vaccines

→ May 10, 2026
→ By keith
→ Leave a Comment

Stick to baseball, 5/10/26.

I posted my first mock draft of 2026 for subscribers to the Athletic this past week. I held a Q&A on Thursday to take your questions on the mock and anything else. I also posted a scouting notebook on Liam Doyle, Ike Irish, Dante Nori, and some other Phillies & Orioles prospects, as well as a draft scouting notebook on some Arkansas and Mississippi prospects, three of whom are probably going in the first round.

I also sent out another epistle of my free email newsletter. Trying to ramp that up to at least every other week.

I’m on Bluesky more than anything else right now. I’ve also been posting longer videos to Instagram and TikTok, talking about players I see or reacting to news, including two clips about the mock. I’ve also been messing around on the restaurant app Beli, if anyone else out there is using it.

A very short links post this week, not sure why. Anyway, and now the links…

Longreads first: Babies are dying because their parents have been scammed by online misinformation into rejecting the vitamin K shot, possibly thinking it’s a vaccine (which is also stupid, as vaccines are safe). Vitamin K is essential for clotting and this ProPublica story reports on babies who have bled to death because they didn’t get the shot.

The Guardian’s Adrienne Mantel describes how Christian nationalists are destroying our public health infrastructure, and potentially exporting their toxic, superstitious worldview around the globe.

Texas Monthly exposes how the Southern Baptist Convention was built by a serial child molester.

The Wall Street Journal investigates betting markets, and, shocker, most bettors there lose money.

Economist Justin Wolfers calculated the cost to each U.S. household of the current, illegal war on Iran will run to thousands and maybe tens of thousands of dollars.

Fayetteville, Georgia, residents, noticed their water pressure was low. It turned out that a data center had stolen 30 million gallons of water via two hookups, paying for neither.

All life on earth emerged from a single common ancestor, about 4 billion years ago. A new study posits that it was about 200 million years before previously thought, while also revealing some new info on what that first prokaryote was like.

The AI craze has led to “RAMageddon,” an impending shortage of random access memory chips for all kinds of devices that will likely lead to price increases in the second half of this year.

Trump’s FDA blocked publication of research showing that the COVID vaccines and the shingles vaccine are both safe. There’s no public health benefit here – they’re just pandering to their anti-science base.

We’ve got anti-vaxxers, anti-seed oil loons, anti-sunscreen charlatans, and now self-styled “sleep experts” are telling parents to ignore the guidelines on preventing SIDS, giving them dangerous advice that is likely to lead to more infants suffocating in their cribs.

Video shows an ICE agent tasing a man multiple times in Bushwick, NYC, after which the Department of Homeland Security lied and said he wasn’t tased.

Fiddler Ashley Macisaac is suing Google after its AI search results wrongly tagged him as a sex offender. It’s only for $1.5 million, which I’m sure Google will settle as a rounding error.

Ravenous is a new worker-owned food journalism outlet founded by five people who had previously worked/published at Eater.

NPR’s Marketplace had a segment on the social media excitement over beans, particularly on “BeanTok.”

Why is Kristi Noem still living in taxpayer-subsidized military housing?

Rock Manor Games – whose owner is a neighbor of mine – has a new Kickstarter up for two games, The Lost Island and Secret Valley.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: artificial intelligence, environment, evolution, food writing, gambling, immigration, links, longreads, nutrition, religion, stick to baseball, the swamp, vaccines

→ May 2, 2026
→ By keith
→ 21 Comments

Stick to baseball, 5/2/26.

I had a weird lull over at The Athletic, as I didn’t really have games to hit or travel planned, so my scouting notebook from this week on Gerrit Cole, Franklin Arias, Ronny Cruz, and more was my first post in a couple of weeks. I’ll be back with at two pieces next week, including my first mock draft of 2026, tentatively scheduled to run on May 7^th.

Over at AV Club, I reviewed the game Catan on the Road, and then spoke to designer Josh Wood about his upcoming game Let’s Go! To France, the sequel to the delightful Let’s Go! To Japan. The site shuttered its games section on Friday, so my regular reviews and writing there are done. I loved writing about games, so I’m open to freelance board game writing opportunities elsewhere.

I’m on Bluesky more than anything else right now. I’ve also been posting longer videos to Instagram and TikTok, talking about players I see or reacting to news.

I also appeared on 92.3 The Fan in Cleveland to talk about Travis Bazzana, Chase Delauter, and other Guardians prospects/players.

I’ll work on another free email newsletter next.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: North Carolina cop Scott Collins shot and killed Brandon Webster, a Black man, in 2019, and claimed self-defense. The Marshall Project finally got the truth, which includes the state never even bothering to investigate Collins’ rendition of events.

What will it take to get rid of RFK Jr. as Secretary of “Health” and Human Services? Laura Weiss goes long on the topic for The New Republic, with quotes from Colette Delawalla, founder of Stand Up for Science and the subject of this profile. Meanwhile, Gregg Gonsalves writes in The Nation about “Vichy scientists” like Jay Bhattacharya who have chosen to collaborate with the anti-science Administration.

Streetsblog found that Staten Island cop James Giovansanti racked up 547 speeding tickets and hasn’t been disciplined once. The Times picked up the story on Thursday in a longer piece on a bill aimed at stopping these so-called “super-speeders.”

Residents of Roxbury, New Jersey, are fighting ICE’s efforts to build a concentration camp in their town.

Is Jimmy Fallon accelerating the death of culture? I guess the question really is whether he’s a cause or a symptom.

The President of Cornell ran his car over the foot of a protesting student and bumped another, then claimed they had attacked his car and blocked his exit. Student journalists at The Cornell Daily Sun obtained video of the incident and found that he made up that excuse.

The University of Iowa created the Orwellian-titled Center for Intellectual Freedom, which just creates the problem it claims it’s trying to solve.

A mother whose daughter died of SSPE, an incurable, fatal disorder caused by a past measles infection, wrote about the tragedy in The New York Times. The Times’ editorial board ran this editorial a few days later about how RFK Jr. and the Trump Republicans have created a terrifying new reality of preventable infectious diseases.

This Administration is going after all kinds of rights. The FTC is ramping up to go after gender-affirming care in the continuing war on trans people. Trump and RFK Jr. are threatening the availability of contraception.

The London Review of Books notes that the genocide in Gaza continues, and those who still live there face appalling conditions, with over 70,000 cases of rodent and ectoparasitic infestations just this year.

Israel continues to attack journalists in Gaza and now Lebanon, killing Lebanese journalist Amal Khalil and injuring her colleague last week in what appears to have been a deliberate act of murder – when the first airstrike didn’t kill her, they fired again.

I posted this in the last roundup but I’m re-upping here after the sanitizing biopic Michael made so much money last weekend: Tim Grierson writes about the now-unavailable documentary Leaving Neverland and how impossible it is to forget the clear accusations against Michael Jackson that documentary laid out.

