Election Day

On this day:
644
Umar ibn al-Khattab, the second Muslim caliph, is assassinated by a Persian slave in Medina.
1333
The River Arno flooding causes massive damage in Florence as recorded by the Florentine chronicler Giovanni Villani.
1793
French playwright, journalist, and feminist Olympe de Gouges is guillotined. Quite a story.
1913
The United States introduces an income tax.
1943
World War II: 500 aircraft of the U.S. 8th Air Force devastate Wilhelmshafen harbor in Germany.
1957
Sputnik program: The Soviet Union launches Sputnik 2. On board is the first animal to enter orbit, a dog named Laika.
1979
Greensboro massacre: Five members of the Communist Workers Party are shot dead and seven are wounded by a group of Klansmen and neo-Nazis during a “Death to the Klan” rally in Greensboro, North Carolina, United States.
1986
Iran-Contra Affair: The Lebanese magazine Ash-Shiraa reports that the United States has been secretly selling weapons to Iran to secure the release of seven American hostages held by pro-Iranian groups in Lebanon.

***

The most obvious answer to France’s problems is economic growth — much easier said than done, of course. The reason that’s so hard for France isn’t because the government is “unresponsive” to the people and their concerns, it’s because it’s too responsive. For decades, the French have demanded the economic policies that got them into this mess, and the government appeased them.--Goldberg

***

Paul Krugman and many others are arguing that:
Massive spending on data centers is crowding out investment in everything else in the economy.
Not so fast. Can you see one immediate problem? How is $51b in data center construction spending crowding out $120b in everything else!--tabarrok

***

Benjamin Rush, the Philadelphia physician and signer of the Declaration of Independence, thought capital punishment “lessens the horror of taking away human life,” thereby fostering murders.

***

"Ultra-Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn have six kids each. Their hipster neighbors have 1.6 kids each. They live in the same economy. They have very different outcomes. Why? Different culture."--Lyman Stone, senior fellow and director of the Pronatalism Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies. The Pronatalism Initiative!

***

Why are we thrilled with entertainers' political opinions and so angry at industry moguls'?

***

Intel’s stock suffered one of its worst days ever on Friday, crashing around 28% after the chip giant reported a weaker-than-expected outlook for the fourth quarter. This rout reduced the value of Intel’s holdings by the government by $12 billion. The Trump administration had the government buy a 10% stake over a year ago.

***

Is Haley Stevens' disagreement with the Democrat Party and its journalists really a heresy? Do certain beliefs disqualify you from membership in a political party? Are some opinions simply overwhelmingly defining? So disagreeing with a candidate's opinion on favored foreign relations results in ejection from the group, but favoring elimination of the police or the Supreme Court doesn't?

Please see Olympe de Gouges, above.

***

Election Day

Here is an Onion headline:
Mary Peltola Insists Scheme To Put Second Dan Sullivan On Ballot Orchestrated By Mary F. Peltola

Mendacity and incompetence are no longer episodes in political life; they are political life. Here the Onion has made the explanation for a lie, a reciprocal lie. Now the voter has our biennial choice between two monoliths of self-serving insincerity and ineptitude to deal with the national debt, AI, Putin, China, and heavily armed religious maniacs.

Some examples of our strengths so far:

--Ernesto Londoño of the New York Times reported that last summer the Department of Homeland Security paid more than $495 million for a 1,600-bed prison the state of Minnesota declined to purchase a year ago for the asking price of $75 million—or even “a fraction of that price.

--Wendy Siegelman of NewsTRACS reports that Trump Media & Technology Group received $350,000 for running ads on Trump’s social media site for this summer’s Freedom 250 events. Freedom 250 was the group Trump backed in place of the congressionally-approved nonpartisan America 250 organization designed to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Trump owns 41% of Trump Media & Technology Group.

--At a rally on October 24, Trump commented to attendees, “I wonder if I should say this,” then went on to say that “our country is making hundreds of billions of dollars because of what’s happened in the Middle East. My people said, ‘Please don’t mention that, sir,’ because people are paying a little higher. But what we’ve done for this country, we’re making money like this country has never made before. I don’t give a damn: I’m going to say it. We’re making a freaking fortune.”

