police — Page 5

→ April 29, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/29/23.

I’m writing this from the press box at Alex Bos Stadium in Baton Rouge, so I’ll have something up on Dylan Crews and Paul Skenes on either Sunday or Monday, depending on whether I bounce to another game on Saturday with rain scheduled here. I’ve had two posts up in the last two weeks for subscribers to The Athletic, one a Q&A with our own Nick Groke about Brewers prospects, and a draft blog post covering some Virginia and California prep prospects plus general thoughts on the top 15 or so names in the class.

On my podcast this week, I spoke with Elizabeth McCracken, author of 2022’s The Hero of this Book and 2018’s Bowlaway, about the former of those two books, the craft of writing, and being short. The week prior, I spoke with David Grann about his new book The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Murder, whichI enjoyed so much I bought a copy for my dad for his birthday last month. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And now, the links:

Longreads first: This story on The Cut about how a woman coped with her husband getting a dementia diagnosis and then serving her with divorce papers as the disorder took hold is just devastating, especially when the twist in the story hits.

An Iowa middle school history teacher explained how the state’s ban on teaching about racism drove him out of the profession, especially when his boss wouldn’t say he could teach that slavery was wrong. Tennessee just passed a similar bill.

Parents across the political and income spectra are pushing back on school literacy curricula that aren’t doing enough to teach kids to read.

The New York Times magazine interviewed Deep Work author Cal Newport on the paradox of productivity in the digital era, where we have so many tools that are supposed to make us more productive, but we’re not.

The head of a law firm with frequent cases before the Supreme Court bought a property owned by SCOTUS justice Neil Gorusch, who didn’t identify the purchaser on disclosure forms.

Now Missouri and other states are banning or restricting gender-affirming care for trans adults. It was never about protecting kids.

In one of the more blatant First Amendment violations I can recall, Texas’s Senate passed a bill that would require teachers to display the Ten Commandments in their classrooms. It’s a waste of time and taxpayer, and ignores the clear intent and words of the Founding Fathers.

Conservatives are now targeting no-fault divorce in their attempts to force their religion’s values on the rest of us.

Iowa Republicans aren’t done – they held a pre-dawn session, always a great sign that you’re not doing anything sketchy, to pass a bill allowing for expanded child labor.

A non-binary high school student at Nashville Christian School wanted to wear a suit to their prom, rather than a dress, but the school banned them on dress code grounds. A local business stepped in to hold a prom just for them. Support AB Hillsboro Village if you live in that area.

West Texas A&M University faculty scheduled a no-confidence vote in school President Walter Wendler, who banned a student drag show because it conflicted with his personal religious views. The no-confidence vote passed with over 2/3 of the voters supporting it. Wendler is refusing to step down despite the non-binding result. The school faces a lawsuit over the cancellation, and a financial penalty would probably do more to get Wendler out of office than any resolution could.

Roadside drug tests aren’t accurate, yet courts have been using them regularly to convict drivers of drug-related offenses. That’s starting to change, slowly.

I certainly share enough negative news about my alma mater so I’ll share a positive story – Harvard raised the income threshold below which undergraduate students pay no tuition to $85,000.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: education, first amendment, harvard, iowa, links, longreads, missouri, police, stick to baseball, tennessee, texas, trans rights

→ April 15, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/15/23.

I haven’t written in the past week-plus due mostly to getting sick, something that wasn’t COVID-19 but might as well have been for this stupid cough I’ve still got. I did get to a couple of HS games in the Boras Classic in Orange County this week and will write that up after I get to another HS game on Wednesday.

My own podcast returned this week with guest Ozan Varol, author of How to Think Like a Rocket Scientist and the new book Awaken Your Genius. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I did appear on two other podcasts this week – Sports Sometimes, with my friend Chris Crawford; and the board game podcast Meeple Town, with Dean Dunning. (Not Dane Dunning. That’s Calcaterra’s bit.)

You can also get more of my words by signing up for my free email newsletter, which went out again on this past Monday.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: This New Yorker profile of Pinky Cole and her fast-growing vegan burger chain Slutty Vegan probably isn’t as complimentary as the subject hoped it would be; if anything, it makes it sound like the quality of the food there is entirely secondary to the owner’s ambitions. It also highlights some of the challenges in bringing a broader audience to vegan food, given the latter’s reputation.

WIRED has a great look at how Bookshop has thrived against the behemoth of Amazon and stayed largely true to its original mission.

Brandy Zadrozny tracked down and interviewed the “Tennessee nurse” who became the target of anti-vaxxer conspiracy theories in late 2020. Tiffany Dover was one of the first people to receive the COVID-19 vaccine but fainted on camera – a common side effect of all sorts of injections, including vaccines – leading anti-vax nut jobs to claim she’d died and harass her workplace and her family. She’s alive and well, although no longer at that job.

Russian troops have kidnapped at least 19,000, and perhaps as many as 150,000, Ukrainian children and put them in Russian schools, indoctrinating them with pro-Russian propaganda and in some cases adopting them out to Russian families. The New York Times found several women who traveled thousands of miles to get their children back.

That same lunatic judge in Texas who decided he could overrule the FDA on drug safety is now going to hear an even more unhinged case around press freedom, as several anti-vax groups are claiming four major media outlets conspired with tech companies to suppress their “business” of spreading bullshit. There’s new evidence that their misinformation campaigns are working, too, as a new survey found an increased percentage of women think the flu and COVID-19 vaccines aren’t safe during pregnancy. Meanwhile, the dubious ruling on mifepristone has galvanized the pharmaceutical industry, who realized the leopards might eat their faces, too.

The declining constituencies of these cultural conservatives, with religiosity experiencing an inexorable decline in the United States and across the west, is leading more and more Republicans to pursue autocratic policies and even espouse political violence.

Brandon Johnson won last week’s mayoral election in Chicago; one core part of his platform was a public health model for improving safety, rather than the standard police-centric model (more cops, more funding for cops, more prisons). There’s good evidence the public health model can work, and a lot of evidence that the police-centric model does not. When people say “defund the police,” this is what they mean – and what they should be saying instead.

Chicha is a fermented drink of indigenous peoples in South America, and is making a comeback in Colombia even though it’s still officially illegal there.

Texas Rep. Bryan Slaton (guess) introduced a bill to ban kids from attending drag shows and has ranted about LGBTQ+ people “grooming children,” so it was no surprise at all to learn that an intern filed a complaint against him, saying that they had an inappropriate relationship and he served them alcohol even though they were younger than 21. Slaton, who likes to post Bible passages on his Twitter account, also proposed a bill to give property tax cuts to straight, married couples who’d never been divorced. To their credit, two Republican lawmakers in Texas have already called for Slaton to step down.

