We have made it through the first week of October: it’s Friday, October 4, 2024, and it’s Cinnamon Roll Day. I love a good, giant cinnamon roll for breakfast, but I haven’t had one in ages. Doesn’t the one below look good? (It needs more icing.) Wikipedia describes the history of the bun, including its Swedish heritage:
[Cinnamon] later began to be used in Swedish pastries, with the modern kanelbulle (lit. ‘‘cinnamonbun‘‘) being created after the first world war. Since 1999, October 4 has been promoted as Cinnamon Roll Day (Kanelbullens dag), a national theme day, acknowledged by a significant portion of the Swedish population. Swedish kanelbulle dough typically also contains cardamom (powder or buds), giving it a distinctive flavour.
This is a Swedish cinnamon bun; it looks good, but I’d prefer icing on top. If you’re in Sweden, please tell us what’s happening today with respect to cinnamon buns.
It’s also National Taco Day (cultural appropriation), World Animal Day, National Diversity Day, National Vodka Day, Ten-Four Day, and National Denim Day.
There will be no Readers’ Wildlife post today as I am down to about four contributions and must conserve them. If you want to see wildlife photos and have some good one, please send them in.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the October 4Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*The longshoreman’s strike has been suspended after management offered a 62% pay increase over six years, a generous offer compared to the first one. Union members will operate under the current contract until January 15 to forestall damage to the economy and interruption of the supply chain during the holidays. But the strike could continue after that. The new offer gives the workers $63 per hour from the present $39.
*The Special Counsel (and judge) involved in the criminal against Trump for criminal conspiracy in trying to get his election reversed has revealed some details of the case. The judge adjucating this case had the “Trump is immune while President” claim sent back to him by the Supreme Court, which mandated complex standards for the judge to consider when ruling on Presidential immunity. The prosecution has given some of its arguments about why Trump is both guilty and has no immunity from prosecution.
When told by an aide that Vice President Mike Pence was in peril as the rioting on Capitol Hill escalated on Jan. 6, 2021, President Donald J. Trump replied, “So what?”
When one of his lawyers told him that his false claims that the election had been marred by widespread fraud would not hold up in court, Mr. Trump responded, “The details don’t matter.”
On a flight with Mr. Trump and his family after the election, an Oval Office assistant heard Mr. Trump say: “It doesn’t matter if you won or lost the election. You still have to fight like hell.”
Those accounts were among new evidence disclosed in a court filing made public on Wednesday in which the special counsel investigating Mr. Trump made his case for why the former president is not immune from prosecution on federal charges of plotting to overturn the 2020 election.
Made public by Judge Tanya S. Chutkan of the Federal District Court in Washington, the 165-page brief was partly redacted but expansive, adding details to the already extensive record of how Mr. Trump lost the race but attempted nonetheless to cling to power.
The brief from the prosecution team led by the special counsel, Jack Smith, asserts that there is ample evidence that Mr. Trump’s efforts to remain in office were those of a desperate losing candidate rather than official acts of a president that would be considered immune from prosecution under a landmark Supreme Court ruling this summer.
“The defendant asserts that he is immune from prosecution for his criminal scheme to overturn the 2020 presidential election because, he claims, it entailed official conduct,” prosecutors wrote. “Not so. Although the defendant was the incumbent president during the charged conspiracies, his scheme was fundamentally a private one.”
The brief was unsealed three months after the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling, less than five weeks from Election Day and one day after Mr. Trump’s current running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, declined during the vice-presidential debate to say that Mr. Trump had lost in 2020.
Mr. Smith’s brief was initially filed under seal last week. It was designed to help Judge Chutkan, who is overseeing the case, to determine how much of the indictment can survive the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in July granting Mr. Trump a broad form of immunity against prosecution for many official acts while in office.
The prosecution has essentially been on hold since late last year, when Mr. Trump began making the legal argument that he should be immune. Judge Chutkan is now determining how much if any of a revised indictment filed by Mr. Smith can go forward under the complex standards set by the Supreme Court.
