Welcome to CaturSaturday, December 27, 2025: the third day of Koynezaa, the sabbath for Jewish cats, and National Fruitcake Day, the day you are supposed to receive one—which you’ll pass on to someone else. The only subspecies I like is Italian panettone. This Welsh one, from Wikipedia, reminds me of an elephant dropping, and may well taste like one. . . :
It’s also Visit the Zoo Day, which reminds me of Mencken’s great essay on zoos (1918): A quote showing their scientific uselessness, which still holds:
. . . . But zoos, it is argued, are of scientific value. They enable learned men to study this or that. Again the facts blast the theory. No scientific discovery of any value whatsoever, even to the animals themselves, has ever come out of a zoo. The zoo scientist is the old woman of zoology, and his alleged wisdom is usually exhibited, not in the groves of actual learning, but in the yellow journals. He is to biology what the late Camille Flammarion was to astronomy, which is to say, its court jester and reductio ad absurdum. When he leaps into public notice with some new pearl of knowledge, it commonly turns out to be no more than the news that Marie Bashkirtseff, the Russian lady walrus, has had her teeth plugged with zinc and is expecting twins. Or that Pishposh, the man-eating alligator, is down with locomotor ataxia. Or that Damon, the grizzly, has just finished his brother Pythias in the tenth round, chewing off his tail, nose and remaining ear
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the December 27 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*According to the WaPo, a scientific article now distinguishes, by lumping together symptoms into clusters, four distinct types of autism. I haven’t read the article yet but I’ll link to it below.
This summer, a team from Princeton and the Flatiron Institute released a paper showing evidence for four distinct autism phenotypes, each defined by its own constellation of behaviors and genetic traits. The dense, data-heavy paper was published with little fanfare. But to the Eastons, who are among the thousands of families who volunteered their medical information for the study, the findings felt seismic.
“This idea that we’re seeing not one but many stories of autism made a lot of sense to me,” Cristina said.
. . . For decades, autism has been described as a spectrum — an elastic term that stretches from nonverbal children to adults with doctorates. Beneath that vast range lies a shared pattern of social communication and behavioral differences, long resistant to neat explanations.
Now, advances in brain imaging, genetics and computational science are revealing discrete biological subtypes. The discoveries could one day lead to more accurate diagnoses and treatments — raising profound questions about whether autism should be seen as something to cure or as an essential facet of human diversity.
There are a few high-impact mutations that alone appear to lead to autism. But researchers now suspect that the majority of cases arise from a subtler genetic architecture — common variants scattered throughout the population that, in certain combinations and under certain environmental conditions, can alter development.
You can read the article for free by clicking below
Here’s a figure I pulled showing the frequency and direction of different types of behaviors in the four identified “clusters” (“DD” is “developmental delay”).
I haven’t yet read this, but it’s always useful, especially given the history of psychiatric diagnoses and the fact that this malady appears to usually reflect the action multiple genes of small effect, to be skeptical. As always, the conclusions will be vetted and tested by other groups of workers. Stay tuned. Oh, and if what was previously recognized as a “spectrum” is now four fairly discrete classes, perhaps this will prompt people to recognize that biological sex is not a spectrum, either, but falls into two easily-recognized classes. Naah, won’t happen.
*In October of 2022 I gave a very enthusiastic to the novel Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell, and I’ve simply forgotten about the book, which is terrific. It’s a fictionalized account of Shakespeare’s composition of Hamlet (he did have a son named Hamnet, who died young), but the bard himself makes almost no appearance in the novel, which largely recounts (with a bit of magical realism) the doings of his family while Shakespeare was away in London. Now it’s apparently been made into an eponymous movie. And, according to Sarah Wildman of the NYT, a very good movie, as we can see in her op-ed, “This is why ‘Hamnet’ made me cry.”
And yet some of the best art is art that does precisely this sort of imagining, refusing to look away from the very human condition of grief.
