lgbt rights — Page 3

→ March 6, 2021
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/6/21.

For subscribers to the Athletic, I ranked the top 30 prospects in this year’s draft class, with the caveat of course that we’ll likely see a lot of movement this spring because most college players didn’t play at all last summer or fall. I also answered some questions on the Padres’ farm system for our beat writer Dennis Lin. And I held a Klawchat on Thursday.

My guest on the Keith Law Show this week is Aaron Fitt of D1baseball.com, talking about this year’s draft class, Kumar Rocker vs. Jack Leiter, and other topics around college baseball. You can subscribe on Apple podcasts, Amazon, and Spotify.

The latest edition of my free email newsletter was about how it feels when the face in the mirror finally starts to catch up with your biological age. Also, you can still buy The Inside Gameand Smart Baseball anywhere you buy books; the paperback edition of The Inside Game will be out on April 6^th.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: WIRED looks at the strange economy of scandals in Hollywood and the man who often inserts himself into the deals made around them.
In 1963, Alderman Ben Lewis, a rising political figure in Chicago and one of the most powerful Black men in the city government, was killed in his office, execution-style, but the city made sure not to investigate it thoroughly. ProPublica examines why not, and whether the police may have been involved in the murder.
Anti-vaxxers are now misusing federal data to lie about COVID-19 vaccines, claiming they pose dangers that aren’t supported by evidence. Alex Berenson, once a promising New York Times reporter, has now gone from cannabis alarmist to COVID-19 denialist to full-blown anti-vaxxer, using his sizable Twitter following to encourage fellow deniers and discourage people from getting the vaccine.
The Washington Post examines the history of lies and fraud that propelled Madison Cawthorn to the House of Representatives.
From last August, Current Affairs explains that police aren’t the answer if crime isn’t actually the question.
The Guardian has the story of the battle over the Wentworth golf club in Surrey, England, which they describe as a battle between the rich and the very, very rich.
Georgia Public Broadcasting has an update on the voter suppression bills currently in the works in the state.
Kayla Parker, a 25-year-old Black activist, is trying to mobilize Tennessee voters the way Stacey Abrams did in Georgia.
Dr. Richard Pan, a state Senator in California, writes that anti-vaccine extremism is a form of domestic terrorism.
David Leonhardt, writing the daily briefing for the New York Times, explains why the Johnson & Johnson vaccine is just as effective as the other two vaccines on the market already, even though misleading headlines show lower efficacy rates.
The University of Texas is embroiled in a completely avoidable controversy over a racist song sung by some fans of their football team. Some angry white donors sent some rather telling emails to the school, threatening to pull their donations if the racist song was banned, because you can’t have college football if you don’t get to do a racism.
The Atlantic reports on the success of a small Universal Basic Income experiment in Stockton, California. The United States is the stingiest developed country when it comes to helping people in our lowest income strata. That needs to change if we don’t want to lose the economic and social gains of the last century.
New York Times opinion page writer David Brooks, who hates millennials but married one anyway, has been taking a second salary from the Weave Project, funded by Facebook and by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ father, without disclosing the potential conflict of interest to his editors or his readers.
A U.S. diplomat has been railing against Jews and promoting the idea of a Christian nation-state online for years and is somehow still employed by the Foreign Service.
Wealthy residents of one town in the Florida Keys received COVID-19 vaccines before most of the state … and, oh, hey, a bunch of donors to Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) live there.
Dan Dakich, an announcer for ESPN and a former assistant coach who has denied being there when Bobby Knight choked Neil Reed, doxxed a UNC teacher and threatened to sexually assault an Ursinus professor. Somehow, four days later, ESPN hasn’t suspended him or taken any other action. Sure seems like they move a lot faster when the tweets are about evolution, doesn’t it?
Former WNBA owner and former Senator Kelly Loeffler lost control of her basketball team to a player whom she refused to meet to discuss their differences of opinion.
The former head of the agency that oversees the Voice of America racked up over $1 million in taxpayer-funded expenditures to investigate his own employees to find reasons to fire them. I thought the Republicans were the party of smaller government and less waste?
These transgender athlete bills pushed by Republican lawmakers – who don’t care about athletes of any identities, only about staying in power – are a solution in search of a problem, according to critics of one such bill in Missouri.
Hundreds of scientists and researchers have signed an open letter to President Biden saying that evidence-based policy should mean decriminalizing sex work. Doing so would be the best way to protect the interests and health of the workers themselves.
Board Game News: Red Rising, the latest release from publisher Stonemaier Games (Scythe, Charterstone, Pendulum), is now available for pre-order.
Alderac has a Kickstarter up for Meeples & Monsters that funded fully in just 15 minutes.
And there’s also a Kickstarter for High Noon, a card-based strategy game for 2+ players, where the first 4000 people to fund the game will get their copies as soon as the Kickstarter closes – the first I’ve seen of this in a board game crowdfunding effort.
The British Museum offers a look at ten board games from ancient history.
And finally, watch a doctor dismantle Rep. Marjorie Taylor-Greene’s ignorant claims on sex and gender in about 30 seconds.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: florida, lgbt rights, links, longreads, social media, texas, the swamp, vaccines

