I hate that guy.

Victor Davis Hanson.

Here in California—which might be a model for other states as well—Gov. Gavin Newsom has now approved a formal commission to administer reparations to black Californians. And they’re trying not to use the word reparations since it has such a bad connotation. But it’s a bad idea in so many ways.

Remember, when California was admitted to the Union, it came in as a free state. It had no prior record of being a slave state. It has never been a slave state. It has no historical baggage as, perhaps, the former Confederacies. So, there’s no argument that people who happen to be in California are owed anything from it, by the state, of any race.

The second thing is we don’t know how many black Americans that are residents of California could trace their lineage back to California. In other words, do we really believe that most of the African Americans in California, who came after World War I and during World War II, have descendants that were suffering the fallout from slavery in California? It’s really absurd.

The third thing to remember is the black population of California is about 5.4% of the 41 million people. Who are going to be paying the reparations? The so-called white oppressor, victimizer class is only 42%. It is a minority. And many of them can trace their lineage back to the Oklahoma diaspora of the 1930s and ’40s, when they arrived here completely destitute.

And then, in addition, we have about 15% to 16% Asian. Some of them came from horrendous conditions in Vietnam. Some of them have families that were Japanese, have received money from the government as direct compensation for property they lost during World War II during the relocations. Some of them can argue that they were oppressed from the 19th century. Leland Stanford Jr., the president of the Southern Union Pacific Railroad, used Chinese labors in a very exploitive manner.

The point is that each particular minority group will then argue that they have claims on—whom? Who is going to be the victimizer class when the so-called white population is the minority?

Read it.

A classic saying among preparedness experts in the US is that America is capable of weathering many crises, but when the food stamps shut down all bets are off. In other words, when the free stuff army loses their handouts, that’s when all hell breaks loose.

The US government spends over $100 billion on SNAP programs every year; the largest single food welfare project in the world. It’s difficult to predict what an end to SNAP might look like.

One can assume the worst and be ready for a “Walking Dead” disaster in which angry mobs run rampant. Or, tensions might continue to simmer. Many people might be forced to simply get a job, and the welfare subset could decide to adapt. But they probably won’t.

Read it.

The inherent threat of socialist programs rests in the fact that they can be used by a political party or a politician as a means to bribe voters from certain demographics to support destructive policies in exchange for handouts. The Democratic Party understood this well when they introduced “The Great Society” welfare programs under President Lyndon B Johnson in the 1960s.

The idea? Primarily to secure the votes of minorities and people under the poverty line in the US for the Democrats for generations by offering taxpayer funded subsidies that would eventually make these groups dependent on the government for their very survival. Specifically, the welfare system lured in black women and single mothers, offering increasing incentives per child as long as there was no father in the picture.

This encouraged black women to have multiple children out of wedlock and increased their divorce rate from 17% in 1960 to 48% in 2024. Single mother households in the black community skyrocketed from 20% in 1960 to 65% in 2024. Compare this to the white community in the US, which has an 18% single mother rate.

Economist Thomas Sowell cites the Great Society programs and endless welfare as more destructive to black Americans than any other factor in US history, including the legacy of slavery that progressive activists often rant about.

Read it.

Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, filed articles of impeachment against the federal judge who sentenced the would-be assassin of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh to eight years in prison, eschewing federal sentencing guidelines of life in prison, The Daily Wire reported Monday.

Roy said U.S. District Judge Deborah Boardman “deserves to be impeached for her absurd” sentence of Nicholas Roske, a 29-year-old who identifies as a woman named Sophie, earlier this month.

Federal prosecutors had sought 30 years for Roske over the June 2022 incident.

Read it.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, who last month declared his country’s support for a Palestinian state, said he would honor an International Criminal Court arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should he visit Canada.

Carney was asked Friday on Bloomberg’s “The Mishal Husain Show” whether he would enforce the ICC warrant issued in November 2024 for alleged war crimes tied to Israel’s military response to the Iranian-backed Hamas terrorist attack on Oct. 7, 2023. Netanyahu has denounced the court’s decision.

“Yes,” Carney said, echoing the stance taken by his predecessor, Justin Trudeau.

Read it.

Legal documents are notoriously difficult to understand, even for lawyers. This raises the question: Why are these documents written in a style that makes them so impenetrable?

MIT cognitive scientists believe they have uncovered the answer to that question. Just as “magic spells” use special rhymes and archaic terms to signal their power, the convoluted language of legalese acts to convey a sense of authority, they conclude.

In a study appearing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers found that even non-lawyers use this type of language when asked to write laws.

“People seem to understand that there’s an implicit rule that this is how laws should sound, and they write them that way,” says Edward Gibson, an MIT professor of brain and cognitive sciences and the senior author of the study.

Eric Martinez Ph.D. is the lead author of the study. Francis Mollica, a lecturer at the University of Melbourne, is also an author of the paper.

Good catch. What they call “center-embedding” may stem from the fact that in European countries many had laws that originated in Roman legal codes that were written in Latin. Latin can say many things more concisely and unambiguously than English (and Greek has the same advantage over Latin)(and Syriac has the same advantage over Greek),

Many fantasy stories that use magic require that magical incantations be uttered in a foreign (preferably ancient) language. Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden novels have a lot of fun with this.

Richard Hanania.

Ideally, one would like to think that if someone has written a 300-page book, it means that they have 300 pages worth of things to say. My experience is that is rarely the case. People generally have an idea that can be expressed in terms much shorter than that, but extending your idea into a book looks impressive on a CV and gets you invited on TV shows and podcasts.

To take one example, the last book I finished was David Sinclair’s Lifespan. It has three parts, and the last of them is nothing but two chapters about his political and social views, where he addresses issues that are ancillary to conquering aging like what’s going to happen to social security and the impact of a growing population on global warming. He also comes out for universal healthcare, legalized euthanasia, and more income equality.

