Welcome to a Hump Day (“Дан грбе” in Serbian), Wednesday, October 15, 2025, and National Cheese Curd Day, a specialty of the upper Midwest. Here’s an offering from Culver’s:
It’s also “I Love Lucy” Day, a show that premiered on this day in 1951 and ran for 6 years (she had some ‘splaining to do), Global Handwashing Day (I haven’t had a cold since the pandemic, which I attribute to frequent and thorough handwashing), National Chicken Cacciatore Day, National Fossil Day, National Lemon Bar Day, National Red Wine Day, National Mushroom Day, and National Roast Pheasant Day (I’ve never had one).
This is perhaps the most famous scene in the “I Love Lucy” series: Lucy and Ethel go to work in a candy factory:
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the October 15 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*Last week the Pentagon said that news organizations will no longer be able to obtain or print information that hasn’t been authorized for release, even if the information is unclassified. They had to sign a pledge to that effect, under threat of losing their press passes. Now the news organizations are pushing back, and the MSM is, by and large, refusing to sign that pledge.
“The proposed restrictions undercut First Amendment protections by placing unnecessary constraints on gathering and publishing information,” he said in a statement Monday. “We will continue to vigorously and fairly report on the policies and positions of the Pentagon and officials across the government.”
The policy says reporters cannot obtain or solicit any information the Defense Department does not explicitly authorize. Any media representative who does not sign by 5 p.m. Tuesday has 24 hours to turn in their media credentials and clear out of the Pentagon facilities.
After pushback from reporters, news organizations and press freedom advocacy groups, the Pentagon expanded the prohibitions in the document, earning condemnation last week from the Pentagon Press Association, which represents the Pentagon press corps.
The policy “constrains how journalists can report on the U.S. military, which is funded by nearly $1 trillion in taxpayer dollars annually,” said the New York Times’s Washington bureau chief, Richard Stevenson. “The public has a right to know how the government and military are operating.”
The Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal, NPR, Reuters and the Guardian, along with the trade publications Task & Purpose and Breaking Defense, said they were not signing either. Fox News, Hegseth’s former employer, has not yet said whether it would sign the pledge.
The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, who was added to a Signal group chat including Hegseth earlier this year, said the constraints on journalists violate their First Amendment rights. As a result, the magazine’s staffers won’t sign.
Good for all of these news organizations! If there had been this rule in the ’60s and ’70s, the NYT wouldn’t have been able to publish The Pentagon Papers, which played a role in the Watergate scandal and Nixon’s resignation. We pay for this stuff and deserve to know what is not classified (or even some of the classified stuff)!
*Hamas has handed over to Israel only 4 of the 24 bodies of hostages it killed, and they’re claiming now that they’re having trouble getting those bodies. Is it a ruse? Whatever it is, why did they promise to do that if they didn’t have the bodies?
Israeli officials and hostage families have accused Hamas of violating the new cease-fire deal by failing to immediately return the remains of many of the former captives still in Gaza.
The truce agreement called for the immediate handover of all remaining bodies in Gaza, but acknowledged that some could be difficult to locate and may take more time to retrieve because of the destruction. Gaza was highly urbanized before the war, but two years of Israeli strikes have turned large parts of it into a flattened landscape of cement rubble.
Hamas on Monday returned only four bodies of roughly two dozen remaining, angering Israelis who had been expecting many more to come home.
Israel Katz, the Israeli defense minister, accused Hamas of failing “to uphold its commitments” but stopped short of threatening any immediate military action, suggesting the cease-fire may hold.
“The urgent task we are all committed to now is ensuring the return of all the bodies of the hostages home,” the minister said on social media. “Any deliberate delay or refusal will be considered a blatant violation of the agreement and will be met accordingly.”A Hamas official said Tuesday that the group was committed to releasing all the bodies, as agreed in the cease-fire reached last week. But the widespread devastation in Gaza was making it difficult to retrieve all remains quickly, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.
Under the truce deal, Israel is required to release the bodies of 15 deceased Palestinian prisoners in exchange for every deceased former hostage returned by Hamas. It began to fulfill that pledge on Tuesday by releasing 45 bodies to Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis.
But an official at the hospital, Dr. Mohammed Zaqot, said Israel had handed over the bodies with no identification, only a number that had been assigned to each one.
If the last sentence is true, then Israel may be reneging on its agreement as well, but not nearly as badly as Hamas, for, after all, Gazan bodies are being returned, and given that they were prisoners, I’m sure they can be identified. But if the bodies of the Israeli hostages aren’t returned, things might not go very smoothly even in Phase 1 of the ceasefire.
