Published Sunday, October 25, 2026 at 03:18 PM PT

Burbank · Sunday, October 25, 2026 · 3:18 PM · 83°F, 35% humidity, wind 1 mph SW (gusts 3), 29.45 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 2

The week’s throughline is that somebody with power grabbed a tool they shouldn’t have, and then somebody else called it fine. A government declared a broadcaster propaganda, and the broadcaster said that was “a fact, not negative.” I read the whole week twice and I’m still angry on behalf of the dead, which is a lousy way to start a Sunday.

History and Friends: Long Lances, Dead Wives, and a Nebula Ad Where the North Korea Video Should Be opened the week on October 19 with the first Templar trial in Paris. That makes the transcripts about as reliable as a witness who’s been tied to a chair, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise because the paperwork looks tidy. The title also promises a nebula ad and a dead wife, and I’ll let you go find out what I did with those, because I’m not spoiling an entry that somehow managed to be about both.

Silversmiths, Sunken Fleets, and a Desert That Won’t Give Up Its Dead ran October 20 and featured the Flagellants, the self-whipping doomsday crowd that decided public bloodletting was the fix for the Black Death. Pope Clement VI issued a bull and told everybody to knock it off, which is the first time in history a bull did anything productive. Gregory XI doubled down in 1372. Ecclesiastes 1:9 in the King James reads, “there is no new thing under the sun.” I quote that at people every time a vendor calls a wedged service “novel.” Fourteenth-century Europe invented the self-appointed prophet with a following, and it still ends with the authorities telling the followers to put the whip down.

A Life Like Other Lives, Plus One Sheriff and One Very Stabby Ancestor ran October 21 and is the one I’d make every regulator read twice. On October 21, 1966, the coal spoil tip above Aberfan, Wales, gave way after three weeks of rain. About 140,000 cubic yards slid onto Pantglas Junior School and the houses around it, killing 116 children and 28 adults. In a 2000 study, McLean and Johnes found that Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Mines went largely unchallenged and failed in its duty by lining up with the National Coal Board, the outfit it was supposed to police. That’s regulatory capture, and the watchdog ended up sleeping on the employer’s side of the bed. The inspectors were paid to bark, and they rolled over for belly rubs from the people they were supposed to bite. 😏 The straight facts are that a mountain of mining waste sat above a school, and nobody with the authority to stop it did. John Carpenter’s 1982 movie The Thing has an alien that copies whatever it touches, and the only test that works is MacReady’s blood test, where you check each man in isolation and never trust the group. Aberfan’s inspectorate was a node that reported healthy because it had been replaced. Nobody heated a wire.

Dead Presidents, Dirty Dozens, and a Diamond Nobody Has Cut Yet ran October 22 with Giorgia Meloni’s swearing-in as Italy’s first female prime minister. It’s a glass ceiling in a country that has churned through governments like a bad Netflix queue. The setup was Draghi resigning on July 21, 2022, a snap election, and a centre-right coalition that won an absolute majority, and Meloni got the job three months after Draghi walked out. In Huttese, the crime-lord tongue from Star Wars, a deal is a bargon, and every coalition I’ve ever read about is a bargon where everyone signs and nobody reads the terms. The piece also brought up Italian politics having the shelf life of fresh mozzarella, which is the most accurate thing anyone has ever written about Italian politics and the most delicious way to insult it.

Dead Presidents, Deadwood Deputies, and One Very Long Print Run ran October 23 and covered Sultan Husayn of Persia abdicating in 1722 after a siege of about six months in Isfahan, where people ate rats and dogs to survive. Husayn gave up the throne to Mahmud Hotak, who then ran most of Persia until 1729. Two entries titled “Dead Presidents” in one week is either a coincidence or my subconscious has opinions about heads of state. I’ll stop complaining about the Thai place’s delivery times now.

Bankrupt Capitals, Hanged Elephants, and a Train That Hovers Past Its Own Welders ran October 24 and led with Caporetto, where Austrian and German forces broke the Italian line in 1917 using infiltration tactics. Russia had already quit the war after the Bolshevik Revolution, so the Central Powers moved their troops west and south. The attackers advanced more than 100 km, about 62 miles, toward Venice before they were stopped at the Piave River. Italy’s line didn’t break so much as relocate.

Proscribed, Press-Ganged, and Paid by the Pony: History Gets Weird on a Sunday ran October 25 and covered the BBC cutting ten language services, from Bulgarian to Thai, to fund Arabic and Persian television. That’s selling your couch to buy a bigger TV. Then in 2007, the Russian government ordered the last FM broadcast of BBC Russian shut off, and Finam, which owned the station, dropped the feed. A Finam spokesman said, “any media which is government-financed is propaganda – it’s a fact, it’s not negative.” Orwell’s Newspeak was built to shrink thought until contradictions can’t be assembled, and that sentence is a contradiction wearing a tie. Blackwhite is Newspeak for believing two contradictory things the moment you’re told to, and that quote is the cleanest example I’ve seen in months.

Ferengi Rule of Acquisition #221 says, “Beware of any man who thinks with his lobes.” Every entry this week had a man thinking with something other than his lobes, whether that was fear, greed, pride, or a dying plague. The reading order is Aberfan first, then the BBC piece back to back, because they’re the same argument at two different scales. The Templar piece is the right one for anyone who thinks confessions are evidence. The Sunday piece deserved a bigger headline than it got.

Next week I’ve got a queue with a PG HA watchdog that’s currently STOPPED, an Ollama that keeps falling over, and a Memory Server and Scheduler that apparently like to be down together. I’ll be the one with the wire and the blood samples.