Open thread 10/28/2025
This guy goes around interviewing couples on how they met, and some of his videos are very touching. But he doesn’t always luck out with the couples thing:
Two excellent videos about Israel
The first one describes the details of Sinwar’s plans and instructions for 10/7, written in his own handwriting a few months before the event, and recently discovered by the IDF. It’s extraordinary. The gist of it is that all the sadism – and the broadcasting of the horrors on social media – was meticulously planned, and why:
Here’s another excellent video. The topic is why people believe anti-Israel propaganda, and what to do about it:
Will the electorate “learn” if Mamdani is elected?
It seems inevitable that Mamdani will win in New York City and become its new mayor. However, he’s done so poorly in the debates – against even a lackluster and much-despised Andrew Cuomo – that the polls have supposedly tightened:
The race for New York City mayor has tightened considerably — with ex-Gov. Andrew Cuomo cutting front-runner Zohran Mamdani’s lead in half from a month ago, according to a new poll.
Mamdani, the Democratic nominee, now leads Cuomo, running as an independent, just 44% to 34% among the likely Big Apple voters, the Suffolk University survey found.
Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa is in third place with 11% support.
But Mamdani had a 20-point lead over Cuomo in Suffolk University’s prior poll conducted in September.
Mamdani’s hefty lead still remains, despite the shift.
Where did those new votes for Cuomo come from? Apparently, Hispanic voters and Independents:
Cuomo is now running roughly even among Hispanics after trailing Mamdani by 30 points in that demographic in the September poll. …
He leads among independents by 10 points, a dramatic flip from a month ago, when he trailed Mamdani by 18 points among non-party-affiliated voters.
Seven percent of voters are still undecided and the four other candidates whose names are on the ballot garner 2% support combined.
Note that “undecided” 7%. That could put the whole thing in play – perhaps.
Sliwa still gets around 10.6%, but will that many people stick with him when they’re actually in the voting booths, realizing that a vote for Sliwa is effectively a vote for Mamdani? In a little more than a week, I guess we’ll find out.
As I’ve written before, I care what happens in New York, and I deeply hope Mamdani won’t win. Others here disagree with me to a certain extent – for example, “physicsguy”:
I know its sounds bad, but I think its good if Fateh and Mamdani both win. The country needs hard, stark examples of what the current incarnation of the Democratic party brings. I’m afraid the residents of Minneapolis and NYC will never learn, but maybe the rest of the country will as those cities fall into the abyss.
Well, quite a bit of the rest of the country is already red, and knows this. And the rest may be in the “will never learn” category. What Thomas Sowell calls the vision of the anointed is strong in many places and among many demographics. Even with the current 3-way race in NY, Mamdani shouldn’t be getting more than a few percentage points, and de Blasio’s tenure as mayor should have been lesson enough to teach everyone.
The truth is that the US is still split approximately 50/50, despite Trump’s strong victory in 2024. The Democrats have a chance of gaining the House in 2026. The clueless nonentity Kamala Harris came way too close to winning in 2024, despite Biden’s disastrous presidency. Trump’s victory over her should have been far more decisive, but too many Democrat voters would vote for anyone rather than a Republican.
If Mamdani wins in New York, it probably won’t be because a majority of New Yorkers voted for him, and yet the whole city will suffer. I’m not willing to sacrifice the city to create an object lesson that way too many people elsewhere may not be taking to heart (not that I have a say in the matter, but I certainly have an opinion). After all, it’s not as though we lack prior evidence of the failure of the sort of policies Mamdani proposes. And yet so many voters don’t care, or are unaware.
Once the left gets hold of the power structure of a city, it often gets very dug in. The damage that can be done is incalculable. One of the things that happens – and to a certain extent has already happened in New York – is that the more conservative residents flee, and the place becomes even more skewed to the left.
And don’t forget – a mind is a difficult thing to change.
And, as commenter “AesopFan” writes:
Places where the ratcheting [to the left] has been reversed have had some sort of intervention element, where the electorate experienced a shift in voting preferences due to the action of the contesting parties. We can do that because of our political system, so long as it isn’t being monkeyed with too much.
Part of the ratcheting includes monkeying with the electoral system.
