scotus — Page 2

→ September 23, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 9/23/23.

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

And now, the links…

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

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

→ September 16, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 9/16/23.

For subscribers to the Athletic, I wrote my annual column on players I was wrong about, and I weighed in on the Red Sox’ firing – and perhaps scapegoating – of Chaim Bloom. I held a Klawchat again on Friday.

On the board game front, I reviewed the excellent new game 3 Ring Circus over at Paste, and updated my list of the best new games so far in 2023 over at Vulture.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Why the actual fuck has Columbia University spent years protect an OB/GYN who abused hundreds of patients while working at the school – and even let him return to practice for five weeks after a patient went to the police, accusing him of sodomizing her, during which period he assaulted at least eight more patients. Columbia refused to cooperate with an earlier prosecution that resulted in a plea arrangement that kept him out of jail. And the Columbia leaders who oversaw all of this have gotten off scot-free, unlike the leadership at Penn State or Michigan State. Dr. Robert Hadden was convicted, finally, in January, of four counts of sexual abuse involving interstate travel (making it a federal case). Columbia still has not notified his former patients that he’s a sex offender. There are over 240 additional women who say he molested or abused them while under his care. If I had gone to Columbia, I wouldn’t give them another fucking dime.

There’s a million-dollar Kickstarter up for a series of expansions and enhancements to the hit game Terraforming Mars, from Indie Game Studios, which bought TM’s original publisher Stronghold Games when the latter’s founder retired a year or two ago. Kickstarter requires now that creators disclose what parts of the project are generated by AI projects, and it turns out that Indie decided to use AI for a whole bunch of the art in the new game – and Indie’s President Travis Worthington is completely unapologetic about this, even in the face of some pretty direct questions from Polygon’s Charlie Hall. What I find most distasteful about this is that they’re charging more for the product while their costs are going down, since they’re not paying actual artists for actual art. This is straight-up profit-taking. (Full disclosure: I’ve written for Polygon and Charlie was my editor.)

Vanity Fair has a story from author and journalist James David Robenalt on the upcoming book by and revelations from former Secret Service agent Paul Landis, who claims that he found another bullet lodged loosely in the seat behind President John F. Kennedy and Jackie Kennedy right after the President’s body was removed from the car. The implication, if we accept this story, is that there was a second shooter. It’s a long story, and I think Robenalt doth protest too much, but he’s also arguing against 60 years of government reports and denials.

The Daily Beast explains how Barstool built up its audience and social media presence by using burner accounts to avoid DMCA-related suspensions of their actual accounts.

The affirmative action policy you haven’t heard about: With enrollment of boys declining at colleges across the country, many have been finding ways to tip the scales in favor of male applicants. Weird that I don’t hear any protests from the right about this. It’s a mystery!

The Zulu prince and South African politician Mangosothu Buthelezi died last week at age 95. The BBC looks at his lengthy and complicated legacy. He served as president of one of the country’s “Bantustans,” puppet states within South Africa that claimed to give autonomy to Black citizens living under apartheid, then allied with the African National Congress in the fight for equality, only to split with the ANC over whether armed action was necessary or whether to ask for international sanctions.

Georgia the state is trying to become less democratic than Georgia the country, as they’ve made protests over the Cop City development a felony. I think this is a 1A violation, but I’m obviously not a lawyer.

Charles S. Pierce weighs in on how Clarence and Ginni Thomas are making a mockery of our democratic system.

Republican politicians who decried “indoctrination” in schools and passed laws banning materials like the 1619 Project from classrooms are now happily allowing students to be indoctrinated by the ahistorical nonsense from the right-wing disinformation outfit PragerU, because this is where censorship inexorably ends up.

Meanwhile, the GOP’s extreme wing is trying to shoehorn further abortion restrictions, including banning the safe, effective abortion pill, into various unrelated bills, and it’s backfiring on Rep. McCarthy and other Republican leaders already – to say nothing of what it might do next November. The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent also looks at how what he calls the “MAGA doom loop” may kill their chances in key battleground states next year.

