22: India

The Very Real Scenario Where Trump Loses and Takes Power Anyway If Trump overturns the 2024 election, here’s how it could happen.
What China’s Leaders Grasp About Another Trump Term
Trump Has Turned It Up to 11 Donald Trump is so dependent on racial and ethnic antagonism that without it, he would be a marginal figure, relegated to the sidelines. ....... Trump’s constant demonization of Black people and immigrants has inured the public to the fact that he is the first — or certainly the most explicit — modern president and party nominee to transparently generate, not to mention exacerbate, fear and white animosity toward people of color......... In the closing days of the 2024 election, he continues to foment race hatred and to rely on it ever more intently. ............. “Trump was distinctive in how he tapped into white grievance,” they wrote. “Trump’s primary campaign became a vehicle for a different kind of identity politics” — one oriented toward capitalizing on the feeling of many white people that they were being “pushed aside in an increasingly diverse America.” ........... in late 2015 a P.R.R.I. survey found that 64 percent of Republicans claimed to believe “that ‘discrimination against whites has become as big of a problem as discrimination against Blacks and other minorities.’” .......... “There is a definite anti-white feeling in this country, and that can’t be allowed,” Trump told Time magazine in April. ........... after “talking to people in Kentucky’s Fifth Congressional District, the whitest and second-poorest congressional district in the country”: ......... The people I talk to do not believe they are racist and are insulted when they see themselves so described on CNN. They roundly rejected a 2017 white nationalist march through Pikeville, Ky., led by the neo-Nazi Matthew Heimbach. Many I talked to were proud to have the first integrated cemetery, and there are town markers commemorating an early-century Black female poet. ........... But they also sense themselves sinking and are threatened — by, in order of importance, immigrants, refugees, Blacks, women, highly educated “elites” — who are doing better than they are — and feel these categories are favored by the Democrats over them. They feel the Democrats are consumed by “identity politics” and have, because of it, wiped white men off the Democratic social map. ........ Most of Trump’s appeal is based, I argue in “Stolen Pride,” on his call to turn the shame of white, non-B.A. downward mobility into blame. Primary among the many targets of blame are immigrants, but secondary are Blacks and women — sort of “secondary immigrants” threatening to replace white males in the status hierarchy. ........... Since the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the Democratic Party has struggled in its efforts to deal with racial issues, while the Republican Party has repeatedly used crime, busing, urban decay and immigration to divide the Democratic coalition. .......... Trump is unique in that he has made explicit racial outreach a core part of his campaign. He did this in 2016, 2020 and now again in 2024. ........... Gary Jacobson, also a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego, sees Trump as an avatar of malice. “Extreme rhetoric fanning fear and hatred of nonwhite immigrants and urban minorities is central to Trump’s current campaign,” he wrote by email. “I assume he thinks it works for him.” .............. Trump could benefit from focusing on these problems and addressing them in terms that make him appear reasonable. This could even include a less hysterical approach to immigration. But it is not in his nature to do so. ............. some reporting indicates that Trump campaign officials have tried to steer the candidate toward those issues. His focus on racial hostility, in terms of policy rhetoric and how he talks about his opponent, appears to be somewhat of a personal choice. ............ Without tapping into and triggering citizens’ racial resentment and racial prejudice, Trump would not be competitive. He is incapable of articulating traditional conservative values. ............ We’re rapidly running out of superlatives to describe how extreme Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric has become. He’s clearly amped up his harsh and violent rhetoric. Even in 2020, his rhetoric largely focused on building a wall and keep out undocumented immigrants. But in 2024, his rhetoric has shifted almost exclusively to talking about immigrants as the deranged and violent enemy who has already invaded the country. ......... He talks about immigrants slitting the throats of housewives in their kitchens and raping young girls and promises mass arrests, militarized encampments and deportation. His rhetoric has now moved — there’s really no other way to say it — fully into Nazi territory. He has called immigrants “not human” and referred to them as “animals.” ............... Trump has taken his supporters with him on this extremist journey. In 2013, a majority (53 percent) of Republicans supported a path to citizenship for immigrants living in the country illegally; by 2019, that number had dropped to 39 percent. ............. Today, two-thirds of Republicans (64 percent) and a majority of white evangelical Protestants (54 percent) agree even with Trump’s dehumanizing assertion, echoing Hitler’s arguments in “Mein Kampf,” that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” We know these words are the bricks paving the road to political violence and even genocide. ......... If he loses, Trump will face an avalanche of criminal proceedings that could last the rest of his life. If he wins, they are likely to go away.