There is no particular reason that the world’s foremost expert on aging should be expected to have anything new or interesting to say on these topics, and he doesn’t. I would’ve skipped these chapters, except for the fact that I was planning on writing a book review and felt obligated to slog through them. It’s not that a professor at Harvard Medical School can’t have interesting political views, it’s that Sinclair’s opinions are a boring mélange of what one would find across Atlantic think pieces. But for some reason he feels the need to pontificate on various topics that have nothing to do with his area of expertise.

Why? Most likely, he’s simply filling up space. Either he thought the book needed some padding, or maybe he felt the urge to preach about single-payer healthcare and decided to trap readers into hearing his views after he lured them in with the anti-aging stuff.

Navy Matters.

Recently, a reader (username “Chinese Gordon”) made the astute observation that mine countermeasures (MCM) was not a path to flag rank. He’s correct, as far as I can tell. Of the 250 or so flag officers we have, how many are former MCM operators? I don’t know but my guess is somewhere between none and almost none. This may explain, in part, why the Navy has, for all practical purposes, abandoned MCM. If we had a couple dozen flag officers with MCM career backgrounds, I’d like to think the Navy would be paying more than lip service to MCM.
How do we get more MCM officers into flag ranks?
Well, this is where we run into a brick wall. Even if the Navy magically decided to add MCM officers to the flag ranks … … there aren’t any to add. There simply are no MCM focused officers left in the Navy. The Avengers are essentially gone, parked pierside, rotting as they wait to be officially retired. The LCS has yet to field a viable MCM module so there are no LCS officers that have worked LCS-MCM.
You’d have to go down to the Lieutenant level to find anyone who deals with MCM to any degree and those few are doing one-at-a-time, unmanned mine hunting technology development, not real world MCM.
Who in the Navy has ever cleared a thousand-mine field, or even just a hundred, in the real world? No one. Who has engaged in an amphibious assault exercise that included actual clearance of mines from a 50 mile approach to the beach? No one. Who has cleared mines from a chokepoint while under enemy fire, real or simulated? No one. And so it goes. No officer in the Navy has even a rudimentary level of MCM expertise as it would pertain to a peer war or even a disagreement with a group of radical Girl Scouts.
We can’t develop flag level focus on MCM because no one in the Navy has any MCM experience.
We’re screwed. We’ll be forced to learn MCM on the fly in a real war and that is a very costly way to learn anything.
By the way, the same applies to offensive mine warfare.

Rep. Malliotakis: Trump Made ‘Wrong Decision’ on Santos

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson Ups The Ante As He Calls For A General Strike (Kelby Vera/HuffPost)

Why protesters against Trump are wearing frog, chicken and T. rex costumes (Washington Post)  Because they never grew up and think that this stupid shit is somehow clever.

Colombia’s Leader Accuses U.S. of Murder, Prompting Trump to Halt Aid (New York Times)

Trump boards AF1 quickly, using small stairs due to ‘increased security measures’: WH official (Fox News)

CNN’s Brownstein Says It Out Loud: Forget The Merits of Comey, James, & Bolton Indictments!

CBS News OMITS Palm Beach Tree Stand, Whines About Trump’s Poop Meme

How can blue states fight back against Trump? With fiscal disobedience (Eric Reinhart/The Guardian)  In other words, breaking the law.

Trump’s response to ‘No Kings’ marches only proved the protesters’ point (Stephen Collinson/CNN)

FBI and Secret Service Discover Hunting Stand Potentially Linked to Assassination Attempt Against Trump

Trump’s revenge tour is putting the ‘petty’ in petty tyrant (Hayes Brown/MSNBC)

No Kings wasn’t cringe — Needing to seem cool in the face of authoritarian takeover is cringe (Jerusalem Demsas/The Argument)

Food Prices Could Go Even Higher After These ICE Raids (Patricia Lopez/Bloomberg)

What You Should Know About Russ Vought, Trump’s Shadow President (Andy Kroll/ProPublica)

No Kings was a huge success. Just look at Trump’s response. (Paul Waldman/Public Notice)

Don Lemon Urges ‘Black And Brown’ Americans To Arm Themselves Against ICE  Black and brown Americans don’t need to arm themselves against ICE, they need to arm themselves againsts Democrat crime.

Trump’s over-the-top reaction to the ‘No Kings’ events was proof of their success (Steve Benen/MSNBC)

Civil Resistance Confronts the Autocracy (Paul Krugman)  More accurately, Democrat criminality confronts law enforcement.

Ten Million Dukes (Anthony Esolen/American Greatness)

Officials, locals undercut Trump claims about Venezuela drug boats (Washington Post)

Judge Grills Trump Officials Over Chicago Tear Gas Use  Would he rather they use bulliets?

My Last Day as an Accomplice of the Republican Party (Miles Bruner/The Bulwark)  The Kristol Krew go full Dramacrat. [Long Live ‘No Kings’ (William Kristol/The Bulwark)]

The Tactical Frivolity of the Chicago No Kings Protest (Gary Shteyngart/New York Times)

MSNBC’s Capehart Agrees With Foul Mouth De Niro: Trump Won’t Leave Office!

With George Santos, Trump finds another convicted congressional Republican to reward (Steve Benen/MSNBC)

Google Leans on Disgraced SPLC to Attack Trump Allies

Lawmakers bemoan Trump’s latest power grab: Troop pay (Politico)

The White House Joins BlueSky and Instantly Becomes the 2nd-Most Blocked Account ??? After JD Vance (Sean James/Mediaite)  They must be doing someting right. The Dramacrat party ought to change their symbol from a donkey to a blue-haired tattooed fat woman with her fingers in her ears yelling “LA LA LA LA LA!”