So the argument turns on whether Trump’s acts were “official ones normally performed by a President” or “private acts that rose to the standards of possible criminality.” It seems to me that this is NOT official conduct, and that case should go forward. However, it won’t go forward until after the election. Will these revelations hurt Trump? Probably not, given that the indictment and court activity have been known for a while, and a conversation with Mike Pence won’t change the minds of MAGA-ites. It’s a pity that none of the verdicts will come down before the election, as then, even if a “guilty” verdict doesn’t drive away Trump voters, it would surely tie up the courts with deciding how to deal with a convicted President.
*Israel is clearly fed up with the machinations of the UN’s secretary-general, who is clearly not nonpartisan, but a staunch hater of Israel and defender of Hamas and Palestine. The Jewish country, in what may be a first, ruled that Antonio Guterres won’t be allowed to enter Israel (not that he wants to!):
Israel’s foreign minister said on Wednesday that he was barring U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres from entering the country because he had not “unequivocally” condemned Iran’s missile attack on Israel.
Guterres on Tuesday issued a brief statement after the missile attack condemning “the broadening of the Middle East conflict, with escalation after escalation.” Earlier on Tuesday, Israel had sent troops into southern Lebanon.
Israeli foreign minister Israel Katz said Guterres’ failure to call out Iran made him persona non grata in Israel.
“Anyone who cannot unequivocally condemn Iran’s heinous attack on Israel, as nearly all the countries of the world have done, does not deserve to set foot on Israeli soil,” Katz said.
“Israel will continue to defend its citizens and uphold its national dignity, with or without Antonio Guterres.”
Well, what are you gonna do with someone who condemns Israel for defending itself (and defends UNRWA), but won’t condemn Iran for an unprovoked and brutal missile attack? But of course the UN. has to caution Israel about this act:
U.N. spokesperson Stephane Dujarric described the announcement as political and “just one more attack, so to speak, on U.N. staff that we’ve seen from the government of Israel.” He said the U.N. traditionally does not recognise the concept of persona non grata as applying to U.N. staff.
During a Security Council meeting on Wednesday Guterres said: “As I did in relation to the Iranian attack in April – and as should have been obvious yesterday in the context of the condemnation I expressed – I again strongly condemn yesterday’s massive missile attack by Iran on Israel.”
Now that looks weird, no? Guterres says he DID condemn the attack, but when you dig a bit deeper, you find out that he did so ONLY after Israel barred him. He did not condemn the latest attack before that. The BBC clarifies:
The United Nations secretary general has condemned Iranian strikes on Israel, after earlier being banned from the country for his initial response.
Speaking to the UN Security Council, António Guterres said it was high time to stop what he called the “deadly cycle of tit-for-tat violence” in the Middle East.
In an earlier statement, Israel’s Foreign Minister Israel Katz declared Guterres persona non grata and an “anti-Israel secretary-general who lends support to terrorists”.
The comments were issued in response to Guterres initially calling for a ceasefire, but not specifically mentioning the Iran attack.
Addressing the council, the UN secretary general said he had condemned the attack in April, and “as should have been obvious yesterday in the context of the condemnation I expressed, I again strongly condemn yesterday’s massive missile attack by Iran on Israel”.
Guterres, then, is being mealymouthed, saying we should have sussed out his condemnation from what he said in April. “It should have been obvious.” What a jerk! He is a long-time Israel hater and shouldn’t be the UN’s secretary-general. But after all, they’ve had an ex-Nazi in that position.
*From the Free Press‘s morning newsletter;
The University of Wyoming’s women’s volleyball team forfeited a game against a team from San Jose State University that included a biological male. They are the third team this season to refuse to play against San Jose State, while one member of San Jose’s women’s team is suing the NCAA over its current gender policies. San Jose administrators say they are complying with NCAA rules, but that’s not the point. The problem is those rules don’t keep the game fair and women safe. Read Suzy Weiss’s 2022 dispatch about the transgender swimmer Lia Thomas: “Watching Lia Thomas Win.”
The Wyoming woomen’st volleyball team (“The Cowgirls”) issued this statement:
After a lengthy discussion, the University of Wyoming will not play its scheduled conference match against San José State University in the UniWyo Sports Complex on Saturday, Oct. 5. Per Mountain West Conference policy, the Conference will record the match as a forfeit and a loss for Wyoming. The Cowgirls will host Fresno State on Thursday, Oct. 3 at 6:30 p.m. in the UniWyo Sports Complex.
