Frank Delonjay

Davey was a winner in life & on the field. After an outstanding playing career, he became a coach - the best 1st base coach I ever saw: secondary leads, pitch tips, cutting your steps 1st to 3rd…he looked and taught players to look for every advantage. 1 of 1. #lopes #dodgers

"Cuando tenía 14 años, robé un trozo de pan para comer, me metieron en el calabozo y me dieron pan gratis durante 6 meses. Esa es la justicia de la vida". "Los miserables", Víctor Hugo

38 days in and the United States Commander in Beef has already pulled off the most complete victory in modern history. Let’s recap the wins. 🏆 • Replaced Khamenei (86) with Khamenei (56) • Reclaimed exactly 0kg of uranium • Reopened a strait that was already open - now with a $2M toll per ship (up from $0) • Proved F-15s and F-35s can in fact be downed by guys who “belong to the Stone Age” • Got US bases destroyed across four or five countries (I've lost count) • Shattered allied trust that the US would actually show up if things got spicy • Put Iranians back in the streets (this time for their government) • Installed Pakistan as the region’s voice of reason. Pakistan. • Openly admitted arming the Kurds to stir trouble in Iran. The Kurds did nothing and kept the weapons. • Bragged about the Crown Prince of the Gulf’s biggest petro-monarchy “kissing his ass” • Raised the cost of living for all Americans even more thanks to skyrocketing gas prices. He really did all that to the Middle Eas for the low, low price of a few thousand civilian lives, tens of billions in equipment, and every ally not named Israel. If that’s not the Art of the Deal, I genuinely don’t know what you people expected. And again, we had money to do all that, but not to provide healthcare to our own citizens. Truly a victory that could only be won by someone capable of bankrupting a casino.

"Dick Allen did the wrong thing! He became the best player on his team, he became the star of the team. He was a sensitive Black man who refused to be treated as a second-class citizen. The baseball writers used to claim that Dick would divide the clubhouse along racial lines. That was a lie. The truth is that Dick never divided any clubhouse. He played with racist teammates, different rules for Blacks. Fans threw stuff at him, yelled degrading racial slurs, dumped trash in his front yard at his home. In general, he was tormented. If you go back in time and analyze Dick Allen’s career and look at his career by applying modern-day analytics, his numbers are far and above a lot of the guys who are in the Hall of Fame. That’s always one way to look at it." Mike Schmidt on his "amazing mentor", Dick Allen. Dick Allen obliterates Luis Alvarado.

#OTD 1964 - Much to the chagrin of team executive Branch Rickey, the Cardinals trade Jimmie Coker and Gary Kolb to the Braves for catcher Bob Uecker. After introducing himself, Rickey quickly informs the Cardinals new catcher, "I didn't want you. I wouldn't trade one Gary Kolb for a hundred Bob Ueckers." Welcome to St Louis "Mr. Baseball"! #STLCards

.@jaketapper Anchor of @TheLeadCNN talking about disinformation from @BrendanCarrFCC regarding information released to news agencies worldwide and Trump and Carr singling @cnn out 4.8.26

I dare you to name a more iconic scene from a TV show!

Ruby Dee in 1969 reads off names of young Black men killed by cops

The “La Marseillaise” scene in Casablanca (1942) still lands with staggering power. Many extras were actual refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe, which is why it feels so painfully genuine.

They handed her over at eleven years old—still a child—married off to a man nearly three times her age. What followed wasn’t a marriage. It was repeated assault, beatings, and a girl learning very quickly that no one was coming to save her. By the time Phoolan Devi escaped, she thought the worst was behind her. It wasn’t. She was dragged back into a world of violence—kidnapped, passed between men, brutalized again. In one village, she was publicly humiliated, stripped of dignity in front of a crowd that watched and did nothing. No outrage. No justice. Just silence. That’s where something inside her broke. Or maybe… hardened. When she resurfaced, she wasn’t the same girl. She carried a rifle. She moved through the ravines with a gang of outlaws. And she had a list of names. In 1981, she returned to Behmai. The village where men had once held power over her body… now faced her with a gun in her hands. What happened next was swift, brutal, and impossible to ignore—a mass execution that left the country stunned and divided overnight. Was it vengeance? Or was it the only language a broken system had left her? They called her the “Bandit Queen.” A criminal. A killer. But years later, after surrendering and spending over a decade in prison without trial, she walked out… and into politics. Elected. Powerful. Untouchable in a completely different way. From child bride… to victim… to outlaw… to member of parliament. Her life doesn’t fit into neat categories. It forces a far more uncomfortable question: What happens when a woman is pushed so far… that becoming dangerous is the only way to survive? © Women In World History #archaeohistories