22: Donald Trump, Elon Musk

Leaked documents show US intelligence on Israel’s plans to attack Iran, sources say
Microsoft Windows Deadline—10 Days To Update Or Stop Using Your PC
What Elon Musk Really Wants The Tesla and X mogul has long dreamed of redesigning the world in his own extreme image. Trump may be his Trojan horse.............. In Elon Musk’s vision of human history, Donald Trump is the singularity. If Musk can propel Trump back to the White House, it will mark the moment that his own superintelligence merges with the most powerful apparatus on the planet, the American government—not to mention the business opportunity of the century. ........... because Trump has explicitly invited Musk into the government to play the role of the master engineer, who redesigns the American state—and therefore American life—in his own image. ........

because Trump has explicitly invited Musk into the government to play the role of the master engineer, who redesigns the American state—and therefore American life—in his own image.

Trump Is Speaking Like Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini The former president has brought dehumanizing language into American presidential politics. .......... The word vermin, as a political term, dates from the 1930s and ’40s, when both fascists and communists liked to describe their political enemies as vermin, parasites, and blood infections, as well as insects, weeds, dirt, and animals. The term has been revived and reanimated, in an American presidential campaign, with Donald Trump’s description of his opponents as “radical-left thugs” who “live like vermin.” ............ This language isn’t merely ugly or repellant: These words belong to a particular tradition. Adolf Hitler used these kinds of terms often. In 1938, he praised his compatriots who had helped “cleanse Germany of all those parasites who drank at the well of the despair of the Fatherland and the People.” In occupied Warsaw, a 1941 poster displayed a drawing of a louse with a caricature of a Jewish face. The slogan: “Jews are lice: they cause typhus.” Germans, by contrast, were clean, pure, healthy, and vermin-free. Hitler once described the Nazi flag as “the victorious sign of freedom and the purity of our blood.” ........ Stalin used the same kind of language at about the same time. He called his opponents the “enemies of the people,” implying that they were not citizens and that they enjoyed no rights. He portrayed them as vermin, pollution, filth that had to be “subjected to ongoing purification,” and he inspired his fellow communists to employ similar rhetoric. In my files, I have the notes from a 1955 meeting of the leaders of the Stasi, the East German secret police, during which one of them called for a struggle against “vermin activities” (there is, inevitably, a German word for this: Schädlingstätigkeiten), by which he meant the purge and arrest of the regime’s critics. In this same era, the Stasi forcibly moved suspicious people away from the border with West Germany, a project nicknamed “Operation Vermin.” ....... This kind of language was not limited to Europe. Mao Zedong also described his political opponents as “poisonous weeds.” Pol Pot spoke of “cleansing” hundreds of thousands of his compatriots so that Cambodia would be “purified.” ......... In each of these very different societies, the purpose of this kind of rhetoric was the same. If you connect your opponents with disease, illness, and poisoned blood, if you dehumanize them as insects or animals, if you speak of squashing them or cleansing them as if they were pests or bacteria, then you can much more easily arrest them, deprive them of rights, exclude them, or even kill them. If they are parasites, they aren’t human. If they are vermin, they don’t get to enjoy freedom of speech, or freedoms of any kind. And if you squash them, you won’t be held accountable. .......... \........................... In the 2024 campaign, that line has been crossed. Trump blurs the distinction between illegal immigrants and legal immigrants—the latter including his wife, his late ex-wife, the in-laws of his running mate, and many others. He has said of immigrants, “They’re poisoning the blood of our country” and “They’re destroying the blood of our country.” He has claimed that many have “bad genes.” He has also been more explicit: “They’re not humans; they’re animals”; they are “cold-blooded killers.” He refers more broadly to his opponents—American citizens, some of whom are elected officials—as “the enemy from within … sick people, radical-left lunatics.” Not only do they have no rights; they should be “handled by,” he has said, “if necessary, National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military.” .......... In using this language, Trump knows exactly what he is doing. He understands which era and what kind of politics this language evokes. “I haven’t read Mein Kampf,” he declared, unprovoked, during one rally—an admission that he knows what Hitler’s manifesto contains, whether or not he has actually read it. “If you don’t use certain rhetoric,” he told an interviewer, “if you don’t use certain words, and maybe they’re not very nice words, nothing will happen.”.................. His talk of mass deportation is equally calculating. When he suggests that he would target both legal and illegal immigrants, or use the military arbitrarily against U.S. citizens, he does so knowing that past dictatorships have used public displays of violence to build popular support. By calling for mass violence, he hints at his admiration for these dictatorships but also demonstrates disdain for the rule of law and prepares his followers to accept the idea that his regime could, like its predecessors, break the law with impunity. .............. These are not jokes, and Trump is not laughing. Nor are the people around him. Delegates at the Republican National Convention held up prefabricated signs: Mass Deportation Now. Just this week, when Trump was swaying to music at a surreal rally, he did so in front of a huge slogan: Trump Was Right About Everything. This is language borrowed directly from Benito Mussolini, the Italian fascist. Soon after the rally, the scholar Ruth Ben-Ghiat posted a photograph of a building in Mussolini’s Italy displaying his slogan: Mussolini Is Always Right. ...........

