Welcome to the Cruelest Day: Tuesday, October 14, 2025, and it’s National Dessert Day, celebrating the best course of any meal. Below is a nice clay bowl of phirni, a Persian dessert made with ground rice cooked with milk and “flavored with aromatic spices such as cardamom, saffron, and rose water, and garnished with nuts like almonds and pistachios, along with rose petals, vark etc.” This one looks excellent:
It’s also Ada Lovelace Day, National Real Sugar Day (as present in Mexican Coke, which, in blind taste tests, is indistinguishable from American Coke), World Standards Day, and Be Bald and Be Free Day. An example of the last one is Molly Tuttle, perhaps the best woman bluegrass guitarist in America. Molly has alopecia areata, an autoimmune disease that removes every hair from her body; she’s been totally bald since age three but only recently has become open with it, and now often plays without a wig An example is below (she has a small solo at 1:47).
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the October 14 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*Hamas released 20 living hostages yesterday, and now they’ve reunited with their families. 2,000 Palestinian prisoners were also released: a ratio of 100 to 1.
The hostages in Gaza were returned to Israel on Monday and nearly 2,000 Palestinians were freed from Israeli jails under a cease-fire deal, and President Trump participated in a summit meeting in Egypt on the peace process along with many other world leaders.
There are many videos of families and loved ones reunited on the Internet; let this one stand for them all. Their memories need not be a blessing yet, as they’ll be making new memories:
Yosef-Chaim Ohana’s father reunites with his son and it is a hug for the ages 🥹 pic.twitter.com/2izIBicSFg
— Aviva Klompas (@AvivaKlompas) October 13, 2025
In Israel, Mr. Trump hailed the agreement as “the end of the war” in an address to cheering members of Israel’s Parliament, but there remain many unanswered questions about whether Israel and Hamas can reach a lasting peace, and about the future of Gaza, which has been devastated by two years of war.
Hamas released 20 hostages from Gaza on Monday as Mr. Trump arrived in Israel. Hours later, the Israeli authorities said that they had finished freeing all 1,968 Palestinian prisoners and detainees slated for release as part of the hostage exchange deal.
Mr. Trump told Israeli lawmakers that the agreement marked “the historic dawn of a new Middle East” before traveling to Egypt, where President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi greeted him. “From the city of Sharm el Sheikh, the will of the people meets the resolve of world leaders to end the war in Gaza,” Mr. el-Sisi said. “They all carry a single message to mankind: Enough war. Welcome to peace.”
At the summit, Mr. Trump shared a long handshake while speaking with Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, in their first encounter since 2017. The Trump administration denied Mr. Abbas a visa to travel to New York last month for the U.N. General Assembly, forcing him to address the gathering by video link.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel did not participate, his office said, citing a Jewish religious holiday.
On a sadder note, the Times of Israel reports the return of some bodies:
The IDF says troops in the Gaza Strip have received two caskets, with the apparent bodies of slain hostages, from the Red Cross a short while ago.
The Red Cross, meanwhile, has collected two more caskets from Hamas a short while ago, and is now bringing them to the same location, the IDF says.
The IDF is set to inspect the four caskets, before draping them in Israeli flags and holding a short ceremony led by a military rabbi.
The remains will then be taken for identification to confirm they belong to slain hostages.
The military says “Hamas is required to abide by the agreement and make the necessary efforts to return all the bodies,” after the terror group announced it would only return the bodies of four of the 28 dead hostages today.
Here’s a heartwarming video of the IDF receiving the hostages, and families go wild as they see their relatives and loved ones on video. The reuiniting has already begun.
There’s also a speech from a spokesperson in the Israeli Prime Minister’s office.
*Trump is in Israel planning to greet the hostages, but then he heads to Egypt to try to broker a final agreement to end the war:
President Trump left Washington on Sunday afternoon, heading to Israel to meet with hostage families on Monday and then address the Knesset. He is then scheduled to travel to Egypt, where he and President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi will lead a summit to discuss the peace process in Gaza with more than 20 countries.