Janet Mills’ withdrawal from the Maine Senate race makes Graham Platner the presumptive Democratic nominee. A Maine reporter and former classmate of Platner’s writes about his appeal.

Texas Tech, a public university, has issued a ban on any discussion of LGBTQ+ topics by professors or even by students in their work. The American Historical Association announced their opposition to the policy, which, in a normal world, would be thrown out as a clear violation of the First Amendment. In Inside Higher Ed, Prof. Ben Wright at the University of Texas-Dallas writes that people need to stop criticizing professors who stay at these schools to fight the crackdown.

It’s not a normal world, of course, as six judicial activists on the Supreme Court sounded the death knell for American democracy, writes Moira Donegan in The Guardian.

Louisiana Republicans aren’t just trying to gerrymander Black citizens out of their franchise – they’re also trying to eliminate an elected position so a Black man can’t take office.

In more free-speech-for-me-not-for-thee news, Utah Valley (corrected) caved to a right-wing political campaign that included Senator Mike Lee (R, of course) to disinvite speaker Sharon McMahon … over McMahon quoting Charlie Kirk’s own words after his death.

New gas-powered data centers could dump more climate-warming gases into the air than entire nations.

The Verge looked at how tech bros have lost touch with what people actually want.

The U.S. government is running fake-news sites in Arabic and Farsi to push pro-American views in the Middle East.

I missed this from last fall, but Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC), currently running for Governor of South Carolina, tweeted at a Jewish Congresswoman “I have a good surgeon if you ever want to get your nose done.”

Republicans in Indiana have succeeded again in making it harder for college students to vote.

We love Quince in this house, for their cashmere sweaters (my god they are warm) and many other things. Bloomberg looked at why they’ve been so successful.

A reader passed along this Times story on the hot resale market for La Marzocco espresso machines.

A tiny bit of good news: Over 400 new independent bookstores opened in the U.S. in 2025, an increase of 31% from 2024.

Mixed-use complexes are the hot new(ish) stadium funding scam that built the Battery in not-Atlanta. The Rays’ new owner is trying to run the same playbook, but economist J.C. Bradbury writes that Cobb County hasn’t seen the promised benefits.

I had no idea that English used to have pronouns to refer to exactly two people, whether it was in the sense of us, you, or them.

Allplay has a new Kickstarter up for River Valley Jewelcraft, a ‘spiritual sequel’ to River Valley Glassworks and Things in Rings.

I’ve never played Kohaku, but there’s a Kickstarter up for a reprint and new expansion.
MENSA does some annual board game awards that are probably the only thing MENSA does that’s worth noting; you can see this year’s winners here over on Board Game Wire.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-science, bookstores, climate change, coffee, Economics, free speech, gaza, immigration, indiana, links, longreads, louisiana, measles, new york city, police, scotus, south carolina, stick to baseball, texas, trans rights, utah, vaccines, women's rights

→ April 4, 2026
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/4/26.

I’ve been traveling like mad lately; this is the first weekend I’ve been home both Friday and Saturday nights since the Super Bowl. That’s put a damper on any posting here, and of course makes me a little anxious about getting started again because doing so seems overwhelming. Some of the links below are as much as a month old.

Here are some of my most recent posts at the Athletic: I interviewed Bill White on his career and the announcement that he’s the latest Buck O’Neil Award recipient; I wrote up a draft scouting notebook on a bunch of mostly high school players I saw in mid- to late March, as well as USC lefty Mason Edwards; I did my annual predictions posts, including the full standings and the player awards; and I wrote up what I saw at the Arizona Breakout Games, including Brewers-A’s, White Sox-Dodgers (with 27 walks), Mariners-Brewers, Reds-Giants, and Guardians-Angels (plus some Rockies back fields notes). The record-setting heat in Arizona pushed some game times around, so I ended up seeing one fewer game than expected, missing Padres-Cubs from my original plan. I appeared on The Athletic Show to kick off the MLB season.

At AV Club, I reviewed the worker-placement game Skara Brae (no relation to The Bard’s Tale series); the polyomino tile placement game Wispwood; and the light set-collection game Sanibel, from the designer of Wingspan.