--"Nobody wanted to eat out. They were afraid. Even if you were in the restaurant, people would walk in and, like the Wild West, hold it up! Everybody is standing there. Can you imagine? A fancy restaurant. They were robbing the whole restaurant. It’s crazy."--Trump

--We are running guys with Nazi tattoos for Senate. Senate! Imposters are in the House! Guys sleeping with Chinese spies are running for Governor of the nation's most important state. We are bombing unidentified boats in the Caribbean, and AI-targeted girls' schools in Iran. 

Zito said insightfully, "The Press takes Trump literally but not seriously; his voters take him seriously but not literally." In this circus, no one is taken seriously except by angry, blue-haired cat ladies. One can only wonder what follows in this foolish sideshow parade, but it will restart today.

Sunday/Sermon on the Mount

 

On this day:

1520
The Strait of Magellan is discovered; the passage immediately south of mainland South America, connecting the Pacific and the Atlantic Oceans, is first navigated by Ferdinand Magellan during the first global circumnavigation voyage.
1555
French Huguenots establish the France Antarctique colony in present-day Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
1755
Lisbon earthquake: In Portugal, Lisbon is destroyed by a massive earthquake and tsunami, killing between sixty thousand and ninety thousand people.
1765
The British Parliament enacts the Stamp Act on the 13 colonies in order to help pay for British military operations in North America.

1790
Edmund Burke publishes Reflections on the Revolution in France, in which he predicts that the French Revolution will end in a disaster.

1814

Congress of Vienna opens to redraw the European political map after the defeat of France, in the Napoleonic Wars.
1922
The last sultan of the Ottoman Empire, Mehmed VI, abdicates.
1938
Seabiscuit defeats War Admiral in an upset victory during a match race deemed “the match of the century” in horse racing.
1950
Pope Pius XII claims Papal Infallibility when he formally defines the dogma of the Assumption of Mary.
1950
Puerto Rican nationalists Griselio Torresola and Oscar Collazo attempt to assassinate US President Harry S. Truman at Blair House.
1951
Operation Buster-Jangle: 6,500 American soldiers are exposed to ‘Desert Rock' atomic explosions for training purposes in Nevada. Participation is not voluntary.
1952
Operation Ivy – The United States successfully detonates the first large hydrogen bomb, codenamed “Mike” [“M” for megaton], in the Eniwetok atoll, located in the Marshall Islands in the central Pacific Ocean. The explosion had a yield of 10 megatons.

***

Advocates of industrial policy believe that there are some promising new industries that are essential to countries and that these should have support (usually in the form of protection) to raise domestic prices and let domestic production be profitable. To my knowledge, no one has ever spelled out what techniques would enable government officials to identify such “winners.”--Krueger

***

Operation Buster-Jangle was a series of joint nuclear test operations between the Department of Defense and the nuclear weapons labs (at this time consisting only of Los Alamos) that were held together for the first time - Operation Buster (conducted by Los Alamos) and Operation Jangle (conducted by the DOD). Buster-Jangle was held at the Nevada Proving Ground.
Buster-Jangle released about 10,500 kilocuries of radioiodine (I-131) into the atmosphere (for comparison, Trinity released about 3200 kilocuries of radioiodine). This produced total civilian radiation exposures amounting to 7.4 million person-rads of thyroid tissue exposure (about 2% of all exposure due to continental nuclear tests). This can be expected to eventually cause about 2300 cases of thyroid cancer, leading to some 120 deaths.

And this government was on our side.

***

Doctors are 14% more likely to diagnose a child with ADHD on October 31, not because there are more kids with ADHD, but because the kids are excited to go trick-or-treating.

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Reflections on the Revolution in France. While not denying the existence of “the rights of man,” Burke argues that these provide an inadequate basis for government. Government, rather, is “a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human needs; it relies on a “deep knowledge of human nature” and on practical actions, not abstract theories. Preoccupation with abstract “rights” can lead people to overlook human nature and justify the “grand spectacle” of revolution.

***

Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for Michigan’s tightly fought US Senate race, wants Democratic congresswoman Haley Stevens to stay away from his campaign events. 

