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Sun, 01 Nov 2026 21:20:00 +0000 Anthropic's IPO Will Make Its Effective Altruist-Aligned Founders Worth Hundreds Of Billions
Anthropic's IPO Will Make Its Effective Altruist-Aligned Founders Worth Hundreds Of Billions
Anthropic's IPO Will Make Its Effective Altruist-Aligned Founders Worth Hundreds Of Billions
Authored by Jordan Schachtel via American Greatness ,
Anthropic's upcoming IPO is going to make its founders very, very rich. And unfortunately for freedom-loving Americans, it will dramatically expand the liquid resources of the Effective Altruism (EA)-linked network surrounding the company , putting extraordinary amounts of cash behind people and groups that are trying to manipulate society into bending to its ideals.
At a reported potential valuation of $1.5-$2 trillion, Anthropic's seven cofounders will hold approximately $150-$200 billion in combined equity . They have already pledged 80 percent of their personal Anthropic equity to philanthropic causes . Of course, we know how that game works in politics. "Philanthropy" quickly becomes a weaponized political agenda. See: Soros, Steyer, etc.
Dario Amodei and his cofounders will soon acquire the capacity to reshape an entire policy ecosystem in Washington, D.C., and it would behoove lawmakers and policymakers to get ready for the unprecedented infusion of EA-aligned capital and resources soon entering the system .
The money
Anthropic released its S-1 IPO filing earlier this week, and it provides a much firmer basis for estimating founder wealth. The disclosed holdings are evenly distributed, with each founder owning approximately 1.4 percent on an estimated fully diluted basis .
Using the reported founder share counts and approximately 16.94 billion fully diluted shares implied by the filing , I created a table that produces the following likely scenarios:
Cofounder Equity at $1.5 trillion Equity at $2 trillion Tom Brown $21.6 billion $28.8 billion Christopher Olah $21.5 billion $28.7 billion Jared Kaplan $21.5 billion $28.6 billion Jack Clark $21.5 billion $28.6 billion Daniela Amodei $21.4 billion $28.5 billion Dario Amodei $21.3 billion $28.4 billion Sam McCandlish $20.5 billion $27.4 billion Combined $149.3 billion $199.0 billion
Anthropic's founders are already wealthy on paper, and access to public markets will soon make their fortunes much easier to deploy.
Anthropic has long had a close association with the broader Effective Altruism movement in the Bay Area.
In an interview with the EA-associated organization 80,000 Hours , Anthropic cofounder Chris Olah recalled that Amodei was giving substantial amounts from his graduate-student stipend to GiveWell , another EA-aligned charity, as early as 2012-2013. That giving helped bring him into contact with Holden Karnofsky, who cofounded GiveWell and Open Philanthropy, another EA-aligned nonprofit entity.
Karnofsky is married to Daniela Amodei (Dario's sister), who also cofounded Anthropic. Open Philanthropy, since renamed Coefficient Giving (in part to wash their hands of the FTX-Sam Bankman-Fried scandal), is a major institution in the EA funding ecosystem. It has already been reported that Dario Amodei and Jack Clark have both signed the Giving What We Can pledge , an EA-aligned campaign that calls on people to commit at least 10 percent of income to "effective" charities.
Benjamin Mann, another Anthropic cofounder who was not listed on the S-1 for reasons unknown, published an essay in 2019 titled "Why I now identify as an Effective Altruist."
We aren't just guessing when it comes to Anthropic's plan to donate heavily to Democrats and push them to pursue Effective Altruist priorities.
In May, Dario Amodei personally donated $1 million to Public First , a super PAC supporting candidates who favor AI doomer talking points and heavy-handed regulatory capture of AI . Its affiliated network spent heavily supporting Democratic congressional candidate Alex Bores. Separately, Daniela Amodei's donations include large sums to the presidential campaigns of Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris .
Anthropic itself has contributed $40 million to Public First Action , the advocacy arm of Public First.
There is a documented overlap between enormous Anthropic-related wealth, EA-linked institutions, Democratic donors, and a relentless campaign in D.C. to pursue regulatory capture on behalf of the top AI frontier companies.
The Anthropic cofounders are deploying their wealth, but not their control over the company.
The governance arrangement, according to Anthropic's IPO prospectus , shows that a single Class F share held by Founder LLC will carry 50.1 percent of voting power on matters submitted to shareholders generally . This shields them from any public investor attempts to steer the company in a new direction, should anyone acquire a substantial position. The Anthropic co-founders designed a system so that they can give away most of their economic stakes without a corresponding reduction in their voting power.
Sure, not every dollar pledged will fund superintelligence doomerism. Some could be healthcare, scientific research, and the like.
But the concentration of power in one vehicle supported by like-minded ideologues deserves some serious scrutiny. Anthropic's IPO will undoubtedly turn an already robust network into an even far wealthier and more influential one .
The people building some of the world's most powerful technologies may soon try to push ideas upon Washington lawmakers that are entirely detached from the interests of their constituents. Now, more than ever, politicians and policymakers need to be aware of the storm coming shortly after the midterms .
Tyler Durden
Sun, 11/01/2026 - 16:20
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Sun, 01 Nov 2026 21:08:00 +0000 Dramatic Footage Shows Private Jet Crashing In Palm Beach County
Dramatic Footage Shows Private Jet Crashing In Palm Beach County
A Learjet 60 (N722BD), registered to LR60271 LLC, based in Wilmington, Delaware, crashed in a residential area of Palm Beach County, Florida, on Sunday afternoon while
Read more.....
Dramatic Footage Shows Private Jet Crashing In Palm Beach County
A Learjet 60 (N722BD), registered to LR60271 LLC, based in Wilmington, Delaware, crashed in a residential area of Palm Beach County, Florida, on Sunday afternoon while flying from Austin, Texas, to North Eleuthera Airport in the Bahamas.