The Moment of Truth The reelection of Donald Trump would mark the end of George Washington’s vision for the presidency—and the United States.

Donald Trump Gains in Three Swing States He's Looking to Flip: New Polls

17: Ajit Doval

17: Canada

17: Elon Musk

Elon Musk, Mukesh Ambani, Starlink

Elon Musk and other billionaires invest staggering sums into electing Trump, plus other takeaways from third-quarter filings Musk, the world’s richest person, gave nearly $75 million to a pro-Trump super PAC that he helped form over the summer – a massive cash infusion aimed at helping turn out voters in key battleground states. Adelson, a staunch Trump backer and heir to a casino fortune, gave even more, plowing $95 million into another outside group backing the former president, according to filings with the Federal Election Commission covering the three months ended September 30. ............... Altogether, just three billionaires – Musk, Adelson and Midwestern packaging magnate Richard Uihlein – donated roughly $220 million in a three-month period to groups backing the Republican’s candidacy. ............ Harris has set a blistering pace – raising $1 billion since she became the Democratic standard-bearer in late July – a milestone achieved faster than any other presidential contender. And Tuesday’s filings show that a high-dollar fundraising committee that channels money to her campaign and aligned Democratic committees, took in $633 million during the third quarter – four times the amount raised by Trump’s equivalent fundraising arm in that time.......... In the battle for control of Congress, meanwhile, individual Democratic incumbents and candidates in some key Senate and House races widened their financial advantage over their Republican opponents.

India says no auction of satellite spectrum after Musk decries move Telecoms Minister Jyotiraditya Scindia said during a New Delhi event that the spectrum will be allocated administratively in line with Indian laws, and its pricing worked out by the telecom watchdog.......... "This spectrum was long designated by the ITU as shared spectrum for satellites," Musk said, referring to the International Telecommunication Union, a U.N. agency for digital technology. ......... "Satellite companies who have ambitions to come into urban areas, serving elite retail customers, just need to take the telecom licenses like everybody else... they need to buy the spectrum as telecom companies buy," Mittal, who is also the chair of Airtel, said at the New Delhi event. ......... Earlier in 2023, both Eutelsat unit OneWeb and Airtel had voiced concerns about auctioning the spectrum in their submissions to the Indian government. ......... Musk's Starlink and some global peers like Amazon's Project Kuiper back an administrative allocation, saying spectrum is a natural resource that should be shared by companies.