Only special politics demand purity.

***

​In August 2025, the U.S. government became a large Intel shareholder, taking a 9.9% stake in the company. The $8.9-billion funding deal gave the U.S. 433.3 million Intel shares at an average price of $20.47 per share.
Intel was down 30% this week.
The Wall Street Journal reported that the federal government has spent $30 billion on 43 stock deals.
Can you believe this? What's next, the Fed going on trips to Vegas?

***

Sunday/Sermon on the Mount

The All Saints gospel is the Sermon on the Mount with the Beatitudes. Christ's description of the Good in the Beatitudes includes meekness, the poor in spirit, and those who mourn--they are not limited to the dramatic apostles, their dramatic lives and deaths.

In many respects, these qualities are in the everyday.

Saint Irenaeus was a man of the Second Century, a man who campaigned against the Gnostics. He has a famous quote: “The glory of God is man fully alive.” This has been debated for years; does it imply the value of self-fulfillment without God? In fairness, he answers this himself in the next phrase: “The life of a man is the vision of God.” However, it implies that spiritual fulfillment is possible for humans in their daily interactions.

The author Alan Furst gave an interview once on his writings, a collection of WWII spy stories that describe the heroism of everyday men during the time before the war. He says that his readings of the period have led him to believe that evil, a true evil life, requires full-time application. That it was simply too hard to be devoted to evil without eliminating all other elements of your life. (Or perhaps evil eventually fills the moral space?) So the caricatures of Evil are true.

Goodness, on the other hand, emerged as a by-product of living a normal, thoughtful life inspired, as Irenaeus would say, by God.
Not at all tooth and claw. And achievable by all.

With hesitation, I mention another book, Jailbird by Vonnagut. The story is delivered by another deadpan narrator, a bright guy who is wandering from failure to failure with ironic acceptance. At one point, he is in front of a Senate investigation committee and is asked why he became a communist. (In the story, he gives up his membership at the ratification of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.) His answer is, wide-eyed, "The Sermon on the Mount."

All Souls Day

 

On This Day:
1675
King Philip’s War: A combined effort by the Plymouth, Rhode Island, Massachusetts Bay and Connecticut colonies attacks the Great Swamp Fort, owned by the Narragansetts
1783
In Rocky Hill, New Jersey, US General George Washington gives his “Farewell Address to the Army”.  
1795
The French Directory succeeds the French National Convention as the government of Revolutionary France.
1917
The Balfour Declaration proclaims British support for the “establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people” with the clear understanding “that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities”.
1920
In the United States, KDKA of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania starts broadcasting as the first commercial radio station. The first broadcast is the result of the U.S. presidential election, 1920.
1936
Italian dictator Benito Mussolini proclaims the Rome-Berlin Axis, establishing the alliance of the Axis Powers.
1960
Penguin Books is found not guilty of obscenity in the Lady Chatterley’s Lover case
2000
The first resident crew to the ISS docked in November 2nd on the Soyuz TM-31.

***

Power always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak; and that it is doing God's service when it is violating all his laws. -John Adams, 2nd U.S. President (30 Oct 1735-1826)

***

Highlighting these supply constraints isn’t an argument against enforcement; it is an argument against ignoring economic realities. For decades, federal policy has signaled “keep out” at the border while the market signaled “help wanted.” Congress has consistently failed to align legal labor supply with actual economic demand. Removing essential labor without functional legal alternatives is not order. It is manufactured scarcity, and every American consumer will now begin paying the price.--letter to wsj

***

Washington's “Farewell Address to the Army”. Moving, heartfelt, and prescient. He spoke about "the unparalleled perseverance of the Armies of the United States, through almost every possible suffering and discouragement, for the space of eight long years, was little short of a standing Miracle. ...For who has before seen a disciplined Army formed at once from such raw materials?... Nor is it possible to conceive that any one of the United States will prefer a National Bankruptcy and a dissolution of the Union, to a compliance with the requisitions of Congress and the payment of its just debts...that the private virtues of economy, prudence and industry, will not be less amiable in civil life, than the more splendid qualities of valour, perseverance and enterprise, were in the Field: " And closed with "his prayers to the God of Armies."