Former federal prosecutor Barb McQuade explains why white-collar crimes like those for which Trump has been indicted can’t just be ignored.

Crimes like those for which Rishi Shah and other executives of Outcome Health, accused of a billion-dollar fraud, were just convicted. The New York Times’ Erin Griffith looks at just how many startup execs are facing or have faced criminal charges and asks if this is the end of “fake it till you make it” in Silicon Valley. (I doubt it.)

Justice Clarence Thomas doesn’t have to take an actual bribe for his relationship with Nazi memorabilia collector Harlan Crow to compromise both himself and the institution of the Supreme Court.

All those conservative commentators rushing to defend Thomas and Crow? Yeah, a lot of them rely on Crow for their paychecks in one way or another, Ilya Shapiro, Jonah Goldberg, David French, and Charles Murray among them. Whatever you may think of the first three, if Charles Murray comes to your defense, you may want to ask him to pipe down.

Speaking of Goldberg, I did appreciate his longish essay in his Dispatch newsletter on how the rising generation of Republicans are becoming, in his words, jerks, taking their cues from Trumpism and the old-conservative God complex model of government (government should enact God’s will, and only we know what God’s will is). He argues that it’s not just bad for the Republican party, but bad for these kids as humans.

The Campaign Legal Center has asked DoJ to launch an investigation into Thomas’s free trips. And that was before ProPublica revealed that Crow also bought property from Justice Thomas, who didn’t disclose the transaction.

A unanimous vote by the Nashville Council has returned Tennessee Rep. Justin Jones (D) to his seat in the state legislature after he was expelled for ~~protesting while black~~ a supposed violation of ‘decorum’ rules. Rep. Justin Pearson (D) has also been restored to his duly-elected position.

Llano County in Texas was going to close its libraries, but the heavily Republican government there backed down after public pressure amplified by national media attention. They’re counting on us to stop paying attention.

Cosmic background radiation left over from the Big Bang is helping scientists map out dark and otherwise undetectable matter across the universe.

The city of Asheville promised to spend a bunch of taxpayer money to fix up the stadium where the privately-owned Tourists ballclub plays. Now they’re taking money away from a previously promised improvement to pedestrian areas in the South Slope neighborhood to help pay for the stadium fixes. Asheville already has two L’s in it. I think they’re taking another one.

Board game news: There’s a deluxe and co-op edition of the great abstract, two-player game Santorini up on Kickstarter.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, book banning, colombia, conspiracy theories, frauds, links, longreads, north carolina, physics, police, russia, scotus, stick to baseball, tennessee, texas, trans rights, vaccines, vegan

→ April 2, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/1/23.

Since the last roundup, I’ve written three new posts for subscribers to the Athletic – my annual predictions post, my first dispatch from spring training (mostly Cactus League), my annual breakout player picks, and a draft blog post on three potential first-rounders from Wake Forest and Miami.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the cooperative game Paint the Roses, which has simple rules but poses a difficult deductive challenge for players, working best with three or more.

I appeared on the streaming Scripps News Network to talk about why major-league salaries keep rising while minor leaguers’ haven’t, although this was recorded and aired before the recent CBA announcement.

