{"id":9818,"date":"2023-03-04T11:23:12","date_gmt":"2023-03-04T16:23:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=9818"},"modified":"2023-03-05T16:46:29","modified_gmt":"2023-03-05T21:46:29","slug":"stick-to-baseball-3-4-23","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2023\/03\/04\/stick-to-baseball-3-4-23\/","title":{"rendered":"Stick to baseball, 3\/4\/23."},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>I posted <a href=\"https:\/\/theathletic.com\/4266342\/2023\/03\/03\/mlb-draft-prospects-players-list\/\">an early draft ranking of just 30 names<\/a>, enough for a typical round, for subscribers to The Athletic. I\u2019ll expand that list a few times and eventually get to 100 by May or so, but I\u2019d like to at least see all the high school players get started.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>No podcast this week as the guest I had lined up had to reschedule. Feel free to sign up for <a href=\"https:\/\/tinyletter.com\/keithlaw\">my free email newsletter<\/a>, as I\u2019ll be sending another one out this week.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And now, the links\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>Longreads first: The <em>Financial Times<\/em> has a deep dive into <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ft.com\/content\/80002564-33e8-48fb-b734-44810afb7a49\">how Putin blundered into Ukraine<\/a> 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.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Anything Elizabeth Kolbert writes is a must-read for me; her latest piece in the <em>New Yorker<\/em> covers how <a href=\"https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/magazine\/2023\/03\/06\/phosphorus-saved-our-way-of-life-and-now-threatens-to-end-it\">our mining of too much phosphorus and subsequent waste of much of it<\/a> is choking our oceans while leading towards a bottleneck that threatens our food supply. The article also describes the world\u2019s longest conveyor belt, a 61-mile track in the illegally annexed territory of the Western Sahara.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>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\u2019t engage in any sort of fact-checking of stories. The <em><a href=\"https:\/\/missouriindependent.com\/2023\/03\/01\/transgender-st-louis-whistleblower\/\">Missouri Independent<\/a><\/em> and the <em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.stltoday.com\/news\/local\/metro\/parents-push-back-on-allegations-against-st-louis-transgender-center-i-m-baffled\/article_a94bc4d2-e68b-535f-b0c7-9fefb9e8e9f4.html?utm_source=pocket_saves\">St. Louis Post-Dispatch<\/a><\/em> 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.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>The <em>New Republic<\/em> profiled Dr. David Gorski, who has also blogged as Orac, and <a href=\"https:\/\/newrepublic.com\/article\/170255\/doctors-war-right-wing-medical-freedom-movement\">his battle against pseudoscience, quackery, and so-called \u201calternative\u201d medicine online<\/a>. (There is no such thing as \u201calternative\u201d medicine. If it works, it\u2019s medicine.)<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>I enjoyed this <em>Slate<\/em> story on the 25<sup>th<\/sup> anniversary of Neutral Milk Hotel\u2019s <em>In the Aeroplane Over the Sea<\/em> and <a href=\"https:\/\/slate.com\/culture\/2023\/03\/neutral-milk-hotel-aeroplane-sea-meaning-jeff-mangum.html\">the bizarre, cultlike fandom that album has generated<\/a>. The title track from that record remains one of my favorite songs to play &amp; sing.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>The cesspool of Twitter had a debunked conspiracy theory trending earlier this week about Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs. It\u2019s just one of several <a href=\"https:\/\/www.azmirror.com\/2023\/02\/24\/arizona-gop-legislators-continue-to-give-oxygen-to-disproven-election-conspiracies\/\">that Republican legislators there continue to push as they\u2019ve seen the state turn increasingly blue<\/a>.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>There is no \u201clab leak theory.\u201d There are a bunch of conspiracy theories, but <a href=\"https:\/\/theracket.news\/p\/there-is-no-lab-leak-theory\">no single, testable theory<\/a> 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.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>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, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.law360.com\/articles\/1574451\/inside-the-fight-to-update-dc-s-criminal-code\">there\u2019s a lot more to the story<\/a>. Most of this would be solved by just making the district a state with the same autonomy as the other fifty have.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Arkansas\u2019 new education plan, which includes an extremely broad voucher program, <a href=\"https:\/\/arktimes.com\/arkansas-blog\/2023\/02\/21\/what-weve-learned-about-learns\">is full of sops to banks and charter-school operators<\/a>, and it\u2019s also likely to gut public education in the state while favoring higher-income families. Sounds great!<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Tennessee jumps on the bandwagon <a href=\"https:\/\/www.npr.org\/2023\/03\/02\/1160784530\/tennessee-ban-public-drag-shows-transgender-health-care-youth\">by banning drag shows<\/a>. 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.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Board game news: Restoration Games announced that they\u2019re <a href=\"https:\/\/www.dropbox.com\/s\/ixc92tixyum8f9i\/Press%20Release%20-%20Unmatched%20In%20the%20Vault.pdf?dl=0&amp;utm_source=pocket_saves\">retiring the first two Unmatched sets<\/a>, Cobble &amp; Fog and Robin Hood vs. Big Foot, later this year, with no plans to reprint them.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/gamefound.com\/projects\/phalanx\/reiner-knizias-secret-project\">The Gamefound campaign for Huang<\/a>, a new game from prolific designer Reiner Knizia, is fully funded with five days to go.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I posted an early draft ranking of just 30 names, enough for a typical round, for subscribers to The Athletic. I\u2019ll expand that list a few times and eventually get to 100 by May or so, but I\u2019d like to at least see all the high school players get started. No podcast this week as [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[821,566,1051,1083,1185,1162,190,961,824,1037,799,870,1044,1239,1335,425],"class_list":["post-9818","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-anti-science","tag-arizona","tag-arkansas","tag-board-game-news","tag-conspiracy-theories","tag-coronavirus","tag-links","tag-longreads","tag-pseudoscience","tag-russia","tag-science","tag-stick-to-baseball","tag-tennessee","tag-trans-rights","tag-ukraine","tag-washington","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9818","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9818"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9818\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9821,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9818\/revisions\/9821"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9818"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9818"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9818"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}