Wiffleball/Metal/SFGiants/49ers/Cyclones/Health
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Too much nuance here for most people debating Hetfield's comments, but this is the best discussion of the controversy that I've seen.
It's ok that people are offended/disappointed in what JH said. But he's been saying the same thing for years.
Addressing the James Hetfield controversy,
Metal has always been about individuality and freedom of expression for me. We all have different life experiences, perspectives, and observations, and those differences are part of what makes music so powerful.
Personally, I only listen to Metallica’s first three albums because I just don’t care for anything after the Cliff Burton era. (Sorry, but aside from “Eye of the Beholder,” “Harvester of Sorrow,” and “One,” I think ...And Justice for All kind of sucks. 😂) But that’s my opinion, and I’m certainly not going to tell anyone else what they should or shouldn’t enjoy.
More importantly, metal has never belonged to one political party, one ideology, or one belief system. I listen to everything from Christian rock and metal to thrash, death, doom, and black metal. Those genres explore all kinds of subjects, perspectives, and philosophies, many of which I don’t personally believe in, practice, or apply to my own life.
I mean, I love Cannibal Corpse’s “Hammer Smashed Face,” but that doesn’t mean I’m out here trying to practice the lyrics in real life, folks. Nor would anyone mistake that song for a positive affirmation anthem. 😂
I’m not a Christian, and I have a real problem with religious hypocrisy. However, I absolutely believe people have the right to practice whatever faith they choose. I’m not a Satanist either, but I have no issue with someone practicing Satanism or using satanic imagery and themes in their music. You don’t have to personally subscribe to an idea to appreciate the art someone creates around it.
Politically, I despise the far right, and I despise the far left. In my opinion, both can become destructive when ideology takes priority over common sense, accountability, and the well-being of ordinary people. I also don’t believe the American government, as a whole, genuinely prioritizes its citizens as much as it claims to. There’s a lot of political theater, endless promises, and finger-pointing, but how much of it ultimately makes a meaningful difference in the lives of everyday Americans?
When it comes to Israel and Palestine, I think we can acknowledge multiple uncomfortable truths at once. I believe Israeli actions and failures to uphold ceasefires can undermine efforts to maintain peace, but I’m equally unwilling to excuse Hamas for its actions, including the exploitation and endangerment of children and civilians. Condemning one side’s actions doesn’t require giving the other side a free pass. We should be able to criticize everyone where criticism is warranted without automatically being labeled a supporter of the opposing side.
Now, regarding James Hetfield’s comments, I agree with his general point. That doesn’t mean musicians shouldn’t express political or social views through their music. Quite the opposite. Music has always been a powerful vehicle for addressing injustice, challenging authority, and expressing deeply held beliefs.
But if I pay to see a band, I’m primarily there for the music. If the lyrics have something meaningful to say, great! That’s part of the experience. But I don’t necessarily need a 20-minute political lecture between songs about how America sucks, how society is broken, or why I should adopt a particular viewpoint. Chances are, I’m already aware of many of these issues, and I came to hear the band play.
That said, it’s their platform, their music, and their choice. They have every right to speak their minds, just as I have every right to agree, disagree, or decide whether I want to attend another show. I’m not losing sleep over it either way. To me, the whole uproar is much ado about nothing.
What I do find amusing, however, is the contradiction in some of the reactions. People will passionately defend an artist’s right to speak freely, right up until that artist expresses an opinion they dislike. Suddenly, that same artist should shut up, keep their opinions to themselves, or stay in their lane. You can’t genuinely champion freedom of expression while demanding that someone else be silenced simply because their viewpoint doesn’t align with yours. That’s hypocrisy, too.
Over the years, I’ve been fortunate enough to meet some incredible musicians and experience some truly amazing music. I haven’t always agreed with their personal beliefs, political opinions, or social positions, but I’ve often been able to look beyond those differences and appreciate the people they are, as well as the talent and creativity they bring to their craft.
I don’t have to agree with someone’s worldview to respect their talent, appreciate their music, or recognize their right to express themselves. That’s what individuality and freedom of expression mean to me.
If that bothers someone, so be it. Life is complicated enough, and we all have our own challenges to deal with. I have neither the time nor the energy to worry about what other people think I should care about, what opinions I’m allowed to hold, or which artists I’m permitted to appreciate.
Metal has always been a place where different ideas, beliefs, and perspectives can coexist, even when they clash. I’d rather keep it that way than turn every band, every song, and every concert into another political battlefield.
At the end of the day, let the music speak, let people have their opinions, and let everyone decide for themselves what they want to listen to. 🤘
Food is a part of it, but I suspect it has more to do with the amount of time the average person spends outside and how they expose themselves. Most people use sunscreens and sunglasses when they go out in the sun. Basically you are telling your body that you are inside a building, not outside in the sun. A whole cascade of hormones and biological processes are determined by the photoreceptors in your eyes and skin. By varying the amount and ratio of UV-A and UV-B that gets absorbed by your body, you are setting yourself up for disease.