***

 It’s truly insane how many people’s entire political viewpoint is centered around self-righteous nonsense built entirely around strawmen & caricatures of their — overwhelmingly imaginary — opponents.--malone

***

Arden and Plomin write:

"We agree wholeheartedly with Clark’s overall message that genetics accounts for outcomes long assumed to be due to nurture. Like other books in his trilogy, Clark marshals evidence from diverse sources to support his argument. The data reach in this book—1600–2026—is jaw-dropping."

Clark cannot find a publisher.

***

Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., 53, has been hospitalized following a stroke, according to his office.

***

The Michigan Senate race is now an international, religious discussion, much more than an American political debate. And it is empty of any of the concepts of government. What happens to the debt? What is the future of Israel's nukes? What will be cut to help the debt? What do we do with Putin's expansionism? Can Europe learn from its mistakes? Who in politics can manage AI when they have defaulted on so much? With that atmosphere, the pros and cons of "From the river to the sea" sound pretty self-indulgent.

***

 

All Souls Day

The souls of the righteous are in the hand of God, and no torment will ever touch them. In the eyes of the foolish, they seemed to have died, and their departure was thought to be an evil thing, and their going from us to be their destruction; but they are at peace. For though in the sight of men they were punished, their hope is full of immortality. --Book of Wisdom

All Saints’ Day, which began most likely as All Martyrs’ Day, can be traced to the earliest Christians. By the third century, the followers of Christ annually honored their fellow Christians who had given their lives while witnessing for and defending Jesus Christ. Typically, on the anniversary of a martyr’s death, those living would gather to remember and offer prayers at the tomb or place where the deceased had died. Tombs were sometimes decorated, and altars were built over the tomb.

In 609, during the reign of Pope Boniface IV (608-615), the Eastern Emperor Phocas (r. 602-610) gifted a temple in Rome to the Holy See. The temple, the Pantheon, was originally built in the first century. Destroyed by fire and rebuilt between 118 and 128, it was a public place to worship and honor all the Roman gods and goddesses — a spectacular monument to pagan Rome.

Pope Boniface accepted this temple, removed all the pagan embellishments, all the statues of false gods, and, according to legend, relocated and buried the remains of hundreds of Christian martyrs beneath the Pantheon. The pope then consecrated the Pantheon as a Christian church to the Blessed Mother and all the Holy Martyrs (Sanctae Mariae and Martyrs). The consecration took place on May 13, and that was the annual date of the feast of All Martyrs for the next 125 years. On Nov. 1, 735, Pope Gregory III (731-741) dedicated an oratory in St. Peter’s Basilica to house the relics of the apostles, martyrs, saints and confessors. Thereafter, Nov. 1 became, at least for the churches in Rome, the feast of All Saints. Eventually, Pope Gregory IV (827-844) assigned Nov. 1 as the date of the feast of All Saints throughout the Latin Church and proclaimed it a holy day of obligation.

The Commemoration of the Faithful Departed, or All Souls’ Day, evolved onto the church calendar long after All Saints’ Day. Sometime between 998 and 1030, St. Odilo, the abbot at the Benedictine monastery in Cluny, France, encouraged all the monks to pray for the souls of those who had died, those awaiting the joys of heaven. He instituted this commemoration on the day after All Saints’ Day, and soon other religious orders and churches began, on that same date, to annually remember all who had died.

Remembering and praying for the faithful departed is tied directly to the belief in purgatory.

SatStats

On this day:

1517
Protestant Reformation: Martin Luther posts his 95 Theses on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg.
1917
World War I: Battle of Beersheba – “last successful cavalry charge in history”.
1926
Magician Harry Houdini dies of gangrene and peritonitis that developed after his appendix ruptured.
1940
World War II: The Battle of Britain ends – the United Kingdom prevents a possible German invasion.
1984
Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi is assassinated by two security guards. Riots break out in New Delhi, and nearly 10,000 Sikhs are killed.

2002
A federal grand jury in Houston, Texas, indicts former Enron Corp. chief financial officer Andrew Fastow on 78 counts of wire fraud, money laundering, conspiracy, and obstruction of justice related to the collapse of his ex-employer.

