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The Daily Grind
Good Morning! ☕️ We get to do this! Let’s make Heaven crowded!
Have you ever let guilt or shame keep you from coming to God? Here’s the good news! He sits on a throne of grace, and He’s inviting you to come boldly. Mercy and grace are waiting to help in your time of need!
Don’t run away. Run to Him. Whatever you’ve been carrying today, remember, you can come with confidence! - Pastor Jimmy
West Coast Bible Study · WCBS
The study examined Psalm 132, identifying it as a prayer likely written by Solomon during the dedication of the temple. The psalm reflects on David's role in bringing the Ark to Jerusalem and his desire to build a dwelling place for God, which Solomon fulfilled. The discussion highlighted the temple's central role in Old Testament worship and its typological connection to the New Covenant church as the local assembly where God's people meet with Him.
Read / listen on WCBS · Archive
Source: wcbsdev.albrightnetworks.com
Clallam County Watchdog
Clallam County Watchdog says the Department of Natural Resources' draft Elwha Watershed Study recommends taking about 2,180 acres of working state trust timber out of production, and that its 171 pages never count what that would cost the local districts that live on timber receipts. Public comment on the draft closes at 11:59 p.m. on Friday, November 13, 2026, at wadnr.commentinput.com.
The study answers a $250,000 proviso in the Legislature's 2025 capital budget. DNR was told to inventory ecological and conservation values on the land it manages in the Elwha watershed and identify acres that might become a Natural Area Preserve or a Natural Resource Conservation Area. The Watchdog's point is that nobody asked it to measure what the trust beneficiaries would lose, and the draft does not.
DNR manages about 7,700 acres of trust land in the Elwha, roughly 4 percent of the watershed. About 2,130 acres are Common School Trust, which helps pay for K-12 school construction statewide. About 5,570 acres are State Forest Transfer land managed for Clallam County and the junior taxing districts where the trees stand. The draft itself names the Elwha beneficiaries: County Roads, the Port of Port Angeles, the North Olympic Library District, Hospital District 2 (Olympic Medical), Crescent School District and Fire District 4. It also recites DNR's trustee duty to generate revenue and act with undivided loyalty to those beneficiaries, mainly through sustainable timber harvest.
The Washington Natural Heritage Program wants a new "Elwha Hills Natural Area" of about 2,364 acres in four units: Eden Valley (113 acres, preserve), Dan Kelly Ridge (799 acres, conservation area), Joyce Ridge (1,035 acres, preserve) and Whiskey Creek (417 acres, preserve). About 2,180 of those acres are DNR trust land, roughly 28 percent of what DNR manages in the watershed. Preserves generally bar recreation, and that is the proposed status for about 1,565 acres; mountain biking on the conservation area would be decided only after designation. The draft does document real species, including Taylor's checkerspot butterfly, marbled murrelet, northern spotted owl, rare plants and lichens, a state-endangered grassland and a state-threatened dry-forest type. The Watchdog grants that, but argues science can describe a hillside without excusing a missing bill.
The money is real. The county treasurer's 2024 Tax and Timber Report shows DNR timber distributions of $10,029,286.98 countywide in 2023. The six Elwha beneficiaries got $2,358,128.61 that year: County Roads $1,015,535.24, the library district $382,725.61, Crescent schools $315,089.73, Hospital District 2 $310,628.45, Fire District 4 $194,657.73 and the Port $139,491.85. From 2018 to 2023, countywide distributions averaged about $5.92 million a year, and DNR's 2025 fourth-quarter report showed $9,551,558 accrued for the county in 2025 with another $11.49 million under contract. The piece is careful that these are countywide figures, that Elwha transfer land is about 6 percent of the county's transfer base, and that DNR never says how many of the 2,180 acres are county transfer land versus school trust. Its complaint is that DNR declined to estimate lost board feet, stumpage or levy support, so nobody can put an honest dollar figure on the proposal. Once designated and acquired, those acres stop producing timber checks, and a Trust Land Transfer payment would be a one-time appropriation rather than a renewable stream.
Jobs are the other half. A 2024 Port of Port Angeles presentation cited 1,904 timber-dependent jobs in Clallam in 2023, about $117 million in labor income, including 878 direct jobs averaging $84,331. The Forks Forum reported that the August 2024 McKinley Mill closure cost nearly 500 direct and indirect jobs. DNR's public survey drew more than 1,200 responses, 44 percent from mountain bikers, with trust beneficiaries and junior taxing districts each under 1.5 percent.
The report covers only the first three of seven steps. Next come a recommendation to the Natural Heritage Advisory Council, a Clallam County public meeting and a decision by Commissioner of Public Lands Dave Upthegrove, followed by applications for Trust Land Transfer or state wildlife and recreation grants to buy the land from the trusts "if funds are awarded." The Watchdog notes that an August 2026 advocacy report from Earth Economics, the Elwha Legacy Forests Coalition and allied groups sought a much larger lockup, that the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe got an exclusive two-week preview from October 16 to November 2, and that the posted draft's tribal and public comment sections are still blank. About 41 percent of the proposed boundary, 1,233 acres, sits outside the Elwha watershed the Legislature asked about, and part of Whiskey Creek has not been surveyed. The recommendation goes to the Legislature by December 1, and the Watchdog urges readers to comment before Friday night that the economic chapter is missing.
Source: ccwatchdog.com
9to5Mac
If you’re having problems accessing iCloud and other Apple services this evening, you’re not alone. Apple has confirmed an ongoing outage affecting iCloud, Find My, and more.
Source: 9to5Mac
Brian Roemmele Report
Brian Roemmele ties a 1988 NASA idea to a new long-context language model and argues that the useful question is whether a model's working memory stays a fixed size as the text gets longer.
The 1988 idea is Pentti Kanerva's Sparse Distributed Memory, published that year by MIT Press from work at NASA Ames Research Center under contract NCC2-408. Kanerva wanted a memory that could take a long, slightly messy cue and still find what was stored, while the hardware stayed the same size. His design uses long binary addresses and builds only a sparse sample of possible locations, called hard locations. A write goes into every location within a set Hamming distance (the count of differing bits) of the cue. A read lets those nearby locations vote, so a close cue is enough. Kanerva's 1993 chapter shows the memory building a clean prototype from nine noisy copies of a pattern, and walking a stored sequence forward from a noisy cue. A February 1988 Stanford report, filed as NASA-CR-184554, describes a buildable prototype using ordinary dynamic RAM, 256-bit addresses and words, and 8K to 128K locations. The table of chips stays fixed and only the set of things it can recall grows.
The modern half is "Muir," a November 5, 2026 arXiv preprint (2611.08376) by Tushaar Gangavarapu of UT Austin and Google with Gil Tabak and Clemens JS Schaefer of Google. A standard Transformer keeps a key-value cache that grows with every token it reads, and at some length that cache is what runs out of memory. Linear-attention models instead compress what they have read into a fixed-size state. Muir builds on the Gated DeltaNet-2 line with three changes. It merges the erase and write gates into a thinner low-rank projection and spends the savings on a 30.4 percent wider feed-forward layer. It adds a "matched-filter readout" that re-weights the state so slow-fading channels, which the authors measured at more than 100 times the energy of fast ones, don't drown out faint traces from far back in the text. And it uses a chunked JAX kernel for stable training on TPUs.
The authors trained models from 166 million to 1.34 billion parameters on 100 billion FineWeb-Edu tokens with a 4,096-token training length. They report that the 1.34-billion model reads continuous 10,485,760-token streams, 2,560 times its training length, in a 25 MB float32 state with no perplexity drift. Roemmele checks the 25 MB against the architecture: 24 layers times 16 heads times a 128-by-128 state times 4 bytes is 25,165,824 bytes. By comparison, a same-shape Transformer's bfloat16 cache at that length would be about 2.06 TB, which the authors round to 2.1 TB. Muir also lowers perplexity 1.8 to 2.0 percent against GDN-2 and 2.5 to 3.6 percent against a same-size Transformer, and trains 2.74 times faster than the Transformer at 32,000 tokens.
He is careful about the labels. The paper is a preprint, not peer reviewed, and he found no public weights on GitHub or Hugging Face as of the morning of November 10. The flat 8.11 perplexity at 10 million tokens equals the score when the state is reset every 64,000 tokens, so on its own it doesn't prove the model uses the whole stream as one memory. The near-perfect passkey retrieval belongs to a static-readout variant (90.0 percent at 1 million tokens zero-shot, 99.4 percent after extra training). The full dynamic model finds the passkey 85.6 percent of the time at 32,000 tokens but only 12.5 percent at 1 million. He says the two variants should not be mixed into one headline.
The practical case is for people who run models at home or in a small shop, where a growing cache eventually pushes the job off the machine. A working state that stays the same size at 4,000 tokens and at 10 million changes that planning. Roemmele includes a small Python and NumPy script, "The Fixed Desk," that builds a toy sparse distributed memory and compares Muir's constant state with a Transformer cache at lengths up to 10 million tokens. On his machine the toy recovered a 12-bit-error cue with 4 errors and walked a six-step sequence exactly. He stresses that it doesn't run Muir.
He closes with a "Kanerva's Desk" SuperPrompt that keeps a short running list of key facts, open questions and pointers, erasing old facts before writing replacements. He also gives two checks before trusting any long-context claim. The first asks whether working memory grows with each page. The second hides a unique fact early in a long document and asks for it at the end. A not-financial-advice opportunity map follows.
Source: brianroemmele.substack.com
Clallam County Watchdog
Neighbors spoke. The Hearing Examiner imposed limits. The developer sued. Now Clallam County is telling a judge that residents’ sworn testimony matters: “This is evidence.” On November 12, the fight over Grouse Glen’s resort proposal moves into Superior Court.
Check your ballot status here. Read how to cure a challenged ballot here.
The Resort That Didn’t Get Everything It WantedWhen CC Watchdog published “Smoke and Mirrors” on February 10, the question was straightforward: What happens when a developer proposes a sizable resort in the middle of a quiet rural neighborhood?
Thanks to Heather Cantua, who shared the court filings and provided this update, we now know the next chapter. The resort received approval—but not on the developer’s preferred terms. Those restrictions are now being challenged in court.
Grouse Glen sits off Highway 101 between Forks and Lake Crescent. The neighborhood consists of 23 five-acre parcels, many with homes, reached by a single private gravel road maintained by residents.
Luminary Resorts, through 9999GrouseGlen LLC, purchased roughly 21 forested acres in the middle of that neighborhood, with the shared road running through the property.
The original proposal called for 32 mirrored cabins, saunas, pickleball courts, a 4,800-square-foot community center, and a 50-space overflow parking lot. The community center could accommodate weddings and events of up to 122 people. The original layout included eight vehicle connections to the road residents use to get home.
Four Conditions the Developer Wants GoneResidents testified at the February hearing about the road, fire and emergency response, wells, rural character, and elk moving through the property.
On March 4, the Hearing Examiner approved the conditional use permit with 23 conditions. Four are at the center of this appeal:
20 cabins instead of 32.
An operating season of April 1 through September 30, rather than year-round use.
No mirrored or reflective cabin exteriors.
A community center limited to registered cabin guests, rather than a public event venue.
The distinction matters. The County did not reject the resort. It approved a smaller, seasonal project with restrictions intended to address its surroundings.
The developer wants those four limits removed.