This season, the standouts of such work are “Hamnet,” the film directed by Chloé Zhao and adapted from the magnificent book by Maggie O’Farrell, and the surprise best-selling novel “The Correspondent,” by Virginia Evans.
“Hamnet” is an imagined narrative surrounding the death of Shakespeare’s 11-year-old son, in this telling, to the bubonic plague. In Ms. O’Farrell’s mind, it is this death that inspired “Hamlet,” the tragic play. But the brilliance of both book and film is to focus on the pain not of one of the world’s most famous men, but that of Agnes, Shakespeare’s wife.
. . . As heart rending as the scenes of illness and death are — and they are remarkable, in their rendering, the full-bodied scream of a mother who has released her own child from this mortal coil — part of the reason “Hamnet” had me still sobbing in my seat as the credits rolled is how well it captures the lingering drudgery of grief, the dull way in which it silvers the hair and deadens the eyes, the way in which time means so little. It captures completely how the very fact that a person could be here one day, and simply gone the next, scrambles sanity.
“I may run mad with it. Even now, a year on,” Shakespeare says to Agnes, both in the text and the film. “A year is nothing,” Agnes replies, dry-eyed, dry-toned. “It’s an hour or a day. We may never stop looking for him. I don’t think I would want to.” And then it all makes so much sense to see the ghost of Hamlet onstage, to hear the famous soliloquies rendered as not a call for applause but instead, perhaps, a means of resurrection.
In approaching “Hamnet,” novel or film, you know you are preparing for a story both about creation and about loss, about child death and about creativity.
Wildman also extols, for different reasons, the recent novel The Correspondent by Virginia Evans (you can read the archived piece here). The book is, says Wildman, “lauded for its remarkable depiction of a septuagenarian woman seeking to find her way in the world, through her own adoption story, her estrangement from her children and her former husband, and finding (however belatedly) new love.” I’ve ordered it via interlibrary loan.
And I will definitely see the movie “Hamnet”, for, says Wildman, the movie rivals the book in quality, and I see that the reviews are nearly all positive. Here’s the trailer:
*I’d never hjeard of Rook T. Winchester before, but reader Barry sent me a link to his piece on the Substack site Closer to the Edge, where Rook is an editor. The piece is called “A letter to Bari Weiss” (the subtitle is “The only thing you pulled is the mask off yourself”) and it’s a passionate attack on her decision to hold the “60 Minutes” segment about the U.S. sending Venezuelan immigrants to captivity at the notorious CECOT prison in El Salvador. Winchester does seem to think that the episode was pulled after it aired, though, which is not the case. Even in Canada, it aired only on the CBS app before it was taken down; it was never aired in the U.S.
Winchester:
Your explanation for pulling the 60 Minutes CECOT report wasn’t just weak. It was the kind of weakness that tries to pass itself off as seriousness, mistaking hesitation for wisdom and calling it leadership because admitting fear would be too honest.
Calling a fully vetted, corroborated investigation into torture “not ready” because the alleged torturers didn’t get enough airtime is not editorial judgment. It’s hostage negotiation with yourself. You didn’t uncover errors. You didn’t dispute facts. You didn’t challenge a single sworn testimony. You just decided that reality needed a permission slip from power before it could be broadcast.
That’s not journalism. That’s customer service for monsters.
. . .And the hypocrisy. My god, the hypocrisy. You made a career out of lecturing institutions about cowardice, censorship, and the moral rot of elite gatekeeping, then walked into one of the biggest newsrooms on earth and reenacted the exact behavior you built your brand trashing. Free speech, it turns out, is sacred right up until it becomes inconvenient for your job title. When the pressure arrived, courage was suddenly “not ready.”
Here’s the funniest part, though. It didn’t even work. The transcript exists. The testimony exists. The evidence exists. The reporting exists. The only thing you successfully buried was your own credibility. You didn’t protect CBS News. You stapled your name to the moment it flinched. History won’t remember the delay. It’ll remember who grabbed the wheel and swerved.
