Welcome to Friday, January 24, 2025 and National Peanut Butter Day, celebrating a comestible I have for lunch nearly every day. Here’s how it’s made commercially:
It’s also Beer Can Appreciation Day, Macintosh Computer Day (the only kind I’ve ever used), National Edy’s Pie Patent Day (celebrating the patent of the Eskimo Pie on this day in 1922; for reasons that are obvious, we can no longer call them “Eskimo Pies”), and National Lobster Day.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the January 24 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*Just in: Yesterday a federal judge declared Trump’s “birthright” Executive Order, which denied automatic citizenship to those born in the U.S., to be an unconstitutional act. I predicted this, but it ain’t rocket science. It’s in the Constitution in black and white (well, black and yellow now):
A federal district court judge on Thursday temporarily blocked President Donald Trump’s executive order aimed at limiting birthright citizenship — the first skirmish in what promises to be a protracted legal battle over the new administration’s agenda.
Senior U.S. District Judge John C. Coughenour heard 25 minutes of arguments and then issued an order from the bench blocking the policy from taking effect for 14 days. There will be a further briefing on a preliminary injunction to permanently block the executive order while the case proceeds.
“I’ve been on the bench for over four decades,” Coughenour, a Ronald Reagan appointee, said. “I can’t remember another case where the question presented is as clear as this one. This is a blatantly unconstitutional order.”
This one ain’t gonna fly.
*OMG he did it! Trump not only sacked the head of the Coast Guard (a woman) but, supposedly to bolster border security, ordered more forces to the GULF OF AMERICA, since his executive order has now renamed the Gulf of Mexico. Shoot me now!
Asked about the statement’s reference to “Gulf of America,” Coast Guard officials cited Trump’s executive order. The Defense Department, which also is preparing to deploy additional forces in support of the new administration’s emphasis on border security, said it had no updates to provide when asked whether the Pentagon will also adopt Trump’s desired name for the gulf.
Sec. 4. Gulf of America. (a) The area formerly known as the Gulf of Mexico has long been an integral asset to our once burgeoning Nation and has remained an indelible part of America. The Gulf was a crucial artery for America’s early trade and global commerce. It is the largest gulf in the world, and the United States coastline along this remarkable body of water spans over 1,700 miles and contains nearly 160 million acres. Its natural resources and wildlife remain central to America’s economy today. The bountiful geology of this basin has made it one of the most prodigious oil and gas regions in the world, providing roughly 14% of our Nation’s crude-oil production and an abundance of natural gas, and consistently driving new and innovative technologies that have allowed us to tap into some of the deepest and richest oil reservoirs in the world. The Gulf is also home to vibrant American fisheries teeming with snapper, shrimp, grouper, stone crab, and other species, and it is recognized as one of the most productive fisheries in the world, with the second largest volume of commercial fishing landings by region in the Nation, contributing millions of dollars to local American economies. The Gulf is also a favorite destination for American tourism and recreation activities. Further, the Gulf is a vital region for the multi-billion-dollar U.S. maritime industry, providing some of the largest and most impressive ports in the world. The Gulf will continue to play a pivotal role in shaping America’s future and the global economy, and in recognition of this flourishing economic resource and its critical importance to our Nation’s economy and its people, I am directing that it officially be renamed the Gulf of America.
(b) As such, within 30 days of the date of this order, the Secretary of the Interior shall, consistent with 43 U.S.C. 364 through 364f, take all appropriate actions to rename as the “Gulf of America” the U.S. Continental Shelf area bounded on the northeast, north, and northwest by the States of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida and extending to the seaward boundary with Mexico and Cuba in the area formerly named as the Gulf of Mexico. The Secretary shall subsequently update the GNIS to reflect the renaming of the Gulf and remove all references to the Gulf of Mexico from the GNIS, consistent with applicable law. The Board shall provide guidance to ensure all federal references to the Gulf of America, including on agency maps, contracts, and other documents and communications shall reflect its renaming.
Yes, it’s the Greatest Gulf in the History of the World, and it has to be named MGAA: “Make the Gulf American Again.” Can we expect commemorative coins?