A spokeswoman for the Israeli government, Shosh Bedrosian, told reporters in Tel Aviv on Sunday that the hostages were expected to be released at one time to the Red Cross early Monday morning local time. They will be transferred initially to the Re’im military base in southern Israel, where they will reunite with their families, she said.
According to Vice President JD Vance, Mr. Trump plans to “welcome them in person.”
Mr. Vance, speaking on the Fox News program “Sunday Morning Futures,” also raised doubts about whether the bodies of all the dead hostages would be returned. “I think the reality is that some of the hostages we may never get back,” he said, referring to their remains, “but I do think most of them, with some effort, we’ll be able to give them to their families so they at least have some closure.”
The summit meeting in Egypt will be held at Sharm el-Sheikh, a Red Sea resort, where mediators recently hammered out a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas to free Israeli hostages in exchange for Palestinian prisoners and a partial pullback of Israeli forces.
The cease-fire, which took effect on Friday morning, is the first phase of an agreement brokered by the United States, Qatar, Egypt and Turkey to end the two-year war, with the next phases still to be negotiated. Mr. Trump put pressure on both sides to break the deadlock.
Several Arab nations who support Mr. Trump’s peace plan will attend the summit, along with the U.N. secretary-general and the heads of state from the United Kingdom, France, Italy and Spain. The president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, was invited to participate, according to Hussein al-Sheikh, a senior Palestinian official, and was expected to attend. It was not immediately clear whether any Israeli representatives would participate.
Hamas has not agreed to disarm, and Egypt is calling for a two-state solution, something that is way premature. If Hamas does not disarm, which was one of the main aims of the Israeli government, then Israel has lost the war—unless somehow an armed Hamas can coexist with a peaceful non-Jew-hating Palestinian government. That seems impossible. And if a two-state solution is put into effect, then Israel has lost doubly, for Hamas would be rewarded for its terrorism of two years ago. But in truth, I don’t think either of these will happen. I am curious about what will happen next, but right now I’m looking for videos of the hostages reuniting with their families. So far there are none, for they have to be taken to the hospital first.
*The Free Press has another coup, an article I’ve looked for around the internet and finally found: “Woody Allen remembers Diane Keaton“. I’m surprised it was in the Free Press, but perhaps nobody else wanted to publish something by Woody Allen. They were a couple for a while, you know. Excerpts:
t’s grammatically incorrect to say “most unique,” but all rules of grammar, and I guess anything else, are suspended when talking about Diane Keaton. Unlike anyone the planet has experienced or is unlikely to ever see again, her face and laugh illuminated any space she entered.
I first laid eyes on her lanky beauty at an audition and thought, If Huckleberry Finn was a gorgeous young woman, he’d be Keaton. Fresh out of Orange County, she flew to Manhattan to act, got a job as a coat check girl, and was hired for a small part in the musical Hair, in which she eventually had the lead.
Meanwhile, David Merrick and I were auditioning actresses in the Morosco Theatre for my play Play It Again, Sam. Sandy Meisner taught an acting class and told Merrick about an up-and-coming actress who was amazing. She came in and read for us and knocked us both for a loop. A small glitch was that she appeared to be taller than me, and we didn’t want that to figure in the jokes. Like two schoolkids, we stood back-to-back on the stage of the Morosco and measured. Fortunately we were the same height, and Merrick hired her.
For the first week of rehearsal we never spoke a word to one another. She was shy, I was shy, and with two shy people things can get pretty dull. Finally, by chance we took a break at the same moment and wound up sharing a fast bite at some Eighth Avenue joint. That was our first moment of personal contact. The upshot is that she was so charming, so beautiful, so magical, that I questioned my sanity. I thought: Could I be in love so quickly?
. . . . As time went on I made movies for an audience of one, Diane Keaton. I never read a single review of my work and cared only what Keaton had to say about it. If she liked it, I counted the film as an artistic success. If she was less than enthusiastic, I tried to use her criticism to reedit and come away with something she felt better about. By then we were living together and I was seeing the world through her eyes. She had huge talent for comedies and drama, but she could also dance and sing with feeling. She also wrote books and did photography, made collages, decorated homes, and directed films. Finally, she was a million laughs to be around.