More from Wyofile:
The University of Wyoming women’s volleyball team will forfeit its game with San José State this weekend amid criticism over the rival team’s transgender player.
The Cowgirls are the third in a group of teams to forfeit games to the currently undefeated California squad, following similar actions from Boise State and Southern Utah universities. The San José State player Blaire Fleming’s transgender status was publicized in April, and afterward another team member joined a suit over NCAA rules allowing trans athletes under certain circumstances.
. . . UW had originally decided to go forward with the game following talks between the athletic department, coaching staff and the team, according to Cowboy State Daily.
Following the decision, Wyoming Equality released a statement calling the forfeiture “yet another troubling instance of politics overshadowing fair competition in collegiate sports.”
“Athletics should be about fostering teamwork, growth, and healthy competition — not about discrimination and exclusion,” spokesperson Santi Murillo said in a press release. “We believe every athlete, including transgender athletes, deserves the opportunity to compete and play the sports they love. This is personal to me, as the first transgender athlete at UW I experienced the best of Wyoming, a focus on playing sports, not politics. Taking away opportunities to compete hurts all athletes.”
That’s a rationale for allowing men who identify as women to compete against biological women in any sport. It’s wrong, and it’s unfair. But the site blames the decision on the legislature:
The decision came as state lawmakers circulated a letter pressuring UW to cancel the game. It was addressed to UW President Ed Seidel and Athletic Director Tom Burman.
“The Legislature has been very clear that the University of Wyoming, being a publicly funded land grant institution, should not participate in the extremist agenda of Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) or propagate the lie that biological sex can be changed,” the letter, circulated by Sen. Cheri Steinmetz (R-Lingle), states. “We all know it cannot.”
That was an apparent reference to the Legislature voting to cut UW’s block grant by the amount it took to fund the university’s Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. Lawmakers also voted to ban the use of state funds for anything to do with DEI, though Gov. Mark Gordon vetoed part of that budget footnote.
In response, UW has eliminated its DEI office, though it retained all staff and aimed to keep programming situated under that entity. Most of those programs didn’t match what lawmakers stated they wanted to root out, UW Board of Trustees members said.
I am betting that the team itself voted on this issue, and the involvement of the legislature wasn’t dispositive. Or so I hope. My position on this issue is clear: men should not be playing in women’s sports, even if the men claim that they are women, whether or not they’ve had medical treatment. And it’s not just Wyoming, but also Idaho and Utah. San José State is now 10-0 in volleyball, far better than that team has ever performed.
*Ta-Nehishi Coates, who has the status of a god among activists, has a new book, which is a collection of three essays. But it’s making news because the longest essay—100 pages—is about the perfidies of Israel (he doesn’t mention terrorism or October 7). While the NYT gave the book a positive review, singling out the anti-Israel stuff for special praise, Coleman Hughes takes the book apart in the Free Press in a review called “The Fantasy World of Ta-Nehisi Coates” (archived here). Remember, Hughes, like Coats, is black, but he’s a heterodox black along the lines of John McWhorter (though more passionate than McWhorter, I think).
That silence [since 2015] has now broken—though this is hardly something to celebrate. His new essay collection, The Message, is a masterpiece of warped arguments and moral confusion. But it is important to take it seriously, not because Coates’s arguments are serious, but because so many treat them as if they are.
Coates’s overarching themes are familiar: the plundering of black wealth by the Western world, the hypocrisy at the heart of America’s founding ideals, and the permanence of white supremacy. If The Message departs from his earlier work in any way, it’s that his desire to smear America has been eclipsed by his desire to smear Israel—an exercise that takes up fully half the book. (More about that, which Coates has declared “his obsession,” in a bit.)
. . . His final essay is called “The Gigantic Dream,” a reference to one of Theodor Herzl’s diary entries, in which the founder of modern political Zionism explains how he came to the conclusion that the Jews needed a state. Coates begins by describing his visit to Yad Vashem, the magnificent and horrifying Holocaust museum in Jerusalem.
It quickly becomes clear, however, that acknowledging the Holocaust is but a throat-clearing exercise before the main event: over one-hundred pages of the most shamelessly one-sided summary of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict I have ever read.