*Over at the Silver Bulletin, pollster and statistician (and Democrat) Nate Silver asks, “Are we entering a Conservative Golden Age?” At first he says “no”, we’ve reached peak MAGA:
According to this framework, the inauguration on Monday could be the high-water mark for the Conservative Golden Age. With narrow majorities in Congress — and a less unified caucus than Democrats had under Biden — legislative accomplishments may be hard to come by for Trump, and Democrats are favored to retake the House in 2026. Courts will challenge his executive orders. The alliance between MAGA and the Tech Right — Trump’s new Silicon Valley buddies — already shows signs of strain. Furthermore, Trump is now a 78-year-old, lame-duck president, and few other Republicans have been able to achieve star power under his shadow. The potential efficacy of his government, or lack thereof, is another potential weak point. Although he deserves more credit than he gets for Operation Warp Speed, Trump mismanaged the biggest crisis of his first term, COVID, and many of his Cabinet appointments and civil servants will have little experience in government. And Trump can put personal pique or profit above the good of the country or the long-term interests of his party and the conservative movement.
What’s more, there is a pretty good argument for simple mean-reversion. Democrats, for all their problems, are a highly competitive party. Kamala Harris became the first Democrat to lose the popular vote since John Kerry, but she lost it by only 1.6 percentage points — and Kerry lost his election by just 2.4 points against a president who’d had an 90 percent approval rating just two years earlier. No Democrat has lost the popular vote by more than that since 1988, while five Republicans have, including Trump in 2020. Republicans’ Electoral College advantage all but disappeared last year, meanwhile, so a narrow popular vote win like Al Gore’s in 2000 or Hillary Clinton’s in 2016 might be enough to flip the White House for a fourth time in a row in 2028.
But then Silver backs up and says, well, the history of America shows random swings, but we might be in for conservatism for a while
But I’ve given short shrift to the claim that we are entering a new era — whether a Conservative Golden Age or something else entirely. That’s because, as Ezra Klein writes, the evidence for a conservative vibe shift goes beyond Trump’s narrow popular vote margin. To take a few data points:
- It’s much harder than in 2016 to write off Trump’s win as a fluke. He won the popular vote. There’s no Electoral College, Comey Letter or (dubiously) Russian interference to blame for his win. Democrats essentially lost the election twice last year — first with Biden and then with Harris — and this came on the heels of Hillary Clinton’s loss in 2016. Maybe it’s bad candidates — the Democrats’ presidential nominees lately have been about as successful as New York Jets quarterbacks — but their product isn’t selling.
- Furthermore, Democrats show every sign of being defeated. Unlike in 2017, there’s little protest activity against Trump. MSNBC ratings and Washington Post subscriptions are down. Kamala Harris and Joe Biden’s teams are fighting, but none of it is particularly constructive or forward-looking, and there’s no clear consensus on what the Democratic Party should do next.
- Trump’s win was buoyed by some sharp demographic shifts, including among voters that Democrats once took for granted as being part of their “team”: Hispanic and Asian American voters, and to a lesser degree Black voters (especially Black men) — and younger voters, too. Democrats can no longer credibly claim to win elections just by turning out their base; in fact, Republicans outnumbered Democrats in the November electorate by 5 points. Americans are also voting with their feet, fleeing blue states and cities.
Here’s his chart of the random political walk:
In the end, he thinks all things are possible, including a return to the “Biden/Obama” liberal age. In other words, he punts.
*From the Free Press: Coleman Hughes on “The end of DEI.” Hughes, a heterodox black intellectual, thinks this is a good thing.
Trump has ordered the executive branch and its agencies “to terminate all discriminatory and illegal preferences, mandates, policies, programs, activities, guidance, regulations, enforcement actions, consent orders, and requirements.”
. . . . Trump’s executive order accurately describes the enormousness of the DEI bureaucracy that has arisen in government and private industry to infuse race in hiring, promotion, and training. Take, for example, the virtue-signaling announcements made by big corporations in recent years—such as CBS’s promise that the writers of its television shows would meet a quota of being 40 percent non-white.
And so, we will now see what federal enforcement of a color-blind society looks like. We’ll certainly see how many federal employees were assigned to monitor and enforce DEI—Trump has just demanded they all be laid off.