. . . . It was amazing that this beautiful yokel went on to become an award-winning actress and sophisticated fashion icon. We had a few great personal years together and finally we both moved on, and why we parted only God and Freud might be able to figure out.
She went on to date a number of exciting men, all of them more fascinating than I was. I went on to keep trying to make that great masterpiece that I am still struggling with when I last looked. I kidded Keaton that we’d wind up—she like Norma Desmond, me like Erich von Stroheim, once her director, now her chauffeur. But the world is constantly being redefined, and with Keaton’s passing it is redefined once again. A few days ago the world was a place that included Diane Keaton. Now it’s a world that does not. Hence, it’s a drearier world. Still, there are her movies. And her great laugh still echoes in my head.
*Finally, a third from the Free Press: “The ‘peace protestors’ who won’t give peace a chance.” Has anybody see pro-Palestinian protestors celebrating the cease-fire, ANYWHERE in the U.S. I haven’t, though I’ve found plenty of scenes of both Gazans and Israelis celebrating. The pro-Pals apparently didn’t really want a cease fire. You know what they want, right? Quotes from the article:
After nearly two years of relentless campaigning by activists, journalists, academics, and a host of “pro-Palestine” personalities to stop the war in Gaza that Hamas started on October 7, 2023, a credible plan to do just that is finally taking hold. You might think the proposal would be met with relief, if not enthusiasm, by those who seemed so desperate to end the most destructive chapter in contemporary Palestinian history.
Strangely, however, activists and organizations formerly insistent on an immediate ceasefire suddenly appear quite opposed to ending the war in Gaza if it is based on the U.S. proposal, which they have denounced as a colonial attempt to continue the genocide, even though the plan literally stops the actual war.
. . .The lack of support from self-styled peace activists in the West is unsurprising. A lack of clarity, consistency, or levelheaded thinking has been a staple of Western-based activism that purports to care about the Palestinian people in Gaza.
Despite the loud marches, the disruption of numerous events, the encampments, and all the problematic displays of “pro-Palestine” sentiments online and in person, when it comes down to brass tacks, there is little understanding or interest in how dealmaking works.
. . .Many of these voices have long called for a ceasefire that would merely freeze the conflict, as opposed to fundamentally altering the landscape in Gaza to effect real political transformation and deliver a lasting peace. As someone who has lived part of my life in Gaza, lost family members and my childhood homes in this war, and is dedicated to Gaza’s future rejuvenation and healing, I believe it is more urgent than ever to liberate Palestinians from the vicious cycles of violence brought on by Hamas’s 18-year rule of the territory. During that time, the Strip has experienced multiple periods of war, blockade, reconstruction, stalemate—rinse and repeat.
Worse, I have watched the devolution of the pro-Palestine narrative into widespread adoption of Hamas’s views and positions to such an extent that the Islamist fascist organization has become legitimized as an actual “resistance” movement. With that false belief comes the false corollary that October 7 was indeed a just, even rational, reaction to decades of failed efforts to free the Palestinian people. Years before October 7, this was not the dominant view. I say that as a Palestinian from Gaza who was once part of the pro-Palestine mainstream, and support for Hamas was indeed on the fringe.
Nowadays, however, you can’t go to a mainstream pro-Palestine event or conference without proud, overt support for jihadi terrorism and Hamas’s armed-resistance narrative. This was the case at the recent People’s Conference for Palestine, which featured a giant banner of the map of Palestine without Israel, and the slogan, in Arabic: “All spaces are theaters for revenge.” At last month’s ArabCon, things were not much different; the event, organized by the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, featured speeches that supported Hamas, the resistance, and anti-Western narratives throughout the conference.
More broadly, the Hamas narrative has clearly been mainstreamed as the Palestinian narrative—thanks in large part to the unholy alliance of academia, social media influencers, and the rest of the woke-industrial complex, as well as foreign-influence peddlers like Qatar, Iran, Russia, and others.
. . . . One of the first steps to freeing Palestinians from the horrors of war is to free them from the “Free Palestine Movement” in the diaspora and Western world
As I said, the pro-Palestinian protestors don’t really want a cease-fire. They want what Hamas wants: the end of Israel and the extermination of the Jews.