So let’s drop the pleasantries. If you can’t stand behind your newsroom when it publishes verified reporting that implicates power, you have no business running a news organization. If your first instinct when faced with documented human rights abuse is to ask whether the perpetrators feel sufficiently heard, then you are not an editor. You are a liability with a press badge.
For the sake of CBS News, its journalists, and the public that still believes journalism is supposed to punch up instead of bow down, you should resign.
It’s a bit over the top, but does make the point that no facts are in dispute, and asking yet another White House employee to badmouth the report adds nothing to what was already scheduled to be aired.
*Several editors of the Free Press give their funniest news items of the year. (I swear, the only reason to subscribe to this site is for the humor, and that mostly from Nellie Bowles). Here are two:
Oliver Wiseman, Deputy Editor
It has been a heavy year in news, but 2025 was not without its lighter moments. After all, this was the year someone known as “Big Balls” briefly held a very important government job. And the year that the leader of the free world sprayed an Islamist fighter turned Syrian president with cologne and asked him how many wives he has. And the year that FIFA, an organization charged with running international soccer tournaments, launched its own “Peace Prize” and awarded it to—who else?—Donald Trump.
But my personal favorite moment of levity this year came in September, with the publication of Kamala Harris’s election memoir, 107 Days. The book is not supposed to be funny, but it is. As I wrote at the time, the former vice president’s day-by-day account of her doomed White House bid is a petty burn book. It is strangely authentic. She roasts assorted senior Democrats (an odd thing to do if you plan on running for president again, as she seems to). When she’s not outwardly aggressive, she’s spectacularly passive-aggressive. And no one is spared, including her poor husband, Doug. The most entertaining entry in the book is for October 20, 16 days before the election and Harris’s birthday. The former vice president gives a detailed rundown of all the ways in which her poor Doug failed to meet the moment that was her 60th. It is amusing. Whether she meant it to be, I’m not so sure.
Another funny thing: The book tour is still happening. Harris has recently added dates through April next year, featuring a few stops in swing states. How will this work? Will she go straight from plugging 107 Days into the Iowa caucus, where she can start gathering material for the sequel?
River Page, Reporter
On Black Friday, a raccoon broke into an Ashland, Virginia, ABC store, got wasted, and passed out in the bathroom. There’s no footage of the incident because, apparently, the little guy—nicknamed “Rocky” by county officials—came in through the ceiling and “took the cameras down with him.” However, there is a hilarious and, for some of us, relatable photo of him passed out next to the toilet. Sadly, Rocky, after sobering up, was rereleased into the wild.
He doesn’t belong there.
Just a month before Rocky’s drunken escapade, researchers at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock published an article claiming that raccoons are beginning to show early signs of domestication, like reductions in snout length. Rocky, as well as many of his compatriots, clearly wants to join our society—and he and they should be able to. Yes, Rocky has his issues. But there are resources available. He can go to Alcoholics Anonymous and smoke cigarettes in the basement of a Methodist Church. I have an uncle who did that and it kind of worked. The point is, it’s Christmas, and nobody should be left out in the cold, even raccoons. If you’re craving eggnog, they’re craving eggnog. Let them in.
*It’s the holidays, not much is happening, and I want to put in a bit more upbeat news until 2026 comes crashing in. One upbeat item from the Associated Press is the successful completion of a pregnancy that’s not only rare but usually doomed: an ectopic (or extrauterine) pregnancy.
Suze Lopez holds her baby boy on her lap and marvels at the remarkable way he came into the world.
Before little Ryu was born, he developed outside his mom’s womb, hidden by a basketball-sized ovarian cyst — a dangerous situation so rare that his doctors plan to write about the case for a medical journal.