Flightradar24 reports:
We're following reports of an aircraft crash near Palm Beach, Florida. Based on ADS-B data, it appears that the involved aircraft is N722BD, a Learjet 60. Last data from the aircraft was at altitude 8,750 ft. Max vertical speed was more than -32,000 fpm.
The Learjet departed Austin at 15:37 bound for the Bahamas, climbing to a cruising altitude of 41,000 feet. At 17:35 near Naples, FL, the aircraft began a descent down to 35,000 feet. At 17:48, the aircraft briefly climbed, before entering a steep, righthand descent.
The crash site is just four miles south of the West Palm Beach airport, which was renamed for President Donald Trump earlier this year. Trump had departed aboard Air Force One a little more than an hour before the crash.
CNN cites the Federal Aviation Administration, which said the private jet had nine people on board when it crashed.
Dramatic footage of the crash:
Footage of the aftermath:
*Developing
Tyler Durden
Sun, 11/01/2026 - 16:08
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Sun, 01 Nov 2026 20:50:00 +0000 Pokemon Card Mania Sparks Bubble Fear: "Just Doing A Crazy Bull Run"
Pokemon Card Mania Sparks Bubble Fear: "Just Doing A Crazy Bull Run"
The hyperscaler and neocloud bubble has dominated the attention of traders and investors this fall as Read more.....
Pokemon Card Mania Sparks Bubble Fear: "Just Doing A Crazy Bull Run"
The hyperscaler and neocloud bubble has dominated the attention of traders and investors this fall as cracks emerge in the AI data center buildout craze. But a much smaller speculative bubble has emerged in Pokémon cards, echoing the Beanie Baby pump-and-dump craze of the late 1990s.
"Facebook Marketplace is littered with people offloading under market . Sealed is going up 20-30% week over week of some generations. Card shows becoming much more frequent. Restocks happening consistently. Seems like market is just doing a crazy bull run, anyone worried about the drop off?" one Redditor recently wrote in the subreddit PokemonInvesting.
Pokémon card pricing and market analytics website CardTrack has created an index tracking the 100 most valuable cards, valued at $274,371 and up 161% since September 2021 .
Much like the stock market's "Fear & Greed" indicator, CardTrack captures a snapshot of investor sentiment, which has entered "Extreme Greed" territory .
"The 100 most valuable Pokémon cards aren't a fund you can buy ... but if you could, here's how the same money would have done against Bitcoin, gold and the stock market Sep 2021 ? Nov 2026 ," the card-tracking website wrote on its site.
Here are the biggest movers in the index.
The index's top constituents.
InvestingLive analyst Justin Low commented on the Pokémon craze:
We are no longer just talking about people spending a few thousand dollars on nostalgia anymore . At these extravagant prices, collectibles are competing for the same pools of capital that could otherwise be sitting in stocks, crypto, watches, art or other alternative assets.
In the current landscape, there is somewhat of an investment infrastructure forming around the hobby. Grading companies provide the necessary authentication and condition benchmarks, major auction platforms are playing a role in terms of improving price discovery, while vaulting services and online marketplaces make it easier for expensive collectibles to change hands without owners physically carrying millions of dollars worth of cardboard around.
Low asks whether all this momentum in Pokémon card prices is a bubble.
I would say parts of it definitely does draw some parallels to one. Record prices attract attention, and the attention then attracts new buyers and new buyers push prices higher and higher. We've seen that script play out one too many a time in traditional markets before.
For context, baby boomers and young millennials remember the the Beanie Baby craze that inflated in the mid/late 1990s, peaked around 1998, and unraveled in 1999, just ahead of the Dot Com bust. That bubble turned $5 plush bears into perceived investments, while some consumers paid thousands of dollars for rare bears at the market's peak.
Tyler Durden
Sun, 11/01/2026 - 15:50
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Sun, 01 Nov 2026 20:25:00 +0000 $34 Million Los Angeles School Sits Vacant And Vandalized Since 2021
$34 Million Los Angeles School Sits Vacant And Vandalized Since 2021
$34 Million Los Angeles School Sits Vacant And Vandalized Since 2021
Authored by Rick Moran via PJ Media ,
In 2003, the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) had 703,000 students. "The district had been running year-round schedules, with the school year shortened by nearly a month, to accommodate its burgeoning student population," reports the Los Angeles Times.
Over the last 23 years, district enrollment has declined by more than 50% . When it became obvious that enrollment had passed its peak, the LAUSD canceled 18 construction projects for new schools in 2007.
But one of those projects, zombie-like, came back from the dead. A charter school, Camino Nuevo Charter Academy, won approval from the school board to build a school at 1215 Miramar Avenue . The state had already earmarked the funds for a charter school, so LAUSD gave the project the green light.
"The school was paid for with a combination of state funds, district funds, and a state loan the charter would have to repay," reports The Times. "The district's facility division acquired the land and managed the construction, which began in 2011, with the Camino Nuevo charter school opening in 2013."
At the time, the LAUSD school board was all for charter schools. It helped relieve some of the overcrowding in the district and didn't appear to threaten enrollment.
All that changed as the decades rolled by. Camino Nuevo closed the campus in 2021 and left behind an $8 million construction debt that any new tenant must pay .
"Ultimately, the campus was too far away" from the other Camino Nuevo schools, said Ana Ponce, head of Camino Nuevo at the time. "Those students found alternatives, predominantly other charter high schools, that were closer to our middle school campuses."
So a beautiful campus built to accommodate 500 students never saw more than half that number, then closed its doors. In debt and facing a now-hostile school board, other charters are reluctant to take possession.
