Harcourts Westside, under the visionary leadership of Ty Cueva, announces the auction of the unparalleled Somma Estate at 10697 Somma Way.
The house has gone unsold for over eight years, during which the asking price has plummeted from 100 million to 75 mill to 30 mill to ok how bout please rent it for 200 thou a month. Cueva auctioned it last March, and the current listing only says pending. The dude is some kinda visionary.
In an unprecedented move in the luxury real estate market, Ty Cueva, CEO of Westside Property Group and the driving force behind Harcourts Westside, has listed The Somma Estate for auction.
Unprecedented used as a synonym for humiliating. Interesting.
The Somma Estate stands apart in its fusion of opulent amenities and homely elegance.
The writer’s zeal to convince you that a 40,000 sq ft construction feels warm and homey leads her down a perilous path to homely, which means ugly.
[The house has] an extraordinary 21 bathrooms.
For the discerning billionaire with chronic explosive diarrhea. Extraordinary.
It’s a self-contained utopia offering a 25-meter indoor pool, steam room, sauna, fitness studio, and even a full-size indoor basketball court, all enveloped in the warmth of a family home.
LOLOLOLOL
The Somma Estate is introduced to auction with a starting bid of $30,000,000, a pivot from its previously higher price points. This decision underscores Harcourts Auctions’ commitment to fostering competitive bidding while making the property accessible to a broader range of affluent buyers.
The question of whether or not Israel should recognize—and fund—the right of yeshiva students to pursue their Torah studies rather than join the army has been a political hot potato since at least the 1970s…
Given that tens of thousands of Haredi men do no Torah study of any actual meaning or value – they lack the motivation/intelligence/training to do little other than show up in a building occasionally and hang around open books – the writer misstates the problem. It’s sweet that he assumes that we assume that all male babies born into this population transform into Torah scholars. But since we have eyes in our heads, we do not assume this. Because we know it is not true.
[T]here are already 6,000 Haredi men serving in the army … hundreds of them are combat soldiers, and … they volunteer in such solid and consistent numbers … the IDF saw fit, in 1999, to establish an independent battalion just for Haredi soldiers, called Netzah Yehuda.
Netzah Yehuda is nothing to be proud of. The US gov has singled this unit out for sanctions, so atrocious has its conduct been in the West Bank. And who can be surprised? A subculture taught to consider pretty much everyone not an ultraorthodox Jew pretty close to subhuman can’t be trusted with serious weaponry. Unless you don’t care about the law of warfare.
And the IDF didn’t create a unit just for Haredim cuz it was wowed by their solidity and consistency: Haredim are so unassimilably weird and demanding in their general and specific orientation (no mixing with women ever!) that nothing short of total segregation will work with them.
Indeed, “fully integrating Haredim into its ranks would require a wide array of logistical challenges—providing strictly kosher food, for example, or addressing concerns rising from coed military service—it currently cannot and does not want to address.” And why is it only the IDF that has to address ways of being that allow this group of Israelis to contribute to the Israeli state’s existential crisis? How about the Haredim meeting the army halfway, and, say, suspending strict observances for the duration of their service? Suspending their inhumane attitudes toward everyone not a member of their religious group?
OOOH, say their rabbis, that would be the first step to secularization.
So?
The author goes on to argue that the war is going desperately badly — a position rather at odds with his initial argument that the Israeli court should leave an enormous population of unemployed young men alone.
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UPDATE:
At least 22 percent of ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students under the age of 26 are illegally employed, in violation of the terms of their exemption from military service, a new study has found, appearing to undercut the community’s argument that its members do not enlist due to their total immersion in Torah study.
The preeminent German poet-philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe famously described architecture as “frozen music,” opining that “the state of mind produced by architecture is similar to the effect of music.” Over 150 years later, Frank Zappa—a somewhat less august personage, perhaps, but nevertheless prescient—reframed Goethe’s meditation on the corporeal and the ethereal: “Music, in performance, is a type of sculpture. The air in the performance space is sculpted into something,” Zappa professed. One wonders what type of music might be frozen in the bold volumes and interwoven planes of the Jamaican pleasure dome created by Grammy-winning celebrity DJ and producer Thomas Wesley Pentz, better known as Diplo.
Yes, the NFL wants female fans, and yes, they want fans of color, and yes, going soft on Butker risks that. But above all else, NFL executives exist to appease the whims of billionaires in the owners’ boxes most of whom—judging by their bankrolling of Donald Trump—agree with Butker. The destruction of Black bodies for white consumption and profit is an ugly business. Normally the NFL wants to keep the underlying ideology of its owners under wraps. The biggest problem with Butker is that he vomited it up for everyone to see.
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SOS grudgingly concedes that Butker’s speech displayed, Zirin notes, impressive concision.
Butker managed, in just a few minutes, to be homophobic, anti-abortion … and racist… He cried out against, “Things like abortion, IVF, surrogacy, euthanasia, as well as a growing support for degenerate cultural values and media, all stem[ming] from the pervasiveness of disorder.”
Given the size of Butker’s … vomit, you’d expect a great deal of difficulty coughing up a few tidy paragraphs, but he did the deed. He got it done. And now all of America is talking about it.
“It is dismantling white epistemic logic, removing the centering of the oppressor’s historical lens, and lifting the Black perspective voices. To be clear, I am not arguing for an essentialization of African culture and Blackness; Blackness and Black people are complex and multifaceted, but I am interested in the historical narratives that throw away the Eurocentric ways we think about Black people throughout history.”
It’s not that this has been plagiarized. It’s that it was ever written in the first place. The worst thing about the ongoing march of DEI plagiarism stories is toppling undefended into this prose. Reader, beware.
[R]arely are [politicians] as instantly and unambiguously repellent as the odious Jordan. He’s so unlikable that even ideologically radical Republicans like Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO) who have no meaningful policy beefs with him are lining up to torpedo his bid. [SOS SOS: Beef and torpedo? Really?] He would be, in every possible way, a gift for Democrats to run against next year, not just because of his sordid antics but also because of the insanely unpopular policies he backs, like a national abortion ban.
Burbled! To see ‘burble’ burble up in this NYT Annals of an Alky is such a pleasure! The word is amusingly close to ‘bubble,’ and indeed seems to find its origin in ‘bubble.’
The alchemic metaphor is nicely maintained, with Giuliani’s enigmatic chemical “transformation” burbling up from a no-doubt Soros-spiked brew.
Burbled. So close to ‘bourbon.’
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Like all great words, this one boasts a distinguished poetic lineage.
Out of all this summer’s blockbusters that have had film buffs chomping at the bit, few (really just one, actually) have elicited hype as visceral and sustained as Universal’s Oppenheimer biopic from director Christopher Nolan. With its sizable fleet of A-listers doing mid-20th-century accent work, a complicated historical figure at its center, and a respected auteur steering the ship, Oppenheimer has all the making of a summer blockbuster destined to continue dominating this year’s film discourse for months to come.
Okay, so it’s not a tragedy. But when your first paragraph throws bombs (“blockbuster” derives from powerful WW2 bombs, so it’s appropriate here), and then swerves to horses (the correct word is “champing”), and after that ships, the result is kind of a mess, kind of a confusing stew. Smaller problems (it should be ‘makings‘; cliches abound; summerblockbuster is used twice; you don’t need ‘really’ and ‘actually’; it should probably be ‘sizable crew‘ if it’s one ship being steered by one person) don’t help matters.
