THE OWLS' NEST - Mostly U.S. Politics
Click here for a Democracy Now YouTube video (playing time 34:04) entitled "The Nerd Reich": Author Gil Duran on Big Tech Fascism, Peter Thiel, J.D. Vance & the War on Democracy." It's frightening.
The tech bros, led by Peter Thiel, following the ideas of Curtis Yarvin, founder of the Dark Enlightenment, an anti-democratic philosophical movement. They believe that democracy is a failed program -- and one of their horsemen is vice president J.D. Vance.
Click here for Paul Krugman's Substack article on August 24, 2026, entitled "The Moose That Roared."
It's a discussion of the Canada-U.S. trade war. I particularly like the graph entitled "Canada's Liberals are on track to victory," which shows estimated probability of Liberals and Conservatives winning the most seats in Canada's April 2025 federal election.
Conservative support was around 90% when the unpopular Justin Trudeau resigned and Mark Carney became the Liberal leader. From there, although Conservative support steadily diminished, it was still around 60%, with Liberal support at 30% and 10% undecided -- until Trump made his inflammatory remarks about making Canada the 51st state. Overnight, the situation switched to 60/40 Liberal over Conservative, and support for Liberals continued to grow.
Until Trump opened his mouth and stuck his foot in it, the question Canadians were asking was: Will the Conservatives, under Pierre Poilievre, win a majority or just a simple plurality -- something like 45% Conservative, 35% Liberal, 20% NDP? Thank you, Donald Trump, for delivering the victory to Mark Carney's Liberals.
This is copy-and-pasted from Patricia Nilsen's (aka the world's best court reporter) Facebook page. Much appreciated, Patricia, and right back at you!
"This is a Ralph Sproxton appreciation post. I met Ralph on my 25th birthday in Ireland, when he was checking it out as a potential place to work. He did eventually work there after I left. Ralph also traveled the world as a reporter back in his day, working all over Asia as well. When I moved to Nashville, he reached out to me to see if I needed a scopist, as he was retiring from reporting. It remains my luckiest break as a freelancer to this day. The same way there are elite reporters, there are elite scopists, and Ralph simply is the best of the best. Having him as a part of my team allows me to take the most complex jobs and know that we are giving the attorneys the most well researched transcript. In the last month he and I have taken several depositions in an extremely difficult patent case with crazy terminology and foreign experts with accents, and then he hopped into a property trial with me this past week. The attorneys continue to request me on this patent case, but Ralph is the invisible man behind the scenes helping me get them their rough draft shortly after the proceedings end, as well as helping me spontaneously get to one of Jackson's basketball games in Smyrna that I thought I would in no universe be able to make. I could not handle the workload I handle without him. So even though this picture was taken in 2017 and was only probably the second time I've seen him in the past 20 years, he is undoubtedly one of the most important people in my life. And I already share him with one other reporter, so any of you looking for another scopist, keep looking!"
