CYBERSECURITY UPDATE: Super Micro reviewing its hardware in search for alleged Chinese spy chips.

“Despite the lack of proof that a malicious hardware chip exists, we are undertaking a complicated and time-consuming review to further address the article,” Super Micro advised to its customers in a letter. Included as part of a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing, the letter claims “We are confident that a recent article, alleging a malicious hardware chip was implanted during the manufacturing process of our motherboards, is wrong.”

“We trust you appreciate the difficulty of proving that something did not happen, even though the reporters have produced no affected motherboard or any such malicious hardware chip,” asserts Super Micro. “As we have said firmly, no one has shown us a motherboard containing any unauthorized hardware chip, we are not aware of any such unauthorized chip, and no government agency has alerted us to the existence of any unauthorized chip.”

Meanwhile: AWS CEO joins Apple’s Tim Cook in urging Bloomberg to retract its Chinese spy story.

TYLER O’NEIL: Oregon Bakers Who Lost Their Livelihood Over a Gay Wedding Cake Make Appeal to the Supreme Court. “Can a bureaucracy bankrupt a business for its unpopular beliefs?”

“Can” and “should” are two entirely different matters, but we know which way the outrage mob goes.

REST IN PEACE: The Passing of a WWII Hero: Joachim Ronneberg, 1919-2018. “He led the raid that destroyed the Nazis’ nuclear ambitions.”

LIZ SHELD: Poll Shows Strong Public Support for Cigarette Alternatives.

SCRAPPLEFACE: Migrant Caravan Goes Home as Trump Buys Honduras.

DEAR RESISTANCE: Listen to my lived totalitarian experience – you have no effing idea what you’re talking about.

If lived experience is indeed the be-all-end-all that the identarian left considers it to be, there is one area where my lived experience without a doubt shit all over the lived experience of the woke folk. Unlike all those among them who have been born and/or raised in the West and have zero or almost zero experience of living under anything other than a liberal democratic government (which is 99 per cent of them at least), I have lived the first 15 years of my life under the Soviet block-style communism, or “real socialism” as the Party used to call it. I’m not going to pretend that the 1970s and the 80s in Poland were as bloody and traumatic as the Stalinist Russia, Mao’s China or Pol Pot’s Cambodia (as P J O’Rourke who visited Warsaw at that time noted, the communism for most part doesn’t kill you any more, it just bores you to death) but I do know a difference or twenty-two between a totalitarian or authoritarian society and a Western democracy.

Needless to say, read the whole thing.

WINNING: Belgium Chooses Lockheed’s F-35 to Replace F-16 Jets.

BLUE WAVE? Dems’ midterm advantage narrows among registered voters as Trump’s approval rating rises, poll finds.

It’s a little too close to election day to still be polling registered voters, who trend more Democrat than likely voters.

OH: Blackwater-Style Firm for Jihadists Opens Training Camp with Donor Help.

RICK MORAN: Senator Cory Booker Accused of Sexual Assault by Gay Man. “Are only women to be believed unconditionally about sexual assault?”

CREEPY PORN LAWYER UPDATE: Michael Avenatti Lived the High Life While Owing Millions to IRS. “As Michael Avenatti floats a 2020 presidential run, court records reveal the lawyer and his companies owed millions in unpaid taxes and judgments.”

THE NEW CIVILITY: Man who abused 9/11 widow identified and fired from job.

The incident occurred on Oct. 13 after a “flash march for Law and Order” was organized by a conservative group.

Video captured by Brandon Farley (@FarelyFilms) shows the woman and a man, who appears to have been protesting the march, at a crosswalk, waiting to cross the street.

The protester begins the verbal spat by saying to the woman, “Why are you trying to block me, I’m f***ing trying to walk here.”

After he called her a “f***ing snarky, little f***ing idiot,” he said. “I’m not like … your cop boyfriend who is going to f***ing knock you out.”

The woman pointed to her NYPD hat and told the man, “My husband died on 9/11,” to which he replied, “Good, good. NYPD was a bunch of sodomizers, f***ing sodomizing immigrants with their bully sticks.”

“Your husband … should rot in the grave.”

Charming.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Million Migrant March and Much, Much More. “We don’t know who these people are, are they criminals, gang members, human and sex traffickers? We have no idea and yet they are glorified by the media. We simply must embrace them.”

I CERTAINLY HOPE SO: Can America and China Avoid the Pull of the Thucydides Trap?

BLUE WAVE? Interest in Midterms Surges, Along With Trump Approval Rating.

Nearly two thirds of registered voters showed a high level of interest in the election—the highest ever recorded in a midterm election since the Journal/NBC poll began asking the question in 2006.

“It’s a barnburner,” Bill McInturff, a GOP pollster who conducted the survey with Democrat Fred Yang, said of the surge of voter interest. “There’s a switch that’s been flipped…They are engaging in the campaign and the process.”

The Kavanaugh hearings made a lot of people sit up and notice.

LATE-STAGE SOCIALISM: Venezuela’s foreign creditors try to lay claim to Citgo.

If Citgo is seized and sold to pay Venezuela’s debts, it could disrupt one of the most reliable sources of cash for a country already reeling from hyperinflation, food and medicine shortages, and a population exodus. U.S. sanctions aimed at pressuring President Nicolás Maduro, who has overseen the worst of the country’s implosion, have exacerbated the government’s pain, largely blocking it from the U.S. financial system.

The fight over Citgo is unfolding in courtrooms and boardrooms across North America and Europe – with a key decision expected by the end of the year.

Two Canadian mining firms are trying to acquire parts of Citgo as compensation for Venezuela’s expropriation of their assets more than a decade ago. A Russian oil company and holders of bonds issued by Venezuela’s state oil producer have staked a claim to Citgo shares. ConocoPhillips suggested it may also pursue the company.

In August, a federal judge in Delaware gave a bankrupt Canadian gold-mining company, Crystallex International, permission to seize shares of Citgo’s holding company, a decision that Venezuela’s lawyers lamented would “trigger a cascade of adverse events.”

It took a while to get going, but the cascade was triggered with Hugo Chavez’s election in 1999.

CHANGE: US reportedly poised to abandon key arms control treaty with Russia.

THE ONLY THING SUBSIDIES GET YOU LESS OF IS MONEY: Beto O’Rourke Says U.S. Needs to Send Financial Aid to Stabilize Central America.

STARVE THE BEAST: Trump to Unveil ‘Major Tax Cut for Middle-Income People’ Before Election.

#HIMTOO: Kavanaugh Pal Mark Judge Struggles to Put His Life Back Together After Dem Smear.

WE NEVER HAD IT SO GOOD: Remembering the Hardships of TV Before Streaming Was a Thing.

HMM: California’s Prop 11 Is an Affront to EMTs.

JILL FILIPOVIC: T.I.’s ‘Melania stripper’ video shows Trump-level misogyny.

When Trump says something mean about a woman, that’s on Trump. When someone else does it, that’s on Trump, too, I guess.

AMERICA’S LONGEST WAR: Taliban Try to Kill U.S. Commander Days After Lauding Talks with U.S. Envoy. “Three Americans wounded in attack after high-profile meeting in Kandahar; police chief who escaped nearly 30 assassination attempts killed.”

BLUE WAVE? Dem congressional candidates raise over $1B in record haul.

This would be a great time to step away from the computer screen and volunteer for a vulnerable local candidate.