For the last five years, vandals have punched holes in the walls, the floors, and the ceilings, started fires, and broken pipes that have leaked water onto the floors. The district is paying $1 million a year for security and maintenance.
Los Angeles Times:
Since Camino Nuevo's departure, one charter operator almost moved in but then backed out. A second charter operator was ready to go, but the district backed out of that deal in 2022 , as then-Supt. Alberto Carvalho wanted to explore options for a district-run program.
"I had a big plan for it," Carvalho said in a 2025 interview. "I envisioned really creating a one-of-a-kind school experience in that building, since it had been left open for a long period of time. ... Use best practices and put them all under the same roof, such as a school without bells, with true teacher-led management and decision-making process. Think of community schools on steroids."
The Los Angeles Academy of Arts and Enterprise (LAAAE) wanted to move in. But the district's hostility to charter schools was evident in the disqualifying conditions it set for LAAAE.
The district's conditions include $750,000 "for prior operation and maintenance costs"; a monthly charge of more than $70,000 for the first three years; assumption of the state loan balance of $8,083,564, with estimated annual debt service of $457,783, according to L.A. Unified; and repairs for the vandalized building, which is being offered "as is," Macias said.
A contractor has projected the cost of needed repairs at $1.86 million , according to a preliminary estimate reviewed by The Times.
The state is demanding that LAUSD make it available to a charter school because that was one of the bond's conditions. The district is making that as difficult as possible.
As a metaphor for failed school policies, Miramar isn't even at the top of the list. With just 60% of schools occupied, the district is going to be forced to close dozens of them, consolidate others, and plan for even smaller enrollment . Nevertheless, the LAUSD is pressing ahead with a multi-billion-dollar modernization and rebuilding plan, raising questions about investing in campuses that may soon be shuttered.
I guess that means there are going to be a lot more Miramar campuses attracting vandals and squatters as tenants .
Tyler Durden
Sun, 11/01/2026 - 15:25
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Sun, 01 Nov 2026 19:37:00 +0000 "No Workable Plan": Obama Judge Throws Out DOJ Bid To Halt Alaska Certification If 'Real' Sullivan Loses
"No Workable Plan": Obama Judge Throws Out DOJ Bid To Halt Alaska Certification If 'Real' Sullivan Loses
"No Workable Plan": Obama Judge Throws Out DOJ Bid To Halt Alaska Certification If 'Real' Sullivan Loses
Is anyone surprised?
A federal judge on Sunday threw out the Justice Department's lawsuit seeking to stop Alaska from certifying its U.S. Senate race if Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan loses. U.S. District Judge Sharon Gleason, an Obama nominee , ruled in a 20-page order that the government lacks standing , writing that it "failed to establish the redressability prerequisite for Article III standing," CBS News reported.
The department sued on Oct. 22, after Trump said he had ordered the case. It asked the court to bar Alaska from certifying any result "that may be impacted by voter confusion" and to make the state "preserve and segregate" ballots marked for Daniel J. Sullivan, a Petersburg retiree who shares the senator's name, Alaska Public Media reported. The idea was to investigate whether those voters meant to pick the incumbent.
Gleason was sharpest on the segregation request, which the department pressed in a Friday filing . She wrote that "the United States provides no workable plan as to how it proposes to segregate ballots" cast for the second Sullivan. The state's lawyers had argued that ballots carry no voter names and are mixed in the box, so no such inquiry is possible, and that it would violate ballot secrecy.
She added that the order would likely cause voter "confusion and consequent incentive to remain away from the polls." "Such late-breaking changes to the election rules are strongly disfavored," Gleason wrote, and the requests "certainly involve the time, place, and manner of Alaska's election," which the Constitution leaves to the states, per the AP .
The department had amended its complaint on Oct. 29, adding a Supremacy Clause claim built on the National Voter Registration Act. Democracy Docket reported that Gleason also denied leave to amend again, finding another rewrite futile. A Justice Department spokesperson did not immediately respond to CBS, and Alaska Public Media said an appeal is likely.
The dismissal does not end the federal criminal investigation into how Daniel J. Sullivan got on the ballot. The department has issued grand jury subpoenas, and no one has been charged, according to the AP. The probe follows a New York Times report, covered here , that Democratic operatives recruited Alaskans named Dan Sullivan; Mary Peltola's campaign denies any role. Gov. Mike Dunleavy has ordered a state investigation , and the feds have surged agents into Alaska, as we noted Friday.
Sullivan, appearing on CNN's "State of the Union," said "I'm sure I'm going to lose a lot of votes to that trickery." Peltola said she is "not interested in tricking voters," per CBS.
The suit was the Trump administration's pre-emptive bid to shape a count that was still two days away. Trump had vowed "powerful legal options" against the other Sullivan, who got 2.5% in the primary, and Attorney General Todd Blanche defended the case on CBS. Alaska's answer to the confusion argument was that voters in the ranked-choice race can rank both Sullivans , and election officials added identifiers to the ballot to tell them apart.
Voting ends Tuesday...
As Jonathan Turley wrote earlier, amid the constant chatter about 'saving democracy', Democratic party leaders appear to embrace these voter confusion tactics as harmless ("it's part of the process") or even humorous ("I think it's funny.")
In his work "Politics and the English Language," George Orwell explains that "In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible." If so, the news this week took a truly Orwellian turn as Democrats rationalized or even praised the effort in Alaska to put a decoy "Dan Sullivan" on the ballot to confuse Alaskans and cause mistaken votes . Other Democratic politicians are entirely silent on the allegation that the campaign of Democratic candidate Mary Peltola engineered this grossly unethical tactic. The very same people running on "saving Democracy" are, once again , defending ballot manipulation designed to negate the votes of citizens.
It is the ultimate expression of rage politics, excusing any act needed to achieve power.