My newsletter is next up on my to-do list, followed by a new music playlist.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: You probably saw McKay Coppins’ piece in The Atlantic (not my employer) on his year as a ‘degenerate’ gambler, where the magazine gave him $10,000 to bet on sports and write a story about it. He’s a Mormon and even sort-of-kind-of got permission from one of their leaders. My one quibble with the piece, which is very good, is that it’s very different when it’s not your money.
A writer for the Times of Israel wrote about how gamblers on Polymarket were sending him death threats if he didn’t change the facts in a story he published on an Iranian missile strike.
Marco Rubio’s college chum and longtime associate David Rivera, a former Congressman himself, is now on trial for lobbying for Nicholas Maduro’s Venezuelan government. Rubio testified last week against his “former” friend.
The Guardian spoke to Iranians after the US bombed oil depots, filling the air there with toxic fumes and blotting out the sun in the middle of the day.
A Project 2025 offshoot laid out plans for Trump to use the U.S. military on our own soil to create a new, shadow law-enforcement regime reporting directly to the lawless president.
WIRED has the story of two crypto bros hatched a scheme to allow people to buy shares of homes, but then left the houses they bought to fall apart, leading to a lawsuit from the city of Detroit.
ProPublica explains how RFK Jr. and his fellow vaccine denialists are ushering in a new era of (preventable) plagues. Many, many children are going to die horrible deaths because of that man, and by extension because of Trump. And our hospitals aren’t ready for even the rising tide of measles cases, let alone, say, a diphtheria epidemic.
The Frontier, in a joint effort with ProPublica, exposes how Oklahoma regulators found hundreds of oil wells that were violating state laws on disposing of the toxic byproducts of drilling – and then they did absolutely nothing about it. Oklahoma might be the worst state to live in right now, given what they’re doing to the environment, their educational system, and the rights of anyone who’s not a white Christian man.
I stay off Twitter except to post links, but when I was still somewhat active there, one of the most prominent and vile anti-vaxxers and misinformation purveyors was William Makis, a former doctor in Canada who has been accused of sexual harassment, animal abuse, threatening co-workers, and … well, you can see for yourself. He’s currently making over a half a million dollars a year via his Substack, selling bogus cancer treatments to desperate people, and is currently under a civil contempt order in Canada for providing medications like ivermectin and fenbendazole, both of which are primarily for animal use and do not treat cancer, without a license.
The Administration blamed AI for the fact that we bombed a school in Iran, but the truth is that this was the outcome of years of human decisions, including the choice to move targeting decisions from a team of experts to a handful of humans using software the working of which they didn’t understand.
A Texas librarian writes about her fight against the book-banning lunatics of Moms for Liberty.
A rare feel-good story around these parts: A woman who was abandoned as an infant in a parking lot in the Cleveland area reunited with the two women who found her.
Guards at the largest ICE concentration camp took bets on which prisoner would be the next to commit suicide.
And a measles outbreak at an ICE concentration camp in Texas has now spilled over into the surrounding community.
An NIH whistleblower wrote in STAT News that scientists need to step up their activism, not reduce it.
Grammarly added a “feature” that used the names and identities of living writers, including several writers at The Verge, to provide AI-generated advice to users – but without those writers’ permission. Grammarly removed the feature pretty quickly, and their CEO ended up talking to The Verge about the whole thing, somewhat combatively.
More in “AI sucks” news: Police in North Dakota used an AI facial recognition app to arrest a woman from Tennessee and put her in jail for five months even though she had never set foot in North Dakota or committed the crimes of which she was accused. She had to prove she’d been elsewhere at the time – the onus was on her, not the garbage AI app, not the police department that used it.
Even more “AI sucks” news: AI-driven lawsuits are clogging up the courts, especially suits where people represent themselves and use LLMs to write their legal arguments.
The final “AI sucks” story of this week is actually a longread: The Guardian talks to several people who ruined their lives – marriages, careers, finances – because they started talking to an AI chatbot and became deluded that it was real.
Several Republican members of Congress have made virulent anti-Muslim comments, including Randy Fine (FL, where else) and Andy Ogles (TN), but Mike Johnson couldn’t even bring himself to condemn the statements. Absolute moral bankruptcy, to say nothing of his vacuous Christianity.
Speaking of fake Christians, Pete Hegseth’s pastor – his fucking pastor – said he wants Texas state Rep. James Talarico to die. I may not be a Christian any more, but I grew up one, and I’ve read that book. This ain’t in it.
Trump pardoned a man now sentenced to prison for an “enormous child pornography collection.” Daniel Tocci was a January 6^th insurrectionist, pardoned by Trump, and now heading back to jail on the CSAM charges.
Covered up by the U.S. war on Iran and other conflicts is the increase in Israeli colonizer violence against Palestinians in the West Bank.
Israel passed a law mandating the death penalty for people convicted of lethal acts of terrorism … oh, no, it only applies to Palestinians. What is the word for a legal system that has different laws for different ethnic groups?
WIRED also has a story from a Gaza hospital, Al-Shifa, where doctors are still begging and smuggling in medical supplies while trying to treat old and new victims of Israel’s war.
Cheaper, easier-to-use solar panels are coming soon, so of course U.S. utility companies are fighting to delay laws making this possible.
A Belgian diplomat may go on trial for his role in the U.S.-backed assassination of Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba. The Democratic Republic of the Congo has been plagued by instability, dictatorships, and both civil and regional wars since the death of its only truly freely elected leader.
ICE dumped a blind Rohingya refugee on the streets of Buffalo without contacting his family or his lawyer. He later froze to death, and the county has ruled it a homicide.
Both Politico (unsurprising) and the NY Times laundered misinformation from a right-wing fake-news site called the Midwesterner. This type of outlet is often called ‘pink slime,’ and it’s been around at least since 2020, with websites that look and sound like legitimate newspapers but are in fact astroturfed and nearly always far-right ops.
InfoWars, the conspiracy-spouting site owned by Alex Jones, is shutting down, but its legacy won’t die until Trump and his movement are finished.
Buried by (waves hands frantically) everything is the news of a woman from South Carolina who accused Trump of sexually assaulting her in 1984. The Post and Courier looked at public records to verify some aspects of her story, although none relating to the specific claim about the president.
Also forgotten already is that claim that there’s a ranch in New Mexico where Epstein and his allies buried the bodies of two sex-trafficking victims.
A trans man in Idaho wrote about how the state’s new law banning trans people from using the correct bathrooms forces him to choose between the threat of jail or the threat of violence.
Meanwhile, the IOS just caved to the trans panic with a new rule that isn’t based in sound science and will unfairly target intersex people too.
A federal judge in Texas ruled that nine protestors who were demonstrating outside an ICE facility were guilty of “providing material support for terrorism” – even though they did nothing but protest.
Activists with the group Dare to Struggle say that L.A. police broke a teenaged protestor’s shin during the No Kings protests last weekend.
You’ll find a god in every golden oyster … except that these golden oyster mushrooms are crowding out native species in North American forests.
Mathematicians may have partially answered a 2000-year-old question about how many rational points a single curve can contain, as a new preprint puts an upper limit on the number of these points, where both x and y are rational numbers, that any curve can have.
The crowdfunding effort for the two-player game The Glasgow Train Robbery has just a few days left. It’s a cooperative game, and one of the two designers was a co-designer of the amazing Lacrimosa, along with two games currently on my shelf of shame (The Battle of Versailles, Take a Seat).
Awaken Realms is putting out a new special edition of Concordia, a top 50 all-time game for me and on BGG, but after early images showing AI art led to review-bombing on that site, the publisher announced they won’t use AI art in the final product.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: artificial intelligence, board game news, christianity, crypto, environment, frauds, gambling, gaza, immigration, iran, israel, links, longreads, mathematics, scams, social media, stick to baseball, texas, the swamp, vaccines

→ February 21, 2026
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 2/21/26.

I was on PTO from Wednesday to Wednesday, so I haven’t written anything new on the Athletic in nearly two weeks. I’ll begin draft content this upcoming week.

Over at AV Club, I reviewed two smaller games with surprising depth and complexity for their size in Oddland and Neko Syndicate.

I appeared on Sox Machine to talk about the White Sox’ farm system and a little more about Colson Montgomery.

I sent out another edition of my free email newsletter on Friday.

And now, the links…

ProPublica got a hold of letters written by children being held in one of ICE’s concentration camps. The camp’s Schutzstaffel responded by raiding the facility to destroy any further missives. Meanwhile, a group of pediatricians wrote about the harm that ICE detentions are already doing to children. Remember that when anyone tells you they’re concerned about, say, what bathroom a person uses because of “the children.”

The American Prospect’s Ryan Cooper explains why Democrats should defund ICE and CBP permanently. The Nation’s Andrea Ritchie says essentially the same thing.

ICE agents zip-tied a 14-year-old girl in Idaho in October during one of their ‘raids.’ She is a U.S. citizen, but that’s beside the point.

Futurism’s Maggie Harrison Dupré has been all over the harms propagated by the AI sector and the amoral actors pushing the technology. Her latest piece looks at how ChatGPT is fueling and encouraging stalkers, because these LLMs are nothing more than compliment machines – they tell you what you want to hear. Well, that, and plagiarism.

The Guardian exposes just how Substack profits from all the neo-Nazi content it hosts.

A new study published in Nature found that X/Twitter users who had the For You feed turned on saw their political views shift to the right, but turning it off did not move them back towards the left (or center).