“This Is Evidence”The company challenged the decision under Washington’s Land Use Petition Act in Clallam County Superior Court.
Its petition argues that the disputed conditions exceed the County’s authority and amount to unconstitutional demands on the project.
Lupa 26 2 00261 05 Petition 2026 03 243.37MB ∙ PDF fileDownloadDownloadIn short, the developer contends that the restrictions lack the required legal justification.
The County disagrees.
In its October 23 response brief, Clallam County defends all four conditions and asks the court to dismiss the petition with prejudice.
Brief 10 29 2026 12585KB ∙ PDF fileDownloadDownloadOne passage deserves particular attention. Defending the seasonal restriction, the County emphasizes that nineteen witnesses testified under oath about specific facts they had observed. Its blunt conclusion: “This is evidence.”
The brief also cites Cantua’s testimony about winter storms in the Sol Duc Valley.
For residents wondering whether showing up accomplishes anything, there is your answer. Their testimony became part of the record. It helped support permit conditions. And now the County is relying on it in court.
That does not guarantee the conditions will survive. It does show that public participation was more than a box checked before approval.
The November 12 HearingAccording to Cantua’s update, the hearing is scheduled for Thursday, November 12, at 2:30 p.m., before Judge Simon Barnhart at the Clallam County Courthouse.
The hearing is open to the public. It is a court proceeding to hear the parties’ arguments, not a public-comment session.
The published remote-access information for Superior Court Courtroom II lists Zoom meeting ID 968-5772-2818, with passcode 12345. Confirm the hearing time, courtroom assignment, and remote-access instructions with the court before attending; calendars can change.
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” — Margaret Mead
Approval Is Not a Blank CheckThis dispute is not about whether a property owner received permission to build a resort. That permission was granted.
It is about whether the conditions attached to that permission will stand.
The neighbors presented facts about where they live. The Hearing Examiner imposed limits. The developer challenged them. Now a judge will decide whether those limits hold up under the law.
Credit to Heather Cantua for continuing to follow the case, sharing the filings, and bringing this update to CC Watchdog.
Stay Engaged This WeekYour property. Your county. Your chance to speak.
On Tuesday, November 10, at 10:30 a.m., commissioners will continue the public hearing on the ordinance and resolution concerning Clallam County’s Comprehensive Plan and zoning amendments. They are still taking public comment.
Why show up?
Protect private property rights. Broad planning policies lay the groundwork for future restrictions on where and how residents build and use their land. Ask what new restrictions these policies could support.
Question optional additions. The Climate Vulnerability Assessment (CVA) is recommended by the state Department of Commerce, not specifically required by the Growth Management Act. Recommended is not mandatory. Commissioners should explain why they are adopting it and how it could influence future regulations.
Insist on equal treatment. Ask whether policies identifying and prioritizing particular communities could lead to preferences based on race—and what safeguards ensure every resident is treated fairly.
Attend at the Commissioners’ Meeting Room, Clallam County Courthouse, 223 E. Fourth Street, Port Angeles, or participate virtually. See the agenda and attendance instructions.
Don’t wait until a broad policy becomes a restriction on your property. Ask the questions now, while public comment is still open.f
Source: ccwatchdog.com
The Verge
As espionage targets go, Jensen Huang is perhaps one of the least surprising on Earth. The Nvidia CEO runs one of the world's most valuable companies, controls the in-demand technology fueling the AI boom, and is cozy with presidents, CEOs, and all manner of important people. He also wears a cool leather jacket.
Which makes Huang's admission that he had an affair with a woman suspected of being a Chinese spy - reportedly while her spying was known to US intelligence and even President Donald Trump - all the more shocking. The fallout goes well beyond his marriage, his reputation, or Nvidia itself. Experts tell The Verge the incident threate…
Source: The Verge
Clallamity Jen
Happy New Week!
Today’s important number: 12,731.
That’s the number of uncounted accepted ballots in Clallam County at the end of day on Monday, November 9th. Counted ballots are now at 48%, up from 45% on Friday evening.
That’s also enough ballots to make a difference in the local races. So, it still isn’t over.
It is an improvement from the nearly 16,000 uncounted accepted ballots on Friday, but the process is dragging out longer than necessary. Meanwhile, the majority of counties in the state are getting ballots counted and not keeping their voters waiting on results. The majority isn’t everyone though; there are a few stragglers along with Clallam.
Clallam has now moved into the #2 position in my top 5 ranking — and that’s nothing to brag about.
Top 5 Counties with Uncounted Accepted Ballots as of 11/9/26:
1. King = 22,514
2. Clallam = 12,731
3. Thurston = 11,131
4. Walla Walla = 10,568
5. Stevens = 10,346
Walla Walla and Stevens moved up from 6th and 7th while Spokane and Skagit dropped out of the running. Good job to them; maybe Clallam will join them someday.
Returned and accepted ballots in Clallam are both in the 69% range, so they haven’t increased much.
Challenged ballots have dropped down to 337. Please check your ballot status here or here. Certification is on November 24th and ballots are accepted until November 23rd.
Here’s my latest video going over the numbers. I also review the West End Voter website again along with the county’s Agendas and Minutes website so people know where to find meeting information for past and future meetings.
[https://substackcdn.com/image/youtube/w_728,c_limit/l_youtube_play_qyqt8q,w_120/17gUJ9fSM7w]
Resource Links:
* West End Voter data website: An independent, nonpartisan look at ballot returns, counting progress and precinct-level results, focused on the West End of Clallam County, Washington.
* Clallam County Meetings Agendas & Minutes (where to find all county meeting events, including Board of Commissioner meetings, along with agendas, minutes, and videos of past meetings)
* Clallam County Elections & Voter Registration (includes Auditor contact information and elections center livestream link)
* Clallam County 2026 November General Election (includes information about resolving challenged signatures)
* Clallam County Unofficial Results Election Statistics (updated once a day around 5pm)
* Washington State Ballot Return Statistics (updated once a day around 5pm):
I’ll review the end-of-day data again on Tuesday night.
Have a great day, everyone!
Clallamity Jen
Source: clallamityjen.substack.com
Letters from an American
Since Democrats' sweeping midterm victories on Tuesday, Heather Cox Richardson writes, President Trump has been posting increasingly provocative material on social media, apparently to pull attention away from the winners and back to himself. Underneath the noise, she argues, are signs that he is deeply worried about anyone getting a look at how his administration has operated.
On Saturday Trump claimed Democrats are "threatening a lot of people…just because they happen to be Republicans," called their promised investigations crimes in themselves, and said he is ordering the Justice Department to investigate. He insisted "there have been no impeachable acts committed, or even thought of," called the Democrats "SLEAZEBAGS" who "should go to jail," and urged the Senate to "act" before Republicans lose more elections "and worse." Richardson reads that "worse" as fear that a House impeachment could this time end in Senate conviction. In Alaska, where Democrat Mary Peltola leads, Trump added Republican Dan Sullivan's votes to those of every other non-Peltola candidate and declared, "Dan Sullivan WON, BY A LOT!" Her verdict: "It feels desperate."
She cites a Washington Post report by Perry Stein and Jeremy Roebuck that congressional Democrats are already staffing the committees they will lead in January, hiring from the large pool of career prosecutors fired from or driven out of the Justice Department during Trump's second term. She quotes a social media user: Trump "purged DOJ to bury the evidence and instead handed Congress a staff of people who know exactly where everything is filed… It just changed employers."
Attorney General Todd Blanche, she says, seemed rattled on CNN on Sunday. Asked by Dana Bash what crime Democrats commit by promising oversight, he couldn't name one; asked whether Democrats should be jailed, he said it depended on what they had done; and he played down the department's cases against Trump's perceived enemies as a few among thousands. Richardson's core point is that accountability is not revenge. It is fundamental to the rule of law.
Most of the letter is history showing what happens when accountability is skipped. After Appomattox in 1865, Ulysses S. Grant let Confederate soldiers go home on a promise not to fight again, a humane and practical act since the South was starving. Andrew Johnson then pardoned all but about 1,500 Confederate leaders for partisan reasons. Never held to account, they recast Grant's mercy as proof their cause was right. By 1871 former Confederate secretary of state Robert Toombs was being quoted in northern papers urging property requirements to keep poor and Black men from voting. Within a decade the "Lost Cause" myth had whitewashed a slaveholders' rebellion into a stand against federal overreach, and it carried racism forward for more than a century, down to the Confederate flags carried into the Capitol in 2021.
She traces the same pattern after Gerald Ford's preemptive pardon of Richard Nixon. Even though the 1915 Burdick decision held that accepting a pardon implies guilt, Nixon never took responsibility, blamed the press, and told David Frost in 1977, "When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal." Next came Iran-Contra, where Reagan aides sold marked-up arms to Iran and secretly funded the Contras, and the Reagan-era Office of Legal Counsel's "unitary executive" theory. William Barr, who as OLC head in 1989 warned against "legislative encroachments" on presidential power, later backed George H.W. Bush's pardons of eleven Iran-Contra officials. Independent counsel Lawrence Walsh warned that those pardons showed "powerful people with powerful allies can commit serious crimes in high office… without consequences."
Barr later served as Trump's first-term attorney general. After Trump was indicted on 40 counts over classified documents and four over the 2020 election, the Supreme Court ruled on July 1, 2024, in Trump v. United States, that presidents have immunity for official acts. Richardson says that ruling shattered the principle that no one is above the law, and that Trump has since used it to turn the government on his enemies. Now that investigations may reach conduct outside official duties, he is trying to persuade Americans that enforcing the law is a partisan attack.
Her conclusion is that it is the opposite: the true rule of law is nonpartisan and is the founding principle of American government. She closes with Thomas Paine's Common Sense: "in America the law is king… and there ought to be no other."
Cliff Mass Weather Blog · Sun Nov 8, 2026 · 6:12 PM PT
Yesterday, a strong front, associated with strong winds gusting to 40 mph or more, moved through the region, resulting in numerous power outages.
As I will describe below, numerical weather models predicted this event with great skill, something we could not have done 20 years ago.
This is a triumph of modern weather prediction technology.
Let me demonstrate this to you.
Below is the radar image around 4 PM Saturday, based on the radar observations from the Langley Hill radar near Hoquium. An intense radar return was apparent offshore (the thin yellow and red line, indicated by the red arrow). This is the front.
Fronts associated with a narrow, cold frontal rainband were first described by UW researchers, such as Professor Peter Hobbs and associates.
Even more impressive is a video of the cold front approaching the coast (from a wonderful phone app called RadarScope).
Here is a forecast of a simulated radar image, made 24 hours (from 4 PM) before the event is shown below. It was made by the UW WRF model run by my group.
Almost perfect. Very strong simulated front.
A forecast made on Thursday evening, showing the strongest near-surface wind gusts, indicating strong winds over the region. Strong enough to worry about.
The winds for Seattle made for Seattle City Light as part of the UW WindWatch system were clearly accurate, showing the threat of strong wind (the black dots are the strongest observed with the city; the gray and colored lines indicate model forecasts)
The models were very, very clear.
There was a prediction of 30-45 mph winds over the city. And that means power outages, particularly early in the storm season.
Such an emphatic forecast by the models was the reason I blogged about it on Friday, making it clear that some would lose power.
In fact, over 100,000 customers lost power over western Washington last night (see below).
This kind of skillful forecasting occurs time and time again, based on highly skillful weather model forecasts.
