wyoming

Stick to baseball, 10/21/23.

My second Arizona Fall League notebook went up on Monday, covering everyone of note whom I hadn’t written up in the first one. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

I appeared on TSN 1050 in Toronto to talk about the League Championship Series and the Blue Jays, including prospect Ricky Tiedemann and the controversial decision to replace José Berrios with Yusie Kikuchi in what turned out to be their last playoff game.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., has profited by spreading lies and half-truths about vaccines for twenty years now. A book his group, Children’s Health Defense, and his publishing partner Skyhorse put out about the COVID-19 vaccines used the photo of a 12-year-old who died when a malformed blood vessel burst in his brain on its cover, claiming he’d died from the vaccine. He was unvaccinated, and of course they used his photo without his family’s permission. This Associated Press story talks to several families hurt by Kennedy’s lies and his so-called activism.
A Koch-funded right-wing site, Cowboy State Daily, is injecting climate denial and transphobic rhetoric into Wyoming politics, crowding out legitimate news sites that adhere to basic journalistic standards. It’s part of the national Metric Media network, which has over 1200 sites across the country and also takes funding from the Koch family’s DonorsTrust foundation.
Arizona continues to deny native tribes water rights they were promised under a 1908 treaty with the federal government. A third of homes on the Navajo reservation do not have access to clean water.
The Los Angeles Times’ Michael Hiltzik looks at how anti-vaxxers are exacting a personal and professional toll on scientists, and we’re losing the war against such disinformation. Dr. Peter Hotez notes within the story the death threats, doxing, and other intimidation tactics he’s seen as a vaccine developer and advocate for vaccination and science in general.
Meanwhile, a new study in BMJ estimates that 27 would-be mothers in the UK died during the pandemic because of confusion over the safety of COVID-19 vaccines during pregnancy.
The Minnesota Reformer has a story on how small businesses in Minneapolis are pressured to hire off-duty cops as “security” in what sure sounds like a protection racket to me.
Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen (R) owns a conglomerate of hog farms that are dumping huge amounts of nitrates into ground water in the state, but when a local journalist published an exposé in the Flat Water Free Press, Gov. Pillen attacked her personally by saying “the author is from Communist China. What more do you need to know?” I think I need to know when he’s going to clean up his hog farms, and I hope more journalists there put his pig’s feet to the fire.
Barbers Hill ISD in Texas suspended an 18-year-old Black student for wearing dreadlocks and is now forcing him to attend an alternative high school, despite the fact that Texas passed its own CROWN Act, prohibiting discrimination based on hairstyle, and the district already lost a lawsuit over the same issue in 2020. The district’s superintendent and deputy superintendent are both white, in case you were wondering.
Book-banning zealots in Iowa are having a field day by targeting any books with a ‘sex act,’ including numerous important works of literature like, ironically, the dystopian novels 1984 and Brave New World.
The federal government has begun distributing the $100 billion in funding for climate change mitigation projects under the Inflation Reduction Act, but it’s taking much longer than expected.
Trump, with the help of The Heritage Foundation, has a plan to gut the federal civil service and replace tens of thousands of employees with Trump sycophants in a return to the “spoils system” of the 1800s.
My friend Tim Grierson has a long, entertaining interview with Eddie Izzard on Cracked.com.
Scientific American looks at the “Sleeping Beauty problem” in probability, which has generated arguments like the Monty Hall problem and the question of that dress’s color.
A professor at UC-Davis tweeted a fairly overt threat against the lives of Jewish journalists, spurring an investigation by the university.
If ChatGPT can do much of the work in academic grant writing, does that tell us that the grant-writing process is broken?
Police in Newton, Iowa, have twice arrested a local resident for speaking out against the police at town meetings, so he’s suing them for violating his First Amendment (and other) rights.
The Azeri-Armenian conflict may move to Meghri, an Armenian town in a strip of land that separates Azerbaijan from its Nakhchivan exclave. Azerbaijan calls it the Zangezur corridor, and it borders Iran, which opposes any changes to the current structure, while Turkey and Russia appear to favor some alteration that would connect the two parts of Azerbaijan even at a reduction in Armenia’s sovereignty.
The Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland argues that Benjamin Netanyahu has walked into Hamas’s trap, and Israel needs to remove him from power before the situation gets even worse.
Twitter Blue subscribers have become “super-spreaders” of misinformation about the Israel-Palestine conflict according to a brief analysis from the independent group NewsGuard, which attempts to rate the reliability of news sites.
The New York Times’ Katherine Miller writes about the rambling, repetitive speeches of Donald Trump as he pounds his false claims that the 2020 election was rigged.
St. Louis County police appear to have ignored erratic, threatening behavior from one of their own in the days leading up to him firing shots in the air at a trunk-or-treat event and shouting “you’re all going to die!”
Deepfake porn videos are spreading too fast for the available tools, and far faster than any government is moving to stop them. Rep. Yvette Clarke (D-NY) did introduce a bill to ban deepfakes and step up enforcement, revising a similar bill she’d introduced in 2019, but it’s only at the committee stage and all sponsors are Democrats.
David Roth writes about how Michael Lewis was taken in by fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried, as Lewis’ reputation continues to take hits after his cringy response to Michael Oher’s lawsuit against the Tuohy family. (Oher appears to have no dispute with Lewis over the book The Blind Side.)
The Chicago man who stabbed a 6-year-old Palestinian boy 26 times, killing him, and stabbed the boy’s mother as well appears to have been radicalized by right-wing media. The spread of disinformation and hate has real consequences.
Board game news: The Kickstarter for the roll-and-write game Merchants of Magick is 3x funded and still up for six more days.
This year’s Essen Spiel convention was the largest ever, bringing nearly 200,000 people to the German city for the biggest board game con in the world.