My podcast will return now that my spring training travel is over, with David Grann lined up as my next guest. I did send out a new edition of my free email newsletter about two weeks ago.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The Chronicle of Higher Education looks at Stanford Prof. Jo Boaler, whose arguments and research are driving changes to high school math curricula in California and beyond … but who has a history of playing fast and loose in her own work and with interpretations of others’ research as well. If her name is familiar, it might be for the time she implied she was calling the cops on Dr. Jelani Nelson after he criticized her in a tweet that pointed out that she charges schools up to $5000 per hour in consulting fees.
The 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics honored three scientists for their work on quantum entanglement. Scientific American looks at the work of Chien-Shiung Wu, a Chinese-born American scientist whose 1949 experiment on entanglement paved the way for the three men who won the award this year. The Nobel Committee did not mention her contributions.
With Twitter gradually losing steam, the New York Times compiled a ranking of the 25 most important tweets in the site’s history.
TechCrunch took a more sober look at how the microblogging site is dying a slow death. Elon Musk is killing the site’s classic verification feature because he doesn’t understand the value it conferred not on the verified users, but on the site itself.
Simon Hattenstone’s mother sent hundreds of abusive tweets about the McCanns, the British family whose daughter Madeleine disappeared during their Portuguese vacation, taking her own life when she was outed as the troll behind those tweets by Sky News. Hattenstone remembers his mother and how little he really knew about her in a very thoughtful column in the Guardian.
Vanity Fair says Ron DeSantis plans to run for President on an anti-vaccine platform. I imagine that’ll also blend with a lot of railing against “wokeness” (see below), but will this stuff play outside of the states that the Republican candidate will win anyway? Or will it be about pretending the pandemic is over/never happened? Meanwhile, DeSantis’s book tour has been a fiasco so far.
Uvalde police were afraid of the Robb Elementary shooter because he had an AR-15, the very gun the NRA is working so hard to keep legal and accessible across the country.
Raquel Evita Saraswati became a major figure in Philadelphia’s advocacy community, especially for LGBTQ+ rights, as a queer, Muslim woman of color. Her colleagues at the American Friends Service Committee revealed last month that she’s not a person of color at all, assuming various ethnic identities to keep up the fiction.
Anti-gay activist and attorney Jared Woodfill, who was also previously the chair of the Harris County, Texas, Republican Party, maintained ties for over 15 years with a man he knew had sexually abused a child. Woodfill remains a major figure in Texas politics despite his lengthy personal, professional, and financial ties to Paul Pressler, his former law partner who has been accused by several people of sexual abuse and statutory rape over the last forty-five years.
Billy Ball’s six-year-old son died from a horrible accident that caused cerebral swelling that killed him. Vaccine deniers mocked and attacked Ball online, claiming the COVID-19 vaccine was the cause and Ball was culpable. Twitter, Facebook, etc. did little or nothing about the harassment.
Texas’s abortion ban is leading to a shortage of doctors, nurses, and other medical personnel. Why would you work there when there’s plenty of demand in states that let you practice medicine?
—
A girl in California gave her goat to the Shasta County Fair, then wanted it back because she found out they were going to kill and eat it. When her family refused to hand it over, the police came and seized the animal. Fair organizers said they intended to teach kids a lesson. I hope they learn something themselves.
A Washington Post-Kaiser Family Foundation poll of trans Americans found the majority were more satisfied in their lives after transitioning.
In Wyoming, Republicans’ attempts to ban abortion in just about every form and case ran afoul of Republicans’ attempts to circumvent the Affordable Care Act. Heh.
Austin police arrested a 71-year-old deaf woman at the airport after she missed her flight, and a jailer twisted her arm enough to break it while handcuffing her. The city charged her with criminal trespass, even though she had a ticket and was trying to change it to a different flight.
Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds (R ) signed multiple anti-LGBTQ+ bills, including one banning gender-affirming care for trans kids, and then said she “didn’t like” doing it.
In neighboring South Dakota, some trans kids are being forced to detransition by that state’s anti-trans law. Who exactly is this helping?
Missouri’s Attorney General is ready to spend a bunch of taxpayer money attacking trans kids, and medical experts are saying his ideas are extremely harmful.
And in Uganda, which is just following the lead of various red states, there’s a new law that makes it a crime to be LGBTQ+ at all. Its proponents invoked the same language as Republicans here – they want to “protect traditional family values” and uphold the Church’s teachings.
When I was a kid, the Republicans used buzzwords like “socialism” to try to scare voters into supporting them, painting Democrats like Mike Dukakis as “card-carrying” liberals. That buzzword has now been replaced by “wokeness,” and the thing the two terms have in common is that people who use them can never define them.
President Biden issued his first veto, striking down a Republican resolution that sought to block retirement fund managers from considering environmental, social, and corporate governance issues, although this was all performative and is part of that whole “wokeness” thing.
A student at Eastern Florida State College said a lecture on civil rights in a U.S. history class made him uncomfortable, so the professor cancelled the class.
Ohio Republicans are trying to pass a law mirroring the Florida law that limits what can be discussed in public education, including banning discussions of so-called “controversial beliefs” like systemic racism and climate change.
Undercover agents (!) went to a drag show in Orlando in December and found nothing “lewd” or indecent, but Florida is going after the venue’s liquor license anyway.
The President of West Texas A&M University cancelled a student-run drag show, claiming it demeaned women and comparing drag to blackface. The students are suing on First Amendment grounds, while they’ve also rescheduled the event off-campus, so they might win twice.
Spotify puffed out its chest a year with the announcement of a $100 million “creator equity fund” that was supposed to boost voices from diverse backgrounds. One year on, they’ve spent less than 10% of it.
Infections with the fungus Candida auris are spreading at an “alarming” rate throughout the United States. It affects people who already have weakened or compromised immune systems, and the current wave of infections is largely resistant to anti-fungals.
With so much evidence of journalistic malfeasance at Fox News – and this was written before the recent summary judgment in the Dominion lawsuit – why won’t journalism schools ostracize the network from campuses? Stop inviting their people to speak. Limit their ability to recruit students through official channels. Anything to acknowledge that this isn’t journalism.
Board game news: Let’s Go to Japan, the new game from the designer of Santa Monica and Cat Lady, is probably going to clear half a million in funding on Kickstarter. The concept is pretty cool – Wood had saved for years for a trip to Japan, where he’d wanted to go since he was a kid, only to have his plans cancelled by COVID-19. So he made this game about it.
The medium-heavy strategy game Wild Gardens is more than 200% funded on Backerkit with 18 days to go.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, education, first amendment, florida, health, iowa, lgbt rights, links, longreads, missouri, ohio, physics, police, social media, south dakota, stick to baseball, texas, trans rights

→ February 25, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 2/24/23.

For subscribers to the Athletic, I’ve had several new posts, including a ranking of the top 20 prospects for impact in the majors in 2023 and a draft blog post on the Globe Life College Baseball Showdown, which featured TCU (Brayden Taylor), Vanderbilt (Enrique Bradfield Jr.), and more. I chatted with three of our beat writers about prospects – Dan Connolly about the Orioles’ farm system, Jen McCaffrey about the Red Sox’ farm system, and Dave O’Brien about Atlanta’s farm system.

I’ve done a bunch of podcasts and other interviews in the last few weeks, including the East Village Times’ podcast (Padres), the Seattle Sports Union podcast, the Phillies Nation podcast, WTMJ Milwaukee’s Extra Innings podcast, the Locked on Dodgers podcast, and the Sox Machine podcast (White Sox).

Over at Paste, I reviewed the game Quacks & Co., the kids’ version of the great push-your-luck game The Quacks of Quedlinburg.

On the Keith Law Show this week, I spoke with Fangraphs’ lead prospect writer Eric Longenhagen as we compared some of our rankings on our top 100s (here’s his top 100) and discussed the top of this year’s draft class. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I sent out another issue of my free email newsletter on Friday, which marks my sixth so far this year, a better pace than I had in 2022, something I hope to keep up now that I’ll be writing something pretty much every week for the Athletic.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The New York Times Magazine has a long feature on Ghibli Park, a sort-of theme park built around the works of animation legend Hayao Miyazaki.

Ninety-four women allege a Utah doctor sexually assaulted them, but a judge said Utah law makes this medical malpractice and threw their cases out. Utah legislators could just change the law, but they’re too busy trying to kill trans kids.

Air pollution might be causing us to lose our sense of smell.

The Appeal has stories of pregnant people who’ve been shackled and abused while in custody in Harris County, Texas, jails, the same jail system that saw 28 prisoners die last year and four already in 2023.

De la Soul’s catalog is supposed to come to streaming platforms in March. OkayPlayer spoke to the attorney who helped clear most of the samples on their earliest work and made this possible.

Funds from two programs created by then-President Trump’s Department of Agriculture to provide disaster relief to farmers flowed to wealthy landowners instead, such as a $983 payment to the owner of a $23 million mansion right near Trump’s own Mar-a-Lago resort. Over $5.5 million in total funds from those programs went to residents of the 75 wealthiest ZIP codes in the U.S.

The New Republic is one of the few outlets doing real reporting on the effects of the train derailment and chemical release in East Palestine, Ohio, such as this article on dying animals and residents’ respiratory distress, and this editorial on the fake conspiracy theories around it and the real corruption that allowed it all to happen.

There’s a network of neo-Nazi home-schoolers operating in Ohio, and the state says they can’t do anything about it. Maybe if they were teaching critical race theory and trans rights?