***

"I do think that we've gotten away from really celebrating our founders and our heroes. What they were doing in 1776 was incredibly radical, if you think about it. At that time, everyone accepted the divine right of kings. Everyone accepted hereditary rule. And our founders took Enlightenment ideas from John Locke and philosophers, and they turned it into the framework for a government. The idea of self-government and that our rights come from our Creator, that we have inalienable rights that are given to us by God and not from a king. Those were radical ideas of the time.

I like to say our founders were the first civil rights heroes, the first civil libertarians. And I think our education system has gotten away from that. They don't view them in the time that they existed, and suddenly now everything is oppressor versus oppressed narrative. And they are labeled more like colonizers or enslavers, and that's the only view that they're looked at, and not as human beings who sacrificed their very lives to write the Declaration of Independence, to form this country…it was an incredible, bold, and courageous act, but it was also an act of moral courage and philosophical courage."-Kelley Paul

***

A NASA twin study (using now-Senator Kelly) shows chromosome changes during and after spaceflight, especially telomeres, related to longevity.

If telomeres lengthen during long spaceflight, why? Is it related to exercise, reduced body mass, altered metabolism, folate status, immune-cell shifts, radiation response or something else? If they shorten rapidly after landing, is that primarily re-entry stress, gravity readaptation, inflammation, immune remodeling or a change in circulating cell populations? And if critically short telomeres remain more common afterward, does that create meaningful health risk, or is it a temporary signal whose clinical meaning is still unclear?

***

Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, is the only place besides Earth known to have standing liquid on its surface, and with it, rivers, rain, clouds, lakes, and seas fed by a weather cycle that runs much like our own. The rain and the rivers are liquid methane and ethane, and the ground they cut through is water ice, frozen so hard at Titan’s temperatures that it behaves like rock. It is the closest thing in the solar system to a working copy of Earth’s landscape, built from a completely different set of materials.


***

Amazon, Alphabet, Meta and Oracle issued about $194 billion of bonds in 2026 through July 7, up from roughly $108 billion in all of 2025, according to Reuters. Goldman Sachs expects the five biggest hyperscalers, including Microsoft, to issue roughly $400 billion in bonds in 2027.

***

With gerrymandering and 'Decoy Dan', how could anyone take a politician's posturing of honesty seriously?

And 'Decoy Dan' has been on the ballot for months. Why has such a late revelation been hailed as such a journalistic achievement?

***


SatStats


The Mets finished last in the N.L. East, with the highest payroll in baseball.

*

79 NBA players are listed on the 2:30 PM injury report for the 10/28/26 games. That’s roughly 15% of the entire league.

*

A monograph by Yi Fuxian, a University of Wisconsin-Madison demographer and longtime critic of China’s population policies, argues that China’s actual population may be closer to 1.27 billion—not the 1.4 billion officially reported. The gap would be as much as 130 million people, roughly the population of Mexico. And Yi argues the distortion has warped strategic thinking in both China and the U.S., feeding overconfidence in Beijing and anxiety in Washington.

*

The Rays have the third-most wins in the American League since 2017, despite consistently operating with one of their lowest payrolls.

*

Berlin and Los Angeles are comparable in size. Berlin has 18,000 cops, L.A. has 8,000. Because we have too few cops to get at the root of violent crime before it is even committed, we wind up spending a fortune on prisons instead. --From Gladwell's new book.

*

At Harvard University, Black students account for just 9.3% of this fall's incoming class, down from 18% in 2023, the year the Supreme Court ruled against affirmative action in college admissions.

*

In World War I, 150 German soldiers were sentenced to death for serious crimes, of which a mere forty-eight were executed. In World War II, thirty thousand death sentences were decreed by military courts, of which two-thirds were carried out, in addition to many more that took place without any judicial proceeding. By contrast the British executed forty men, the French 103, the Americans 146, almost all the condemned Allied soldiers having committed capital crimes as defined in civil law, rather than being sentenced for dereliction of military duty. Meanwhile, the Japanese executed 22,253 of their own men, and the Russians at least 150,000, possibly as many as 300,000.

