Welcome to a Hump Day (“Lá an Droma” in Irish): Wednesday, November 5, 2025, and National Donut Day. Here’s a poster from WWI, with the caption, “World War I propaganda poster featuring The Salvation Army, which made doughnuts for soldiers in Europe”. The boys in the trenches wanted coffee and donuts, but I think I see a pie on the platter as well:
It’s also National Chocolate Fondue Day, National Fart Day, and World Nutella Day.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the November 5 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
I posted the nooz about the big Democratic win earlier today.
*Obituaries first: Dick Cheney died at 84. Given his heart problems, I’m amazed he lived this long:
Dick Cheney, widely regarded as the most powerful vice president in American history, who was George W. Bush’s running mate in two successful campaigns for the presidency and his most influential White House adviser in an era of terrorism, war and economic change, died Monday. He was 84.
The cause was complications of pneumonia and cardiac and vascular disease, according to a statement from his family.
Plagued by coronary problems nearly all his adult life, Mr. Cheney had five heart attacks from 1978 to 2010 and had worn a device to regulate his heartbeat since 2001. But his health issues did not seem to impair his performance as vice president. In 2012, three years after retiring, he underwent a successful heart transplant and had been reasonably active since then.
A consummate Washington insider, Mr. Cheney was an architect and executor of President Bush’s major initiatives: deploying military power to advance, they said, the cause of democracy abroad, championing free markets and deregulation at home, and strengthening the powers of a presidency that, as both men saw it, had been unjustifiably restrained by Congress and the courts in the aftermath of the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal.
As Mr. Bush’s most trusted and valued counselor, Mr. Cheney foraged at will over fields of international and domestic policy. Like a super-cabinet official with an unlimited portfolio, he used his authority to make the case for war, propose or kill legislation, recommend Supreme Court candidates, tip the balance for a tax cut, promote the interests of allies and parry opponents.
But it was the national security arena where he had the most profound impact. As defense secretary, he helped engineer the Persian Gulf war that successfully evicted Iraqi invaders from Kuwait in 1991, and then took a leading role a decade later in responding to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. To prevent future attacks, he advocated aggressive policies including warrantless surveillance, indefinite detention and brutal interrogation tactics. And he pushed for the invasion of Iraq to topple Saddam Hussein in 2003, completing the unfinished job of his previous stint in power but leading to years of warfare.
Dick Cheney, the divisive US vice-president under George W Bush who helped lead the country into a disastrous invasion of Iraq, died on Monday, his family has said. He was 84.
And a NYT comparison of Trump with Cheney by Ron Suskind, The tragedy of Dick Cheney, which contains this
Fresh off a briefing about Qaeda leaders looking for fissile materials to build a bomb, Mr. Cheney uttered what would come to be known as his 1 percent doctrine: If there’s a 1 percent chance of terrorists getting their hands on weapons of mass destruction, we need to treat it as a certainty. This low-probability absolutism became a guiding doctrine of U.S. foreign policy. It has cost blood and treasure in staggering amounts.
Before the war started, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney were informed that Saddam Hussein did not in fact have weapons of mass destruction. They saw no reason to inform the public. Once Baghdad fell, what would it matter?
For those who tried to tell the truth, the consequences were swift. When Ambassador Joseph Wilson undercut some of the administration’s justifications for going to war, Mr. Wilson’s wife was outed as an undercover C.I.A. officer. And when Mr. Cheney’s top aide, Lewis Libby, was convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice in relation to that outing, Mr. Cheney pressed the president to pardon him, barking, “You are leaving a good man wounded on the field of battle.” (Mr. Bush held his ground, but Mr. Trump has since obliged.)
Yep, he was not a man who, despite his low-key demeanor, any liberal would want to have in power.
*Today the Supreme Court will hear in full the first major case inspired by Trump’s antics: the impositions of tariffs on everyone, including Canada.
President Trump’s global tariffs hang in the balance as the Supreme Court hears one of the most consequential economic cases in decades.