The most controversial part of this executive order is that it repeals the storied, 60-year-old Executive Order 11246, signed by President Lyndon Johnson in 1965. Johnson’s original order mandated that government contractors take “affirmative action” to ensure that employees are hired “without regard to their race, color, religion, or national origin.”
The phrase affirmative action, however, has come to have a profoundly different meaning for us than it did during the 1960s civil rights era. Back then, it simply meant that companies had to make an active effort to stop discriminating against blacks, since antiblack discrimination was, in many places, the norm. Only later did the phrase come to be associated with the requirement to actively discriminate in favor of blacks and other minorities.
. . .In the intervening decades, this racial spoils system has not only caused grief for countless members of the unfavored races—it has also created incentives for business owners to commit racial fraud, or else to legally restructure so as to be technically “minority-owned.” As far back as 1992, TheNew York Times reported that such fraud was “a problem everywhere”—for instance, with companies falsely claiming to be 51 percent minority-owned in order to secure government contracts. In a more recent case, a Seattle man sued both the state and federal government, claiming to run a minority-owned business on account of being 4 percent African.
For progressives, Trump’s repeal of LBJ’s 1965 executive order is being framed as a reversal of Civil Rights–era gains. In covering the repeal, Axios reminds readers that “Segregationists during Johnson’s time opposed the executive order.” This framing makes sense only if you omit the changed meaning of affirmative action over time. In context, the segregationists of the 1960s believed in a race-based society and wanted to exclude black people from opportunities, whereas today, Trump is opposing racial mandates. They were against color blindness; Trump is for it.
Trump’s executive order gets closer to the original intent of the civil rights movement than today’s DEI policies. During the Senate debate over the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the bill’s lead sponsor, Senator Hubert Humphrey, famously promised that if anyone could find any language in the Civil Rights Act that required preferential hiring based on percentages or quotas, he would eat the entire bill page by page. In the twenty-first century, it’s today’s progressives who would be the ones chewing.
. . .In one sense, Trump is simply riding an anti-DEI wave that he cannot claim credit for. For instance, he could have done this in his first term, but like every Republican since Nixon, he chose not to.
In the end, Hughes says this is one of the rare moments in American politics when a leader gets to turn his ideology into law.
*Just when we thought the LA wildfires were going to abate, they’ve started up afresh, fueled by those pesky Santa Anna winds. And the new ones are bad:
A second new fire ignited in the Los Angeles area overnight near the affluent Bel-Air neighborhood, while thousands of firefighters continued to battle a blaze that ripped through more than 10,000 acres north of the city.
The fresh blaze, named the Sepulveda fire, had reached 40 acres with 0% containment early Thursday, according to state fire officials. It broke out roughly 2 miles from the perimeter of the Palisades fire that has already ravaged more than 23,000 acres and destroyed thousands of structures this month.
Officials lifted evacuation warnings for the Sepulveda fire after firefighters said they stopped “all forward progress” of the blaze. The fire wasn’t immediately threatening any homes, the Los Angeles Fire Department said.
The new fires hit a region already reeling from weeks of historic flames and bracing for further damage from strong winds and potential mudslides from rain that is forecast this weekend.
The Hughes fire in northern Los Angeles County, near the city of Santa Clarita, broke out Wednesday and scorched more than 10,100 acres. It was 14% contained by early Thursday, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, or Cal Fire. Some 4,000 firefighters worked overnight to contain the fire.
The Palisades fire killed a famous surfer, too: a guy staying behind to save his house and his CAT!. His name was Randy “Crawdaddy” Miod, and he was only 55:
So, when the Palisades fire made its way toward Malibu earlier this month, he didn’t leave. He had ridden out fires before and was determined to stay behind to protect his house, his cat and the life he loved.
On Jan. 7, Smith spoke to Miod on the phone. He said he could see smoke, but he wasn’t leaving. The last thing he told his mother was: “Pray for the Palisades and pray for Malibu. I love you.”
On Jan. 9, Smith learned that her son’s remains had been found outside his home. He was 55 years old. When Bel heard the news, she found it hard to believe: She had never thought of Miod as being 55.