O Farol do Jument foi construído em 1904, foi um pesadelo de engenharia que durou 7 anos. Erguido sobre o recife Ar-Gazeg, na Bretanha, os operários só trabalhavam na maré baixa, içando blocos de granito de barcos em meio a mares brutais. A obra foi financiada por Charles Potron, um sobrevivente de naufrágio que deixou 400 mil francos para que um farol fosse feito naquele ponto mortal. O desafio foi insano: cada pedra de granito era encaixada como um quebra-cabeça para suportar ondas de 30 metros de altura. A força do oceano era tão absurda que a estrutura original começou a rachar logo no início, exigindo reforços de aço perfurados a 30m de profundidade na rocha para o farol não tombar. Uma das construções mais épicas e perigosas da história.

Prof. Jeffrey Sachs on the farce of Western countries telling Congo to ‘just govern properly’: ‘The Kingdom of Belgium created a slave colony in Congo for 30 years. The government of Belgium ran the slave colony for another 40 years. The CIA assassinated Congo’s first popular leader Patrice Lumumba, and then installed another dictatorship for the next 30 years. And then Glencore and others now suck out your cobalt without giving Congo tax income. We don’t reflect on that. We say what’s wrong with you? Why don’t you govern properly?’

🙏🇺🇸🙏 The heat inside the 67th Evacuation Hospital in Qui Nhon never seemed to fade. In 1970, sweat mixed with dust and disinfectant. Stretchers lined the halls. Helicopters never stopped. Inside that chaos stood Second Lieutenant Diane Mumpher Klutz. She was barely in her twenties. Fresh from nursing school. Already in a war zone. Inspired by her family's military legacy, Diane joined the Army in 1969. Within months, she was in Vietnam, working long shifts that felt endless. Day and night, wounded soldiers arrived. Some were barely conscious. Some were terrified. Some were fighting for every breath. There were not enough supplies. Not enough sleep. Not enough time. But she kept going. She cleaned wounds. Checked vitals. Held shaking hands. Whispered comfort to men who thought they might d*e. She learned how to stay calm while chaos exploded around her. Twelve hours became fourteen. Fourteen became sixteen. No complaints. No quitting. "This is hell," many nurses thought quietly. But Diane stayed strong. "I'm proud to have served my country," she later said. In 1971, she came home. No parade. She met her future husband, Stephen Klutz, also a Vietnam veteran. Together, they tried to build peace after war. Diane refused to let her story end in silence. She earned a Ph.D. in Nursing. She became a professor. A nurse practitioner. A mentor to hundreds of students. She spent her life healing others. Long after the war stopped caring. Today, she lives in Corpus Christi, Texas, a proud veteran, mother, and grandmother. Strong. Humble. Still carrying memories most people will never understand. She gave her youth to wounded strangers. She gave her strength to broken bodies. She gave her life to service. And most people never knew. That is the tragedy. That is the truth. Heroes like Diane Mumpher Klutz do not ask for praise. They just keep saving lives 🙏🇺🇸🙏 No headlines. Just a quiet return to normal life.

April 9, 1865: Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House. This effectively ended the American Civil War…the deadliest war in U.S. history.