*The NYT tells us that good beer and beer consumption is declining, and an op-ed tells us “How to save beer.” (The author, though writing in the NYT, works for the WSJ.)
In 2023, beer consumption in the United States fell to its lowest level in decades. The industry faces both demographic issues (there are fewer young drinkers) and image ones (beer’s stubborn reputation as a carb-heavy relic for dads and dullards). People with remote jobs aren’t going for drinks after work, and taproom traffic hasn’t bounced back to pre-Covid levels. Hard seltzers and canned cocktails are cutting into beer’s share of a faltering market. And the drinking rate among Americans is at its lowest rate since the 1930s.
For a time, the proliferation of small-batch craft beers helped elevate the beer industry into one that was less about keggers and more about connoisseurship.But even that trend is reversing: According to the Brewers Association, craft beer sales fell 4 percent last year. For the first time in two decades, more breweries closed than opened.
But I’d argue the future of beer is still craft beer and that the pint glass is half full, not empty. It just needs something worth raising again.
Here are three suggestions, though the first one is ALL IMPORTANT (my bolding)!:
There are a few simple steps the craft beer industry can take to immediately address its downturn. For starters, it must abandon the I.P.A. arms race. Craft beer’s obsession with hops has gone too far, as what started as a rebellion against bland lagers has spiraled into a bitter, boozy blur. Double I.P.A.s. Triple I.P.A.s. Hazy. Juicy. Dank. West Coast. New England. Most taste like pine resin with a splash of grapefruit pith, and not in a good way.
Craft breweries also cranked up the alcohol: 10 percent to 12 percent alcohol by volume is common now, more than double a standard beer. Dogfish Head’s 120 Minute I.P.A. hits 18 percent — a sweet, heavy nightcap. But beer isn’t bourbon. You don’t swirl it in a snifter and reflect on your childhood. You drink a few, with friends, and it’s supposed to refresh, not knock you out. Brewers chasing complexity are losing the people who just want something cold, crisp and repeatable. I love a good I.P.A., but bring back the pilsner, the amber, the pale ale, or reinvent the lager, as many have.
Craft beers also need smarter labels. The industry built its identity on personality, with quirky mascots, puns and inside jokes as logos. It was fun — until it became clutter and noise. My beer aisle now looks like a vertical Comic Con merch table.
I don’t know what idiot decided that all good craft beers have to be bitter with heavy hops, but in some places all you can get is overhopped beers. These people need to taste Timothy Taylor’s Landlord in the UK, and then make something like it. Here’s a friend, Andrew Berry, having a Landlord in the UK, though he lives in Cambridge. Lucky fellow! Also read the new article in the Harvard Crimson about how a new species of butterfly has been named after Andrew, Euptychia andrewberryi. Note as well the reference to Andrew’s penchant for Weetabix.
Now THIS is a pint. Dump those overhopped IPAs down the drain and have one of these:
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili’s being cute:
Hili: I’m thinking out loud.
Andrzej: I don’t hear anything.
Hili: That’s because I only think out loud inwardly.
In Polish:
Hili: Siedzę i głośno myślę.
Ja: Nie słyszę.
Hili: Bo ja głośno myślę tylko do siebie.
*******************
From Jesus of the Day:
From Now That’s Wild:
From The Language Nerds:
Masih has been awfully quiet these days. Fortunately, we have a stand-in who is more vociferous. Reposted by JKR, the “SRJC” in this tweet stands for “Santa Rosa Junior College”:
1.A male @SantaRosaJC player concussed a woman in practice.
2.Three women have since left the SRJC women’s volleyball team citing safety concerns.
3.Yet the college president, Dr. Garcia, is distributing flyers at women’s games claiming:“There are NO concerns related to… https://t.co/5PfGql8lvY pic.twitter.com/toBh1Xpl1e
— ICONS (@icons_women) October 10, 2025
From Simon. I posted this spoof the other day, but for some reason it didn’t show up. If you did see it, well, skip this one:
Circumcision Causes Autism?