*

Texas produces more than Canada, with three-quarters of the population.

*

Last year, China’s credit to the nonfinancial sector—a broad measure of corporate, government and household borrowings—topped 300% of gross domestic product. Chinese leader Xi Jinping is presiding over a dangerous spiral of debt that is strangling the economy at home and damaging trade partners around the world.


*

Tampa Bay constructed its World Series roster with a staggering 17 of the Rays' 26 players acquired through trades. No other playoff team acquired more than 14 players through trades.


*

The Debt Crisis

When Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. collapsed, its U.S. operations had 1.2 million derivatives transactions outstanding with 6,500 trading partners.
In all, the contracts, which were tied to interest rates, bonds, currencies, commodities, and stocks, had a "notional," or theoretical, value of $39 trillion. (wsj)

The notional value of the world's derivatives actually was estimated at more than $600 trillion. Yes, $600 trillion. Notional value is the total value of a leveraged position's assets.

The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) estimated the net notional value of uncollateralized derivatives risks was between $2 trillion and $8 trillion

*

The Democratic Republic of Congo sits on mineral deposits valued at an estimated twenty-four trillion dollars, a figure that turns up in advocacy material, mining-sector research and the United States government’s own commercial guide to the country, which notes that most of those resources remain untapped. The same country is described by the World Bank as among the five poorest nations in the world.

*

Back-of-the-envelope estimates suggest that the global cost of cyber risk exposure is around $1 trillion per year.--Journal of Finance

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From 2000 through 2019 (just before COVID) the percentage of total job separations caused by non-retiring workers voluntarily quitting their jobs was 56%, while the percentage of total job separations caused by workers being involuntarily discharged was 38%.

Values of Diversity

 On this day:

1226
Tran Thu Do, head of the Tran clan of Vietnam, forces Ly Hue Tong, the last emperor of the Ly dynasty, to commit suicide.
1470
Henry VI of England returns to the English throne after Earl of Warwick defeats the Yorkists in battle.
1485
King Henry VII of England is crowned.
1905
Czar Nicholas II of Russia grants Russia’s first constitution, creating a legislative assembly.
1918
The Ottoman Empire signs an armistice with the Allies, ending the First World War in the Middle East.
1922
Benito Mussolini is made Prime Minister of Italy.
1938
Orson Welles broadcasts his radio play of H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, causing anxiety in some of the audience in the United States.
1941
World War II: Franklin Delano Roosevelt approves U.S. $1 billion in Lend-Lease aid to the Allied nations.
1985
Space Shuttle Challenger lifts off for mission STS-61-A, its final successful mission.

***

"Even $1 million isn't going to make you happy. It is not going to happen. You look around, and you see people with $2 million, and your happiness will disappear."--Warren Buffett

***

Packers wide receiver Christian Watson left Lambeau Field in an ambulance on Thursday night after breaking a rib and spitting up blood, but he later returned to the field. Watson finished the game with eight catches for 113 yards: Six catches for 100 yards before going to the hospital, and two catches for 13 yards after returning from the hospital.

***

Earlier this year, Russian authorities issued a stern warning to a Siberian institute that researches the pathogens behind bubonic plague, anthrax, and other diseases: It lacked a sufficient decontamination plan in the event bacteria accidentally escaped. 

As if this were not a government program.

***

People who use less widely spoken languages could end up paying more to use artificial intelligence than those who speak English or other dominant languages. 

Perhaps a brewing "diversity" question?

***

Values of Diversity

"Recent years have witnessed many strong claims that ‘diversity’ leads to more original and impactful science, which is a science-focused form of what we call “The Diversity Hypothesis.” However, what evidence supports the claim that diversity enhances scientific output or impact? This pre-registered rapid scoping review seeks to collate and evaluate the scientific evidence for the Diversity Hypothesis…

…Based on over 100 scientific articles, we find that only between 15% and 28% of results reported in the literature are consistent with the hypothesis, with the balance of the results not being consistent with it.