A community college professor taught the same study skills lecture for 30 years, and the video quietly became one of the most watched educational recordings on the internet. His name is Marty Lobdell. He spent his career as a psychology professor watching students fail not because they were lazy, but because nobody had ever taught them how their brain actually works under the pressure of learning something hard. The lecture is called "Study Less Study Smart." Over 10 million views. Passed around in Reddit threads, Discord servers, and university study groups for over a decade. And the core insight buried inside it has been sitting in cognitive psychology research for years, waiting for someone to explain it in plain language. Here is the framework that completely changed how I think about effort. Your brain does not sustain focus the way you think it does. Studies tracking real students found that the average learner hits a wall somewhere between 25 and 30 minutes. After that, efficiency doesn't just decline. It collapses. You're still sitting at your desk, still looking at the page, but almost nothing is going in. Lobdell illustrated this with a student he knew personally. She set a goal of studying 6 hours a night, 5 nights a week, to pull herself out of academic probation. Thirty hours of studying per week. She failed every single class that quarter. She wasn't failing because she lacked effort. She was failing because she had confused time spent near books with time spent actually learning. The 25-minute crash hit her at 6:30pm every night. She spent the next five and a half hours sitting in the wreckage of her own focus and calling it studying. The fix sounds almost too simple. The moment you feel the slide, stop. Take five minutes. Do something that actually gives you a small reward. Then go back. That five-minute reset returns you to near full efficiency. Across a six-hour window, the difference is not marginal. It is the difference between thirty minutes of real learning and five and a half hours of it. The second thing he taught destroyed something I had believed about how memory actually works. Highlighting feels productive. Going back over your notes and recognizing everything feels like knowing. But recognition and recollection are two completely different cognitive processes, and your brain is very good at making you confuse them. You can see something you've read before and feel completely certain you understand it, even when you couldn't reconstruct a single sentence from memory if the page were blank. He proved this live in the room. He read 13 random letters to his audience. Almost nobody could recall them. Then he rearranged the same 13 letters into two words: Happy Thursday. The whole room got all 13 without effort. Same letters. Same count. The only thing that changed was meaning. The brain stores meaning. Not repetition. The moment new information connects to something you already understand, the retention changes entirely. This is what the cognitive psychology literature calls elaborative encoding, and it is the mechanism underneath every effective study technique. The third principle was the one that hit me hardest, and the one almost nobody applies. Lobdell cited research showing that 80 percent of your study time should be spent in active recitation, not passive reading. Close the material. Say it back in your own words. Teach it to someone else, or to an empty chair if no one is around. The struggle of retrieval is where the actual learning happens. Reading your notes again is watching someone else do the work. His parting line has stayed with me longer than almost anything else I have read about learning. He told the room that if what he shared didn't change their behavior, they hadn't actually learned it. It would just live in their heads as something they had heard once and felt good about. He was right. And most people leave every lecture exactly like that. The students who remember everything aren't putting in more hours. They stopped confusing the feeling of studying with the fact of it.