*NYC’s next mayor, Zohran Mamdani, is making visits to synagogues and uttering make-nice sentiments about Jews during Judaism’s High Holy Days, which are now. He of course is trying to avoid an anti-Semitic reputation, for we already know he’s going to win the mayorship whatever happens. But the city’s Jews have mixed feelings, not least because Mamdani refused to condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada”, which really means, “kill Jews everywhere,” and has supported the BDS movement. I’m one of the wary ones
[Mamdani] wished Jewish New Yorkers a happy new year in Hebrew. He checked in with community leaders. And after the sun set on Monday night, Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for New York City mayor, walked into Rosh Hashana services for the first time.
For most New York politicians, the High Holy Days each autumn present an easy opportunity to show support for the city’s vibrant Jewish community. They share holiday greetings on social media, or perhaps show up at a temple or two.
But for Mr. Mamdani, the 10-day stretch will be something more complicated, a high-profile election-season test of his relationship with a group of New Yorkers that is split passionately for and against his candidacy.
It is no simple balancing act. Mr. Mamdani, a state assemblyman and democratic socialist, has no intention of backing off his strong criticism of Israel, which has unsettled some Jewish voters, especially older ones. Yet allies say he is trying to reinforce a message delivered on primary night that he would value and protect all New Yorkers as mayor.
Monday night’s services at one of Brooklyn’s most progressive synagogues, Kolot Chayeinu, offered the friendliest of preludes. Members of the congregation buzzed with excitement when Mr. Mamdani entered from a side door and sat in the front row next to Brad Lander, the comptroller and an ally. Neither man spoke during the service, in keeping with custom, but they were warmly welcomed.
. . .In a minute-long video on Monday, Mr. Mamdani, 33, spoke of how Jews had endured “wave after wave of persecution.” He name-checked conservative Jewish communities in Williamsburg in Brooklyn and Riverdale in the Bronx, and suggested that the introspection of the Jewish holidays should inspire all New Yorkers.
“It is a tradition we could all do well to emulate: to build a city that feels sweet and learns from what did not work in the past, where we are not afraid to admit our failings and grow accordingly,” he said. “And where, above all, every New Yorker is safe and cherished by the city they love.”
“Shana Tova, New York,” he concluded.
Gag me with a spoon! He may turn out to be okay as mayor, though his program is untenable, but I think he (and the Democrats) have higher political ambitions. That’s why his performance as mayor will be crucial.
*One of the signs of “progressive” leftists is their damning the word “woke” and the whole concept of “wokeness”, which they see as a confected sham (it isn’t; it’s performative virtue-flaunting). So I wasn’t surprised when Michelle Goldberg of the NYT, a “progressive” writing for a “progressive” newspaper, gave a poor review to the new Julia Roberts movie, “After the Hunt”. The op-ed’s title?: “The New Julia Roberts movie seethes with anti-woke resentment” (article archived here). However, Rotten Tomatoes gives the film only a 41% critics rating, and describes the plot this way:
A gripping psychological drama about a college professor (Julia Roberts) who finds herself at a personal and professional crossroads when a star student (Ayo Edebiri) levels an accusation against one of her colleagues (Andrew Garfield), and a dark secret from her own past threatens to come into the light.
I had to read Goldberg’s piece because a. I love Julia Roberts and b. it’s about wokeness. A few excerpts:
“After the Hunt,” Luca Guadagnino’s psychological thriller about the fallout from the #MeToo movement, has been in theaters for only a few days, but it already feels dated. It’s a memento of the micro-era, toward the exhausted end of Joe Biden’s presidency, when the backlash against self-righteous progressivism was cresting, and taking on sanctimonious college students seemed, at least in some circles, like a brave provocation.
Now, at a moment of ferocious federal government repression of the campus left, “After the Hunt” is a bit of a silly anachronism. It’s interesting mostly for what it inadvertently reveals about the seething resentments that helped set the stage for today’s right-wing crackdown.
“It has gotten so hard for me to listen to these kids, when they have had everything, everything handed to them in their lives, insist that the world stop at the first small injustice,” says a school counselor played by Chloë Sevigny, using an obscenity. That peevish spirit animates much of the movie, which turns on not one but two possibly made-up allegations of sexual abuse.
In 2018 the Democratic strategist Aaron Huertas coined the term “reactionary centrism” to describe a style of politics that prides itself on even-handedness while being disproportionately obsessed with left-wing overreach. Always deployed as an epithet, “reactionary centrism” is overused by progressives to inoculate themselves from criticism. But it describes a real ethos — a loathing of wokeness so intense, it led some elite former Democrats to support Donald Trump. “After the Hunt” brings reactionary centrism to prestige cinema.