Judge Demands Answers on Trump Immigration Crackdown in Chicago (Mattathias Schwartz/New York Times)

Shutdown could halt SNAP benefits for millions, states say (Avery Lotz/Axios)  Thank you, Chuck Schumer.

How the Supreme Court placed ICE above the law (Ian Millhiser/Vox)

President Denies Reality Of Massive Nationwide Protests While Posting Videos of Himself Dumping Shit On Citizens (Mike Masnick/Techdirt)

ICE Barbie’s Top Goon Accused of Illegally Revealing Child’s Rap Sheet (Tom Latchem/The Daily Beast)

The View’s ‘Conservative’ Fears Democrats Won’t Harness Protest Energy

America As No-Longer-Democracy and Not-Yet-Dictatorship (Thomas Zimmer/Steady)

Watch: Liberal Boomer Paid-Protesters Caught Chaperoning At NYC ‘No Kings’ Protest 

Accountant arrested after ‘opening fire on MAGA supporter’ in dispute over Trump sign… as victim recalls bullets whizzing past his head (Laura Parnaby/Daily Mail)

News Outlets Won’t Describe Trump’s AI Video For What It Is: The President Pooping on America (Samantha Cole/404 Media)  Aging boomer activists aren’t America.

Court Backs Trump’s Authority to Send National Guard into Portland

9th Circuit Rules for Trump, Potentially Allowing National Guard to Deploy to Portland (Kate Riga/Talking Points Memo)

Trump claims ‘unquestioned power’ in vow to send troops to San Francisco (Dani Anguiano/The Guardian)

US appeals court lets Trump send troops to Portland (Dietrich Knauth/Reuters)

Read it.

Texas attorney general Ken Paxton has asked the Texas State Securities Board (TSSB) to review what he says is evidence that entities tied to the East Plano Islamic Center (EPIC)’s EPIC City project violated state and federal securities laws — and to refer the matter back so he can file suit.

Paxton called the alleged misconduct “flagrant,” arguing that state law requires a TSSB referral before his office can bring a securities action.

EPIC City is a 402-acre master-planned community near Josephine, Texas, spanning Collin and Hunt Counties. Materials describe housing (single-family, townhomes, multifamily), a mosque, schools, parks, senior living, and retail. The project vehicle, Community Capital Partners, LP (CCP), has been described in EPIC’s promotions as created by EPIC, with EPIC as the beneficiary of project profits.

That’s all we need, a big knot of potential jihadists in east Plano.

As long as Islam exists, ‘jihadis’ will be a problem. It’s been that way for 1400 years, and there is no indication that it will change. Whether our Ruling Class will continue prating how ‘peaceful’ Muslims are while ignoring the mass murder, or whether they will wake up and decide to do something about it, is an exercise left for the reader. 

Read it.

Finally! I’ve been talking about molten salt nuclear reactors for 10 years at least. They burn waste, and they can’t melt down. The small amount of waste they produce turns to lead in decades, not centuries. Operating at low pressure makes for a simpler system. They can be small and modular or city size. Makes so much sense, and we are finally building them in the USA. Spend money on this, not stupid things like wind “farms.”

The Foundry.

The plight of corporate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) jobs is only getting worse as the Trump administration’s crackdown takes hold, new employment research shows.

As of September, job postings for diversity roles have plunged roughly 50% from pre-pandemic levels, falling to about 1,500 this year, according to Revelio Labs data reported by Bloomberg. By comparison, DEI-related postings nearly quadrupled in 2022, reaching approximately 10,000.

When President Donald Trump took office in January, DEI job postings were about 6% above 2019 levels, according to the outlet.

Read it.

Hate crimes against Christians are rising across Europe, especially in Austria. In Vienna alone, five incidents of vandalism against churches and Christian memorials were reported between mid-September and early October. Attacks included destroyed statues, graffiti, defaced religious icons, arson and threats.

Some of these acts were linked to left-wing extremists. A paint attack on the Paulaner Church was claimed via an anonymous video on the extremist platform Indymedia, targeting a pro-life demonstration. During the October 5th opening mass of the March for Life at St. Charles’ Church, worshippers discovered a bag containing fake ticking bombs.

Read it.

On October 19th, Sunday, Bolivians elected centre-right senator Rodrigo Paz Pereira as their new president, ending two decades of Socialist rule that left the South American nation deep in economic crisis.

With 97.8% of ballots counted, the Supreme Electoral Tribunal said Paz had 54.6% of the vote.

The result sparked celebrations across La Paz, where crowds gathered with fireworks and music. “We came to celebrate the victory with great hope of a new direction for Bolivia,” said Julio Andrey, a 40-year-old lawyer.

Paz, 58, the son of a former president, has pledged what he calls “capitalism for all”—a mix of decentralization, lower taxes, fiscal discipline and continued social spending. In his victory speech, he declared that Bolivia was “reclaiming its place on the international stage.”

Paz also said he had received a congratulatory message from U.S. president Donald Trump, while Secretary of State Marco Rubio stated that Washington “stands ready to partner with Bolivia on shared priorities.” Rubio added that “after two decades of mismanagement, President-elect Paz’s election marks a transformative opportunity for both nations.”

Under former Socialist president Evo Morales, Bolivia nationalized industries, broke ties with Washington and aligned with other leftist governments. Paz’s victory marks a sharp political and economic turn for the country.

Read it.

revolutionary bionic microchip is restoring sight to people who have lost their vision due to age-related macular degeneration (AMD) — marking what experts call a “new era” in artificial vision.

According to The Telegraph, more than 80% of patients fitted with the tiny, wireless chip saw major improvements in their vision during a global clinical trial led by Moorfields Eye Hospital and University College London.

The New York Times, a Voice of the Crust.