The Heritage Foundation published a “roadmap” for the country that is really a playbook for a Christian nationalist future; Jessica Valenti exposes this under the headline “they’re coming for our daughters.” I can’t describe the Heritage Foundation’s worldview as anything other than sick. It is a diseased way of looking at women and humanity as a whole.

Israeli settlers shot and killed an American in the West Bank. No one will do anything about this.

The far-right elites in Texas are backing MAGA candidate Don Huffines for state comptroller as he promises to “DOGE Texas government.”

Meanwhile, the self-immolation of Texas’ public universities continues, as UT-Austin is consolidating four departments relating to Black, Latino, and women’s studies, a move that appears motivated by ideology; and all University of Texas schools now must limit discussion of “controversial topics” in the classroom. I wonder who decides what is “controversial.”

I am shocked, shocked to note that cryptocurrency is now being used to facilitate human trafficking.

A brainwashed mother in South Carolina whose unvaccinated son is hospitalized with complications from the measles told The Independent that she still wouldn’t vaccinate him. There is no risk from vaccines even close to what that poor kid has already suffered, and what he’ll suffer in the future if he survives.

The FDA’s site removed pages that exposed fake autism treatments like MMO (bleach) and raw camel milk.

However, the FDA’s thoroughly unqualified leader Vinay Prasad reversed course and will now review Moderna’s mRNA-based flu vaccine. I wonder what pushback got to him; I suspect it wasn’t the public outcry, but the business one.

Why is Prasad unqualified? Well, for one thing, he’s already facing sexual harassment accusations, and is making us taxpayers pay over $65,000 a year for him to commute from California to DC. And he’s only been on the job for 9 months.

Oklahoma’s radical Gov. J. Kevin Stitt (R) says he will eliminate tenure at most public colleges in his state, a great move for a state widely ranked in the bottom five for education.

Also in Oklahoma, a man speaking out at Claremore City Council meeting against the construction of a new data center was arrested – not stopped, but fucking arrested – for going a few seconds over his allotted time.

There’s some real evidence that Putin murdered dissident Alexei Navalny … and it barely made a dent in the news this week.

The Lemoneads’ Evan Dando is a creep.

Rep. Randy Fine (R-FL) has taken up MTG’s mantle as the most overtly racist member of Congress; he has a challenger this fall in Democrat Jennifer Jenkins, who has a history of calling out Fine’s bigoted language and rhetoric. I knew Fine in college; I thought he was pretentious, but if he held these views back then I didn’t know it.

Harvard took a $350 million gift from Gerald Chan, the second-largest in the university’s history, and then named their school of public health after his father. Chan had a close relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. Harvard physics professor Lisa Randall is also all over the Epstein files. I’ve seen some comments that mere association with Epstein, especially for scientists (given his interest in patronizing scientific research), shouldn’t be a capital offense; I might be sympathetic to that perspective if any of these assholes owned up to schmoozing with the convicted sex offender before their names appeared.

At Salon, Andi Zeisler writes that academics who communicated and fraternized with Epstein may not be criminals, but they did so in pursuit of a shared vision of a world where only certain people (men, mostly) were worthy of attaining knowledge and the status that comes with it.

The same folks who were all about “free speech” and talking about opposing cancel culture have been dead silent as the Trump Administration attempts to quell free speech by demanding that social media platforms reveal the identities of users who criticized ICE. Maybe it wasn’t actually about free speech after all.

Defector’s Patrick Redford wrote how Eileen Gu will never be the ‘traitor’ that J.D. Vance and other nationalist nitwits are calling her.

Astronomers might have seen a star in the Andromeda Galaxy become a black hole.

The delightful folks at Flatout Games have a new Kickstarter up for two smaller games, Forage and Honeypot.

Two minor scandals in the gaming world from the last two weeks: Dice Tower contributor Sam Healey resigned from the site – claiming God told him to step away or some other non-apology nonsense – after he said that Alex Pretti and Renée Good were to blame for being murdered; and Alderac (AEG) COO Ryan Dancey, who has left a trail of messes and controversies behind him in his three decades in the industry, was forced out by CEO John Zinser after Dancey posted a pro-AI and very anti-designers rant on LinkedIn. Hey, I guess something good did come out of that site!

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: ai, astronomy, board game news, christian nationalism, education, florida, harvard, immigration, israel, links, longreads, measles, oklahoma, russia, social media, stick to baseball, texas, vaccines

→ January 10, 2026
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 1/10/26.

I had one story this week for subscribers to the Athletic, breaking down the Cubs’ trade for Edward Cabrera. I’m spending most of my time right now working on the annual prospect rankings, which are tentatively slated to run starting January 26^th with the top 100.

At AV Club, I reviewed the flip-and-write game Ra and Write, which borrows the theme from the auction game Ra but doesn’t have many similarities beyond that; and Propolis, a bee-themed engine-builder in a small box.

I’m trying to squeeze in another edition of my free email newsletter this weekend before the heavy phone work resumes on Monday. We’ll see how that works out for me.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: WIRED has the story of how a down-on-his-luck private detective named Brad Dennis helped find “Torswats,” a teenager who made well over 300 swatting calls to schools, universities, and other targets, when the FBI appeared not to take the case very seriously at all. The culprit, Alan Filion, is awaiting sentencing after pleading guilty to four charges, while it appears that the case has sent Dennis in the wrong direction. (Unrelated, but the swatter Dennis knew in the early 2000s who ended up targeting him eventually was charged and convicted, then died quite young in 2023.)

The New York Times investigates how a teenager died while working at the Nebraska pork production factory Pillen Family Farms, founded by now Gov. Jim Pillen (R), while two years have produced no charges or even explanations for the minor’s family. Maybe Morrissey was right: meat is murder.

In the National Catholic Reporter, John Grosso calls out JD Vance’s gross misuse of both his platform and his soi-disant Catholic faith to blame murder victim Renee Good for her own killing, referring to Vance’s actions as a “a moral stain on the collective witness of our Catholic faith.” I’m secular now, but grew up Catholic and certainly understand the tenets of that religion enough to say ‘hell yeah.’

Ben Lorber at Religion Dispatches points out that Elon Musk openly endorsed a white nationalist position and nobody has said a thing about it.

The notoriously left-wing Wall Street Journal reveals how lobbyists are charging $1 million to secure a pardon from President Trump.

WIRED explains what the “quantum apocalypse,” where existing cryptographic methods would become obsolete almost overnight, might mean for our society and the global economy.

The #3 official at the Interior Department didn’t disclose that her husband held a multi-million dollar water rights contract with a lithium mine that her department approved. That story ran a week ago, and there’s been absolutely nothing since then – I don’t see a single member of Congress so much as calling for an investigation.

An Ohio teenager died from the flu despite being otherwise healthy, because the flu can kill a healthy person. Get vaccinated.

An unvaccinated person with the measles visited the Ark Encounter fiction park in Kentucky, which, well, a person who doesn’t believe in science visited an entire theme park built around ignorance of science.