*A kid hit the jackpot by finding a very rare (but not old) baseball card: the Topps rookie card for Pirates pitcher Paul Skenes:
One of the sports card hobby’s most sought-after modern cards came to light Tuesday.
The 2024 Topps Chrome Update Rookie Debut Patch one-of-one autographed card for Pittsburgh Pirates phenom pitcher Paul Skenes was pulled by an 11-year-old collector in Los Angeles, the card company announced via social media. It later added that the child only opened one hobby box (which includes 24 packs with four cards in each pack) when they hit the card.
Apparently there’s only one of these (see below):
Shortly after Topps released the news Tuesday, the Pirates reaffirmed their offer for the card via Instagram.
The MLB Debut Patch, which was first introduced last year, has been one of Fanatics’ most prominent innovations since acquiring Topps. Before each player’s first MLB game they play, a small patch is placed on the sleeve of their uniform. Once that game is complete the patch is removed and put into a trading card that the player autographs. The card then goes into a set and becomes a highly coveted and unique collectible. This is also currently being done in MLS, for which Topps also has a trading card license. And with Topps acquiring the licenses for both the NFL and NBA in the coming years, plans for expanding the program to those leagues are also being made.
“Getting to the big leagues is one thing,” Skenes said in a Topps-produced video right after signing the card. “Sticking around and pitching is another. This patch shows that I’m a big leaguer, and there are only so many people in the world who can say that. There’s kind of a small fraternity of people who can say they made their debut. There’s a small number of people who have this patch. To have something physical like that, to be able to commemorate it, it’s pretty cool.”
Via Card Ladder, the 2024 Rookie Debut Patch carrying the highest price tag on the open market came from the Tampa Bay Rays’ Junior Caminero. His PSA 9 graded card sold for $66,000 on Dec. 20. The Rookie Debut Patch card for the Cincinnati Reds’ Elly De La Cruz received a PSA 10 grade recently and should also fetch a much higher price than the Caminero card. Last July, a $150,000 bounty was accepted for Anthony Volpe’s 2023 Debut Patch card.
The Skenes card should eclipse them all. Even hand-drawn imitations of the Skenes card have sold for significant amounts on eBay in recent months, with one going for $150 in November and another for $200 earlier this month.
As you see above, there’s a big reward if you get it:
Collectors have been hunting for Skenes’ unique rookie patch autographed card ever since the release of the 2024 Topps Chrome Update set dropped in November. Many collectors have offered up bounties for the card, most notably the Pittsburgh Pirates and Livvy Dunne, Skenes’ girlfriend. The team has offered a package that includes two season tickets behind home plate at PNC Park for 30 years and a host of other unique experiences and items. Dunne, an LSU gymnast and social influencer, offered the card holder a chance to sit with her in a suite during a game if the person took the Pirates’ deal.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is using her tail as an indicator:
Hili: You look as if you forgot where the fridge is.A: I’m thinking about something else.Hili: The fridge is where my tail is pointing.
Hili: Wyglądasz tak, jakbyś zapomniał gdzie jest lodówka.Ja: Myślę o czymś innym.Hili: Lodówka jest tam gdzie wskazuje mój ogon.
*******************
From Things with Faces: This should scare you!
From America’s Cultural Decline into Idiocy:
From Merilee:
From Masih. Finally the ICC goes after the right people!
The International Criminal Court’s call for the arrest of Hibatullah Akhundzada, the Taliban leader, is a historic and momentous day in the fight for justice. Today, I stand with the brave women of Afghanistan, congratulating them and dreaming of the day when these criminals are… pic.twitter.com/zg0I3VZOqu
— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) January 23, 2025
Wikipedia was captured by the Jew haters, but I see now this part of the entry has been changed back to the deaths caused by Hamas. Look what was there before!
WOW.
Nefarious Wikipedia editors have made it appear as though Israel was responsible for every death on October 7. The system is broken. @WikiBias2024 pic.twitter.com/sSnYXveDl3
— The Mossad: Satirical and Awesome (@TheMossadIL) January 21, 2025
From Bryan:
Haha this math joke is hilarious. pic.twitter.com/4cYI20wkpq
— Abakcus (@abakcus) January 22, 2025
From Luana:
This is an “anti-racism seminar” at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia.
