My latest draft blog post covers six top prospects I saw in the last week and a half, including Riley Pint, who hit 100 mph on my gun. ESPN also posted a free lookback at my old reports on Aaron Hicks. I held my regular Klawchat on Thursday, going about a half hour longer than usual.

And now, the links…

• I’ve always thought the UN was worse than useless, but boy, does this take the cake: Their own Nepalese peacekeepers caused the ongoing Haitian cholera epidemic that has killed upwards of 10,000 people. And they’re covering it up, with help from our own federal government.
• Thieves are stealing nuts from California farmers and it’s actually a serious problem.
• The NY Times weighs in on transgender bathroom hysteria with an op ed that emphasizes two aspects of these hateful laws: They don’t make anyone safer, and they carry real economic consequences for states that pass them. Not mentioned is how such laws blatantly pander to the evangelical base of the right wing, and how such voters seem to fall for it.
• Charles Pierce’s column on the two names we’ll be saying till the election was spot on and very entertaining to read.
• This Slate piece on the fake Craigslist ad asking for a “feminism tutor” is super weird and creepy. The piece identifies the serial harasser as a Penn State student, but the school’s directory shows zero results in a search of his name.
• Sarah Palin claimed that she’s as much a “scientist” as Bill Nye is, which is a bizarre sort of ad hominem attack.
• The University of Georgia paid Ludacris $65K to perform before a spring football game but remember there’s no money to pay the players because amateurism.
• I found this 2010 Science post called Things I Won’t Work With: Dioxygen Difluoride highly amusing.
• The Onion reports what other news outlets won’t: Pharmaceutical Industry Reeling As More Moms Making Vaccines At Home.
• The 1970 Miami High School baseball team was inducted into the school’s Hall of Fame this past week. “If it happened today — 24 innings thrown in one 346-pitch game by a high school junior — the coach likely would be fired or maybe even worse.” I don’t know if that pitcher, Alberto Zamora, was a major prospect before that outing, but he never made it to full-season ball.
• Don’t believe positive reviews you see online, even if they seem well-written and specific. A Fusion write created a fake business and bought likes and reviews for $5 a pop.
• The sister of the late Harris Wittels, Parks & Recreation writer and actor as well as creator of the Humblebrag, wrote a searing piece on the end of empathy and the awful shit people say online. Within her piece is a subpoint to which I can certainly relate: People will say awful things to total strangers when behind the comfort of a keyboard and a pseudonym. Someone came here the other day to say he disagreed with my comments on C.J. Nitkowski’s post and that he wouldn’t be a reader any more, and ended with “Fuck you.” He might have said the other stuff to my face. The last bit? I doubt it.
• Millenials prefer straight cash to stupid office perks, and Bloomberg is on it.
• Vox has a thoughtful piece on smugness in American liberalism; everything in there is at least somewhat accurate, but couldn’t you make the same points about any such community, especially online? Vaccine deniers, conspiracy theorists, evangelicals, atheists, vegetarians, Trump supporters – they all thrive in environments where they can limit their exposure to people with differing views, creating a feedback loop that further convinces them that they are right and everyone else is wrong. It’s human nature, and I don’t think it’s limited to any part of the political spectrum.
• Finally, did you know I’m a “liberal firebrand?” I didn’t realize believing in flatter taxation, a balanced budget, and free markets made me a left-wing nut job. Or that believing in equal rights for everyone put me anywhere but with the majority.
  

  Please explain, ESPN, why you fired conservative firebrand @gehrig38 for his opinions and allow liberal firebrand @keithlaw to express his?

  — Dan Curry (@dancurry) April 21, 2016

The index to all 30 MLB farm reports and top tens is now up; all reports are Insider except for Baltimore’s, which is free for all readers. Insiders can also read my top 100 prospects ranking and my my ranking of all 30 farm systems.

And now, the links…

• The University of Tennessee has a lot of explaining to do about the rape culture on campus.
• More SVIIB content, now just six days from the release of their final album. The questions in this interview are generic, but Alehandra Deheza’s answers are always enlightening. She also spoke to DIY about the process of finishing the record, with the tantalizing suggestion that she’ll be embarking on some sort of tour.
• The Huffington Post has some actual journalism for a change, with this piece on the horrifying scope of domestic violence in the United States.
• Here’s yet another good reason to avoid buying grated cheese: You may be buying fake cheese, or cheese doctored with cellulose. Buy hard cheeses whole and they’ll last for months. I’ve recommended the grana padano, which is virtually identical to Parmiggiano-Reggiano but is produced in a neighboring region of Italy, sold at Trader Joes; it’s 40-50% less than buying whole P-R at Whole Foods but in most applications you’d never notice the difference.
• I stand with Apple.
• Everybody seems to want their eggs to be “cage-free,” but getting to that point is complicated and expensive. One fundamental problem with our food supply, especially that of products from animals, is that we’ve lost any sense of what eggs or milk or meat really should cost. Factory-farming techniques that weren’t good for the animals drove prices down for consumers, but that model is not sustainable and consumers are increasingly demanding better treatment of the animals as well.
• One of my alma maters just reached a $750 million settlement in a longstanding patent lawsuit against Marvell Technology, after two judgments against the company that including a ruling that said infringement was wilful. The best part? The school’s President has said that CMU should “dedicate a substantial majority of this resource to helping qualified students afford a Carnegie Mellon education.”
• Meanwhile, another win for the collegiate athletics cartel, as former athletes at Penn lost their case arguing they were analogous to work-study employees and thus should be paid minimum wage for their time. The quote from the NCAA’s lawyer is stunning in its intellectual dishonesty.
• Vox interviews the woman who took 47 million academic papers and made them available, free, online. Yes, it’s copyright infringement, but I still see value in what she has to say, even if I can’t approve of what she did. The copyright owners in these cases are not content creators in the sense intended by U.S. copyright laws.
• I’ve seen this pitched as a “debunking of seasonal affective disorder,” but if I’m reading the underlying research correctly, it’s really a debunking of the idea that we’re all a bit down in winter. I’d welcome feedback from the more science-literate out there.