The day after Friday The 13th

Well, there have been lots of scary and confusing things happening lately, but two really Friday-the-13th-ish things from yesterday seem to have been resolved without major tragedies:

- The first major grounding of planes by the FAA since Pete Buttigieg was secretary

- The big boat crash in New Orleans: No fatalities!

And Ed Driscoll reminds us that yesterday was predicted to be the end of the world. From overpopulation.

Concerning the H.L Menken quote above, I have noticed that "government" can also include not only people with a talent to get elected, but also those with a talent to get OTHERS elected (or to get OTHERS to THINK they have a talent to get others elected. These people can really expand the size of government.

I might even suggest that the tens of thousands of trolls who warped their talking points on "affordability" in contacting millions of people on social media might be considered part of government. You know, as Ace reported: "The Republicans never figured out what we were doing," (Van) Jones said in-studio to a smiling Collins. "There's something called the American Accountability Network (AAN), tens of thousands of online humans, not bots, coordinated to make the affordability message a winning message online. 32.5 million people hit on Instagram every day. 88.8 million hit on Twitter, X, every single day. And 185 million Facebook hits every single day. And they never figured it out."

"The Republicans could not understand it wasn't bots. It was actual human beings," he said.

There are a couple of parts that stand out to me in the short segment above: There were tens of thousands of people organized to deliver a warped message to influence people, and the Republicans never figured it out. What were THEY doing?

Will Republicans figure this out in time?

New Democrat Plan to Solve the "Housing Crisis: " Let's Inflate the Housing Market By Pouring Government Cash Into It and Letting People Who Can't Afford a Mortgage Buy Homes Until They Default

Say.... wait a minute...

Isn't this how they created the 2008 housing market collapse the crashed the world economy? . .

And. . . "Affordability." . .

$1,000 for an entire house.

As noted in the update to this post, it will be hard to evict non-payers for non-payment this time around. There are "squatter's rights" now. In California, you even have trouble getting a relative to leave after a certain number of days' access to your home with no rental or lease agreement of any kind.

Friday The 13th is over! Time to engage?

FRANCE

What have the Mullahs got against France?

Are they just engaging in cyberattacks because previous cyberattacks showed France's vulnerability?

BREAKING:

France has formally accused Iran’s IRGC terrorists of cyberattacks that disrupted supermarket refrigerators and freezers across the country last month.

Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot said intelligence traced the attack to Shahid Kaveh, an offensive cyber unit under the IRGC’s Electronic and Cyber Center.

France has requested international arrest warrants for the unit’s head and two deputies.

Overnight on October 11–12, hackers breached internet-connected temperature controllers, activated defrost cycles, and raised temperatures to 40°C–50°C, spoiling millions of euros worth of food at major chains.

Similar attacks have since hit supermarkets in six other European countries, including the UK, Germany, Belgium, Sweden, Luxembourg, Ireland, and Estonia.

— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) November 9, 2026

Twist on the charges in France against that famous French author: Will this lead publishers to turn to AI?

This kind of thing, these sort of charges, will freeze publishing. Publishers -- who tend to be risk averse given their slim margins -- will shun any material that could retrospectively be identified as "offensive" or "causing discomfort" etc.

That means, in practice, pretty much all of what we call literary writing, because it depends on ambiguity, intellectual complexity, and layered, ancient, unresovable conflicts in the mind and in society.

Only AI work will be trustworthy -- because it can be programmed to police itself according to all the current speech codes. It can even seamlessly update its own texts as those codes change.

The codes of speech and thought and expression very quickly will become as complicated as the tax codes and most human authors will simply give up trying to comply with them. Though publishers will give up first, I expect.

— Walter Kirn (@walterkirn) November 11, 2026

The Founding

A Daily Dose of the American Rev (formatting added)

In a November 13, 1787 letter to John Adams’s son-in-law William Stephens Smith, Thomas Jefferson penned what would become one of his most repeated quotations: “(W)hat country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms . . . The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.” To best appreciate the quote, it is important to know its context.

Jefferson was in Paris when he wrote the letter, serving as the U.S. Minister to France. Smith had sent him a copy of the proposed U.S. Constitution, which had been signed by the delegates to the Constitutional Convention on September 17 and sent to the states for ratification. In his letter Jefferson thanks Smith for transmitting it to him. As for the proposed Constitution, “There are very good articles in it: and very bad. I do not know which preponderate,” Jefferson wrote.