On NewsNation Now, Rep. Suhas Subramanyam (D-VA) went beyond many of his colleagues in saying that the Alaskan scandal shows precisely where all states, including Virginia, should go. When asked about the scandal, Subramanyam insisted that it showed how all states should embrace the widely criticized ranked-choice voting system . (Alaskans may finally reject the system this year). While asked about the use of a decoy candidate, Subramanyam bizarrely spun the question as third-party candidates - a bizarre claim since the fake Dan Sullivan has not campaigned, has never run for office, and is obviously on the ballot solely to confuse voters.
Nevertheless, Subramanyam insisted, while he would not run a decoy, "I also don't have a ranked-choice voting system in Virginia. I wish I did, honestly. But, in Alaska, they have ranked-choice voting, and third-party candidates are very relevant. And so, if you recruited a third-party candidate who can take votes away from your opponent, that's part of the process, and that's just how it works in Alaska." Previously, Subramanyam also supported the most radical gerrymandering effort in the nation (which was later struck down as unlawful).
Sen. Chris Murphy (D., Conn.) seemed to snowball as he tried to rationalize the move . He first attempted to blame it on one woman who was a "disgruntled former employee." When CNN host Kaitlan Collins noted that The New York Times was relying on a large number of sources in the Peltola campaign, Murphy said it wouldn't bother him at all to have decoys on his ballot because no one would be confused when voting. Of course, the entire reason you put another Dan Sullivan on the ballot is to confuse voters and cause citizens to throw away their votes on the wrong man . In a close election, that can easily make the difference in the outcome of the election. Murphy also praised the Peltola campaign and said he "trusts" them, despite the New York Times saying they actively sought to cause such voting errors .
In 2025, Murphy appeared on any cable show that would have him to declare that "those of us who believe that the threat to democracy is urgent" need to "act like it."
Most Democratic leaders refused to say anything at all in the face of an open effort to nullify votes through candidate confusion.
Pundits and party officials have dismissed the scandal as brass-knuckles politics or even as humorous. The head of Alaska's Democratic Party, Eric Croft, insisted that the sole consideration is whether it is a crime, not whether it is unethical: "I reread all of Alaska's statutes. I'm kind of a recovering attorney up here. And there is nothing, there's no legal issue to it. On your, you know, sort of dirty tricks thing, I think Alaskans have a different take there too."
When pressed whether it is a good thing to try to confuse Alaskan voters and nullify their votes, Croft responded "No, I think it's funny."
That knee-slapper involves a politician and campaign that allegedly lied to the public about their involvement. It involves a decoy who is also accused of lying when he said he had no interaction with third parties and did not enter the race to confuse voters. (Notably, the decoy, when asked by the Division of Elections how his name should appear on the ballot, reportedly asked to use "S" as a middle initial (like the senator) as opposed to his own initial of "J." ).
One would think that this would be an easy question for candidates who insist that they are defenders of democracy. However, in 2024, Democrats moved to remove Trump and other Republicans from ballots while claiming to be protecting voters by denying them the choice of candidates . The fact that the voters gave Trump the popular vote and swept every swing state only magnified the hypocrisy of these Democratic leaders. Yet, some of the same figures are back at it again with efforts to manipulate balloting to confuse or nullify votes in the name of protecting democracy.
Some of the same figures, such as Marc Elias, have reappeared in yet another election scandal. The Elias Law Group was named by the New York Times as involved in the controversy. Elias was a central figure in the Russian hoax as the campaign lawyer for Hillary Clinton. The Federal Election Commission (FEC) fined the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign for violating election rules in hiding the funding for the infamous Steele dossier. Before the election, Clinton officials denied any such involvement.
In an age of rage , consistency, like decency, is a stranger to politics.
We are left again in that moment with lawyer Joseph Welch in the Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954: "Have you no shame, sir, at long last? Have you no shame?" The answer today is clear: No, but I have the votes.
Tyler Durden
Sun, 11/01/2026 - 14:37
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Sun, 01 Nov 2026 19:36:00 +0000 Looting And Chaos Erupt In Germany, Molotov Cocktails In Paris, As Europe Slides Deeper Into Crisis
Looting And Chaos Erupt In Germany, Molotov Cocktails In Paris, As Europe Slides Deeper Into Crisis
Europe appears to have been thrown into an accelerated timeline of crises colliding at once , whether far-left soci
Read more.....
Looting And Chaos Erupt In Germany, Molotov Cocktails In Paris, As Europe Slides Deeper Into Crisis
Europe appears to have been thrown into an accelerated timeline of crises colliding at once , whether far-left social unrest in France, which has spread to several other countries, the unfolding debt crisis in France, or the political crisis in Poland that erupted in the last 24 hours. The momentum is troubling and concerning .
For the third Saturday in a row, Paris looked like a city under lockdown . More than 40 metro and RER stations were closed, and shopkeepers along the route boarded up their windows with plywood or kept their shutters down.
France's seats of power, including the Élysée Palace, the prime minister's office, and the National Assembly, were heavily guarded, even though the authorized march took place several miles to the east. Overnight curfews also restricted access to Place de la République and Les Halles, two areas ransacked on Oct. 17.
Some 70,000 police and gendarmes were deployed nationwide , and Nuñez said 40,000 checks had been carried out on roads and in train stations, 15,000 of them in the Paris region, to intercept weapons. Face coverings, Halloween masks included, were banned around the demonstrations.
France Tens of thousands of left-wing demonstrators marched along the eastern edge of Paris on Saturday, in a third straight weekend of nationwide protests marked by a Molotov cocktail attack on a gendarme , clashes in several major cities, and a call by far-left student unions for new blockades of high schools and universities from Tuesday.