An NBC News investigation into 31 states that provide county-or other below state-level data found that 70% of jurisdictions have fallen below the herd immunity vaccination rate for pertussis, which is why whooping cough cases are now soaring in this stupid country.

Utah theocrats are pushing to end all gender-affirming care for minors despite a report from the state’s Health and Human Services Department finding positive outcomes from such treatment. Keep your nonsense religion out of my house, please.

Montana revoked the medical license of a quack doctor who diagnosed healthy patients with cancer and treated them with chemotherapy and opioids, killing at least one of them in the process. This came about due to investigative reports from ProPublica, which found that the state renewed Thomas Weiner’s medical license twice despite complaints about his conduct.

The Intercept calls on Democrats to fight back against the MAGA machine’s attempts to destroy trans people, which is straight out of the totalitarian playbook.

Kansas’ Governor Laura Kelly (D) has claimed the deal for a new NFL stadium that provides $4 billion in subsidies to the Chiefs will not cost anything in new taxes. Field of Schemes explains why that’s a lie.

The Guardian’s Andrew Lawrence wrote about how Sinners became the most culturally important film of 2025.

Here are 19 artists who pulled their music from Spotify in 2025.

The notoriously left-wing Financial Times walks us through the executives at “the deepfake porn site formerly known as Twitter.”

A former Times editor spoke about what she perceived as anti-trans bias coming from the top levels at the newspaper. The Times responded, although the paper’s response does not provide evidence to counter the former employee’s claims.

The city of Wilmington announced a plan to have a local nonprofit manage an encampment for homeless people within the city. Mayor John Carney, formerly the Governor of Delaware, had campaigned on making housing and combating homelessness a priority, but this is the first move forward on that front after his decision in October to ban other encampments and step up enforcement against people with nowhere else to go.

Denny Carter writes at his Bad Faith Times how popularism has failed miserably in the UK and Democrats need to give up that strategy entirely.

A new study found that playing tabletop and/or role-playing games provides social, educational, and therapeutic benefits, especially for neurodivergent players.

Rock Manor Games has a Kickstarter up for the latest expansion to the Set a Watch series.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: 2025 in music, anti-science, board game news, delaware, kansas, labor rights, links, longreads, religion, social media, stadium scams, stick to baseball, the swamp, trans rights, utah, vaccines

→ December 6, 2025
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 12/6/25.

For subscribers to the Athletic, I wrote my analyses of the Sonny Gray trade; the Dylan Cease signing (featuring a massive temper tantrum by Jays fans in the comments); the Cody Ponce & Devin Williams signings; and the Jhostynxon Garcia-Johan Oviedo trade.

At AV Club, I reviewed the game White Castle Duel and wrote up my weekend at the PAX Unplugged board game convention here in Philly.

I sent out a new edition of my free email newsletter last weekend, right after the holiday.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: ProPublica has the story of another woman killed by Texas Republicans and their anti-abortion crusade. Just worth noting that the unholy marriage between Christians and the anti-abortion movement is an entirely modern creation, not supported by the Bible or the previous 1700 or so years of Christian thought.

Bill McKibben, an environmental activist and lifelong Methodist, writes in the Guardian of how Trump and his allies are doing to America what they did to Christianity – subverting their meanings and destroying them from the inside.

Dr. Atul Gawande, author of The Checklist Manifesto and a professor at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, says that the ending of USAID funding has already killed hundreds of thousands worldwide.

Princeton Prof. Robert P. George, a highly influential conservative philosopher and legal scholar who was in the news recently for his resignation from the board of the Heritage Foundation, spoke to The Chronicle of Higher Education about the state of academic thought and the growing ‘illiberalism’ on the far right.

Also in ProPublica, a Minnesota pediatrician who challenged the methods of the director of the child abuse team at the state’s primary children’s hospital says he was sacked for speaking out. The director in question, Dr. Nancy Harper, appears to still use debunked ideas like “shaken-baby syndrome” and thus overdiagnoses child abuse, separating children from families without sufficient cause.

Twitter turned on location identification for its accounts, and shocker of shockers, a huge number of self-proclaimed MAGA accounts are based in Pakistan or Morocco or elsewhere outside the U.S.

Prof. Jack Goldsmith, a conservative scholar at Harvard Law School who authored the memos authorizing the Bush Administration’s use of warrantless wiretaps in 2004, writes that the U.S. strikes on boats in the Atlantic are murder even if you assume all of the government’s claims are true.

I won’t link to too much about the Olivia Nuzzi scandal, given how much attention it’s received and the fact that Vanity Fair finally undid its mistake in hiring her (although whoever approved that hiring needs to be held accountable for the decision), other than this New Republic piece on the public-health cost of Nuzzi’s utter lack of ethics.

Speaking of which, Kentucky has reported its third infant death in the last year from pertussis, a vaccine-preventable disease; all three infants were unvaccinated, as were their mothers.

Michael Scherer writes about the delusions of RFK Jr., who is dismantling public health in the face of all available evidence and massive pushback from the scientific community.

Dr. Rachael Bedard writes in the Times about her experiences attending an anti-vaccine conference and why these grifters and liars are so easily able to capture people’s minds.

Scientific American has a somewhat related story about how AI chatbots could sway voters’ opinions even when the bots were fabricating ‘facts.’

Drew Magary writes that it is time to declare war on AI, and I couldn’t agree more.

Government bans on the use of puberty blockers for trans teens set a dangerous precedent for further intrusion into individual health-care decisions.

Concerned Republican Senator Susan Collins (ME) is backing a referendum to overturn Maine’s protections for trans students. National media members need to stop calling her a “centrist.” She is as extremist as the rest of the party.

Drain the swamp! Trump commuted the sentence of David Gentile, who had served just two weeks to date for his role in defrauding investors of $1.6 billion through his private equity funds. The corruption is coming from inside the White House.

Tennessee libraries have begun shutting down to purge books that Republican theocrats wish to ban because they contain LGBTQ+ characters or themes.

I’m absolutely stunned that a Turning Point staffer and Arizona city councilwoman has been accused of sexually harassing another TP employee – and kidnapping his daughter when he rebuffed her. People that obsessed with others’ sex and sexuality are telling you something about themselves.

The government of the Caucasus nation of Georgia sprayed anti-government protestors with bromobenzyl cyanide, a toxic form of tear gas introduced by the Allied Powers during World War I, according to a report from the BBC.

Disgraced New York City Mayor Eric Adams signed an order that would ban any city agency heads or staff from doing pretty much anything in line with the BDS movement against the government of Israel, just a month before the door hits him on his way out of Gracie Manson in four weeks. Incoming Mayor Zohran Mamdani could undo this with a similar order, but of course there will be an outcry calling this antisemitism if he does.

Europe’s water reserves, especially those in southern Europe, are drying up due to climate change, while Tehran is approaching day-zero for water.

