MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: What, So Now We Can’t Even Buy Babies? “People generally aren’t allowed to buy babies and that’s probably for the best. But, as it turns out, governments can’t even pay people to have them — and that’s a problem.”

IS THERE ANYTHING THEY CAN’T DO? Study: GLP-1 weight-loss drugs might lower, not increase, teen suicide risk.

JUST ONE OF MANY FAILURES: The Failure of Biden’s ‘Just Say Don’t’ Foreign Policy.

WHERE WE ARE:

Since your handle is “Whole Mars”, perhaps this lengthy reply is apropos:

Getting the cost per ton to the surface of Mars low enough that humanity has the resources to make life multiplanetary requires a roughly 1000X improvement in rocket & spacecraft technology.

Recent US… https://t.co/BdasygYS5q

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 15, 2024

YEP:

Hamas, for example, justifiably committed unspeakable atrocities on Oct 7 because they were driven mad by decades of settler colonialism. Criminals are flooding into the US from all over the world because America has made the rest of the world unlivable.

"It's your fault."

— wretchardthecat (@wretchardthecat) October 14, 2024

RICHARD FERNANDEZ: Waking Up. “Perhaps the most subversive political movie of the 2010s was Christopher Nolan’s ‘Inception.’ It is ostensibly about dreams, but the purpose of manipulating dreams is to bend time, which subjectively passes differently for those dreaming at different levels. Political illusion is like that also. It’s about bending time to seize power, which is very real. In politics the great moments seem always just around the corner, a vote away, instead of being decades of hard work distant.”

“Jam tomorrow, jam yesterday, but never jam today,” the wise man once wrote.

THE “CRISIS” WAS DELIBERATELY CONTRIVED BY ITS INTERNAL ENEMIES: Western Culture: Crisis of Confidence? And this rather elderly take now seems a bit . . . optimistic.

MORE NUKES IS GOOD NUKES: Google Agrees To Buy Nuclear Power From Small Modular Reactors To Be Built By Kairos Power.

First it was Amazon, then Microsoft, now Google telegraphs why the “next AI trade” will generate obnoxious amounts of alpha in the coming years by sending the same message: i) it’s all about how all those data centers will be powered, and ii) in the future a growing number of data centers will be powered by small modular nuclear reactors.

On Monday, Google – picking up on what we discussed last week in “Google Turns To Nuclear To Power Its Data Centers” – announced plans to buy power from Kairos Power’s small modular reactors (SMRs) as part of a growing industry shift toward nuclear energy to meet rising data center demands. By purchasing energy from multiple SMRs, Google aims to send a strong market signal while supporting long-term commercialization.

According to CNBC, senior director for energy and climate at Google, Michael Terrell, said on a call with reporters that “we believe that nuclear energy has a critical role to play in supporting our clean growth and helping to deliver on the progress of AI.”

Even if a few years down the road, AI turns out to have just been a fad, at least we’ll have gotten nuclear power plants out of it.

SLOUCHING TOWARDS WORLD WAR III: Biden’s Parting Gift to the World: Nuclear Holocaust. “Forgive the headline. Hopefully, things in the Middle East won’t come down to a nuclear holocaust — but hope is not a plan and Presidentish Joe Biden has apparently leaned hard enough on Israel for them to take Iran’s nuclear program off their target list.”

LIMITED TIME DEAL: Flashlights LED High Lumens Rechargeable. #CommissionEarned

EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY (WHITE HOUSE EDITION): Kamala Harris Spokesman Is Asked About Tensions With Joe Biden, His Answer Says Everything.

It doesn’t get any easier for a spokesperson than that. Sams is given two separate chances to just say, “No, there’s no tension and the president fully supports the vice president.” Instead, we get a predictable mention of January 6th before another deflection stating that Harris is her “own candidate.”

I didn’t think anyone was confused by that last part, but the fact that Sams refused to just come out and deny the reports, which have included quotes from inside the Harris camp, says everything.

Is Biden actively seeking to hurt Harris’ campaign? I wouldn’t go that far, but he has certainly taken a carefree approach regarding how his statements and actions affect her campaign. He has repeatedly tied her to his policies when given the chance to support her preferred narrative that she is her “own candidate.” More recently, he directly undercut her attacks on Ron DeSantis, making her look like a liar using a hurricane as a political prop.

Something is going on behind the scenes, and it’s not hard to figure out why. Biden feels betrayed. He’s announced that in no uncertain terms publicly several times. And while Harris has tried to present herself as disconnected from the backstabbing that occurred, she is the one who benefited from it. Senility aside, that’s not lost on Biden, who no doubt suspects she helped orchestrate the scheme that forced him out of the race.

Biden has always been petty and ego-driven — and maybe the worst human being ever to serve as president.

If Harris is on the receiving end of some of that, at least we get a tiny silver lining.

HEY, WHY DO YOU THINK JOE BIDEN PICKED HER? Kamala Harris accused of plagiarizing parts of 2009 book ‘Smart on Crime.’

THIS IS THE DEEP STATE: The Tyranny of FEMA: Elon Musk Versus Biden-Harris.

GOOD. KEEP IT FALLING. Columbia fundraising falls by nearly 30% following pro-Palestine protests.

THE REPLACEMENT THEORY IS JUST CRAZY RIGHT-WING CHATTER: 10% Of Texas Population Illegal Aliens? “Given that the entire population of Texas is some 31,000,000 people, that means that just under 10% of the population are non-citizens, the majority of which are probably illegal aliens, and most of them have probably been imported under the Biden-Harris administration.”

Good info at the link on what Texas is doing to prevent illegal votes from being counted.

WELL, THEY’RE DEMOCRATS, SO: Tim Walz, Doug Emhoff Walk Away Without Paying for Order at Coffee Shop. Hey, it was a photo op, everyone knows those aren’t real.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: The Idiot Doesn’t Fall Far From the Moron — Kamala’s a Plagiarist Too! “OK, it’s embarrassing if a high school student is caught cribbing from Wikipedia. It’s sad if a college student does it. Kamala Harris was San Francisco’s district attorney when she got her embellishment jag on. That’s somewhere on the other side of pathetic. Kamala Harris is a never ending series of ‘hold my beer’ moments following revelations that lead us to believe that she can’t possibly be an even bigger trainwreck.”

WHILE SPACEX WAS FIGURING OUT HOW TO CATCH A FLYING SKYSCRAPER IN MIDAIR AND LAND IT SAFELY, NASA WAS…

NASA grant (2022)
Amount: $50,227
Recipient: University Of North Carolina At Charlotte
Purpose: Exploring synergistic opportunities between Charlotte-area environmental justice initiatives and NASA earth science informationhttps://t.co/pH6v81bY8L

— RandoLand.us (@RandoLand_us) October 14, 2024

We can’t afford to miss out on those synergistic opportunities, apparently.

HMM: RFK Jr. voters shifting to Trump to deliver battleground state wins.

Don’t get cocky.