Biden’s EPA has streamlined a program to approve alternatives to fossil fuels that originally covered biofuels but also includes fuels made from recycled plastics – even though one such process is likely to release a highly carcinogenic byproduct into the atmosphere. And the EPA won’t release details of the process, right down to the names of the chemicals involved.

The majority-Black city of Jackson, Mississippi, is likely to end up with a separate, state-run court district with judges appointed entirely by white politicians, thanks to a Republican-authored bill that already passed the state’s lower chamber.

A police officer in Pueblo County, Colorado, shot and killed an unarmed man in the car line outside a school because the man got into the wrong car by mistake. Video shows the officer gave no warning and neither he nor his partner gave the victim, 32-year-old Richard Ward, any assistance as he bled to death on the ground. The DA declined to charge the officers, saying they “justifiably feared for their lives.”

A publisher planned to revise several of Roald Dahl’s books to remove potentially offensive language, but after criticism it appears they relented. I have a lot of thoughts on this, most of them opposing the effort. You can’t undo history, and art is a comment and reflection of its time. With a children’s book, you always have the choice not to read the book to your kids, or to read it in full and explain why some language or imagery is inappropriate or offensive. I’m also not sure what good this does for books with millions of copies in print.

New York Times White House correspondent Peter Baker has a history of activism through his work and his social media commentary. He also criticized journalists who argued that the paper’s coverage of trans issues has been slanted when he co-signed a letter calling them “activists.”

From the Onion: It Is Journalism’s Sacred Duty To Endanger The Lives Of As Many Trans People As Possible.

The chaos and breakdowns within Twitter hampered rescue efforts after this month’s earthquake that killed thousands in Turkey and Syria.

Russia used state media to support Canada’s so-called “Freedom Convoy” that protested the country’s attempts to limit the spread of COVID-19.

I grew up in Smithtown, New York, and from kindergarten through twelfth grade I attended public schools in that district, which is now further embarrassing itself by adding armed guards at its schools despite no actual evidence that these prevent mass shootings.

Board game news: The small publisher Holy Grail Games announced they’re shutting down.

25^th Century Games has a Kickstarter up for three new tile-laying games: Agueda, Color Field, and Donut Shop. As of Friday morning it’s less than $2000 away from its funding goal.

The Search for Lost Species is over 11x funded already on Kickstarter; it’s the sequel to The Search for Planet X, my #1 game of 2020.

The Kickstarter for the last standalone expansion for Set a Watch is also fully funded, with just five days to go.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, children's literature, environment, hip-hop, japan, links, longreads, mississippi, miyazaki, ohio, police, russia, social media, stick to baseball, texas, the swamp, utah

→ February 4, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 2/4/23.

My top 100 prospects ranking ran on Monday for subscribers to The Athletic, followed by the players who just missed the list, and then my ranking of all 30 farm systems. I held a Q&A on Monday, which the site excerpted for a separate article. I also held an old-fashioned Klawchat here on Friday. The team-by-team top 20s will start to run on Monday.

On The Keith Law Show, I spoke with Steve Ives, writer and director of the upcoming documentary Ruthless: Monopoly’s Secret History, which will run on PBS’s American Experience and stream online on February 20^th. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I’ve been keeping up better with my free email newsletter recently, and I’ll get back to it again this upcoming week once I get through the last nine team reports.

And now, the links…

The Atavist has the story of a family caught up in the world of YouTube influencers, including one star’s mother accused of inappropriate behavior against a number of her daughter’s co-stars.

Mother Jones looks at the troll site Kiwi Farms, and how driving it offline hasn’t worked to stop its users’ campaigns of doxing and harassment.

The new emerging microbe threat around the world? Infectious fungi taking advantage of the COVID-19 pandemic by exploiting people with damaged immune systems.

Cory Doctorow examines what he calls the “enshittification” of TikTok and other sites that built up massive user bases on one premise and then switched to another model to make some money – a digital bait and switch of sorts.

The New Yorker looks at NY Times opinion columnist Pamela Paul, whose columns seem designed to push buttons and have often engaged in TERF-like arguments.

Chuck D spoke to Rolling Stone about the new documentary series Fight the Power: How Hip Hop Changed the World, available now via PBS.

Even a mild case of COVID-19 leads to a massive increase in heart disease risk.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) announced a plan to block all diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs at state colleges.

Dan Rather wrote about DeSantis’ platform of white grievance.

Florida teachers are removing all books from their classroom for fear of prosecution by the white police state. Here’s more on the policy behind this.

Meanwhile, the craven College Board, whose entire business model is built around making it more expensive for students to go to college, bowed to pressure from DeSantis and eviscerated its A.P. African American Studies curriculum.

Republicans continue to push anti-abortion laws, proposing 105 bills and counting just this year alone, even subverting democratic norms to do so. They’re also forum-shopping to try to ban the abortion pill.

Abortion bans often include exceptions for rape or incest. They’re mostly meaningless, there to make people feel better about discriminatory laws against providing medical care.

Utah passed a law banning transition health care for trans kids.

Arizona’s legislature passed a law allowing lawmakers to delete all emails after 90 days, which isn’t suspicious at all.

Some businesses are warning Missouri lawmakers their culture war is going to harm the state’s economy.

An off-duty cop in Providence, RI, shot an unarmed kid, and a jury acquitted him of all charges.

Georgia cops killed a protestor fighting the construction of a massive training facility in the woods around Atlanta. They’re claiming he shot first. I do not take the word of police as truth.

Texas election deniers raised funds to build a mobile hospital in Ukraine. They failed, and it’s not clear where the donated money went.

Harvard Prof. John Comaroff has been accused of sexual harassment by multiple women, leading to a mass walkout of his first class back from suspension last week.

Tom Verlaine, founder of the essential American art-punk band Television, died last week at age 73.

Many consumers say that tipping is getting out of control. This isn’t a yes/no question, really; I think you can say tipping for some services is obligatory, and for others is unnecessary.

Noted free speech absolutist Elon Musk took down a video critical of India’s hypernationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the government’s request.

The FBI infiltrated a major ransomware group called Hive, gaining the group’s decryption keys to allow victims to recover their locked files.

Rolling Stone’s EJ Dickson asks, “Can we please just let the M&M’s fuck?”

The Guardian looks at Daybreak, the upcoming cooperative board game about climate change co-designed by Matt Leacock (Pandemic, Forbidden Island).

The role-playing game based on the Hugo-winning novel The Fifth Season is now on Backerkit.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: abortion, arizona, board game news, coronavirus, georgia, harvard, links, longreads, missouri, police, science, social media, stick to baseball, texas, trans rights, utah

→ January 14, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 1/14/23.