→ November 16, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 11/16/19.

I wrote this week, but nothing has been published quite yet. Some of it will be in bookstores on April 21st of next year, though, as I work on the first edit for The Inside Game, my new book combining baseball decisions and cognitive psychology. I also am tentatively scheduled to appear at Washington, DC’s, Politics & Prose on April 24th, with other events likely in that first week. If you’re with a bookstore and interested in arranging an event, feel free to reach out to me in the comments and I’ll connect you with my publicist.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The legal battle over a 7-year-old trans girl in Texas could have substantial implication for trans rights of children in that state and across the United States.
The Guardian looks at the big-data approach to history and projecting the future, a new field of inquiry reminiscent of the psychohistory of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation novels.
Vanity Fair details the theft of 550 Bitcoin-mining computers in Iceland. The authorities know who stole the machines, but not where the machines are.
A New Jersey high school baseball coach ended up sued after he told a kid to slide, and the kid ended up with a horrible leg injury.
A woman who’s worked in the board game industry came out with her story of how designer/publisher JR Honeycutt manipulated and abused her across a months-long relationship. BoardGameGeek immediately removed him from a panel where he was supposed to speak at BGG.Con this month.
Deval Patrick wants to run for President. He helped a Republican billionaire make millions through foreclosures while he was Governor of Massachusetts.
Restaurant critic Adam Platt – you may have heard of his brother, Oliver – writes about what it’s like to be targeted by a chef whose food you’ve reviewed.
ESPN’s Kevin Arnovitz writes about the silence that follows the NBA’s and Daryl Morey’s China/Hong Kong controversy. I may be showing my age, but can you imagine a similar blowback in the 1970s-1980s if an athlete or GM had voiced support of Solidarity or the Helsinki Watch Groups?
Dignity Health stuck one of its own employees with a $900,000 bill for medical care for her daughter, born three months premature, by trying to use a loophole around a missed deadline. This ProPublica piece points out that “Dignity is also a religious organization that says its mission is to further ‘the healing ministry of Jesus.'”
“I was an astrologer – here’s how it really works, and why I had to stop.”
Anti-vaxxers are now targeting minority groups with their dangerous misinformation.
The Daily Beast got basic anti-vaccine ads approved by Google and Facebook despite those companies’ claims that they wouldn’t run such false or misleading advertisements.
A woman who’s active in promoting vaccine safety and accurate vaccine information on Twitter went to a screening of Vaxxed 2 and tweeted her thoughts.
The head of the Nutrition Department at Harvard’s School of Public Health weighs in on how much meat we should eat and on the new plant-based meat alternatives.
The founder of a site called NoFap, which is – and I’m not making this up – trying to tell men to stop masturbating, is suing a prominent sex researcher because she said masturbation isn’t bad and that porn addiction isn’t real.
Health officials fighting the Ebola outbreak in the north Kivu region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo will now have a second vaccine to try in the city of Goma, which hasn’t yet been hit by the outbreak. Over 2000 people have died already in the year-long Ebola flare-up, which has spread rapidly due to locals’ mistrust of government and NGO personnel.
The current way we use antibiotics to fight routine bacterial infections may be out of date, and contributes to drug resistance.
The lower house of the Ohiobama legislature passed a bill saying that teachers can’t grade students’ incorrect science answers as wrong if the answers reflect the students’ religious beliefs. Imagine paying your tax money so the public schools in your district could fail to teach kids basic science.
Deadspin’s last (interim) editor-in-chief Barry Petchesky wrote for the New York Times about being fired for refusing to stick to sports.
The United States talks about fighting global terrorism, but the country is now seen as a leading exporter of white supremacist terrorism, spreading to violence across the western world.
The Saudis are not our friends. They hacked into the phones of Twitter users critical of their dictatorial regime and extorted them into tweeting state propaganda.
A MediaMatters survey found that just 3% of news reports on the California wildfires pointed out the role of climate change in the conflagration.
Leaked emails show Trump consigliere Stephen Miller empathizes strongly with white nationalists.
Peter Nicholas writes in the Atlantic that Trump’s strategy of attacking his adversaries may not work given how many people are on the opposite side of the impeachment inquiry.
President Trump continued to funnel tax dollars to his friends as his administration hired $380-an-hour outside consultants to handle work ordinarily assigned to government employees, leading to nearly $750,000 in gains for Trump’s allies.
As many as 90% of domestic violence victims report possible traumatic brain injuries, according to two researchers writing for Scientific American.
A new outpost of Pizzeria Bianco, my #1 pizzeria in the United States, will open in Los Angeles in the space formerly occupied by Tartine Bianco.
Board game news: The designer and publisher of the role-playing game Gloomhaven, which costs $120 and comes in a 20-pound box, announced a streamlined version called Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion, which should cost around $50 and hit retail in Q3 in 2020.
Calliope Games is reissuing the 2004 game Station Master (Kickstarter link) with new artwork.
Next Move announced Azul: Crystal Mosaic, an expansion to the 2018 Spiel des Jahres winner that will include overlays to keep your tiles in place and new double-sided player boards.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: africa, anti-science, basketball, climate change, health, lgbt rights, links, longreads, nutrition, pizza, pseudoscience, stick to baseball, the swamp, vaccines

