecutions of public officials with whom she’s feuded.
Republicans in North Carolina passed a bill to grab power from the Governor so they can control elections in the state, which already has a gerrymandered legislative map. Gov. Roy Cooper (D) vetoed Senate Bill 749, but the body is set to override his veto on Tuesday.
Delaware became the 17^th state to ban the “gay panic” defense, where a defendant accused of a violent act claims the act is justified because their victim was LGBTQ+.
A city commissioner in Anchorage, Alaska, who had a previous history of fraud, has been indicted for fraudulently taking $1.6 million in COVID-19 relief funds. She and her husband are accused of using the money to buy cryptocurrency, pay taxes, and for other personal matters.
The mayoral race in Franklin, Tennessee, got even more bizarre last week when a bunch of self-proclaimed white nationalists showed up to support candidate Gabrielle Hanson at a campaign event.
People of Praise, the extreme Catholic group that counts SCOTUS Justice Amy Coney Barrett as a member, is facing an FBI investigation into a cover-up of sexual abuse in the sect.
A rare bit of good news on the environment – Antigua & Barbuda has transformed the nation’s uninhabited third island, Redonda, from a lifeless rock into a thriving fountain of biodiversity.
An activist group is suing the EPA on behalf of a largely Black community in West Virginia’s “Chemical Valley,” arguing that the agency hasn’t done enough to protect residents from ethylene oxide pollution from a Union Carbide plant there.
The capitalists will let you drown. There’s money for cops and sports stadiums, but not for housing, or for infrastructure that might have prevented the flooding that plagued New York City eight days ago.
Speaking of which, just ten New York City cops were responsible for $68 million in payouts to victims of their misconduct, yet all ten are still on the public payroll.
A cop in Pennsylvania tried to strangle his ex-girlfriend and then used his authority to have her involuntarily committed.
The conservative newsletter/site The Dispatch argues that Trump and his supporters in office are devoid of moral leadership, and as Trump’s rhetoric worsens, too few people in his party seem to notice or care. Indeed, Trump called for the execution of General Mark Milley, and it barely made a ripple.
Did Hasan Minhaj go too far in fabricating autobiographical details in his standup routine? Brian Logan, comedy critic for the Guardian, says he did. The controversy seems likely to cost Minhaj a shot at the hosting job for the Daily Show.
Your brain sees winning streaks everywhere, even in random sequences. Scientific American looks at why.
Did the James Webb Telescope discover galaxies older than the projected age of the universe? Maybe, explains astrophysicist Katie Mack.
Some board game Kickstarters of note: Diatom is a tile-laying, pattern-making game based on an old Victorian art form.
And there’s a Kickstarter for the roll-and-write Merchants of Magick game, which is in the same universe as Set a Watch, along with two new expansions.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: alaska, antiscience, board game news, climate change, cognitive psychology, delaware, environment, florida, frauds, health, italy, lgbt rights, links, longreads, Music, north carolina, physics, police, social media, stick to baseball, tennessee, texas, vaccines

→ September 23, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 9/23/23.