My latest piece for subscribers to the Athletic went up last Saturday, a breakdown of the Phillies’ trade for Gregory Soto, a deal I quite like for Detroit. My podcast will return this upcoming week, and the top 100 prospects ranking is scheduled to run on January 30^th.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the roll-and-write game Riverside, which just missed my top ten games of 2022 list (it was the final cut).

I’ve sent out two editions of my free email newsletter in two weeks (!), so you should definitely sign up now.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The Financial Times has a fascinating story on four women who work as spies in Britain’s SIS, looking at their actual jobs and lives (as much as possible) and the agency’s history of discrimination, often to its own detriment.

Patrick Burleigh wrote about growing up with testotoxicosis, an extremely rare condition that causes boys to begin puberty as young as age two.

The Denver Post tells how a consultant to the Denver Art Museum used her position and imprimatur to help an art smuggler move looted items from holy sites in southeast Asia. The consultant, Emma Bunker, died last year.

The New York Times, which was also guilty of the sins described in this article, looks at how biased polls that implied there would be a ‘red wave’ this November screwed up the narrative and led Democrats to commit resources to many of the wrong races.

The Philly Inquirer looks at the successes and struggles of Mastbaum High School, a vocational/technical school in Kensington, a neighborhood often called ground zero of the city’s opioid epidemic. One unavoidable conclusion: the school is wildly underfunded given its role in the community.

You may have seen a claim about more athletes dying from cardiac arrest since the COVID-19 vaccines were introduced than died from the same in the preceding twenty or so years. It’s bullshit, and comes from a source-less site called goodsciencing that is probably backed by the CEO of conservative site NewsBlaze.

Dr. Céline Gounder, Grant Wahl’s widow, wrote about how anti-vaxxers also pounced on her husband’s death to spread misinformation and outright lies. Fucking ghouls.

A romance novelist faked her own death, and has now returned like nothing ever happened.

The cousin of one of the founders of Black Lives Matter flagged down a police car after an accident. One of the officers Tased the man so extensively that he died of cardiac arrest. Keenan Anderson was unarmed. The LAPD is already blaming the victim, saying he had cocaine in his system, which, last I checked, is not a capital crime.

Gov. Ron DeSantis is weaponizing Florida’s public schools, using political appointees to try to stifle any future dissent coming from its students. Vanity Fair’s Bess Levin explains just how bad a DeSantis presidency would be.

Damar Hamlin’s tragedy has been fodder for anti-vaxxer lies. The BBC also looked at how the conspiracy theorists pounced. So did WBUR, while Forbes looked at the backlash to the anti-vaxxers, including a tweet from yours truly.

A fake tweet claiming a Florida doctor had made absurd pro-vaccine statements was amplified by a host of alt-right accounts, and Twitter refused to take it down, leading to a wave of harassment against her. VICE also covered the story, focusing on Joe Rogan amplifying the tweet.

Meanwhile, public confidence in the MMR vaccine, which fights measles, mumps, and rubella, is waning after two years of attacks from denialists and grifters against COVID-19 vaccines.

The BBC invited a cardiologist turned anti-vax grifter (he charges $10K-$20K per speaking appearance now) on air to discuss a cholesterol medication, but he hijacked the interview to make false claims about the COVID-19 vaccines.

Germany has warned Twitter that it’s running afoul of EU laws against misinformation.

An adjunct professor at Hamline University in Minnesota followed multiple steps before showing a painting of Muhammad in an art class, and was still fired after a Muslim student complained.

Yet another fake AirBnB listing scam, this time in Philly, with renters showing up to find that the house was listed without the owners’ knowledge.

Writer Hilary de Vries described her struggle getting effective treatment for her sister, who has schizoaffective disorder and has trouble holding on to housing.

New York City is paying $135,000 to a homeless man its cops beat and dragged off the subway. The cops lied about him hitting them first, but body-camera footage proved them wrong.

One recent poll found that two-thirds of Britons now want a referendum to rejoin the EU. So it was Leave, Remain, or Regret?

The Times continues to uncover lies and inconsistencies in Rep. George Santos’ background, including possible campaign finance violations.

CNBC joins the parade of investigations into Santos, this time showing his campaign may have committed fraud when a staffer allegedly posed as a member of Rep. Kevin McCarthy’s team on fundraising calls.

Right-wingers have been organizing for several years to take over school boards so they could push their theological, homophobic, transphobic, and even white supremacist agendas into public schools. The Philly Inquirer has a story about some progressives who are belatedly fighting back.

For example, Central Bucks schools in Bucks County, which I think is where Deliverance was filmed, have banned teachers from displaying Pride flags or other inclusive materials in classrooms, thanks to a school board dominated by right-wingers.

Smithtown, New York, the retrograde part of Long Island where I was born, decided to remove all Pride displays from its libraries back in June. This isn’t shocking if you’ve been there, as it’s as provincial a suburb as you’ll find. People there don’t get off the Island enough to realize there’s a whole big world out there.

Texas’ Department of Agriculture issued a report stating that climate change threatens the state’s food supply. Of course, Gov. Greg Abbott, when he’s not busy spending Texas citizens’ money on busing migrants to northern cities, has blocked local attempts to fight climate change.

In other performative political stunts, Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders (R) banned state officials from using the gender-inclusive term “Latinx.” She also signed an order banned state schools from teaching critical race theory, which I hope some Arkansas journalist asks her to define.

Alabama, fighting for the title of America’s biggest backwater, is now claiming (via its Attorney General) that women there who use abortion pills obtained from out of state will be prosecuted, which I don’t think is constitutional but I’m not a lawyer.

A deputy campaign manager for Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot (D) sent an email to teachers asking them to encourage students to volunteer for her re-election campaign in exchange for class credit.

A baseball player for Northwestern has filed a defamation suit against multiple women who accused him of sexual assault or other inappropriate behavior, even one who did not make those accusations public, according to this Deadspin story.

Scientists have observed quantum interference between two different kinds of particles – similar to entanglement, Einstein’s “spooky action at a distance,” which occurs between two related particles – for the first time.

Why is cutting the U.S. defense budget such a forbidden concept?

Writing for The Nation, Elie Mystal explains why passing gun control laws is futile with an archconservative judiciary in place.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: abortion, academia, alabama, florida, guns, links, longreads, new york, pennsylvania, philadelphia, physics, police, social media, stick to baseball, texas, the swamp, vaccines

→ December 31, 2022
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 12/31/22.