→ November 2, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 11/2/19.

This isn’t quite new, but I put out a formal announcement this week that my second book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, will be out on April 21, 2020. You can pre-order it now on HarperCollins’ site.

On the board gaming front, I ranked the top 25 board games of the 2010s for Paste this week, and also wrote about some recent programming games, where players issue instructions as if they were writing code, over at Ars Technica. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

You can get more of me by signing up for my free email newsletter, which I send out irregularly but definitely not often enough to bother you.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: A ProPublica investigation found billionaire Dan Gilbert got a huge tax break with the help of the Trump Administration after making large donations to Trump’s campaign. The tax break in question involved “opportunity zones,” incentives aimed at spurring new development in disadvantaged urban areas – not, as in Gilbert’s case, for investments already made.
One dollar of every $10 spent on AmazonBasics products is spent on batteries. One writer tried to track where those batteries come from and what their impact is on the environment. She found a few answers, but not enough, and a lot of opacity from a company that is already under fire for labor concerns, climate impact, and its logistics operation’s effect on road safety.
Allie Conti, writing for VICE, describes discovering a vast, nationwide hosting scam on AirBnB that costs unsuspecting guests hundreds of dollars and leaves them without a place to stay.
The well-titled article “The Fight Over a Shitty Rock” has a very serious point: There’s a dispute roiling over Rockall, a tiny and uninhabitable islet in the North Atlantic claimed by the United Kingdom, and whether the islet extends the UK’s fishing rights against the wishes and claims of Ireland.
The chocolate industry has already been criticized for its use of child labor and even slaves; now the Washington Post points out that cacao farmers in West Africa are decimating forests, accelerating climate change, while western chocolate producers talk about sustainability without addressing this issue at all.
Spotify’s dominance in the streaming industry is still tenuous and hasn’t led to consistent profits, which explains in part the company’s acquisition of podcast producers Gimlet Media.
Anti-vaxxer nuts send racist, violent threats to people who post pro-vaccine messages, and Facebook does absolutely nothing about it. The people running these sites – Twitter is no better – talk a big accountability game when it comes to abuse and harassment, but they don’t back it up with actions.
Facebook also lets right-wing propaganda site The Daily Wire violate its rules by using sock puppet accounts to promote its content. Again, Facebook does … nothing. And they blocked pro-vaccine ads while letting anti-vaxxer ads run. It’s okay if we’re still getting paid.
Anti-vaxxers love to claim that measles is ‘benign,’ but there’s growing research on just how harmful a bout of the viral disease can be in the long term. New evidence shows that causes ‘immune amnesia’ in survivors, whose immune systems must relearn how to fight infections because measles wiped out 11% to 73% of antibodies already present in that person’s blood.