…Overall, the results of the analysis section indicate that there is little empirical evidence that diversity improves scientific output and/or impact. In fact, with the possible exception of disciplinary diversity—a type of informational or viewpoint diversity operationalized at the team level—the majority of the evidence seems to point in the other direction. These findings are robust regardless of how the data is parsed and analyzed. The same conclusions can be drawn looking at the full data set, only the population-adjusted results, or only the results of high quality based on the MMAT analysis."--tabarrok

Diversity is an equality token, like refusing distinctions between apples and lemons because they are both fruit. But we are strangely selective. For example, we don't hear cries to diversify ownership of nuclear weapons among nations.

Financing Democracy

On this day:

539 BC
Cyrus the Great enters the city of Babylon, detains Nabonidus, and ends the Babylonian captivity. He gives the Jews permission to return to Yehud province and to rebuild the Temple, but most Jews choose to remain in Babylon.
312
Constantine the Great enters Rome after his victory at the Milvian Bridge, stages a grand adventus in the city, and is met with popular jubilation. Maxentius’ body is fished out of the Tiber and beheaded.
1268
Conradin, the last legitimate male heir of the Hohenstaufen dynasty of Kings of Germany and Holy Roman Emperors, is executed along with his companion Frederick I, Margrave of Baden by Charles I of Sicily, a political rival and ally to the hostile Roman Catholic church. Both became romantic symbols for various subsets through time, and Charles of Anjou set a dangerous precedent for many other executions over succeeding centuries of dynastic and political rivals across Europe.
1390
First trial for witchcraft in Paris leading to the death of three people.
1618
English adventurer, writer, and courtier Sir Walter Raleigh is beheaded for allegedly conspiring against James I of England.
1675
Leibniz makes the first use of the long s (∫) as a symbol of the integral in calculus.
1929
The New York Stock Exchange crashes in what will be called the Crash of '29 or “Black Tuesday”, ending the Great Bull Market of the 1920s and beginning the Great Depression.
1941
The Holocaust: In the Kaunas Ghetto, over 10,000 Jews are shot by German occupiers at the Ninth Fort, a massacre known as the “Great Action”.

***

We haven't yet learned how to stay human when assembled in masses. -Lewis Thomas, physician and author

***

AI constitutions (like Claude’s Constitution and the OpenAI Model Spec) are real constitutions, and we need to take how they govern us – and the AIs they create – seriously.

In this paper, I apply constitutional theory’s oldest paradox – that “the people” authorize the constitution, but the constitution defines “the people” – to the AI constitutions, and explore how we could build institutions that would create the conditions for meaningful consent if an AI can give it. --Caputo

***

Obligate mutualism is a special case of mutualism where an ecological interaction between species mutually benefits each other, and one or all species are unable to survive without the other. In some obligate relationships, only one species is dependent on the relationship. Fig and fig wasps are an example of a co-obligate relationship, where both species are totally dependent on the relationship. The fig plant is entirely dependent on the fig wasp for pollination, and the fig wasp requires the fig plant for reproductive purposes. Many insect-fungi relationships are also co-obligate: the insect disperses, and in some cases protects, the fungi while the fungi provide nutrients for the insects.

***

Vast numbers of nonwhites are being raised to believe that America hates them. This, itself, should be a hate crime.

***

The Sullivan news in Alaska's Senate race is not new; indeed, the fact that it has been under the radar for so long is more damaging to so-called American journalism. 

Any election where at least the spirit of the law has not been violated was because it was too hard. These people are awful.

***

Darlene Graham is in trouble in the S.C. Senate race? Must be an error. Political success seems to be hereditary. But should she lose, the Rube-publicans can be reassured the substitute, whoever she is, will be no different. All of these people are linked by a hidden net of insincerity, short-sightedness, and willingness to sacrifice the national well-being for personal gain.

***

Financing Democracy

Good news. Both American parties want to end corruption in politics and eliminate the influence of political money in elections and government. Here are the obvious targets they can work on. (They probably already know.)

As of August 28th, 170 billionaire families have spent over $1.7 billion to influence the outcome of the 2026 federal midterm elections. 17 of these families—who collectively gave $363 million this cycle—had direct personal or professional connections with convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. With two months remaining in the election cycle, this amount of billionaire election spending surpasses the record-breaking $1 billion they spent in the 2022 midterm cycle and is on track to double their political spending from four years prior. We are very pro-growth.