I skipped last Saturday’s post, since it was Christmas Eve (iiin the drunk tank…), but since the last roundup I’ve written up the Daulton Varsho/Gabriel Moreno trade and the still in-limbo Carlos Correa signing with the Mets.

Over at Paste, I ranked the ten best new board games of 2022, and posted reviews of two of them – Kites, a real-time cooperative game; and Lacrimosa, a heavier game based on the life of Mozart. For those of you interested in my board game content, I’m going to do some small giveaways of promos and small expansions via my Instagram account starting this week, so feel free to follow me there if you’re interested.

I’ve got a bunch of non-work writing to do this weekend before I get back to prospect calls on Monday, with a new issue of my free email newsletter next up once this post is done.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: This is about two weeks old, but the New York Times had an extremely in-depth investigative report on the toll of Putin’s war on Ukraine.
This week in “anti-abortion laws are going to kill women,” a woman in Louisiana was having a miscarriage and two ERs turned her away because they were afraid of prosecution under the state’s draconian anti-abortion law.
Meanwhile, an Arizona anti-abortion law has allowed a man to sue the clinic that gave his ex-wife an abortion, claiming wrongful death.
I know there was A Discourse around this article, but you should read the actual piece about the so-called “nepo babies” that ran in Vulture, as it’s more nuanced and thoughtful than the title or cover might imply.
Also from the New York Times’ investigative unit, this December 19^th story started the flood of revelations about Representative-Elect George Santos’s fictional resume.
Rolling Stone talked to Dave Coutts, the singer of the 1990s band Talk Show, which was Stone Temple Pilots without singer Scott Weiland, about his experience in that one-album band and his post-music career.
The hoax about computerized voting machines that flipped votes from Trump to Biden comes from a longtime fraudster named Dennis Montgomery, who sold a bunch of his so-called evidence to Mike Lindell and also has a history of selling bogus information to the federal government.
Des Moines, Iowa, removed police “school resource officers” from schools and tried restorative practices instead. In These Times looks at some of the results from the first year, where arrests dropped by about 80% but police calls only increased from 9 to 13. Not really mentioned is that this system, in addition to improving outcomes and keeping more kids in school and out of prison, is how much less it costs taxpayers, too.
Slate’s Justin Peters wrote about the finale of the “great Internet grievance wars” and what the so-called Twitter files actually say, even as some loud right-wing accounts on the site are still complaining about “shadowbanning” as we speak.
Aaron Rupar wrote about his experiences getting suspended from Twitter by a petulant Elon Musk. This came as the billionaire claimed an Internet account was responsible for a stalker trying to find him, even though police found no link.
Two journalists for the Bend Bulletin were reporting on the impact of a severe cold snap on the city’s homeless, and decided to get involved to try to help one such woman despite the dictum that journalists shouldn’t become part of any story they cover.
Texas hired a man to train school board members, even though he’d been convicted twice of defrauding federal agencies. Of course, this training was supposed to be an alternative to so-called “woke” agendas. Grifters have realized how easy it is to target these people.
Vox has a list of seven reasons why the planet might not actually be doomed, based on the proceedings at this month’s COP15 summit in Montréal.
This New York Times story on a South Korean tour group that was stranded in Buffalo by the snow, only to find themselves taken in by a local couple who just happened to have a bunch of Korean ingredients in their kitchen, is both a rare bit of good news and a testament to the power of food to bring people together.
The anti-vaxxers and other COVID denialists who’ve sown distrust and ignorance around COVID vaccine have led to rises in chicken pox, measles, and other vaccine-preventable diseases as the dupes fooled by their misinformation are now skipping other critical vaccines.
The Atlantic points out that Republicans’ anti-vaccine policies have killed more Republicans than Democrats, although the article doesn’t try to pinpoint a death toll from this.
Meanwhile, Florida’s hyperpartisan Supreme Court has impaneled a grand jury to “investigate” COVID-19 vaccines. I assume they’ll find whatever Gov. DeSantis tells them to find.
DeSantis also reached out to Chaya Raichik, the hatemonger behind the anti-LGBTQ LibsOfTikTok account, after her identity became public, offering to hide her at his Governor’s Mansion even though she is a California resident. I don’t understand why Florida taxpayers are okay with this sort of use of their money, but it appears they are.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: abortion, environment, florida, frauds, iowa, lgbt rights, links, longreads, Music, police, russia, stick to baseball, texas, vaccines

→ November 25, 2022
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 11/25/22.

Just a quick note from me this week for subscribers to The Athletic, looking at the Angels’ trade for Hunter Renfroe in exchange for three fringy reliever types, with notes from Sam Blum as well. I did do my annual livestream where I take your questions while I spatchcock a turkey, although the video quality appears to be terrible. I blame Twitter.

For Paste, I reviewed Splendor Duel and Botanik, two new small-box two-player games from the publisher Space Cowboys. Splendor Duel is a strictly two-player spinoff of the wonderful game Splendor, adding direct player interaction and special powers on the cards that make it more than two-player solitaire, which can be true of the original.

I sent out another issue of my free email newsletter last week. I’m on a bunch of wannabe Twitter replacement sites, including Post.news, Hive (keithlaw), and Counter Social, plus the usual Facebook and Instagram links. Also, you can buy either of my books, Smart Baseball or The Inside Game, via bookshop.org at those links, or at your friendly local independent bookstore.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: ProPublica leads the way again, with a story on how a woman’s 911 call when her baby died was used to convict her of killing him, thanks to the police’s use of an evidence-free technique called “911 call analysis.”

The World Professional Association for Transgender Health has issued a lengthy rebuttal to a recent New York Times article that claimed harm from puberty blockers that isn’t supported by available research. The report also questions whether the authors of the Times article misquoted some sources.

A sheriff in a rural county in northern Minnesota has been accused of misusing corporate funds given to his office, arresting protesters against a water pipeline on tar sands in the county, and now retaliating against lawyers seeking to subpoena him

The head of the Autism Science Foundation writes about the need to recognize profound autism as a distinct diagnosis from or within that of autism spectrum disorder, arguing that the people advocating for autistic rights represent just one type of autism diagnosis.
The most likely GOP nominee for President in 2024 hosted white nationalist antisemite Nick Fuentes at Mar-a-Lago this week.

Anti-vax accounts are pretending to be legitimate by buying the blue check mark, allowing them to spread misinformation more widely, as Twitter appears to have given up on moderating content on its site.