Stick to baseball, 7/2/22.

For subscribers to the Athletic this week, I had a minor league scouting blog post on the Giants’ Kyle Harrison and several other Giants, Red Sox, and Pirates prospects. I’ll have another one on Monday on some Phillies, White Sox, and Orioles prospects. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

My guest this week on The Keith Law Show was Jason Kander, author of the new book Invisible Storm: A Soldier’s Memoir of Politics and PTSD. You can subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I’ve been holding off on sending out my free email newsletter because the bad news hasn’t stopped and I’m not really sure what to say at this point, but I’ll do it soon. Also, my two books, Smart Baseball and The Inside Game, are both available in paperback, and you can buy them at your local independent book store or at Bookshop.org.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: “It is unconscionable that politicians would label it as child abuse,” says Dr. Laura Edwards-Leeper about gender-affirming care for trans and nonbinary minors. The cover story in the latest issue of the American Psychological Association’s Monitor on Psychology looks at the importance of such care and the role that psychologists should play in it.
In the New Yorker, Andrew Marantz asks if Hungary under its tyrannical leader Viktor Orbán gives us an idea of what our authoritarian future might look like.
Also in the New Yorker, Jia Tolentino writes that we are not going back to pre-Roe, but to some place much worse.
After the SCOTUS ruling dismantling women’s reproductive rights came down, right-wing influencers spread rumors of impending violence from those angered by the ruling, including the supposed activist group Jane’s Revenge. The violence never occurred, and I still can’t find hard evidence Jane’s Revenge is an actual group.
Dana Milbank of the Washington Post writes of the Supreme Court’s “radicals” sowing maximum chaos with their inconsistent use of precedent and selective applications of history.
Adam Serwer of the Atlantic writes that the Constitution is whatever the right-wing says it is, regardless of the document’s text or judicial precedent, calling it “undead constitutionalism.”
Vox’s Ian Millhiser says Neil Gorsuch lied about the facts of the Kennedy v. Bremerton case to gift a victory to the religious right.
The New York Times’s Paul Krugman tweeted his disdain for the recent run of SCOTUS decisions.
CNN’s Jill Filipovic wrote that “the Republican Party has a rape problem” about the spate of abortion bans that don’t even try to make an exception for victims of rape or incest.
The arrest of Lizelle Herrera in Texas for having a miscarriage is far from unique and likely to become more common in the wake of the SCOTUS ruling.
Mexican abortion clinics are preparing for an influx of patients from the United States, especially with two border states trying to completely ban the medical procedure.
A ten-year-old girl in Ohio who was six weeks and three days pregnant had to travel to Indiana to get an abortion because Ohio banned the procedure for anyone, for any reason, after six weeks. I just want to restate that the pregnant person here was a ten-year-old girl.
A major Kansas City area health system has stopped providing Plan B contraception in its Missouri facilities after the state banned all abortions, even for victims of sexual assault.
Marcus Stroman was one of many MLB players to criticize the SCOTUS ruling overturning Roe v. Wade.
President Biden appears to have struck a deal with Sen. Mitch McConnell to put an anti-abortion judge on the federal bench in Kentucky
On the Athletic, Hockey Canada is losing sponsors after it came out that they covered up an incident where eight of their players sexually assaulted a woman, who sued the organization and signed an NDA when they settled.
Mental Floss writes of the 600-year history of the singular ‘they.’
Angeli Rose Gomez, the Uvalde mother who rushed into the elementary school to save her two boys during the massacre there, has been harassed by police and had to move out from her sons to protect them. She’s suing the department now.
Police in New Haven, Connecticut, put a Black man in handcuffs, threw him in a van without a seatbelt, and then made an abrupt stop while driving, which threw him within the van and made him a quadriplegic. He’s on a respirator, eating through a feeding tube, and is suing the department.
Two Virginia politicians, both Republicans, filed a lawsuit seeking to have a graphic memoir called Gender Queer declared obscene. The ACLU, PEN America, the Virginia Library Association, the Authors Guild, Barnes & Noble, and several other groups all signed a letter opposing the suit.
Alan Henry, author of the new book Seen, Heard, and Paid: The New Work Rules for the Marginalized, spoke to Objective Journalism about his career as a Black man in traditional journalism, including some negative experiences at the New York Times.
California is considering a bill that would give their state medical board more power to discipline doctors who spread medical misinformation, and of course anti-vaxxers are unhappy about it.
I regret to inform you that Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) is once again feuding with a Muppet.
This video of highlights from the Wyoming Republican House primary debate is … something.
The price of Turkey agreeing to admit Sweden and Finland into NATO is Turkey’s demand now that those two nations extradite 33 opponents of the Turkish regime, including members of the banned Kurdistan Workers’ Party and followers of an exiled cleric whom Turkey blames for a failed 2016 coup attempt.
The group Check My Ads is targeting Fox News’ advertisers as the network’s hosts have been downplaying the January 6^th insurrection.
It’s rare, but we have our first confirmed case of a human getting SARS-CoV-2 from a cat.
Board game news: NPR’s Throughline podcast does a deep dive on the history of Monopoly, from its disputed origins to its flawed depiction of the American dream. (Not discussed is why the game is actually terrible.)
Stonewall Uprising, a two-player game about the watershed moment in gay rights in the United States, is on Kickstarter and already almost 400% funded.
Stonemaier Games teased the next expansion, Asia, for Wingspan, although it won’t be available for several more months.

Stick to baseball, 10/21/23.

Stick to baseball, 7/2/22.

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