He was drawn to times and places where the status rules were shifting. His book “The Right Stuff,” about the U.S. space program, takes place at such a moment. Before, the combat pilots were the tippy-top alpha males in the world of flight, but then along came the astronauts to knock them off their perch. In “Radical Chic,” you can catch glimpses of the old blue-blood Protestant elite — the Astors, the Whitneys, the Rockefellers. But this is 1970. A new crowd is beginning to displace them: the Bernsteins, Barbara Walters. The members of this rising elite have often made their money in culture and the media, and include the formerly unthinkables — Catholics, Jews, Black people.

The old aristocrats had it so easy, those stately bankers in the J.P. Morgan mold. They may have been frequently bewildered about why the masses didn’t like them, but their own place in the social aristocracy was secure. It was right there in their bloodlines — the generations of grandees stretching back centuries. The status rules were simple. All you had to do was live like an English earl and collect European culture by the boatload, and you could cruise through Manhattan amid the sound of others bowing and scraping.

The members of the new cultural elite could never be so secure. Their status — their very reason for being — was based on their own superior sensibility. They lived by their wits and their public attitudes. These media-age aristocrats had to excel at tasks that members of the beau monde have always excelled at — being rich, thin and well connected; keeping the duplexes adorned with the design trends. But they had to do so much more. They had to be morally avant-garde, able to articulate the luxury opinions du jour. They had to perform all these inversions — rising to the social stratosphere by ostentatiously demonstrating their solidarity with the oppressed, assuring their place atop the structures of power by striking radical poses and pretending to support tearing those structures down. Wolfe was there at the dawn of 20th-century one-downmanship, when you could rise to the social stratosphere by donning peasant and revolutionary garb.

David Brooks, when he’s not engaged in his Pet Conservative dog-and-pony show, is actually a pretty good writer.

Not as good as Tom Wolfe, of coures … nobody is … but still pretty good.

New Atlas.

The US Air Force has released video of a ship being ripped in half to demonstrate its new Quicksink weapon, which turns an inexpensive dumb bomb into a precision anti-ship missile – and which lives up to its name in spectacular fashion.

Modern weapon systems are amazingly effective, with the ability for a single small warhead to take out a small target that one time would have required a carpet bombing raid or a heavy artillery barrage. Unfortunately, they’re also expensive and with the current geopolitical situation suggesting a return to large-scale peer-to-near-peer conflicts, cheaper alternatives that are easier to stockpile have become more attractive.

One example of this is anti-ship weapons. The go-to weapon for this is a torpedo like the US Type 46 torpedo that can deliver 96.8 lb (43.9 kg) of high-explosive PBXN-103 to the target and destroy it by exploding under its keel, breaking the ship’s back.

The AntiPlanner.

In 2004, Denver’s Regional Transit District promised voters that by 2015 it could build six new rail transit lines and complete three extensions to existing lines for $4.7 billion. Today, it has spent $5.5 billion to complete five of the six lines and still has three extensions to build. Now a new report from RTD estimates it will cost at least another $1.2 billion to “complete the system.”

The report estimates the cost of finishing these lines to be $1.6 billion and says the agency only has $0.4 billion available to do it. Amazingly, the report admits that both of these numbers are optimistic: the actual cost of construction, it says, “will be much higher” while the funding estimate “assumes a larger share of statewide funds will be allocated to FasTracks than is likely.” Back in 2004, when RTD was thumping for voter approval of FasTracks, it steadfastly refused to admit that either its cost estimates were low or its revenue estimates were high, both of which proved to be the case.

Soon after voters approved FasTracks, RTD realized that its costs would be higher and tax revenues lower than it had projected. An analysis of the six major rail lines found that the line to Longmont would cost more than $60 per rider, while most of the other lines would cost less than $10 per rider. As a result, RTD decided that the Longmont line was “no longer viable” and dropped it so it could afford to complete the other lines.

Read it.

How many Islamic toilets is a Muslim terrorist entitled to? At least two.

That’s the ruling by a U.S. federal judge in the long running saga of a UK Muslim terror imam locked up in a Colorado prison who called for murdering non-Muslims and wants those same non-Muslims to tend to the ‘purity’ of his nether regions so he can properly pray to ‘Allah’.

And so begins the most disgusting article I ever had to write: in both the moral sense of how far backward we bent to cater to Muslim terrorists who hate us and on a grosser physical level.

The current Toilet Jihad began with a real Jihad that claimed at least four lives.

Read it.

It’s a question we have to ask too often: How stupid do the nation’s top journalists think we are?

The available evidence would suggest: Pretty stupid,

Newsbusters.

Twice in recent days, MSNBC reporter Jacob Soboroff downplayed the criminal record of an illegal alien a week after he flipped out because federal agents arrested him at a Chicago bakery while he was having coffee.

On October 7, Soboroff first brought the story to MSNBC during Chris Jansing Reports as he interviewed a witness to the arrest. As he played video of agents parked outside the bakery and chasing the men inside, the MSNBC reporter tried to portray the Trump administration as being dishonest about whom they are arresting.

‘No Kings’ protests against Trump bring a street party vibe to cities nationwide (Associated Press)  And all the senile hippy boomers come out to play….

NJ Residents Rip School Board Over Vile Texts Attacking MAGA Mom

Going Full Venezuela — No Kings day feels eerily familiar to me. (Quico Toro/Persuasion)

Morning Joe Admits Bolton Indictment Legit, But Claims It’s Still Trump Abuse

Republicans mostly silent as millions of Americans protest Trump on No Kings day (Edward Helmore/The Guardian)

Ex-ICE director says Trump’s immigration crackdown putting agents in “terrible position” (Anna Schecter/CBS News)  Yeah, they actually have to do their jobs. They didn’t get a government job in order to actually work….

Today, millions of Americans and their allies turned out across the United States and around … (Heather Cox Richardson/Letters …)  By ‘allies’ I assume she means non-Americans, i.e. illegal immigrants.

