trans rights — Page 2

→ 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

→ March 11, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/11/23.

Nothing new at the Athletic this week, although I should have 2-3 coming up this week as my travels continue. I did hold a Klawchat on Thursday.

For Paste, I reviewed the game Gartenbau, which combines very simple rules with tight decisions that make it a real challenge to play it well.

On The Keith Law Show this week, I had my annual Oscars preview episode with Chris Crawford. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I was going to send another issue of my free email newsletter this week but got tied up with some other writing (board game stuff, actually), so it’s still on my to-do list.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: WIRED has the story of the takedown of a former Iraqi translator who became a major fentanyl dealer in the U.S. and is now serving a 30-year sentence in federal prison.

Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) is trying to strip the press of its First Amendment rights.

The rash of anti-trans bills across the south and Midwest are the work of a network of religious-right groups that operated in secret while pushing their bigoted agenda, according to emails between those groups and South Dakota state Rep. Fred Deutsch (R) obtained by Mother Jones.

ProPublica has more information on billionaire Leonard Leo’s new plan to try to “crush liberal dominance” in American politics and culture. He’s considered the main architect of the strategy that gave conservatives a 6-3 Supreme Court majority and control of much of the federal judiciary.

My wife and I watched the Oscar-nominated animated short My Year of Dicks, which is very funny and sweet, which led us down the rabbit hole of its writer Pamela Ribon, including this hilarious 2011 post from her now-defunct blog about how she might have become a new urban legend.

Walgreens won’t sell abortion pills in states that merely threatened legal action, even though the medication is still legal in those locations.

Failed actor turned conservative talking head Michael Knowles, called for transgender people to be “eradicated” in a speech at the far-right convention CPAC this week.

All of the rhetoric you’re seeing against trans people right now was previously used against gays/lesbians by the same sort of Christianist activists.

A girls basketball team in Hoover, Alabama, the host city for the SEC baseball tournament, was forced to play in a boys’ rec league if they wanted to continue to use city facilities. When they subsequently won the league’s tournament, they were denied the trophy, which was then given to the boys’ team that finished second, because they are a ‘competitive’ team playing in a recreational league.

An anti-vaxxer nurse in Spain is in court, accused of faking vaccinations of children.

After a woman went on a racist tirade in a pizzeria near Philly, TikTok vigilantes tried to identify her, and instead targeted three innocent women instead, leading to widespread harassment.

From January 2022: Ashli Babbitt, who some right-wingers want you to believe was a martyr, had a history of violent behavior prior to her participation in the January 6^th insurrection.

Witnesses at Guantanamo Bay recalled Ron DeSantis laughing while prisoners there were tortured.

Utah legislators have voted to change the law that made it nearly impossible for victims of sexual assault by doctors to sue their attackers.

The Tennessee House passed a bill gutting marriage equality, possibly allowing elected officials to decline to issue a license to a couple for any reason. The state’s Republicans also passed a law banning drag shows, which is nothing more than performative bigotry

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: abortion, alabama, first amendment, florida, links, longreads, social media, stick to baseball, tennessee, trans rights, utah, vaccines

→ March 4, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/4/23.

I posted an early draft ranking of just 30 names, enough for a typical round, for subscribers to The Athletic. I’ll expand that list a few times and eventually get to 100 by May or so, but I’d like to at least see all the high school players get started.

No podcast this week as the guest I had lined up had to reschedule. Feel free to sign up for my free email newsletter, as I’ll be sending another one out this week.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The Financial Times has a deep dive into how Putin blundered into Ukraine and has continued isolating himself from would-be advisers who might have helped him out of this mess. The writer posits that Putin may try to hold on until January of 2025, hoping we elect a Republican as President and thus pull our military support of Ukraine.
Anything Elizabeth Kolbert writes is a must-read for me; her latest piece in the New Yorker covers how our mining of too much phosphorus and subsequent waste of much of it is choking our oceans while leading towards a bottleneck that threatens our food supply. The article also describes the world’s longest conveyor belt, a 61-mile track in the illegally annexed territory of the Western Sahara.
A former employee came out with claims about malfeasance at a St. Louis medical center that treats transgender youth, telling her story to a newsletter author who doesn’t engage in any sort of fact-checking of stories. The Missouri Independent and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch both investigated and found no corroboration, finding instead that parents had nothing but praise for the center and the treatment their children received. Newsletters are fine for some types of content, but not for actual news.
The New Republic profiled Dr. David Gorski, who has also blogged as Orac, and his battle against pseudoscience, quackery, and so-called “alternative” medicine online. (There is no such thing as “alternative” medicine. If it works, it’s medicine.)
I enjoyed this Slate story on the 25^th anniversary of Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea and the bizarre, cultlike fandom that album has generated. The title track from that record remains one of my favorite songs to play & sing.
The cesspool of Twitter had a debunked conspiracy theory trending earlier this week about Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs. It’s just one of several that Republican legislators there continue to push as they’ve seen the state turn increasingly blue.
There is no “lab leak theory.” There are a bunch of conspiracy theories, but no single, testable theory of how COVID-19 was supposedly engineered in and escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China. And the available evidence points to a zoonotic (natural) origin.
If you saw anything about Washington, D.C., attempting to update its criminal code this week, with hysterical tweets about reducing penalties for certain crimes like carjacking, there’s a lot more to the story. Most of this would be solved by just making the district a state with the same autonomy as the other fifty have.
Arkansas’ new education plan, which includes an extremely broad voucher program, is full of sops to banks and charter-school operators, and it’s also likely to gut public education in the state while favoring higher-income families. Sounds great!
Tennessee jumps on the bandwagon by banning drag shows. There is no evidence any drag show has ever harmed anyone. There is, however, copious evidence that guns have. The choice to ban harmless entertainment should tell you everything about this legislature.
Board game news: Restoration Games announced that they’re retiring the first two Unmatched sets, Cobble & Fog and Robin Hood vs. Big Foot, later this year, with no plans to reprint them.
The Gamefound campaign for Huang, a new game from prolific designer Reiner Knizia, is fully funded with five days to go.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-science, arizona, arkansas, board game news, conspiracy theories, coronavirus, links, longreads, pseudoscience, russia, science, stick to baseball, tennessee, trans rights, ukraine, washington