There’s a new Kickstarter from Spanish publisher Salt & Pepper Games, publishers of the solo game Resist!, for Queen of Spies, another solitaire game, set this time set during World War I.

Mike Drucker’s parody of Isaac Chotiner interviewing Santa Claus is note-perfect.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: abortion, academia, arizona, artificial intelligence, board game news, book banning, climate change, journalism, kentucky, links, longreads, maine, minnesota, new york city, religion, science, social media, stick to baseball, texas, the swamp, vaccines

→ November 15, 2025
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 11/15/25.

Nothing new from me at the Athletic this week as I wait for a trade or signing to write up. I did hold a Klawchat on Thursday here on the dish.

At Endless Mode, I reviewed Vantage, the new open-world cooperative game from designer Jamey Stegmaier (Tapestry, Scythe); it’s like the old Choose Your Own Adventure books converted to the tabletop, but despite incredible art and a massive amount of content in the box, I found it frustrating to try to play.

I sent out a new edition of my free email newsletter this week, finally. I’ve gotten a bit stuck with one or two of the ideas I’ve had for newsletters and I think that held me back from writing one.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: A group of New York-based investors used a loan program designed to help revitalize disused properties in Baltimore to borrow over $100 million to buy properties, and then default on the loans, screwing over lenders, tenants, and the Baltimore housing market in general.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent used a tax dodge to avoid paying over $900,000 in taxes from 2021-23. He now oversees the IRS.

Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem steered a $220 million contract to a firm to which she is closely tied, skipping the competitive bidding process by claiming there’s an “emergency” at the border with Mexico.

I don’t understand why this has received so little attention, but the Senate passed a bill that would wipe out the U.S. cannabis industry, which will do significant economic harm to a nascent industry and to the states that have benefited from taxing an activity that is just going to move underground anyway.

KFF Health News looks at the destruction wrought by Russ Vought, the architect of Project 2025, on our public health infrastructure. Holding these people accountable if and when they ever lose power is going to be crucial to preventing a recurrence.

Canada culled a flock of ostriches where at least some were infected with the H5N1 avian flu, despite some ridiculous interference and protests from anti-vax nut jobs. The ostrich farmers in question tried to hide the infections and didn’t follow requirements for basic biosafety.

Meanwhile, two longtime anti-vax grifters are now overseeing the FDA’s vaccine regulation program.

The unionized writers at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette have been on strike for over three years now, but finally got their day in court and won a ruling that covers management’s violations back to 2020.

Child rapist and cult leader Warren Jeffs went to prison over a decade ago, but the harm he inflicted on his community continues, as measles has swept through Colorado City because he preached that vaccines were part of a government plot to make people infertile.

The resident of a home in Whitestown, Indiana, shot and killed a cleaning woman who went to the wrong house. Police have yet to name the shooter, who could (should!) face criminal charges.

A corrupt police chief in Marion County, Kansas, abused his power to raid the offices of a tiny local newspaper there in 2023 to prevent the Marion County Record from publishing a story about a local restaurant owner who may have lied on her liquor license application. This week, the county agreed to pay $3 million to the paper’s publisher and several of the journalists. The chief, who later resigned, is still facing criminal charges.

The husband of Michigan Secretary of State and gubernatorial candidate Jocelyn Benson (D) is the VP of development for a company planning to build a massive data center in the state over objections from the local community. At best, it’s a huge conflict of interest.

This is how you write a fair and honest obituary: James Watson “co-discovered DNA’s structure but later engaged in rank racism and sexism.” We do not have to paper over the misdeeds of the deceased to comply with some dated sense of decorum. Watson was part of one of the most significant discoveries of the 20^th century. He was also a racist asshole.

A 13-year-old girl in Louisiana was expelled (and later reinstated on probation) for hitting a classmate who made and distributed a deepfake porn image of her. Her parents notified the school, which appears to have taken no action against the boy.

This LitHub piece is well worth reading if only for how it explains why the phrase “Critics say” should not appear in serious journalism. You need to name those critics and show what they’re saying and why it might be valid.

Alex Berenson, dubbed “the pandemic’s wrongest man” for his consistently incorrect predictions about first the spread of the virus and then the effectiveness and safety of the vaccines against it, lost his lawsuit claiming the federal government “censored” him when Twitter nuked his account in 2021. He’s still making bank from his Substack newsletter, though.

A student from Colorado Academy applied early decision to Tulane and was accepted, but later backed out. The university then punished the entire school with a one-year ban on early-decision applications.

Chile named its Miss World winner this past week, which is newsworthy because Ignacia Fernández is also a death-metal vocalist for the band Decessus and even gave a performance as such in the finals. There are very few female vocalists in that particular subgenre; I could only name two without searching, Arch Enemy (Alissa White-Gluz) and the defunct Nuclear Death (Lori Bravo).

The Climate-Colored Goggles newsletter writes about the Dodgers’ partnership with Phillips 66, a fossil-fuel company driving the same climate change that’s feeding the devastating wildfires that hit California just about every year.

Mystic Lands, the sequel/update to the card-crafting game Mystic Vale, has six days left on its successful Kickstarter (although I am surprised it hasn’t raised more money given the original’s popularity).

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-science, baltimore, board game news, cannabis, cults, death metal, first amendment, frauds, guns, kansas, links, longreads, louisiana, michigan, science, stick to baseball, the swamp, unions, vaccines

→ November 1, 2025
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 11/1/25.

My ranking of the top 50 free agents this offseason will run on Monday over at the Athletic, and I’ll do a Q&A that day or the day after, depending on my schedule.

Over at Endless Mode, I reviewed the new two-player game Leaders, which is pretty meh in his basic mode but really shines in expert mode, where players get to draft the character tokens they’ll use in the game versus the semi-random setup in the original.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: ProPublica goes deep on the delusional born-again Christian in charge of the North Carolina Supreme Court.

The best piece I’ve read this week, and one of the best all year, is this New York Times investigative report on the underpowered fight against sex trafficking on Figueroa Street in Los Angeles. It’s a very humanist look at the real victims here, the trafficked girls, and how they end up coerced into sex work.

Suriname has long been a carbon-negative country, as the nation’s share of the Amazon rain forest absorbs more carbon dioxide than the poor population of the country can produce. That may change as the country pursues an offshore oil-drilling initiative, claiming they’ll use the funds to build a sustainable green economy.

Salon’s Amanda Marcotte explores how the far-right group the Proud Boys invented antifa.

Radley Balko explores how false accusations of child molestation destroyed a preschool teacher’s life, even after they were ruled unfounded. Jordan Silverman ended up losing custody of his sons and saw his health and career wrecked by the allegations and vindictive parents who wouldn’t accept the official ruling.

The Intercept reports on a Tennessee man who was jailed for posting memes mocking murdered right-wing demagogue Charlie Kirk. The great Phil Williams of News Channel 5 interviewed the sheriff involved, who did not acquit himself well and seems unaware of what the Constitution says.