As Etienne Fauchaire reported for The Epoch Times , the Interior Ministry counted 320,000 demonstrators across France, including 70,000 in Paris, down from 410,000 the previous Saturday and roughly 550,000 on Oct. 17, when rioters looted hundreds of shops. Organizers claimed nearly 500,000 participants, including 200,000 in the capital.
By 9 p.m., 565 people had been arrested nationwide.
At an evening press conference, Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez said every march had contained groups of rioters and looters, "many of them driven by the ultra-left and the radical far left," who attacked police with the goal of reaching the city centers "with unheard-of violence."
He listed Paris, Montpellier, Toulouse, Rennes, Marseille, Nantes, Angers, and Tours as cities where groups of several hundred people had tried to break through police lines with mortar fireworks, paving stones, and other projectiles, and said firefighters had to put out numerous fires.
The most serious incident took place at the end of the Paris march near Porte de Charenton, where a Molotov cocktail landed on the shield of a mobile gendarmerie unit and set a gendarme alight before his colleagues put out the flames. He ended up being slightly injured, Nuñez said.
"When you throw a Molotov cocktail at a police line, I call that attempted murder," the minister said, stating that everything would be done to identify the perpetrators.
Similar left-wing rallies took place in some 30 German cities on Saturday.
Germany Beyond the political crisis in Poland and the US warning earlier today of a potential "mass casualty" incident in Moscow, another crisis appears to be unfolding in Germany on Halloween night: looting and chaos .
An initiative called "Gen Z regelt" ("Gen Z's got this") organized these protests "for education, health, climate protection and an affordable life" and opposing the return of military conscription.
Some protests in Germany also turned violent on Saturday night.
"The looting of stores has started in Frankfurt, Germany. Young first and second-generation migrants are attacking stores in the city ," Poland-based digital news outlet Visegrád 24 wrote on X.
A lot more footage of the looting has surfaced on X in the last few hours:
"German police were attacked with a Molotov cocktail in the city of Frankfurt on Halloween night. Youths participated in looting and clashes with police, with much of the footage livestreamed on TikTok ," Budapest-based news outlet Remix News & Views wrote on X.
Rest of Europe In Portugal, thousands of demonstrators gathered in Lisbon once again to protest the housing crisis. The movement has faced criticism from the Portuguese right, which accuses left-wing and far-left groups of driving the protests.
In The Hague, Netherlands, protests broke out after calls to demonstrate circulated online. According to Dutch police, 34 people were arrested, and one officer was taken to hospital with suspected hearing damage after fireworks were thrown at police. As in Paris, many shops across the city had boarded up their windows amid fears of rioting.
On Oct. 30, large crowds took to the streets across Italy following a call to demonstrate by the Italian trade union USB. The union estimated that more than 1 million people participated in protests across 70 cities, while the Interior Ministry put the figure at 255,000 . Violent clashes between demonstrators and police broke out in Rome, Turin, Mestre, Vicenza, and other cities, according to Corriere della Sera.
Europe's mounting crises point to a troubling deterioration in stability.
***
Tyler Durden
Sun, 11/01/2026 - 14:36
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Sun, 01 Nov 2026 19:35:00 +0000 David Stockman On America's Debt Trap: Washington Is Running Out Of Time
David Stockman On America's Debt Trap: Washington Is Running Out Of Time
David Stockman On America's Debt Trap: Washington Is Running Out Of Time
Authored by David Stockman via International Man ,
With the benchmark 10-year US Treasury yield recently above 5.0%, it's time to call a spade a spade when it comes to the fiscal culprits in Washington .
Yes, the Dems are now and always have been fiscal miscreants. More or less, they have functioned since the New Deal and Great Society on the predicate that Washington has first call on the incomes and wealth of the American people; and that federally directed redistribution for the purpose of vote-getting in the guise of social uplift and the public good is absolutely copacetic.
This posture is odious, of course, but at least the Dems tell one truth about their policies. Namely, they happily proclaim government is here to help you and that they are the pro-government party on the banks of the Potomac.
But what is absolutely not copacetic is the modern GOP's pretense of being the anti-government people's party . And most especially its consequent claim to being the tribune of relief from Big Government's crushing tax burdens and its roadblocks to economic growth, jobs, rising incomes and Main Street prosperity.
In the annals of American politics, a bigger lie has never been told . Ever since the presidency of Ronald Reagan, the GOP has claimed to be fighting Big Government by championing "tax cuts" in every way, shape and form on the grounds that cutting revenue and starving the "beast" is the politically smart way to shrink the girth of the state, reduce the Federal deficit, ignite economic growth and jobs and bring prosperity back to Main Street.
Alas, that's a monumental con job. Once again, Milton Friedman had it right when he said that the true tax rate of Big Government is represented by the spending share of GDP - regardless of whether it is financed by borrowing or taxing.
Unfortunately, however, ever since the GOP succumbed to the snake oil doctrines of Art Laffer in 1981 - the notion that tax cuts will both pay for themselves with added growth and ultimately enable the nation to grow its way out of debt - the GOP has been utterly AWOL in the battle against spending .
As shown below, during the 45 years since 1980, the Federal spending share of GDP during GOP Administrations (Reagan, Bush the Elder, Bush the Younger and Trump 45 and 47) has averaged 20.8% of GDP (dotted red line). That amounts to the grand sum of 30 basis points less than the Dem administrations' average of 21.1% (dotted blue line).
Back in the day, they called that "not a dime's worth of difference". And, no, we do not supply magnifying glasses so that the faint difference between the 45-year track records of the two parties shown in the graph below might be more easily detected.
Needless to say, it has not always been this way.
For most of the post-war period before 1980, there was a more significant difference between the spending policies of the GOP and Dems, as shown in the next graph below, which covers the 25 years between 1955 and 1980. During that period, the GOP administration spending share of GDP averaged 80 basis points lower than the Dem administration average, but more importantly, was also far lower as an absolute matter.
