OPEN THREAD: Happy Friday.

THE NEW SPACE RACE: Nations pursue sovereign space capabilities fortified by commercial services.

FACES IN THINGS: Eerie Discovery on Mars Looks Exactly Like a Human Face.

AN UNSURPRISING DEVELOPMENT: Increased autism risk linked to Y chromosome, study finds.

CHANGE: Vast Proposes New Space Station for 2028 That Will Grow 2 Modules Per Year Through 2032.

WELL, THAT’S WHAT THEY DO: Gun-Ban Groups Spend Big and Sell Lies To Defeat Pro-Gun Candidates.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Fact Check: The ‘Gun Lobby’ That Democrats Demagogue Against is You.

BIG DEAL, HUNTER BIDEN GETS MORE THAN THAT: A humanoid robot’s painting called ‘AI God’ may sell for over $120,000.

WHEN PUBLIC HEALTH AUTHORITIES BETRAY THE PUBLIC’S TRUST, THERE ARE CONSEQUENCES: US vaccinations fall again as more parents refuse lifesaving shots for kids.

FANCY OUTFITS: NASA Artemis III mission to moon unveils new spacesuit designed by Prada.

IS THERE ANYTHING THEY CAN’T DO? Wegovy, other weight-loss drugs might help with alcoholism, opioid addiction.

SETTLING ALL FAMILY BUSINESS: Morning Greatness: October 7 Mastermind Killed by Israeli Forces.

In the words of Keith Laumer, there’s nothing more peaceful than a dead troublemaker.

ROGER SIMON:

But assuming for the moment the polls and the more reliable prediction markets are correct and she’s a loser, something I heard last night while listening to Tucker Carlson’s interview with Mark Halperin is resonating in a truly spooky, not a fun Haloweenish, manner.

Tucker asked political prognosticator Halperin what it would be like if Kamala loses. He said millions of Democrats would suffer from a psychological collapse that would create the “greatest mental health crisis in the history of the country”. The ramifications of this, including violence, will be all over society for a long time. This is no normal election.

I don’t have the expertise and certainly not the contacts of Halperin, but that has also been my observation. The time between the election and inauguration could well be fraught beyond anything we have seen this century and quite a while before. And it’s not likely to stop at the inauguration. Trump Derangement Syndrome, so manifested by Ms. Harris during the interview, is a profound mental illness not likely to go away with the snap of the finger or anybody’s vote. And with the psychotherapy community so predominantly leftist they are likely to exacerbate the situation more often then help improve it.

Most of our political class is a Cluster B debacle.

THAT SOUNDS LIKE A LIFE WELL-LIVED: Autopsy of 78-year-old man reveals he had three penises.

JOEL KOTKIN: How Harris Obstructed California Home Construction: She says she wants to clear away ‘red tape,’ but as attorney general, she produced a lot of it.

Kamala Harris has a plan to help America’s struggling home buyers by increasing the supply of houses. Her recently released 82-page policy book, “A New Way Forward for the Middle Class,” calls for clearing away the “regulatory burden” and “red tape” that constrains new-home construction. Tim Walz promoted the “three million new houses proposed” under Ms. Harris’s “bold forward plan” during the vice-presidential debate.

Yet like Mrs. Harris’s scripted reversals on fracking, immigration, and Medicare, her push to create more single-family homes contradicts her past positions.

Of course it does.

FOLLOW THE SCIENCE: We Were Wrong To Panic About Secondhand Smoke: A recent American Cancer Society study reports a negligible risk from passive smoking, shedding new light on the uproar over a 2003 paper.

In 2003, UCLA epidemiologist James Enstrom and I published a study of environmental tobacco smoke (ETS)—also called “secondhand smoke” or “passive smoking”—in the British Medical Journal (BMJ). Using data from the American Cancer Society’s prospective study of 1 million adults, we concluded that ETS exposure was not associated with increased mortality.

Since that conclusion flew in the face of the conventional wisdom that had long driven state and local bans on smoking in public places, our study understandably sparked a controversy in the public health community. But the intensity of the attack on us in the pages of a medical journal—by critics who were certain that our study had to be wrong but typically failed to provide specific evidence of fatal errors—vividly illustrates what can happen when policy preferences that have taken on the status of doctrine override rational scientific debate.

A recent study by American Cancer Society (ACS) researchers underscores that point by showing that, contrary to what our critics asserted, the cancer risk posed by ETS is likely negligible. The authors present that striking result without remarking on it, which may reflect their reluctance to revisit a debate that anti-smoking activists and public health officials wrongly view as long settled.

Flashback: The Suicide of Expertise.

First link from the comments on this by Brian Leiter.

OPEN THREAD: Disport yourselves in the comments.

LIFE IS EVERYWHERE: Surprise Discovery Reveals Animal Life Thriving Under The Seafloor.

NOW THEY TELL US: Heart Health Alert: Study Reveals Standing Desks May Do More Harm Than Good.

THEY’RE PROBABLY RIGHT TO BE SUSPICIOUS: Survey: Most older Americans don’t trust AI-generated health info.

PLUG-IN HYBRID NEWS: Here’s How Our Kia Sorento PHEV Handles Tricky Situations.

UNAMERICAN: Michigan And Hawaii Launch Tip Lines To Encourage Anonymous Snitching On Gun Owners.

GUT NEWS: Discovery of a gut-to-brain regulation pathway in flies offers insights into human aging.

CHANGE: The ABA Retreats From Its Diversity Mandate—or Does It? “Holistic” admissions are an obvious backdoor to racial preferences. Yeah, you can’t trust them not to be racist.

EVERYONE’S GOING NUCLEAR ALL OF A SUDDEN: Amazon goes nuclear, to invest more than $500 million to develop small modular reactors.