In a social media post, Los Angeles Dodgers outfielder Alex Call said Major League Baseball playoffs broadcasts have featured "soft porn ads" and that "parents shouldn't have to worry about this."I wonder if the accompanying Sydney Sweeney photograph is on a Los Angeles skyscraper.
Call is not on the Dodgers' active roster for the NL Championship Series – but is with the team – and posted on X about how his son wanted to watch a game with him and that the commercials left him trying to "justify ... half-naked women" on his screen.
Advertisements featuring Megan Fox and Sydney Sweeney have been in heavy rotation during this year's playoff broadcasts across multiple platforms.
The Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce (MMAC) estimates that Brewers postseason games contribute roughly $3.5 million to the local economy. But there’s another economic benefit beyond ticket sales or new “Take October” merch: income taxes.The article does not explain whether that's the standard state income tax rate, or if Wisconsin's rules require players to keep track of "duty days" for calculation of taxes, in the manner of California's notorious jock tax that can more than exhaust the bonus a player earns in a postseason tournament.
Appearing on Wisconsin’s Afternoon News, Dale Kooyenga, president of the MMAC said, “when we have teams here, we get more income tax revenue from that.”
“If you’re a musician or an athlete, or really any job, you pay income taxes where you work,” Kooyenga said. So when “Lebron James plays here, … say he plays five of 80 games here in Wisconsin, [he] pays 5/80ths of his income in Wisconsin.”
Fifty to sixty years ago the second-wave feminists, seeing only the upside potential of the Pill with abortion-on-demand as the backstop plan were all about those "casual sexual encounters," with or without "an ethic of care," and the "alternative lifestyles" fetish offers quite the diversity of sexual encounters. And cracking down on the Greek letter organizations? Sometimes that's all the rage, sometimes it's not.Nothing has changed in the eighteen months since that post, or in my evaluation of those fifty to sixty years of allegedly progressive social change. The inconsistencies go on and on and on. Combine an alternative lifestyle version of a casual sexual encounter in a Cornell fraternity house, and when the election cycle demands a new outrage to rile up the women of the fevered brow, the rage resumes.
Because culture is a type of shared consciousness, it is an emergent phenomenon, and it might be simpler to bet on emergence, and let the evolutionary dead-ends, whether of the rabbit culture or the Consciousness Revolution or of privilege-shaming, collapse of their own inconsistencies.
You can be certain that nobody involved in the Cornell U fraternity gang-bang circus is going to come out looking good, not the frat boys, not the girl, not the county DA, not New York AG Letitia James, and not NY Governor Kathy Hochul. The latter two have decided to showboat what has become a rape case in an election year when both are up for another four-year term.The story, sans the obligatory home videos you know 'phone owners are recording, and the ketamine, is one of long pedigree. The cause years ago was "date rape," perhaps modified to "acquaintance rape" in order to portray the woman involved as being deprived of her agency, whether it was assisted by beer or booze or enhanced by other stimulants or perhaps sedatives, and thus a victim of circumstances. Never mind that, as appears to be the case in this Cornell story, the lady had her evening of what she thought was fun, then, a day or so later thinks, ewwww, I shouldn't have done that. Now there's a whole therapeutic bureaucracy for her to lay out her victimization case. A colleague correctly described that situation as the complainant simply lacking any character: she could have dialed back the pregaming, turned down the invitation, or excused herself when the drinks and the pharmacopeia started to circulate at Chi Phi.
First, the incident itself: October 19, 2024, a Saturday night when upstate New York is at its fall color peak and the campus is jumpin’, 20-year-old “Jane Doe” starts drinking at her sorority, Delta Delta Delta (Δ Δ Δ, “Tri-Delt”) whose motto is Let Us Steadfastly Love One Another. Around eleven o’clock Jane goes into downtown Ithaca to do more drinking at a bar. She’s legally underage, but manages to get served.