The anti-vaxxer faux-documentary Vaxxed has a sequel, but the producers aren’t saying where it’s playing for fear rational people will try to stop it, so keep your eyes open, rational people, and demand any theater near you that tries to show Vaxxed 2 pull their screenings.
An evidence-based technique called motivational interviewing is proving useful in addressing vaccine-hesitant parents. It involves one-on-one conversations between parents and trained counselors who don’t tell the parents what to do, but “simply talk through parents’ fears and goals, and let them decide what to do.”
Louisa Thomas wrote of the ‘stories’ the Houston Astros have told, which don’t always align with reality, in the New Yorker. I know of at least three more departures from their baseball operations department in the last few months, only one of which, longtime Jeff Luhnow lieutenant Oz Ocampo, is public.
Michael Stipe and Mike Mills spoke to the BBC about their album Monster on the 25th anniversary of its release.
Writing for Paste, Annie Merkley writes about what it’s been like as an American in the midst of the protests in Chile, a piece that also explained to me what the protests have been about.
It’s from June of 2018, but John Pavlovitz’s “Now You Want Civility?” post seems apropos after all the pearl-clutching over Nationals fans booing President Trump last Sunday. And, by the way, one of the clutchers was Delaware Senator Chris Coons, a Democrat I’m hoping gets primaried the next time he’s up.
VICE asks if sex addiction is real, or a misidentification of people who have sexual habits or preferences that might vary from the median.
A Spanish court acquitted five men of rape because the victim was drunk, so they didn’t have to use force. This is separate from the “Wolf Pack” rape case that led to protests earlier this year.
A legislator from Cobb County, home of your Atlanta Braves, is trying to make it a felony for trans kids to get gender reassignment via surgery or drugs. In two thousand and fucking nineteen, we are still doing this. This isn’t ‘protecting kids,’ as she claims; it’s going to do nothing but increase suicides.
Deep sleep may help protect the brain against Alzeimer’s and other neurodegenerative diseases by triggering electrical pulses, according to one new study.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: chocolate, climate change, frauds, georgia, lgbt rights, links, longreads, sleep, social media, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ July 20, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 7/20/19.

No new ESPN+ pieces this week but I expect to have several next week. I held a Klawchat on Thursday.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Century A New World, the end of the Century trilogy that began with Spice Road and continued with Eastern Wonders.

If you read my free email newsletter, you learned at least two interesting things this week, one of which is that I’ve backed away from Twitter by logging out of it on my phone. I find the entire atmosphere on the site too toxic for my tastes, which even continued on Friday as I checked it on my laptop to find someone angry I didn’t tweet about a particular story that broke yesterday.

