My second Arizona Fall League notebook went up on Monday, covering everyone of note whom I hadn’t written up in the first one. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

I appeared on TSN 1050 in Toronto to talk about the League Championship Series and the Blue Jays, including prospect Ricky Tiedemann and the controversial decision to replace José Berrios with Yusie Kikuchi in what turned out to be their last playoff game.

And now, the links…

• Longreads first: Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., has profited by spreading lies and half-truths about vaccines for twenty years now. A book his group, Children’s Health Defense, and his publishing partner Skyhorse put out about the COVID-19 vaccines used the photo of a 12-year-old who died when a malformed blood vessel burst in his brain on its cover, claiming he’d died from the vaccine. He was unvaccinated, and of course they used his photo without his family’s permission. This Associated Press story talks to several families hurt by Kennedy’s lies and his so-called activism.
• A Koch-funded right-wing site, Cowboy State Daily, is injecting climate denial and transphobic rhetoric into Wyoming politics, crowding out legitimate news sites that adhere to basic journalistic standards. It’s part of the national Metric Media network, which has over 1200 sites across the country and also takes funding from the Koch family’s DonorsTrust foundation.
• Arizona continues to deny native tribes water rights they were promised under a 1908 treaty with the federal government. A third of homes on the Navajo reservation do not have access to clean water.
• The Los Angeles Times’ Michael Hiltzik looks at how anti-vaxxers are exacting a personal and professional toll on scientists, and we’re losing the war against such disinformation. Dr. Peter Hotez notes within the story the death threats, doxing, and other intimidation tactics he’s seen as a vaccine developer and advocate for vaccination and science in general.
• Meanwhile, a new study in BMJ estimates that 27 would-be mothers in the UK died during the pandemic because of confusion over the safety of COVID-19 vaccines during pregnancy.
• The Minnesota Reformer has a story on how small businesses in Minneapolis are pressured to hire off-duty cops as “security” in what sure sounds like a protection racket to me.
• Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen (R) owns a conglomerate of hog farms that are dumping huge amounts of nitrates into ground water in the state, but when a local journalist published an exposé in the Flat Water Free Press, Gov. Pillen attacked her personally by saying “the author is from Communist China. What more do you need to know?” I think I need to know when he’s going to clean up his hog farms, and I hope more journalists there put his pig’s feet to the fire.
• Barbers Hill ISD in Texas suspended an 18-year-old Black student for wearing dreadlocks and is now forcing him to attend an alternative high school, despite the fact that Texas passed its own CROWN Act, prohibiting discrimination based on hairstyle, and the district already lost a lawsuit over the same issue in 2020. The district’s superintendent and deputy superintendent are both white, in case you were wondering.
• Book-banning zealots in Iowa are having a field day by targeting any books with a ‘sex act,’ including numerous important works of literature like, ironically, the dystopian novels 1984 and Brave New World.
• The federal government has begun distributing the $100 billion in funding for climate change mitigation projects under the Inflation Reduction Act, but it’s taking much longer than expected.
• Trump, with the help of The Heritage Foundation, has a plan to gut the federal civil service and replace tens of thousands of employees with Trump sycophants in a return to the “spoils system” of the 1800s.
• ­My friend Tim Grierson has a long, entertaining interview with Eddie Izzard on Cracked.com.
• Scientific American looks at the “Sleeping Beauty problem” in probability, which has generated arguments like the Monty Hall problem and the question of that dress’s color.
• A professor at UC-Davis tweeted a fairly overt threat against the lives of Jewish journalists, spurring an investigation by the university.
• If ChatGPT can do much of the work in academic grant writing, does that tell us that the grant-writing process is broken?
• Police in Newton, Iowa, have twice arrested a local resident for speaking out against the police at town meetings, so he’s suing them for violating his First Amendment (and other) rights.
• The Azeri-Armenian conflict may move to Meghri, an Armenian town in a strip of land that separates Azerbaijan from its Nakhchivan exclave. Azerbaijan calls it the Zangezur corridor, and it borders Iran, which opposes any changes to the current structure, while Turkey and Russia appear to favor some alteration that would connect the two parts of Azerbaijan even at a reduction in Armenia’s sovereignty.
• The Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland argues that Benjamin Netanyahu has walked into Hamas’s trap, and Israel needs to remove him from power before the situation gets even worse.
• Twitter Blue subscribers have become “super-spreaders” of misinformation about the Israel-Palestine conflict according to a brief analysis from the independent group NewsGuard, which attempts to rate the reliability of news sites.
• The New York Times’ Katherine Miller writes about the rambling, repetitive speeches of Donald Trump as he pounds his false claims that the 2020 election was rigged.
• St. Louis County police appear to have ignored erratic, threatening behavior from one of their own in the days leading up to him firing shots in the air at a trunk-or-treat event and shouting “you’re all going to die!”
• Deepfake porn videos are spreading too fast for the available tools, and far faster than any government is moving to stop them. Rep. Yvette Clarke (D-NY) did introduce a bill to ban deepfakes and step up enforcement, revising a similar bill she’d introduced in 2019, but it’s only at the committee stage and all sponsors are Democrats.
• David Roth writes about how Michael Lewis was taken in by fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried, as Lewis’ reputation continues to take hits after his cringy response to Michael Oher’s lawsuit against the Tuohy family. (Oher appears to have no dispute with Lewis over the book The Blind Side.)
• The Chicago man who stabbed a 6-year-old Palestinian boy 26 times, killing him, and stabbed the boy’s mother as well appears to have been radicalized by right-wing media. The spread of disinformation and hate has real consequences.
• Board game news: The Kickstarter for the roll-and-write game Merchants of Magick is 3x funded and still up for six more days.
• This year’s Essen Spiel convention was the largest ever, bringing nearly 200,000 people to the German city for the biggest board game con in the world.