Once a particular city gets ratcheted the wrong way* past a certain point, it is not recoverable.
NOTE: Remember this, when New York faced bankruptcy?
Milei’s party scores a decisive victory in Argentina
Milei wasn’t running; he’s not up for re-election until 2027. This was a midterm election in which polls said his party wasn’t doing well. But it seems the polls were wrong
Fancy that.
And Trump apparently had a role in all of this:
Basically, no one believed that Millei’s reforms would stick. People did not want to invest in Argentina’s economy because they were pretty sure another leftist would just defeat him at the next elections and return the country to basket-case socialist rule.
The only way to get people to invest would be to convince them that Millei was popular and that he’d be around to make sure the reforms stuck. But people didn’t believe this, and the Argentinian peso continued to decline in value.
This is when Trump intervened. He declared the US dollar would trade at a fixed rate against the Argentinian peso, thus effectively setting a floor for the peso’s value. He also spent billions of America dollars buying up the Argentinian peso, buttressing its value.
But that’s not all he did. Trump declared that America’s support for the Argentinan peso was conditioned absolutely on the Argentines voting in favor of Milei’s party at the mid-terms. If the public turned on Milei, Trump would end all support for the country.
He said that if the Argentines chose basket-case socialism again, America would bail out of bailing out Argentina, as Argentina would just be a “waste of our time.”
Milei’s victory was dramatic, although – this being a parliamentary election – his party didn’t reach 50%:
Milei, a key ideological ally of President Trump, said his party and allied blocs picked up 14 seats in the Senate and 64 in the lower house of Congress on Sunday, three seats short of a congressional majority.
“I am the king of a lost world,” Milei exulted as his supporters cheered in downtown Buenos Aires on Sunday. “Today we have passed the turning point. Today we begin the construction of a great Argentina.”
No kings? Ah, well. Make Argentina Great Again. Argentina has been an economic basket case for long enough that the voters decided to take a chance on Milei. He’s had some successes although it hasn’t been smooth sailing:
Milei had spent his first two years in office with a minority in Argentina’s Congress. With his party’s victory on Sunday, he will have more breathing room to carry out his shock therapy agenda with less fear of legislators overriding his vetoes.
Under the new government’s watch, monthly inflation plunged from 12.8% prior to Milei’s inauguration in December 2023 to 2.1% in September of this year.
One thing that especially interests me is the poor predictive value of the polling. As Trump said:
NOTE: I’ve written previously quite a few times about Milei; see these posts.
Open thread 10/27/2025
I know that movies made from true stories are not the same as documentaries …
… but it has long annoyed me when such movies play fast and loose with the truth, especially when the additions are not improvements – which is often the case.
Last night I watched a movie based on a Holocaust memoir I’d read, and I’d also seen the author’s interview with Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation. That’s really why I watched the 2011 movie In Darkness in the first place, because it’s based on that family’s experience hiding in the sewer system of Lvov for over a year.
Krystyna Chiger (later Keren) was only a young child when her family was forced into the Lvov ghetto, and then when the ghetto was liquidated they hid in Lvov’s sewer system where they remained for fourteen months. That’s the story the movie purports to tell, the same story in her book The Girl In the Green Sweater.
But it’s not the same story, although it sticks to the general outlines. Although the movie was one of the Oscar nominees for Best Foreign Language Film (it’s a joint Polish/German/Canadian effort), and also received a whole bunch of awards from European groups, IMHO it’s only about one-tenth the film it could have been, using the same source material. And that left me in a state of frustration at many moments while watching it, yelling at the screen things like, “That didn’t happen!” and “What about [fill in the blank]?”
The writers saw fit to add a bunch of exceptionally dramatic – sometimes cheesy and cliched – scenes that didn’t happen, and left out or minimized many of the most dramatic true events that did happen. They also threw in a host of completely gratuitous sex scenes that added nothing but more cliches.
