IF SOME STRANGER STUCK ME WITH A SYRINGE, I’D BREAK HIS JAW IF NOT HIS NECK: Social Media ‘Influencer’ Heads to Jail Over ‘Pranks’ Where He Stuck Random Strangers with Real Syringes.
Archive for 2025
October 12, 2025
REPORT FROM THE BLUE ZONES: NYC Columbus Day Parade canceled due to NY’s state of emergency.
OPEN THREAD: Ring out the weekend.
PROFESSOR CARRINGTON, CALL YOUR OFFICE: Colossal ‘hole’ in the sun could spark impressive auroras this weekend.
ANALYSIS: TRUE.
Nowhere has the death of the "expert" class been more evident than in foreign policy.
Everything they told you for decades was wrong, specifically regarding the Middle East.
All of it, every bit of it, was dead wrong. And they still pretend they have credibility. https://t.co/lqjPCrf2w1
— Bonchie (@bonchieredstate) October 11, 2025
ROBIN HANSON: Power Corrupts Prestige. “Humans have long shared norms that say to resist power, but admire prestige. So people with power have long sought to launder their power into prestige; they’d rather be seen as prestigious, instead of a bigshot.”
Samsung Galaxy Tab S9 11” 256GB WiFi 7 Android AI Tablet. #CommissionEarned
FIGHT THE (ELECTRIC) POWER: Ferrari Refuses to Go Fully Electric—V6, V8, and V12 Will Keep Roaring.
MR. FAFO FOUND OUT? Reported Killed By Fellow Gazans in Tribal Dispute.
UPDATE:
Good luck, New York. https://t.co/qiFhVkHZuh
— Bonchie (@bonchieredstate) October 12, 2025
LIMITED TIME DEAL: iRobot Roomba 104 2in1 Vacuum & Mop Robot. #CommissionEarned
HMM: EDC Tip: No Reloads for Self-Defense. “If you have no other brand loyalty, just purchase the same thing that local law enforcement uses. If you’re ever questioned, your attorney can say that if it’s good enough for local cops to carry, it’s certainly good enough for an armed citizen. Again, no hostile attorney is going to try and convince a jury that the Sheriff’s Department is wrong and their ammo is evil.”
READER FAVORITE: Toniiq Ultra High Purity Quercetin Capsules. #CommissionEarned
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:
Authorities Warn Katie Porter Has Grown To 600 Feet And Is Currently Rampaging Through San Francisco https://t.co/EEK3JIYjEX pic.twitter.com/KrR13bM0sY
— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) October 8, 2025
On the upside, this would give the long beleaguered city the fresh start it so desperately needs.
THE LONELY LIVES OF SCIENTISTS: Scientists need your toenails.
POOR JOE BIDEN IS STRUGGLING TO ADAPT TO PRIVATE LIFE:
Joe Biden’s post-presidency has been rough, to put it mildly.
Nearly nine months after Donald Trump reclaimed the White House, Biden is holed up in Wilmington, Delaware, grappling with a reality that must feel like political exile. He’s dealing not just with the sting of losing power, but also the inability to sell access and enrich his family. Though he won’t admit to the latter.
The irony couldn’t be thicker. After years of attacking Trump and using the Justice Department in a desperate bid to put his successor behind bars, Biden now finds himself being told by his own advisers to stay quiet and act like a traditional ex-president. Most of the time, he does—keeping his mouth shut while Trump hits him with personal jabs and sharp policy criticism.
Give him credit for one thing — despite Joe’s myriad ailments, he’s still occasionally capable of making the right decisions on the important issues:
WATCH: Kamala Harris reveals that Joe Biden doesn't pick up her calls.
Eugene Daniels asking about Biden's cancer treatment: Have you talked to him about it?
Kamala: "Yeah. No. I called him earlier."
Daniels: "How's he doing?"
Kamala: "I have not talked to him. I just left… pic.twitter.com/kZ7tcWDDqw
— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) October 12, 2025
SCOTT JOHNSON: A fool’s house.
I recall the late William F. Buckley, Jr. bragging on his ability to identify liberals. Take him to a party, blindfold him, spin him around, take off the blindfold, and he could unerringly point out the liberals.
It’s not bragging if you can do it. I have no doubt Buckley could do it. “Brag” is the wrong word. “Revealing” or “disclosing” would be more like it.
I thought of Buckley’s revelation when we attended the Guthrie Theater’s production of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House this past Wednesday evening. The Guthrie has staged the version of the play adapted by Amy Kellogg Tracy Brigden is the director. Performed on the Guthrie’s Wurtele Thrust Stage in a space that seats 1,100, the play was nearly sold out. The place was packed.
The star of the play is Amelia Pedlow (Ibsen’s Nora). She is a strikingly beautiful actress. The production was professional, but something is wrong when the audience laughs at Nora’s climactic declaration of independence, as it did Wednesday night. I think the audience was obtuse.
We got off on the wrong foot with the Guthrie’s recorded land acknowledgment. The recorded land acknowledgment is read by someone with the sonorous voice of a public radio announcer: “The Guthrie Theater would like to acknowledge that we gather on the traditional land of the Dakota People and honor with gratitude the land itself and the people who who have stewarded it through the generations, including the Ojibwe and other indigenous nations.”
Exit quote: “I wanted to shout out ‘It’s not too late to give it back’ in response to the land acknowledgment.”
CLONING SEEMED FRIGHTENING THEN, NOW IT SEEMS . . . QUAINT. RIP: John Gurdon, Nobel laureate and ‘godfather of cloning,’ dies at 92.
SASHA STONE: Diane Keaton Was One of a Kind.
Her career spanned over 60 films, and her range extended from screwball comedies like Play It Again, Sam, Sleeper, and Annie Hall to serious dramas like The Godfather I and II.
Woody Allen made her a star and captured her spirit in Annie Hall. The film is a loose sketch of her original name, Diane Hall, which she changed to Diane Keaton. How she transitioned from someone naive to someone more sophisticated and educated, ultimately leaving him behind. I’ve seen it so many times I could recite almost the entire movie by heart.
Speaking of which: Diane Keaton’s Best Roles from The Godfather to Annie Hall. Two guesses as to what the London Times considers her best role:
This is Keaton’s everything. Annie Hall is the star-making moment, when she erupted into the movie-going consciousness as a new and idealised, never-seen-before female protagonist. She was bookish, sporty, quirky, confident, nervous, open, reserved and prone, in moments of extreme anxiety, to staring at the ground and sighing in a singsong voice, “Oh well, la dee dah, la dee dah.” She dressed like Buster Keaton and was the perfect vehicle for Allen’s postmodern rom-com, a film that mish-mashed the French New Wave with Preston Sturges comedies and TV documentaries. She embodies the character and the film. The Oscar win for best actress was rarely more deserved.
Despite Star Wars smashing box office records in 1977, it was beaten out for best picture at the Academy Awards by Annie Hall in large part due to the latter’s repeated showings on Z Channel, the movie-oriented L.A. cable TV channel, which was required viewing for everyone in the industry. As the Washington Post noted in 1988:
Most years around this time, at least one film gets a special Academy Awards push via home video. The practice started in 1977, when frequent showings of “Annie Hall” on the Z Channel — an all-movie cable channel broadcast only in Los Angeles and widely watched within the film industry — were deemed largely responsible for that movie’s Best Picture award.
Here’s my look at the 2004 documentary on the rise and fall of that quirky L.A. institution: Z Channel: Closed-Circuit TV for Hollywood’s Ruling Class.
TIME FOR ONSHORING: Senators: Dependence on foreign drug supplies threatens security, health.
JD VANCE ANNIHILATES GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS IN FIERY LIVE INTERVIEW:
VANCE: “Here’s, George, why fewer and fewer people watch your program and why you’re losing CREDIBILITY, because you’re talking for now 5 minutes with the Vice President of the United States about this story regarding Tom Homan, a story that I’ve read about, but I don’t even know the video that you’re talking about. Meanwhile, low-income women can’t get food because the Democrats and Chuck Schumer have shut down the government!”
“You are focused on a BOGUS story. You’re insinuating criminal wrongdoing against a guy who has done nothing wrong instead of focusing on the fact that our country is struggling because our government’s shut down! Let’s talk about the real issues, George.”
“I think the American people would benefit much more from that than from you going down some weird left-wing rabbit hole where the facts clearly show that Tom Homan didn’t engage in any criminal wrongdoing.”
GEORGE: “It’s not a weird left-wing rabbit hole! I didn’t insinuate anything. I asked you whether Tom Homan accepted $50,000 as was heard on an audio tape recorded by the FBI in September 2024, and you did not answer the question. Thank you for your time this morning.”
How bad was it for Stephanopoulos? “So Bad They Actually Cut [Vance’s] Feed:”
🚨 BREAKING: JD Vance destroyed ABC's George Stephanopolous so hard they CUT HIS FEED and went to break 🤣
VANCE: "Here's, George, why fewer and fewer people watch your program and why you're losing CREDIBILITY, because you're talking for now 5 minutes with the Vice President of… pic.twitter.com/zeQ10DUz1r
— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) October 12, 2025
UPDATE: Tom Bevan of Real Clear Politics tweets, “I swear, the only reason for the admin going on the Sunday shows anymore is to own the lib anchors. Nobody watches these shows. [Vance] is going to get far more mileage off of this on social media.”
ROGER KIMBALL: The Physics and Politics of Peace: Trump’s Triumph in the Middle East.
Peace in the Middle East was impossible—until it wasn’t. Donald Trump started to traverse that impassable domain in his first term with the Abraham Accords. Then, just a few days ago, he managed another impossible passage when he brokered peace between the irreconcilable forces of Israel and Hamas. Almost as impressive, Trump solicited and received the support of Muslim countries from Indonesia to Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar, and Egypt. Amazing.
How did he do it? Well, in part, it was “the art of the deal” in practice. But stepping back, Trump’s forceful yet patient endeavor on behalf of peace reminded me of Walter Bagehot’s insights in his neglected masterpiece, Physics and Politics. First published in 1872, this curious book is partly a contribution to political history and partly an exploration of the often forgotten truism that not all things are possible at all times and in all places. If political liberty is a precious possession, Bagehot saw, it is forged in a long development of civilization, much of which is distinctly, and necessarily, illiberal.
Trump has brokered an unthinkable deal: the release of the final 20 live Israeli hostages, with Israel maintaining a secure posture in the Gaza Strip; the possibility of a non-Hamas future in Gaza, supported by regional allies; the even greater possibility of future Abraham Accords with countries like Saudi Arabia and Indonesia.
So, how did this happen?
It happened the same way things always happen in the Middle East: The decisionmakers ignored the conventional wisdom.
The conventional wisdom said that military action could not guarantee security. That wasn’t just wrong; it was catastrophically wrong: It was military action that took out the supporting pillars beneath Hamas’ feet.
Finally, speaking of the physics of the Middle East, the one man who is absolutely everywhere in Gaza just keeps on going and going: Of All the People to Survive in Gaza, You Knew Mr FAFO Had to Be One of Them.
UPDATE:
Hamas is the only army in the world that wears civilian clothes during war and puts on uniforms during ceasefires. pic.twitter.com/QrGb9jtzbm
— Amit Segal (@AmitSegal) October 12, 2025
READER FAVORITE: Kitchen Mama Auto Electric Can Opener. #CommissionEarned
SOMEBODY SET UP US THE BOMB: RFK Jr. and Trump link circumcision to autism through Tylenol.
Earlier, from America’s Newspaper of Record: Pregnant Women Begin Downing Tylenol In Hopes Sons Will Start Electric Car Companies And Become Billionaires.