— Brent Terhune (@brentterhune.bsky.social) 2025-10-10T21:12:41.545Z
From Barry, a tweet of John Oliver criticizing Bari Weiss. Barry says, “He’s not a fan. Oliver also does an excellent job of showing just how shoddy the ‘reporting; at The Free Press can be: ‘It’s at best irresponsible and at worst deeply misleading’.”: If you want to go directly to the video, it’s here.
In which John Oliver methodically unpacks how thin it is to claim you’re all about “the truth” when you’re only running essays don’t get properly fact-checked — and don’t hold up to even basic reporting scrutiny http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gieT…
— Olivia Messer (@oliviamesser.bsky.social) 2025-10-13T14:01:22.002Z
When skydiving just isn’t extreme enough: sky gliding + sky surfing.pic.twitter.com/RdsgxJU5fO
— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) September 13, 2025
Two from my feed. First, an animal rescue video. Sometimes I think there’s something to this animal “thankfulness”:
they knew 🥹🤌 he was helping their baby… instead of attacking, they🦢 thanked him. nature is truly beautiful 🥰 pic.twitter.com/i7ckZYroU7
— Nature & Animals🌴 (@naturelife_ok) October 12, 2025
Raccoons playing pranks:
Good morning all. I’m exhausted. Got zero sleep. Who knew raccoons played such pranks? 😡 pic.twitter.com/fxdGSkfZRj
— Dr. Lynn Fynn-derella🐭 (@Fynnderella1) October 12, 2025
One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:
14 October 1943 | At 15.30 prisoners of the German extermination center at #Sobibor began a revolt. Most of the SS guards were killed. Around 300 prisoners managed to escape, some 50 of them survived the war. Learn more: https://t.co/YxFnsWN4lI
— Auschwitz Memorial (@auschwitzmemorial.bsky.social) 2025-10-14T09:36:05.884047495Z
And one from Dr. Cobb, who’s now in Shanghai:
A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
I would rather try to persuade a man to go along, because once I have persuaded him he will stick. If I scare him, he will stay just as long as he is scared, and then he is gone. -Dwight D. Eisenhower, US general and 34th president (14 Oct 1890-1969)
During the Cold War the Soviet Union insisted that all it wanted was peace. Fun fact: the world мир in Russian means both “peace” and “world.” A friend of mine would point out that it was unclear, therefore, whether the USSR wanted peace or the world. We were inclined to think it was the latter.
Red Sq parades, big signs “MIR MIRY” (“Peace to the world”)
Do you remember those commie shows every May, Dr. B? I do.
Yes, the beer world sucks these days. I used to be able to go into even a small liquor store and get a nice variety of German beers. Now I am lucky if I can find anything but IPAs or Anheuser-Busch (InBev) brands.
I realize that taste in beer is a very personal thing, but I can’t help myself from sharing my enjoyment of this beer with fellow lager-lovers . . .
DrBrydon, have you ever tried Eggenberg Samichlaus Classic? It’s an Austrian doppleock brewed just one day a year – December 6 – and then aged 10 months before it’s bottled. It does have a high ABV of 14%, but I think it hides the alcohol very well. A real pleasure to sip, IMO.
Regarding craft beers: I am glad to see that it is not just me/I. A few years ago, I was excited to have several local craft breweries pop up around town serving a range of freshly brewed recognizable flavors. But something happened as over time I could no longer recognize the flavors; my favorites were no longer on offer, and there was a confusing noise of label art competing for my attention. I guess these breweries were just competing with one another for new niches, but the result has been that I seldom visit them anymore, staying home with my reliable bottles of Scotch and sometimes a few bottles of Guinness.
Down with IPA’s! Up with lagers!
And don’t get me started on “summer” brews with grapefruit. Grapefruit in beer! Ouch.
The racoon video is pretty obviously an AI fake.
How so? I don’t understand.
Someone well-versed in the technicalities would probably respond to you better. To me, however it was just too good to be true.
John Oliver has some good criticism of Bari Weiss and Free Press, but he’s most offended by her abhorrence of DEI.
hi Jerry, why do you write about “2,000 Palestinian hostages were also released:”?