Argentina is trying to get Italy to extradite a priest who helped the military junta torture dissidents in the 1970s. Franco Reverberi fled Argentina to return to his native country when it became clear he might be called to account for assisting torturers, sitting in the room while these abuses took place and even telling victims that God wanted them to reveal their secrets.

Convicted murderer Danelo Cavalcante escaped from Chester County Prison, about eleven miles from where I live, and was on the run for two weeks before a police dog found him. You know who didn’t find him or even remotely help in the search? All of the random idiots who went out to search for him or “report” on the search as so-called citizen journalists.

The library director and another library official in Sterling, Kansas, were fired in July after displaying a rainbow image at the entrance to the library because a few “Christians” complained it was promoting a “gay agenda,” even though the image was about neurodivergent people. I can’t with these people. Your religion is your business but it is not an excuse for hate, ignorance, or just being an asshole.e

A mathematical puzzle unsolved for fifty years, about the minimum dimensions for a Möbius strip, has been solved.

The asymmetric coop game Flock Together hit its funding goal in a few hours and is already 300% funded, over $150,000, just a few days into the campaign.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: abortion, argentina, board game news, georgia, kansas, kickstarters, links, longreads, metoo, police, scotus, south africa, stick to baseball

→ August 12, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 8/12/23.

I’m back, in more ways than one – I took some PTO right after the deadline to go to Gen Con, get some downtime, and just generally focus on myself for once. I’ll be back at work on Monday, although my next article probably won’t run until later in the week.

I was quite busy leading up to the trade deadline. I started with my midseason re-ranking of the top 60 prospects in the minors. Then I started breaking down trades as they happened:

Plus a brief look at some of the teams that did the best and the worst at the deadline.

Meanwhile, I wrapped up everything I saw and played at Gen Con, including my top ten games of the convention (which saw a record 70,000 unique attendees), and reviewed the family cooperative game Miller Zoo.

I’ve had two great guests on the Keith Law Show from the music world – Susanna Hoffs, talking about her debut novel This Bird Has Flown and her new album The Deep End; and Joe Casey of Protomartyr, talking about their new album Formal Growth in the Desert and his beloved Tigers. You can listen & subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And now, the links, gathered over the last four weeks…

