SatStats

On this day:

1775
John Murray, the Royal Governor of the Colony of Virginia, starts the first mass emancipation of slaves in North America by issuing Lord Dunmore’s Offer of Emancipation, which offers freedom to slaves who abandoned their colonial masters in order to fight with Murray and the British.
1811
Tecumseh’s War: The Battle of Tippecanoe is fought near present-day Battle Ground, Indiana, United States
1872
The ship Mary Celeste sails from New York, eventually to be found deserted
1908
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid are reportedly killed in San Vicente, Bolivia.
1917
The Gregorian calendar date of the October Revolution, which gets its name from the Julian calendar date of 25 October. On this date in 1917, the Bolsheviks storm the Winter Palace.
1919
The first Palmer Raid is conducted on the second anniversary of the Russian Revolution. Over 10,000 suspected communists and anarchists are arrested in twenty-three different U.S. cities.
1941
World War II: Soviet hospital ship Armenia is sunk by German planes while evacuating refugees and wounded military and staff of several Crimean hospitals. It is estimated that over 5,000 people died in the sinking.
1973
The U.S. Congress overrides President Richard M. Nixon’s veto of the War Powers Resolution, which limits presidential power to wage war without congressional approval.
1983
United States Senate bombing: a bomb explodes inside the United States Capitol. No people are harmed, but an estimated $250,000 in damage is caused.

***

 "Obviously we wouldn't want to be owning anything that we thought was in a currency that was really going to hell. And that's the big thing we worry about with the United States currency."-- Warren Buffett at his final shareholders meeting as Berkshire Hathaway CEO in 2025.

***

Mary Louise Kelly hosted her final show Friday on All Things Considered after an NPR career that goes back 25 years.


***

Hackers linked to the Chinese government used AI to break into major banks in India, according to India’s top cyber agency. The attacks used publicly available AI tools, including Artex, PentAGI, Cairn and CyberStrikeAI, to help steal data and money, officials said.


***

Sen. Chris Murphy announced Friday that he has been released from the hospital after suffering a stroke last week but will miss “several weeks” of Senate votes while he continues to recover. So we'll soon have the advantage of a continuing political career of another brain-damaged guy.

***

FDA reports involving caffeine- and stimulant-containing energy drinks and supplements were about 11 times more likely to mention cardiac arrest and 4.5 times more likely to mention heart attacks than reports involving products without these ingredients.

***

SatStats

Economists estimate China’s annual growth at just 0% to 3%, well below Beijing’s official 4.5%, accusing Xi Jinping of concealing a slowdown with data blackouts and censorship.

*

AI errors align with the authors' ideology 97% of the time.

*

TARP:

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.

*

Wealthy households make up about 10% of the entire rent-stabilized stock, according to a Citizens Budget Commission analysis of 2023 data.

*

Mortality rates for cardiovascular diseases are approximately 30 percent higher among black adults than among white adults. Cervical cancer rates are almost five times higher among Vietnamese women in the U.S. than among white women. Prostate cancer is nearly twice as common among black men as it is among white men.
When does vigilance in subsets become profiling?

*

The top 10 percent already pay more taxes, estimated at 75 percent of federal income taxes, than the bottom 90 percent combined.

*

The Norwegian state produces about 120 barrels of oil for every man, woman, and child living in the country. If the U.S. could produce that much oil per person through a state-controlled entity, it would be more oil than the entire world produces today and worth enough money to replace all federal individual and corporate income tax revenue.

*

Following the application of rent caps in Berlin, the supply of rental apartments collapsed, falling by 52 per cent.

*

Margin debt stands at $1.50T in the June 2026 report, up 49% in a year — growth that fast has appeared in 15 of 342 months on record, every earlier cluster inside the run-up to the 2000, 2007 or 2021 peaks.

*

Education in the NYC school system:

The Success Academy charter-school network has just released a report on the New York City public school system.

They enroll 409,379 kids, or 43% of all NYC public school children. In 503 of them, the majority of students failed both math and reading last year, some for a whole decade. And the more a school fails, the more categorical federal aid it qualifies for. The criteria used to identify failing schools “do not create accountability”; instead, the system “creates eligibility,” charge the authors.

Mayor Mamdani is handing the Department of Education $38.6 billion this year — an increase of almost $4 billion from last year, despite plummeting enrollment — with no strings attached.

Today, the per-student cost has soared to roughly $49,500 per pupil, among the highest in the nation.

“What is missing is not money . . . [but] honesty — honest measurement, honest reporting, and honest consequences when schools consistently fail,” say the authors.

Here’s the conclusion: The New York bureaucracy that runs the system—DOE officials, Albany officials, and the unions that control them—intentionally misleads and obscures failures, mostly to protect the adults.