BEHOLD! MY FACE! IS IT NOT SHOCKED?  Another Mamdani Aide Exposed for Anti-Jewish, Anti-Gay Rants.

SURE. SCIENCE NEEDED MORE DISCREDITING:  Synformation: Epistemic Capture meets AI.  Synthetic facts and underlying reality matrices are being normalized.

IT’S TRUE THAT THINGS ARE UNAFFORDABLE, BUT NOT AS UNAFFORDABLE AS GOVERNMENT:  Affordability mythology.

MORE COOF NUMBERS:  A Little More COVID Updating…

ACADEMIA IS SICK AND BROKEN. AND DETERMINED TO RESIST ORANGEMANBAD IF HE TRIES TO FIX IT:  Needier People in Colder Spaces (and a few notes about random stuff in academia and politics).

AND WRITERS. AND FILMMAKERS. AND….   The crippling effect of “woke” on historians.

A BUCHAREST VIGNETTE:  Romania, Freedom Isn’t Free, and Oblivious Americans.

FROM AN ADMITTEDLY BIASED SOURCE, BUT IT CHECKS OUT, HISTORICALLY, WITH HOW RUSSIANS TREATED THEIR TROOPS:  Extortion & rape: How Russians treat Russians.  “A man isn’t going to tell another man that he was raped by a third man. But witnesses are talkative”.

ALL IS NOT AS IT SEEMS:  Hate.

GOOD:  ICE Arrests Uzbekistan Terrorism Suspect Who Was Given CDL During Biden Admin.

SHOCKED, SHOCKED, SHOCKED. BEHOLD MY SHOCKED FACE:  75% of Pacific Palisades Fire Victims Still Stuck in Temporary Housing.

MY EDITOR DID A POST ABOUT MY LATEST BOOK:   Deej Recommends: No Man’s Land.
He’s my editor because I pay him for structural edits. He doesn’t get any further pay for the book doing well or not.

OPEN THREAD: It’s the 55th Anniversary of Elton John’s 11/17/70 album. When I saw him perform a couple of years ago, he did some of those songs, with verve and gusto. He played and sang like a much younger man, but moved on stage with obvious stiffness. By contrast when I saw Paul McCartney the same year, his voice was clearly fading, but he moved like a much younger man.

A GOOD PROBLEM TO HAVE: With more moon missions on the horizon, avoiding crowding and collisions will be a growing challenge.

CAT LADIES BEWARE: Owning a Cat Could Double Your Risk of Schizophrenia, Research Suggests.

WELL, GOOD: Reviving Exhausted T Cells Sparks Powerful Cancer Tumor Elimination.

READER FAVORITE: 5 Precision Adjust Knife Sharpener. #CommissionEarned

OOPS: Jeep Is Recalling 112,859 SUVs That Might Have Sand in Their Engines.

ARE YOU PAYING ATTENTION, NEW YORK CITY?

Keep in mind that the biggest recent experiment we have in rent control is that removing rent control increased supply and REDUCED prices. https://t.co/A47uBdZkyP

— Alex Tabarrok (@ATabarrok) November 17, 2025

This one line from the linked article is worth repeating — endlessly, if necessary: “It was not just that the law was repealed, but also that it was replaced with nothing.”

GOODER AND HARDER, CALIFORNIA:

Anarchotyranny is where the same state that allows homeless vagrants to use heroin while sprawled out on the public streets also monitors your trash to make sure the plastic bottles are in the right can https://t.co/b9zZEunkY2

— The American Tribune (@TAmTrib) November 17, 2025

As Adam Carolla noted earlier this year, “San Francisco’s done this and LA’s done this; once you essentially look the other way for homeless or junkies or illegals or criminals or whatever that is, and you shine a spotlight on taxpayers with over-regulation and over-permitting, trying to manage every grain of your life versus illegals go do whatever you want or homeless, go shoot up wherever you want, or sleep wherever you want then you’ve lost it. LA’s there, San Francisco’s there. Look if you’re not a taxpayer, and you don’t have a checking account, whatever city you’re in they’re not going to be nearly as interested in you, as they are in the people who have a checking account and pay can be compliant. The people who are compliant are paying them. So, it’s like, okay, who do you make money on?”

HIGHER EDUCATION IMPLOSION UPDATE: This Black College Is A ‘Criminal Enterprise,’ Ex-Top Official Says In Lawsuit.

It is one of four similar lawsuits filed in the last few months against the University of Maryland Eastern Shore, its president Heidi Anderson, its provost Rondall Allen, and its diversity, equity, and inclusion czar Jason Casares, that all follow a similar pattern: A faculty member allegedly discovers wrongdoing at the university, and then is retaliated against by the university’s DEI office.

Claims from the suits paint a picture of a university with almost no academic standards, that admits 90% of applicants and looks the other way at cheating and truancy to avoid worsening its 17% on-time graduation rate and keep the federal student loan money flowing.

The lawsuit filed July 28 by Sandeep Gopalan, a Rhodes scholar who until recently was the school’s vice president for research and vice provost for academic affairs, said that after he claims to have exposed a scheme by Anderson and other top administrators to steal thousands of iPads, the university axed Gopalan’s program and Ph.D. students in retaliation.

The students were funded by a $4.6 million grant from the federal Department of Education that Gopalan had secured and the university had no ability to terminate, but it dismissed the scholars anyway, falsely suggesting that the Trump administration had cut off funding to the historically black college, he said.

More at the link, which you can be sure is somehow racist.