Longreads first: The best thing I’ve read in the last month was this lengthy New York Times story on how one family has dealt with the discovery that frontotemporal dementia, an inherited condition with no cure or treatment, is in their genes. It’s wonderfully written and centers the people without ever leering at or patronizing them.
The Washington Post looks at how a Saudi company is draining scarce water resources in Arizona.
The New Yorker profiled Sudan Archives, whose album Natural Brown Prom Queen was my #2 LP of 2022.
Ed Yong announced he’s leaving The Atlantic (not my employer), but he did file a long piece on the shattering effects of long COVID.
ProPublica continues to show how Harlan Crow bought himself a Supreme Court vote by treating Clarence Thomas to cruises on his yacht, securing Thomas’ support in cases that affected Crow’s tax bill.
Ohio voters rejected the state Republican party’s bid to make it harder for voters to pass constitutional amendments. That ballot question, which lost badly in the election this past Tuesday, was boosted by about $4 million from the U-Line company’s owners. If you own or work at a company that’s shipping any kind of goods, don’t buy your boxes and materials from U-Line. And if you get a package from anyone in a box made by U-Line, ask them to find another vendor.
Texas A&M suspended a professor for criticizing the state’s Lt. Governor, Dan Patrick (R). Which is the party of freedom and liberty? And which supports cancel culture?
The President of Stanford has resigned after an investigation found manipulated research in three papers he co-authored.
Also from the Post, a moving story about a missing persons case from 13 years ago that the reporter who covered it couldn’t shake, and what it meant when the criminal case was finally solved.
Cory Doctorow points out how Tesla used its proprietary, DRM-protected software to tell drivers their cars had longer ranges than they actually did.
Efforts to reduce the population of the Aedes aegypti mosquito, which spreads numerous diseases including malaria and dengue, may end up thwarted by climate change. Several groups have released mosquitos infected with the Wolbachia bacterium, which makes the mosquitos’ offspring nonviable, but that bacterium can’t survive when temperatures are regularly 95 degrees and above.
This still seems so hard to believe, but scientists at the Livermore lab have used lasers to start a fusion reaction that created more energy than it required, which, in theory, could solve the looming energy crisis. I’m old enough to remember the “cold fusion” hoax, though, so I’d like to see a lot more of this.
Scientific American looks at how the four-color map problem was solved via brute force.
Donanemab may finally offer a huge step forward in the treatment of Alzheimer’s, with trials showing it can reduce cognitive decline in early-stage patients.
RFK Jr’s conspiracy theory-laden campaign promises to make it easier for doctors to spread medical misinformation. Meanwhile, Sherri Tenpenny, who’s been pushing anti-vax garbage for probably twenty years now and claimed that COVID-19 vaccines would make people magnetic, had her medical license suspended by the state of Ohio for her failure to comply with an investigation.
Meanwhile, an independent reporter unveils who’s funding the COVID-19 misinformation outfit the Brownstone Institute.
This is almost a month old but it still holds up: Ron DeSantis has a Ron DeSantis problem.
Texas took over the Houston Independent School District and is now closing the libraries at 28 schools there to convert them into ~~jails~~ discipline centers.
WBEZ in Chicago published video showing Waukegan cops coercing a false confession from a 15-year-old.
Footage emerged in Los Angeles of a sheriff’s department deputy punching a mother who was holding her baby.
NPR examines the rising number of people without housing in this country and offers four reasons why we can’t solve this issue, although I think they ignored the reason that most voters won’t actually give up anything to help. Homelessness is someone else’s problem to way too many people.
As every media entity on earth tries to be cool by celebrating hip-hop’s 50^th birthday, the BBC notes several pioneers who’ve been “written out of (rap) history,” including the Last Poets, the Watts Brothers, and Gil Scott-Heron, the last of whom you might at least know as the author of the poem “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.”
San Diego’s Juniper and Ivy might be my favorite restaurant in the country, and I was just there again in April. They’ve switched to a prix fixe menu for August that may be temporary, although I wonder if this is a trial balloon of sorts. I’ll still go there any time I’m in the best city in the country.
I’m not a big Starbucks customer; I don’t care for their coffee, although they do have good tea, and they offer a decent place to sit and work for a bit while I’m on the road. I’m going to have to rethink that as long as they’re engaging in a massive, dirty war against their own employees’ attempts to assert their right to organize.
Board game news: The Kickstarter for Wizards & Co. is complete but you can still pre-order the game, which comes from the designers of games like Egizia, Coimbra, Lorenzo il Magnifico, and Alma Mater.
Mistwind, designed by Daryl Andrews and Adrian Adamescu (Sagrada), is already about six times past its funding goal on Kickstarter.
The fourth Iron Rail game, Age of Rail: South Africa, has just three days to go on its Kickstarter. I have to admit I was not a fan of Iberian Gauge, the second in the series.
The next game from Elizabeth Hargrave (Wingspan) is Undergrove, which I believe is going to Kickstarter this fall. You can sign up here for updates from Alderac, the publisher.
You can also sign up to be notified when the Kickstarter for Perch, an area-control game with a modular board, launches in a few weeks.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-science, arizona, coronavirus, links, longreads, ohio, physics, police, science, scotus, stick to baseball, texas, vaccines

→ July 16, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 7/16/23.

For subscribers to the Athletic, here’s an index to my draft coverage from this past week:

My pick-by-pick analysis for the first 39 selections
My AL team draft recaps
My NL team draft recaps
My post-draft Q&A
My final mock draft, if you’re curious

I also recapped the Futures Game and wrote a brief note on the call-up of Pirates’ right-hander Quinn Priester.