. . . For example, I was waiting for Coates to mention a single instance of Palestinian terror, but the moment never came. He does, however, find the space to mention so many of the Israeli policies that were implemented specifically to prevent the terror attacks that murdered so many innocents during the Intifadas—checkpoints in the West Bank, for instance.
Though Coates didn’t look into Israel-Palestine until his 40s, according to his recent New York profile that may be his “greatest asset”—a pair of fresh eyes, as it were. But far from an asset, Coates’s hasty research is a liability, resulting in errors that always come at the expense of Israel. For instance, as an example of Israel’s Jim Crow–like “two-tier society,” he asserts that “Jewish Israelis who marry Jews from abroad needn’t worry about their spouses’ citizenship,” whereas the state “tracks Palestinian noncitizens through a population registry” and “bars Palestinian citizens from passing on their status to anyone on that registry—abroad or in the West Bank.”
The implication conveyed by this sentence—that Israeli law treats Arab Israelis differently than Jewish Israelis—is simply not true. The law in question is neutral as regards the race of the citizen attempting to naturalize his or her foreign spouse. The restriction is instead based on the nationality of the spouse.
It goes on. How can someone judge Israel’s behavior without mentioning terrorism? (The NYT piece also says that.) I haven’t read much Coates, only his famous essay on reparations. And I wouldn’t dream of telling people not to read this collection. But I probably won’t, for the sake of my digestion, I may, however, read his first two books. But if you’ve read it, or are contemplating reading it, or simply want to get an idea of what it says (granted, though the eyes of someone who likes Israel), do read Hughes’s review.
*Lord, does Biden want Israel extinguished? Everything his administration has done around Iran has been to try to negotiate the country out of producing nuclear weapons, Yet any fool knows that this is a fool’s errand, and that once Iran gets nukes, it’s pretty much all over for the Jewish state. And so we have another article, this time from the Times of Israel, about Biden warning Israel about attacking Iran’s nukes.
US President Joe Biden said Wednesday that he opposes Israel striking Iran’s nuclear facilities in retaliation for Iran’s ballistic missile attack, telling reporters that Jerusalem has a right to respond but that it should do so “proportionally.”
Biden did say that sanctions would be imposed against Iran and that he discussed the idea with the leaders of the G7 countries in a joint call earlier Wednesday.
“We’ll be discussing with the Israelis what they’re going to do, but all seven of us agree that they have a right to respond but they should respond proportionally,” Biden told reporters before boarding Air Force One. “Obviously, Iran is way off course.”
Israel is reportedly mulling an attack on Iran’s nuclear or oil facilities as part of the retaliation for Tuesday’s attack, which saw Iran fire 181 ballistic missiles at Israel, sending most of the country into bomb shelters and causing considerable damage but only one known fatality — a Palestinian man in the West Bank.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared soon after the attack that Iran had made “a big mistake” and would “pay the price.”
Speaking to reporters in Washington, Biden urged Israel to respond “proportionally” to the attack. Asked whether he backs a strike on Iranian nuclear sites, Biden responded: “The answer is no.”
Well isn’t that special? What, exactly, does Biden mean by “proportional”? Should Israel be allowed to fire just 150 missiles at Iran, not killing anyone? (Biden apparently thinks that Israel’s response to Hamas’s attack, in terms of civilian death toll, was “disproportionate”. He doesn’t seem to realize that the death toll is a) reported by Hamas, b) includes Hamas fighters among the dead and c) is a death toll that Hamas has deliberately elevated by both wanting the death toll to be high and making it so by embedding terrorists in the civilian populations. Frankly, I’m tired of an ignorant President trying to control Israel’s response to being attacked. He doesn’t seem to realize that Israeli’s feel, and rightly so, that they’re are in an existential crisis. If he realized that, perhaps he’d be less likely to withhold weapons from Israel.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Szaron, who likes reality, is scared:
Hili: What frightened you?Szaron: An abstract idea.
Hili: Czego się wystraszyłeś?Szaron: Abstrakcyjnej idei.
*******************
From Malcolm. It may be photoshopped, but who cares?