Just to take one of many examples where the movie played down scenes when the truth would have been far more suspenseful and cinematic, we have the way the Jews managed to get fresh water every day. According to Krystyna’s book, there was a broken pipe that dripped fresh water, but it was several kilometers away from their hiding place and could only be reached by her father (or another of the men) crawling through a narrow pipe, carrying the kettle that would hold the water in his teeth the whole way. Now, we don’t need to see the entire trek, which must have taken a long time. But in the only scene in the movie that refers to the process, we see someone (is he walking or crawling? The scene is so fleeting I don’t remember) for a couple of seconds going to get the water, and to the best of my recollection he was carrying the receptacle in his hands.
That’s it for the water. No drama at all. Why oh why? And this is just one of many instances like this, including the film’s climactic scene – which I won’t describe, in case you want to watch it.
Instead, we have the repetitive sex scenes, and a few made-up action scenes as well as the action scenes that really did happen. The film also skips the main motive of the Polish Catholic man who is most instrumental in helping them – which is that he’s led a fairly dissolute life, wants to go straight, and believes that helping the Jews will save his soul. It’s an exceptionally moving fact – at least, I think so – but the movie leaves it out entirely or in one brief sentence makes a sort of oblique joke out of it.
The title In Darkness makes sense; the sewers were very dark indeed, so dark that when the survivors emerged after fourteen months, their vision was temporarily affected (although the movie shows their vision as blurred when in fact they saw things shifted to red, as though through a red filter). But it makes for a mostly dark movie, and even the scenes shot outside the sewers – and there are quite a few – are somewhat monochrome.
But there would have been a simple remedy for that. Leave out some of the hokey action scenes and the sex scenes, and give us some of the people’s previous life before the Nazis. Introduce them to us as they were before the war, and let us get to know them before they become nearly-indistinguishable from each other in the dark of the sewers. The contrast – which we learn from Krystyna’s book and her interview – was stark, and would have made good cinema. But we get none of that. We first meet these people when they’re about to escape the ghetto and go down to the sewers, and I (who knew pretty much who the actors were supposed to be) still spent at least the first half hour trying to figure out their identities.
Speaking of the characters’ missing backstories, in the film the little girl who plays Krystyna wears the green sweater of the book’s title throughout the film. But it has no significance for us; we never learn that the sweater was knitted by her grandmother. Here’s the actual story, not a bit of which is told in the movie:
The green sweater, which her paternal grandmother knit before the German invasion of Poland, was a treasured object. Two years before, Kristine had watched that beloved grandmother being loaded onto a truck and deported, likely to the nearbyBelzec death camp. When her grandmother had waved goodbye, a Nazi guard had bashed her head with the butt of a rifle.
The sweater was a precious link to prewar love for the child, from a grandparent who’d been cruelly ripped away, and the garment is now in the Holocaust Museum in DC.
And then there was the time element, which is practically ignored in the movie. The movie only discloses at the very end of the film, in titles, that the length of their sewer stay was fourteen months. Why couldn’t the viewers have known that while watching the movie, with some sort of periodic time stamps now and then to let us know how long this was taking? Instead, we have no idea, and it could just as well have been fourteen days or fourteen weeks as fourteen months.
Now that I’ve said all this, I bet it’s not a bad movie if you don’t know the story in advance. But I suggest this video in which the beauteous Krystyna (now Kristine) tells the story, or her book to which I’ve linked above. And yes, she seems to still be alive now, at around ninety years of age. A strong constitution, I guess. The video interview is from 1998, when she was 63 (and as usual, I suggest that if she speaks too slowly for you, you can watch at faster speed by adjusting the settings). It’s long but I think it’s very rewarding:
Giving up on Gaza peace
I see a great deal of current commentary saying that things will never work out in Gaza, that Trump and Netanyahu were foolish to think it would, and that it’s all over there and Hamas has won.
It’s been what – two and a half weeks? – since the deal was announced and the hostages came home, and the Gazans aren’t singing Kumbaya? I would wager that neither Trump nor Netanyahu are surprised by this.
This is what I wrote not long after the hostages came home:
The problem is deeper than these people [the terrorists that were released by Israel in exchange] – much deeper. And any more permanent solution will have to be more comprehensive.
That’s what the larger Plan is all about. You can hear people saying it’s a trap and now Israel has snatched defeat from victory, and you can hear people say it has great promise. I submit that no one knows at this point and so I think that sort of talk is a waste of time. As events play out it will become more clear. Will that take a month, a year, two years, or a decade? I certainly don’t know that, either. But let’s give it a chance. Do we have any choice?