Just 1 in 30,000 pregnancies occur in the abdomen instead of the uterus, and those that make it to full term “are essentially unheard of — far, far less than 1 in a million,” said Dr. John Ozimek, medical director of labor and delivery at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles, where Ryu was born. “I mean, this is really insane.”
Lopez, a 41-year-old nurse who lives in Bakersfield, California, didn’t know she was pregnant with her second child until days before giving birth.
When her belly began to grow earlier this year, she thought it was her ovarian cyst getting bigger. Doctors had been monitoring the mass since her 20s, leaving it in place after removing her right ovary and another cyst.
Lopez experienced none of the usual pregnancy symptoms, such as morning sickness, and never felt kicks. Though she didn’t have a period, her cycle is irregular and she sometimes goes years without one.
Lopez experienced none of the usual pregnancy symptoms, such as morning sickness, and never felt kicks. Though she didn’t have a period, her cycle is irregular and she sometimes goes years without one.
. . . . Shortly after the game, Lopez began feeling unwell and sought help at Cedars-Sinai. It turned out she had dangerously high blood pressure, which the medical team stabilized. They also did blood work and gave her an ultrasound and an MRI. The scans found that her uterus was empty, but a nearly full-term fetus in an amniotic sac was hiding in a small space in her abdomen, near her liver.
“It did not look like it was directly invading any organs,” Ozimek said. “It looked like it was mostly implanted on the sidewall of the pelvis, which is also very dangerous but more manageable than being implanted in the liver.”
Dr. Cara Heuser, a maternal-fetal specialist in Utah not involved with the case, said almost all pregnancies that implant outside the uterus — called ectopic pregnancies — go on to rupture and hemorrhage if not removed. Most commonly, they occur in the fallopian tubes.
A 2023 medical journal article by doctors in Ethiopia described another abdominal pregnancy in which the mother and baby survived, pointing out that fetal mortality can be as high as 90% in such cases and birth defects are seen in about 1 in 5 surviving babies.
But Lopez and her son beat all the odds.
On Aug. 18, a medical team delivered the 8-pound (3.6-kilogram) baby while she was under full anesthesia, removing the cyst during the same surgery. She lost nearly all of her blood, Ozimek said, but the team got the bleeding under control and gave her transfusions.
Since then, Ryu — named after a baseball player and a character in the Street Fighter video game series — has been healthy and thriving. His parents love watching him interact with his 18-year-old sister, Kaila, and say he completes their family.
With Ryu’s first Christmas approaching, Lopez describes feeling blessed beyond measure.
“I do believe in miracles,” she said, looking down at her baby. “God gave us this gift — the best gift ever.”
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili, out on the veranda with Szaron, shows some literary acumen:
Andrzej: What are you guys doing here?
Hili: Waiting for Godot to let us in.
In Polish:
Ja: Co tu robicie?
Hili: Czekamy na Godota, żeby nam drzwi otworzył.
*******************
From Give Me a Sign:
From Things With Faces; a sprouted potato looks like a duck:
From Cats Doing Cat Stuff:
Masih is quiet but here’s J. K. Rowling not writing on sex. (I have enough socks, thank you, and they all match because I buy just one type.)
Yesterday my son pulled a box of new socks out of his stocking and said ‘ah, this is great because I’m down to only two matching pairs.’ I had no idea we failed to teach him that socks can be purchased by the prospective wearer themselves. https://t.co/mSkoca5bAL
— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) December 26, 2025
So you thought math couldn’t be corrupted by sacralizing indigenous culture? Think again:
& what *is* indigenous math?
U count to 10 & then deliver a religious sermon
Specifically, tell kids that “Sky Woman” will save everyone from the apocalypse…but only if they accept the Good News of Sky Woman’s “creation story”
literally flat out creationism
Thanks @CBCNews pic.twitter.com/aYYYXfG9Vo
— Jonathan Kay (@jonkay) December 25, 2025
From Malcolm, a tweet about the good side of barnacles. Sound up!