Videos circulating online appear to show mass executions in Sudan’s Darfur region after the Rapid Support Forces, a breakaway faction of the country’s military, took control. Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab estimates that the RSF killed 10,000 people in three days.

The BBC looks at the probably stolen election in Cameroon, where dictator Paul Biya, who has ruled the African nation for 43 years, claimed victory and a new term that will run until he’s 99 years old. An opposition leader who also claimed victory has led the country, and there have been protests for at least the last three days.

The lab-leak conspiracy theory was already dead, but here’s another nail for its coffin: Scientists found another Covid virus in Brazilian bats, proving that the mutation that allowed SARS-CoV-2 to infect humans is a natural phenomenon.

The Guardian obtained a leaked document showing that Amazon sought to hide how much water its data centers use. Crypto, AI, they’re all disasters for the environment.

Get your flu shot.

Bacteria are evolving to become resistant to antibiotics faster than we’re developing the drugs.

Meanwhile, Florida is trying to kill its own citizens by ending all childhood vaccination mandates. It took less than a year for rollbacks in vaccination rates and mandates to lead to measles outbreaks. Florida is going to be the epicenter of outbreaks of multiple diseases within the next twelve months, and there’s no keeping them within the state’s borders.

I mentioned last week how Indiana University had shut down its student newspaper because the paper dared to print the news. Many alumni pulled their donations in response, and the school relented. You have the power to do something, somewhere.

Middlebury College student Lia Smith, a trans woman, was found dead last week after she committed suicide. Middlebury had kicked her off their swimming and diving team as they complied in advance with the Administration’s war on trans people.

A white man in Alabama planned attacks on multiple synagogues and possibly public figures, and then planned to commit suicide by cop, according to officials involved in his arrest this past week.

The Guardian also has the details on a maybe-new scam where moped riders bump a potential mark’s car and then demand to see the victim’s driver’s license and/or insurance documents so they can open up new insurance policies in the victim’s name and submit bogus claims. I say “maybe-new” because this sounds like a twist on several other scams involving staged accidents.

John Roberts’ legacy as Chief Justice may be determined by one ruling he made in 2024 – and it’s probably not the legacy he thinks he’ll leave.

Board game news: The Kickstarter for Cascadia: Alpine Lakes, a standalone follow-up to the Spiel-winning Cascadia, is already over $200K and has a month to go.

The Kickstarter for Wonderland’s War Duel, a two-player version of the acclaimed (and very hard to find) 2022 game Wonderland’s War, has just five days left.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: africa, anti-science, board game news, coronavirus, environment, first amendment, health, indiana, links, longreads, north carolina, scams, scotus, stick to baseball, tennessee, trans rights, vaccines

→ October 25, 2025
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 10/25/25.

I ended up unable to do a links post last weekend because I was out scouting the Arizona Fall League (which also prevented me from doing something else on Saturday morning), so we’re back now and at least I can post my AFL wrap-ups. I broke them up into one post on the notable pitchers and another on the notable hitters I saw in the eleven games I attended, but of course I couldn’t see everyone.

Over at Endless Mode, I reviewed the games Twinkle Twinkle, a solid family-level tile-laying game; and Duel for Cardia, an excellent two-player capture-the-flag game that gets a lot of mileage out of its two 16-card decks.

I sent out another issue of my free email newsletter about two weeks ago, so I’m due for another one now that I’ve written some more stuff.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: You’ve probably seen the Politico story on the incredibly racist, anti-Semitic, and generally hateful group chat featuring a bunch of adult Republicans, including a state Senator from Vermont who’s since resigned.

Charlie Warzel writes in The Atlantic (not my employer) about how AI slop is taking over the internet, stifling or threatening to stifle real creativity. He’s casting about a little for an analogy; it’s just Cory Doctorow’s enshittification write large. (Link is free to read.)

Mother Jones exposes the hacking software company First Wap, whose products use SS7 to track phone users anywhere in the world, without requiring that they click on a malicious link or otherwise put some sort of tracking app on their phones.

ProPublica found that ICE has held at least 170 U.S. citizens against their will so far, in many cases physically abusing them, and I’m sure that’s an undercount. The site also reported that Kristi Noem took campaign donations from a dark-money group for her personal use.

The Athletic (my employer) has a story by Carson Kessler and Gabby Herzig about catfishing scams that convince men they’re talking to top women golfers, eventually conning them out of thousands of dollars and posing new safety risks to the athletes from men who think they have romantic relationships with them.

An Arizona wannabe influencer tried to extort a local bakery, JL Patisserie, for a collaboration fee, or at least a bunch of free food, in exchange for a favorable video. The bakery declined; the woman showed up anyway, and then posted a negative review that had some false claims in it, so the bakery posted a point-by-point response … and then all hell broke loose. I went there and got a chocolate-pistachio croissant for $8.50; it was probably the best croissant I’ve ever had, and I’ve been to France three times.

Starving children screaming in agony: the inevitable result of the Trump Administration’s devastation of the USAID program.

Sen. “Cancun” Ted Cruz is targeting Wikipedia, claiming the site – which has extensive rules on reliable & verifiable sourcing – has a “left-wing bias.” Well, if you’re saying facts have a left-wing bias…

Christian Pastors Gone Wild: A Utah youth pastor says young black men should be executed and cites the Bible in his arguments … a former South Carolina pastor was sentenced to 20 years in prison after authorities found over 5000 CSAM images on his phone … an Ohio pastor who said that being gay was a “health risk” and that gay literature made him “sick” has been arrested and charged with raping a 14-year-old girl. No trans people or drag queens were involved in any of these stories.

Indiana University fired its student newspaper’s advisor, then shut down the newspaper entirely because the students were publishing … news. Purdue students stepped up and distributed 3000 copies of their own paper, with the front-page headline “We Student Journalists Must Stand Together,” on IU’s campus.

The Guardian reported on the justified backlash against comics who took the Saudi dictators’ money to play the Riyadh comedy festival.

Former anti-vaxxers told Raw Story that they’re “horrified” by RFK Jr’s gutting of the American health system, including eroding Americans’ trust in vaccines (which are, again, highly safe and effective). Meanwhile, measles cases continue to rise across the U.S.

And hundreds of anti-science bills have hit state legislatures as evangelicals and ‘do-your-research’ loons try to make America die of preventable diseases again.

A viral story about an Olive Garden waitress who threw breadsticks at customers is fake … but uses the identity of a real person, with her picture, and it’s made her life needlessly difficult.

Texas police who said they used a network of license-plate cameras to try to track the safety of a woman who’d self-administered an abortion. Turns out, of course, they were actually trying to track her so they could charge her with murder.

Professor Lisa Moore, who heads the Department of Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at the University of Texas, writes that she doesn’t recognize the place where she’s worked and taught for 35 years.