Trump is a hero today, especially in Israel. You can read about that here. He seems to think the war is over, or at least he thinks it’s a good idea right now to accentuate the positive. But he’s a practical man, and knows that it may be necessary to resume military operations at any time.
Israel knows it, too. But today’s a day to celebrate.
Well, that day of celebration is in the past, although the recent past. And the hostages are still home, which means the focus is no longer on them and on making sure they don’t get killed by Israel as Israel battles Hamas.
But for anyone who thought that Hamas wouldn’t violate the ceasefire – well, I want to try to sell them that proverbial bridge. Anyone who thought this would go smoothly – same thing. It seems pretty clear to me that the rest of the Plan will be extraordinarily difficult and will take a very long time even if ultimately successful.
Will the other countries that pledged to help actually help? I very very much wonder. But I repeat that I don’t think either Trump or Netanyahu are naive about this, and I think we don’t know the half of what’s happening and what will happen with these countries behind closed doors.
And I also think that engineering the hostages’ return – getting that done initially rather than later – was one of the main points of the deal. Israel needed a rest, even if it’s a short one. It’s a tiny country that’s been on a war footing for two long years. The “ceasefire” – any ceasefire in the area – should always have scare quotes around it, for the foreseeable future.
After October 7, 2023 – never such innocence again.
As New York goes, so goes Minneapolis
Or is it the other way around?
I’ve never thought to compare those two places before, although they’re both cities. Climate, demographics, location, history, style – all are very very different. But in terms of mayoral races, they sound surprisingly similar, as Bill Glahn points out:
Minneapolis voters (who are 80-90% Democrats) face a Hobson’s choice next month at the ballot box. They could opt for the gradual (though accelerating) decline offered by two-term incumbent Democrat Mayor Jacob Frey. Or they could take the offer of a quick coup de grâce from sitting state Sen. Omar Fateh, another Democrat. …
For reasons I am unable to fathom, the city’s newspaper, The Star Tribune, is out today with its umpteenth puff piece on the youngish (age 35) state senator. …
Reporter Deena Winter writes,
“Over the past five years, the democratic socialist has gone from political unknown to standard bearer for Minneapolis’ ascendant progressive coalition, harnessing disaffection with more moderate Democrats — and with the political process itself — to rack up a series of electoral and legislative wins.”
In his thirties? Check. Democratic socialist? Check. Previously unknown? Check. Suddenly winning? Check. Third-world connections? Check (Fateh is of Somali ethnicity). Muslim? Check.
Fateh has more allegations of fraud than Mamdani, but their policies certainly sound similar:
Fateh says that he will fight Donald Trump on immigration enforcement. On housing, Fateh will begin with rent control and transition to the abolition of private property.
On policing, there will be none. …
He vows to raise many taxes (local income tax, carbon fees, vacancy tax, a “land-value” tax). But the problem here is that you have to tax something, some object (property value, sales, income, wealth, people), of which there soon will be nothing. …
… [O]nce Fateh takes office, the existing cash in the city’s treasury will soon vanish through fraud and scams. His ability to raise new revenue will be stymied by a lack of anything taxable to latch onto. He will then be left pleading for a county/state/federal bailout.
Come to think of it, he sounds even worse than Mamdani, due to possibly more corruption and fraud (see this for allegations against Fateh of voting fraud in initially winning the Democrat nomination for mayor, which was later withdrawn).
And Fateh’s opponent Frey – who was mayor during the Floyd riots and COVID – is not all that dissimilar to Cuomo, although a bit more energetic and considerably younger (44).
Frey is the current mayor of Minneapolis, running for a third term. He’s also Jewish, which makes for a stark contrast with Fateh (Frey also reminds me a bit of Chicago’s ex-mayor, Rham Emanuel, in that not only are they both Jewish but they both have – of all things – a ballet background; Emanuel as a dancer himself and Frey being the child of two professional ballet dancers).