Listen to the barnacles sounds
[📹 its_mad_science]
pic.twitter.com/rkenSpQXM6— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) November 21, 2025
Two from my feed. First, a sad kitty:
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣 pic.twitter.com/7bXcvOZmYd
— LAnDo NIFFIRG™️🇨🇦 (@llandoniffirg) December 26, 2025
Arrant ignorance, but you don’t need to go to college to learn this stuff.
Still one of the best videos made here.
I’m sure that even today most people at these universities don’t understand what they’re shouting about and why they hate Jews. pic.twitter.com/JUWXpW2IpP
— Eli Afriat 🇮🇱🎗 (@EliAfriatISR) December 26, 2025
One I posted on The Auschwitz Memorial:
A rare survivor, and I can’t find a record of his death. If he’s still alive, he’s 101 today. https://t.co/DMJsAJBMEF
— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) December 27, 2025
Two from Dr. Cobb. I used to post about treehoppers because they are plain weird (we don’t know what these shapes are really for), and here’s a weird one:
Brazilian treehopper, is a small, bizarre-looking insect known for the cluster of hollow, ball-like appendages on its head, which are extensions of its pronotum. These growths likely confuse predators, making the insect appear larger or harder to eat.#science #biology#Entomology
— Tim Edwards (@timzero4.bsky.social) 2025-12-26T18:58:46.394Z
Matthew asked me if this were true, and I said “YES!” Though it’s less common now than it used to be. This is from a whole Wikipedia article on the subject.
— depths of wikipedia (@depthsofwikipedia.bsky.social) 2025-12-24T15:37:52.333Z
A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
One does not ask of one who suffers: What is your country and what is your religion? One merely says: You suffer, that is enough for me. -Louis Pasteur, chemist and bacteriologist (27 Dec 1822-1895)
Yes Matthew. I agree with Jerry. From looking back at my extended family and their Jewish social group, eating out Chinese restaurants at Christmas was a real thing for Jewish families in the 50’s and 60’s though it has waned over the generations. The less yiddish spoken, the less likely to do Chinese on Christmas it seems. And the adults of those earlier generations generally referred to the ethnicity of those restaurants with what today would be recognized as a slang pejorative.
Yes. It’s a thing. The phrase went “Let’s get some Chinese!” Note the strange elocution. It’s not “Let’s get some Chinese food.” No. It’s “Let’s get some Chinese!” That’s how I remember it.
It is here Norman. Not huge but it is (still) an acknowledged part of our local culture. Like you and I it is a bit… last century. 🙂
HA! I wanted to order Thai (prefer it to Chinese) on Christmas day but my favorite restaurant was closed. 🙁
So I ordered a pizza!
best,
D.A.
NYC
As a young child, I vividly remember eating at Chinese restaurants (back when they were very rare in the US). I don’t remember any connection to Christmas (although that may have been true as well).
I’m also wait-listed on Interlibrary Loan for The Correspondent in part because I still correspond the old-fashioned snail-mail way with the people who were my college roommates 64 years ago. Do you still write letters? How many of your readers still write letters?
Yes! Another letter writer! I write in longhand with my mother’s Parker fountain pen; which she got as a high school graduation gift in 1942.
I have come to find that I only write letters on paper—and send them in an envelope through the U.S. Mail—when I’m sending a letter of condolence to the loved ones of a colleague or friend who has just died. Otherwise, I use e-mail. I do send holiday cards that I sign by hand. Because I write in longhand so rarely, my penmanship has deteriorated to the point of, well, terrible. People who get my cards have to check the envelope for the return address in order to verify that the ink-scratches on the card are mine.
HA! My situation is similar, Norman. Every December in my building we tip all the staff in cash. I always use an envelope and put in a hand written note. They like the money of course, and earn it well, but I think most of them appreciate the hand written thank you notes also. Fancy – I even have a seal. Handing off bills is a bit crass I always think tho lots of my neighbors do that.