They’re also pushing a bullshit documentary called Died Suddenly that claims many people died suddenly after receiving the COVID-19 vaccine – some of who are, in fact, not dead – and are harassing those people’s loved ones online, claiming they’re part of some sort of cover-up.

This spike in militant anti-vaccine activity is leading to rises in measles cases, as measles is extremely contagious but depends on a pool of unvaccinated hosts, since the MMR vaccine is one of the most effective we have.

Meanwhile, some former Twitter employees expressed their dismay at Twitter’s decision to reinstate twice-impeached former President Trump’s account. Of course, there are a lot of former Twitter employees these days.

The New Republic examines Elon Musk’s implied anti-trans agenda, given his moves so far.

The Washington Post interviewed dril about the state of Twitter. I admit it wasn’t quite as funny as I’d hoped it would be.

The Atlantic wins for the best headline of the week, with Trump’s Terrifically Stupid Return to Twitter.

Georgetown history professor Thomas Zimmer posted an interesting if disturbing thread on Musk’s lurch to the right and his embrace of an anti-democratic worldview, arguing as well that Twitter’s demise will be bad for democracy across the globe.

A Christian (Baptist) preacher in Washington state said the massacre of five LGBTQ+ people at a club in Colorado Springs was “a good thing.”

And it’s a vicious cycle, as the flood of anti-LGBTQ+ hate speech coming from the right leads to more violence, which spurs on more hate speech, and so on.

The same far-right is now attacking the hero who stopped the Club Q shooter, calling him a “groomer” and a slur for gay men, led by the same troll who started the bogus Pizzagate conspiracy.

Republicans are now trying to pass laws restricting investment firms from pursuing climate change-friendly policies, like divesting in fossil fuel producers, calling them “anti-boycott” laws.

Government officials and candidates have visited Trump’s properties over 500 times, even continuing to do so in the wake of the January 6^th insurrection.

The Post’s Philip Bump argues that the Supreme Court has lost any justification for its claims of being above the partisan fray, with the news that Samuel Alito leaked a decision back in 2014 just the latest in a series of moves showing how polluted the institution has become.

Meanwhile, Amy Coney Barrett, who isn’t even one of the two most conservative justices on the court, has yet to recuse herself from a case involving LGBTQ+ rights given her own membership in a religious group that practices the same sort of discrimination.

The BBC reports on the kenari nut, a crop that may be about to boom as a possible dairy substitute, while also potentially driving economic growth in Indonesia.

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette co-owner Allan Block and his wife Susan responded to a question about why he won’t settle with striking workers with a “fuck you” and a slap (video included). You can support the strikers in several ways, including reading their strike paper at Union Progress.

Board game news: Z-Man Games announced Mists over Carcassonne, a new cooperative spinoff of Carcassonne, due out in January.

Holy Grail Games has a Kickstarter going for Copan: Dying City, a worker-placement game where resources get scarcer as the game progresses and the city of the title collapses.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: autism, board game news, food science, lgbt rights, links, longreads, minnesota, misinformation, police, religion, scotus, social media, stick to baseball, trans rights, unions, vaccines

→ October 8, 2022
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 10/8/22.

My hypothetical ballots for five of the six major postseason player awards went up for subscribers to the The Athletic this week. I also held a Klawchat on Friday.

At Paste, I reviewed Wormholes, a space-themed pickup-and-delivery game that’s very easy to learn. I think it’s great for family play, on the weight and fun level of Ticket to Ride.

On The Keith Law Show this week, I spoke with Sports Illustrated’s Stephanie Apstein about the postseason awards, playoff predictions, rules changes, and more. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I sent out another edition of my free email newsletter on Friday night. Also, you can buy either of my books, Smart Baseball or The Inside Game, via bookshop.org at those links, or at your friendly local independent bookstore. I hear they make great holiday gifts.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: A Colorado state custody evaluator, who happens to be the brother of actor Val Kilmer, has a history of disbelieving abuse allegations and recommended a teenaged victim stay under the control of her abuser, according to an extensive report from ProPublica. Mark Kilmer has also been convicted of harassing his ex-wife, who accused him of assaulting her.

From last June, this WIRED story on the conflict between a potential lithium mine that could help power tens of thousands of electric cars and a single species of wild buckwheat that only lives on that one site in Nevada is balanced and beautifully written.

The Washington Post let investigative reporter Radley Balko go, a very disappointing decision as the paper seems to be leaning away from the serious journalism that made them worth paying for in the last six years. He has a new post up on his Substack about how Arkansas has kept a severely intellectually disabled man in prison for 30 years, even with questions about his guilt.

Thousands of Americans have died thanks to the propaganda efforts of anti-vaccine quacks and cranks, writes Kurt Anderson for the Atlantic.

Also from ProPublica: Mississippi police departments have taken to hiding search warrants from the public, flouting state laws on making them available at courthouses, which has the result of protecting officers who may have violated residents’ Fourth Amendment rights in no-knock searches. I donated to ProPublica today, as their journalism is incredible and this type of depth becoming more rare in our media landscape.

The Guardian has an extract from the upcoming book The Ransomware Hunting Team: A Band of Misfits’ Improbable Crusade to Save the World from Cybercrime, which you can pre-order here.
The BBC has a story on the ignominious and ongoing history of book-banning, even in liberal, democratic societies.

Scientific American spoke to Dutch mathematician Ionica Smeets about her work fighting the misuse of statistics by anti-science folks.

It’s not perfect, but it’s a start: a new California law bans doctors from giving patients medical misinformation during direct care.

Chess player Hans Niemann likely cheated in over 100 online games, but there’s no evidence he’s done so in a live game, according to an investigation by Chess.com.

A Kansas City cop tasered a handcuffed child in the back of his police car and still has his license.

The attorney for the family of an LAPD cop who died during a training exercise has alleged he was killed by fellow officers for being a whistleblower.

Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds (R) ran a TV ad so racist the Des Moines Register ran an editorial saying it has no place in their community. The ad seeks to distinguish white Iowan society from anything other.

TIME has a story on Michigan state Sen. Mallory McMorrow (D) and her message that Democrats can’t ignore the importance of state races as they try to hold both houses of Congress.

Could Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) be in actual legal trouble now that the identity of the woman who lured migrants on to his Publicity Stunt Airways flight to Massachusetts has been revealed?