Elon Musk expands his empire of misinformation At any Tesla event, you have to go in expecting a good amount of smoke and mirrors. This is the company run by Elon Musk, after all — its self-anointed Technoking who’s made overpromising and underdelivering a theme of his career........... But Thursday’s “Cybercab” robotaxi unveiling was, even by Musk-ian standards for bluster, one giant optical illusion. The kind of spectacle that should remind everyone that the world’s richest person is someone who promotes and appears to relish misinformation and hyperbole on a mass scale, whether he’s speaking to investors, his millions of followers on X or whichever politician he feels is most likely to agree with his increasingly right-wing and conspiracy-laden worldview........ the fact that the robots were not actually autonomous and were being operated remotely by humans ............ At one point, an attendee even got a bartending bot to admit that it was being assisted by a human. ........... Over the weekend, federal emergency workers were forced to halt their in hurricane-hit North Carolina after National Guard troops reported that an “armed militia” was “hunting FEMA

Elon Musk battles Indian billionaires over satellite internet spectrum Starlink head in spat with owners of Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel mobile networks who have called for space bandwidth auctions ......... A person close to the company said only services reaching currently unserved communities should be assigned spectrum, to allow for a “level playing field” after Indian operators invested “billions of dollars” in terrestrial connections. .......... “It’s more about ensuring that the telecom industry remains in control of the local players rather than foreigners coming in and dictating their agenda,” they said. “I can’t think of any other explanation, it’s not like there’s a scarcity of spectrum, it’s abundant.” ......... A simple assignment of spectrum may hand Musk’s company, the largest and most successful of its kind, a “first-mover advantage”, while an auction process would allow Indian players time to get their products market-ready, said the person close to Reliance. ......... Musk told Modi last year that he wanted to bring Starlink, which operates more than 6,000 low-orbit satellites, to India to connect remote communities........ Musk also has his eye on the long-term potential of India as a location for a Tesla plant, despite cancelling a trip to New Delhi earlier this year to prioritise talks with and focus on its Asian rival China.



No spectrum auction: Government after Elon Musk objects to Mukesh Ambani's pitch Telecom Minister Jyotiraditya Scindia has announced that India will follow the global trend of administrative spectrum allocation. The decision came after Starlink CEO Elon Musk objected to Ambani's Reliance Jio lobbying for the auction route.

‘Will do the best to serve…’: Starlink owner Elon Musk react ..
‘Mukesh Ambani afraid of Elon Musk’? Tesla billionaire responds to meme on Reliance boss
Musk reacts to Ambani lobbying, calls any India move to auction satellite spectrum 'unprecedented' Starlink boss Elon Musk in reponse to news that rival Ambani is lobbying for the auction route instead of allocation for satellite broadband spectrum in India would be “unprecedented”.

Elon Musk Takes On Mukesh Ambani's JIO
Explained why SATCOM technology is unlikely to disrupt incumbent telecom players in India
Masterstroke by Mukesh Ambani, big trouble for Elon Musk, game over for Starlink? Jio has made its apprehensions known to the government about international corporations like Starlink and Amazon Kuiper looking to introduce their satellite internet services in India.
Elon Musk Challenges Ambani and Mittal on Satellite Spectrum
Scindia: No Satellite Spectrum Auction Scindia emphasised that the pricing structure would be determined by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India.
India Sides with Elon Musk on Satellite Spectrum as Ambani, Mittal Prepare for Intense Battle Telecom minister Jyotiraditya Scindia has given blow to Indian telecos, including Reliance and Airtel, who have been advocating for the auction method ........ the minister cited the Telecommunications Act 2023 and global practices to back his stance on spectrum allocation. .......... “For satcom, spectrum will be allocated administratively...that does not mean that spectrum does not come without a cost. What that cost is and what the formula of that costing is going to be...will be decided by the TRAI,” said Scindia. Satellite spectrum across the globe is allocated administratively, and India is taking the same route, he added. ........ The key issue pointed out by Reliance was TRAI’s failure to provide a level playing field between satellite-based and terrestrial access services. In the letter, the telecom giant cited the Supreme Court judgement in the 2G case and hinted towards a legal battle that might surface if concerns remain unresolved.