Another reminder that it is no longer appropriate to make fun of forecasters and weather models. 😀
No longer appropriate
Source: Cliff Mass Weather Blog
Cliff Mass Weather Blog · Fri Nov 6, 2026 · 8:35 PM PT
Most weather fronts that cross the region are unremarkable due to their passage over the relatively warm, uniform waters of the northeast Pacific.
This weekend will be different: a SuperFront will make landfall late tomorrow (Saturday).
Some of you will lose power.
Let me show you simulated radar images for three times: 10 AM, 4 PM, and 9 PM on Saturday from the UW high-resolution forecast system (from the 4-km grid-spacing domain). Red indicates very strong winds, followed by yellow. The arrows point to the frontal locations.
The high-resolution 1.3 km simulation run by my group at the UW produced an even more intense front (forecast around 8 PM shown). Very impressive.
What about the predicted winds?
The City of Seattle supports the most high-tech wind prediction system in the country (called SeattleWindWatch, run at the UW), which includes an ensemble of many wind predictions for estimation of the uncertainties.
The forecast below is for the winds over Seattle. Several of the simulations predicted winds reaching 40 mph. Over the water, winds could be stronger,
Winds will rev up after dinnertime and peak overnight.
As noted above, wind will be strongest over the water (see forecast below for 4 AM). I suspect most of the power outages will be in such areas.
For the whole region, the strongest winds will be on the coast (see map of strongest wind gusts below). Importantly, there will be areas of intense gusts on the lee/downstream side of some of our highest terrain, including the eastern slopes of the Cascades.
In addition to wind, the front should bring substantial ( and welcome) precipitation to the region, with the total through 4 AM Sunday shown below
So, if you live west of the Cascades, get your meteorological popcorn out and be prepared for a dramatic meteorological show later tomorrow and early Sunday.
Source: Cliff Mass Weather Blog
Cliff Mass Weather Blog · Thu Nov 5, 2026 · 9:41 PM PT
This weekend, we will "enjoy" the meteorological trifecta of winds, coastal waves, and substantial precipitation.
The forecast sea level pressure for Sunday at 10 AM predicts a strong 994 hPa low center to west of the Washington coast.
Such strong winds over a large area (large fetch) will produce large waves that will reach our coast later this weekend (see below). These waves will climb to 45 feet offshore and over 20 feet on our coast.
As the low moves northward up the coast on Saturday and Sunday morning, wind gusts will increase along the Washington coast and over the western Washington interior
The forecast gusts at 4 AM Sunday are shown below. Strong gusts (50 kt and more) on the coast; 30- 45-knot gusts in the interior, particularly near the water.
The UW runs perhaps the most sophisticated wind prediction system in the country for Seattle City Light (called WindWatch), and it is predicting 40 mph gusts in Seattle on Saturday night and early Sunday. (see below)
As the first major blow of the season, with lots of vegetative growth over the summer, there will be power outages.
My "pro-tip": charge up your electronics and lights on Saturday. You won't regret it.
Finally, there is the wet part of the upcoming weather.
Below is the predicted precipitation accumulation through Monday at 4 AM. Very wet in the Olympics and the northern Cascades. Plenty elsewhere. Reservoirs will begin to fill.
This is just the beginning of the wet/stormy season in the Northwest, with a lot more on the way. Typical November conditions, and there is no going back.
Source: Cliff Mass Weather Blog
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9to5Mac
If you’re having problems accessing iCloud and other Apple services this evening, you’re not alone. Apple has confirmed an ongoing outage affecting iCloud, Find My, and more.
Source: 9to5Mac
MacRumors
Apple's Claris subsidiary is testing an app called Harbor , which turns Apple silicon Macs into a private AI server.
Harbor works with a single Apple silicon Mac, but it also supports connecting multiple Mac computers over Thunderbolt 5 to pool unified memory for larger models. Apple added RDMA over Thunderbolt 5 with macOS Tahoe 26.2, making clustering faster.
Harbor detects devices connected over Thunderbolt 5 and lets users browse for, download, and load open-weight models. It's described as an easy-to-use app with no manual configuration required.
Harbor turns your Mac into a private AI inference server. Run open-weight models locally on Apple silicon—your data never leaves your hardware, and nothing reaches the cloud. Connect multiple Mac computers over Thunderbolt 5 to pool unified memory, enabling large models and higher concurrency than a single computer can handle alone.
Set up in minutes, not hours. Harbor automatically detects your devices over Thunderbolt 5 to form a cluster. Plug in, start, and you're running—no manual configuration, no command line, no infrastructure expertise required.
Download and run models directly. Browse, download, and load…
Source: MacRumors
9to5Mac
iFixit published its teardown of the new MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display today, revealing interesting details about how Apple brought back its illuminated logo on the lid. Watch it below.
Source: 9to5Mac
The Verge
Oura announced its quarterly earnings today and said it agreed to acquire Counsel Health for $625 million, after adding the company's AI chatbot to its app earlier this year . Counsel Health calls itself an "AI-native primary care company," using the app to deliver AI-generated responses and insights based on users' health data reported from their wearables that can then proceed to a conversation with one of its in-house physicians.
Oura says it expects the deal to close before the end of the year.
Oura CEO Tom Hale said in an interview with Bloomberg that the acquisition is part of a plan to connect wearables, clinical AI, and access to do…
Source: The Verge
9to5Mac
Reuters reports that three contract workers died after inhaling gas during an inspection at a Tata Electronics factory that produces iPhone components in India. Here are the details.
Source: 9to5Mac
9to5Mac
Spotify today expanded customization options for its AI DJ, allowing users to choose between different voices and personalities, as well as control how much the DJ talks between songs. Here are the details.
Source: 9to5Mac
The Verge
SpaceX announced a new version of its all-in-one satellite internet terminal that integrates a dish, Wi-Fi router, and now a battery into a single device about the size of a laptop. According to some users on X who shared screenshots of invitations to order Starlink Mini 2, the dish is priced at $999, which includes a full year of Roam Unlimited service that SpaceX values at $2,100.
The Starlink Mini 2 will run for up to 4.5 hours on a full charge, SpaceX claims, but that can be expanded by hot-swapping in additional batteries that will be sold separately, or by connecting the dish to a 60W power source over USB-C.
Despite the addition of…
Source: The Verge
The Verge
As espionage targets go, Jensen Huang is perhaps one of the least surprising on Earth. The Nvidia CEO runs one of the world's most valuable companies, controls the in-demand technology fueling the AI boom, and is cozy with presidents, CEOs, and all manner of important people. He also wears a cool leather jacket.
Which makes Huang's admission that he had an affair with a woman suspected of being a Chinese spy - reportedly while her spying was known to US intelligence and even President Donald Trump - all the more shocking. The fallout goes well beyond his marriage, his reputation, or Nvidia itself. Experts tell The Verge the incident threate…
Source: The Verge
MacRumors
Apple today announced the Swift Student Challenge for 2027 , with submissions set to be accepted from February 8 to February 28, 2027.
The Swift Student Challenge is an annual contest that gives young developers worldwide a chance to show off their creativity and app development skills by creating an app. Apple says students should submit an app built in Xcode or Swift Playground that can be experienced within three minutes.
Students can submit an app for any platform this year, which is new. In prior years, apps were designed for iOS devices.
Ahead of the contest, Apple is offering students tutorials and Meet with Apple online sessions to learn new coding intelligence features and get inspiration for their projects. There are also Develop in Swift tutorials covering Swift UI, AI and machine learning, and spatial computing.
Apple will select winners who "demonstrate excellence in innovation, creativity, social impact, or inclusivity." A group of Distinguished Winners will be invited to Apple Park in Cupertino, California to attend Apple's WWDC 2027 event. Rules and eligibility details can be found on the Swift Student Challenge website .
Apple hasn't announced dates…
Source: MacRumors
Tuesday Evening (pm-e1): NEW Front lead Clallam County Watchdog on DNR’s Elwha draft (2,180 acres of trust timber; public comment closes 11:59 PM Friday Nov 13) and Brian Roemmele’s Forgotten 1988 NASA Design (both as hand summaries of long posts). NEW WCBS Psalm 132. NEW tech: Apple iCloud outage, Claris Harbor local-AI app, Oura buys Counsel Health, Starlink Mini 2. Markets and Robin show Tuesday’s close. Built from Substack RSS before the Outlook evening email dump (no new YouTube briefings yet). Carried: Grind Run To Him Not From Him; election tracker on the Front (and at /election/); Smoke and Mirrors; Clallamity Jen; Cliff Mass Forecast Triumph.
ChannelE2E
A business can recover its files after a cyberattack and still be unable to operate if employees can't sign in or critical AI applications remain offline. That's the problem Dell Technologies is addressing with an expansion of its cybersecurity and recovery portfolio. Announced recently, the new capabilities focus on three increasingly connected risks: securing AI environments, restoring compromised identity systems and strengthening infrastructure recovery. The announcement raises an important question: Do customers' existing disaster recovery plans cover the systems they now depend on to run their businesses?
Among the additions are new PowerProtect capabilities that help organizations restore Active Directory, Microsoft Entra ID and Okta to a clean, trusted state following an attack. Dell also introduced 24/7 managed detection and response for identity threats, including suspicious authentication activity and privilege misuse. For AI environments, new security hardening and resilience services help organizations identify configuration risks, prioritize critical workloads and establish recovery procedures. An expanded PowerProtect AI Assistant uses conversational AI and proactive risk reporting to support recovery operations while keeping people involved in approving actions. Dell also announced tighter integration between PowerProtect and PowerScale for snapshot-based recovery, along with quantum-ready encryption and assessment capabilities.
For MSPs, the opportunity is to expand conversations about backup and recovery into broader business resilience planning. A customer may have reliable data backups but lack a tested process for restoring its identity infrastructure or recovering the AI systems that support daily operations. Providers can review those dependencies, identify recovery gaps and develop services around identity protection, incident readiness and recovery testing. Dell's new offerings provide additional tools for addressing those requirements, although some capabilities are rolling out through December. As customers become more dependent on interconnected systems, the value of a recovery strategy increasingly depends on restoring business operations, not simply recovering data.
Source: channele2e.com
Brian Roemmele Report
Brian Roemmele ties a 1988 NASA idea to a new long-context language model and argues that the useful question is whether a model's working memory stays a fixed size as the text gets longer.
The 1988 idea is Pentti Kanerva's Sparse Distributed Memory, published that year by MIT Press from work at NASA Ames Research Center under contract NCC2-408. Kanerva wanted a memory that could take a long, slightly messy cue and still find what was stored, while the hardware stayed the same size. His design uses long binary addresses and builds only a sparse sample of possible locations, called hard locations. A write goes into every location within a set Hamming distance (the count of differing bits) of the cue. A read lets those nearby locations vote, so a close cue is enough. Kanerva's 1993 chapter shows the memory building a clean prototype from nine noisy copies of a pattern, and walking a stored sequence forward from a noisy cue. A February 1988 Stanford report, filed as NASA-CR-184554, describes a buildable prototype using ordinary dynamic RAM, 256-bit addresses and words, and 8K to 128K locations. The table of chips stays fixed and only the set of things it can recall grows.