Second “No Kings Day” protests likely the largest single-day political demonstration since 1970, with 4.2-7.6 million participants (G. Elliott Morris/Strength In Numbers)  And by pretty much the same people.

Networks Grant Leftist ‘No Kings’ Protests 18 Times the Air Time as March for Life

Plan to Fire Artillery over a Highway During Vance Visit Irks California’s Newsom

It’s 2025, and Democrats Are Still Running Against Trump (Shane Goldmacher/New York Times)  It’s all they’ve got.

Rubio promised to betray U.S. informants to get Trump’s El Salvador prison deal (Washington Post)  Sure, I believe that.

No Kings: The Lunatics Are Running The Asylum (Sasha Stone/Free Thinking Through …)

Trump Is Dragging Us Down to His Level (David French/New York Times)

Trump posts obscene AI video after ‘No Kings’ protests drew millions nationwide: Live updates (The Independent)

No Kings protests held across U.S., overseas to demonstrate against Trump administration (NBC News)  I guess the British and the Saudis couldn’t participate. Pity.

Sanders at ‘No Kings’ rally: Mega-billionaires have ‘hijacked’ economy (Tara Suter/The Hill)  As opposed to mere millionaires, like him and Senator Umbrage. Where does he draw the line? He never says, and nobody ever asks.

Rand Paul: ‘All of these people have been blown up without us knowing their name’ (David Cohen/Politico)  Who cares what their names are? Does he mean that justice is different for people if you know their names? Is he going to start demanding the same due process rights for illegal immigrants as for Americans and legal residents. Is he going RINO on us?

When Could The Government Shutdown End And What Might Finally Force Breakthrough?  Republican supermajority in the mid-terms.

Trump jabs ‘No Kings’ protesters with AI videos of himself wearing crown (Zac Anderson/USA Today)  Ah, ah, ah,  ah, yankin’ their chains, yankin’ their chains….

‘King’ Trump, 79, Dumps on Protesters in Bonkers AI Video (Catherine Bouris/The Daily Beast)

Trump posts wild AI video showing him flying fighter jet, dropping sewage on No Kings protesters (Ryan King/New York Post)

Trump Vows to Make San Francisco ‘Great Again

Inside the quiet, yearslong investigation into John Bolton (CNN)

Mamdani, Jeffries and How to Beat Trump at His Own Game (Chris Hayes/New York Times)  Putting America first? That’s not a game Mamdani wants to play.

Trump Posts Fake Video of Himself Flying a ‘King Trump’ Jet Over Protesters (Jenny Gross/New York Times)

Donald Trump Has Posted An AI Video Of Himself Dumping S**t On Protesters (Kevin Schofield/HuffPost)

FBI Probing Air Force One Sniper Stand at Palm Beach Airport

Secret Service discovers hunting stand with direct sight line to Trump’s Air Force One exit in Florida (NBC News)

Secret Service Discovers Hunting Stand Overlooking Trump’s Air Force One Exit  Guess they’ve started taking their job seriously again.

Read it.

Every new discovery in space begins as a mystery. Some mysteries might take longer than others to understand, and some of the most fantastic remain a secret for many years. Some mysteries will remain so long after humanity has disappeared. Here are just a handful of the mysteries discovered by NASA.

The Foundry.

Place your bets, ladies and gentlemen….

Read it.

By the time you read this essay, no matter the hour of the day, you will likely have already made some kind of choice: coffee with skimmed milk, whole milk, cream, or black? Sugar or no sugar? Tea instead? Personalised, preference-based choice is, at present, a deeply familiar aspect of life in much of the world, though perhaps most markedly so in the United States, where I live and work. It is also something people don’t generally spend a lot of time discussing, in part because it feels so ordinary. People around the globe shop for everything from housing to vacations to, yes, caffeinated drinks. They pick what they want to read, what they want to listen to, and what they want to believe. They vote for favourite candidates for office. They select friends and lovers, fields to study, professions and jobs, places to live, even insurance plans to hedge their bets when something they cannot choose occurs.

Perusing a menu of options to decide what best matches individual desires and values – which is what we generally mean today by making a choice – is a key feature of modern democratic and consumer culture alike. It is also an exalted one. People may disagree about what the possibilities should be, but rarely about the principle of maximising arenas for choice-making or the options themselves. For many of the world’s citizens, this is simply what freedom feels like.

Yet, as you may have also felt at various moments, abundant choice isn’t always so straightforward. Behavioural economists point out that most people are actually pretty bad at making decisions of this kind (which explains the appeal of return departments and divorces for when things don’t go as hoped). Philosophers and political theorists say it promotes selfish individualism and discourages collective action around issues that affect us all. And sociologists add that societies that prize choice too much tend to blame those with only poor or limited options for their own misfortunes. So much for choice as consistently synonymous with freedom.

The Foundry.

Conservative shareholders at eight major corporations have filed resolutions urging those companies to stop using politicized tools like the Southern Poverty Law Center’s “hate map,” which added Turning Point USA a few months before the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

The Heritage Foundation and portfolio manager David Bahnsen, which have held thousands of dollars in shares at each of the companies, filed the proposals last week.

“The Southern Poverty Law Center has designated October as Hate Crimes Awareness Month—but few organizations have sown more hatred against fellow Americans than the SPLC itself,” Heritage Chief Advancement Officer Andrew Olivastro told The Daily Signal in a statement Friday. “It doesn’t fight hate—it manufactures it, embedding division into every press release they issue and every word they post; their business model is defamation, and America is finally waking up.”

“Companies are now rightly distancing themselves from the SPLC, recognizing that its model is not only flawed but dangerous,” Olivastro added.

Read it.

Nobel Prize winner María Corina Machado, a Venezuelan opposition leader, might have beaten out President Donald Trump for the coveted award, but she says she is on the same team as Trump in striking at the corruption, repression, and persecution under dictator Nicolás Maduro.