Iran is not defined by a regime which only exists because the CIA installed a Shah who ran a monarchic autocracy which led to the rise of religious fundamentalism and ultimately the Islamic revolution of 1979. Why did the US install him? Because the democratically elected government that ousted him in 1951 nationalised Iranian oil for the benefit of the Iranian people. Iran is NOT defined by the monsters for whom the US created a permissive environment to create a an Islamic terrorist state. The U.S. and British governments did this, NOT the people of Iran. Once we define a nation by the actions of their leaders we create another permissive environment for genocide just as we did in Gaza and now in Lebanon. Iran is a beautiful country steeped in ancient history which has seen them repel invaders time and time again. It’s estimated that just 20% of the population support the regime, yet the US and Israel has deliberately targeted civilian infrastructure. Hundreds of hospitals and schools have been destroyed as well as cultural sites and energy generation facilities. This is NOT a holy war as Trump would have you believe, it’s just another war prosecuted by greedy white men in search of geopolitical power and wealth. Just as it was in 1951 when they actively destroyed democracy to install a dictator, they think they can now deliver new regime change in installing a new monarchic leader in the form of Trump working from home to control Iranian oil. This has NOTHING to do with liberating the Iranian people, Trump is more than happy to deal with a repressive regime as long as they do his bidding and pay a licensing fee to him personally into his Qatari bank account. The problem is, he’s picked on the wrong regime. A regime able to call on centuries of lived experience of invaders. They have no intention of fighting a conventional war, for them it’s about asymmetric warfare. They can instigate attack anywhere in the world to attack American interests. They’ve just chosen not to push that button YET. Trump is out of his league and now desperate for an off-ramp. Iran are more than happy to provide one, but the cost will be crippling both politically and economically. This is the biggest political and military failure in American history. Not because the U.S. military underperformed, they have been outstanding as one would have expected. They’ve carried out their orders to the letter. The question remains however, did they carry out illegal orders? Only time will tell. There is little question that Trump as Commander in Chief, may well find himself accused of war crimes and or crimes against humanity. Once again, time will deliver a verdict on that. Every day the US remains in this war costs billions and Trump’s popularity dips ever further. He’s on political life support already, but it’s the lies that are killing him. He’s up against a smart enemy better at social media than him, who are more than prepared to wait him out, because every day he remains in this quagmire is another nail in his coffin. He’s spent his entire life expecting someone to clean up the mess he leaves behind. That’s why he’s lashing out at allies and threatening to leave NATO. He’s a man in quicksand without a plan and no exit strategy. Even when he has nowhere to turn he can’t help his self enrichment gag reflex kicking in as he considers a ‘joint venture’ with Iran to share the proceeds of tolls on ships navigating the Strait of Hormuz. He’s also embedded Kushner and Witkoff into proceedings to ensure he gets a cut of any reconstruction contracts that might arise as a result of what he’s destroyed. Just as Hitler became delusional in his bunker when it was all over, Trump is facing the same fate. The lies, the twisted narratives, the fantasy that the people believe in him is all part of a cancer that is eating him alive. When he’s gone, if America does not hunt down and jail his enablers, I fear there is no hope and no better tomorrow.

HR: We lost a high-performing employee today. CEO: What happened? HR: The company hired someone fresh out of college into the same role and paid them more than him, even after he gave us 11 years. CEO: But we pay well for this job. HR: He earns 55,000 after more than a decade of loyalty. The new hire started at 70,000. CEO: That’s unfortunate, but that’s the market rate for new talent. HR: And now we’ve lost the person who actually carried the role for years. CEO: Fine. Declare the position vacant. HR: With what budget? CEO: 80,000 starting salary. Companies will underpay loyal employees for years, then suddenly find a bigger budget the moment those employees leave. The problem is rarely money. It is how little they value the people who stayed.

Watching my first @MLB victory brings back so many great memories!

May 2, 1972 #BlackHistory Black Journal focuses on Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who was recently voted the NBA's MVP by his peers. The profile features an exclusive interview with Jabbar conducted by Black Journal’s Stan Lathan, which offers a candid look at the man and the athlete. Jabbar, who generally avoids the press, says of the Black Journal episode, “I am glad to have the opportunity to show people who I really am.” From his boycott of the 1968 Olympics to his practice of Islam, Jabbar discusses a number of topics, his feelings about his height, his marriage, sports as a money-making business, Black professional athletes and their commitment to the Black community, and the media’s portrayal of him, among others.

Did you Know? In May of 1947, after coming off his 2nd MVP season, Stan Musial was struggling at the plate (hoovering around a .200 batting average all season) He finally complained to management that he has felt stabbing pain in his gut all season. The Cardinals were on the road playing the Brooklyn Dodgers, when it was decided that Stan needed to return to St Louis to see the team Doctor. He was diagnosed with appendicitis and tonsilitis. But instead of a appendectomy that would have him miss 4 to 6 weeks of the season, it was mutually decided to freeze his appendix. Not a lot is known about the odd procedure, but it's thought they would heavily ice pack the area to "freeze" the appendix. Of course now that would be unacceptable. Musial would recover enough to finished the year batting .312 with 19 home runs and 95 RBIs. He had surgery in the off season to remove both the appendix and tonsils. The surgeries were a success because the next season (1948) Stan proceeded to have the greatest season of his Hall of Fame career: *135 Runs *230 Hits *46 Doubles *18 Triples 39 HR *131 RBI *429 Total Bases *.450 OBP *1.152 OPS *200 OPS+ *.376 BA MVP *Led league #STLCards #Legend