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar weighed in on another DeSantis controversy, where the Governor went on Fox News and falsely claimed that no Americans questioned slavery prior to the Revolutionary War. Even I knew the Quakers were abolitionists well before American independence. He also called out Kyrie Irving’s idiocy for spreading nonsense conspiracy theories on his Instagram account.

Facebook banned the Proud Boys four years ago, but the site’s software still auto-generates pages for the group and its affiliates.

The hollow chocolate bunnies of the apocalypse? A Swiss court ruled that Lidl’s chocolate bunnies were too easily confused with Lindt’s and ordered the retailer to destroy its stock.

Board game news: A tiny publisher at Central Michigan University has a Kickstarter up for Rising Waters, a new historical-themed board game about the 1927 Mississippi flood that also focuses on the huge racial disparities exposed by the disaster.

The roll-and-write game Draft & Write Records is already funded on Kickstarter with 11 days to go.

This New York Times story on Russian men fleeing to neighboring countries to avoid being forced to serve in the war against Ukraine has a photo of some of those men playing the board game Splendor.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-science, arkansas, board game news, chess, colorado, environment, florida, iowa, links, longreads, michigan, misinformation, mississippi, police, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ September 17, 2022
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 9/17/22.

My one new post this week for The Athletic is a scouting notebook looking at some Yankees and Red Sox prospects, including Jasson Dominguez, Yoendrys Gomez, and Cedanne Rafaela. I’ve had to push some things off, as I got sick on Tuesday and it turns out that my COVID number is finally up.

My guest on The Keith Law Show this week was Dr. Justin E.H. Smith, author of the book The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is: A History, A Philosophy, A Warning, which you can buy here on Bookshop.org. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

My free email newsletter returned today after a long hiatus, describing my COVID experience so far and linking to a lot of the stuff I’ve written over the last few weeks.

And now, the links…

Hasidic private schools in New York City fail to provide even the most basic secular education to students, but have taken in $1 billion in taxpayer money, according to an extensive New York Times investigation. It would appear that various Mayors and Governors have declined to fully examine the issue for fear of alienating the Hasidic voting bloc.

“Satanic panic” is back, thanks to QAnon, right-wing influencers, and major media members like Fox News hosts.

The chairman of the Alabama GOP refused to show his photo ID to vote, and then had the poll worker who asked him to show it fired. It appears this is part of a larger pattern of behavior for John Wahl and his family, who hold substantial power through their Anabaptist sect.

Marcus Mumford spoke to the L.A. Times about his new album and its discussion of the abuse he suffered as a child.

The Denver Post argues that Rep. Lauren Boebert is a Christian nationalist, and part of a dangerous movement that threatens American democracy..

Years of investigations by the Kansas City Star and other outlets appear to have resulted in the arrest this week of a former Kansas City, Kansas, detective who stands accused of raping two women, taking money from drug dealers, and framing innocent people. It’s unbelievable how long people were aware of what Roger Golubski was allegedly doing, yet he was able to continue to do it, and even retired from one department and got a job with another.

Portland, Oregon, police had evidence two years ago in the case of the 2019 killing of a prominent anti-fascist activist, but sat on it for two years before making an arrest in August.

Why on earth are some Gen-Z folks starting to talk up the Unabomber’s manifesto?

People pushing the lab-leak conspiracy theory, including Jeffrey Sachs (an economist with no background in science), are doing great harm by advocating a belief that is contrary to all available evidence.

A Black protester in South Carolina is likely to give birth in jail, where she’s serving a four-year sentence for being mean to cops. She was convicted of “breaching the peace in a high and aggravated manner.”

The man accused of killing Eliza Fletcher was investigated for a 2021 rape, but the Memphis DA’s rape kit backlog is so long that the results didn’t come back until September 5^th. You would think this would lead to calls for increased funding to process rape kits.

A Detroit-area man who killed his wife and shot his adult daughter had fallen into a QAnon rabbit hole, according to other members of his family.

…as international experts warn that right-wing extremism is becoming more mainstream.

A lawsuit against the state of Texas includes evidence from a mother whose 13-year-old trans son was pulled out of class and questioned for over an hour by state “investigators.”

The co-chair of the Michigan state GOP referred to Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg as “a weak little girl.”

The Uihlein family, owners of the U-Line shipping materials company, have helped pay for fake-newspaper mailers blasting Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker while trafficking in transphobic and homophobic rhetoric. Don’t buy from U-Line.

Fred Franzia, the winemaker behind the popular $2 wines known as Two Buck Chucks, died this week at 79.

Candace Owens claimed that British colonization of Africa was actually a good thing for the colonized people.

An Iowa law on restitution for victims of violence means that a woman who, at age 15, killed the man who raped and trafficked her, owes his family $150,000. It is, literally, a law of unintended consequences. A GoFundMe for the woman has raised nearly three times that amount already.

Students and staff at Seattle Pacific University are suing the school over its anti-LGBTQ+ hiring policies.

Jennifer Rubin writes in the Washington Post that the Christian right is ignoring the biggest threat to their existence: Declining religiosity in younger generations. The younger you are, the less likely you are to identify as Christian, or as religious at all.

There’s a campaign afoot on the right to penalize businesses that work towards environmental or social goals, much like Florida is trying to penalize businesses that don’t support Gov. DeSantis’s agenda. The party that claims to support free enterprise isn’t adhering to the “free” part of it.

Noted liberal rag (checks notes) Bloomberg has an op ed arguing that the Texas judicial ruling that companies could decline to cover PrEP treatment for employees takes religious freedom too far.

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp said he’d be open to banning contraception in the next legislative session.

The American Library Association reported a huge increase in book-banning efforts across the country so far in 2022.

Khruangbin’s new album is a collaboration with Vieux Farka Touré, reimagining the songs of his father, the legendary Malian musician Ali Farka Touré.

Board game news: You can pre-order the latest game in the Unmatched series, Houdini vs. The Genie.

Sagrada: Artisans, the legacy version of the great dice-drafting game Sagrada, is now on Kickstarter and already funded.

Age of Inventors, an economic/resource management game from a small Greek publisher, is also on Kickstarter and also funded this week.

Dune: War for Arrakis, an asymmetrical area-control game pitting the houses Atreides and Harkonnen against each other, is also on Kickstarter, and fully funded even with a higher goal. It seems like it’s designed primarily for two players, but with 3 or 4 the extra players control “sub-factions” loyal to one house or the other.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: alabama, board game news, conspiracy theories, cults, free speech, georgia, iowa, kansas, links, longreads, oregon, police, south carolina, stick to baseball, trans rights, vaccines, wine

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