“President Trump has made decisions regarding the dismantling of a narcoterrorist structure and I want to insist on this, it was Maduro who declared the war on us,” Machado told NBC News, from her undisclosed hideout, where she has been for 14 months fearing Maduro’s reprisal.

“If Maduro will stop this war by moving out and facilitating a transition to democracy. We do need the help of other countries and the leadership of President Trump to stop this war, because it is about saving millions of lives.”

Read it.

he planned Cascade Advanced Energy Facility in Washington, which will be built by Energy Northwest with funding from Amazon, will deploy 12 small modular reactors, Amazon said in a Thursday release.

The “modular nature” of the plant means that three 320-MW sections will together comprise a 960-MW plant within the space of a few city blocks, in contrast to “traditional nuclear power facilities whose single GW plant can take up more than a square mile of land,” Amazon said.

The SMRs will be supplied by X-energy, which received $500 million in Series C funding from Amazon last year, using X-energy’s advanced nuclear reactor design. The Cascade facility will be built outside Richland, Washington, near Energy Northwest’s Columbia Generating Station.

Richland is in Benton county, on the Red side of the Blue state.

Read it.

Because they know that it will go nowhere without U.S. participation. “Follow the money!”

The United Nations body specializing in regulating global shipping voted on Oct. 17 to delay a vote on the adoption of a proposed framework that will impose a global carbon tax on international shipping—a regulation the United States has strongly opposed.

Member states of the U.N.-backed International Maritime Organization (IMO) were set to approve the proposal on Oct. 17 when Saudi Arabia, which has voiced opposition to the plan, tabled a motion to defer the vote by one year.

The motion was passed with 57 votes in favor and 49 against.

The proposed net-zero framework would have required ships to comply with a global fuel standard for large oceangoing vessels of more than 5,000 gross tonnage, as part of an effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the global shipping industry to net zero by 2050.

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“Coup d’Flat”: Billionaire-Funded ‘No Kings’ Color-Revolution Turns Into White Liberal Boomer Parade As Dems Become National Laughingstock

The Democratic Party’s dark-money NGO network, bankrolled by left-wing billionaires, unleashed a highly coordinated, color-revolution-style mobilization nationwide on Saturday; the same tactics U.S. intelligence agencies have used overseas for years in regime-change operations. Yet the turnout wasn’t dominated by unhinged young leftists or gender-confused woke warriors, but rather by white baby-boomer liberals, a mobilization effort that NGO expert Mike Benz described as a “Coup d’f?lat.”

The nation is waking up to the fact that dark-money NGO networks, including the Arabella Network, Soros Network, Gates Foundation, Ford Foundation, Tides Foundation, Rockefeller Network, Singham Network, and many others, are funneling millions of dollars into what investigative researchers Peter Schweizer and Seamus Bruner of the Government Accountability Institute call “Riot, Inc.” – the permanent protest industrial complex and the engine behind “No Kings 2.0” partners and organizers. These protests are far from organic; this movement is manufactured, coordinated, and entirely artificial.

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California Democrat Gov. Gavin Newsom seeks to use the mass mail-in ballot state’s Democrat stranglehold to crush California’s independent redistricting commission, but a deep-pocketed key figure in establishing it does not want it to die in the darkness of partisan force.

Charles Munger Jr., a Berkshire Hathaway heir backed by his late father’s $2 billion estate, is committed “to protect something that he fought so hard alongside us to win,” Common Cause CEO Virginia Kase Solomón told The Washington Post.

But Common Cause, which co-wrote Munger Jr.’s Propositions 11 and 20 to make redistricting independent of the state’s Democrat stranglehold, recently returned his $200,000 August donation, saying it would not join the heir in opposing Newsom’s Proposition 50.

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My, what a surprise.

The Foundry.

Americans don’t just disagree on policies. In three key areas, they disagree on the principles that lead to the creation of those policies.

The first is truth. Some people believe that absolute truth exists—a shared reality outside of ourselves. We may not like the truth, but attempting to deny it will only cause confusion, frustration, and failure. Others believe that truth is relative. Priority should be given to one’s lived experience and what individuals believe to be true.

The debate where this is most obvious concerns sex. Either sex is based on biological reality or personal feelings. The former is objective and observable. The latter is subjective and self-selected.

But this isn’t just a personal choice. It permeates societal disputes about pronouns, sports, locker rooms, and surgeries. In some places, biological men are housed in women’s prisons. Unsurprisingly, that has resulted in some of those men raping female prisoners. But the Left doesn’t care about those “lived experiences.”

John Hinderaker.

When I went to law school, the law was a masculine profession. Almost all lawyers were men, and women in my law school class were a small minority who were viewed as pioneers. In the intervening years, the law business has undergone a near-inversion: most law students today are women, and most associates in law firms are women.

Some women, of course, have proved to be great lawyers. I know a number whom I would put in that category. But the general feminization of the legal profession threatens–or promises, take your pick–major cultural changes. This article by Helen Andrews, titled “The Great Feminization,” is intensely interesting. It documents the ways in which our culture has been feminized, and points out the changes–mostly for the worse–that such feminization has entailed.

Power Line.

This is revealing:

The national body of Students for Justice in Palestine backed Hamas’s grisly public executions of fellow Palestinians in Gaza on Sunday, posting “Death to the Occupation, Death to Collaborators” on Instagram.

SJP’s Instagram post concluded with this:

Between exploiting Gaza’s youth for money using desperately needed aid to the killing of their own people in service of Zionism, collaborators have no place in a liberated future.

Death to the occupation. Death to Zionism. Death to all collaborators.

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According to a post shared on X on October 18th, a Jewish lawyer wearing a Star of David was arrested in the UK after the police alleged the symbol had “antagonised” pro-Palestine protesters. The lawyer was handcuffed and detained by police for almost ten hours.