I won’t give the spoilers, but here’s some of the criticism from Goldberg:
While “After the Hunt” plays coy about its central mystery, to one of its producers, Brian Grazer, its message is clear. “Before this project existed, I was very much in the anti-woke category — it just got too extreme,” he told The Hollywood Reporter. “And this movie shows the damage of that by dealing with false accusations on the Yale campus.”
Grazer, of course, is the longtime Democratic donor who shocked Hollywood by revealing that he voted for Donald Trump last year. He’s been a bit vague about why, telling The Times, “As a centrist, it was because I could feel and see Biden’s deterioration and the lack of direction in the Democratic Party.” Watching “After the Hunt,” I felt I could better understand the worldview of men like him. The movie offers insight into the politics of victimhood, just not in the way its creators intended.
I’m really not sure what that last sentence means except that it deals with subjects that came to the fore “towards the exhausted end of Joe Biden’s presidency.” But that was not so long ago, and the second paragraph smacks of whataboutery: “You should make a movie about Trump’s effects on universities.” Yes, the movie may be bad, but Goldberg is the one who seems sanctimonious.
*For some humor, the Wall Street Journal reports that the numbers “six” and “seven” are causing great mirth among the kids, and for no good reason (h/t Luana).
Math teacher Cara Bearden braces herself for any equation that yields the two numbers, knowing her students will immediately scream them right back at her. “SIX Sevennnnnn,” they squeal with a palms-up, seesaw hand gesture that looks somewhere between juggling and melon handling. The meme is ripping across the internet and spilling into real life, especially at school.
“If you’re like, ‘Hey, you need to do questions six, seven,’ they just immediately start yelling, ‘Six Seven!’” says Bearden, who teaches sixth- and eighth-graders at Austin Peace Academy in Austin, Texas. “It’s like throwing catnip at cats.”
Now teachers avoid breaking kids into groups of six or seven, or asking them to turn to page 67, or instructing them to take six or seven minutes for a task. Six is a perfect number, and seven is a prime number, but only a glutton for punishment would put them together in front of a bunch of 13-year-olds.
The meme’s meaning (and its whole point) is that it has no meaning. Maybe if French philosopher Albert Camus had a TikTok, he could explain it, given how well he understood repetitive cycles of senselessness. But Reddit works, too.
“The fact that six seven is not funny,” one person wrote, “is funnier than 67 itself.”
The meme is a prime example of brain rot, the internet junk food consumed by people of all ages to suck away time, productivity and the living of life. Kids have been saying “six seven” for about—sorry—six or seven months since the spring, but the recent return to school has supercharged the trend.
. . .By many accounts, the six-seven craze traces back to late last year and the rapper Skrilla, whose song “Doot Doot (6 7)” includes the phrase “six seven,” a reference to 67th street in Philadelphia where many of his friends grew up. The song caught on with video edits of the NBA’s LaMelo Ball, the star 6’7” point guard on the Charlotte Hornets.
Then in March, the meme spiraled further into youth culture with a viral video of a boy with forward-swept hair who lurches toward the camera and delivers a giddy “six seven” with hand motions while other kids around him do the same. The phrase appeared in a 36-minute basketball video and originally was pushed by marketers as a meme to promote one of the players.
At lest numbers like “69” or “420” have a meaning. This is meaningless, but still a source of humor. I’m just letting you know in case you want to be au courant.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, we have another arcane dialogue:
Andrzej: What are you up to?
Hili: Listening to ovations marching toward their doom.
In Polish:
Ja: Co ty robisz?
Hili: Słucham wiwatów prowadzonych na rzeź.
*******************
From Silly Hippy:
From The English Language Police (I hope you get the reference to Abbot and Costello):
From Meow:
Masih has a nice video tweet of Iranian women refusing to cover their hair, but for some reason it won’t embed (it could have been made private). But if you click on the screenshot you can go to the original tweet (sound up):
From Jay. The thread explains this in part because of a rise in the mental health of young people (there are other data in the thread)
1/ NEW: trans identification is in free fall among the young
(h/t @FIRE data in particular) pic.twitter.com/i0Z1BNcWG8
— Eric Kaufmann (@epkaufm) October 14, 2025
From Barry who says, “It’s a good question.” I have my own guess, but I’ll let you make yours (put it in the comments if you wish):
What the hell is that 😱 pic.twitter.com/oKf1C5pp8t
— Nature is Amazing ☘️ (@AMAZlNGNATURE) October 12, 2025
From Malcolm; kitten rescue!