Two Harvard professors wrote that the school must reject the Trump Administration’s so-called “compact” and take a public stand against it.

This is how you report on the President: “Clueless Donald Trump, 79, Humiliated After Dodging Legal Question.”

Did President Trump push Israel to accept a ceasefire to protect his own financial relationships with the Qatari emirate?

As Trump spends $130 million or more on the vanity-project ballroom at the White House – which he is not allowed to do without Congressional approval, not that they’ll stop him from doing anything – a typhoon destroyed villages and killed at least one person in Alaska.

Data centers make bad neighbors. If they’re trying to build one near you, speak out against it.

An El Paso family claims a Border Patrol agent shot and killed their dog during a search; the incident took place in September and ended up in the national news earlier this month, but I can’t find any more recent update.

Kevin Howley, a writer and media critic, writes about the harm of the “fact-free anarchy” that has taken over public discourse in the U.S. with the full complicity of the mainstream media.

Defector has a good laugh at the Free Press writer – I’m not calling them journalists, sorry – Olivia Reingold, who is complaining that most of her friends are shunning her after she wrote a story claiming that the Gazan babies who died of starvation were actually sick with other things, so it wasn’t that big of a tragedy. I need a quantum violin to play for her, because anything else would be too large.

The hosts of a left-wing podcast called out Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) for his votes for Trump appointees and generally clubby attitude towards the rise of authoritarianism.

Your brain adjusts to doing things you think are morally wrong, so that doing the same sort of thing again becomes easier and easier. The good news is you can go in the other direction by doing the right thing, and make it easier to be honest or brave or otherwise virtuous.

Raas: A Dance of Love is an upcoming board game from two Indian designers, now up on Gamefound; it’s the first game I’ve seen that uses an aspect of Indian culture and is also designed by people from the subcontinent.

Boardgamegeek has an entertaining designer diary from two of my favorites, the folks behind the new game The White Castle Duel, as well as the original The White Castle and The Red Cathedral.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: arizona, board game news, environment, frauds, indiana, links, longreads, neuroscience, religion, stick to baseball, texas, the swamp, vaccines

→ October 7, 2025
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 10/7/25.

Nothing new from me at the Athletic recently, although I’ll make up for that later this month. My latest review at Endless Mode looks at the new edition of the Reiner Knizia game Botswana, a family-level bidding game that has been published under a half-dozen names, including one edition by Milton Bradley in a traditional mass-market size under the name Quandary.

Now that this is up, I’ll work on another edition of my free email newsletter next. The next Stick to Baseball post will run on the 18th.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Billionaire Amy Griffin took psychedelics and “remembered” past sexual abuse by a grade-school teacher. She wrote a memoir about it … but no one can confirm any of the details, and she may have just ruined an innocent man’s life.

ProPublica detailed the 94 million pounds of food aid cancelled by the Trump Administration, hurting poor communities – including many in red states – and farmers as well. Meanwhile, PBS documents federal cuts to pediatric brain cancer research.

Jack Posobiec made himself famous by pushing the whole Pizzagate hoax, and continues to spread lies and misinformation on behalf of Republicans, now doing so as some sort of consultant on voter fraud. It turns out he’s been voting in Pennsylvania while living in Maryland.

The Huffington Post spoke to Leonard Peltier, who is now under home confinement after spending 47 years in prison for a crime he probably didn’t commit, about being slightly free and the threat Trump poses to indigenous Americans.
A New Jersey teenager stalked a girl who rejected him, even describing some of his actions on his Youtube channel, and after police did nothing, he drove his car at 70 mph at the girl and her friend while the two were on their bikes, killing them. Did police fail to react because his father’s a cop?

I wasn’t aware of “SIM farms” until the Secret Service announced they’d discovered a huge one in New York City; WIRED explains why they’re such a threat to our infrastructure.

Bluesky is dealing with its first real existential crisis, as noted anti-trans crusader Jesse Singal appears to have violated the site’s TOS, after which Bluesky execs … altered the TOS? TechCrunch and the blog Azhdarchid both delved into the controversy, including Bluesky CEO Jay Gruber throwing a tantrum on the site over it.

Writer Kaleb Horton died suddenly of a seizure in September, and shortly afterwards an AI-generated slop book supposedly about him appeared on Amazon.

There’s a new book-club scam targeting authors, asking them to pay to get their books before ‘clubs’ that have no actual members, just AI bots.

It’s gotten very little attention here in all the chaos, but the Trump Administration is bailing out Trump ally Javier Milei, whose mismanagement of Argentina’s economy and alleged corruption have put the country on the brink, a $20 billion deal that also happens to help billionaire hedge-fund manager Rob Citrone, a buddy of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.

Where does that money come from? Maybe the $18 billion in infrastructure projects for blue New York City Trump is trying to cancel.

Meta plans to open a data center in Louisiana that will require more energy than the entire city of New Orleans. It’s really well past time to tax these massive energy sinks for the externalities they’re generating.

South Carolina theocrats are trying to pass the nation’s most draconian abortion ban over opposition from doctors and medical experts. Abortion bans kill pregnant people. They are not ‘pro-life’ in any sense of the term.

A Christian church leader in Miami had fifty-seven slaves – excuse me, “forced laborers” – in her mansion when FBI agents raided it in August. Michelle Brannon and her partner David Taylor are also accused of running a money laundering scheme, while Taylor is accused of sexual harassment.

Ever wonder who’s really funding the anti-trans movement? Turns out a lot of the money comes from fossil-fuel companies, apparently using attacks on trans rights as an insidious way to install climate deniers in office.

The Daily Caller, a fake-news site influential with the current Administration, called for conservatives to commit acts of violence in response to the murder of Charlie Kirk.

Also underreported: Trump declared that people who are “anti-Christian” are terrorists.

Meanwhile, Trump supposedly answered questions from Jake Tapper over text message, despite a history of the President eschewing text or email. There’s no confirmation the person responding was actually Trump and it has led to new speculation about his declining health.

The Alabama owners of three small Alaska newspapers edited an article to remove reference to Charlie Kirk’s “racist and controversial views,” leading to the resignation of three of the writers – which left one of the papers without any journalists on staff.

A new documentary called The Alabama Solution shows the horrific conditions inside that state’s prison system, using smuggled smartphones to film and photograph the awful state of the facilities. It premieres Friday on HBO.

Six babies in Israel have died from measles-related complications since May and a seventh will have to have all four limbs amputated, thanks to the work of anti-vaccine lunatics who’ve brought the highly contagious virus back from the edge of eradication.

There’s a Kickstarter up for expansions to three games published by Cranio: Barrage, Golem, and the Rats of Wister, the last of which I hated when I played it.

And another for an expansion to Return to Dark Tower, along with a new printing of the sold-out base game.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: abortion, alaska, artificial intelligence, board game news, energy, frauds, links, longreads, new jersey, police, prison culture, scams, south carolina, stick to baseball, the swamp, vaccines

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