On Wednesday, the nine justices will weigh whether the president lawfully invoked his authority under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to levy the global tariffs without Congress’s approval, as well as a set of tariffs on Canada, China and Mexico related to fentanyl.
Challengers, a group of small businesses and states, say he exceeded his legal powers. Lower courts have agreed, and now it is up to the Supreme Court to decide the ultimate fate of a cornerstone of the president’s agenda.
Prediction markets anticipate the Supreme Court will most likely reject Trump’s arguments. On Polymarket, bettors assessed the president’s chances of victory at 39% early Wednesday. Ahead of the hearing, S&P 500 and Nasdaq-100 futures slipped; markets stumbled Tuesday.
Trump called the case “literally, LIFE OR DEATH, for our Country” in a Truth Social post on Tuesday. He is expected to watch proceedings, but not attend in person.
Arguments begin at 10 a.m. ET in Washington, and audio from the hearing will be livestreamed. Our reporters will be covering it live.
What’s at stake: If the court overturns the tariffs, the Trump administration has warned it will need to repay tens of billions of dollars it has already collected. It will also undercut a core legal justification for a large chunk of Trump’s tariffs and potentially remove leverage in trade talks.
What to expect: The court will hear from lawyers for the Trump administration and the challengers. While a decision isn’t expected immediately, the arguments could provide important clues about which way justices are leaning.
What to watch: What indication, if any, justices give about how they will rule on this vital question.
Remember that the Court’s decision won’t come down until June of next year at the latest, but perhaps as early as next Spring. I have no idea how they’ll rule, but perhaps the questions posed by the Justices will give a clue. You can hear the court hearing on this case at 10 a.m. Eastern time at the link below (click on screenshot):
*The Washington Post emphasizes properly that any reconstruction of Gaza, if it’s at last to bring peace with Israel, must tackle the problem of Palestinian schoolchildren being taught to hate Jews and Israel, teaching that is promoted, of course, by UNRWA, a UN agency. This is from an op-ed by Todd L. Pittinsky, a professor at Stony Brook University:
Every generation in Gaza grows up memorizing the language of martyrdom. Schools, summer camps, mosques and media channels work in concert to instill an uncompromising worldview: violence is virtuous, compromise is weakness and the annihilation of Israel is a sacred duty. Hamas’s rockets are the visible expression of decades of indoctrination of the next generation.
Gaza’s children are the victims of this violent ideology. Few parents in London, Paris or Washington would tolerate their child being taught that violence is noble or that neighbors are subhuman. Yet the international community has subsidized precisely that curriculum for Palestinian children — and then has acted shocked when violence perpetuates itself. It’s time for that to end.
Academic critics have long alleged that Western funding for education is just a thinly veiled cover for cultural imperialism. Such arguments badly overreach. After World War II, Germany’s education system was overhauled to remove Nazi propaganda while preserving German culture. Postapartheid South Africa reformed its curriculum to promote reconciliation. Postwar Japan replaced militarism with civic education. Defanging destructive ideologies is not imperialism, cultural or otherwise.
The scale of the problem today is well documented. A 2021 report by IMPACT-se, an education nongovernmental organization, found ample evidence of textbooks produced by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency containing militaristic themes alongside maps that erase Israel from the region. A 2019 UN Watch analysis identified over 100 UNRWA social media posts supporting militant groups. Another 2025 UN Watch report documents that more than 15 percent of UNRWA’s senior educators in Gaza are affiliated with Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Other investigations have found that curriculum materials violate UNESCO standards and that schools have been used to store weapons. This is clearly a systemic problem.
UNRWA has operated for decades with minimal oversight. But each revelation produces the same response from the organization: acknowledgment of concern, promises of reform — and then business as usual once the cameras leave. The massacres of Oct. 7, 2023 were the gruesome cost of inaction. Several UNRWA employees may have participated in the violence. The agency responded by treating it as an isolated personnel issue rather than the logical endpoint of decades of hateful indoctrination.