Two kids using their brains to help a kitten get down pic.twitter.com/c95h9I0ENW
— Why you should have a cat (@ShouldHaveCat) September 11, 2025
Two from my feed. First, a clumsy ram:
I can’t stop laughing 😂😂 pic.twitter.com/o0tqxRW7MM
— Nature is Amazing ☘️ (@AMAZlNGNATURE) October 14, 2025
. . . and interspecies love:
The cat and the owl were raised since they were babies and grew up like bros. pic.twitter.com/yOiyKEOa40
— The Figen (@TheFigen_) October 13, 2025
One I posted from The Auschwitz Memorial:
This Czech Jewish girl was gassed as soon as she arrived at Auschwitz. She was twelve years old.
— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-10-15T10:33:52.160Z
From Dr. Cobb (currently in Shanghai); a beautiful pastel drawing of a Mandarin Duck (Aix galericulata) male
A mandatory duck in pastels I did a few weeks ago. I'm really pleased with my progress in pastels. Practice practice practice. #mandarinduck #duck #bird #riverbird #birdart #natureart #riverlife #wildlife #pastelmat #pastelart #artist #pastellist #ukartist #pastelpencils #panpastels #drake
— Threeoffour. (@beckitoo.bsky.social) 2025-10-12T12:37:56.353Z
A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
He who has a why can endure any how. -Friedrich Nietzsche, philosopher (15 Oct 1844-1900)
But Hu’s on first?
I don’t know.
Trump is clearly trying to become a dictator. He’s creating his own “Ministry of Truth”.
As Orwell said “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”
It’s good to see the press is pushing back against this.
This has been an ongoing fight between the Executive and the Press since at least the Pentagon Papers. It’s not unique to Republican administrations. And as for a Ministry of Truth, what Biden achieved was for more like a MoT.
The Pentagon’s new rules on what the media can and cannot publish sounds like what would happen during an active war. Spies are everywhere, the enemy must be kept in the dark, loose lips sink ships, etc. Changing the “Department of Defense” to the “Department of War”is similarly worrying.
It can’t have escaped Trump’s notice that many of our most admired presidents held office whilst we were at war. It rallies us behind the leader.
Funny PCC(E) should mention the Pentagon Papers…
I’m opposed to pretty much most of what Trump does, but given the utterly transformed media/tech landscape now, this particular fight seems petty.
In an era where the president himself can email us (all!) in seconds, information distribution is so efficient that “But that’s myyyy seat in the press pool/pentagon!” battles don’t matter much. There are bigger battles than elite journalist status competitions.
D.A.
NYC
Be careful with the “clearly” part, especially as a foreigner viewing it all from outside. Know what you don’t know, and you “clearly” can’t predict the future or see into President Trump’s mind. The office of the Presidency has great executive power, by design, and the proper balance among the three separated branches of government is for Americans to figure out. They deliberately didn’t make the Executive responsible to the Legislature as we do in Westminster Parliaments. There are explicit Constitutional features that make it impossible for a U.S. President to be a dictator (or a king) except in a colloquial sense, which usually means he is pursuing policies the accuser doesn’t agree with, or the accuser thinks the voters should have elected someone else.
Westminster Prime Ministers have weaker checks on their dictatorial ambitions than do U.S. Presidents, particularly if they have Parliamentary majorities because a modern PM is no longer responsible to Parliament but rather dictates to it, literally. He can tell his party to pass any law through Parliament he demands it to. He is therefore pretty close to a law unto himself until the people vote his Government out of office. Ten years and three mandates are not unusual. That consolidates a lot of power over the civil service, and an iron grip on Cabinet and back-bench MPs. Some of our strong PMs have ruled autocratically for twenty years. Even FDR couldn’t top that.
Americans aren’t much interested in what foreigners think of their politicians anyway. Since most Americans here are too polite to tell you that, it falls to us other foreigners to set example.
My use of ‘clearly’ is based on Trump’s own words and deeds.
A PM with a big majority can push things through parliament, yes, but s/he cannot do it alone, they must get consent from MPs who are answerable to their own constituencies at the ballot box. Even Thatcher had her rebels.
“Americans aren’t much interested in what foreigners think of their politicians anyway.”
There are many self aware Americans who do care, and who are happy to discuss their position on the global stage, but I don’t express opinions in order to get approval from Americans. The world is still entitled to have a view on the politics of one of the most powerful nations on the planet. Perhaps it would benefit the uninterested Americans to be more aware of how they are perceived by their allies as many of their actions have repercussions around the world.