Stereotyping Jews as pets of the right wing Liberal Party leader Peter Dutton.
This is an absolute farce. “Anti-racism training” everybody pic.twitter.com/cV2RKYhIzk
— Drew Pavlou (@DrewPavlou) January 23, 2025
From Malcolm; a useful helper at work:
Office helper. pic.twitter.com/QT92IUeh2t
— cats with jobs 🛠 (@CatWorkers) January 5, 2025
From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I posted:
Gassed upon arrival at the camp, this Norwegian woman was just seventeen.
— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-01-24T11:33:30.007Z
Two posts from Dr. Cobb. Look at this worm! I put the video below the post, and Matthew added a paraphrase of Shakespeare:
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous nature is! O brave new world,
That has such worms in’t.
The spaghetti worms (Terebellidae) flail tentacles like a chaotic noodle monster to trap food. Elegance is overrated when tentacle spaghetti works just fine.#NoodleTactics #invertebrates #marinelife
— Dr Craig R McClain (@drcraigmc.bsky.social) 2025-01-23T17:25:09.612Z
Matthew thinks that this guy looks like he’s from the 1980s (it’s a bit enhanced but not colorized):
I think this is a remarkably contemporary-looking photograph, which masks the fact it was actually taken 111 years ago! I've enhanced this amazing autochrome of Henri Lumiere, which was photographed in 1914, during the Great War, by his father Auguste. It was taken in colour and isn't colourised.
— BabelColour (@babelcolour.bsky.social) 2025-01-23T19:11:20.018Z
Will New Mexico be renamed New America?
I didn’t know – or forgot – that “brave new world” was coined by The Bard!
The worms are quite cinematic – would make a good B-movie monster.
But the real question I want to know from PCC(E) is “smooth or crunchy?!”
Smooth is blasphemy in my peanut butter religion.
Happy Friday!
Trust me, if you ever get diverticulitis you will have a conversion experience.
I get that!
Yuck. That “Dutton’s Jew” thing looks like something someone at Pharyngula would draw up.
PS – I’ve always wondered what “Judeo-Christian values” actually are?
Yeah, that was disgusting. It reminds me of a DEI training at my workplace that wasn’t quite as bad. They emphasized the difference of work cultures, Western emphasizing hard work and individualism with African and Eastern emphasizing family and collectivism. Another demeaning one was where we were instructed that black people don’t like it when white people notice or worse, want to touch their hair.
Despite its reputation for general sanity there’s some seriously extreme woke garbage coming out of my country of birth.
Today (?) is Australia Day (Aust’s 4 July) and there’s all sorts of kerfuffles about that and the Aborigines and their “allies”.
Quilette covers it well as it is based (in every way) there.
I’ll be putting a shrimp on the barbie here in Florida. 🙂
D.A.
NYC
On the subject of the Gulf of Mexico, it seems that Trump may be able to get some progress in this name change, but it won’t be universally applied. Federal agencies may be compelled to start using the new name, but state agencies don’t have to. Florida, with its ultra right wing governor, has already endorsed the change. Bordering countries don’t have to, though. There are many geographical features that have different names applied to them from different countries.
This article summarizes some of this: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2025/01/21/donald-trump-gulf-of-america-name-change/77850538007/, and reminds us that Obama re-named Mt. McKinley –> Mt. Denali. But Trumps’ executive order has declared that the old McKinley name is coming back.
It is telling that Trump is starting to talk glowingly of McKinley. The POTUS of the gilded age, friendly to industrialists and monopolists. He also loved tariffs.
Yes, when I heard of his stupid declaration I immediately thought of the Persian/Arabian Gulf.
If the current President had an actual design staff, they could have immediately updated or revised a dozen or so globes, maps, with whatever he wanted, and then immediately distributed them to every place he’s likely to visit, and tell him they’re ‘working on the rest’. This could save a lot of time and money.
I’d bet that #47 would be satisfied with that, as he really doesn’t care about what anyone else thinks, he just want to know his orders were carried out, and that he could see the results.