A nice coffee mug from Jesus of the Day.
From The Dodo, a badass cat:
From Masih; I hope I haven’t posted this before. Iran pretends that its populace is celebrating Iran’s missile attack on Israel. Too bad the strike was a total dud.
In Iran, the regime staged small gatherings of security forces, Basiji militia, and morality police to create the illusion of public celebration over missile attacks on Israel.
In one video, a person from the gathering tells an unveiled woman filming them to “put on your hijab.”… pic.twitter.com/iItKZNrqDr— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) October 2, 2024
From Luana, a satirical video featuring Greta (note: it’s labeled “satire” and thus NOT GENUINE!). But now that she’s become a loud pro-Palestinian activist, Greta is fair game for satire.
Omg this is hilarious it’s stupidity makes it soooo funny 🤣 😂 pic.twitter.com/5oH8nqLt6S
— Benonwine (@benonwine) October 2, 2024
From Malcolm; I’m not sure that this is interspecies love, but it sure ain’t interspecies hate!
From my feed: the feel good tweet of the month. You MUST read the thread to see all the companies who chipped in to give this pair a fantastic wedding and honeymoon (and an expensive ring!)
A South African man proposed to his girlfriend at KFC, and a journalist shamed him on Twitter for being “broke.” The backlash led to companies offering to fund the couple’s dream wedding and support their new life together.
A short thread 🧵 pic.twitter.com/6ogey8Jb4f
— internet hall of fame (@InternetH0F) October 2, 2024
Also from my feed; cat owners will understand:
Bro was waiting for the cat to get up pic.twitter.com/D93xBFaiOx
— No Cats No Life (@NoCatsNoLife_m) October 2, 2024
From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I retweeted:
A fourteen year old French boy murdered at Auschwitz. https://t.co/7SmRT11ZQi
— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) October 4, 2024
Two tweets from Dr. Cobb. The Greek Islands have become way overtouristed since I first visited them when they were relatively un-inundated in 1972. Now I wouldn’t go near Crete or Santorini. But maybe I can go to Sifnos. .
Bonus pictures: Some sweet Sifnos cats. Sure, wherever you visit in Greece, there will be plenty of stray cats. But I don’t think I ever saw quite as many as during the time I spent in Kastro on Sifnos! pic.twitter.com/1wxHRAm6Cp
— Paliparan (@PaliparanDotCom) September 28, 2024
Matthew’s response to this tweet, and the only one possible for a Brit, was “Crikey!”:
This is the most terrifying debris flow video I have seen from the flooding in East Tennessee/Western North Carolina#HurricaneHelene #tnwx #ncwx #flood pic.twitter.com/gDCI09Ge4a
— Alan (@smokiesvol) September 28, 2024
Good for the women from U. Wyoming. I think refusing to compete against teams who have female impersonators on them is the best way to handle this until the governing bodies come to their senses.
I don’t know how the NCAA will come to its senses. The policy means that they have become gender activists, and those in that mind set will not ever admit they are wrong.
I had a thought, though, which is that teams facing this kind of thing should be allowed to install a bio-male on their team to even the odds.
Just a passing thought.
In this case, the fight-fire-with-fire response of reacting to a trans-identified male on the other woman’s team by placing one on your own team won’t be effective in doing anything but encouraging all women’s teams to have as many males on them as possible to remain competitive. Many trans rights activists would probably consider that a dream scenario; the women’s activists might see it as an own goal.
Mark, it will take lawsuits to right this ship:
In March, a group of 16 female athletes sued the NCAA, which administers collegiate sports at around 1,100 US schools, seeking to force the governing body to ban transgender women from competing in women’s sports.
I am gladly agreeing with both you you. My idea would only further degrade the intended purpose of women’s sports.
Mark, it would make it worse, but I like the thinking – if you can’t beat them on the high ground, then go down to their level and beat ’em that way!
I struggle with whether to feel sorry for or angry at the men who choose to play on female teams.
The idea of “trans women” in women’s sports became popular as a human rights cause. Except that it directly interferes with women’s rights.
It’s so entrenched now that only boycotts have any chance of reversing it.