Telecom Minister Jyotiraditya Scindia on October 15 ..
Elon Musk calls Reliance Jio's spectrum auction request 'unprecedented'

15: Kamala Harris

Trump dances for 30 minutes at campaign event
Trudeau’s Move Casts Light on the Reach of India’s Intelligence Agencies The Canadian prime minster’s accusation of Indian government involvement in the killing of a Sikh nationalist signifies a sharp escalation in diplomatic tensions between India and Canada.

America Is on the Brink of a Great Political Realignment. It’s Already Visible in Arizona. “I believe that God voted early on July 13, when he spared the life of Donald Trump.” ......... “I do not believe that if you love the Lord, read the Bible and call yourself a Christian, that you can vote for Kamala Harris for president,” he said at Dream City. ......... Its strategy, which it calls “chase the vote,” is to tap into new parts of the electorate by targeting what the campaign calls “low propensity voters,” the sort of alienated, disconnected people, especially men, who’d presumably gravitate toward Trump if they could be bothered to cast ballots at all. “We’re going to make it too big to rig on Election Day,” said Kirk. ............. Much of what they said was MAGA boilerplate. But a surprising subtext of their conversation was the problems that Trump’s character and personality create for Republican turnout. ........... In this citadel of MAGA spirituality — the ex-president himself spoke there at a Turning Point event in June — I’d expected to hear Trump praised in exalted terms, not justified as the lesser of two evils. But Carson argued that, unless Jesus Christ himself is on the ballot, the lesser evil is the choice in every election. ............ In 2016, Democrats hoped that Trump’s evident indecency would spur a significant number of Republicans to vote for Hillary Clinton. “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia,” predicted Chuck Schumer, a Democratic senator from New York. It didn’t work out that way. ............... During the Trump years, as Republicans have improved their margins with working-class voters, Democrats have made gains with educated suburbanites and, more broadly, with those who fundamentally trust American civic institutions. This realignment is remaking politics in states including Georgia, which is now a swing state, and Ohio, which used to be one but isn’t anymore. But perhaps no place has undergone a partisan revolution quite like Arizona’s. .............. Arizona voted for Joe Biden in 2020, albeit by the smallest margin of any state, fewer than 11,000 votes. The state has one Democratic senator, Mark Kelly, and one Democrat-turned-independent, Kyrsten Sinema, who is likely to be replaced by a Democrat .......... “I never felt particularly comfortable with those folks, but the Republican Party was a big tent, and you could be a John McCain-style Republican and feel at home in the Republican Party. That’s no longer the case.” ............... In 2022, Republicans nominated Mark Finchem, a onetime member of the Oath Keepers militia, to be secretary of state. Now running for State Senate, he recently retweeted a QAnon video accusing the Rothschild banking family of engineering the Civil War. .......... Rusty Bowers, the very conservative former speaker of the Arizona House, has been driven out of Republican politics for refusing to go along with the “stop the steal” movement. He lost his last primary to David Farnsworth, a businessman who described the 2020 election as “a real conspiracy headed up by the devil himself.” .................... describing Turning Point as more powerful than the Republican National Committee. .............. Election conspiracy theories nullify any incentive for the party to moderate after its losses .............. It was Turning Point, after all, that turbocharged the political campaign of Kari Lake, the extraordinarily unpopular Republican Senate candidate. In 2021, Lake, a former local TV anchor, was running a long-shot race for the Republican gubernatorial primary when she impressed Trump at a Turning Point event in Phoenix. His fulsome endorsement helped catapult her to victory in a crowded primary. As The Post reported, she staffed her campaign with former Turning Point employees. .................. At a rally shortly before that year’s election, she asked, “We don’t have any McCain Republicans in here, do we? Get the hell out!” ............... everyone she knows from McCain’s operation is a Harris supporter ........... Following Trump’s campaign stunt in Arlington National Cemetery in August, McCain’s youngest son, Jim McCain, both endorsed Harris and registered as a Democrat. ............ Seven thousand people attended a Harris rally in Chandler, outside Phoenix, on Thursday. Jill Biden visited, as did a bevy of pro-Harris celebrities, including Jennifer Garner, Kerry Washington, Glenn Close and Jessica Alba. Barack Obama is headed there this week. .............. The party’s MAGA-fueled erosion is perhaps most visible in the pitiful state of Lake’s campaign. Observers have started comparing her to Mark Robinson, the Trump-endorsed Republican candidate for governor of North Carolina. The analogy feels a little unfair, given that Lake has never, at least to my knowledge, called herself a Nazi, expressed a wish to own slaves or fantasized about committing obscene acts with an in-law in the comments section of a porn site. But it gets at the depth of Lake’s reputational collapse................ Trump, who cares only for praise and fealty, has a natural affinity for grifters and fanatics. He elevates figures who share many of his faults but not his Mephistophelean charisma. .............. “There’s part of me that is pessimistic, that thinks that the Republican Party might be a lost cause,” said Giles. He wonders if a new conservative party could emerge. “Maybe we have three parties for a while in our country.

