Morning

Dodgers win.

Welp

If only there had been some signs.

People who know Obama say he has been surprised and appalled in how many of the rich people who now form his social circle have made concessions to Trump. He’s reaching out to business and other institutional leaders, urging them not to bend to the current administration even if it helps their bottom lines.

One of Obama's flaws is that he is an elitest. He does believe the rich guys in nice suits should run the world, and that they will do it competently and benevolently.

Not sure how he came to that conclusion.

Dear JD Vance,

In recent years, many young people have approached the faith through social media, successful programs and popular online Christian witnesses. The danger is that a faith discovered online is limited to individual experiences, which may be intellectually and emotionally…

— Pope Leo XIV (@Pontifex) October 31, 2025

Mayor Mamdani

The likely result on Tuesday. Many of our "vote blue no matter who" favorites have behaved very badly in all of this, and that should not be forgotten. Islamophobia never stopped being "respectable," and that goes beyond any issues related to Israel or American Jews.

Though there are many who think "the more Muslim you are, the more antisemitic you are" by definition. 

The "Islamophobic" label is for them .

Unreality

One of the unrealities that our media embraces - and it is mostly pretending not to understand things, not actually failing to understand them - is that a conservative movement and administration filled with actual Nazis can genuinely be interested in things like "fighting antisemitism on college campuses."

Every time the New York Times, for example, puts a phrase like that in the newspaper, are they informing readers? If not, what are they doing? What do they think they are doing?

Morning

Slacker Saturday

Friday Evening

 Enjoy

Nobody Could've Predicted

That the audience and patrons and artists of the Kennedy Center would be repulsed by a Trump takeover.

Just Do It

The only reason to be against this is the likelihood that the next Dem senate will reinstate it right away, probably while saying the pledge of allegiance on the Capitol Steps.

Celebrate By Neuken In De Keuken

It is always good when far right assholes face a bit of a setback.

Dutch centrist party D66 won the most votes in Wednesday’s general election, news agency ANP said on Friday, putting its 38-year-old leader Rob Jetten on course to become the youngest-ever prime minister in the Netherlands.

With almost all votes counted, D66 can no longer be overtaken by the far-right Freedom Party (PVV) led by Geert Wilders, according to the news agency, which collects the results from all municipalities in the Netherlands.

A Dutch friend tells me that it is more of a left party than a centrist party, though anglo media is loathe to label it that way.  Their coalition will be centrist, but the party is not. 

Big Shitpile II: NVIDIA BOOGALOO

Welp

Here is where the bubble dynamics get complicated. Tech firms don’t want to formally take on debt—that is, directly ask investors for loans—because debt looks bad on their balance sheets and could reduce shareholder returns. To get around this, some are partnering with private-equity titans to do some sophisticated financial engineering, Paul Kedrosky, an investor and a financial consultant, told us. These private-equity firms put up or raise the money to build a data center, which a tech company will repay through rent. Data-center leases from, say, Meta can then be repackaged into a financial instrument that people can buy and sell—a bond, in essence. Meta recently did just this: Blue Owl Capital raised money for a massive Meta data center in Louisiana by, in essence, issuing bonds backed by Meta’s rent. And multiple data-center leases can be combined into a security and sorted into what are called “tranches” based on their risk of default. Data centers represent an $800 billion market for private-equity firms through 2028 alone. (Meta has said of its arrangement with Blue Owl that the “innovative partnership was designed to support the speed and flexibility required for Meta’s data center projects.”)

In this way, the data-center financing ends up being a real-estate deal as much as an AI deal. If this sounds complicated, it’s supposed to: The complexity, investment structure, and repackaging make exactly what is going on hard to parse. And if the dynamics also sound familiar, it’s because not two decades ago, the Great Recession was precipitated by banks packaging risky mortgages into tranches of securities that were falsely marketed as high-quality. By 2008, the house of cards had collapsed.

Haven't seen the word "tranche" in awhile.

As with the original shitpile, the complexity makes it hard to see just how fucked everything is until it is too late. There are the underlying assets, and then who knows how many bets placed on them, and bets placed on those bets, with all the bets somehow going in the same direction.. 

Proof of Vaccination

In the near future, you will need vaccination proof to travel more and more places.

SARASOTA, Fla. — Florida plans to end nearly a half-century of required childhood immunizations against diseases that have killed and maimed millions of children. Many critics of the decision, including doctors, are afraid to speak up against it.

Sure Why Not

 

Morning

Futile Friday

Happy Hour

Get happy

Woke Universities

College freeze peach was always about how it was wrong for students to even question their betters, as defined by who Atlantic writers respect, and this is what they have achieved.

Melissa DeRosa ’04 M.P.A. ’09, secretary to former governor Andrew Cuomo (D-N.Y.) and unofficial advisor of his bid for New York City mayor, berated a Cornell undergraduate student after she probed DeRosa about Cuomo’s sexual harassment allegations at an Oct 1. Zoom event hosted by the Cornell Political Strategy Group.

After the event, the club suspended the student, before reducing her punishment to a strike in the club’s punishment system days later, according to a former club member familiar with the situation.

You are surely thinking that the student must have been really out of line.

“I was wondering how you, as a woman who has done a lot of work for women, can grapple with the ethical and moral qualms of working with a disgraced governor with numerous sexual harassment allegations?” the student analyst asked DeRosa during the event.

It's Going To Keep Getting Worse

I don't think Dems have some magic wand to fix everything, but I do wish the leadership would prioritize giving a shit about this stuff. Right now I'm pretty sure that if I get whisked away and my member of Congress starts making a big deal about it, Jeffries will send him not so subtle signals to focus on What The American People Really Care About.

I could be wrong about that, but that I'm not obviously wrong about it..

Sure Why Not

Time for internal passports and borders too. Maybe states can set internal tariffs as well.

Oh So That Was True

Spent years being yelled at by people who claimed Garland was doing everything perfectly.

The slow decision-making at the top of Attorney General Merrick Garland’s Justice Department affected two major probes into Trump after he lost the White House in 2020: whether he illegally possessed and obstructed the retrieval of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago residence, and whether he conspired illegally to overturn the 2020 election.

Far from rushing the Trump cases, FBI and Justice Department officials chose to move cautiously and slowly over concerns about the implications of investigating a former and possibly future president, taking  pains to insulate the probes from even the appearance of politics.

Surely if we do this just right then no one can accuse us of being "political!"

Trump Almost Fixed The Problem He Created

Huzzah.

Trump said afterwards that Washington’s dispute with Beijing over the supply of rare earths has been settled, China would resume buying US soybeans and Washington would reduce its tariffs on China.

Trump shook hands with Xi after their talks and boarded Air Force One to return to Washington, saying onboard that the meeting had been a “great success”.

He told reporters the Chinese leader had agreed to work “very hard” to prevent the production of the synthetic opioid fentanyl – blamed for many American deaths – and in exchange the US would reduce fentanyl-linked tariffs from 20% to 10%, lowering the overall tariff burden from 57% to 47%.