I had Joe Sheehan back on the podcast last week, before the draft, and then skipped this week to write all that stuff above. You can listen & subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I’m a little pressed for time so let’s get to the links:

Longreads first: Well, not quite a longread, but here’s the GQ article on David Zaslav that he pressured the publication to pull after it was published online.
ProPublica reports on how the EPA has banned the pesticide chlorpyrifos for food crops in the U.S. but worked against a global ban on the chemical.
Unfortunately, ProPublica continues to seriously screw up its coverage of the research on the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Did an elite private school in New York City drive a student to suicide by asking him to leave?
Yet another story of the increasing harm from online romance scams, this time about how they’re driving victims to attempt suicide.
Elie Mystal argues that SCOTUS’s affirmative action ruling kicks the door open to Jim Crow-style bigotry.
Even before RFK Jr. revealed himself as an antisemite and Sinophobe, he was pushing an old anti-vaccine lie about “saline placebos” as part of his denialist messaging.
Reason asks why so many soi-disant libertarians are backing RFK Jr.
Giant hog farms are an environmental and animal-welfare disaster. They also make horrendous neighbors, but recent laws and court rulings have favored these factory farms over individual homeowners’ rights.
This is from last August but a Pew Research survey found American right-wingers are absolutely more insane in their climate change denial than even right-wingers in other countries. Meanwhile, the planet may be hitting the climate change point of no return.
Half the police force in Golden Valley, Minnesota, quit after the town hired a Black police chief. Crime went down.
Florida’s various laws repressing educator speech may already be driving a brain drain out of the state.
And the state of Florida is also going after voter registration groups, threatening them with thousands of dollars in fines for helping citizens exercise their constitutional right.
Moms for Liberty is an extremist group and Republican politicians are lining up to court their support.
Elon helped spread a conspiracy theory that claimed an innocent 22-year-old college student was a federal agent posing as a neo-Nazi to infiltrate hate groups.
Elon appears to be accelerating the enshittification of Twitter.
Rep. Clay Higgins (LA-R) suggested that the government close public libraries and replace them with “church owned” libraries instead.
Sen. Josh Hawley (MO-R) shared a quote that he claimed was from Patrick Henry but actually came from a virulently antisemitic magazine.
The WGA strikers may have been wobbling, but an anonymous comment from a studio exec seems have to given their strike new energy.
A US labor judge ruled that Starbucks illegally shut down a unionized store in Ithaca, New York, and ordered the company to reopen it.
A Muslim student from a Delaware high school was arrested outside his graduation ceremony by University of Delaware police.
As Substack and other sites become festering holes of homophobia and transphobia, Medium came out with a statement in support of LGBTQ+ rights.
Conservative activists didn’t stop at abortion – now they’re targeting birth control.
Conservative activists didn’t stop at trans kids – now they’re trying to ban gender-affirming care for adults.
Archaeologists think they’ve found the hidden entrance to what the Zapotec civilization believed was a path to the underworld. Nobody needs another Indiana Jones film, thanks.
India has a large sugar industry, and now a native rum industry is emerging by distilling better-quality spirits and exploring the liquor’s flavor profiles.
The ice in your cocktail has a significant cost in climate impact, so some bartenders and cocktail bars are trying to reduce its use and waste.
GQ did actually publish a fascinating look at one of the world’s most prolific and weirdest art thieves.
Jen Ramos Eisen wrote about what it was like to be a survivor of intimate-partner abuse at Domingo Germán’s perfect game.
Kevin Johnson wrote why he, as a Black man, has chosen not to review Morgan Wallen’s concerts in St. Louis given Wallen’s past, free use of the n-word.
Know a student affected by book bans? They can sign up for free to get access to a huge library of such titles via the Seattle Public Library.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-semitism, antiscience, climate change, coronavirus, environment, florida, lgbt rights, links, longreads, rum, scotus, stick to baseball, unions, vaccines

→ July 1, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 6/30/23.

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

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

And now, the links…

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

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

→ June 24, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 6/24/23.

I released my second mock draft for 2023 this week for subscribers to the Athletic. I also did a Q&A to answer your draft questions.

My guest on the Keith Law Show this week was Michael Ruhlman, author of Ruhlman’s Twenty and the brand-new The Book of Cocktail Ratios: The Surprising Simplicity of Classic Cocktails, which is an essential guide for any home bartender. You can listen & subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The New Yorker’s Louisa Thomas has a tremendous story on the vicissitudes of Daniel Bard’s career, as he’s had at least two distinct comebacks already in his baseball life. (There’s also a mention of Keith Law Show guest Sian Beilock, author of Choke.)