The modern half is "Muir," a November 5, 2026 arXiv preprint (2611.08376) by Tushaar Gangavarapu of UT Austin and Google with Gil Tabak and Clemens JS Schaefer of Google. A standard Transformer keeps a key-value cache that grows with every token it reads, and at some length that cache is what runs out of memory. Linear-attention models instead compress what they have read into a fixed-size state. Muir builds on the Gated DeltaNet-2 line with three changes. It merges the erase and write gates into a thinner low-rank projection and spends the savings on a 30.4 percent wider feed-forward layer. It adds a "matched-filter readout" that re-weights the state so slow-fading channels, which the authors measured at more than 100 times the energy of fast ones, don't drown out faint traces from far back in the text. And it uses a chunked JAX kernel for stable training on TPUs.
The authors trained models from 166 million to 1.34 billion parameters on 100 billion FineWeb-Edu tokens with a 4,096-token training length. They report that the 1.34-billion model reads continuous 10,485,760-token streams, 2,560 times its training length, in a 25 MB float32 state with no perplexity drift. Roemmele checks the 25 MB against the architecture: 24 layers times 16 heads times a 128-by-128 state times 4 bytes is 25,165,824 bytes. By comparison, a same-shape Transformer's bfloat16 cache at that length would be about 2.06 TB, which the authors round to 2.1 TB. Muir also lowers perplexity 1.8 to 2.0 percent against GDN-2 and 2.5 to 3.6 percent against a same-size Transformer, and trains 2.74 times faster than the Transformer at 32,000 tokens.
He is careful about the labels. The paper is a preprint, not peer reviewed, and he found no public weights on GitHub or Hugging Face as of the morning of November 10. The flat 8.11 perplexity at 10 million tokens equals the score when the state is reset every 64,000 tokens, so on its own it doesn't prove the model uses the whole stream as one memory. The near-perfect passkey retrieval belongs to a static-readout variant (90.0 percent at 1 million tokens zero-shot, 99.4 percent after extra training). The full dynamic model finds the passkey 85.6 percent of the time at 32,000 tokens but only 12.5 percent at 1 million. He says the two variants should not be mixed into one headline.
The practical case is for people who run models at home or in a small shop, where a growing cache eventually pushes the job off the machine. A working state that stays the same size at 4,000 tokens and at 10 million changes that planning. Roemmele includes a small Python and NumPy script, "The Fixed Desk," that builds a toy sparse distributed memory and compares Muir's constant state with a Transformer cache at lengths up to 10 million tokens. On his machine the toy recovered a 12-bit-error cue with 4 errors and walked a six-step sequence exactly. He stresses that it doesn't run Muir.
He closes with a "Kanerva's Desk" SuperPrompt that keeps a short running list of key facts, open questions and pointers, erasing old facts before writing replacements. He also gives two checks before trusting any long-context claim. The first asks whether working memory grows with each page. The second hides a unique fact early in a long document and asks for it at the end. A not-financial-advice opportunity map follows.
Source: brianroemmele.substack.com
Letters from an American
Since Democrats' sweeping midterm victories on Tuesday, Heather Cox Richardson writes, President Trump has been posting increasingly provocative material on social media, apparently to pull attention away from the winners and back to himself. Underneath the noise, she argues, are signs that he is deeply worried about anyone getting a look at how his administration has operated.
On Saturday Trump claimed Democrats are "threatening a lot of people…just because they happen to be Republicans," called their promised investigations crimes in themselves, and said he is ordering the Justice Department to investigate. He insisted "there have been no impeachable acts committed, or even thought of," called the Democrats "SLEAZEBAGS" who "should go to jail," and urged the Senate to "act" before Republicans lose more elections "and worse." Richardson reads that "worse" as fear that a House impeachment could this time end in Senate conviction. In Alaska, where Democrat Mary Peltola leads, Trump added Republican Dan Sullivan's votes to those of every other non-Peltola candidate and declared, "Dan Sullivan WON, BY A LOT!" Her verdict: "It feels desperate."
She cites a Washington Post report by Perry Stein and Jeremy Roebuck that congressional Democrats are already staffing the committees they will lead in January, hiring from the large pool of career prosecutors fired from or driven out of the Justice Department during Trump's second term. She quotes a social media user: Trump "purged DOJ to bury the evidence and instead handed Congress a staff of people who know exactly where everything is filed… It just changed employers."
Attorney General Todd Blanche, she says, seemed rattled on CNN on Sunday. Asked by Dana Bash what crime Democrats commit by promising oversight, he couldn't name one; asked whether Democrats should be jailed, he said it depended on what they had done; and he played down the department's cases against Trump's perceived enemies as a few among thousands. Richardson's core point is that accountability is not revenge. It is fundamental to the rule of law.
Most of the letter is history showing what happens when accountability is skipped. After Appomattox in 1865, Ulysses S. Grant let Confederate soldiers go home on a promise not to fight again, a humane and practical act since the South was starving. Andrew Johnson then pardoned all but about 1,500 Confederate leaders for partisan reasons. Never held to account, they recast Grant's mercy as proof their cause was right. By 1871 former Confederate secretary of state Robert Toombs was being quoted in northern papers urging property requirements to keep poor and Black men from voting. Within a decade the "Lost Cause" myth had whitewashed a slaveholders' rebellion into a stand against federal overreach, and it carried racism forward for more than a century, down to the Confederate flags carried into the Capitol in 2021.
She traces the same pattern after Gerald Ford's preemptive pardon of Richard Nixon. Even though the 1915 Burdick decision held that accepting a pardon implies guilt, Nixon never took responsibility, blamed the press, and told David Frost in 1977, "When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal." Next came Iran-Contra, where Reagan aides sold marked-up arms to Iran and secretly funded the Contras, and the Reagan-era Office of Legal Counsel's "unitary executive" theory. William Barr, who as OLC head in 1989 warned against "legislative encroachments" on presidential power, later backed George H.W. Bush's pardons of eleven Iran-Contra officials. Independent counsel Lawrence Walsh warned that those pardons showed "powerful people with powerful allies can commit serious crimes in high office… without consequences."
Barr later served as Trump's first-term attorney general. After Trump was indicted on 40 counts over classified documents and four over the 2020 election, the Supreme Court ruled on July 1, 2024, in Trump v. United States, that presidents have immunity for official acts. Richardson says that ruling shattered the principle that no one is above the law, and that Trump has since used it to turn the government on his enemies. Now that investigations may reach conduct outside official duties, he is trying to persuade Americans that enforcing the law is a partisan attack.
Her conclusion is that it is the opposite: the true rule of law is nonpartisan and is the founding principle of American government. She closes with Thomas Paine's Common Sense: "in America the law is king… and there ought to be no other."
Christian Warrior Training
Bottom Line Up Front: Christian Warrior Training’s Keith Graves reports that Islamic State media is again pushing lone-actor attacks on churches and Christians — al-Naba issue 571 praised the October 23 funeral attack on St. George’s Greek Orthodox Church in Hmoud, Jordan (nine dead) and urged Muslim youth to copy it wherever they are, while a new English IS-linked magazine, “Invade,” also advocates lone attacks. Four Islamic State and Hizballah cases moved through U.S. federal court in California, Nevada, New York and Tennessee, and a Utah man was indicted after posts about bombing a synagogue and seizures that prosecutors say included six pipe bombs. Reader SARs came in from churches in New Mexico and Nevada. In Chicago a man is charged with attacking a firefighter outside a church after churchgoers called 911. A Pelzer, South Carolina pastor was arrested on six child-sex charges, and a former Pensacola police officer who worked contracted church security faces child-abuse-material and voyeurism counts. Louisiana charged a man with arson at a Caddo Parish Baptist church, and in Mexico a Catholic priest was held and tortured for three days before release.
The title case — and the pattern Graves wants teams to drill — is Greenville, Mississippi: police named Jeremiah Jackson, 20, as the suspect after a worshipper at a church on South Colorado Street was asked to step outside around 12:30 p.m. on Sunday, September 27, and was shot. Jackson is wanted for aggravated assault and was still not in custody when the post went out. Graves’s point is blunt: treating an unexpected outdoor summons during or after service as a high-risk cue, and keeping coverage on exits and the parking lot, is how you stop “called outside and shot” from becoming a weekly script.
On the terrorism side, federal pleas and verdicts keep stacking. Ammaad Akhtar, 34, of Stockton pleaded guilty to attempting to provide material support to the Islamic State after handing an undercover agent cash, guns and gear and swearing allegiance. Joshua Robles, 19, of North Las Vegas pleaded guilty after investigators say he collected IED materials, kept a high-school floor plan and wrote about “lone wolf operations.” A Brooklyn jury convicted Halima Salman of receiving IS military-type training in Syria. Regan Darby Prater of Tullahoma, Tennessee drew 210 months for attempting to support Hizballah and for a napalm arson that did more than $1.2 million in damage, after prosecutors say he passed personal data on more than 35,000 people he believed were tied to the Israeli government. Separately, Skyler AJ Rose of Ogden, Utah was indicted on hate-crime and explosive charges after posts about bombing a synagogue, and Florida arrested Jerry Sneed of Orlando over alleged threats against a Jewish residential community. Europol also said units from 16 countries referred more than 9,000 links tied to terrorist role-play and recruiting inside online games.
Suspicious-activity reports from readers: in Carlsbad, New Mexico, a man let in through locked doors appeared to count worshippers, then fled a dark tan Ford Expedition when a safety team member walked toward him; in Reno, a man scanned the congregation and backed out just before the offering. Violent crime beyond Greenville includes Lamar Brown’s arrest outside True Light Baptist in Chicago’s Grand Crossing after he allegedly attacked a firefighter, a naked-man burglary and battery case near a St. Francisville, Louisiana church hall, and a North Charleston crash into Grace City Church after police say the driver drove toward two people with a child in the car.
Sex-crime and trust cases this week: Pelzer pastor Tracy Gordon Black faces six child-sex charges after defending a registered sex offender’s role in a park ministry; former Pensacola officer Matthew Baxter, who worked contracted security at Echo Life Church, faces child-abuse-material, voyeurism and related counts. Arson: Billy Van St. Andry is charged in the October 18 fire at Arkadelphia Baptist Church in Caddo Parish. A 10-year-old boy was killed in Murfreesboro crossing the road from a Coptic church to retrieve a soccer ball.
Internationally, Fr. Clemente Morales Topete of Culiacán was abducted, beaten and burned over three days before release; Christian Solidarity Worldwide Nigeria said 17 of 37 worshippers abducted from Kaduna churches on Easter Sunday died in captivity; a mob attacked a Church of North India dedication in West Bengal; and Northern Ireland police are investigating a reported assault on Archbishop John McDowell after a funeral. Domestically, Grand Chute, Wisconsin police active-threat training at Pathways Church sparked false active-shooter rumors because the public was not notified in advance — Graves’s reminder to keep force-on-force inside and to warn neighbors.
Paid CWT downloads this week include the printable Weekly Church Crime Watch PDF and a Holiday Threat Calendar covering November 9 through January 7. Graves’s standing advice for U.S. teams: train for lone actors, treat “step outside” summons as a threat cue, staff lots and doors, and do not assume the first responding unit will immediately control the scene.
Source: christianwarriortraining.com
Substack
Jeff Miller’s argument is simple: if you have an article in you, you probably have a book in you too. He makes the case with a hypothetical about Delilah, whose friendships keep fading, then turns that story into a five-step framework for expanding one hard-won lesson into a manuscript.