I think we should just be grateful it wasn’t renamed “the Gulf of Trump.” I wonder which one of his handlers talked him down from that (though it may have been a group effort.)
hee hee
You know, If he had gone with the ‘Gulf of North America’ I wouldn’t have a problem with it. It’s the jingoism that sticks in my craw.
Greenland? No. But… “Trumplandia” does have a nice ring to it.
In show biz news, the first “openly trans woman” has been nominated for a “Best Actress Oscar.” (“Openly?” Have there been rumors about any others?) If you accept the premise that Trans Women are Women, then this was inevitable.
Actually, this doesn’t bother me. The Academy is a private organization, and the members can do what they want. Unlike sports, being transgender will not give the nominee an unfair advantage over biological women. It will be fun to see if any celebrities (other than conservatives such as Kirk Cameron, Kid Rock or Kevin Sorbo) will dare to speak out.
Three conservative actors who first names all begin with the letter “K”. Hmmm…
Ha! I didn’t notice that until after I posted it.
Actually their commonality is that all three are stone cold retards. Further evidence of the times where the right are mentally retarded and the left are mentally ill. “Strange days indeed.” John Lennon, 1980
D.A.
NYC
ps Isn’t that Kirk Cameron clown an old earth creationist? And Kid Rock. Really. Creationists and anti-vaxers go in the same asylum as trans activists.
Most likely the Academy will just quietly decide to give the Oscar to an actress. The actor will be lauded for her ground-breaking courage and then told to please fuck off now. I hope he wins, though. It will be fun to see the losing actresses, each of whom knows of course she would have won, all choking down rage as they smile at him at the after-party. I’m sure there are many actresses already seething at missing out on one of the four nominations because this dude got one. After all, Riley Gaines and battered women are just amateur hour. We all love trans people as long as they don’t horn in on our grift. We’re talking real money here.
IMHO, the award should have gone to a woman. There’s already a Best Actor category for men.
Awarding the Best Actress to a man means no woman won this year.
Related: Nate Silver says that Trump has
“swung policy far to the right on immigration, the environment, transgender rights..”
On the environment yes. On transgender and immigration NO. Blocking men in women’s sports is just common sense. So is ending a policy in which millions of people just strolled across the southern border.
But don’t you see, Fr. Katze? Transwomen are in every respect a subset of women. Ideologically they are women who were incorrectly assigned male at birth and have now “come out” as the women they always knew they were. “Welcome home, Alicia! ❤️“. The activists aren’t being metaphorical. They mean it literally. A woman is defined not by sex but by the gender she chooses. These is no moral basis to exclude transwomen from any category of woman, least of all the category “actress” in virtue-signalling Hollywood. To do so would be to exclude them on the basis of gender identity. We’d be saying that cis-women are OK to be Oscar-winning actresses but trans-women are not, which is gender discrimination on its face.
The only reason to highlight that a woman is trans is to make her intersectionality newsworthy, not to snipe at her. A lesbian woman is special. A straight woman is not. But both are women. Meh. A black woman is special. A white woman is not (unless she is a lesbian, but a black lesbian woman is more special.) By parallel argument, a trans-woman is special (hence “ground-breaking”) but a cis-woman is nothing special at all, and indeed a straight white cis-woman is not only not special, she is herself an oppressor. Women’s rights that all women can claim are so 1970s. You have only intersectional rights now. (That’s why so many SWC-Ws voted for Donald Trump, to protect their membership in the oppressor class.)
So the only reason to point out in the news that a woman is trans is not to dog-whistle that she is a man, — oh, No! — but to call attention to her special-ness as a woman. The consensus: Transwomen are (a special kind of) women, holds for exactly the same reason that fiat currency has value: belief in it is enforced by law and by social pressure. Saying “But transwomen aren’t women, they’re men!” may not be enough anymore to break the spell. It may just get you in trouble with the Human Rights Commission if the Canadian Government can make it so.
Yep that’s the thinking! An extra special woman.
And definitely Trudeau & Co are all in.
Apparently, Wikipedia has recently taken at least some disciplinary action regarding some of the antisemitic distortions it has promulgated. This from the ADL: https://www.adl.org/resources/press-release/numerous-anti-israel-wikipedia-editors-including-instigators-who-targeted?utm_campaign.