→ February 11, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 2/11/23.

My top 100 prospects and team reports have been running for the last 12 days, finishing up today with the AL West team reports/top 20s. You can see the index of everything I’ve written here, which includes direct links to the reports for every team, the top 100, the farm system rankings, my chats on that site, and more.

My latest review for Paste actually went up last week, and even I missed it in all the hubbub. I reviewed the board game It’s a Wonderful Kingdom, the two-person variant of the popular game It’s a Wonderful World, but I have to say I think the original is a better game, even for two people. It’s a bit like 7 Wonders meets Century Spice Road, but with a little more to it than that might imply. You can buy It’s a Wonderful World here on amazon if you’re intrigued.

My free email newsletter has been almost-weekly this year, and I’ll send out the next iteration this weekend. I skipped my podcast this week because I was writing so much. I think it’ll be back next week. Maybe. Life is full of uncertainties.

And now, the links…

The Toronto Star looks at the fall of Jamie Salé into conspiracy theory and denialism. The 2002 Olympic gold medalist, previously best known as one of the two skaters originally cheated out of the gold by corrupt judges, has become a COVID and vaccine denialist – and, of course, now she’s trying to profit off these false views.

The Hollywood Reporter has more details on the implosion of Rick and Morty co-creator Justin Roiland’s animation empire in the wake of his arrest on domestic abuse charges and multiple former co-workers detailing harassment by Roiland.

Intelligencer looks at the increasing “junkification” of Amazon, where legitimate products are getting harder to find as the company tries to muscle its way into more spaces. My outsider’s take: this is what happens when a company needs unbridled growth to prop up a stock price (or a billionaire owner’s wealth).

The right-wing propaganda site Revolver states that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R )’s takeover of that state’s schools, including the previously progressive New College of Florida, is the blueprint Republicans need to use to take down public education across the country. (The article also says that African American studies is “a joke of a subject,” if you doubt my characterization of Revolver’s leanings.)

Elon Musk fired a top Twitter engineer because engagement on the billionaire’s tweets is low. Totally stable genius there.
Twitter glitched for me twice this week – once when we all got the “exceeded the daily limit” warning, and once when the app showed me misplaced white boxes where certain tweets should have appeared in my timeline. Former employees say this is due to a series of code freezes and Musk’s frequent, mercurial demands for changes.

The BBC profiles the French author Colette, calling her “the most beloved French writer of all time,” although in the English-speaking world she’s probably best known for writing the novel Gigi that became a hit musical and film.

Native American groups are protesting the Kansas City NFL team’s nickname, mascot, and their use of the embarrassing “tomahawk chop.” Atlanta baseball fans, pay attention.

A Montana bill would prevent schools from punishing students who intentionally misgender or deadname classmates. Just say bullying is allowed and be done with it.

Is disdain for the less educated the “last acceptable prejudice,” as Michael Sandel writes in the New York Times? He also argues that it’s a problem for the Democrats, and a perception they need to shed.

Voice actors are being asked to sign away rights to their own voices so studios can create AI versions and save a few bucks.

Tony Dungy and James Brown (the NFL announcer) have withdrawn from their speaking slots at an event hosted by an anti-gay Pharisee preacher.

Republicans are not serious about governing, except when it comes to using the government as a weapon against their enemies, which is, you know, what fascist regimes do.

Also in Florida, the state is going to pass legislation to end Disney’s extra-governmental Reedy Creek Improvement District as retaliation for the company’s opposition to the state’s anti-LGBT “don’t say gay” law. See the previous bullet point.

Attempts to erase Black history from curricula, as Florida is doing, end up doing nothing except leaving students less literate in American history, rather than getting them to “love” the U.S. more, writes education Prof. Adam Laats in the Washington Post.

By the way, sometimes pressure works, even on zealots: Florida’s interscholastic sports committee has dropped plans to make questions about athletes’ menstrual cycles mandatory. It was a blatant attempt to out trans kids, of course, although they claimed otherwise.