Delilah cannot reach her friend Betty. Calls go unanswered; texts sit on read. She takes the snub to her pastor, who is also a licensed therapist, and tells him the same thing keeps happening: a friendship is going well until the other person pulls away. Betty had cancelled lunch twice because her mother was sick. Delilah took it personally and sent a long message about how she always seemed to care more than Betty did. Betty never replied.
The pastor asks about the friend before Betty. That was Carla, who got engaged and suddenly had less time; Delilah told her she was being replaced, and Carla stopped calling. Before Carla was Monique, a college roommate who forgot Delilah’s birthday; Delilah did not speak to her for a month, and they never really recovered. Pastor Jung suggests that Delilah’s default is to expect more from her friends than they are capable of. She says friends should show up. He agrees they should, then asks whether she needs them to show up in a way no one can.
That question takes a few sessions. They talk about her father, who left when she was nine and kept promising to visit — some weekends he came, most he did not — and about Delilah sitting by the front window with her bag packed, waiting. They talk about her mother, who worked two jobs and was too tired to notice much. Delilah learned early that if she wanted to be loved she had to hold on tight, and that if someone let go even a little, it meant they were leaving. When Betty cancels lunch, the pastor says, part of her is nine years old again, sitting by the window. Delilah had never seen it that way.
He offers a distinction that becomes the article’s thesis. Love and trust are not the same thing. Love is something you give. Trust is something you lean your weight on. You can love people deeply without putting your whole weight on them, because only God can hold that much weight. He reads John 2:24–25, where Jesus does not entrust himself to the crowds because he knows what is in people. Delilah bristles at first — Jesus didn’t trust people? — but as she reads the Gospels she notices that he loved anyway: Peter, who denied him; Judas, whose feet he washed. He could love that freely because he was leaning on his Father, not on them.
She wrestles with God about it for weeks, afraid that if she stops needing people she will end up alone. Slowly she sees a different shape: she does not have to stop loving people; she has to stop asking them to be God for her. She sends Betty a short text apologizing for the long message and asking about her mother. Two days later Betty calls, and they talk for an hour. It does not fix everything overnight, but Delilah feels lighter. She is not waiting by the window anymore.
She writes the lesson down, then shapes it into a church-blog article, “Trusting God with Your Relationships.” The big idea is one sentence: I can love people fully because my trust rests in God, not in them. Leadership posts it, and it strikes a nerve. People stop her in the hallway — “That was me with my sister.” “That was me with my husband.” “How do I forgive a friend who isn’t even sorry?” Every one of those questions, she realizes, is a chapter. She has a book. The remaining problem is how to turn one article into about 200 pages.
Miller then turns back to the reader with the Heart to Page framework he uses with clients, in five steps. First, know what is on your heart: the thing you learned the hard way that could change someone else’s life. Delilah did not have to look far; she lived it. Second, know your reader — not “everyone,” but one person. For her it is the woman in the hallway who keeps getting hurt by the people she loves most. Third, write a core thesis: one sentence that is strong, clear, and transformational. Delilah already had hers. Fourth, make the reader a promise. The thesis is what you believe; the promise is what the reader gets: by the end of this book, you will be able to love the people in your life without needing them to be perfect.
Fifth, map the journey. The reader is the hero; the writer is the guide. Miller’s preferred map is the hero’s journey from Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, which he first learned to use for nonfiction from A.J. Harper’s Write a Must-Read. Each stage can be a chapter or two: ordinary life; the call to a better way; refusal of the call; meeting the mentor; crossing the threshold; tests, allies, and enemies (the hallway questions, each as a chapter); the ordeal (facing the nine-year-old by the window); the reward (a first win, like the text to Betty); the road back; resurrection; and return with the elixir.
For each stage he asks three questions: What is my reader going through here? What will I give them? How should they be different before the next stage? Answer those, he writes, and you have an outline — which is how one article becomes 200 pages. Delilah’s story can be chapter one; the writer’s own story belongs in there somewhere too. If you have an article in you, he concludes, you have a book in you.
Source: Substack
Clallamity Jen
Happy New Week!
Today’s important number: 12,731.
That’s the number of uncounted accepted ballots in Clallam County at the end of day on Monday, November 9th. Counted ballots are now at 48%, up from 45% on Friday evening.
That’s also enough ballots to make a difference in the local races. So, it still isn’t over.
It is an improvement from the nearly 16,000 uncounted accepted ballots on Friday, but the process is dragging out longer than necessary. Meanwhile, the majority of counties in the state are getting ballots counted and not keeping their voters waiting on results. The majority isn’t everyone though; there are a few stragglers along with Clallam.
Clallam has now moved into the #2 position in my top 5 ranking — and that’s nothing to brag about.
Top 5 Counties with Uncounted Accepted Ballots as of 11/9/26:
1. King = 22,514
2. Clallam = 12,731
3. Thurston = 11,131
4. Walla Walla = 10,568
5. Stevens = 10,346
Walla Walla and Stevens moved up from 6th and 7th while Spokane and Skagit dropped out of the running. Good job to them; maybe Clallam will join them someday.
Returned and accepted ballots in Clallam are both in the 69% range, so they haven’t increased much.
Challenged ballots have dropped down to 337. Please check your ballot status here or here. Certification is on November 24th and ballots are accepted until November 23rd.
Here’s my latest video going over the numbers. I also review the West End Voter website again along with the county’s Agendas and Minutes website so people know where to find meeting information for past and future meetings.
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Resource Links:
* West End Voter data website: An independent, nonpartisan look at ballot returns, counting progress and precinct-level results, focused on the West End of Clallam County, Washington.
* Clallam County Meetings Agendas & Minutes (where to find all county meeting events, including Board of Commissioner meetings, along with agendas, minutes, and videos of past meetings)
* Clallam County Elections & Voter Registration (includes Auditor contact information and elections center livestream link)
* Clallam County 2026 November General Election (includes information about resolving challenged signatures)
* Clallam County Unofficial Results Election Statistics (updated once a day around 5pm)
* Washington State Ballot Return Statistics (updated once a day around 5pm):
I’ll review the end-of-day data again on Tuesday night.
Have a great day, everyone!
Clallamity Jen
Source: clallamityjen.substack.com
Clallam County Watchdog
Clallam County Watchdog says the Department of Natural Resources' draft Elwha Watershed Study recommends taking about 2,180 acres of working state trust timber out of production, and that its 171 pages never count what that would cost the local districts that live on timber receipts. Public comment on the draft closes at 11:59 p.m. on Friday, November 13, 2026, at wadnr.commentinput.com.
The study answers a $250,000 proviso in the Legislature's 2025 capital budget. DNR was told to inventory ecological and conservation values on the land it manages in the Elwha watershed and identify acres that might become a Natural Area Preserve or a Natural Resource Conservation Area. The Watchdog's point is that nobody asked it to measure what the trust beneficiaries would lose, and the draft does not.
DNR manages about 7,700 acres of trust land in the Elwha, roughly 4 percent of the watershed. About 2,130 acres are Common School Trust, which helps pay for K-12 school construction statewide. About 5,570 acres are State Forest Transfer land managed for Clallam County and the junior taxing districts where the trees stand. The draft itself names the Elwha beneficiaries: County Roads, the Port of Port Angeles, the North Olympic Library District, Hospital District 2 (Olympic Medical), Crescent School District and Fire District 4. It also recites DNR's trustee duty to generate revenue and act with undivided loyalty to those beneficiaries, mainly through sustainable timber harvest.
The Washington Natural Heritage Program wants a new "Elwha Hills Natural Area" of about 2,364 acres in four units: Eden Valley (113 acres, preserve), Dan Kelly Ridge (799 acres, conservation area), Joyce Ridge (1,035 acres, preserve) and Whiskey Creek (417 acres, preserve). About 2,180 of those acres are DNR trust land, roughly 28 percent of what DNR manages in the watershed. Preserves generally bar recreation, and that is the proposed status for about 1,565 acres; mountain biking on the conservation area would be decided only after designation. The draft does document real species, including Taylor's checkerspot butterfly, marbled murrelet, northern spotted owl, rare plants and lichens, a state-endangered grassland and a state-threatened dry-forest type. The Watchdog grants that, but argues science can describe a hillside without excusing a missing bill.
The money is real. The county treasurer's 2024 Tax and Timber Report shows DNR timber distributions of $10,029,286.98 countywide in 2023. The six Elwha beneficiaries got $2,358,128.61 that year: County Roads $1,015,535.24, the library district $382,725.61, Crescent schools $315,089.73, Hospital District 2 $310,628.45, Fire District 4 $194,657.73 and the Port $139,491.85. From 2018 to 2023, countywide distributions averaged about $5.92 million a year, and DNR's 2025 fourth-quarter report showed $9,551,558 accrued for the county in 2025 with another $11.49 million under contract. The piece is careful that these are countywide figures, that Elwha transfer land is about 6 percent of the county's transfer base, and that DNR never says how many of the 2,180 acres are county transfer land versus school trust. Its complaint is that DNR declined to estimate lost board feet, stumpage or levy support, so nobody can put an honest dollar figure on the proposal. Once designated and acquired, those acres stop producing timber checks, and a Trust Land Transfer payment would be a one-time appropriation rather than a renewable stream.
Jobs are the other half. A 2024 Port of Port Angeles presentation cited 1,904 timber-dependent jobs in Clallam in 2023, about $117 million in labor income, including 878 direct jobs averaging $84,331. The Forks Forum reported that the August 2024 McKinley Mill closure cost nearly 500 direct and indirect jobs. DNR's public survey drew more than 1,200 responses, 44 percent from mountain bikers, with trust beneficiaries and junior taxing districts each under 1.5 percent.
The report covers only the first three of seven steps. Next come a recommendation to the Natural Heritage Advisory Council, a Clallam County public meeting and a decision by Commissioner of Public Lands Dave Upthegrove, followed by applications for Trust Land Transfer or state wildlife and recreation grants to buy the land from the trusts "if funds are awarded." The Watchdog notes that an August 2026 advocacy report from Earth Economics, the Elwha Legacy Forests Coalition and allied groups sought a much larger lockup, that the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe got an exclusive two-week preview from October 16 to November 2, and that the posted draft's tribal and public comment sections are still blank. About 41 percent of the proposed boundary, 1,233 acres, sits outside the Elwha watershed the Legislature asked about, and part of Whiskey Creek has not been surveyed. The recommendation goes to the Legislature by December 1, and the Watchdog urges readers to comment before Friday night that the economic chapter is missing.
Source: ccwatchdog.com
Clallam County Watchdog
Neighbors spoke. The Hearing Examiner imposed limits. The developer sued. Now Clallam County is telling a judge that residents’ sworn testimony matters: “This is evidence.” On November 12, the fight over Grouse Glen’s resort proposal moves into Superior Court.
Check your ballot status here. Read how to cure a challenged ballot here.
The Resort That Didn’t Get Everything It WantedWhen CC Watchdog published “Smoke and Mirrors” on February 10, the question was straightforward: What happens when a developer proposes a sizable resort in the middle of a quiet rural neighborhood?
Thanks to Heather Cantua, who shared the court filings and provided this update, we now know the next chapter. The resort received approval—but not on the developer’s preferred terms. Those restrictions are now being challenged in court.
Grouse Glen sits off Highway 101 between Forks and Lake Crescent. The neighborhood consists of 23 five-acre parcels, many with homes, reached by a single private gravel road maintained by residents.