Good for the news orgs to show backbone! During the President Reagan reign, “they” tried to get NASA employees to sign a contract (Executive Order 12345 I think it was) saying that we would not publish what they called “classifiable” information without explicit government permission. While not defined in the document at first, inquiries led to it being defined as any information that is classified or SOMEDAY may become classified! Which of course is anything. It was aimed at whistleblowers or former employees who write books on their careers and would allow the government to successfully sue the authors and attach any profits that may come from such a book due to breach of contract…the executive order contract. We were divided into branches – groups of about 25-30, like a uni department- and a security specialist, who in my branch’s case was a locksmith they had put a tie on, who read us the riot act, passed out blank contracts to everyone, and directed that we sign. Luckily I had a great boss who asked enough questions and intimidated the guy for weeks until the clock finally ran out and those who did not sign, never had to. Btw, my boss at that time became my role model when I became a boss many years later.
Yes, I wouldn’t sign one of those agreements if I were a journalist or headed a news org.
Mamdani’s quote, if I am not mistaken, easily could be referring not to Jews but to Palestinians. Hard to tell and that’s the point I think – brazen demoralization right to their face.
Also a reminder on Mamdani: he can never be President because he wasn’t born in the USA. One less thing to worry about.
“Hamas has handed over to Israel only 4 of the 24 bodies of hostages it killed, and they’re claiming now that they’re having trouble getting those bodies. Is it a ruse? Whatever it is, why did they promise to do that if they didn’t have the bodies?”
Probably quite deliberate and intended to humiliate and provoke Israel. Also a bit of a power play…an intentional violation of the agreement followed by “what are you going to do about it, Israel? Are you really going to resume the war over this?”
Of course, if Israel does resume its campaign because of this violation, then Hamas will claim that Israel is the bad guy and all of the useful idiots in the West will agree. The net effect will be to further diminish Israel’s standing in the world…which is on track with Hamas’ long term goal of the destruction of Israel.
Since Hamas has not disarmed or surrendered, it is still a belligerent who controls the distribution of food aid within Gaza. Israel knows Hamas appropriates the food to feed its fighters or sells it to raise operating cash, as any hard-pressed belligerent government would. Therefore Israel can interdict aid crossing through its territory into Gaza (or indeed by any other route it controls) until Hamas surrenders. If Israel wants to play nice, it could resume aid as a goodwill gesture once Hamas turns over the Israelis’ remains as it promised. But it doesn’t need to, since Hamas no longer has any leverage over Israel.
Apropos of the Lucy show, did you know that Little Ricky was played by a child actor and not the Ricardo’s real son? I just learned that yesterday.
And apropos of 6 and 7, if you want to make a first grader literally roll on the floor, tell them this joke:
Why was 6 afraid of 7? Because 7 8 9!
Now the 6 and 7 thing is nuts, but 7 8 9? That’s really cute for the little guys. Thanks Brooke. From a former math teacher.
As a follow-up for older kids, you can ask: Why did 7 eat 9? Answer: To get his three square(d) meals a day!
Because seven skibidi six
More from the English language police:
“I think he (and the Democrats) have higher political ambitions.”
The simpler form is “I think he has higher political ambitions.” Ok fine. But modifiers differ in how they affect the verb:
“…he probably has…”
“…he sometimes has…”
“…he never has…”
but
“…he may have…”
“…he doesn’t have…”
“…he wouldn’t have…”
What the hell?
Great animal clips in today’s post! That orange blob repeatedly coming up to the surface must be a school of small fish, no?
Mandami? He seems to think that posing as a friend of the Jews will help him. Maybe it’ll work, but I hope not.
An orange blob repeatedly coming to the surface? I’m sure there’s a political joke in there somewhere.
And who else was reminded of Edward Lear’s poem “The Owl and the Pussycat”?
No sign of the beautiful pea-green boat.
Edward Lear’s “The Owl and the Pussycat” was my first thought.
And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,
They danced by the light of the moon.
The moon, the moon
They danced by the light of the moon.
OMG. I had no idea what I was saying! And I thought I was just talking about an orange school of small fish. 🙂
The ram attacking the black bowl is very funny. Not so funny, however, is when they attack each other, or humans. In New Zealand in the last two years 3 farmers have been killed by rams. Once two rams decide to attack each other they will not stop until they are literally ‘punch drunk’, or one is killed. Rams hand reared on the bottle because of mis-mothering are the most dangerous because they have no fear of humans.