In 1976 a Sydney doctor asked in print whether the new cooking oils were causing melanoma. His reasoning was simple. The sun had not changed. What the people were made of had.
Hunters lived naked on the African savannah for 2 million years, on the equator, under the same sun all day.
Egyptian labourers dragged limestone up the pyramids in a loincloth, in 45 degree heat.
Greek athletes trained and competed stark naked at Olympia, in August, from dawn to dusk.
Medieval families brought in every harvest of their lives with their faces, necks and arms turned to the July sun for 14 hours a day.
Nelson's sailors worked the rigging stripped to the waist in the Caribbean.
The palest people on earth, Scots and Irish, were shipped to Australia and cleared the bush by hand, under a sun their skin had never met.
The Anzacs dug trenches at Gallipoli with their shirts off. Bondi Beach in 1935 was shoulder to shoulder with fair-skinned Australians, and the only thing anybody rubbed on was coconut oil.
Not one of them owned a bottle of sunscreen, and melanoma was a medical curiosity. As late as the 1930s an American's lifetime odds were 1 in 1,500. Today they are nearer 1 in 50.
The sun did not get 30 times stronger in 90 years. The fat changed. Sunflower, soybean and corn oil replaced butter and dripping, and linoleic acid began building up in human tissue, including the fat in and under the skin. Linoleic acid oxidises under ultraviolet light. Butter and dripping hold firm. In the lab, the more corn oil the mice were fed, the more skin tumours the same lamp produced.
Australia never took up the question. In 1981 it launched a cartoon seagull telling everyone to slop on sunscreen.
B. S. Mackie kept measuring. By 1987 the linoleic acid in Sydney's body fat had climbed well past its 1975 level, and the melanoma patients carried significantly more of it than the people without.
Sunscreen sales have risen every decade since the seagull. So has melanoma. Office workers now get more of it than farmers and fishermen, who are in the sun all day.
The sun has been up there for 4.5 billion years. Seed oil has been in the human diet for just over a century. Only one of them was ever put on trial.
Brian Klein retweeted
JULIAN ASSANGE: ‘I want to be totally clear, I am not free today because the system worked. I am free today after years of incarceration because I plead guilty to journalism.’
Brian Klein retweeted
When the Fed was born in 1913, the big banks warned that without it we would have nonstop inflation, wildcat banking, bank failures, and endless business cycles.
When the Biologics Control Act of 1902 was passed, pharma warned that without it we would have mass injury from vaccines and rogue poison pushers.
When the Meat Packing Act of 1906 was passed, the corporate meat packers warned that without it, we would all be eating rancid meat and die.
When AI came to be regulated by government, the top players in the industry warned that without this oversight....see the pattern?
Brian Klein retweeted
The reason we can’t get AI under control in a so-called democracy is because we’ve already lost control to the machines. Corporations have taken over our government through campaign contributions and they’re in charge. Not us. Until you get money out, you can’t fix any of this.
Brian Klein retweeted
To reduce outside influence in our elections, let’s just limit campaign contributions to candidates a donor can actually vote for.
Seems like a common sense fix to me.
Brian Klein retweeted
We need a mass consumer movement to force tech companies to
PRIORITIZE WIRED OVER WIRELESS
They need to hear this with the full fury of the collective health-conscious consumer.
I am not saying “don’t allow easy connections to airpods.”
I am saying, for example, if I plug my iphone into a car’s USB it’s immediate reaction should be to start carplay on the wired connection.
Instead, it prioritizes bluetooth if the bluetooth is connected, even though this dramatically reduces the quality of the connection, causing playback to skip like it would never on a wired connection.
Some rental cars I’ve even see have USB ports that will charge the phone but not mediate connection to carplay.
The most insidious evil thing I have ever seen from a wifi company:
Optimum, who should face tremendous consumer fury, has no option within the account dashboard to turn off wifi (AT&T makes this very easy), *and* they use to have a physical button combination that could turn it off on their routers but they got rid of it!
So there literally is no way to run the ethernet without the wifi unless you call the customer service and ask them to put it into “bridge mode” which allows you to run it through non-optimum hardware using the optimum hardware as a bridge.
The internet is another clear demonstration that wireless is inferior. If you have fios, you get *massively* higher speeds on the wired connection.
While wireless often offers convenience, wired is simply always higher quality, always.
And it’s healthier.
Wired citizens should not be treated as second-class citizens. It’s time to speak up.
There might be something to this. Anything is better than the position players throwing lob balls.
The MLB on-call blowout pitcher should be like the NHL dentist; a local guy who is on duty at the stadium for the duration of the game, prepared to serve *either* team when things get bad.