Luminary Resorts, through 9999GrouseGlen LLC, purchased roughly 21 forested acres in the middle of that neighborhood, with the shared road running through the property.
The original proposal called for 32 mirrored cabins, saunas, pickleball courts, a 4,800-square-foot community center, and a 50-space overflow parking lot. The community center could accommodate weddings and events of up to 122 people. The original layout included eight vehicle connections to the road residents use to get home.
Four Conditions the Developer Wants GoneResidents testified at the February hearing about the road, fire and emergency response, wells, rural character, and elk moving through the property.
On March 4, the Hearing Examiner approved the conditional use permit with 23 conditions. Four are at the center of this appeal:
20 cabins instead of 32.
An operating season of April 1 through September 30, rather than year-round use.
No mirrored or reflective cabin exteriors.
A community center limited to registered cabin guests, rather than a public event venue.
The distinction matters. The County did not reject the resort. It approved a smaller, seasonal project with restrictions intended to address its surroundings.
The developer wants those four limits removed.
“This Is Evidence”The company challenged the decision under Washington’s Land Use Petition Act in Clallam County Superior Court.
Its petition argues that the disputed conditions exceed the County’s authority and amount to unconstitutional demands on the project.
Lupa 26 2 00261 05 Petition 2026 03 243.37MB ∙ PDF fileDownloadDownloadIn short, the developer contends that the restrictions lack the required legal justification.
The County disagrees.
In its October 23 response brief, Clallam County defends all four conditions and asks the court to dismiss the petition with prejudice.
Brief 10 29 2026 12585KB ∙ PDF fileDownloadDownloadOne passage deserves particular attention. Defending the seasonal restriction, the County emphasizes that nineteen witnesses testified under oath about specific facts they had observed. Its blunt conclusion: “This is evidence.”
The brief also cites Cantua’s testimony about winter storms in the Sol Duc Valley.
For residents wondering whether showing up accomplishes anything, there is your answer. Their testimony became part of the record. It helped support permit conditions. And now the County is relying on it in court.
That does not guarantee the conditions will survive. It does show that public participation was more than a box checked before approval.
The November 12 HearingAccording to Cantua’s update, the hearing is scheduled for Thursday, November 12, at 2:30 p.m., before Judge Simon Barnhart at the Clallam County Courthouse.
The hearing is open to the public. It is a court proceeding to hear the parties’ arguments, not a public-comment session.
The published remote-access information for Superior Court Courtroom II lists Zoom meeting ID 968-5772-2818, with passcode 12345. Confirm the hearing time, courtroom assignment, and remote-access instructions with the court before attending; calendars can change.
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” — Margaret Mead
Approval Is Not a Blank CheckThis dispute is not about whether a property owner received permission to build a resort. That permission was granted.
It is about whether the conditions attached to that permission will stand.
The neighbors presented facts about where they live. The Hearing Examiner imposed limits. The developer challenged them. Now a judge will decide whether those limits hold up under the law.
Credit to Heather Cantua for continuing to follow the case, sharing the filings, and bringing this update to CC Watchdog.
Stay Engaged This WeekYour property. Your county. Your chance to speak.
On Tuesday, November 10, at 10:30 a.m., commissioners will continue the public hearing on the ordinance and resolution concerning Clallam County’s Comprehensive Plan and zoning amendments. They are still taking public comment.
Why show up?
Protect private property rights. Broad planning policies lay the groundwork for future restrictions on where and how residents build and use their land. Ask what new restrictions these policies could support.
Question optional additions. The Climate Vulnerability Assessment (CVA) is recommended by the state Department of Commerce, not specifically required by the Growth Management Act. Recommended is not mandatory. Commissioners should explain why they are adopting it and how it could influence future regulations.
Insist on equal treatment. Ask whether policies identifying and prioritizing particular communities could lead to preferences based on race—and what safeguards ensure every resident is treated fairly.
Attend at the Commissioners’ Meeting Room, Clallam County Courthouse, 223 E. Fourth Street, Port Angeles, or participate virtually. See the agenda and attendance instructions.
Don’t wait until a broad policy becomes a restriction on your property. Ask the questions now, while public comment is still open.f
Source: ccwatchdog.com
The Patriot Post and AIER (The Daily Economy) — last 48 hours. Kept off the Front Page by request.
The Patriot Post
Full text · 1000 words
First things first: Pete Hegseth is facing impeachment not because he committed “high Crimes and Misdemeanors” but because all the Democrats’ wives have a secret crush on him.
Oh, sure, Hegseth is the most visible face of the administration’s engagement in what can reasonably be called an unpopular war, but the real reason they want Hegseth’s scalp is that he represents most everything today’s Democrats are insecure about. Hegseth embodies youth, strength, vigor, intelligence, conviction, toughness, presence, patriotism, and honorable military service. Name a single DC Democrat who brings those attributes to the Georgetown cocktail scene.
The eight articles of impeachment were brought yesterday by outgoing Kentucky Congressman Thomas Massie, an odd DC duck who used to caucus with the Republicans but who has, over time, morphed from principled Libertarian to Trump-deranged sore loser, a guy whose schtick ultimately grew old among his rock-ribbed Kentucky constituents, who sent him packing during primary season.
As the Washington Examiner reports , “Most of the eight articles outline Hegseth’s actions on recent military operations in Iran, Yemen, and Venezuela without prior congressional authorization. They argue that the secretary’s usurping of Congress’s will, as outlined in the War Powers Resolution of 1973, amounts to high crimes and misdemeanors.”
There’s a kitchen-sinkiness to these articles, though, as evidenced by one that focuses on the lethal and highly effective boat strikes conducted against Central- and South American drug runners, and by another that focuses on Hegseth’s ostensible mistreatment of Scummy Six Seditionist Mark Kelly, the Democrat senator and former Navy pilot who defiled himself and his military branch by participating in Michigan Senator Elissa Slotkin’s despicable “illegal orders” psy-op video aimed at our warriors and our intelligence services.
This bouillabaisse of charges also reveals some disingenuousness in Massie’s rationale for having brought the articles. “The best target is Pete Hegseth,” as he put it yesterday near the steps of the Capitol. “One of the things that I really want out of this is to litigate whether Congress has war powers or not. Like, this is, I’ve got Republican colleagues who know I’m right on this.”
Like, if he really just wanted to litigate the War Powers Act, he would’ve delivered a more focused series of articles rather than going all Groucho Marx on us.
I’ll say this about Massie, though: He’s persistent. Massie first introduced these articles of impeachment back in September, but they didn’t get a vote at the time. Now, having become the darling of the Democrats, he thinks the time is right to drop an impeachment stink bomb before skedaddling out of town.
The Democrats are deeply grateful to Massie for having drawn up the articles because it lets them present the impeachment as a bipartisan effort. But it’ll only be truly bipartisan if Republican get all weak and wobbly — which I wouldn’t put past too many of them right now. As for the Democrats, I suspect they’ll bring the whole Signal snafu into evidence against Hegseth, if only to bloody him up a bit more.
The House is expected to take up Massie’s impeachment vote this afternoon, but a defiant Hegseth wasn’t about to just sit back and watch. Instead, the war secretary, who is one of Donald Trump’s most compelling communicators, held his first Pentagon presser in more than six months. Said Hegseth:
What one disgruntled and defeated congressman is attempting is not oversight. And it’s not accountability. It’s a political spectacle. ... It’s a farce, and it’s a stunt. And everybody knows it. ... No secretary of war or secretary of defense has ever been impeached for carrying out lawful military operations. And in our case, successful ones. ... None of these are high crimes or misdemeanors. They’re partisan policy disagreements from people who want to politicize our military. We will not apologize for putting American lives first. We will not apologize for stopping the flow of drugs that kill our citizens. We will not apologize for destroying the capabilities of a regime that chants, “Death to America.”
As Fox News’s Lucas Tomlinson noted, “Ahead of Veterans Day, Hegseth called the resolutions dishonorable to those serving in harm’s way and a message that their service was a crime.” Holding the White House to account for its overly optimistic prediction about the war, Tomlinson added, “The White House said at the beginning of the war it would last only four to six weeks, and it has now stretched for nearly nine months.”
Tomlinson asked the secretary if he agreed with Vice President JD Vance’s assessment that Iran was the reason for the Republicans’ drubbing on Election Day. Hegseth said he didn’t want to engage in any finger-pointing. Good for him. What the Democrats most want right now is for the Republicans to splinter into every-man-for-himself backbiting.
Still, as National Review’s Andrew McCarthy notes, there’s a good chance that one or more of these articles will be approved, if for no other reason than the Republicans’ razor-thin margins in the House. He writes , “In September, Speaker Mike Johnson (R., La.) adjourned the House early, in large part, to prevent Massie from forcing the Hegseth vote. And that was before last week’s midterm wipeout that has many Republicans enraged, including MAGA Republicans who blame the Iran war for the party’s demolition. Many of them see Hegseth, reportedly a strong war advocate, as the main culprit.”
McCarthy, though, also notes that the Framers put all executive power in the hands of a single individual, a president, so schlepping off responsibility to a subordinate is a dodge if that subordinate was simply carrying out the administration’s lawful policy.
“We’ve seen this show before,” Hegseth said. “They impeached President Trump over a perfect phone call. They impeached him again in his final weekend in office. Both times they failed. Both times he came back stronger. And the American people sent him back to the White House. Now they’re trying a third time, this time against a member of his cabinet. They will fail again.”
The Patriot Post
Full text · 816 words
In Sunday’s “60 Minutes” interview, which I covered yesterday , President Donald Trump and his interviewer, Ross Douthat, used the word “deal” 35 times. The word “amnesty” was used zero times. Yet that’s the word now flooding the Internet as people digest what Trump said about immigration.
So what got everyone all worked up about amnesty?
As I detailed yesterday, Trump evaluated his immigration work, saying he “got an A+ for closing up the border” and “very high marks for getting the bad ones out.” But he also admitted, “I get hurt because ... there’s a large group of people [who] think that [landscapers and hotel workers] should be allowed to stay.”
Backing up to what prompted that comment, Douthat asked the president, “What is one thing you would like to work with a Democratic majority on?”
Immigration, answered Trump. “The deal would be we would work something out,” he explained. “Get the killers out. ... Get the rapists out. Get all the rough ones out. Get the drug dealers out. But let the people that are here, and in some cases here for 10 and 15 years, work a deal for them, okay?”
“Some kind of legal status?” asked Douthat. “Yeah...” Trump responded.
Republican voters are used to this sort of talk being code for amnesty, so that’s where the conversation went. Many on the Right were apoplectic .
Amnesty is certainly where Florida Republican Representative Maria Salazar took things, though without using the word. “Well done, Mr. President!” she excitedly posted on X . “What you described on 60 Minutes is what the Dignity Act is all about.” The Dignity Act is effectively amnesty .
Note: Eight of the bill’s GOP cosponsors lost last Tuesday .
Amnesty was never part of Trump’s platform or appeal. It’s not what anyone who voted for him in 2024 expected. In fact, he promised “the largest deportation operation in the history of our country,” which almost by definition means it wouldn’t stop with “the worst of the worst.”
Still, while the visceral reaction to ICE was indeed strong (as Democrats planned and hoped), Trump has not been nearly as tough as he could have been. Since January 2025, there have been an estimated 1.2 million formal deportations, though self-deportations more than double that. His administration hasn’t done widespread workplace enforcement, so most landscapers and maids have been able to stay.