I’ll be at the Under Armour Game at Wrigley Field on Monday, a great event that showcases many of the high school players who’ll be drafted in the first round next June. It’s free to attend; you can request tickets ahead of time or just get them at the ticket windows that day. The game starts at 2 pm and I highly recommend it.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: If you enjoyed Fleabag, nominated for a slew of Emmy Awards this year, as much as I did, you’ll probably enjoy this GQ interview with star/creator Phoebe Waller-Bridge, conducted by Tina Fey.
The Guardian‘s The long read feature looks at the rise and fall of French cuisine, long considered the backbone of a culinary education, but now seen as stuffy and dated in many quarters.
I hate my lawn, other than the modest pleasure of mowing it (I listen to the Grierson & Leitch podcast, which correlates quite well with the time required to mow, and I use the cuttings in my compost pile), and I’m losing the battle to various native weeds. Lawn care in the U.S. is a $40 billion a year business, and it’s all a disaster for the environment. Maybe it’s time to turn away from grass; I’m faced with a decision this fall, as too much of my lawn has lost out to large and smooth crabgrass, a sign that my soil isn’t providing the real grass with the nutrients it needs, and don’t get me started on spurge.
The Guardian looks at the rise in audiobook sales, asking if it’s good, bad, or both.
I read & recommended Ed Yong’s book I Contain Multitudes about a year and a half ago; in the book, he described nascent efforts to combat mosquito-borne illnesses by using a Wolbachia bacterium to naturally sterilize mosquito populations in the wild. One such experiment in China has nearly eradicated Aedes albopictus from two islands,
For Athletic subscribers, I highly recommend the great Peter Gammons’ profile of the majors’ best rookie this year, Fernando Tatis, Jr.
I finally got to Razza in Jersey City this week, about a year and a half after the New York Times food critic said it was the best pizza in New York City. He recently revised that statement after Una Pizza Napoletana returned to Manhattan after several years in San Francisco. I went shortly before the move, and it was spectacular.
One of my favorite restaurants in the Phoenix area, Scottsdale’s Pig & Pickle, closed suddenly this week in what sounds like a dispute with a new landlord.
There’s an underreported scandal going on in Malaysia right now: ousted Prime Minister Najib Razak and his wife are on trial for corruption, and prosecutors showed his wife racked up $800,000 in jewelry charges on a credit card linked to a state-owned investment fund. President Trump welcomed Razak to the White House in 2017, when the embezzlement scandal had already become public but Razak had yet to be voted out of office.
LGBT rights are under attack in Poland too, as the right-wing party in power is cheering on towns creating “LGBT-free zones”.
An Arizona newscaster dropped an f-bomb on air after the Phoenix New Times wrote that she joined a far-right social networking site that has attracted several overt racists banned from Twitter. An Arizona Republic editorial wrote that it’ll probably make her more popular.
A Philadelphia pediatrician wrote about her attempts to empathize and reason with “vaccine-hesitant” parents, even though the best solution is to fire them into the sun.
Lots of board game news as we approach Gen Con (I’ll be there as usual): Ravensburger announced Villainous: Evil Comes Prepared, the second expansion to last year’s Disney’s Villainous. You can pre-order it exclusively through Target right now.
Dire Wolf is taking its free-to-play digital card game Eternal to tabletop, releasing a physical version of the game in August; you can pre-order it through Dire Wolf’s site.
Renegade Game Studios announced pre-orders for Paladins of the West Kingdom, the second game in Shem Phillips’ West Kingdom series and his fifth in the series of Viking-themed games that began with Raiders of the North Sea.
The role-playing game Gloomhaven is coming to Steam and just entered Early Access this week.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: arizona, baseball, board game news, lgbt rights, social media, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ June 22, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 6/21/19.

No new ESPN+ content this week, although that will change next week after I get to a few more minor league games. I did hold a Klawchat on Friday.

On the board game front, I had two pieces up at Paste this week. One is a straight review of Corinth, a new roll-and-write game from Days of Wonder that is sort of Yspahan: the Dice Game, but with a new theme and much altered rules. The other recaps the day and a half I spent at the Origins Game Fair, running through all the new games I saw or played.