The Trump administration is right to insist in its 20-point peace plan that “the values of tolerance and peaceful co-existence” are critical for long-term success. To ensure that hate does not take root again, reconstruction aid must come with nonnegotiable conditions: independent curriculum oversight by external auditors with direct access to materials and classrooms, teacher vetting for extremist affiliations and full donor transparency. When Western taxpayers fund schools, they have every right to insist those schools don’t teach children to become terrorists. Indeed, they have every obligation to do so. We now know what failure looks like.
In the past I’ve shown some of the material taught to Palestinian children, as well as play-acting that mimics attacks on Jews. Here’s a short video about the indoctrination of Palestinian students, partly funded by the UN:
Can it be fixed? I think so, as long as you keep UNRWA out of it and design a curriculum that doesn’t teach hatred. It was done in Germany, and I’m optimistic it can be done in Gaza.
*Speaking of the Middle East, the Times of Israel reports that the Trump Administration has put together a multinational plan for ensuring peace in Gaza, a plan that will last two years and includes giving the U.S. some governance over the territory.
The Trump administration’s draft United Nations Security Council resolution on establishing an international force in Gaza would reportedly give the US and other participating countries a broad two-year mandate to govern Gaza and be in charge of security there.
According to a copy of the draft published by the Axios news site on Monday, the so-called International Stabilization Force will be in charge of securing the Gaza Strip’s borders with Israel and Egypt, ensuring the safety of civilians and humanitarian zones, and training and partnering new Palestinian police officers.
The force’s mandate will apparently include disarming Hamas, with the draft saying that the ISF will “stabilize the security environment in Gaza by ensuring the process of demilitarizing the Gaza Strip, including the destruction and prevention of rebuilding of military, terror, and offensive infrastructure, as well as the permanent decommissioning of weapons from non-state armed groups.”
This clause could well be subject to debate, as countries that have offered to contribute troops to the ISF are not interested in sparring with Hamas in Gaza, two Arab diplomats reiterated to The Times of Israel last week.
The draft resolution also states that the ISF will perform “additional tasks as may be necessary in support of the Gaza agreement,” and that it will be established and operate “in close consultation and cooperation with Egypt and Israel.”
Additionally, the resolution calls for granting US President Donald Trump’s proposed “Board of Peace” the powers of “a transitional governance administration with international legal personality that will set the framework and coordinate funding for the redevelopment of Gaza pursuant to the Comprehensive Plan, until such time as the Palestinian Authority has satisfactorily completed its reform program.”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly proclaimed that the Palestinian Authority cannot play any role in governing postwar Gaza, although the idea has remained popular among Israel’s Western allies.
A US official told Axios that the goal is to deploy the first ISF troops to Gaza by January. Washington is reportedly aiming to negotiate the terms of the resolution within days and hold a vote on it within weeks.
The debate about disarming Hamas will indeed be contentious, but somebody has to disarm Hamas, as the terrorist group shows no signs of wanting to disarm or surrender. If Israel does it, that will break the cease-fire, but the article is right: which country wants to take on the task of disarming (i.e., fighting) Hamas? It can’t be in their interest to have their soldiers killed by Hamas, regardless of their desire to help Gaza become peaceful.
*The other day a friend who is also a sports maven told me that the best job in the world is that of a football coach at a big-time sports college like Alabama. You make a ton of money (more than the college President by far), and then, even if you’re fired because you had a losing season, you get millions of dollars in the buyout. Sure enough, the WSJ echoes that in an article called “America’s hottest job: fired college football coach.” Once you’re fired, you can retire in luxury:
College football cannot stop being college football.
Like the other day, when the Governor of Louisiana, Jeff Landry, went on a surreal press conference tirade in which he howled about the $53 million buyout for the recently fired LSU football coach Brian Kelly, cracking that he wanted President Trump to select Kelly’s replacement, and wait, did the Governor more or less just fire the school’s athletic director on TV?
Landry’s Howard Beale moment is merely the latest example of college football’s unusual grip on this country, its culture and its frequent entanglement in politics. While some of the Governor’s assertions were challenged—Louisiana taxpayers will not be writing a check for Kelly’s buyout, officials confirmed—his baffled irritation isn’t out of place.