You could certainly argue that’s de facto amnesty.
That’s also a concession to practical and political reality. As I noted yesterday, most Americans hold a contradictory position on immigration. They think we needed to close the border but not do anything to the millions of people who crossed illegally. Stop committing the crime of illegally crossing the border , they say, but don’t deport anybody who already committed that crime .
Americans generally view this as compassion, but it invites border chaos — and other crimes, like tax evasion and identity theft. Sanctuary jurisdictions are far worse , deliberately protecting even violent criminals at the expense of law-abiding Americans.
Perhaps Trump knew he stepped in it because, at a press conference on Monday, he insisted , “There’s no amnesty, no, no anything.”
As usual, this all depends on how you define amnesty.
“My policy hasn’t changed,” Trump added. That’s likely true because he just elevated immigration hardliner Stephen Miller to be chief of staff .
But his administration has also softened its rhetoric. DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin said on Monday, “If we want to have an immigration reform where we can look at DACA and figure out a way that these individuals can become maybe legal permanent citizens or something like this, that’ll be up to Congress to do that. I’ll be open to talk to anything.”
He added, “Amnesty is never going to be a solution. We’re never gonna allow amnesty to happen.”
What does he call “legal permanent citizens”?
Indeed, this is exactly what’s so exasperating about the amnesty conversation. Every Republican knows “amnesty” is a toxic word, so they avoid it and insist their policy won’t be that. But then they talk of deals and limited enforcement that... are amnesty.
In any case, Democrats are unlikely to make a deal with Trump. “There’s not going to be any opportunity, certainly, to work with Stephen Miller and what he represents,” declared soon-to-be Democrat House Speaker Hakeem Jeffries. “We’re committed to forcefully pushing back against the extremism that they may try to continue to unleash on the American people.”
Speaking of unleashing extremism, here’s the Democratic Socialists of America platform : “End ICE detention and deportations and punish federal agents’ brutality. Legalize migration, grant amnesty for all immigrants regardless of status, provide a path to citizenship for all permanent residents, and end visa caps and quotas.”
Meanwhile, another migrant caravan is headed for the border , and all four border states will have Democrat governors in January.
The Patriot Post
Full text · 566 words
On Friday, Susie Wiles wrote on her X account, “Today is my last day as White House Chief of Staff.” That same day, President Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social, “I am pleased to announce that Mr. Stephen Miller, the current Deputy Chief of Staff of the Trump Administration, and one of my most trusted advisors, will become the Chief of Staff starting Monday.”
Wiles, regarded as cool under pressure, had been lauded in her position as chief of staff. However, Friday’s abrupt staffing change has the public speculating. Did Wiles’s recent bout of breast cancer cause her to reevaluate her role in politics and yearn for a less flashy position so that she can spend more time with family? Or was she simply the scapegoat?
Unfortunately, Wiles failed to do her job. In January 2025, shortly after she was announced as Trump’s chief of staff (she had been his 2024 campaign manager), I wrote , “Now that the Trump team is about to transition into the White House, Wiles’s goals remain unchanged. On the campaign trail, her job was to help package Trump’s vision for the country and present it to voters. Now, as chief of staff, that remains her goal.” Wiles didn’t sell Trump’s vision and the importance of a conservative majority to the country, and it cost us the midterms.
Wiles is not the only person at fault, of course. However, she was a logical scapegoat for the blue tsunami. Even so, Trump — while praising her work — failed to explain his reasoning for the personnel rearrangement. “I think Susie’s done a very good job, great job,” he said . “But I just wanted to make [a change]. Stephen’s been great, and we got to make moves. Sometimes in life you have to make moves.”
Miller’s appointment sends a status quo signal not just to voters but to colleagues in Washington, DC. Miller is not a popular figure among Democrats or even among some Republicans since he fervently supports hardline immigration policy and sweeping deportations.
“There’s not going to be any opportunity, certainly, to work with Stephen Miller and what he represents,” declared soon-to-be Democrat Speaker of the House Hakeem Jeffries. “And we’re committed to forcefully pushing back against the extremism that they may try to continue to unleash on the American people.”
Even Indiana Republican Representative Marlin Stutzman said Miller is “not liked out here in the Midwest.”
Miller is seen as the voice in the White House egging on tougher ICE enforcement measures, which were a big issue for voters (particularly Latinos) in the midterms. Many have regarded the scope of this administration’s immigration policy as going “too far.” Trump even admitted as much on Sunday, saying in a “60 Minutes” interview, “I think it was too tough.” He continued, “For getting people out, I get very high marks for getting the bad ones out. But I get hurt because we also took people who had good jobs, who created one violation, or breaking the law, and that was that they came into the country illegally.”
Miller, like Trump, is a pugilist. Whichever way Trump decides to turn (or not turn) on his agenda, both will continue to fight with the dogged ruthlessness that has earned them many enemies. Let’s hope Miller’s ability to communicate fiercely will resonate and accomplish good work. Otherwise, it will be a long two years.
The Patriot Post
Full text · 645 words
Last week’s blue tsunami could cause party disagreements in the new Democrat congressional majority. Some even wonder whether those divisions could fuel an internal civil war for control of the party.
The most prominent Democrat victory of the midterms came in Michigan, where Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed easily overcame Republican Mike Rogers in a race many had considered a toss-up.
Following his victory, El-Sayed gloated , “JD [Vance], there is this delicious irony in the fact that you’re constitutionally obligated to swear me in.”
While El-Sayed is not technically a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), for all intents and purposes, he is one — and with apologies to Bernie Sanders, he may arguably be the most radical leftist to ever hold the office of U.S. senator.
Also celebrating was the co-chair of the DSA’s national political committee, Ashik Siddique, who heralded the victories of eight DSA candidates in House races as just the latest evidence of the Marxist group’s continued rise to power.
“Democratic Socialists of America are building an enduring organization that can lead an enduring movement,” Siddique crowed. “We’re now seeing DSA candidates win reelection to second or third terms across the country. We ran more candidates in this cycle than ever before. I think there were at least 200 candidates at many levels of government, from local up to Congress. So we’re really leading the conversation and helping to shift public opinion on a wide range of issues.”
He further noted how a number of the DSA’s platform issues, like abolishing ICE, an anti-Israel agenda, and Medicare for All, have seemingly become mainstream issues for Democrats.
Siddique expressed confidence that this hard-left ideology would only continue in Washington, even if there is some pushback from establishment Democrats. He pointed to the staying power of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the increasing numbers of DSA-aligned representatives to bolster his conviction.
In many ways, he is not wrong. DSA candidates have certainly been punching above their weight in recent elections. A party that numbered just 6,000 members in 2016 now boasts over 130,000 today, and with these recent election victories, it’s likely to grow even more. The DSA will boast eight representatives in the new Congress, doubling its current number.
The DSA has also made it clear that it has its own ideas for Democrat leadership — namely, pushing out the current leaders, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, in favor of younger, more radically driven leadership.
Jeffries’s comment on his party’s midterm victory seemed to signal that not all Democrats embrace a radical socialist agenda. “Enough of the extremism,” he said. Of course, his warning was aimed at President Donald Trump, but it also put the DSA on notice that Jeffries has no intention of giving up his leadership position.
In fact, despite the DSA’s strong showing, the blue tsunami may ironically lessen the power of the radical socialists. With more mainstream Democrats elected, especially from red parts of the nation, where they ran as moderates and focused primarily on economic issues, Jeffries can lose the eight DSA votes and still have little problem securing the speakership. Democrats will likely enjoy their largest House majority since 2009–2010, meaning Jeffries can essentially ignore the noisy DSA faction.
The faction of Democrats that has grown most over the last couple of election cycles has been the more moderate New Democrat Coalition, which has risen from 43 members to 114, with a strong chance of adding 22 or 23 more in the new Congress after all the votes are finally counted.
So, while the prospect of a civil war within the Democrat Party may seem plausible, given the noisy and radical nature of the DSA faction, it is unlikely. In reality, both Jeffries and Schumer will likely keep their leadership positions as establishment Democrats once again reassert their power.
AIER
Summary (672 words) of a 1092-word post — full text at source
When the Democrats who won both chambers of Congress last Tuesday take office in January, they will get the gavels, every committee chair and broad investigative power. AIER's writer argues they will also inherit a fiscal problem that is already on the calendar: more than $40 trillion in national debt, $32.7 trillion of it held by the public, and a $41.1 trillion debt ceiling that the government is on pace to hit in the first half of 2027.
The warning signs are coming from lenders. In October the International Monetary Fund told heavily indebted governments to deal with their finances before they become unmanageable. Between February and September, the average 10-year government bond yield across the G7 rose by more than a full percentage point, to multidecade highs. For the United States in particular, the IMF found that long-term forward rates have become more sensitive to projected government debt. In the author's words, bond markets are beginning to lose patience.
The arithmetic is unforgiving. A one-point rise in yields on $32.7 trillion of publicly held debt eventually adds about $327 billion a year in interest, phased in as debt rolls over. That comes on top of the $1.05 trillion Washington already spent on interest in 2026. Another point would push the bill to roughly $1.37 trillion, and that assumes the debt stops growing. The Treasury paid an average of 1.6 percent on its debt in 2021 and pays 3.5 percent today. Because it has leaned on short-term bills, that average will keep rising. The author compares this to taking out an adjustable-rate mortgage you know will reset higher and still making only the minimum payment.
The incoming majority's early priorities point toward more spending, not less. Several members-elect who campaigned on affordability want to restore the Affordable Care Act subsidies first put in place during the pandemic. Those were billed as temporary, partly because a temporary program gets a lower cost estimate. The author quotes Milton Friedman: "there's nothing so permanent as a temporary government program." Reversing the Medicaid cuts would cost about $880 billion over ten years.
That brings calls for higher taxes. The IMF urges indebted countries to "strengthen tax systems," and some on the New Right talk about a "grand bargain" that pairs tax increases with promised spending cuts. The article raises two objections. First, Congress can set tax rates but not tax revenue. Since 1950 the top marginal income-tax rate has ranged from above 90 percent down to 28 percent, yet federal receipts have held near 17 percent of GDP, because people change how and when they take income when rates rise. Second, the money Congress collects is largely committed in advance to mandatory programs that sit outside the normal budget process and grow automatically unless benefits or eligibility are changed by law.
So why do governments keep borrowing when debt keeps getting more expensive? The author's answer is that it is good politics. Spending delivers visible benefits now to organized groups, while the cost of borrowing comes later and is spread thinly across taxpayers who barely notice each new issue.
The author expects a familiar script within months of the swearing-in. A Democratic Congress and a Republican president will fight over the debt limit, each casting the other as the villain, and then raise the ceiling without fixing anything. Real repair, he says, would take decades of sustained effort, which shows the problem is structural rather than technical.
It was not always this way. Until 1917, federal borrowing had to be tied to specific projects, such as the Louisiana Purchase and the Panama Canal, which let voters judge Congress's fiscal record directly. The debt limit began as a temporary World War I shortcut to speed approvals and has, the author argues, long outlived its purpose.
He concludes that the IMF and the bond market are saying the same thing: waiting makes stabilization more expensive. The new Congress can change the incentives that produced $40 trillion in debt, or it can wait for lenders to force the change.