On July 8th, the night after the Futures Game, I’ll be at the Hudson Library and Historical Society in Hudson, Ohio, talking baseball, taking questions, and signing copies of my book Smart Baseball.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The Atlantic‘s William Langewiesche examines the unsolved disappearance of Malaysian Airlines flight MH370, and the uncomfortable but almost certain conclusion of who was responsible. EDIT: A rejoinder from the Daily Beast.
E. Jean Carroll says Donald Trump raped her in 1996. The party of family values will ignore her.
Conditions at the contractors’ offices where Facebook moderators work are dismal. I have become almost totally convinced that user-generated content sites can’t police themselves. People will say and post the worst things, but the sites have little incentive to remove anything that isn’t outright illegal, and the sheer volume of bad content (and reports) makes policing it infeasible.
A mapping error gave Under Armour billionaire Kevin Plank a huge tax break, with a boost from Maryland Governor Larry Hogan (R).
Noted left-wing publication (checks notes) Scientific American ran an editorial demanding that transphobes stop using phony science to defend their deviant beliefs. Sex and gender aren’t binary, scientists have known this for at least a half-century, and yet we still have troglodytes trying to uphold the two-bathroom paradigm.
A couple of Harvard alums have started a firm dedicated to growing high-quality shiitake mushrooms, viewing them as a sustainable, more healthful alternative to meat. I guess it’s unsurprising, but I never considered how the growth medium would affect the flavor and nutrition of mushrooms, just as soil quality affects that of vegetables.
Islanders goalie Robin Lehner won the Bill Masterson Trophy for his public discussion of his bipolar disorder and substance abuse.
Writing for Forbes, Bruce Y. Lee asks why actress Jessica Biel, who has no medical background, is fighting a pro-vaccination law that will crack down on doctors who give out bogus medical exemptions to existing vaccination mandates.
You know, like California Dr. Bob Sears, who is accused of giving out bogus medical exemptions while already on probation for giving out bogus medical exemptions. He should lose his medical license, permanently. He should probably be in jail.
New York millionaires Bernand and Lisa Selz are funding the anti-vaccine movement, donating over $3 million to groups that fight vaccination laws and spread misinformation about vaccines. I hope other outfits that have taken donations from the Selzes, like the Brooklyn Museum and the Frick Collection, turn them away.
An adult with autism, writing only as Max, explains how the anti-vaccine movement offends him and others with autism spectrum disorders.
The anti-vaccine movement is also fueled by Russian operations on social media, according to former DHS official and current Kennedy School lecturer Juliette Kayyem, speaking in this Q&A on the current measles outbreak and anti-vaccine sentiment.
An LA police officer, while off duty, used his service weapon to shoot a developmentally disabled, non-verbal man who pushed him in a local Costco, killing the man and hitting both the man’s parents, with the mother still in a coma.
The University of Michigan’s baseball team is headed to the CWS finals; Tony Paul wrote about Wolverine player Joe Donovan and his late brother, Charlie, who was also a Michigan recruit but died before reaching Ann Arbor.
Martin Feldstein, one-time chair of the President’s Council of Economics Advisers – Reagan fired him for opposing the supply-side strategy of deficit spending – and my Economics 10 professor at you-know-where died last week at age 79. There’s really no party or even subgroup of either party pushing for the policies he espoused.
Tens of thousands of Indian villages are facing water shortages, with no end in sight. Climate change and overpopulation are leading us down a death spiral when it comes to the global supply of clean water.
I’ve included songs from YONAKA on multiple playlists the last two years, including three songs on my top 100s of 2017/2018; NME profiled the band and their debut album’s focus on toxic masculinity and mental health topics.
This is an older post but I found it this week while googling something unrelated: a former member of the extremist Christian sect that also counts the Duggars as members writes of growing up “Quiverfull” and escaping the cult.
Speaking of cults, the folks proselytizing about the evils of wheat – not celiacs, mind you, but people who avoid wheat by choice – will often claim modern wheat varieties are worse for the environment, but a new study debunks that myth, showing that modern wheat requires less everything, including fertilizers, water, and fungicides.
In Alaba … no, wait, this time it’s Indiana, where the school district did the right thing but one teacher couldn’t handle it. An Indiana teacher resigned rather than accept a school policy to refer to trans students by their desired names and pronouns, but now he’s suing for his job back, backed by the Alliance Defending Freedom, a hate group that wants to criminalize homosexuality and transgenderism.
The New York Times took a break from profiling Trump supporters to … actually, to profile more Trump supporters, but this time it’s to shine a light on racist whites in Minnesota, angry at Somali refugees for being black, Muslim, and nearby.
Ryan Thomore writes for Cubs Insider about how Pride Days at the ballpark matter to LGBTQ+ fans.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: alternative, baseball, food science, harvard, lgbt rights, links, longreads, minnesota, racism, stick to baseball, vaccines, water crisis

→ June 1, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 6/1/19.

