Aug 25
2025
Let’s talk football: Terry Pegula’s yacht and brain damaged players
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It turns out Terry Pegula owns a yacht valued at up to $100 million.
Fox News reports the yacht “was custom-built and delivered in 2021 and is valued between $75 million and $100 million. From designer interiors, including Louis Vuitton and Gucci, the yacht offers a glass-sided spa pool, sauna, gym, cinema lounge and much more … The yacht is reportedly available to charter at around $500,000 per week.”
The story notes that taxpayers are forking over $850 million to help build a new stadium for Pegula’s Bills. As if he needed the money.
Today’s football heroes are tomorrow’s damaged goods.
ESPN surveyed NFL players from the 1988 season, most of whom are in their 60s. One-third of them, more than 500, responded, and here’s what they had to say:
- Six in 10 have some sort of disability.
- Almost half have “serious difficulty” concentrating, remembering or making decisions at times.
- Fifteen percent have been diagnosed with dementia.
- Half experience pain daily.
- Half also experience depression.
- Black players are faring much worse than white ones.
Remember this next time you watch a Bills game. Men destroying themselves for your entertainment.
PS: Nine out of 10 players surveyed said they’d play again.
Last week I wrote about U.S. Rep. Tim Kennedy’s participation in a junket to Israel sponsored by AIPAC and all the money he and most other House members representing New York have taken from the pro-Israel lobbying group. Now comes a report from WGRZ on local activists giving Kennedy grief for the trip. Kennedy’s response, talking out of both sides of his mouth: “We’re with the people of Israel, we’re with the people of Palestine.”
Buffalo Rising has posted a supportive piece on the proposed extension of Metro Rail and The Buffalo News has editorialized in favor of it. I covered transportation, including light rail, in the 1980s for The Orlando Sentinel and learned that fixed-rail transit systems only work in cities with dense populations and clogged roads.
Long story short, traffic has to be bad enough that people are willing to abandon their cars for mass transit. That’s not the case in Buffalo.
Left out of the analysis for the NFTA is the likely impact on bus service — you know, the form of mass transit used by lower-income people, the folks who really need public transportation. An extended Metro Rail would require larger subsidies, which are likely to come at the expense of money available to underwrite bus service. Either that of some form of higher taxes.
Student test scores in language and math are improving in New York. Or, perhaps, the state is scoring the tests differently to show improvements that are actually declines. The Empire Center explains.
Donate to support our nonprofit newsroomA lot of people have cancelled their subscription to The Washington Post in the belief the newspaper has gone soft on Trump. Margaret Sullivan thinks otherwise, noting a number of hard-hitting stories The Post has published of late and writing: “I still find the Post’s journalism essential.”
I agree with her and still subscribe.
Elon Musk’s rocket company, bolstered by billions of dollars in federal contracts, has mastered the art of the tax dodge with the help of changes in federal tax laws. Reports The New York Times:
“SpaceX has most likely paid little to no federal income taxes since its founding in 2002 and has privately told investors that it may never have to pay any.”
Nicholas Kristof explains why he believes Israel’s war in Gaza is unconscionable.
The New York Times columnist writes: “I believe Hamas committed war crimes. But war crimes by one side in a conflict do not justify war crimes by another.”
He concluded by saying:
“For almost two years, Americans have seen what was going on in Gaza, yet our leaders enabled mass killing and starvation. Gaza represents not some distant and inevitable tragedy, but our own moral and practical failing. We have blood on our hands.”
