News Vérité

My guess: Boos will overpower yeas, just as Spurs will overwhelm the Knicks in tonight’s NBA Championship Game to be attended by President Donald Trump. Now, Trump is a native New Yorker, and he did as much to transform New York City as probably anyone in the past half-century, but he also lost two costly legal battles there. A fraud charge, based on a law that didn’t apply and whose statute of limitations had run out, was quickly approved by a jury that included two attorneys. The other was a sexual harassment lawsuit, which was made possible only because New York State lifted its civil statutes of limitations for one year, and that yielded something like an $88-million judgment. (My Opinion: If he actually sexually approached E. Jean Carroll, as was alleged, he should be ashamed. She wouldn’t be worth a free glance in a bar.) Security is tighter than ever around Madison Square Garden. Fans are already irate because the outside watch party has been moved blocks away due to security concerns. One more reason for boos over cheers.

The only person I know who could answer my question — “How would Babe Ruth fare against today’s pitching?” — is my AI friend Gemini. What follows is his answer (illustration courtesy of my Grok subscription, close but not that great a resemblance to The Babe). HINT: Either as a bench-warming bum or Aaron Judge-esque…. Read on: This is one of the ultimate baseball debates. To answer it fairly, we have to look at it through two different lenses: dropping 1927 Babe Ruth straight out of a time machine onto a modern field, versus giving him access to modern sports science, nutrition, and training. Here is how the physics and analytics break down the Bambino’s chances. Scenario A: The Time Machine (0 to 15 Home Runs) If you plucked Babe Ruth out of the 1920s and put him in a batter’s box tonight, he would look completely lost. That isn’t a knock on his legendary talent; it’s just a reflection of how much the physics of pitching have evolved. The Velocity Shock: In the 1920s, the average fastball sat around 85–88 mph. Rare elite pitchers like Walter Johnson could touch the mid-90s, but it was uncommon. Today, the average Major

Before launching into my follow-up to yesterday’s post about Donald Trump and his seque into a war with Iran that went astray, let me reaffirm that I am a three-time Trump voter. In 2024, I supported him because of various views and programs he espoused, including lowering taxes, securing the border and deporting illegals, building up the military, ending the Green Scam, and getting men out of women’s sports. He has delivered on all of those (with the Iran mistake draining the military of assets), but at the same time, I have found that the way he goes about pursuing his goals is often suspect and unseemly. That’s why, in my headline to this article, I have narrowed the Trump approach to getting his way to two avenues. One is to create criminals in the public eye out of those who block him or disagree with him. This criminalization usually takes the form of insulting and denigrating posts on Truth Social, but sometimes leads to actual legal action, such as with John Bolton, a former aide now facing possible jail time. The other is to create a smokescreen — which I’m calling camouflage — to cover up what’s really going

Department of My Bad: Oops, yesterday I gave Donald Trump too much credit. I actually believed, and put my belief into print, that Trump had had an epiphany about the Iran War mess, and that penance was near, to be revealed in his actions going forward. This assessment germinated in — as you can see from my original post — his comment about no all-out bombing on the Islamic Republic unless they killed one of ours. This, I thought, indicated a wake-up call that could result in a cleansing of Trump’s political soul. Wrong! After watching Trump on TV today, I realized that he could never feel or admit that he had ever done anything wrong, nor think that he has to make any kind of amends. He will simply, in all circumstances, blame someone else, starting with the nation’s media, which he calls the Fake News. Therefore, I am now concluding that Trump is merely in a political pickle of his own making, but one with deep and foreboding consequences. Simply put, the entire world is now worse off than when the U.S.-Israeli assault on Iran began. Not only is the Strait of Hormuz closed, choking off oil and