For subscribers to The Athletic, I posted my annual Minor League Player of the Year column this week, as well as my last regular-season scouting notebook of 2023, covering prospects I saw from the Red Sox, Orioles, and Nationals. I’ll head to Arizona in October for Fall League coverage, of course. My podcast will be back next week and I’ve already filed my next review for Paste.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas didn’t just take a bunch of free trips from billionaire Harlan Crow; he also attended donor parties hosted by the billionaire Koch brothers, as reported here by ProPublica.
The New York Times reports on child labor at Perdue and Tyson chicken-processing plants, where immigrant kids are exploited by factory officials willing to look the other way and who claim ignorance when these children are seriously injured on the job. The Department of Labor only investigates when they receive a tip, and fines top out at $15,000.
Penn Medicine hired a new facilities director for its hospital without checking his background, which included a five-year federal prison sentence for wire fraud and misuse of a social security number. Larry Butler was fired four days into his tenure as COO of a hospital in Oregon in 2022, but Penn still hired him in July of 2023, only for him to “resign” four weeks later.
The Indian state of Kerala is experiencing yet another outbreak of the Nipah virus, which causes severe respiratory illnesses in humans and appears to have jumped the species barrier from pigs about 25 years ago. This is the fourth such outbreak in Kerala in the last five years.
Elon Musk’s grandfather was an antisemite and avid supporter of South Africa’s racist apartheid system, according to this lengthy story from The Atlantic, which contradicts Musk’s own mythmaking.
The U.S. media continues to fuck up its coverage of the Presidential race, treating Trump as some sort of entertainment vehicle – as they did in 2015-16 – while playing into dubious narratives around President Biden’s age or his son’s behavior.
The daughter of Dennis Rader, the serial killer who called himself “BTK,” is an adult now and is trying to use her knowledge of her father to help police close more cases.
The Sound of Freedom was a surprise box-office hit this summer and sits in 10^th place this year for U.S. receipts thanks to a broad effort by conservative and Christian groups to sell tickets, but the subject of the film, Tim Ballard, was ousted from his anti-human trafficking organization after an investigation into sexual misconduct, and now the film’s producer also stands accused of sexual assault, in this case of a minor.
The all-Muslim city council in Hamtramck, Michigan, banned the display of any Pride flags on public property during June (Pride Month) this year, after LGBTQ+ groups had supported the Muslim immigrant groups when they arrived in the city. The issue came back up this past week when Mayor Amer Ghalib refused to march near the city’s queer alliance in a Labor Day parade.
South Africa is facing a new, xenophobic movement called Operation Dudula that is targeting foreigners in the country and blaming them for the rise in drug addiction, especially the drug known as nyaope, a form of black tar heroin that sellers claim contains antiviral properties. The group’s beliefs and philosophy seem to mirror those of right-wing, anti-immigrant groups in the U.S. and Europe.
Azerbaijan has reclaimed the majority-Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh after the region’s separatist government, which called itself the Republic of Artsakh, agreed to disarm and to seek reintegration with the surrounding nation. This should end the looming humanitarian crisis in the region but may lead to a large exodus of ethnic Armenians; it also may further reduce the influence of Russia, which had backed Armenia’s interests with military aid, in the Caucasus.
Russell Brand’s agency learned three years ago that a minor accused him of sexual assault, and they ignored her. Tavistock Wood dropped Brand from its roster with the revelations this month that three other women also accuse him of rape or sexual assault, and they’re claiming they knew nothing about it.
Gabrielle Hanson, a Republican and Trump-supporting candidate for Mayor of Franklin, Tennessee, used images of women culled from social media in campaign materials, claiming these women – many of them women of color – were her supporters. The women were actually selected seven years earlier for an ad campaign for the clothing brand The Limited and had posted photos of themselves at a celebratory brunch, which Hanson and her now ex-campaign manager Erin Mazzoni used without their permission. That link has an incredible video where journalist Phil Williams interviews Mazzoni, who sounds, to put it kindly, completely bonkers.
Alabama Republicans continue to fight to preserve their gerrymandered legislative map that suppresses the power of Black voters (who make up 27% of the state’s population), and they’re doing it with the backing of Leonard Leo’s dark-money network. Just this summer, Congressional Republicans blocked a bill that would have required such dark-money groups to come into the light and disclose their donors.
Both The New Yorker and Paste ran stories on The Baseball Project, the fun supergroup with members of R.E.M., Dream Syndicate, and the Minus Five, where all of their songs are about baseball. They’re great live, by the way.
Anti-vaccine misinformation is highly effective: More Oklahoma parents are skipping safe, effective childhood vaccinations against dangerous and incredibly contagious viruses like measles.
Climate change may cause 39 million U.S. homeowners to lose access to home insurance, including many homeowners who don’t accept the reality of climate change and vote for the one party that also denies it.
New York editor Katy Schneider describes “the pandemic skip,” the way we all lost about two years to the pandemic but may not have fully realized or internalized the passage of that time.
A sketchy group calling itself “NY Citizens Audit” has received a cease-and-desist letter from the New York Attorney General’s office, accusing the group of intimidating voters by posing as election officials to knock on doors and accuse people of committing voter fraud.
Australian officials visited D.C. this week to call on the United States to drop its prosecution of Julian Assange for publishing leaked documents, a call echoed here by the Freedom of the Press Foundation because the same overbroad reading of the Espionage Act could easily be used against all sorts of journalists anywhere on the political spectrum.
Believing transphobic things does, in fact, make you a transphobe.
Board game news: Undergrove, the next new game from Wingspan designer Elizabeth Hargrave, will go up on Kickstarter in November, and you can save the page now to be notified when it’s live.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: alabama, board game news, climate change, coronavirus, frauds, free speech, health, labor rights, lgbt rights, links, longreads, metoo, oklahoma, scotus, south africa, stick to baseball, tennessee, vaccines, voter suppression

→ September 2, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 9/2/23.