This way there’s no extra body to take on road trips, just a roster of local men’s league pitchers in every MLB city that are on call. They don’t know if they’ll be pitching for the home team or the visitors until the time comes, but either way they have every reason to try to bring their best stuff and make competitive pitches — it might be the only time in their life they get a look on a big league mound.
It would be so much more fun to watch a 53-year-old Everyman pumping 82 mph but still trying to go after hitters while wearing a #89 jersey with no name on the back than random position players throwing literally HALF that hard and not caring.
Brian Klein retweeted
Top of the third at Fenway last night. Mariners DH Dominic Canzone tapped a 51 mph chopper in front of the mound.
Payton Tolle is 6-foot-6 and 250 pounds. He pounced on it and cut Canzone off about halfway down the first base line.
Easy tag. Routine out.
Instead he opened his arms wide and hugged him.
Wrapped him up completely, applied the tag in the middle of it, and Canzone put an arm around him and smiled before heading back to the dugout.
MLB called him an absolute gem. The clip went everywhere.
If you watch Tolle pitch, none of it is out of character. He prances around the mound. He fist pumps at nothing. He takes exaggerated leaps at balls he has zero chance of catching. He gives out enormous hugs in the dugout between innings, mostly to Garrett Whitlock.
He is 23 years old and he looks like he is having the best time of anyone in the building, every single night.
Here's where that comes from.
Written on his glove are three words.
You're so pretty.
That's what his mother used to yell at him. Loudly, on purpose, in front of his friends and his teammates, specifically to embarrass him. It was how she told him she loved him.
Jina Tolle was diagnosed with Stage 4 colon cancer back in 2016. Doctors gave her three months.
She lived almost eight years.
She never complained about it, by every account from people who knew her. She was a former Wichita State golfer, and her stories about that place are a big reason her son chose to play there.
She died in May 2024 at 48 years old.
Two months later, the Red Sox drafted her son 50th overall.
There's a detail in this that's hard to believe. The Red Sox scout who pushed for Boston to draft him, John Reilly, had been friends with Jina for years before he ever met Payton. When they finally met in person at TCU in 2023, the first thing they did was hug each other.
Now Tolle runs out to center field before every game.
"It's like I'm having a conversation with her," he said. "There's sometimes where if I need some comfort, I know that I've always got a fan, so that's nice."
Before and after every start, he signals I love you and looks up at the sky.
"She told me to play with joy and show people why you love this game, and I get to go out there every fifth day, and I get to do that."
"She was my best friend and I still talk to her quite a bit. For her to go through that with the mindset she had, it poured into my brother and myself."
This past winter he joined the Red Sox Holiday Caravan and spent his offseason visiting cancer patients around Boston.
On the field he's turning into a real problem for hitters. He entered last night 8-6 with a 3.09 ERA and 141 strikeouts, and earlier this season he became the youngest Red Sox pitcher to strike out 14 in a game since Roger Clemens.
Boston came back to win 9-8 in extras.
But the play everyone will remember from that night is a guy who decided a routine tag out was a good enough reason to hug a stranger.
His mom told him to play with joy. He took it literally.
For more stories like this, follow us on any platform @thesportsontap
Brian Klein retweeted
I wasn't familiar with any of these scandals that I ended up covering at CBS News until they assigned me to investigate some medical-related stories including the planned re-start of the smallpox vaccine after 9/11.
At the time, it wasn't controversial to explore medical risks. In fact, back then, it would have been odd and unjournalistic to turn a blind eye to it (like so many do now).
I never dreamed I would learn what I did about the medical establishment and federal agencies misleading us on so many levels in ways the injured and killed people.
And after many of us began heavily covering these issues, the industry/establishment successfully gained near total influence and control over the media and other forms of information dissemination.
Taken together, it's probably the biggest story of a career.
The best responses to all the hysteria around the measles story have come from this account. No one really wants to talk facts. They just believe their side is right and FU if you think differently.
While I have a lot of disdain for Trump, and specifically with RFK Jr., his Zionism, cases haven't just been up in Mexico. .
So, look at the number of measles cases:
- In Canada in 2025: 5,045 cases in a country w. a population of 41 mill
- In Mexico from Nov. 2025 to April 2026: 16,763 confirmed cases in a country with a population of 131 mill.
- The EU in 2024 reported 35,212 cases, which was nearly a 9x jump from 2023, including England, which had a large outbreak in 2024.
- Indonesia also has had a huge number of suspected and confirmed cases.
A lot of these trend lines for increasing case numbers started in 2022 and 2023 when children weren't getting their routine vaccinations due to Covid.
So, while your comment reflects your disdain for the current administration, does it accurately reflect what's going on regionally and globally?
Or, in other words, are Trump & RFK Jr. to blame for measles outbreaks in Japan, Canada, and other countries, including when Biden was POTUS?
Or, do you simply filter or omit data that contradicts your polemics?
