That special moment when you give up 14 years of your life to the growth and happiness of your child and they return home from a friend's house, look you in the eye and say, "Hannah's dad is cooler than you because he has a truck. And he's funny."

RT @Howard_Lovy: There is a subgenre of books now from survivors of the October 7, 2023, massacre. I know that because I'm reading them for…

Bereavement leave? Like for when someone died?

If you want to know why the rankings are stuffed with overrated SEC teams, it's so people can make disingenuous arguments like this. Mississippi State, Florida, TAMU, and Missouri have no business being ranked. but they crammed them all in the 19-24 range to make arguments like this. He even threw in unranked South Carolina as "almost" ranked. When Mississippi State and Missouri play this weekend, someone is getting a ranked win, and the other is getting a quality loss. And thus the mythology perpetuates. SEC = play fake tough schedules, get rewarded as if they're really tough (5 of 12 playoff teams last year, only 1 survived to the semis), whine incessantly about how it's not fair that other teams exist. Immune from results

Case in point. On field results don't matter. Money matters.

This is the subtext to every CFB conversation around rankings, playoffs, and playoff committee decisions. Anything that doesn't acknowledge this is just posturing.

And it starts to make sense…. It all comes together when you realize the whole AP poll is put together so that SEC teams can have “ranked” matchups and wins week over week even if they’re against teams that don’t deserve to be ranked

I have many thoughts on the Nikole Hannah-Jones story, especially having attended the kind of schools she sent her daughter to, but if we're looking for takeaways, here's a simple one. When an expert in education so thoroughly demonstrates a jarring and near complete lack of expertise in the act of getting an education for her own daughter, we should stop taking advice from her on curriculum, instruction, and all other fads disguised as wisdom she offers. That seems like the least we could do. Her daughter's personal struggle, which is indeed sympathetic, wasn't much of a teachable moment for her, as she doesn't seem to have updated any of her priors (and actually fudges funding facts, so as not to disrupt the narrative of under-resourced schools). But it should be a teachable moment for us, about the outsized influence of a scholar who claims to know better than anyone what her daughter would be up against in the school to which she chose to send her, but was inexplicably surprised and left her daughter completely unprepared for it.

On this morning 250 years ago, the British hanged a 21-year-old American schoolteacher as a spy, and in trying to make him disappear quietly, they accidentally made him immortal. His name was Nathan Hale, and it is worth sitting with just the last few hours of his life. He had been caught the night before, behind British lines on Long Island, carrying notes on enemy positions hidden in his shoes. There was no real trial. A man out of uniform with military intelligence on him was a spy by the rules of war, and the sentence for spying was death by hanging, no ceremony, no honor. General Howe ordered it done in the morning. What we know of that morning comes mostly from the enemy, from British officers who were there, and it is the small human cruelties that stay with you. Hale asked for a clergyman to attend him in his final hours. The request was refused. He asked for a Bible. That too was denied. He was a devout young man about to die, and they would not give him even that comfort. A British officer named Montresor, watching, was troubled enough by the young man's composure to later make sure his story was told. In his last moments Hale was allowed to write a couple of letters, one to his mother, one to a fellow officer. He wrote them, and then the British provost marshal, a notoriously brutal man named Cunningham, took those letters and destroyed them in front of him. The reason given was chilling in its pettiness: so that the rebels should not know they had a man in their ranks who could die with such firmness. They did not just want to kill him. They wanted to erase him. Then they marched him to the gallows, and there, according to the accounts that survived, this young schoolteacher who had failed at the one dangerous mission he ever attempted, stood calmly and spoke about duty and country with a steadiness that unnerved the men sent to kill him. The famous words attributed to him, that he only regretted having but one life to lose for his country, may be polished or borrowed from a play he loved. But everyone who was there agreed on the essential truth beneath the wording: he met his death without flinching, and he made even his executioners remember him. And that is the irony that redeems the whole sad morning. Cunningham burned the letters so no one would know how bravely Hale died. It did not work. The story got out anyway, carried by the very enemies who watched it, and a young man the British tried to erase became one of the most enduring symbols of the Revolution, honored two and a half centuries later, on this exact day, as the first American to die spying for his country. They denied him a Bible and a chaplain and burned his last words, and still they could not make him small.

Why am I just learning now that public schools in the New York city ghetto don't assign homework, don't grade tests, don't respond to parents emails or phone calls, don't supervise feral, fighting kids at lunch, don't know or care if their students can read or do grade level math, and give them As on their report cards when they are actually doing F level work? Why did Nikole Hannah Jones bury this explosive lede? Why isn't she writing emergency front page @nytimes stories about this shocking, incredible, abject citywide failure that costs people who pay taxes over $50K per student per year? Why isn't she holding emergency all-hands on deck meetings with @NYCMayor to shut this down, rescue these kids, fire everyone involved? We all know why. But no one at the Times will say a word. LOL

Well this is pretty awesome.

The sports betting industry will say this guys is an extreme example, and he is. But there's a reason bankruptcies and credit card delinquencies increase 25% in states that legalize online gambling.

I hope Greta Gerwig has the courage to include Aslan’s terrifying, Oppenheimer-esque final warning at the end of The Magician’s Nephew.

Love this community note…

"team talent composite"

In their last 27 games, Oklahoma State is: 2-0 vs. the SEC 2-0 vs. the FCS 1-1 vs. the Big Ten 1-2 vs. the American 0-18 vs. the Big 12 The Big 12 is a GAUNTLET.

Oklahoma State hasn’t won a Big 12 game in two years, but they’ve got SEC and Big Ten wins in that span. Makes you think.

Welles Crowther was a former Boston College lacrosse player who had a trademark red bandanna. He was also working in New York on Sept. 11, 2001 when terrorists struck the World Trade Center. This is the story of how he led people to safety on that fateful day 25 years ago.