Nothing new this week at the Athletic beyond contributing notes on the callups of Jasson Dominguez and Ceddanne Rafaela.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the board game Bamboo, a cute medium-box game that’s a pretty meaty game at heart.

I appeared on two podcasts this week, talking to Jim Margalus of Sox Machine about the White Sox’ front office turmoil and to Chris Crawford about eight prospects who’ve had surprising years, four positive and four negative.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The writer Naomi Klein writes in the Guardian about being confused with the crackpot Naomi Wolf and how people fall for conspiracy theories online, part of her upcoming book Doppelganger.
Albanian youths bought into the hype of influencers who claimed they’d found riches elsewhere, leading to a shortage of young people staying in the town of Kukes.
The Atlantic profiles the latest Presidential candidate/grifter, Vivek Ramaswamy, who seems to think January 6^th was something other than an insurrection of idiots and might be a 9/11 truther. He also claims he’s not “bought and paid for” but is a major investor in companies fighting climate change policies.
Florida state officials sought opposing viewpoints on slavery while reviewing the AP African-American Studies curriculum. The Tampa Bay Times has more details on how Gov. Ron DeSantis’s “anti-woke” policies have led to this embarrassing situation.
In the late 1950s, Spain built a dam that should have flooded the thousand-year-old town of Granadilla, leading authorities to evacuate it. Sixty-odd years later, the town remains above water, but residents and their descendants still can’t return.
ProPublica exposes a Chicago cop who’s lied under oath at least 44 times, putting dozens more cases at risk.
Do you follow a doctor or scientist on social media who’s always promoting their subscription newsletter? The BMJ ran an opinion piece on how those pose a conflict of interest.
The San Francisco Chronicle looks at how the New York Times has covered (badly) the national assault on trans rights.
Try to contain your surprise, but Republicans blocked a bill that would have required dark money groups to reveal their donors’ identities.
The Katy ISD in Texas has halted all new book purchases for its schools because of objections to any books with LGBTQ+ themes.
Disgraced Spanish soccer official Luis Rubiales is facing a national inquiry over his forced kiss of a Spanish women’s national team player; meanwhile, his mother is going on a hunger strike over what she claims is unfair treatment of her creep son.
Atlanta magazine has lost much of its editorial staff after its publisher and editor-in-chief told writers to cut back on “woke” coverage of one of the south’s most diverse cities.
Azerbaijani forces have blocked food shipments to the Armenian exclave of Nagorno-Karabach, leading to a massive humanitarian disaster.
The Gabonese military overthrew the country’s latest leader, the third in the line of the Bongo family that had ruled the country for 55 rules. Is it a real change in power or more of the same?
Big Gay Ice Cream was one of the hottest brands in the company before the pandemic hit, but mismanagement and a fight for control have reduced the brand to just one NYC outpost and left the future of the company in doubt.
Billy Bragg tore apart country singer Oliver Anthony’s faux working class song “Rich Men North of Richmond” for the Guardian and recorded his own response track calling on people to join and support labor unions if they actually care about the plight of blue collar workers.
Saudi Arabia has sentenced a critic of the regime to death for his tweets. Very nice for an ally of the United States and a primary owner of the site formerly known as Twitter.
When VICE declared bankruptcy, its executives still got paid even when its employees didn’t.
I missed this in June but a unique Magic: the Gathering card representing the One Ring from the Lord of the Rings trilogy was valued at over $2 million by companies offering a bounty for whoever pulled the card.
If you’re having trouble falling asleep, cognitive behavioral therapy may help.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: florida, frauds, links, longreads, police, social media, stick to baseball, texas, trans rights

→ July 1, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 6/30/23.

I posted my 2023 Mock Draft v3.0 this week, and as usual did a Q&A to take your questions on it. Going forward, I’ll have the last Big Board update later this upcoming week and then mock 4.0 on Saturday, the morning I fly to Seattle to cover the Futures Game and then the draft. I also did a just-for-fun piece on who I’d put on the All-Star rosters, and then I avoided the comments entirely. I was a lot more active in the comments on the other pieces, including my scouting blog on Jackson Holliday and Brady House. And I weighed in on Friday night on the two players going to Kansas City in the Aroldis Chapman trade.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Rebuilding Seattle, a midweight economic game with some polyomino tile-laying aspects, an imposing game on the table that plays pretty quickly and doesn’t have that many rules to learn.