My second mock first round for Monday’s MLB draft went up this past Tuesday for ESPN+ subscribers; my Big Board, ranking the top 100 prospects in the class, went up the previous week. I held a Klawchat on Thursday, and will hold another Monday afternoon, plus a Periscope live chat Monday night after the draft starts.

My latest board game review for Paste covers Aerion, a fun little solo game from the designer of Onirim, but that might be a bit too easy to beat. I won every single time I played; it was often close, but I still could find a way to win even with various included expansions.

I finally got back to my email newsletter yesterday, talking about why this was such a weird draft class to cover.

And now, the links…

One of those viral videos that purported to depict racism against African-Americans, this one involving a Chipotle employee (herself a person of color), turned out to get the story backwards; CNN has a long piece breaking down how the ‘internet mob’ got the story wrong and how it affected the woman targeted by the online outrage.
The BBC relates the history of British colonial authorities trying to erase hijras, India’s “third gender.” India recognized transgender people as an official third gender in 2014.
Jonathan Mayo polled 22 MLB scouts and executives asking who they’d take #1 in this draft class.
Waldorf Schools in California form major clusters of unvaccinated children; parents of these kids interviewed in this Guardian article voice the appeal to nature fallacy or the false conflict of interest claims. As much as anti-science is associated today with fundamentalist religion, you can also find wide swaths of anti-vaccine sentiment on the left in communities like these.
A German father wrote about losing his son to SSPE, a rare but invariably fatal side effect of measles infections. Max caught measles at six months, too young to be vaccinated, and SSPE put him into a vegetative state at the age of 12, after he’d suffered seizures and lost most of his memories. He died at 20.
Maine became the fourth state to eliminate non-medical exemptions to mandatory childhood vaccination rules, with the law passing the state’s Senate by a single vote. State Sen. James Dill (D), who voted for the bill, still raised bogus arguments about genetic conditions that might exempt children from the schedule, despite a total lack of evidence to support the existence of any such conditions. He’s listed as a scientist in that article, but his specialty is pest management, not immunology.
Fox News host Laura Ingraham defended white supremacist Paul Nehlen as a “prominent voice” who was “censored” (not what that word means) by social media.
Elizabeth Warren’s explanation of why she won’t do a town hall on Fox News is perfect (although I have no idea what Whoopi Goldberg is talking about at the end).
Why is the Administration referring to fossil fuels as “molecules of freedom?”
A science professor at Williams College writes about how students are rejecting science that challenges their worldviews, such as discussions of genetic differences between males and females, or across different geographic groups.
This New York Post article asserting that some students are avoiding colleges in states that are trying to outlaw abortion seems incredibly anecdotal, even if it’s sort of plausible. I’d like to see actual data on whether this affects applications or enrollment at any such schools before we claim this is a thing.
The Good Men Project tracks Sean Doolittle’s tour of MLB cities’ independent bookstores.
I loved Gabriel Garcia-Marquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, so I enjoyed this mental floss piece with some facts and trivia about the novel.
A University of Alabama-Birmingham study of spectator injuries at sporting events pointed to the need for more netting to protect fans from “ballistic” injuries – something flying from the field of play into the seats.
There’s a new, micro-game on Kickstarter from Wingspan designer Elizabeth Hargrave called Tussie Mussie.
Tweet of the week:
The people who belittle @AOC for being a former waitress are the same faulting @ewarren for billing out at $675/hr. So how much exactly should world-changing women make?