AFAIK Japan is the last holdout on proper letter writing. And business suits and name/biz cards. They hold on to cool stuff there.
D.A.
NYC
A handwritten letter is always special. I have a letter that my paternal great granddad wrote to my dad when he joined the Royal Marines at 16, and a letter from my maternal granddad giving permission for my mum to marry my dad. Future generations aren’t likely to have these wonderful memories as we don’t cherish emails in the same way as written letters.
I have a collection of embroidered postcards that were sent from the front during the Great War. I don’t know the men who wrote them, but I like that their words live on.
I still write letters, but nobody writes me back. Boo hoo. I’ve been waitlisted for that novel since the end of July and have only made it to position 19 on 40 copies. I think the library should reinstate late fees. It’s a shame, but it seems without them people ignore the due dates.
I don’t trust the MSM when they say that the facts are not in dispute. We have seen repeatedly that MSM cherry picks its facts and often fails to verify those things they claim are facts. I respect Weiss enough to believe she had valid reasons for holding the story back.
I don’t trust MSM period. No comment on Ms Weiss
Merry Koynezaa all!
I’ll have the fruit cake! I used to hate anything with dried fruit when I was a sprog, now I like it. I have two fruit cakes I made & the brandy soaked fruit for another. Also I drained off the gin/vodka from one of the batches of fruit, & made Yule cake vodka.
Christmas fruit cake also goes amazingly well with blue cheese. Especially Stilton. Or at least my partner and I think so.
You’re joking, right?
I suspect that he’s not joking. Christmas fruit cake with a strong-tasting cheese is traditional in Yorkshire. (No more weird than peanut-butter-and-jelly on bread, which we’re told is a favourite of kids on that side of the pond 😘). Having tried it, it’s “ok”, though personally I’ll take them separately.
My paternal grandfather, a coal miner, always ate fruit cake with Stilton. He spent his life in North Nottinghamshire (just across the border from Yorkshire) – perhaps it’s an English regional thing?
I am open to that, since some contrasting food combinations do work together. Peanut butter and pickles is one I keep hearing about (never tried it). But hot fries dipped in a vanilla shake is something that is pretty amazing.
Gastronomic tip: do not try peanut butter and sardines, even if that’s all you have in the cupboard. (YMMV of course).
One of my favourite weird things is Weetabix with butter and jam 😂 You get crumbs everywhere, but it’s delicious.
Cheese and peanut butter is a nice combination too.
I don’t know what it is with Americans and fruit cake? When I watch US cooking shows they all seem to hate christmas cake. Each to their own I suppose.
It’s a ritual. You make the cake weeks in advance and pour a tot of whisky or brandy on it every week It’s a slice of heaven 😁
Fruit soaked like that also makes a fantastic mincemeat for pies. You make it in October to give it time to mature mmm mmm mmm.
Yes, it’s weird. I’m the rare Yank who loves fruit cake.
It has to be the right kind of fruit cake, though. The one in the image is not what I call a Proper Fruit Cake. I like the dense kind. It should be packed with nuts and fruit, all soaked in brandy (or whatever) well in advance.
Served cold with coffee, it’s delish. And I can see serving it with cheese.
The one in the image isn’t dark enough for what I would consider a fruit cake. It doesn’t look as if it has treacle in it, which is essential in my cakes.
Sometimes my mum made a Dundee Cake, which is still a fruit cake, but it doesn’t have icing, the top has a design in almonds.
I think treacle is known as molasses in the US?
I’m going to have to go to the shops and see if they have any left 😁
Treacle! I bet that’s delicious.
Google tells me that molasses is thicker and less sweet than treacle; apparently it’s most similar to black treacle.
Whenever I hear the word “treacle” I think of Alice in Wonderland, and the three little sisters who lived at the bottom of a treacle-well.
I downloaded the kindle version of The Correspondent over the summer then forgot about it, and while on holiday in Borneo in late August saw it there and thought what the heck. I absolutely loved it and finished it in about 2 days. Well worth it.