And now, the links…

Longreads: The LA Times looks at solar farms in the deserts of the American southwest and the complex forces shaping their construction and spread, from environmentalists to monopoly utilities.
At The Intercept, Ilyse Hogue looks at the founding of the nationalist group The Federalist Society, which sparked the 40-year battle to end abortion access in the U.S.
The Atlantic profiles RFK Jr., calling him the first MAGA Democrat for his misinformation-filled anti-science platform, in a piece that, to rational readers, makes him look insane. I just hope reporters keep asking him which vaccines he deems safe.
Another U.S. government report concluded that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was not at the Wuhan lab before the pandemic began. The conspiracy theorists, including some authors who have profited by spreading the lab-link hoax, were not happy.
Speaking of RFK Jr., his drive to “debate” a scientist over vaccines is also misleading, because what he really wants is a platform to shout his views. Denialists are big fans of the Gish gallop, where you say so much that’s false in a short period of time that you drown your opponent, making rebuttals impossible.
You know who might hate RFK Jr. more than I do? Autistic people, whom he’s mocked and demonized for decades, spreading outdated and dangerous stereotypes about the neurodivergent.
Did a relative of yours send you one of those scaremongering stories about a new study showing that sucralose was “genotoxic” and causes cancer? Yeah, it’s not and it doesn’t. That study’s authors have misrepresented their data, and journalists who aren’t science literate – or choose not to be – ran with it.
All this anti-science and the associated distrust of public health comes at a substantial cost to society.
Striking reporters at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and Business Insider have gone old school and started their own strike papers, which, like Defector, give people a look at what worker-owned publications might look like.
All that money the U.S. spent to go find the remains of the Titan submersible will come from you, me, and all other American taxpayers.
The BBC looks at Community Violence Interventions, which may have prevented one or more revenge shootings in Chicago quite recently. It’s a better, cheaper approach to violence reduction in cities than spending more on police, which has no impact on violent crime rates.
A 53-year-old man who grew up with anti-LGBTQ+ views and has come around decided to go sit on the sidewalk at the Denver Pride parade with a sign saying “Recovering Bigot. I Am Sorry! Free Hugs.” The Washington Post interviewed him as he described the positive, inclusive, and forgiving environment he found.
Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs (D) signed an executive order banning conversion therapy in the state, making it the 27^th to do so.
Did you hear about the imbroglio around New York City’s plans to force some of its pizzerias to clean up their ovens to reduce carbon emissions? That’s wrong. The plan isn’t new and the target is particulate emissions, not carbon dioxide, which should resonate with everyone who’s been in the path of wildfire smoke this summer.
Florida Governor and Presidential candidate Ron DeSantis (R-) used Texas taxpayer resources on a recent campaign trip there.
DeSantis keeps losing – in court, as a judge blocked the state’s ban on drag shows as likely unconstitutional.
Groomer alert: A Texas pastor convicted of sexually assaulting 14 girls was released from prison early for good behavior. But drag shows!
And then we have Justice Sam Alito, who took a trip to Rome paid for by a group that has filed briefs before SCOTUS, whose wife leased land to an oil and gas firm while the Department of Justice was fighting the EPA before the Court, and, of course, when he received questions from ProPublica about some of these improprieties, he ran to the Wall Street Journalandwrote a whiny pre-buttal instead of answering.
Keith Law Show guest Jason Kander, author of Invisible Storm: A Soldier’s Memoir of Politics and PTSD, is one of four veterans dealing with the disorder whose stories make up the new film Here. Is. Better. The New York Times gave it a positive review.
The Kingdom of Jordan wants to build a brand-new capital city in the Black Desert, where there is no infrastructure, no natural water access, nothing at all to sustain a city and its population.
Modern hunter-gatherers have a thriving gut microbiome compared to those of us who sit in a desk chair and write about baseball prospects and board games.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-science, arizona, crime, florida, frauds, health, jordan, lgbt rights, links, longreads, police, scotus, stick to baseball, unions, vaccines

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