Meanwhile, messages are zinging around on social media, Snapchat, etc. There’s a party going on at the Chi Phi fraternity (ΧΦ). Jane communicates with one of the members there. He cordially invites her over for “a threesome.” Jane apparently has a reputation as a lively girl around campus. She accepts and heads over to Chi Phi with a load on, “five out of ten” on the intoxication scale, she later writes in a nine-page statement she gave to campus police.
She arrives at Chi Phi around midnight. More drinks. Pretty soon she’s in that threesome in a bedroom. The frat boys are also pretty hammered. Things get even wilder. Four other frat boys enter the picture. On top of the alcohol, they start doing ketamine, known to produce a dissociative “floaty, out-of-the-body feeling.” One’s judgment is not too good on it, even worse when mixed with booze. The scene at Chi Phi is Animal House plus. Various shenanigans ensue. Eventually, Jane Doe gets home.
An ocean fishing charter off the Florida Coast near Eglin Air Force Base had an unusually large, scaleless catch. The large gray behemoth in question was a U.S. military LUCAS drone, a one-way attack aircraft derived from a design modeled after Iran’s Shahed-136.Before you let the authorities know you've found something they might be interested in, you make use of what the fish make use of a large floating object.
Base officials confirmed to Task & Purpose that the drone went down Sept. 17 during routine testing on the base’s range, two days before fishermen found it floating in the Gulf.
Simple: the more electronic components there are, the more ways there are for stuff to go wrong. An appliance repairman recently suggested I stick with my old school appliances (circa 2007 is old school these days) for as long as they last, as the new ones have a mean time to some sort of failure of less than a year. Most of his service calls these days are for the new ones, and one of the advanced features tends to be what fails.So too let it be with owners of the latest smart refrigerators. "Owners mourn spoiled food after firmware update bricks Samsung smart fridges." Absurd, embarrassing, and totally unnecessary.
Affected fridges “suddenly lost power and stopped functioning immediately after” trying to issue a firmware update through SmartThings, Samsung’s smart home platform, per Star News Korea. The SmartThings app then showed the devices as offline. Some users said that their fridge’s internal display was stuck showing the message “Checking SmartThings app during update.”Hard pass. All I want my refrigerator to connect to is a power grid, and all I want to start my car is an ignition key. Other internet-connected home appliances? No thanks.
There are numerous reports on Samsung’s Korean community forum detailing the problem. Some users claim that they have owned their affected fridge for just a year or less.
“[T]he refrigeration and refrigeration functions themselves did not work normally, so all the food in the refrigerator had to be disposed of,” one user wrote, per a translation.
The obvious alternative, of course, is to avoid fridges that get updates altogether. Dumb fridges can suddenly break too, but that usually doesn’t happen if that fridge’s hardware components are all working properly and if it’s just a year or two old.I'm willing to use electric or gas appliances connected to the respective mains. Adding internet connectivity brings avoidable first world problems that might not be worth the convenience of having the roast defrosting or the wine chilling or the oven preheating or food in the doggie dish (don't you have to activate the robot to get that out of the 'fridge?) before the owner gets home.
While most of the complaints this week center on rotten food, an abruptly broken fridge can cause other serious problems, like ruining medication. As other poorly issued smart home gadget updates have proven, extraneous technology can spoil a simple product.
The Other Huskies were bitten by the Georgia State Not Southern Panthers 35-14 last week. Props to NIU for equally distributing its losses, with one each to teams in the Big Ten, Missouri Valley, Big 12 and Sun Belt. That is, as we say on "Marty & McGee" "apro-pro" because I can never remember which conference NIU is now in.Not that it matters this Saturday, as they have the Flying Byes of Open Date U., to use Mr McGee's terminology, followed by an evening homecoming game with the Flying Falcons of Air Force, which also play in the Mountain West. Off we go, into the bowl chase yonder. Both the university's orchestra and the community symphony orchestra have performances scheduled for that Friday and Saturday.