I read you always, but just now Bertolt Brecht’s Stories of Mr. Keuner. Wow! ‘Mr. Keuner looked at the drawing his little niece had made. It depicted a hen flying over a farmyard. ‘Tell me, why does your hen have three legs?’ asked Mr. Keuner. ‘Hens can’t fly, of course,’ said the little artist, ‘and so I needed a third leg to give it a lift.’ ‘I’m glad I asked,’ said Mr. Keuner.” What would Mr Keuner have to say about some of the astonishing and wonderful issues youn raise – especially Biden’s message to Israel about Iran I wonder.
I had a WEIT dream :
There was a conference on fly research and evolution. There was an author who published in Methods in Enzymology, which was highly cited, and I happened to have the book with a holographic sticker, and was typing it in with the italic font formatting. I even typed it in with color font and that holographic sticker effect.
A scientist “Omamura” – who I think was supposed to refer to Motoo Kimura – was getting an award from someone dressed up as a fly but with gorgeous gold and glossy black costume anatomy.
Later, as dreams go, a Stetson hat bedecked PCC(E) himself was sort of chasing this unusual shark species around in a kind of sunny Mediterranean sea rock-structured shallows. I think readers know of a picture of PCC(E) with some sort of Stetson hat – I think that’s the origin.
I think it was all sort of posted on the site too, in some sort of virtual reality way!
I found that quite.. quite!
CRIKEY!
Crikey indeed Matthew. The Appalachian Mountain valleys in western North Carolina and Virginia as well as eastern Tennessee and virtually all of West Virginia are deep and narrow offering very limited paths for storm water run off. Roadways, railways, and towns are generally found at the bottom of the valley beside the river. When they get a big ‘un such as a slow moving or expansive dying tropical storm, huge torrents of water can totally wipe out infrastructure. This happened with the remnants of Hurricane Camille, a cat 5 hurricane that wiped out much of Gulfport, MS when it came ashore from the Gulf of Mexico, but a few days later as a moisture laden tropical storm, devastated the Tye River valley just south of Charlottesville VA and just last week with the remnants of Helene in the area around Asheville, NC.
There are a number of short you tube videos now on the google, filmed and narrated by residents of these towns, showing the remnant mud, debris, devastation, and high water marks on buildings as well as the steep forested mountain slopes in the background that surround these small towns.
Same reason why hurricane Irene in 2011 was so destructive in Vermont–many towns and roads at the bottom of mountain valleys. I remember the wind wasn’t so bad during the storm, all it did was rain. Got a big surprise when I went to work in the morning. Access to the village was cut off for a while and many Vermont towns cut off for weeks.
Yes, the northeast has similar potential for this type of flooding. You also had Sandy a few years ago, a perfect example of a hybrid storm in which a dying tropical storm merges with a continental low pressure area…I am not a meteorologist, but that is my understanding. A really gripping book on the 1969 Hurricane Camille coming ashore from the Gulf of Mexico with Cat 5 winds and a few days later, having lost its catastrophic winds but maintained it moisture content and even amplified it as it merged with a continental low over the Appalachians, and devastated the Tye River valley south of Charlottesville, VA is told in the book, “Roar of the Heavens” by Bechtal…the stories from the mountain people leave the reader breathless.
Thank you.
Thanks for the book suggestion. I’ve ordered it on Abebooks.
It seems an American dock worker can earn more than a Canadian GP. I can gross more per hour, but 40% goes on running expenses for the office.
On Wednesday (Oct 2) Jerry posted about this strike in the Hili dialogue, citing this passage from some news source:
Jerry then commented:
To put things into perspective: Median pre-tax household income in the United States is about $75,000.
In 2020, a pre-tax household income of $150,000, put a household in the top quintile of the household income distribution (that is, above the 80th percentile of the household income distribution). In that year the upper limit of the fourth quintile of this distribution was $141,110. (The mean household income in the top quintile was $253,480.)
In other words, these dock workers are very well paid, especially given their level of education. They are at least upper-middle class.
See:
Household Income Quintiles: 1967 to 2022
https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/statistics/household-income-quintiles
Source: US Census Bureau. Historical Income Tables: Households. March 2024. [Data source: Current Population Survey, 1968 to 2023 Annual Social and Economic Supplements (CPS ASEC).]