To wit, the spending share under Eisenhower, Nixon and Ford averaged 17.5% of GDP versus an average of 20.8% of GDP under GOP administrations after 1980.
That 330 basis points up-shift in the GOP spending posture after 1980 is the real skunk on the woodpile. It essentially means that the post-1980 GOP simply abandoned its core job as the purported Opposition Party in the conduct of American fiscal democracy .
That is to say, once the GOP got hooked on the wrong fiscal variable - tax rates rather than the spending share of GDP - it was all over except the shouting.
Its political energy and capital went into beating the tom-toms on the political hustings for tax cuts. But for crying out loud, tax cuts are always and everywhere a no-brainer sale politically because no one wishes to pay taxes . At the same time, this "easy road taken" posture basically amounted to default when it comes to hard-core battling for entitlement reform, domestic spending cuts and minimalist Warfare State expenditures.
Indeed, it actually got even worse as a matter of political narrative inside the GOP. Namely, after 1980, the neocons led by the insidious Kristol clan - Irving and his son, Bill - became overt and tendentious opponents of the GOP's core spending cut mission.
Back in the day, in fact, the senior Kristol took to lecturing us about the political stupidity of the GOP's historic commitment to balanced budget and spending curtailment, labeling it the "root canal theory" of politics.
Leave the massive, GOP-leaning constituencies of old people, veterans and farmers alone , he instructed, and get on with the tax cuts which are both saleable politically and which put money back in people's pockets as an economic matter.
The problem with the hybrid of supply-side tax-cutting, neocon world policing and full-frontal surrender to the Welfare State spenders was that it never remotely added up.
The GOP's early 1980s gang of the supply-siders and neocons essentially tried to roll back tax policy to the 1955-1980 status quo ante, while allowing both the Welfare State and the Warfare State to balloon unimpeded along the high spending path that unfolded in Washington after 1980.
Needless to say, there is no rational theory of economics that says you can marry 17% of GDP tax policy with 21% of GDP spending policy on a permanent basis and expect anything other than a long-term debt calamity .
That is, a fiscal breakdown that eventually triggers a debt/interest expense/debt spiral that is mathematically unsustainable .
Tyler Durden
Sun, 11/01/2026 - 14:35
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Sun, 01 Nov 2026 19:10:00 +0000 Beijing To Convene Stock Market Rescue Meeting As Plunge Protection Goes Into Overdrive
Beijing To Convene Stock Market Rescue Meeting As Plunge Protection Goes Into Overdrive
About one week ago, we wrote about China's version of the Read more.....
Beijing To Convene Stock Market Rescue Meeting As Plunge Protection Goes Into Overdrive
About one week ago, we wrote about China's version of the Plunge Protection Team going into overdrive as Beijing moved to stabilize equities amid an imploding AI trade. Bank of America's Michael Hartnett, BNP Paribas, and Goldman Sachs all pointed to signs of renewed state-backed market support.
Fast forward to Sunday : Bloomberg cites local news outlets saying China's central bank, securities regulators, and some securities firms and funds will meet Monday to review ways to boost a relending program that finances share buybacks and stake increases.
The combination of China's PPT and Beijing's search for creative tools to boost stock prices follows the CSI 300 Index's October plunge into a bear market , which fell 8.5% and dropped for a record 12 straight weeks. Last month's decline was the steepest since early 2016.
Beijing's pain point has certaintly emerged. Hartnett's latest Flow Show, "Enter the Dragon" edition, pointed out that a $17 billion inflow into Chinese equities had just occurred, while China's state-owned investment funds intervened in the stock market, according to Nikkei Asia.
Goldman's Asia desk recently noted that "state-backed 'national team' ETF buying supported the recovery , with turnover across nine favored ETFs reaching RMB84bn ($12.6bn), after the market entered bear-market territory on Thursday."
BNP Paribas' Asia Pacific equity derivatives strategist Scarlett Liu was quoted by Nikkei as saying that elevated ETF inflows point to a "reacceleration in dip-buying by the national team."
Beijing's move to rescue the CSI 300 from a bear market comes as China's official manufacturing and non-manufacturing purchasing managers' indexes slumped back into a contraction in October.
As we noted, "What makes this PPT round especially different is what Beijing is propping up. The AI Trade."
This past Thursday, our technicians at The Market Ear gave readers a broader understanding of why China's PPT is coming to the rescue, first asking: "Is this capitulation, or just another leg lower?"
Tyler Durden
Sun, 11/01/2026 - 14:10
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Sun, 01 Nov 2026 18:50:00 +0000 NPR Reveals Democrat Scheme To Rig AIs Into Deceiving Voters
NPR Reveals Democrat Scheme To Rig AIs Into Deceiving Voters
NPR Reveals Democrat Scheme To Rig AIs Into Deceiving Voters
Authored by David Strom via Hot Air ,
Democrats love to decry misinformation, and they do so for a very specific reason: to distract from the fact that misinformation and Narrative™ control are the most powerful tools in their toolbox.
Don't get me wrong; everybody wants to control The Narrative™. That is why everybody has a PR agent of some kind and uses rhetoric to persuade people. It's just that the Democrats have a vice grip on the cultural means of production and the bureaucracies and institutions that provide "reliable" information , so Republicans have a tough time competing on this battleground, and their voters tend to be a lot more skeptical of narratives in the first place.
One of the brilliant things about decrying "misinformation" or "money in politics" is that you are telling people what they want to hear - that deceiving people is bad and that buying elections is wrong - and that makes people less likely to notice that you are deceiving people and buying elections.
After all, you are the people against that, right?
Yeah, well, no. Not in the least. The Left is all about both. Obama ran against both, for instance, but he ran the most expensive campaign in history, by far, when he ran and won, and one of the tools his campaign used was manipulating Google results to create a playing field that favored him.
Life in 2026 is far more complicated and sophisticated, and Democrats have adapted well to the landscape. And they have deep connections in Big Tech and own the PR landscape, so it shouldn't surprise us that their geniuses have figured out how to poison AI to feed sophisticated misinformation to voters .
Ahead of the midterms, some voters are turning to ChatGPT to help them decide who to vote for. When asked for information about candidates in some highly competitive races, NPR found that OpenAI's AI chatbot cited a set of websites that are thinly veiled political ads made to look like reporting from local news outlets.
Less than two weeks before Election Day, when asked "Which House candidates in [Michigan's 4th Congressional District] care about affordability?," the chatbot said Democrat Sean McCann had the "Most detailed published affordability plan" at the very top of its answer. The stakes in this race are high - it's one of the competitive U.S. House races that could determine control of the chamber.
ChatGPT's response when NPR asked "Which House candidates in [Michigan's 4th Congressional District] care about affordability?"
As a citation, ChatGPT linked to a website called the Kalamazoo Beacon. The Beacon labels its articles as "news articles" in the website's source code. The outlet also describes itself in the site's source code as "Reporting on Kalamazoo, southwest Michigan, and the issues shaping lakeshore communities."
But the Kalamazoo Beacon has only published 16 stories, all about McCann, his policy positions and his record as a state legislator, NPR's review shows.
The Beacon is one of 10 "local news" websites that promote one Democrat apiece in competitive U.S. House races. The 10 sites are part of a larger group of 37 websites identified by the digital security firm VisionHeight that promote many more candidates, mostly Democrats , for a slew of federal, state and local offices, as well as some nonpartisan posts like judges.
ChatGPT's citation of these websites highlights how AI-generated answers can become yet another avenue for stealthy political advertising as more voters consult chatbots before they head to the polls.
This is a far more sophisticated version of a tactic Democrats have used in the past: creating fake newspapers delivered to people's homes, presented as "news" but really PR packages for candidates or parties.
But those were fairly transparent; seeding fake news into AI is not, because AI presents information as if it comes from neutral "news" sources , when in fact it is just laundered propaganda not identified as such.
In much the same way that Google will launder Wikipedia answers as authoritative in its AI summaries, making the left-leaning "editors" at the site extremely powerful in creating a Truman Show reality, the fake "news" sites provide another layer of credibility to campaign propaganda.
The set of 37 websites presents candidates in different, overlapping groups. Each of the 10 Democrats covered by a site purporting to cover local news is also the sole subject of a site that offers opinion articles about why voters should support them. The various candidates, who are running in different states, also show up in roundup-style articles on five more websites that have names such as "Public Safety Democrats" and "Democratic Women in the House."
The volume of websites and articles may also help the network's operator boost their preferred narratives, DiResta said.
Another 12 websites, each focusing on a state, covered the House candidates in those states as well as other state and local candidates running for office. The state and national websites also boosted an 11th House candidate that did not have her own dedicated site purporting to be local news.
While most of the sites are openly partisan, the articles published by the network link out to sources for the claims they make, such as congressional voting records, mainstream news articles and partisan news sources, such as the pro-Democrat Courier network.
The genius of these sites is that they are not meant to be read by humans at all. They are designed to optimize for web crawlers and cross-link so the network appears far larger and more credible than it actually is. It's the same principle used in academic journals, where citations serve as a form of credibility checking ("peers take this work seriously" ), which has led to junk papers actually getting more citations because they create a web of cites that make them appear influential.
The websites transparently welcome AI chatbots: All the websites explicitly allow a long list of AI crawlers made by major AI companies to scrape information off of them. Many articles are formatted as questions and answers, which chatbots tend to prefer to cite. Many news organizations prevent such crawlers from going through their websites because the crawlers take content without bringing in revenue.
Every website in the network also contained a file called llms.txt, which lists articles on the site in plain text. This is surprising because most websites don't have these files, said Alisha Ukani, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Washington's Center for an Informed Public, who noticed these files while reviewing the sites at NPR's request. Ukani focuses on how AI is changing the internet. In an email, she noted that the websites that do have llms.txt files tend to be "biased towards technology and business-related websites."
To gauge the group's success in getting picked up by AI chatbots, NPR drafted 37 questions and used them on ChatGPT and Gemini, the two most popular AI chatbots, as well as Google search, which sometimes provides AI-generated answers in its results. For each of the 10 congressional races, NPR asked more general questions, such as which candidates care about issues such as public safety. NPR also asked the chatbots questions more specific to individual candidates, such as their priorities.
In 19 responses, or about half the time, ChatGPT cited at least one article from the network of websites , often citing them alongside other sources such as Ballotpedia, a website that tracks races and candidates, or the candidates' own campaign websites. In 17 of those 19 times, the chatbot cited one of the outlets that pretended to be a local news site. In the other two instances, ChatGPT cited websites from the network that purport to cover politics in a state.
The group's output may have been even more successful in being picked up when users ask about down ballot candidates. NPR identified five city council candidates in Michigan that a website in the group called the Wolverine State Report covered. When NPR asked ChatGPT about the positions of each of the candidates, ChatGPT cited the website every time.
Unlike traditional search engines, submitting the same question multiple times to a chatbot can give users significantly different responses. NPR submitted each query only once, so future or parallel experiments may yield different results. However, preliminary research has shown that chatbots tend to cite questionable sources more often when there are very few sources of credible reporting, such as downballot races where there is often less news coverage. The phenomenon is called a "data void."
What's truly remarkable is how quickly these sites poisoned the information landscape, showing how sophisticated the operation is. The sites showed up in mid-September and almost instantly became authoritative sources in AIs that people use to choose which candidate to vote for.
Here's how it worked:
Registration burst: All 37 registered September 15, 36 of them within eight minutes. Crawler welcome mat: Where real publishers use robots.txt to block AI, these list 17 crawlers by name - OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Perplexity, Meta, Amazon, Apple - and invite them all in. Every site also has an llms.txt file listing its articles in plain text for AI systems, something most sites don't have. Q&A stuffing: Each favored candidate gets a ~5,000-word profile plus a voter guide of 50-63 questions phrased exactly how a voter asks a chatbot. On Sept. 30 alone, about 100,000 words went up from a single template in four layouts. Repetition as verdict: The phrase "is the stronger choice" appears more than 360 times across the network - 34 times on a single Wolverine State Report page about one candidate. In three voter guides, the favored candidate is named 110+ times, the opponent six or seven. Schema laundering: The profiles are tagged in hidden code as news articles , so machines classify them as journalism, not ads. All the candidates being promoted are denying involvement, and I am certain that this is technically not true. Nor is it likely that any party organization is involved. And, so far, nobody can track down who is behind this .
Dark money, in other words, made this happen.
You know, the kind of "dark money" that Democrats want out of politics.
Tyler Durden
Sun, 11/01/2026 - 13:50
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Sun, 01 Nov 2026 18:20:00 +0000 'Despicable Betrayal!','Sold Her Soul!': Haley Stevens' Staff Quits, Dems Melt Down After She Endorses Republican In Michigan
'Despicable Betrayal!','Sold Her Soul!': Haley Stevens' Staff Quits, Dems Melt Down After She Endorses Republican In Michigan
Update (1335ET): Democrats are having a meltdown after Rep. Haley Stevens flippe
Read more.....
'Despicable Betrayal!','Sold Her Soul!': Haley Stevens' Staff Quits, Dems Melt Down After She Endorses Republican In Michigan
Update (1335ET): Democrats are having a meltdown after Rep. Haley Stevens flipped and endorsed Republican Mike Rogers for a coveted Michigan Senate seat - appearing with him on Sunday at a black church in Detroit ahead of midterms, just two days away.
Mike Rogers and former Democratic Senate candidate Haley Stevens (photo via Fox2 Detroit)
According to RawStory , Haley's congressional staff began resigning 'almost immediately,' and "observers online suggested she "sold her soul" for power."
Stevens appeared with Rogers, a former GOP congressman endorsed by President Donald Trump, at a Sunday morning service at Perfecting Church in Detroit, according to Bridge Michigan. Shortly afterward, Detroit News Washington correspondent Melissa Nann Burke reported that “Haley Steven’s official staff including her longtime chief are resigning from her office this morning, per spox.”
HuffPost senior politics reporter Igor Bobic posted an automatic email reply from Stevens’ communications director: “Hello, as of November 1st I am no longer with the Office of Congresswoman Haley Stevens.” - RawStory
Meanwhile, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) called it a "despicable beytrayal from Rep. Stevens."
Except, Schumer's hands aren't exactly clean this election cycle (are they ever?)...
***
After losing her party's Senate primary to Abdul El-Sayed in August, Rep. Haley Stevens has officially endorsed his Republican opponent Mike Rogers, attending Sunday church services with him in Detroit.
The two were seen separately entering Perfecting Church, a prominent Black church in the city - an extremely unusual move for a sitting Democrat in the closing days of a race her party is fighting to hold. Election Day is Tuesday.
Stevens and El-Sayed had been scheduled to campaign together Sunday at a get-out-the-vote event at another Detroit church with Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-SC), which would have been their first joint public appearance in months , according to MS NOW. Stevens endorsed El-Sayed days after the primary, and they appeared together at a unity breakfast that month, but have not campaigned together since.
Abdul El-Sayed (Photo by Finn Gomez/Getty Images)
The plan went south after Stevens issued a statement calling on El-Sayed to condemn an anti-Israel ad from Rebellion PAC , an outside group not affiliated with his campaign, posted by Cenk Uygur - which blames high grocery prices on U.S. aid to Israel.
In response:
Stevens wrote that the ad "did not invent its argument" and reflected El-Sayed's own rhetoric, and that he could begin his effort to remove money from politics "by getting Israel out of his explanation for everything Michigan cannot afford," MS NOW reported.
El-Sayed responded , writing that Stevens "seems intent on relitigating a primary that ended three months ago." His campaign then asked Stevens to stay away from its events for the rest of the race , a Democratic source told MS NOW on condition of anonymity.
After a Saturday rally in Sterling Heights, El-Sayed told MS NOW, "You guys love to play the 'condemn' game, " adding that the ad "was not made by me, and I do not agree with the contents of that ad." Stevens answered in a statement that did not name him: "I was glad to see our senate nominee say he does not agree with the content of the vile Rebellion PAC ad which claimed Israel and Jews were to blame for the high costs of groceries."
According to Newsweek , the ad repackages a spot from Uygur's failed 2024 presidential run. In response, El-Sayed campaign spokesperson Roxie Richner said it is "not affiliated in any way with the Abdul for Senate campaign" and that "no one speaks for Abdul but himself and his campaign." DNC chair Jaime Harrison said the ad "doesn't help him," and Uygur wrote on X that anyone who thinks it is antisemitic is "in a cult."
This is a close, key race. According to a WDIV/Detroit News poll by the Glengariff Group, taken Oct. 19 to 22 among 600 likely voters, El-Sayed is sitting at at 51.4% , with a margin of error of 4 points. The Democrat's campaign has been under pressure on other fronts, as we reported when undercover video and when AIPAC pulled back .
Tyler Durden
Sun, 11/01/2026 - 13:20
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