The National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) is apparently seeking regulatory guidance on a very serious campaign-finance matter: how exactly should it report Hasan Piker’s generous contributions to the Republican Party?I wonder what rights a political influencer has to his social media clips that get quoted, either in full (the most effective way to attack a person is to show him unedited) or in part (which also puts the person on the back foot, spending time showing how he's taken out of context). Those social media clips will be dropping, what with Election Day about five weeks away.
In a letter to the Federal Election Commission, the NRSC asked how it should quantify the value of Piker’s commentary, which reaches millions across Twitch and other digital platforms. After all, when a prominent left-wing streamer repeatedly says things so inflammatory, divisive, and politically self-defeating that they may as well be GOP advertising, surely someone has assigned a dollar value to the service.
Iran's president said Wednesday that his people have been "victims of terrorism" by the United States, delivering a rare wartime speech at the U.N. General Assembly a day after President Donald Trump said he may "annihilate" the Islamic Republic if a deal isn't reached soon to end the nearly seven-month war.Gee, you think riling up your starveling base to yell "Death to Israel, death to America" for nearly a half century is a good way to win friends and influence people? Reap what you sow, stooge.
The defiant speech by President Masoud Pezeshkian marked a striking instance of a foreign leader addressing the world body while their country is at war with the host nation. While defending his country, Pezeshkian held up large photos of the late Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and the more than 150 Iranian schoolchildren killed on the first days of the war.
"We have only defended ourselves. We are not terrorists," Pezeshkian said at the General Assembly. "Our innocent people have been the targets of cowardly attacks and aggressions imposed upon our country. And we defended ourselves with utmost strength. America and Israel attacked us."
He added of the United States: "Yes they did hit us, but we did not bend the knee." Toward the end of his speech, Pezeshkian called out Trump by name.The stooge had to posture that way because his political masters in Teheran speak their own language of force. "Iran has presented the US with a roadmap to end the war that echoes the two countries' June agreement — a 60-day ceasefire, the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, and groundwork for further talks — The National reported." Same nonsense, different talking head. Renounce the nukes, Iran, and stop funding those proxies, and then we can lift the sanctions and let your leaky ships sail.
"It must be understood by Mr. Trump and those who seek to bully us that we are ready for dialogue and diplomacy and negotiations without accepting the language of force," he said.
Shortly after, both U.S. and Israeli officials blasted the speech, saying that it was hypocritical for the Islamic Republic to present itself as the victims of the world.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters: "I don't know what standing Iran has to lecture anyone on human rights or the international system when they habitually violate it."
I applaud this market experiment with a, shall we say, unusual kind of leisure spot.The "unjust criticism?" It brings to mind a parody of the late Yogi Berra's observation, phrased as "They're so inclusive nobody goes there any more." Lift a mask requirement on Saturdays, alienate the "immunocompromised disabled divas," never mind that there still is a mask requirement all the other days the bar is open. Benjamin Bartee is less than impressed. "One night per week without the muzzle, in 2026, in a town with nary a single case of COVID, was enough to warrant the avalanche of outrage from the 'disabled community.'"
But the experiment is failing. And yet some people – ignorant of the foundation, working, and benefits of free markets – are unjustly criticizing the owners of this experiment for trying to salvage it.
The current feminist wave, which includes the belief that women are inherently superior leaders due to their peaceful nature, has been undercut by millions of women openly cheering homicide. "The Clancy trial has somehow caused feminists to argue that women are completely controlled by their hormones," said legal expert Ben McCray. "They now vehemently say that women are so weak and feeble that they can't even be held responsible for their own actions. The nation now agrees with their assessment."Psychiatrist Sally Satel had thoughts about that argument. Satire or not, the women of the fevered brow do a pretty good job of bringing on the mockery simply by being their authentic selves. Not too long ago, Indiana Fever reserve Sophie Cunningham, who shies away from the culture wars, noted, "You can be girly, and you can go out and kick someone's a**."