Missouri’s Republican-led legislature rejected a measure to ban children from carrying guns in public.

Iowa Republicans introduced a bill that would expand child labor in the state, including jobs previously deemed too dangerous for kids like those in mining, logging, and animal slaughterhouses.

A professor at the University of Wyoming tweeted about a former student of hers who was trans and killed themselves. Legislatures passing laws attacking trans people, especially trans kids, are destroying lives just to score political points.

We’re seeing fewer big scientific breakthroughs, with the pace dropping steadily for over three-quarters of a century. Part of it is that breakthroughs are harder to come by as the low-hanging fruit is long picked, and part is that nations don’t invest in basic science research without promise of immediate financial returns the way they used to.

Over 200 people have been quarantined and at least 8 have died in Equatorial Guinea from an as-yet unidentified hemorrhagic fever (a category that includes dengue and the Ebola and Marburg filoviruses).

Board game news: Allplay (formerly known as Board Game Tables) has a Kickstarter up for four new small box games, with pledges starting at $19 for any one of the titles.

Rock Manor Games has a Kickstarter, already over 400% funded, for the new expansion to the game Set a Watch.

This blog post arguing that Dominion killed replayability in board games makes a great point – the need to constantly buy expansions to is a great business model for a very small number of games/publishers but not sustainable for the industry as a whole.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: africa, disney, florida, football, french literature, iowa, links, longreads, metoo, missouri, montana, racism, science, social media, stick to baseball, trans rights

→ 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

→ December 17, 2022
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 12/17/22.

Five new posts this week for subscribers to The Athletic:

I’ll try to do a Klawchat this upcoming week as my schedule permits; I’m trying to fill my days with calls for the prospect rankings package that will run in late January or early February.

My top ten games of 2022 article is already in my editor’s hands at Paste, so that should be up any day now. I’ll update here when it runs.

My guest on the Keith Law Show this week was Boston Globe writer Alex Speier, talking about the Red Sox’ confusing offseason so far and apparent desire to act like a small- or medium-payroll team. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I’ve got a new email newsletter about half-written, so I’m really hoping I can finish that off tonight or tomorrow. You can sign up here, for free. 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.

Finally, I caved and set up an account on Mastodon, @keithlaw@mastodon.au. Perhaps that’ll prove a better place for actual discussions with readers as the bird site becomes overrun by trolls – even my post saying I was on Mastodon attracted three randos who seemed only there to mock anyone who said they were leaving Twitter (which I’m not).

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The New York Times ran a “Lives They Lived” piece on twelve children murdered with guns in 2022, as gun violence has surpassed auto accidents as the leading cause of death for children in the United States. I think I was most affected by the one on a 17-year-old boy whose brother was also shot and killed several years previously. No way to prevent this, says only nation where this happens regularly.
ProPublica opens the window on CIA-led night raids on Afghan civilians, for which the U.S. has never taken responsibility. Mission Accomplished, though, right?
Adam Serwer, writing for the Atlantic, writes about conservatives’ invention of the “right to post,” although it doesn’t seem to apply to everyone, just them, as Twitter suspended a bunch of journalists who report on Elon Musk’s doings. NBC promptly beshit themselves by failing to back up Ben Collins, even taking him off the air for a few days for ~~defending evolution~~ failing to insufficiently worship Musk.
Also in the Atlantic, the solution to our growing problem of homelessness is to create more housing. That’s it.
Leading Republican figures had no problem gathering with ardent white nationalists talking about “total war” at the New York Young Republican Club’s recent gala.
This Twitter thread on the extreme right-wing concept euphemistically called “Common Good Constitutionalism,” which believes hardcore Christianity should be the guiding principle for our country, should terrify the rational among us regardless of our political leanings.
A professor at Chico State had an affair with a student and threatened to kill two co-workers, but the university only suspended him for a third of a semester while leaving any mention of the incident out of his personnel file. He’s since been suspended again through the end of this academic year after a new outcry over the school’s mishandling of the matter in 2020.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who has been under indictment for seven years for alleged securities law violations, sought information on Texas residents who changed the genders on their driver’s licenses amidst the state’s push to punish trans people for existing. If he can do this, I’m not sure what prevents any state official from demanding a list of residents who are Black, Jewish, etc.
Also in Texas, Carroll ISD no longer protects students against discrimination based on their gender, religion, or sexual orientation. Texas’s lurch towards theocracy continues virtually unimpeded.
Florida passed a law in June that was supposed to address the state’s shortage of about 5000 teachers by putting military veterans, even those with zero educational experience, in the classroom. The state has hired seven.
One member of Twitter’s now-disused Trust & Safety Council explained to Slate why she quit the board after Elon Musk bought the company.
Harassment and threats of violence, encouraged by Musk himself, forced former Twitter head of Trust & Safety Yoel Roth to flee his home last weekend.
The Kickstarter for a new printing of the 2017 game Sol: Last Days of a Star is already funded at over $140K pledged with two weeks to go.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: academia, board game news, california, florida, guns, links, social media, stick to baseball, texas, trans rights

→ 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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