— Katherine M. Gordon (@katgordon) May 28, 2019

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-science, baseball, india, lgbt rights, links, maine, vaccines, white nationalism

→ May 30, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 5/25/19.

For ESPN+ subscribers, I posted my 2019 MLB draft Big Board, ranking the top 100 prospects in this year’s draft class. I’ll tweak that before the draft but this is the last complete re-ranking. I also held a Klawchat on Friday.

I’m behind on just about everything else these days, but I’ll have a fresh game review up for Paste this upcoming week, and I swear there will be a new email newsletter issue soon. Really. I promise. Mostly.

And now, the links…

I tweeted about this story this week, but the report that set me off was Brandy Zadrozny’s article for NBC News about parents giving their kids bleach as a (fake) autism cure. The so-called MMS “cure” is just a fancy name for a toxic dose of chlorine dioxide, which is used to bleach wood pulp and paper.
The Washington Post examines how one right-wing activist has helped pack the nation’s courts with conservative judges. Why should any one person, regardless of political bent, have this kind of power over this branch of government? It’s likely to take decades to roll back the damage done to the country’s judiciary when it comes to fundamental issues like civil rights.
The Atlantic explores Sesame Street‘s introduction of a Muppet who lives with foster parents, and how the show’s writers try to teach viewers about dealing with traumatic events.
The editorial board of prestigious British medical journal The Lancet wrote this week that all doctors must fight to protect women’s rights and keep abortion safe and legal.
Anti-vaxxer activists are now working to spread their disinformation within communities suffering from measles outbreaks, including encouraging the orthodox to use (bogus) religious exemptions to skip mandatory vaccinations.
ProPublica shines a light on how the family of New Jersey political boss George Norcross benefited from over $1 billion in tax breaks, obtained through pressure on state officials that extended to one family lawyer helping write legislation to specifically benefit the Norcrosses.
Violence against trans people appears to be on the rise, so in response, the Administration is trying to roll back very basic protections for trans people, allowing homeless shelters to turn away people for being transgender and healthcare providers to freely discriminate against them.
Far far-right Arizona Rep. Kelly Townsend is trying again to pass a bill banning political speech in the classroom in a direct attempt to retaliate against teachers who fought last spring for higher pay and better working conditions in the #RedForEd movement.
Other far-right politicians attended a rally in Spokane to create a Christian state called Liberty State out of eastern Washington and northern Idaho. I’m sure the old Aryan Nations folks would be thrilled.
Deadspin’s Albert Burnenko writes that the idea that Trump wants to be impeached is absurd.
Trump entered office with more debt than any President in history, and last year added even more. So many of the core values that underpinned our democracy have died quiet deaths since his election; the failure to require Trump to divest from all his businesses feels like the worst of all the new precedents we’ve set.
Quentin Tarantino did not handle it well when asked a fair question about the limited dialogue for Margot Robbie in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
The Division 3 Minnesota Intercollegiate Athletic Conference is kicking out St. Thomas after 100 years of membership for being too good.
Lindsey Adler asked a number of Yankees players about the time each came closest to quitting baseball (subscription required).
Over at Baseball America, J.J. Cooper looks at what happens in pitching-poor drafts like this year’s when you choose to draft a pitcher. The short answer: it’s not good.
Alabama continues to roll back the clock as fast as they can, as Alabama public television refused to air an episode of Arthur that showed a same-sex wedding.
A Methodist pastor in Alabama had some strong words for forced-birth Republicans, but more importantly, doesn’t he look a lot like David Ross?
Britain’s Labour Party made this tremendous video arguing against UKIP’s politics of exclusion as part of its Labour Voices series.
Board game news: Pre-orders are up now for Era, the newest game from designer Matt Leacock (Pandemic, Forbidden Desert).
Asmodee announced a new division, Gamegenic, to design and sell accessories for games, items like card sleeves, playmats, and storage boxes.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: alabama, arizona, baseball, board game news, lgbt rights, new jersey, pseudoscience, stick to baseball, the swamp, vaccines, white nationalism

Stick to baseball, 3/6/21.

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