Defector has the story of con artist John Rogers, who scammed people out of millions through his business of buying and digitizing photo archives from major newspapers and professional photographers.

NPR affiliate KNKX looks at how Christopher Rufo, who made “critical race theory” an electoral rallying cry and is now going after trans people, went from a little-known City Council candidate to a right-wing influencer with links to two Presidential candidates.

The new chief of the 1100-person Grand Caillou/Dulac Band of Native Americans in Louisiana is a 25-year-old coastal scientist who wants to help his tribe fight climate change and preserve their way of life.

Water recycling is the next big thing in building and urban planning, from commercial to residential properties.

Meanwhile, the state of Arizona is making it way too hard for native populations to access their guaranteed water rights.

The Guardian spent three days interviewing the Kenyan Nobel Laureate Ng?g? wa Thiong’o, author of Wizard of the Crow and A Grain of Wheat.

The BBC has a rare look at the famine and increased repression taking place right now in North Korea.

NBC News’s Brandy Zadrozny interviewed putative Presidential candidate and science denier Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who shows just how divorced from reality he is, claiming that the powers-that-be prolonged the pandemic, that the vaccines killed more people than they saved (they did not), and that the CIA killed his father. He also still doesn’t understand that the mercury found in fish and the mercury that used to be found in vaccines were in completely different forms that the human body handles differently.

RFK Jr. is not a doctor or scientist; he’s a lawyer, with no medical or scientific background whatsoever. This TIME editorial explaining how and why RFK Jr. is “dead wrong” about vaccines was co-authored by a doctor and professor of global health.

Still not convinced? RFK Jr.’s anti-vaccine group, the misleadingly-named Children’s Defense Fund, has been reaching out to neo-Nazi and white nationalist users to drum up support for him. Very fine people.

The Washington Post has more on how a fringe, Christian doctors’ group has spurred Republicans’ renewed war on abortion, transgender rights, and more.

The same billionaire who lavished gifts on SCOTUS Justice Clarence Thomas has also donated over $450,000 to Republican Senators who might vote on judicial ethics reform.

The British government is holding over 60 migrants, mostly Tamils, in a makeshift detention camp on Diego Garcia, with conditions deteriorating and what seems like an end-run around refugee rights because the Brits are claiming the island, which houses a military base, isn’t actually part of the UK.

Two old morons accused a nine-year-old girl of being trans at a track meet, stopping the event and demanding proof that the girl was cis. This is what comes of right-wingers spreading fear and hate of trans people just to gain political currency.

Writing in the Observer, Kathryn Bromwich argues for a more inclusive feminism and less focus on the distraction of transphobia, as there are far more pressing and practical issues confronting women today.

Starbucks caved to pressure from bigots and removed Pride décor from many of its stores. Workers from over 150 locations are going on strike to protest the move.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who uses a wheelchair, vetoed a bill to make it easier for people with disabilities to vote by mail. He also approved a law that bans cities and counties in Texas from mandating water breaks for construction workers in the heat.

The BBC has the story of a Texas woman who was denied an abortion for a nonviable pregnancy and nearly died as a result of the state’s draconian, misogynistic abortion ban.

The Speaker of the North Carolina House, Tim Moore (R), stands accused of using his position to gain sexual favors, including “engaging in group sex” with people looking to benefit politically.

The British newspaper The Times ran a story claiming that COVID-19 came from a lab leak, although they didn’t provide any evidence. It’s right in line with the paper’s AIDS denialist stance from the 1980s.

Elon Musk joining in and encouraging an attack against vaccine developer Dr. Peter Hotez has many scientists looking for the exit from Twitter.

Can you wash and reuse plastic zip-top bags? Yes, several times.

Barbara Kingsolver became the first author to win the Women’s Prize for Fiction twice.

PEN America referred to the removal of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s memoir Between the World and Me from a South Carolina school’s AP course list as “an outrageous act of government censorship.”