My wife and I listening to The Correpsondent audiobook. The readers are excellent! It’s a good absorbing book enriched by the different voices.
I hope you’ve seen this from SNL 2005:
Thanks for posting. Great piece, and they actually got Darlene Love to do the vocals. I’d never seen it before.
Zoos. I don’t know if zoos contribute much to science or not, but I don’t like the idea of keeping wild animals—sentient beings—in captivity, even in situations that attempt to simulate their natural habitats. It’s an outdated institution that should be phased out.
Bari Weiss. One doesn’t even need to get into the substance to understand why Bari Weiss is the target of so much criticism. She spiked an episode that was planned and completed before she even came on board CBS. It pi**ed everyone off! She should not have meddled and let the episode air without comment, initiating editorial oversight only on new stories, and in collaboration with her team. Se made a rookie mistake, and the entire media establishment is (rightly) punishing her for it. It was an unforced error that has made her radioactive.
Ectopic pregnancy: It’s not a miracle, but that woman is extraordinarily lucky.
Autism. I expect that autism will turn out to be a “syndrome” and not a specific disease tied to a specific biological entity. The number of genes that affect brain development and function must be enormous, with any number of combinations leading to behavioral symptoms we lump together into the autism spectrum.
On another note, re the Free Press roundup of funny moments – Dave Barry’s Year in Review dropped yesterday, which I just discovered. Always a good way to end the year. https://davebarry.substack.com/p/the-year-in-review
Thx for that Loretta. Dave Barry is a national treasure.
Wish I could write like that.
best regards,
D.A.
NYC
YES – on the dude interviewing pro-Pal students on campus. I met kids like that (before Oct 7!) who were equally clueless so I wrote an article “What pro-pal students get wrong.” But these students in the interview are classic.
In other Zionist news, to my shock Israel just recognized Somaliland (not Somalia, there are 2, like Koreas or in the past Germanies).
It is a big deal and caught me by surprise even though after an article I wrote about this very thing a little while ago I made some nice Somaliland friends on twitter.
It is a geopolitics though a loudmouth lens.
https://themoderatevoice.com/excellent-news-from-the-horn-of-africa-somaliland/
Have a good weekend – we got snow here (sigh).
D.A.
NYC
Below is an alternative and detailed take on the Bari Weiss / 60 Minutes imbroglio. It is by Sharyl Attkinson, a five-time Emmy Award-winning investigative journalist, formerly with PBS, CNN, and CBS. She departed the latter in 2014 after 21 years, her final post being Washington, D.C. bureau correspondent. Currently freelancing, she hosts a Sunday morning syndicated public affairs/investigative show.
Some caveats. While her parting with CBS was reportedly amicable, she did voice frustration with its liberal bias and believed they dedicated too little money and time to investigative journalism. Her internal critics say she was angry because she wasn’t getting enough airtime; others say she was intentionally sidelined (see bias above). She has also taken fire for pushing journalism that lines up with some of RFK Jr’s concerns, but those issues aren’t remotely visible here. She does seem to be an independent voice willing to challenge consensus narratives—for better or worse. All that said, her current criticisms of CBS stand—or fall—on their own merit.
Bottom line: She supports pulling the story on professional grounds, but she criticizes Weiss for handling it poorly. I have no dog in this fight.
https://sharylattkisson.substack.com/p/heres-whats-wrong-with-the-shelved
Interesting piece. Yes, Weiss stepped in too late in the process. People are angry because she spiked a completed story that took a great deal of time to research and write. They feel that she treated them with a lack of respect.
The J.K. Rowling post helps me to realize that I have never once in my life bought my own socks or slippers. These are instead purchased by my better half every couple Xmases, as a part of the Great Understanding that glues together marriage. But she has never bought her own flannel pajamas. That is my sacred duty which I take very seriously.