In the video made public under the post, two men who appear to be plainclothes police officers, conduct an interview with (or rather, interrogation of) the Jewish man, identified in the X post as a lawyer, who argues that the wearing of a religious symbol cannot cause “offence.”

According to the date of the recording visible on the footage, the incident happened in August.

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The Europe that the monk Raoul Glaber saw with pride at the dawn of the year 1000, covered with “a white mantle of churches,” has entered a dark era of de-Christianisation. Church towers gave way to minarets, and city churches, gradually falling into disuse, were at best converted into trendy bars or contemporary art exhibition halls—when they were not destroyed once and for all. And what of the monasteries, those spacious buildings that once housed cohorts of monks whose prayers, recited from dawn to dusk, set the rhythm of the days and seasons in the countryside?

Today, many of them are real estate complexes that have become useless. The monks are ageing and are going to end their days in medical care facilities that have only a very distant relationship with stained glass windows and ribbed vaults.

And yet, there are still communities in France that continue to speak to young people and are capable not only of erecting walls and building new monasteries, but also of restoring ancient walls threatened with abandonment.

Read it.

Well, that peace didn’t last long, did it?

Imagine how peaceful the world would be if the Religion of Peace didn’t exist.

Read it.

Today is the day that the forces of goodness and righteousness and correct pronouns take our country back from the twisted fascist psychopath who is exerting his despotic rule over us.

To demonstrate how widespread and deep the support for the No Kings movement is, it’s worth noting that today’s event in Minneapolis is sponsored by the local chapter of the U.S. Communist Party.

Based on the previous iteration of the event back in June, the occasion will largely be a Boomer affair, staffed by geezers in my age group doddering (or riding their mobility scooters) down the street carrying signs.

However, in major leftist citadels such as Portland, Antifa is urging the cadres to infiltrate the No Kings rallies and “show them what antifascism really looks like.” So the day may turn sporky in some zip codes.

Read it.

New York City Mayoral frontrunner Zohran Mamdani posted a picture of himself posing with a Brooklyn Imam known as being an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing whose son ran a terrorist camp for children.

In a post to X, Mamdani can be seen posing with Imam Siraj Wahhaj and City Councilmember Yusef Abdus Salaam in Wahhaj’s Bed-Stuy mosque in celebration of the weekly Muslim prayer.

First Arrests Hint At How Billions In California Homeless Dollars Vanished Without A Trace on Newsom’s Watch

Swalwell: When we’re in majority, ICE masks coming off (Sarah Fortinsky/The Hill)

Appeals court denies Trump administration appeal of National Guard deployment ruling in Illinois (WLS/ABC7)

FEMA Cuts Disaster Aid, Leaving States Fending for Themselves (Scott Dance/New York Times)  Because, as we all know, disaster aid is TOTALLY the responsibility of the Federal government–and the Federal tazpayer.

Donald Trump’s Dream Palace of Puffery (Susan B. Glasser/New Yorker)

Trump plans to leave his mark on Washington by building a Paris-like arch near the Lincoln Memorial (Darlene Superville/Associated Press)

Salesforce Offers Its Services to Boost Trump’s Immigration Force (Heather Knight/New York Times)

Joe Rogan is unpleasantly surprised by Trump’s actions. He’s hardly alone (Aaron Blake/CNN)

How dozens of Trump’s donors have benefited from his second term (Financial Times)

The Smart People Can’t Accept Trump Isn’t Hamas or Hitler or Stalin

ICE amps up its surveillance powers, targeting immigrants and antifa (Eva Dou/Washington Post)

How the Supreme Court taught Trump to rewrite history (Matthew Wollin/Public Notice)

Donald Trump: America First globalist (Marc Caputo/Axios)

Trump Says $20 Billion Project Schumer Wants Is ‘Pretty Much Dead’ (Bloomberg)

Republican Frustration With Kristi Noem Has Reached a Boiling Point (NOTUS)

Joe Rogan Rips Trump for Setting a ‘Dangerous Precedent’ (Leigh Kimmins/The Daily Beast)

Exclusive: Trump immigration plan may wipe out 15M jobs by 2035, study claims (Russell Contreras/Axios)

It’s a Bird! It’s a Plane! It’s a Chemtrail? New Conspiracy Theory Takes Wing at Kennedy’s HHS (Stephanie Armour/KFF Health News)

GOP senators worry about Trump, Hegseth shutdown moves (Alexander Bolton/The Hill)

America First? No, Billionaire Buddies First (Paul Krugman)

Universities Are Standing Up to Trump (Alan Blinder/New York Times)

Small businesses are being crushed by Trump’s tariffs and economists say it’s a warning for the economy (Gabrielle Fonrouge/CNBC)

Trump Boat Bombings Take Darker Turn as Top Official Suddenly Resigns (New Republic)

The resistance reaches into Trump country (Waging Nonviolence)

Trump preparing to reopen Alaska wildlife refuge for oil drilling (Adam Federman/Politico)

Trump’s Very Own Basket of Deplorables (William Kristol/The Bulwark)

Donald Trump’s Deep-State Wrecking Ball (Andy Kroll/New Yorker)

Propaganda Puppet Kimmel: Trump Is “Pretending There’s Chaos” For “A Military Takeover”

‘No Kings’ protests return as Trump ramps up authoritarian practices, organizers say (Safiyah Riddle/Associated Press)

The Pro-Massacre, Pro-Segregation, Pro-Eugenics Administration (Dan Holtmeyer/Liberal Currents)

“Outraged” Trump Refuses To Adhere To Global Carbon Tax On Shipping

Scoop: Warren pushes White House to release jobs report during shutdown (Courtenay Brown/Axios)

Putin Plays to Trump’s Ego as U.S. Wavers on Ukraine Aid (New York Times)

Trump Refiles His $15 Billion Defamation Lawsuit Against The New York Times (Michael M. Grynbaum/New York Times)

Trump Pushes Indiana Lawmakers to Redraw State Maps (Tyler Pager/New York Times)

Trump Threatens Democrats As Government Shutdown Enters Third Week: Live Updates (Jennifer Bendery/HuffPost)

What Trump Is Really Up to in Chicago, According to JB Pritzker (Dasha Burns/Politico)

Dear Mr. President, Americans Don’t Care Who Owns Donetsk, So Why Risk WW3 By Sending Tomahawks?