The setting was certainly an interesting choice on the part of the “Euphoria” star, who spent the better part of last year running from the controversy over her ad for American Eagle Outfitters—also a sponsor of this year’s Stagecoach—in which, following a brief explainer on genetic determinism, a voice-over boasted of the blond, blue-eyed actress’s “great jeans.” The inspiration had seemingly been “Genes,” a near-identical ad that Brooke Shields did for Calvin Klein in the nineteen-eighties, but, in 2025, jokes about Sweeney’s supposed physical supremacy appeared to be giving free press to a right-wing talking point. By then, conservatives had concocted a theory that the fifties-pinup physique of Sweeney, a registered Republican, was an affront to progressive sensibilities; a year earlier, the National Post, a right-leaning news site, had raised the question “Are Sydney Sweeney’s breasts double-D harbingers of the death of woke?” While we were pretending not to be looking, breasts had somehow become Republican-coded.Read on, and the basis for her confusion is clear. "When I was growing up, in the early two-thousands, 'conservative' meant conservative. The right was the party of George W. Bush, abstinence-only sex education, and Christian evangelical teens who recited chastity pledges and wore promise rings under the banner of 'True Love Waits.'"
The Tilt-A-Whirl, for example, spins its passengers in one direction, then another, sometimes hesitating between forays and sometimes swinging abruptly from one motion to another. A rider never knows exactly what to expect next.That's without the clutch operator selectively reducing or increasing the speed of rotation the better to get a car into an extreme spin cycle. You get sufficient deterministic chaos without the clutch operator.
Yet these complicated, surprising movements arise from a remarkably simple geometry. A passenger rides in one of seven cars, each mounted near the edge of its own circular platform but free to pivot about the center. The platforms, in turn, move at a constant speed along an undulating circular track that consists of three identical hills separated by valleys, which tilt the platforms. The platform movements are perfectly regular, but the cars whirl around independently in an irregular manner. Moreover, there is essentially just one adjustable parameter–the rate at which the platforms move around the track.
When the platforms travel at very low speeds, the cars complete one backward revolution as their platforms go over each hill. In contrast, at high speeds a car gets slammed to its platform’s outer edge and stays locked in that position. In both cases, the motion is predictable.
What happens at intermediate speeds?
To model dynamical systems like the Tilt-A-Whirl, mathematicians, scientists, and engineers use equations that describe how the positions and velocities of a system and its components change over time in response to certain forces.
It’s convenient to characterize a system’s dynamics by plotting how its position and velocity evolve over time. Each plotted point represents the system’s state of motion at a particular instant, and successive points generate a winding line through an imaginary mathematical space (known as phase space) representing all possible motions. Different starting points generally initiate different curves.
A simple, repeating motion, like the to-and-fro oscillations of a swinging pendulum, appears as a circle or some other closed curve. Such a plot shows that the system cycles through precisely the same state of motion again and again at regular intervals.
More complicated sequences of movements produce tangled paths that wander through phase space, sometimes never forming a closed loop.
To describe the Tilt-A-Whirl’s dynamics, physicists Bret M. Huggard of Northern Arizona University and Richard L. Kautz of the National Institute of Standards and Technology found a mathematical equation that approximates the motion of an idealized Tilt-A-Whirl. In essence, the movements of an individual car resemble those of a friction-impaired pendulum hanging from a support that is both rotating and being rocked back and forth while the pendulum swings. Solving the equation determines how a Tilt-A-Whirl car would behave under various conditions.That's right, there was a publishable article on the physics of the Tilt-a-Whirl.
The resulting jumbled mixture of car rotations never repeats itself exactly, which gives the Tilt-A-Whirl its lively and unpredictable character. Indeed, no two trips are ever likely to produce exactly the same thrills and chills.That orchestration might shake some change loose from a rider's pockets, or it might require that spinning car to be hosed out afterwards. But I digress.
At the same time, the mathematical model used by Kautz and Huggard predicts that chaotic motion would occur at a speed close to the 6.5 revolutions per minute at which the ride is normally operated.