And one would think that DOGE would target the Gulf of America naming campaign a waste of taxpayer money. Will Elon Musk call for its elimination in his report to the President?
The day after Don announced the name change, the gulf coast was hit with its first-ever blizzard. I don’t think God likes the change.
There is a very good and relatively recent documentary on the escape of many Norwegian Jews to Sweden, titled Escape to Sweden. Sadly Liv Markus was not among them. The film seems to be available free to PBS station subscribers.
On this date in 1935, the Kruger Brewery of Newark, NJ, first introduced canned beer to the public. The brewery wasn’t sure if canned beer would be successful, so it was first introduced in Richmond, VA, far from Kruger’s home market. So, if canned beer was a flop, it would not negatively impact their home market.
As y’all may know, canned beer was successful.
In 1933, Kruger produced 2000 cans of beer for testing. For years, there were rumors that one of these cans survived. A few years ago, one of these cans surfaced in, of all places, Texas. It was sold in a private auction, so there is no record of the price realized, but the rumors said that the price was anywhere from $50k to $100k.
If you think that price is ridiculous, please refer to the article about the baseball card posted above!
Not to mention what Boss Tweet’s bitcoins have brought in.
Another Trumpism:
Trump says Canada would have ‘much better’ health coverage as a state
https://www.ctvnews.ca/world/article/trump-says-canada-would-have-much-better-health-coverage-as-a-state/
I am amused at the uproar about the “Gulf of America” given how many on the Left readily adopt this week’s new language whenever the zealots demand that we change words. I think the word games range from silly to stupid to harmful, but I’ll take “Gulf of America” over “chestfeeding” and “front hole” any day. Hell, I’ll take it over “cis” or even over “person experiencing homelessness.”
People will readily call a dude with a bulging package a “she,” but this Gulf thing is just a bridge too far. Did anyone ask the Gulf how he feels about it? How does he “identify”?
HAHAH. Killer Doug. I thought the same. We can really call it what we want. For…well….ever the Iranians and Gulf Arabs have been arguing about the name of the Gulf between them.
Even Japan and Korea can’t agree on the name of the sea between them.
It isn’t uncommon and not that important.
D.A.
NYC
David, sounds like a dispute over names assigned at berth. Regarding our little Gulf, I did consult a Spanish-English dictionary to ensure I didn’t “misgender” the body, though questions of fluidity did cross my mind.
Barbara, shame on you for taunting me like that!
No, Doug, it’s “person experiencing unhousedness”, or maybe “domicile challenged person”.
Why does the Boss keep reading Ezra Klein?
Not only is EK a fool, even his hair is so woke it glows purple in the dark.
As if his era of NYTimes idiocy wasn’t enough.. look up his slimy history re: Sam Harris. Or his ideas about Israel.
Klein is a shrieking little turd. And I’m being polite there.
D.A.
NYC
Orange Julius has apparently now removed Tony Fauci’s security detail.
So dumb. Trump is so reflexively vindictive. Also removed Bolton’s protection despite being targeted by Iran personally (not that I’m any kind of Bolton fan myself).
This kind of revenge puts many of Biden’s “pre-pardons” into perspective.
On that though…. I do object to his pardons of Fed death penalty criminals.
D.A.
NYC/Florida
Academy awards.
Is acting one of those categories where it really doesn’t matter. Actors act, it’s just what the individual brings to the table or set as it were.
I’d say that the director would need to be on their toes, details would matter much as in, if the actor over extends the role it would get facial. The character would would get messy.
But this brings me to, is the part a trans women pkaying a TW role, or a TW playing a womens role, hence my first thoughts on the matter. Perhaps its better if the TW or TM actor goes into best actor category.
The transwoman actor is playing a transwoman. You may look up the movie’s plot on Wikipedia: The name of the movie is Emilia Perez.
In the Netflix hit show “Squid Game”, season 2, one of the characters is a trans woman. The actor playing “her” is a man. Some ‘wokies’ got very upset that the character wasn’t played by a biological woman, because “trans women are women”. You can’t make this stuff up.
I had a hard time wrapping my head around this conundrum.