These buyouts are absurd, an outgrowth of a crazed marketplace and undeniably screwy optics at a state university.
At the same time, it was telling that a common reaction to Landry’s tangent was:
What are you doing, man? You’re making LSU look nuts! This crazy rant about Kelly’s ridiculous deal is going to impact our ability to give a ridiculous deal to the next guy.
And that was it, in sharp relief, the hypocrisy and riddle of college football: how to pull the brake when everyone’s on the same speeding train.
Meanwhile, the impatient sackings continue. Auburn University parted ways with its head coach, Hugh Freeze, after less than three seasons. Counting three interim appointments, the Tigers are on their sixth head coach since 2020.
Sixth!
Cycling through head coaches like Hollywood assistants who can’t perfect a Starbucks order is another symptom of college football’s sicko economy. Of course there will be no shortage of candidates, including some of the recently dismissed, like Penn State’s ex, James Franklin, who appears to be again in demand.
It’s great work, if you can get it. Even if you can’t get it, it’s great work. Franklin’s buyout with Penn State is about $50 million, which would be offset if he gets a deal elsewhere. Freeze’s buyout is a relative bargain at $15.8. The accumulating buyout-palooza for the recently fired is crossing $200 million, according to USA Today.
Who wouldn’t want to come back in their next life as a fired head football coach, flirting with rival ADs and ESPN while they chill by the pool and circle chalets in the Journal’s Mansion section?
Sounds fab to me.
Fifty-three million bucks as a consolation prize for being fired! The President of LSU makes $750,000 per year, but he could make another $650,000 if he meets a bunch of incentives. Even so, he has to work for that money, while Kelly can just sit back and eat caviar.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, a man and his cat have a funny exchange:
Hili: I’m hunting a postmodernist mouse.
Andrzej: Leave that mindless creature alone.
In Polish:
Hili: Poluję na postmodernistyczną mysz.
Ja: Zostaw w spokoju to bezmyślne stworzenie.
*******************
From Give Me a Sign:
From CinEmma:
From The Language Nerds:
Masih is still celebrating, JKR is quiet, and so Emma Hilton gets the honor of the Lead Tweet:
I am not clear Ashlee understands what “child-bearing hips” actually are.
Ashlee presumably understands that no penis is child-bearing. https://t.co/zYj46JXorH
— Emma Hilton (@FondOfBeetles) November 4, 2025
From Luana, a mini-conversation between Helen Pluckrose and Steve Stewart-Williams:
A very insightful comment from Helen Pluckrose. https://t.co/gyf0mbzdpj pic.twitter.com/DseGUCxOHD
— Steve Stewart-Williams (@SteveStuWill) November 3, 2025
From Bryan, an illusion:
Chromostereopsis
Many people see red in front of blue, whereas some people perceive blue in front of red. pic.twitter.com/R6kiZuxMHT
— Akiyoshi Kitaoka (@AkiyoshiKitaoka) November 3, 2025
From Simon, who gives us a man who apparently doesn’t know mathm but also sets our tariffs:
It’s like he’s reading The Onion without realizing it’s satire https://t.co/iafib5j5Ti
— Tina Smith (@SenTinaSmith) October 22, 2025
One from my feed, and I hope it’s not AI. You have to be very careful these days, and we all make mistakes:
— Dogs are our lives (@loveDoges111) November 3, 2025
One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:
This Dutch Jewish boy was gassed to death as soon as he arrived at Auschwitz. He was three years old. Had he lived, he'd be 85 today.
— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-11-05T12:49:32.070Z
. . . and two from Dr. Cobb. He saved the first meme and I retweeted it to post here. It is, as far as I know, correct:
From Matthew Cobb’s collection. pic.twitter.com/PcbAvXwlcJ
— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) November 4, 2025
. . . and this is what happens when AI gets hold of one of the great classic suggestions in modern science:
Nature suggests you use their "Manuscript Adviser" bot to get advice before submittingI uploaded the classic Watson & Crick paper about DNA structure, and the Adviser had this to say about one of the greatest paper endings of the century:
— Tomer Ullman (@tomerullman.bsky.social) 2025-11-03T13:55:08.703Z
Our foremost social critic, Titania McGrath, has once again deigned to grace us with her insights: Gaza betrays LGBTQ+ allies.