Interestingly, Tilt-A-Whirl fanatics know by experience that they can actually take advantage of this sensitivity. They can affect the motion of a car by throwing their weight from side to side at crucial moments, turning cycles with little or no action into thrilling whirls.
"Thus, it would seem that aficionados of the Tilt-A-Whirl have known for some time that chaotic systems can be controlled using small perturbations," Huggard and Kautz observed.
It turns out that Tilt-A-Whirl operators can also take advantage of this sensitivity. Software engineer Dave Boll described his experience one summer running a Tilt-A-Whirl, "which is easily the most entertaining carnival ride to operate."
Why? The operator can actually orchestrate the movement of individual cars. A single lever controls the ride's speed, so an operator can slightly retard or accelerate the ring of platforms at any moment. By applying just the right amount of velocity change at exactly the right time, it's possible to spin a particular car. For example, if a car is currently not spinning, is about to go uphill, and is positioned toward the inside, accelerating the platform will send the car into a very fast spin.
As a Black woman who works at the intersection of parks and water, I am watching the ongoing push to restore protections at Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante closely. We know that access to the outdoors is already racialized in this country, much like access to clean air or safe drinking water.Is that intersection north or south of wells and water? Somehow an ongoing spat between ranchers and conservationists in Utah, with Barack Obama expanding the boundaries of western monuments it's probably wise to have an air-conditioned four-wheel drive car to get to, only for Donald Trump to shrink them for Joe Biden ... you know how this is going to play out.
Today, many Black neighborhoods are cut off from the waterways that sustained earlier generations. Despite their cultural and ecological importance, many lakes and streams across the Midwest and the country have been industrialized, polluted, or paved over. This has real consequences for community health and safety, from deadly flooding to toxic taps.What earthly connection "this" has to do with the latest round of cowboys and Indians in Utah I don't know, but at Common Dreams, emoting trumps logic.
Fortunately, parks and clean water are two areas where people across the political spectrum agree: The public good must be put above corporate profit, keeping public lands in public hands, and preventing pollution at the source to ensure safe and affordable water in every home in America. And we’re seeing people rise up.Nowhere in her lament over those western monuments do we see any acknowledgement of how badly those public lands have been mismanaged by those public hands. Sad!
The very first thing a dealer scans for isn’t the trains themselves. It’s the cardboard sitting next to them.There's even a category called "new in box" referring to rolling stock that has not been taken out of the box.
Original packaging protects against dust, moisture, and warping, and its presence signals a collector who understood what they had. A box in solid shape quietly raises the offer before a single piece even changes hands.
Reflexive apologists for Trump’s proposal have tended to focus on the sins of the other party — pointing, for instance, to the unnecessary and inflationary stimulus checks that the Democrats issued in 2021, and to President Joe Biden’s illegal attempt to forgive student loans. But this isn’t a defense, so much as a confession. Those policies were bad, and the Republican Party opposed them. That they were attempted was a disgrace; it was not a catch-all excuse for further reckless behavior. Whatever problems may exist in the American economy in 2026, there is no need for a round of debt-financed $5,000 checks. The central problem of our political era is the persistence of inflation and the associated increases in the cost of everyday goods. Trump’s suggestion would worsen, rather than improve, that issue.Or, following the Babylon Bee, satire is the best response. "Trump Pledges That If Voters Defeat Socialism In November, They Will Each Get An Equal Redistribution Of Wealth From The Government." I vaguely remember something called Ricardian equivalence, and Robert Barro asking, "Are Government Bonds Net Wealth?" There might be a corollary involving helicopter droppings, er, printed money, although even in a hyperinflationary environment, having a windfall of helicopter droppings leaves you slightly less badly off than if they fall on your neighbor.
The role of the federal government within the U.S. economy ought to be to provide a stable framework within which free people may thrive. When it taxes, it ought to tax predictably and consistently, with the purpose of covering its spending. When it spends, it ought to spend on those functions that only the national government can fulfill. President Trump’s proposal cannot be squared with the federal government’s proper role — nor, for that matter, can it be justly described as “policy.”