Billionaires’ political spending is up 53-fold since the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision allowed for unlimited campaign donations.
Twenty years ago – the last midterm cycle before the floodgates of unlimited spending were opened – the top 15 contributors spent less than $15 million in the 2006 elections. A handful of individuals now spend 6,400% more to decide who controls America’s federal government. Presumably politicians are more expensive now. Inflation and all.

The vast bulk of billionaire-family political contributions went to so-called “independent expenditure” groups–which, thanks to Citizens United, can raise unlimited amounts from each donor–rather than directly to candidates or parties, which still work under campaign-contribution limits. Less than 20% of billionaires’ contributions went through committees with spending limits. Innovation.

Billionaire spending heavily favored Republicans over Democrats by over two-to-one, with $1.2 billion (69%) going to support Republican candidates so far and $488 million (28%) going directly to backing Democrats.

In addition to known billionaire political donations, there are nearly $600 million in dark money contributions from unknown, shadowy sources that could include the nation’s wealthiest families and the corporations they control. But certainly not interested foreign actors with bad intent.

Cleaning up this mess will probably not come from new laws; it will come from new candidates. And virtue. Imagine: "Just say 'No!'" But I wouldn't count on it.

Now there's a bet for Kalshi.

Business and Other Nations

On this day:
312

Battle of Milvian Bridge: Constantine I defeats Maxentius, becoming the sole Roman Emperor.

1628

The Siege of La Rochelle, which had lasted for 14 months, ends with the surrender of the Huguenots
1919
The U.S. Congress passes the Volstead Act over President Woodrow Wilson’s veto, paving the way for Prohibition to begin the following January.
1922
March on Rome: Italian fascists led by Benito Mussolini march on Rome and take over the Italian government.
1929
Black Monday, a day in the Wall Street Crash of 1929, which also saw major stock market upheaval.
2006
The funeral service takes place for those executed at Bykivnia forest, outside Kiev, Ukraine. 817 Ukrainian civilians (out of some 100,000) executed by Bolsheviks at Bykivnia in 1930s – early 1940s are reburied.

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“There is no such thing as a Lost Cause, because there is no such thing as a Gained Cause.” --T.S. Eliot

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A factor unmentioned in the polls that might be important in the midterms: Americans don’t want us to ally with Putin (and North Korea) in their invasion of Ukraine, alienating ourselves from Canada and Europe, the Aussies and the Brits. Just a gut feeling.

***

Terrific series, though the experts were worried. Milwaukee and Tampa Bay have the third-smallest combined television market of any World Series pairing in the modern era, and the two teams’ payrolls, added together, are nearly a hundred million dollars less than that of either the Mets or the Dodgers.
But they are not afraid. The Brewers began scouting their best offensive player, Jackson Chourio, when he was 14 and living in Venezuela, and signed him to an eight-year, $82 million contract before he even reached the majors.
Brewers have clawed and elbowed their way back into every game, one run at a time, as they had all season. They’d trailed in every game against the Dodgers, in the N.L.C.S., and still swept them.
The Brewers aren’t some small-market darling, and expense is not quality.

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Reuters notes China's STAR50 index of AI and semiconductor companies has collapsed by 40 percent, wiping out $480 billion in market value. 40%.

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Business and Other Nations

While the default position of democracies--everybody's lying-- is likely true, it is also true that, in Ukraine, a private U.S. business probably compromised some defensive Ukrainian software and threatened the country without breaking a law or firing a shot. This may, or may not, have caused Ukraine serious trouble. The company, Starlink, says Ukraine violated its contract not to use the software to kill. Capitalism takes the high ground.

Should a free citizen be allowed to compromise the nation's friends?

Should we compromise the independence of rapacious, ambitious, high-performance producers and put them at the mercies of rapacious, ambitious politicians from the bottom quintile who have no obvious redeeming social value?

Will we see the profound politicians seek to curtail the free activities of citizens that seem to compromise political entities in whom we have shown an embarrassing disinterest?

How long do you think it will take the lowest quintile crowd to try to nationalize Starlink and run it disguised as virtue?