“I am so disappointed in Hamas. As the Middle East’s foremost progressive activist group, you would think they would know better than to agree to a “peace deal” whose architect is none other than Donald J. Trump. By aligning with that tyrannical pumpkin-hued fatberg, Hamas has well and truly lost the moral high ground.”
A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
There is no great invention, from fire to flying, which has not been hailed as an insult to some god. -J.B.S. Haldane, scientist (5 Nov 1892-1964)
Maybe the invention of the concept of “blasphemy”?
We can’t even invent a god without insulting another god.
And yet no god is ever insulted.
Again: I hate ai.
Then you will like this Mark Parisi cartoon:
https://www.offthemark.com/DailyCartoon?prod_id=13437
Cute. Thanks.
The dumba$$ videos are [€#%]
But
I gotta say, it’s good for checking understanding of how to solve math problems – (not the same as “making it do the work for me and I fill in an answer”).
I also like the movie trailers people made with it – e.g. retro Panavision ~60s-style Star Wars, Lord of the Rings,… very dream-like and surreal…)
The cat and dog video clip is definitely AI, as there are various anomalies. But just for starters, why would one happen to be recording a random moment in the kitchen?
It would have been more convincing if they had the camera angle from high up on the wall, as some people do have cctv inside the house and it can catch funny moments, but no fixed camera would be set at that angle. It was the angle and the lack of reaction from the dog that made me assume it was fake.
Please tell us how you feel about ai, Jim. Hee hee. I’m with you all the way. I just get a kick out of all the times you’ve said it. “I hate ai”. So do I!
I won’t be surprised if the Court comes e down against Trump on tariffs. If they do so, though, it will probably be because Congress delegated the authority to the Executive, which they shouldn’t have done. The power of the purse is the Legislature’s responsibility. Congress has increasingly tried to punt their responsibilities over the last five dcades or so.
Still… (big sigh) the money gathered had gone into the treasury and it put a tiny dent into our ginormous national debt. I for one would not be put out if the treasury kept that money.
I see blue before red before blue. Is that many or some or neither?
That’s more or less my experience, also.
Blues on the same plane, red in the back. Obviously.😆
Blue in front of red with my reading glasses on; red in front of blue with my reading glasses off.
There isn’t much that I can find to be good about Mr. Cheney. But a couple of them was that he was supportive of his gay daughter at a time when it was politically difficult to do so within his party, and especially that he was vocally against Trump and his lies following the Jan. 6 insurrection.
He also gave the world Liz Cheney, and was reportedly “hysterically funny”.
Red in front of blue for me.
UNRWA: needs either to go away, or be completely restructured and reanimated—by different people. The education of Gazan children can be reformed, but who will be the teachers? Other Gazans who were poisoned by UNRWA? In principle, this can be fixed, but it will be very difficult in practice. It may take generations.
Just this morning UN Watch published an interactive website documenting the explicit terror connections of 500 UNWRA employees, many of whom are at the highest level of UNWRA or various terrorist groups. And this is just the tip of the iceberg – an estimated 3,600 UNWRA employees have terror connections:
https://unwatch.org/unrwa-terror-network/
All the days listed, including national fart day, fall on February 5. Not November 5.
Oh dear, I’ve already gone ahead and celebrated National Fart Day.
Don’t feel sorry for the fired LSU Athletic Director; he is walking away with a $6.4 million buyout (as an AD at LSU and Texas A&M, he is responsible for over $120 million in buyouts). And the LSU coach was 5-3 which is still a winning record.
The dog is apparently AI. I suspected it when the dog hardly moved, I’d expect it to shake off the flour or flinch as it seemed to go into it’s eyes.
If you read a few comments on shared images there are people who are quick to point out what is AI.