ICYMI: Welp, So Much for Trump’s Gaza Peace Plan.

BROOKINGS INSTITUTION SUDDENLY GETTING COLD FEET: No, Don’t Release the Epstein Files.

All of a sudden, it seems like everyone is calling for the release of the Epstein files. The MAGA movement is angry at President Trump and Attorney General Pam Bondi for not coming through for them and delivering the cabal of rich pedophiles who benefited from relationships with Epstein.

Democrats and other Trump opponents, smelling blood in the water, have joined the calls for transparency on the theory that they might hoist Trump and his attorney general on their own conspiracy-packed petard.

Allow me a moment’s dissent: Have you all lost your minds?

Should the FBI and the Justice Department release willy-nilly their investigative files into a major child-exploitation and human trafficking case involving a large number of victims—given that truly vile conduct directed at them, and an untold number of witnesses who may be wholly innocent of wrongdoing, is likely to be unleashed?

The question answers itself.

For one thing, at least some of the information in the so-called Epstein files is likely grand jury information—that is, information protected by Rule 6(e) of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure—or otherwise protected by court seals. It is illegal to release this material. It’s not a choice the attorney general gets to make: Should I dump all this information into the public domain? She can’t. She shouldn’t. And if she does, she should go to jail.

Attorney General Bondi should resign if she was lying when she declared that she had Epstein’s client list on her desk—something the FBI now says does not exist. If she simply misspoke, she did so recklessly and stupidly and should probably resign anyway. But the solution is not a data dump of material, much of which is properly protected by federal law.

Even among the materials that are not protected by court seals, the Epstein files necessarily contain a wide range of information about victims. Are people seriously calling for this material to be dumped into the public’s hands?

Flashback to Julie Kelly in 2020: Brookings Institution: A Key Collusion Collaborator.

Related: Matt Tiabbi asks, “Do we want to know how the world really works, or is it too disgusting to countenance?” The Epstein Circus Will Shatter Our Last Delusions:

“Release all of the Epstein Files” was a siren call for the MSNOW set as recently as this weekend, but now that Trump has issued a statement calling for House Republicans to vote for their release because “we have nothing to hide,” everything is in play. The House Oversight Committee already started the avalanche with a series of releases that over the weekend had me answering TextEdit prompts like, “Are you sure you want to open 897 files?”

If you’re a Democrat, you’ve already seen the Trump lowlights: a 2011 email from Epstein saying of former Mar-a-Lago spa attendant Virginia Giuffre, “VICTIM spent hours at my house with him,” and this 2019 note to author Michael Wolff: “Of course [Trump] knew about the girls.” There are mitigating docs with both issues (Giuffre, another suicide from earlier this year, wrote Trump “couldn’t have been friendlier” in a posthumously published memoir). Still, Pam Bondi’s Epstein files pirouette earlier this year never made sense and has been driving intramural MAGA turmoil since, with Marjorie Taylor Greene now railing against the idea that “rich, powerful people should be protected.” For an administration that’s done well sending roaches scurrying in the FBI, CIA, and DHS via Russiagate and Covid investigations, Epstein stands out as an unforced error. If it’s not dirt on Trump himself, and administration sources insist it isn’t, what’s the holdup?

Democratic Party hysteria over this issue is obviously absurd because “all of the Epstein files” could have been released over the last four years. There must be reasons why the last administration didn’t take that step, and there should be scandal in MAGA-world if those reasons overlap at all with the Trump administration’s. Between Epstein’s own hysterical rants about Trump in the newly released documents (he sounds like Kathy Griffin in some of the emails) and the blue party’s seeming entanglement with Epstein from the Clintons to Larry Summers to Reid Hoffman, it’s hard to imagine where that overlap might be, unless it involves major corporate names and/or overseas relationships. Some of that is suggested in [Dem Virgin Islands delegate Stacey Plaskett’s] story.

Faster, please.

GUNS THAT EVERY AMERICAN SHOULD OWN.

BUBBLES POP: I looked into CoreWeave and the abyss gazed back.

You may not have heard of it because it’s not doing the consumer-facing part of AI. It’s a data center company, the kind people talk about when they say they want to invest in the “picks and shovels” of the AI gold rush. At first glance, it looks impressive: it’s selling compute, the hottest resource in the industry; it’s landed a bunch of big-name customers such as Microsoft, OpenAI and Meta; and its revenue is huge — $1.4 billion in the third quarter this year, double what it was in the third quarter of 2024. The company has almost doubled in share price since its IPO earlier this year, which was the biggest in tech since 2021. So much money!

But as I began to look more closely at the company, I began feeling like I’d accidentally stumbled on an eldritch horror. CoreWeave is saddled with massive debt and, except in the absolute best-case scenario of fast AI adoption, has no obvious path toward profitability. There are some eyebrow-raising accounting choices. And then, naturally, there are the huge insider sales of CoreWeave stock.

After I unfocused my eyes a little, I realized CoreWeave did make a horrible kind of sense: It’s a tool to hedge other companies’ risks and juice their profits. It’s taking on the risk and the costs of building data centers that bigger tech companies can then rent while they build their own data centers which may very well wind up competing with CoreWeave. What’s more, it’s part of a whole stable of companies that are propping up demand for the behemoth of the AI boom: Nvidia.

I don’t think CoreWeave’s weaknesses are a secret. It just seems like a lot of investors are ignoring them.

To be fair, there’s nothing wrong with riding the bubble, provided you’re savvy enough to get off before it pops.