There is no Sliwa figure in Minneapolis, but there are many candidates and the race will be decided by ranked-choice voting. And so we have this situation:
Looking to the 2025 Minneapolis mayoral race, Minnesota Sen. Omar Fateh, Rev. DeWayne Davis and Jazz Hampton have formed a pact to lobby for each other’s second- and third-place votes. Schultz says together they are using ranked-choice voting in an effort to block Mayor Jacob Frey from reelection.
So I think regular polls mean even less than usual there, because of this type of voting. But for what it’s worth, Frey leads in the most recent poll, but both candidates are way below 50% and the poll doesn’t seem to deal with the reality of the ranked-choice situation.
NOTE: Speaking of Mamdani, I watched this video by Ben Shapiro about the NYC race, and in it he said a fascinating thing: that a recent poll revealed that, among foreign-born New Yorkers, Mamdani leads Cuomo 62% to 24%, but among American-born New Yorkers, it’s 40% Cuomo, 32% Mamdani, and 25% Sliwa. It’s worth listening to his remarks on Mamdani in general, and the most recent debate in particular.
Open thread 10/25/2025
Are we seeing the start of an “Ozempic for all” movement?
In yesterday’s post on the expansion of the definition of obesity to include 70% of Americans, I wrote:
Who’s celebrating? The makers of diet drugs and the purveyors of diet programs.
Well, today I saw this article:
The study, published in the Lancet journal and funded by Novo Nordisk, looked at data from 17,604 people aged 45 and over who were overweight and had cardiovascular disease, who were randomly assigned either weekly injections of semaglutide or placebo.
Previous analysis* of this data by the same international team found that semaglutide reduced heart attacks, strokes and other major cardiac events by 20% in this group.
In the new study, the team found that this reduction in major adverse events was similar regardless of participants’ weight at the start of the trial. That is, people only marginally classed as overweight, with a body mass index (BMI) of 27 (the average BMI for adults in the UK), saw similar benefits as those with obesity who had the highest BMIs.
The benefits were also largely independent of how much weight people lost in the first four and a half months of taking the drug. However, the researchers found a link between shrinking waistlines (the reduction in waist circumference) and heart benefits, with this accounting for a third of the drug’s protective effect on the heart after two years.
Google’s AI says “Novo Nordisk is a Danish pharmaceutical company that manufactures and distributes Ozempic, a prescription medication used to treat type 2 diabetes and obesity … an injectable medication containing semaglutide …”
So this study is funded by the manufacturer of the drug. That doesn’t mean the finding is a lie, but it certainly means it should be looked on with caution.
Thing is, these weight-loss drugs also have major side effects. The known ones tend to be GI problems, but often serious enough to cause people to stop the drug even though quite motivated to take it. And even one of the study authors says:
This work has implications for how semaglutide is used in clinical practice. You don’t have to lose a lot of weight and you don’t need a high BMI to gain cardiovascular benefit. If your aim is to reduce cardiovascular disease, restricting its use to a limited time only and for those with the highest BMIs doesn’t make sense.
At the same time, the benefits need to be weighed against potential side effects. Investigations of side effects become especially important given the broad range of people this medicine and others like it could help.
We have no idea what the long-term side effects would be; these drugs are relatively new.
Trump is building a ballroom in the East Wing
Impeach him, I say! Or perhaps sue him for something or other?
And yet now and then on the left there are surprising voices of reason on this, for example Shaun King on X:
I actually think it’s a great idea to build a big ballroom on the White House grounds.
It’s virtually impossible to hold events of any size there and they are always wasting millions on tents and heaters and chairs and lights and everything else.
Stop acting like you have some emotional attachment to the East Wing. You don’t.
Ah, but “acting like” when it’s politically expedient is one of the main tools of the left these days – and although it’s certainly not limited to the left, it is pretty much their stock in trade.
Although no, Obama wasn’t worse, at least not in terms of White House renovations.
Here’s a history of previous White House renovations. Some of them were before my time – actually, most of them were. But did anybody gave a rat’s patootie at the time?
NOTE: I do remember Jackie Kennedy’s renovations of White House decor, and the televised tour she gave. And I remember the intense shock I felt at the time, young though I was, on hearing her breathy almost Marilyn Monroe-ish voice. Here’s an article on her White House changes, and here’s a short clip from the tour: