The Missing Speech…

As of September 2025, UNICEF states:

“At least 63,000 children have been reported killed or injured” in Gaza

Reuters report citing WHO, by July 2025 nearly 12,000 children under five in Gaza were suffering from acute malnutrition. Reuters

As of late September 2025, the most commonly cited figures (from Gaza’s Health Ministry) are:

It is also widely believed that, given the near total destruction of Gaza, the reported death toll is a vast undercount

Court Painter & The Missing Speech

‘where seriousness resides’…

bit.ly/48eY3d1

Variations on fallen angels…

The Fall of the Rebel Angels ,Gustav Dore 1870

Screenshot

The Two Amigos…

Source: CTV News

Halifax — The U.S. ambassador to Canada took aim at those who use the term “trade war” to describe economic tension between the two countries at an event in Halifax Thursday, saying he was frustrated by the “elbows up” rhetoric.

Pete “Blow Hard” Hoekstra made the remarks at a luncheon hosted by the Halifax Chamber of Commerce in the city’s downtown.

“I’m disappointed that I came to Canada, a Canada that (where) it is very, very difficult to find Canadians who are passionate about the American-Canadian relationship. You ran a campaign where it was anti-American. ‘Elbows up.’ … It was an anti-American campaign. That has continued. That’s disappointing,” Ambassador Blow Hard said as he huffed and puffed while sporting a jaunty band aid : confident to catch the attention of his boss The MAGAMonarch.

Who rocks it better?

can’t take a joke…

https://www.axios.com/2025/09/18/trump-maga-media-cnn-cbs-ellison-tiktok

Driving the news: ABC  pulled Jimmy Kimmel off air “indefinitely” on Wednesday in response to the late-night host’s comments about Charlie Kirk’s assassination.

The extraordinary move came after Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr warned ABC that it could face fines or license revocations if it did not “operate in the public interest.”

Trump celebrated Kimmel’s removal — just as he did CBS’s decision to cancel Stephen Colbert’s show — and called for NBC to take action against remaining late-night hosts Seth Meyers and Jimmy Fallon.

Standing ovation WTF…

Canada’s MPs are back on Parliament Hill — and they’re already being ridiculous. Following the disturbing murder of Charlie Kirk, Canada’s MPs took it upon themselves to pay tribute to the man in the House of Commons. Not only did they attempt to rewrite history and paint him as a man entirely dedicated to faith and family, but the remarks from Conservative MP Rachael Thomas received a standing ovation on both sides of the political aisle. You can oppose political violence without rewriting the legacy of a man who did a lot of harm to vulnerable and marginalized communities. But Canada’s politicians, some media and many employers don’t seem to entirely understand that.

curb the algorithms…

BY BARBARA WALTER 

Barbara Walter is the Rohr Professor of International Affairs at the School of Global Policy and Strategy at UC San Diego. Her most recent book is How Civil Wars Start and How to Stop Them

Political violence is not random.

Research shows it becomes far more likely under four conditions: when democracy is declining rapidly, when societies are divided by race, religion or ethnicity, when political leaders tolerate or encourage violence, and when citizens have easy access to guns.

The United States checks all four boxes and none of them are getting better. Violence also tends to spike around elections, which means the coming contests in 2026 and 2028 are poised to be flashpoint

The avenues for prevention look bleak. Democrats haven’t had the votes — or the courage — to strengthen democratic institutions. Republicans benefit from the current pseudo-democratic system and have no incentive to reform it. The racial divide has narrowed somewhat, but not enough to defuse conflict. Trump and other MAGA leaders rely on threats and violence to stoke fear, and Congress remains paralyzed on gun control. All of this points toward things getting worse, not better.

But there is one place where real progress is still possible. Most acts of political violence in America over the past two decades have been carried out by lone actors — young men radicalized online. The radicalization pipeline runs through a handful of American tech companies that remain almost entirely unregulated.

If lawmakers were willing to curb the algorithms that amplify conspiracy theories, disinformation and hate, they could weaken the pipeline feeding violent extremism. After Charlie Kirk’s assassination, that may be the single most immediate lever left to pull.

The question is whether America has the will to pull it before the violence grows worse.

Billionaires braggadocios…

Court Painter with portrait of Elon Musk

https://apnews.com/article/richest-billionaires-musk-ellison-oracle-tesla-bloomberg-forbes-e90a3cab2a0b256923ca55814893f9fe?utm_source=copy&utm_medium=share

NEW YORK (AP) — The battle among billionaires for bragging rights as the world’s richest person got heated Wednesday with the surprising surge of an old contender: Larry Ellison.

In a stunning few minutes after markets opened, stock in Ellison’s Oracle Corp. rocketed more than a third, enough for him to temporarily wrest the title from its longtime holder Elon Musk and hand it to the software giant’s co-founder.

But the stock market is fickle, and Musk was back on top by the end of the day, at least according to Bloomberg, as Oracle gave up a bit of its earlier gains.

For those keeping score, the difference now is a billion, which isn’t much given the size of the figures: Musk’s $384.2 billion versus $383.2 billion for Ellison.

The dueling fortunes are so big each could fund the lifestyles of 5 million typical American families for a year, about the entire population of Florida, allowing them to all quit their jobs. Or they could just tell all of South Africa to take a vacation for year and produce nothing, based on its gross domestic product.

Spending Boom Boom …

Mark Zuckerberg (Meta)

Sam Altman (OpenAI)

Click link for article

https://www.axios.com/2025/09/09/data-centers-ai-spending-boom

Elon Musk (Tesla/xAI)

Sundar Pichai (Alphabet/Google)

Tim Cook (Apple)

Satya Nadella (Microsoft)

Dario Amodei (Anthropic)

Arvind Krishna (IBM)

Andy Jassy (Amazon)

Jensen Huang (NVIDIA)