His letter shows that what troubled Jefferson the most was the power granted to the president and that under the proposed Constitution he could potentially serve for life (not until the ratification of the 22nd Amendment in 1951 was the U.S. president limited to two terms in office). Jefferson complained that the Convention had been too influenced by its concerns about Shays’s Rebellion in Massachusetts (which began in August 1786 and ended in February 1787).

Our Convention has been too much impressed by the insurrection of Massachusetts,” he wrote, “and in the spur of the moment they are setting up a kite (meaning a bird of prey) to keep the hen yard in order. I hope in God this article will be rectified before the new constitution is accepted.

Jefferson also complained that the Convention had been influenced by false claims that America was experiencing anarchy. “Yet where does this anarchy exist?” he wrote. “Where did it ever exist, except in the single instance of Massachusetts? And can history produce an instance of a rebellion so honourably conducted?”

While Jefferson did not defend Shays’s Rebellion on its merits (“I say nothing of its motives. They were founded in ignorance, not wickedness.”), he insisted that not only were such rebellions no good cause for alarm, but that they were in fact essential to the preservation of liberty, even if they were predicated on misconceptions. “God forbid we should ever be 20 years without such a rebellion,” he wrote. “The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions it is a lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty.”

And thus, Jefferson concluded, it is essential to the preservation of liberty that the people, even if motivated by misconceptions, take up arms and rebel from time to time, to warn their rulers that they “preserve the spirit of resistance.” As for how to treat the rebels, “the remedy is to set them right as to the facts, pardon and pacify them.”

Jefferson’s famous (and controversial) “tree of liberty” letter, was written 239 years ago (yesterday).

The portrait, from 1791, is by Charles Willson Peale.

As I recall, Jefferson was not quite so bold about the blood of tyrants and patriots after the French Revolution. Any thoughts on his presence in France when he wrote this?

WEEKEND

When you have time,

The Canterville Ghost
A Hylo-Idealistic Romance by Oscar Wilde

They don't make ghosts like that anymore.

And scroll through the blog from Kansas, too!

The Week In Pictures: Huang ‘Em High Edition

Last week’s midterms are still in the news, and Microsoft’s Outlook outage disrupted business and led to a lot of memes. But the number one meme-generator, of course, was Jensen Huang of Nvidia falling victim to a Chinese honey pot. And it turned out that his life was even more complicated than it first seemed. Nothing like a little hilarity to put the pain of the midterms behind us.

Music

For some people, not unreasonably, the proper object of getting rich is to enjoy life. The idea was charmingly expressed by music hall artist Charles Coborn.

I've just got here through Paris
From the sunny southern shore;
I to Monte Carlo went
Just to raise my winter's rent
Dame Fortune smiled upon me
As she'd never done before
And I've now such lots of money, I'm a gent
Yes, I've now such lots of money, I'm a gent

I stay indoors till after lunch
And then my daily walk
To the great Triumphal Arch
Is one grand triumphal march
Observed by each observer
With the keenness of a hawk
I'm a mass of money, linen, silk and starch
I'm a mass of money, linen, silk and starch

As I walk along the Bois de Boulogne
With an independent air
You can hear the girls declare
"He must be a Millionaire."
You can hear them sigh and wish to die
You can see them wink the other eye
At the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo

It must seem madness to the ordinary person that an American trillionaire should choose to closely supervise the massive expansion of xAI's Colossus / Macrohard supercomputer and data center operations in Memphis from a Airstream trailer parked near the factory.

— wretchardthecat (@wretchardthecat) November 13, 2026

Hope you have something nice planned for this weekend.

This is the Thread before the Gardening Thread.

Last week's thread, November 7, It's getting hard to keep all the streams of messaging straight now

UPDATE to the Dalrymple book review: In a NYT report, an SUV (not a truck) killed 3 pedestrians. Would you think differently about the news report if the driver's name were included?

Comments are closed on the thread above so you won't ban yourself by trying to comment on a week-old thread. But don't try it anyway.

posted by K.T. at 11:01 AM

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