If I said “hostages” it was a typo. I meant “prisoners” of course. I’ll fix it if it’s still there.
And speaking of Woody Allen and The Free Press, Bari Weiss interviewed Allen a few weeks ago. It’s a very interesting piece: https://youtu.be/xc9tEipzWUk?si=Th44cXsBqa2cp_RX.
And while we’re also on the subject of beer, I have been sampling the many alcohol-free beers that have entered the market recently. Many are thin and unsatisfying, but some are quite good. Try Samuel Adams Golden and Fremont Dark, for example. The Samuel Adams Golden has a remarkably good head for a near-beer, small bubbles almost like a nitro, and good flavor. Fremont Dark is, well, dark, and has quite a bit of flavor. As for IPA’s, there are too many of them and they are often too bitter for me.. Some even taste like grapefruit juice! If you want to drink beer, you don’t have to go the direction of the high-alcohol brews—which I find to be a bit harsh tasting. You can actually go the other direction. Alcohol-free beer, you ask? Let the screaming begin!
The California volleyball complaint that blew up in the past month:
If you look at the very bottom of the unexpanded — this old iPad won’t expand them — tweet, you see an argument that “policing” women’s bodies with “intrusive” testing “harms” cis-women, too, and so just go with self-ID. The irony is that even if the college did sex testing, it would just show what we already know: the transgendered athlete in question is male. He knows he has male genitalia, and we know he knows it because he allows himself to be known publicly as a transwoman. No one would be more surprised than he if he turned out to be SRY-negative.
So really the college refuses sex testing, no matter how non-intrusive, because acting on the results would be giving effect to a belief that self-proclaimed gender doesn’t count, not in athletics anyway, only sex does. And that, Ladies and Gentlemen, they can never be permitted to abide. God knows what that might lead to. Dogs living with cats maybe, even.
I have to say I was skeptical when Molly Tuttle went electric on her latest album, “Goodby Little Miss Sunshine,” but, Molly being Molly, she won me over and I can’t stop listening to it. Are there any other bluegrass, oldtime, or big-hat-big-truck country songwriters out there who would slip “je ne sais quoi” into their lyrics?
I wonder if that guy complaining about craft breweries ever actually goes to any craft breweries. We had company this weekend, so I ended up at three different breweries over the course of the weekend.
Here was the selection at each of them (1 & 3 provided names and styles, even if the names were a tad unimaginative at the first):
Brewery 1:
Amber – Altbier
Berliner Weiss – Sour
Festbier – Festbier
German Pils – Pilsner
Hefeweizen – Hefeweizen
Kolsch – Kölsch
Oktoberfest – Märzen
Radler – Shandy
Tropidelica 25 – IPA
Vienna Red – Lager
Brewery 2:
Oktoberfest
Helles
Honey Cream
Not So Dumb Blonde
Enchanted Rock Red Ale
Hefe
Pioneer Porter
Peacepipe Pale Ale
Harper Valley IPA
Brewery 3:
Gold Export Lager – Traditional German Lager
Southerlite – Classic American Light Lager
Standard IPA – Classic American IPA
Silver King – Hazy IPA
SABA Copper Alt – German Alt-bier
Tide Runner – Bavarian Pale Ale
Maybe a tad heavy on the pale ales (especially the third), but it’s hardly like IPAs were the only options. Admittedly, going to three breweries in one weekend was a bit unusual for me, but I probably hit up a craft brewery every month or two. And I’m hard pressed to think of any craft breweries I’ve gone to any time recently that didn’t have plenty of less-hoppy options.
I’m also not terribly surprised that the number of breweries is starting to drop. As good as craft beer is, it had all the indications of a fad, and it seems a lot of the drinking public is moving on to the next fads (craft cocktails and seltzers). But I think that even after the brewery market settles down, we American beer drinkers will still be left with better options than what we had 30 years ago.
Alopecia areata causes localised patches of baldness. If she has “an autoimmune disease that removes every hair from her body” that would be alopecia totalis. Some people reserve totalis for total scalp and facial hair loss, and whole body hair loss is referred to by them as alopecia universalis.