+1
Same around these parts.
D.A.
NYC
” I have no dog in this fight.”
Me neither. In fact, I don’t think anyone even should have a dog in this fight (CBS segment on prison) at this point.
If there is one valuable thing I have learned about the human condition over the past decades is that every issue has at least two sides. And that I want to evaluate those views, and determine relevant facts, and come to my own conclusions about which aspects of each narrative are worthy.
I’m not interested in Rook Winchester’s opinion on the topic as yet, because no one but Bari Weiss has full command of the facts surrounding her decision. And she has no obligation to share them, and every obligation not to share them.
She has promised to publish the piece soon. That’s all we need to know. Take her to task if she doesn’t follow through, or if the piece deserves it.
Had I run into Winchester’s screed anywhere other that WEIT, I would have stopped reading at this sentence:
Calling the Trump administration the “torturers” is pure Trump Derangement Syndrome, a disease that has evidently mutated into Weiss Derangement Syndrome.
Winchester’s whole piece is a red herring, as are most of the attacks on Weiss’s decision. The issue isn’t that the segment was not factual. The fact that it was vetted 10 times and that the lawyers didn’t find anything illegal about it is not in question. What is in question is whether the piece was one sided. According to Axios, contra the producer’s claims, three federal departments responded to CBS’s request for comments, yet none of their statements were included in the report.
So I’m about 20 years old and on my own for about a year and feeling cocky and independent. Then I got some holes in my socks and was shocked when I realized that I had to use my own money to buy socks? What? Why didn’t somebody warn me about this?
Re the linked-to CBC article “How Indigenous mathematics¹ intertwines spirituality and numbers” —
Almost certainly because all their teachers were themselves ignorant and fearful of the subject, probably having been taught similarly, down the generations. That is a real “trans-generational trauma”.
Excellent objective; but his approach eliminates any useful or interesting mathematics content, replacing it with stuff that the students are expected to already be comfortable with. And it seems he and the CBC suffer from the common confusion between “emotional” and “spiritual”.
(That’s (more than?) enough for now.)
. . . . .
¹ I resisted the temptation to put each of those 2 words in scare-quotes; maybe as penance for failing to resist reading the CBC article even though I knew better.
Love the snow cat, still giggling about it. That pause before it raises its head 😂
Thank you for the happy news about Ryu. It’s good to hear happier things over the festive season. As ‘god’ gave her ‘the gift’ a child who could have killed her, I hope she gave even more thanks to the doctors who worked hard to get the skills that saved both their lives against god’s odds.
Good to see the university video, I bookmarked it, thx. Every time someone turns up on my feed saying Israel is committing genocide I point out that they could have razed Palestine the day after, the festival attack, but they didn’t, and point out that if they object to genocide, they shouldn’t be supporting Palestine. I think many people here are just as ignorant as those students.
Not sure if it’s good news, but several of the ‘hunger strikers’ decided to eat their christmas meals 🤦♀️ They say they will resume their hunger strike next year. The people kidnapped by Hamas didn’t have the luxury of choosing when to starve 😡 There have been reports that they are only skipping food. every second day, which is fasting and not a hunger strike, if true. Several of them are woke and would be thrown off tall buildings if they went to Palestine. They really don’t get it.
To end on another happy note, Olympic swimmer and women’s activist Sharron Davies was appointed a Conservative peer in the House of Lords earlier this month. She has campaigned against men in women’s sport and set up a sporting union for women.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx23pxxl7yno
Some more good news.
Jakub (Jack) Fogel was alive three years ago at 98. In the link his daughter Helene Levin is wishing him a happy birthday on Facebook.
He lost his whole family in the holocaust and it’s good to hear that he had family who loved him. He may have died since, but he had a long life. There may be more information on Facebook for those who use it. The link it explains how he moved to Australia and volunteered at the Melbourne Holocaust Museum..
https://www.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=611866060939283&id=100063476832976