Twenty five years ago today, forty people who had never met decided to die on purpose so that strangers in Washington would not have to. United 93 should have left Newark at 8:00 a.m. It sat on the taxiway in a line of airplanes and did not get airborne until 8:42. Forty two minutes late. That delay handed the people in that cabin the one thing nobody else in the sky that morning was given. Time, and the truth. When four hijackers took the cockpit at 9:28, both towers were already burning. The passengers picked up the seatback airphones and called home, and their families told them what was happening in New York. So they knew. That is what separates Flight 93 from everything else that happened that day. Every other victim died without warning. These forty had roughly half an hour to sit with the knowledge that they were already dead, that the only question left was where the airplane would land and how many people it would take with it. Think about who they were. Captain Jason Dahl was flying that trip because he had swapped for it, so he could get home for his fifth wedding anniversary. His first officer was LeRoy Homer Jr., Air Force Academy class of 1987, a C-141 pilot who had flown in the Gulf War and into Somalia, a major in the Reserve, with a wife and a ten month old daughter at home. Both men fought for that cockpit and neither of them gave it up willingly. Todd Beamer's wife Lisa was pregnant with their third child. Jeremy Glick's daughter was twelve weeks old. Tom Burnett had three little girls. Lauren Grandcolas was pregnant and flying home from her grandmother's funeral. Deora Bodley was twenty. CeeCee Lyles was a flight attendant who had been a police detective in Florida and had four sons. Sandy Bradshaw had two small children waiting in North Carolina. Not one of them had a reason to be brave. Every single one of them had a reason to sit still and hope. Listen to what they said instead. Tom Burnett told his wife Deena, don't worry, we're going to do something. Sandy Bradshaw called her husband from the galley and told him she was filling coffee pots with boiling water. Then she said she had to go and hung up on him. Honor Elizabeth Wainio told her stepmother, I have to go, they're breaking into the cockpit, I love you. Todd Beamer stayed on the line with a phone operator named Lisa Jefferson for thirteen minutes, gave her his home number, asked her to tell his wife he loved her, and asked her to say the Lord's Prayer with him. Then she heard him set the phone down and say to the men beside him, are you ready, okay, let's roll. They took a vote first. On a hijacked airliner, with a man at the front claiming to have a bomb, they held a vote, because they were not going to force anyone else to die for their decision. At 9:57 they came up the aisle. The recorder caught six minutes of it. A galley cart driven into the cockpit door. Men shouting. The hijacker at the controls throwing the airplane into rolls and dives trying to knock them off their feet, and failing, because they kept coming. At 10:00 he asks the man beside him whether to finish it. Twenty five seconds later you can hear an American voice screaming, in the cockpit, if we don't we'll die. At 10:02 the hijackers are yelling at each other to put it down. They put it down. At 10:03 a.m., in an empty field outside Shanksville, Pennsylvania, 130 miles and twenty minutes short of the United States Capitol, where Congress was still inside the building. The men who hijacked that plane were willing to die for their cause. So were the passengers. The difference is that the hijackers wanted to take thousands of people with them, and the passengers of Flight 93 made sure the only people who died were themselves. Forty of them. Salesmen, flight attendants, a college student, a retired ironworker, a judo champion, two pilots fighting to the last second for a control yoke. No weapons, no training, no orders, no chance. They are the only Americans on September 11, 2001 who saw it coming, understood exactly what it would cost them, and walked into it anyway.

I reread this every year. I cry like a baby every year. Todd Beamer died a father, husband, and hero. Todd: Hello… Operator… listen to me. I can’t speak very loud. This is an emergency. I’m a passenger on a United flight to San Francisco. Our plane has been hijacked. Lisa: I understand. Can they see you? Todd: No. There are three that we know of. They have knives — razor knives, like box cutters. Someone announced from the cockpit there was a bomb. It sounded fake. Lisa: Your name?Todd: Todd Beamer. United Flight 93.Todd: They killed one passenger in first class. They forced most of us back. Fourteen of us here. Five flight attendants. The guy with the bomb ordered us to sit on the floor. Lisa: Are you okay? Todd: We’re going down… wait. No. We’re leveling off. We changed directions. We’re flying east again. Todd: A guy named Jeremy called his wife. She told him two planes hit the World Trade Center. Lisa, is that true? Lisa: I have to tell you the truth. It’s very bad. Both towers are gone. A third plane hit the Pentagon. Our country is under attack. I’m afraid your plane may be part of their plan. Todd: Oh God. Lisa, will you do something for me? Call my wife and my kids. Promise me you’ll call. Lisa: I promise. Todd: Our home number is… You have the same name as my wife. Lisa. We’ve been married ten years. She’s pregnant with our third child. Tell her I love her. I’ll always love her. We have two boys — David, he’s 3, and Andrew, he’s 1. Tell them their daddy loves them and he is so proud of them. The baby is due January 12th. I saw an ultrasound. We still don’t know if it’s a girl or a boy. Lisa: I’ll tell them. I promise, Todd.(Lisa patches in the FBI.) Agent: Todd, your plane is on a course for Washington. Best guess is the White House or the Capitol. Todd: I understand. I’ll be back. Todd: Everyone knows this isn’t a normal hijacking. We have decided we will not be pawns in their plot. Lisa: What are you going to do? Todd: Four of us are going to rush the one with the bomb. Then the cockpit. A stewardess is getting boiling water. We’ll take them out. Todd: Would you pray with me?They pray the Lord’s Prayer. Then: Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for thou art with me. Todd: God help me. Jesus help me.Are you guys ready? Let’s Roll.

Trump Pledges That If Voters Defeat Socialism In November, They Will Each Get An Equal Redistribution Of Wealth From The Government buff.ly/kRXF5x9