Three Weeks to Go, and That’s All Anyone Is Sure Of And it sends a smart political signal that she is not some crunchy-granola liberal who believes that guns are intrinsically evil. ......... In a perfect world, I’d ban handguns altogether. The chances that one stored in the home will be misused, often by kids with fatal results, are high. ........... I guess Harris’s enthusiasm for the Glock in her home might give her more credibility when it comes to banning assault weapons and requiring universal background checks for gun purchases, both of which she supports. ........... No signs that she’s going to be a sensational presidential conversationalist, but she seemed pleasant, well prepared and not nuts — unlike some candidates I could mention. .......... Have to admit I’m worried about the apparent lack of enthusiasm among Black and Hispanic men.......... A lot of voters, including me, fear she isn’t really up to the job, which could be the reason she’s mostly avoided tough interviews. ............. assuming that vision is more than just a list of wan liberal talking points and vague references to “my plan.” ............ I really don’t want to see Bernie Moreno as Ohio’s next senator. ......... Very pleased that Ruben Gallego, the Democratic Senate candidate in Arizona, appears well ahead in his race with the deeply strange Kari Lake, who still won’t concede that she lost the governor’s race two years ago. ............ controlling the weather is easy when you have the Rothschild space lasers near to hand. .......... But long term, I’ve never thought it was really fair to give the party that elected fewer senators the power to just close everything down. ............ the Senate’s role as a check on the often mindlessly majoritarian impulses of the House. ............. The other big idea in terms of fixing our institutions is a term-limited Supreme Court ......... I guess I don’t believe lifetime tenure is good for much of anything. Even the pope. ............. any change to court tenures should be accompanied by a requirement for the Senate that any court vacancy be filled within 60 days, to avoid the sort of mischief we saw around Merrick Garland’s nomination to nowhere in 2016. ......... I spent my early years living between two countries that never quite felt entirely my own, in my case Mexico and the United States. I’d like to think that by having our feet planted in two cultures, two languages, two traditions, we did more to enrich American life than detract from it — just as all immigrants to America do, whether they’re from Norway or Nigeria, Holland or Haiti.

14: Kapil Sharma

14: Bill Clinton

14: Donald Trump

14: India-Canada

13: India

11: AI

10: Triptii Dimri

Tesla Robotaxi

10: AI