NBC News reporter Ben Collins received a Walter Cronkite Award for TV Political Reporting, earning special recognition for his “incisive reporting from the trenches of the information war,” and gave a great speech about fighting misinformation and the need to stand up for the truth.

Truthout has some details on billionaire Leonard Leo’s operation to try to buy up the American judiciary and impose a hard-right agenda on the country.

Looks like CNN and MSNBC learned one tiny lesson, refusing to broadcast Trump’s post-arraignment speech live, since they couldn’t fact-check it in real time.

A whole bunch of Trump supporters claimed they’d respond to his arraignment with violence. They did not. You can’t cave to these people.

Meanwhile, Rep. Elise Stefanik (R) sent out a fundraising email for a “Trump Defense Fund” that would actually funnel most of the money to her.

On the bright side, Delaware’s at-large Rep. Lisa Blunt Rochester (D) announced that she’s running for the Senate seat soon to be vacated by Tom Carper’s retirement. Delaware has never had a female Senator or a Senator of color.

Writer/activist Michael Harriot exposes some of the hypocrisy of Nikki Haley’s views and statements on race.

Verge explains the Reddit shutdown last week where multiple subreddits went dark for days to protest the company’s new policies.

The astroturfing group Moms for Liberty, which is pushing book bans and other anti-LGBTQ+ policies, quoted Hitler … again.

Board game news: A new version of the 1980s classic game Crossbows & Catapults is now up on Kickstarter.

Tangerine Games launched a Kickstarter for yet another bird-themed game, the very pretty Nestlings.

Thiefdom, a new game from the designers of Clans of Caledonia, is now also up on Kickstarter. I don’t like Clans of Caledonia anywhere near as much as the consensus – I find it a rather soulless economic Euro – but this appears to be a totally different sort of game.

Waypoints, a print-and-play game for $5, is also up on Kickstarter for one more week.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: african literature, anti-science, baseball, board game news, book banning, con men, delaware, links, longreads, misinformation, north carolina, north korea, refugees, scotus, social media, stick to baseball, texas, trans rights, vaccines, water

→ 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 8, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/8/23.

I had two new pieces up this week for subscribers to The Athletic, my second minor league scouting notebook from the Cactus League and a draft blog post on a few potential first-rounders I saw in Arizona. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday. I’m down with some sort of cold right now, though, so I’ll be away from the stadium for a bit.

My first column for Wirecutter on board games, giving recommendations for five great roll-and-write games for different age/skill levels, ran this week.

My podcast will return this week, now that I’m off the road (and even if I’m still not 100% on Monday). I am about to send out a new issue of my free email newsletter today, though.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The Atavist has the story of Lesley Hu, whose ex-husband was so brainwashed by anti-vaxxers whose content he found online that he killed their son rather than allow him to be vaccinated. It’s a horrifying story of misinformation, mental illness, and a court system unprepared to deal with these cases.

You’ve probably seen the ProPublica story about the conservative billionaire who’s been lavishing gifts on Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas for twenty-plus years. The most important thing to remember – and, if you’re outraged, to keep telling your Representative and Senators – is that it’s fairly clear that Thomas broke the law by failing to disclose these gifts.

BMC Infectious Diseases is set to retract a paper published last year that claimed, with insufficient evidence (to put it mildly), that COVID-19 vaccines had caused up to 278,000 deaths. How did such a terrible study get through peer review? The problem is with the process, not just this particular paper.

I linked to a story a few months back about a U.S. Marine who used the courts to kidnap an Afghan baby whose parents had been killed but who had living relatives willing to take her in. This past week, a different U.S judge voided the adoption. It’s not over, but this is a step in the right direction. The Marine and his wife used their Christianity as a justification for taking the child, who is now 4 years old.

Mississippi is about to create a separate, state-appointed court to oversee the city of Jackson, meaning white state officials will determine the judges who rule over the 80% Black municipality.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) and his handpicked, denialist Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo omitted key data from a flawed COVID vaccine report that claimed that young men should not get these safe, effective immunizations. Infection with COVID-19 carries a much greater risk of cardiac-related deaths than the vaccines do, but the report left out data showing this.

