one interesting thing is the collapse of mass support for trump before he took office. his in-person events were sparsely attended. his conventional fundraising (donations in the dollar to thousand dollar range) was more or less nonexistent.

Trump I was a grassroots phenomenon. Trump II was elite.

An artillery shell fired during 250th anniversary celebration of the Marine Corps at Camp Pendleton on Saturday detonated prematurely over Interstate 5, damaging a California Highway Patrol vehicle on JD Vance's security detail www.nytimes.com/2025/10/19/u...

Those with sharp eyes might detect a subtle difference in NYT play last month of an event in one city, w 100,000+ attendees, versus play this morning of some 2500+ events w many millions of attendees, in all 50 states.

See if you can spot it! /s

Then you can find today's story on p A23

BREAKING: Microsoft, $MSFT, leaders worried that meeting OpenAI’s rapidly escalating compute demands could lead to overbuilding servers that might not generate a financial return, per the Information

RFK is undoing human subjects protections so he can conduct placebo trials of vaccines. That means infecting people knowingly. I wonder who will “volunteer” for these trials? If history is any guide, a lot of incarcerated and other powerless people.

Purdue to the rescue of IU student newspaper, whose institution was attempting censorship. Details in alt!

yes but it wasn't something IMPORTANT like a Republican commemoration of the life of Charlie Kirk, which in the NYT is treated like a HUGE event with visual & placement prominence

bsky.app/profile/jfal...

NEW:Trump urged Zelenskyy to accept Russia’s terms for ending its war in a volatile White House meeting on Friday, warning that Putin had said he would “destroy” Ukraine if it did not agree.

The meeting between Trump and Zelenskyy descended many times into a “shouting match” on.ft.com/3WMSQSu

The Peace President threatens to invade a country he whose name he can’t spell.

So I’ve been busy with a ton of other stuff, but basically, China just purged, basically all, of the senior leadership of the military - He Weidong was CMC Vice Chair, Miao Hua was head of the political department. Seeing some stuff about key branch leadership also going.

x.com/ifenglobal/s...

The top of two prominent newspapers’ mobile editions right now—and the reason that, despite growing up in New York, I always read @theguardian.com first (and rarely open @nytimes.com):