Tables H-1 and H-3
https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/income-poverty/historical-income-households.html
I am tired of people being stupid about transgender athletes. It should not be hard for people to understand that it is the physical body that performs athletics, not whatever complex psychological gender feelings the athlete might have.
Michael, you don’t seem to understand woke intersectional activism. A quote from Yascha Mounk’s book The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time (2023):
In March, a group of 16 female athletes sued the NCAA, which administers collegiate sports at around 1,100 US schools, seeking to force the governing body to ban transgender women from competing in women’s sports.
Excellent quote.
Real cinnamon buns, the kind they made in my elementary school from scratch, the best I’ve ever had, needed no icing. Made by the smiling grandmotherly ladies who worked there, they had raisins, along with enough sugar, cinnamon and butter to run down to the bottom and caramelize. And they were about the side of an adult palm, at least, and came out of big black Vulcan ovens that you could see while going thru the line.
For me, those are the gold standard cinnamon buns. When I was in Sweden, ’81-5, I don’t really remember cinnamon buns. What I do remember is the kaffebröd (“coffee bread”), that was closer to a pastry and considerably infused with cardamom. There may have been cinnamon in what I typically bought at the local bakery, but it was cardamom that came thru. The dough was twisted like a challah but the whole thing was fairly flat, and topped with coarse sugar like in the pic above. That seemed to be typical wherever you got kaffebröd.
I came away with the sense that cardamom is the Swedish National Spice. It’s wonderful. I just looked up the flavorant spectrum of the essential oil and it’s mostly alcohols and esters, predominantly a particular cineole and terpinyl acetate.
Cinnamon is 90% powered by cinnamaldehyde.
For decades, every Saturday morning my grandmother and my mother would make big batches of cinnamon rolls from scratch. The topping was a caramelized pecan glaze, and we could have them all week long, at breakfast or for the adults, at afternoon coffee. Later in life, my mother gave up on making the dough from scratch and switched to Rhodes dough, which I will say still makes a fine pecan cinnamon roll. Those generations are gone, but I can still make a mean batch of rolls 🙂
Right, the cinnamon/cardamom flavored kanelbulle were ubiquitous in Sweden as breakfast rolls or at coffee breaks. No need for icing, just some sugar. Kanelbulle even have their own day, which is today.
Not just elementary school. I taught high school for four years in the early 70’s and every Wednesday, the cafeteria lunch was a bowl of vegetable beef soup (yum!), grilled cheese sandwich, and a full size cinnamon yeast bun (double yum). Any leftover buns were cut into pieces and served as a treat to faculty who came into the cafeteria for Friday morning breakfast. Hempenstein’s first paragraph says it all.
“The Wyoming woomen’st [sic] volleyball team (“The Cowgirls”) issued this statement…”
Perhaps this inadvertent typo should become nomenclature for trans-males in women’s sports – “wooman” ?
“We believe every athlete, including transgender athletes, deserves the opportunity to compete and play the sports they love.”
Isn’t the transgender athlete taking away an opportunity from a biological woman?
Aside from the disingenuousness of leaving out the completion, “. . . even if this means playing as the wrong sex,” this quotation is false on its face.
To look at me you would never guess but I played (junior — under 16) high school football. Don’t ask me what possessed me to try but the coach had a no-cut policy. If you wanted out you had to quit and I was not going to quit. I scrimmaged in a variety of defensive backfield positions but achieved no discernible football prowess. The hitting drills almost killed me (so therefore did make me stronger, right?). I played in a grand total of one game in two years, against the weakest team in the county and did make a few tackles. The only play I can remember to this day is failing to prevent a rushing first down on second and short yardage. (Three downs in Canada.)
So no, every athlete does not deserve the opportunity to compete and play a sport just because s/he loves it. To play competitively you have to be good enough to be an asset to the team. If you’re a guy who sucks, be part of the male team but ride the bench. You don’t deserve anything in sport, except to not have men competing against you if you are a female athlete.
As Leslie mentioned, the statement:
is fundamentally misleading and mendacious because what is really pushed for is this:
Of course, once it is spelled out, the idea that there is a human right to compete in the sex category of one’s own choosing is ludicrous.