“I’m not a king,” Trump says ahead of nationwide No Kings protests (Josephine Walker/Axios)

MSNBC’s ICE-Breaker Jacob Soboroff Touts Fear: We May Not Have a 2026 Election

Fmr CNN Host Don Lemon: ‘Get a Gun’ in Case ICE Shows Up

Don Lemon tells Black, Brown citizens to carry guns in case ICE shows up (Fox News)

Trump Selfie Snub Triggered MAGA Civil War That Leaked Racist Young Republican Chat (Laura Esposito/The Daily Beast)

PBS Host Geoff Bennett Prods Retired Justice Kennedy to Condemn Current Court

CNN Admits There’s Some Merit to Bolton Classified Info Indictment

Trump’s Secret Police Shot a Citizen. Then Damning New Info Emerged. (Greg Sargent/New Republic)  Greg Sargent loses his shit.

Trump Asks Supreme Court to Greenlight Chicago Military Takeover (Jacob Knutson/Democracy Docket)

Former WH Special Consul Cobb: Bolton Indictment Has Legal Merit

Trump admin cancels more than $11 billion in mostly blue state projects (Jason Lalljee/Axios)

Court extends restraining order to shield more feds from shutdown RIFs (Jared Serbu/Federal News Network)

White House joins Bluesky and immediately trolls Trump opponents (Aamer Madhani/Associated Press)

Public Health Professor Warns Trump’s ‘Eugenics’ Policy Echoes Nazism (Tom Latchem/The Daily Beast)

Unfettered and Unaccountable: How Trump is Building a Violent, Shadowy Federal Police Force (ProPublica)

The Shutdown is Stretching On. Trump Doesn’t Seem to Mind. (Luke Broadwater/New York Times)

Trump’s ‘peace through strength’ foreign policy confounds MAGA Republicans (Paul Kane/Washington Post)

Voting Rights Act faces a near-death experience at US Supreme Court (Jan Wolfe/Reuters)

How the shutdown enabled the Trump administration’s mass firing spree (Emily Peck/Axios)  Well, it looks as if the Narrative ‘journalists’ are not totally stupid.

PBS Whines Trump, GOP Won’t Buckle On Shutdown

With shutdown cuts, Trump moves closer to eliminating Education Department (Washington Post)

Read it.

A group of GOP lawmakers, led by Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), sent a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi, asking her office to refer Smith, who was involved in two federal cases against then-former President Donald Trump, to the Office of Professional Responsibility for an investigation.

A statement from Blackburn’s office said Smith had “allegedly engaged in serious prosecutorial misconduct through the politically motivated Arctic Frost investigation and must face appropriate consequences, up to and including disbarment.”

It was revealed earlier this month that the FBI had obtained cell phone records of several sitting Republican senators.

Read it.

Given that the Federal Reserve has obviously abandoned its 2 percent target for the rise in prices brought on by its own paper-money inflationary policy, it’s important that we keep in mind how our nation’s paper money-system and the Fed’s inflationary policy plunder and loot the American people.

There is the plunder and looting that takes place through the simple inflationary expansion of the money supply. By inflating the amount of money in circulation, the Fed reduces the value of money sitting in people’s savings accounts or that they receive in income. Their savings and income buy less than before simply because the federal government, through its inflationary policy, has debased the value of money.

This is what has been occurring ever since the U.S. government converted to a paper-money standard during the President Franklin Roosevelt administration during the 1930s. Prior to that time — in fact, for more than 125 years prior to that time — the official money of the American people had been gold coins and silver coins. That’s because the Constitution mandated gold coins and silver coins as the official money of our nation.

But gold coins and silver coins cannot be printed, like paper money can. So, FDR used the excuse of an economic “emergency” to declare a permanent end to our constitutional monetary system. Indeed, he did it without even the semblance of a constitutional amendment. And the U.S. Supreme Court upheld his extraordinary “emergency” power to effectively amend the Constitution through executive order and congressional law, even though the Constitution does not delegate“emergency” powers to either the president or the Congress.

Ever since then — year after year, decade after decade — the value of the paper dollar has gone down. That’s because the federal government found it more convenient to pay for its out-of-control welfare-warfare-regulatory programs through newly printed money than by simply raising income taxes on people.

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Film and TV production in the Los Angeles area has hit an all-time low, sinking to levels worse than the SAG union strike of 2023. The city has introduces new tax incentives to generate enthusiasm but many in Tinseltown are questioning if the industry will ever recover.

FilmLA, the city and county’s film permitting office, said Tuesday that on-location production in the greater Los Angeles area declined 13.2% from July through September 2025 compared to the same period last year. Once again, this continues a multi-year trend in declining local production.

LA motion picture employment dropped from 142,000 in 2022 to 100,000 by end-2024 – a 30% cut (42,000 jobs gone). Below-the-line crew were hit hardest; 63% earned less in 2024, and 41% are considering an exit. High taxes in LA and California have forced some productions to leave the area, but total US film and TV productions are still in decline no matter where you go in the country. There has been a 28% drop in theatrical releases since 2019 and a 25% drop in scripted TV projects.

The vast majority of film and TV media are shot in the greater Los Angeles area due to proximity to studios, editing facilities, effects houses and actor pools. A drop in Hollywood and LA production indicates are decline in the film industry as a whole. The plunge in activity coincides with the overall drop in box office receipts since 2019.