A writer who used to cover the Tennessee State House says the legislature has been trending in the direction of autocracy for years now.

Iowa is increasing its funding to the so-called Field of Dreams stadium, which will run between $52 million and $57 million in public support.

Republicans are mad that young voters keep tipping elections to Democrats, often progressive ones, so now they’re trying to make it harder for college students to vote.

Why do so many of the people on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list of entrepreneurs and business leaders end up in prison?

There’s a shortage of the wonderful French herbal liqueur known as Chartreuse, but it’s not because of supply-chain issues: The monks decided not to make as much of it.

I wasn’t familiar with the Indian metal band Bloodywood, who fuse Western styles from thrash to death metal to rap-metal with Indian folk music, but they’ve become a breakout act in a country that has never embraced the metal genre the way other nations with comparable arts scenes have.

An atheist prisoner in West Virginia has sued the state for making Christian-affiliated programming a required part of his release conditions.

Board game news: Klaus Teuber, the designer of the game now known simply as Catan, died this week at age 70. The New York Times, Washington Post, and Boardgamegeek all published worthwhile obituaries, honoring the man whose creation has sold over 40 million copies and divided board game history into Before and After. Catan and Ticket to Ride are the two games that did the most to turn me into a board gamer, and in turn into something of a board game writer, too.

Inside Up Games has a huge hit on its hands with Earth, which I’ll be reviewing this month or in early May and which I think is the favorite right now to win the Kennerspiel des Jahres. Their next big release, the route-building and resource management game Terminus, is on Kickstarter now.

Alderac’s Kickstarter for Let’s Go to Japan ends in just over two more days.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-science, board game news, catan, florida, frauds, iowa, links, liquor, longreads, metal, mississippi, scotus, stick to baseball, tennessee, 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

→ November 19, 2022
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 11/19/22.

For subscribers to the Athletic, I wrote two pieces this week, one on the Angels’ signing of Tyler Anderson and the Yankees’ re-signing of Anthony Rizzo, and one on four trades from earlier this week before teams had to set their 40-man rosters. I also held a Klawchat on Friday.

On The Keith Law Show, I spoke to Jessica Grose, New York Times opinion writer and author of the new book Screaming on the Inside: The Unsustainability of American Motherhood, about the book and what we might do to make being a working mother easier in the U.S. You can pre-order her book, which is due out December 6^th, and you can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