Am I splitting hairs? 😉
Thanks for combing through that, Christopher.
John Oliver? Meh. He’s great when you agree with his premise, but openly and notoriously misguided on transgender issues, as for example, men in women’s sport. JKR called him out on that issue in an excellent statement on X in 2024. His response to that, a lengthy segment in 2025 was truly cringeworthy and packed with misinformation. He’s a prime example of how gender-madness has degraded the discourse of the “left”.
Ever heard him on Israel, Tom?
Terrible. Like there’s some kind of shortage of lefty British scolds who don’t know what they’re talking about over here.
(No offense Britishers, including my Mum).
Oliver’s large investigative team has done some decent work over the years, but he is insistently, glow-in-the-dark level woke.
Take him away. He displeases me.
D.A.
NYC
https://x.com/DavidandersonJd
“Take him away. He displeases me.”
That cracked me up!
The volleyball story, like many other, seems to be straying into spectrumism. Should the player be banned for being/having been male, with its associated advantages, or because the player is too big/strong to interact with others? Should we put a weight/strength limit of football defensive linemen so they don’t injure lightweight/smaller running backs and quarterbacks? Should PGA golfers all be given handicaps as racehorses are weighted?
You’re making that too complicated, JA. The player should be banned from women’s volleyball because he is not a woman. Full stop. As to why we have women’s sport that excludes men I’ll let the women carry that ball, but there is no “spectrumism” at all, (whatever that is) in saying men aren’t women and therefore no man can play women’s volleyball.
Other sports have weight categories and skill handicaps for the same reason baseball puts the pitcher’s mound where it is and why hockey has blue lines. It makes the game more interesting. That’s the only justification women’s sport needs for excluding men — it’s their game — but I’m open to others.
I agree. But the argument against the volley player (and others), is that the player is too strong (concussed a woman, three players left … citing safety concerns) when you are correct, being male is what is needed.
Beer consumption has been falling over the last 25 years. Working with market research companies editing videos for their clients (breweries in NZ) it was a concern back then, losing market share. The younger generations coming into pub age where more into clubs, drinking at home, going out later. Alcohol harm awareness also went up. Competition (if you can call it that) with other types of recreational drugs and drinks such as red bull & vodka. We had a fatality from over doing the red bull.
In a recent trip to the UK they were losing pubs at 30 or so a month in 2024 / 25. They had to reinvent themselves and focus on good food and a pint but it can be expensive.
I’m good for a hazy pale ale, hazier the better and the brewers are bringing the alcohol down from over 5% to under.
And up to 25 years ago wasn’t the national religion “rugby, racing and beer”?
Yes 😁 that was so but our drinking habits have morphed somewhat ( more diverse choices) and it’s not like the 50’s to late 70’s. Racing like beer consumption was on the wane by the 80’s and nowadays racing has it’s own govt minister to keep it going.
Even rugby took a hit from other sports they had to change rules to make it more exciting to counter and professionalism, sponsors TV dollars saved it.
Yes, I’ve heard of him: Winnie the Poo, right?
That’s him also know in his hay day as the “Kingmaker”.
Sounds like Game of Thrones. Any “Red Wedding” scenes?
(FWIW I was a fan of Diana Rigg, ever since The Avengers long ago).
Since NZ changed to MMP both main political parties had to go cap in hand to Winnie (NZ First party) to form a govt. He held the balance of power hence the Kingmaker moniker.
Agreed The Avengers’ Emma Peel was a must watch for every teenage boy. Never watched any of Game of Thrones. Ms Rigg did turn up in The Detectorist an off beat British c9medy drama series which I give the big thumbs up.
I think what RFK Jr meant is that there’s a meaningful association between circumcision and autism (due to babies getting more pain killers when circumcised). But some of the media, of course, frames this wildly incorrectly as “circumcision causes autism”. I even heard a few knuckle brains on NPR frame it this way–purposely distorting the reality of the original message. I wonder why they’d do that?
Well, it could be another jab at the Jews, no?
The unkindest cut of all.