With Twitter imploding, you can find me in a bunch of other places, including Facebook, Instagram, counter.social, and cohost, as well as here and on my free email newsletter, which went out again yesterday. 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: Population projections have the stretch of West African coastline that runs from Lagos, Nigeria, to Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, becoming the largest zone of continuous, dense habitation on earth by 2100, with about 500 million people in it. The Guardian looks at what this means for the region, its people, and the planet as a whole.
Clint Smith’s story in the Atlantic on his visits to Holocaust memorial sites and what they might tell us about how to grapple with our own shameful past is one of the best things you’ll read this year.
And this New York Times Magazine article on the theft of an Afghan baby by a network of American evangelical Christians should win a Pulitzer. The lawsuit is still ongoing, but we should not be in the practice of stealing babies from countries we invade.
The United States lags badly behind other developed nations in researching and preventing stillbirths. We still have 20,000 stillbirths every year in the U.S., and at least a quarter of them are (likely) preventable.
A woman visiting Ohio had a miscarriage and began to hemorrhage. Because of Ohio’s anti-abortion law, the emergency room sent her home to wait because they couldn’t “prove there was no fetal development.” This is how these religiously-motivated laws will kill women.
I was obsessed with the computer game Age of Empires when it first came out in the late 1990s. WIRED has an interview with the current CEO of Microsoft Gaming and the head of the studio that makes the Age games as the game celebrates its 25^th anniversary and two new civilizations were added to the most recent version, Age of Empires IV.
ProPublica has the inside story of how anti-abortion groups helped write Tennessee’s extremely strict ban on the medical procedure and are working to defend it.
Colombia faces a difficult challenge as its new President wants to stop extracting fossil fuels and move to climate-friendly energy sources, including the lack of a transition plan for affected workers.
This 12-minute BBC podcast looks at online harassment and threats against scientists investigating the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
The CARES Act led to the release of 11,000 inmates from federal prisons during the early part of the COVID-19 pandemic. Only 17 reoffended. The U.S. has the highest incarceration rate in the world and we spend nearly $200 billion just to keep people in prison. Maybe we should rethink this?
A new research paper in Nature found evidence that climate change is increasing the risk of bat pathogens spilling over into humans.
Yoel Roth was the head of trust and safety at Twitter, and wrote an op ed explaining why he quit a few weeks after Elon Musk took over the site. It’s not good, but it also explains how the company’s dependence on advertisers may prevent Musk from turning it into 8chan. Roth himself has some bigoted tweets from 10+ years ago.
Eighteen unvaccinated Ohio children, all but one under the age of 5, have contracted measles in an ongoing outbreak across two day care facilities. Measles is one of the most contagious viruses we know, and it can cause death up to ten years after the infection from a progressive and incurable neurological condition called SSPE.
More anti-vax loons are demanding “vaccine-free” blood and are trying to set up so-called “safe” blood banks.
Meanwhile, America’s Frontline Doctors, a quack group that took in millions from prescribing useless COVID-19 treatments and offering online “consultations,” is imploding now because founder and January 6^th insurrectionist Simone Gold may have been embezzling the group’s funds for personal gain.
Also, it appears that someone contracted dengue fever from a mosquito bite in Arizona. Climate change makes this almost inevitable.
Tucker Carlson’s attempt to play kingmaker this election season ended mostly with embarrassing defeats.
It’s a weak substitute for the real thing, but Democrats should codify Roe v. Wade right now, and force SCOTUS – with five justices who are religious zealots or otherwise openly anti-abortion – to grapple with it, according to The Nation’s Elie Mystal.
Mystal also wrote elsewhere about how Chief Justice John Roberts delivered the House to his fellow Republicans by gutting voting rights laws.
Tom Scocca writes that Trump’s hold on the GOP is stronger than ever despite the drubbing many of his preferred candidates took in the midterms.
The Virginia state education department has proposed major changes to social studies standards, written by five new appointees of the state’s Republican governor. Educators oppose the changes, calling them jingoistic and derogatory towards non-whites.
Moms for Liberty, the astroturfing, pro-white/anti-LGBT activist group that’s been targeting school board elections, threw out a Black superintendent in South Carolina and banned critical race theory
A Connecticut school district is so wedded to its racist mascot (the Redmen) that they’re forgoing $94,000 in state funding just to keep it.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is shipping more migrants to Philadelphia in another instance of human trafficking, but the government of the City of Brotherly Love has posted a list of resources for folks who want to help welcome these new residents. Love > hate.
And Texas Republicans have filed a bill that would criminalize gender-affirming care for minors – yes, putting parents in prison for getting medical care for their kids. Why is MLB putting the All-Star Game there?
The Biden Administration is giving Saudi Arabian “Prime Minister” Mohammed bin Salman immunity from a lawsuit filed by the fiancée of murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi, because oil.
All the news about Republicans investimigrating Hunter Biden’s laptop or something is overshadowing the real damage they’re going to do by going after science agencies.
Board game news: Pandasaurus Games owners Molly Wardlaw and Nathan McNair face accusations from former employees of creating a toxic workplace environment through “negligence, mismanagement, and manipulation.” I have met Molly and Nathan, although I can’t say I know either of them well, and I’ve reviewed many Pandasaurus Games over the years. The company denied the allegations and their response is at the bottom of the linked article.
Tabriz, the new game from the co-designer of the amazing Cascadia, is crowdfunding on Gamefound for two more days.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: abortion, africa, anti-science, board game news, carceral state, colombia, links, longreads, measles, philadelphia, scotus, social media, south carolina, stick to baseball, tennessee, texas, trans rights, vaccines, video games, virginia

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