Source: AIER · Mon Nov 9, 10:13 PM PT
AIER
Full text · 956 words
Imagine buying George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm on your Kindle, only for Amazon to reach into your device and remove the two classic novels. It sounds unsettling, but it happened in 2009 when a third-party seller lost the rights to distribute the books. Customers got their money back, and Amazon acknowledged that it had handled the situation poorly. But the incident raised a troubling question: what does it actually mean to own something in the digital marketplace?
Had you bought those two books in hardcover, the retailer could not remotely remove them from bookshelf. But digital purchases can work differently. Consumers aren’t always buying a copy they can keep and control. Sometimes, they’re simply buying a license to access them for a certain amount of time and under certain conditions.
At first glance, this may not seem like a major economic issue. Both sides of a voluntary exchange expect to benefit from it. But digital rights create new information asymmetries that impede competition. Economists describe information asymmetry as a situation in which one party possesses relevant information that another lacks.
Say a consumer has two options for purchasing the same song or book for $15. Retailer A offers an independent downloadable file, while retailer B offers access through its digital platform, subject to certain licensing restrictions. Some consumers may prefer the convenience of retailer B, while others may value the greater control offered by retailer A. With clear information, consumer preferences would help determine which product succeeds. But when retailer B fails to adequately explain the limits of its license, consumers may not understand or may undervalue the additional rights retailer A offers, weakening competition on those terms.
Are consumers, then, well aware of the limits of their licenses when they make digital purchases? Research by Aaron Perzanowski and Chris Jay Hoofnagle suggests otherwise. In a 2017 article, the two researchers describe a survey of nearly 1,300 consumers involving a simulated digital marketplace. Among respondents presented with a “Buy Now” button, more than 83 percent believed they were purchasing ownership rights, while more than 86 percent believed they could keep the digital product indefinitely.
Perzanowski and Hoofnagle also tested a potential solution: giving shoppers a short explanation of their rights. In their study, 86 percent of respondents who saw the standard purchasing language believed they were buying ownership rights to an e-book, compared with 63 percent of those who received a clearer explanation.
Even among shoppers who received additional information, nearly two-thirds still believed they were buying ownership rights. Now, someone buying a movie to watch once may prefer a cheaper, temporary license (like renting from Amazon), while someone else would happily pay more for durable access. Both approaches are valid, as long as buyers can accurately distinguish between the two.
These ownership rights can matter greatly. With a physical good, a consumer might recover some of what she originally paid by selling a used copy to someone else. She could also lend it to a friend or donate it to charity. These options have value, and she might be willing to pay more upfront for a product that includes those rights than one that doesn’t.
Amazon’s Kindle controversy involved the removal of purchased files. A different vulnerability emerged when streaming service Funimation shut down in April 2024 and its operations were folded into Crunchyroll. Some consumers had purchased Funimation DVDs and Blu-rays that came with digital copies of the same shows. But Crunchyroll did not support those digital copies, so while customers could still enjoy their physical discs, they lost access to the digital component of their purchases.
The economics of intellectual property can cut either way. Licensing can expand access to creative works by allowing sellers to offer different prices, subscription models, and usage rights to consumers with different preferences. But goods can also be purchased, say, as independent, downloadable digital files rather than merely through access to some platform. Still, consumers may not always be aware of that option or understand how it differs from purchasing a license. With those differences made clear, we might reasonably expect competition to lead firms to differentiate their products on those terms.
Existing consumer protection laws already prohibit deceptive business practices, including misleading representations about what consumers are purchasing. But those laws don’t necessarily require digital retailers to clearly explain when a purchase provides only a license. Perzanowski and Hoofnagle’s proposal goes a step further by calling for clearer disclosures of consumers’ rights. In other words, companies should say “License” when they mean it, rather than leaving customers to assume they’re buying full ownership.
One version of this proposal has already become law. California’s Assembly Bill 2426 took effect on January 1, 2025, and, subject to certain exceptions, requires disclosures (or a consumer acknowledgment of those terms) when certain digital goods are licensed but advertised as purchases. Rather than prescribing ownership rights for digital goods, AB 2426 focuses on disclosure, leaving sellers free to compete over the rights they offer. That distinction matters when businesses are competing to offer consumers different ownership rights.
Rather than legislating ownership rights for all digital goods, AB 2426 focuses on disclosure, allowing digital sellers to compete over which sort of rights to offer. But disclosure could go further by addressing an important feature of a digital purchase: is it a standalone digital good that can be stored independently on my device, or is it only accessible as long as I have access to the retailer’s platform?
Including this distinction in existing deceptive trade practices laws, or laws like AB 2426, could better equip consumers to choose the digital goods they prefer. After all, how can consumers reward businesses for offering better ownership rights if they don’t know what they’re buying?
Source: AIER · Mon Nov 9, 10:09 PM PT
AIER
Summary (709 words) of a 1610-word post — full text at source
After last week's Republican rout, party leaders reached for explanations. President Trump blamed Fox News. Vice President JD Vance offered a more pointed one on X: "The reason we lost is the war." The Iran conflict surely hurt. Trump had bragged on election night 2024 about keeping the country out of war, and once a key global energy chokepoint closed, average gasoline climbed from $2.98 a gallon in late February to $4.50 in early May while his approval ratings fell.
AIER's authors grant that Vance is not wrong about the war, but argue the data point more strongly at the second item on his own list, the cost of living. In a nationwide ABC News poll, about one in three voters said the Iran war was "crucial" to their vote, while fully half said the same about the cost of living, and about government corruption.
Tariffs, they argue, sit at the center of that affordability anger. Before the election, Cato's Alfredo Carrillo Obregon wrote that sweeping White House tariffs had become "a culprit behind increases in Americans' cost of living," and the polls and vote totals bore him out. Last month, New York Fed economists found tariffs raised prices in 67 categories of goods in 2025, and the typical household is paying at least $1,000 more, perhaps several times that, to keep the same standard of living. Contrary to the president's promises, consumers pay: about 64 percent of the tariff bite comes from pricier imports, and the other 36 percent from domestic producers who either pay more for imported inputs or raise prices once foreign competitors are penalized.
Defenders say higher prices are the point. Americans now pay 75 percent more than the rest of the world for aluminum and 64 percent more for steel, and the trade deficit appears to be shrinking. Manufacturing jobs are rising again, but only after cratering in the first year of what the authors call "tariff theatrics." AIER's Dave Hebert notes the administration is claiming victory for partly filling a hole it dug.
Voters did not buy it. In NBC News exit polls, just 21 percent said Trump's tariffs had helped the national economy, against 66 percent who said they had hurt it. Asked about their own area, only 14 percent said tariffs helped and 64 percent said they hurt. Earlier polls showed most voters, including 75 percent of Republicans, had noticed tariffs raising prices. Strategists seemed to know it. Democratic House candidates spent more than $58 million on ads mentioning tariffs, while Republican House candidates spent nothing promoting them, and only a penny of each GOP ad dollar went to spots that even mentioned "Trump." Small businesses and makers report thinner margins and forced price hikes on goods with imported parts, angering the small-government, pro-business base that liked what Candidate Trump promised.
Corruption, another top reason 2024 Republican voters backed Democrats in 2026, is built into tariffs too. Every tariff creates something valuable for officials to hand out: an exemption from a tax competitors must keep paying. Tariff-related lobbying reached record levels, according to LegiStorm, and more than 1,000 discretionary exemptions to the April 2025 tariffs were granted through an opaque, unequal process, many tied to White House connections. Small firms without lobbyists face heavy compliance costs from shifting rules. Even after the Supreme Court struck down the emergency tariffs, the refund process favored big money: Wall Street firms bought businesses' refund rights for as little as five to twenty cents on the dollar from small importers who couldn't wait.
The authors conclude that neither the war nor tariffs alone caused the defeat, but both contributed mightily. Voters who turned out in 2024 for no more wars and cheaper groceries came back in 2026 to punish broken promises. Vance, a leading tariff champion who says trading partners have been "taking advantage" of America, may prefer to blame only the war. Concentrated benefits for a few steel mills have long sustained protectionism while its costs spread across millions. But as tariffs grew broader and businesses openly passed costs on, and Fed research showed consumers cutting back on tariffed goods more than prices rose, Americans reacted. The 2026 election, the authors write, suggests Americans are no longer willing to pay the price of protectionism.
Source: AIER · Mon Nov 9, 12:54 AM PT
AIER
Summary (575 words) of a 1156-word post — full text at source
Month-long riots in France have given immigration restrictionists new attention and support. Polls show anti-migration sentiment, including against legal immigration, at record highs, and some 63 percent of French voters favor suspending legal immigration for three years. A top argument, in France and elsewhere, is that immigrants depress wages. The "Econ 101" logic: more immigrants, more labor supply, lower wages.
The author says this stops halfway through the lesson. Newcomers add to labor supply, but they also add demand. What immigrants consume has to be produced, and producing it means hiring workers. If the added demand for labor is big enough, immigration can raise wages. Ultimately that's an empirical question, and the evidence is mixed. A recent Labour Economics meta-analysis of 88 peer-reviewed studies published from 1985 to 2023 found the distribution of wage effects "centred near zero," meaning demand growth often offsets the supply increase. But it also "exhibits substantial dispersion": roughly as many studies find positive effects as negative ones, and study design often shapes the result.
To explain the spread, the author, drawing on ongoing work with Casey Pender of Mount Allison University, argues that demand shifts can easily outgrow supply shifts, but only if markets are free to respond. One channel is productivity. Employers pay more when labor is more productive, and productivity rises with specialization, which depends on market size. More participants support more specialization and upskilling for both immigrant and native workers, provided markets are open and barriers to entrepreneurship are low.
Capital is the second channel. Adding workers first means more workers per machine, which nudges wages down. But that makes new equipment more profitable, so investment follows and spreads the extra workers over more machines until wages return to their old level or rise. Internationally, capital chasing returns tends to flow toward countries with growing workforces, financing factories and new businesses, as long as it can cross borders freely.
The catch, the author notes, is that immigration's effect on wages depends heavily on policies that have nothing to do with immigration. High barriers to starting businesses choke off specialization. Limits on foreign investment cut the capital that offsets wage pressure. Progressive taxes on skill-building shrink the payoff from upskilling, and taxing investment keeps capital away from the expanding workforce. The more a country restricts markets, the harder it is for immigrants' demand to outweigh their added supply, which is why wage studies find such different results in different places.
Housing works the same way. Restrictionists say more immigrants mean higher rents, and immigration does raise housing demand. But if wages rise more than rents, housing can become more affordable for everyone, as long as builders can respond quickly: no rent control, limited land-use rules, open bidding for construction, and a predictable, flexible market. Heavy intervention turns immigration into congestion, and U.S. cities with more housing restrictions have seen faster rent increases from similar numbers of immigrants. Because American homebuilding relies disproportionately on immigrant labor, blocking those workers also slows the new construction that would ease prices.
The author's conclusion is the "most depressing lesson": many complaints about immigration are really byproducts of government interference elsewhere that keeps markets from absorbing new workers. It may be no surprise, he writes, that France, with its bureaucracy, high taxes, heavy regulation and costly state-owned companies, is now the hottest hotbed of anti-immigrant feeling. In economies hogtied by bad policy, few of immigration's benefits show up, while its visible costs remain.
Source: AIER · Mon Nov 9, 12:49 AM PT
Full daily briefing — every video for today, including ones already shown above.
Fox News · YouTube
Source: Fox News on YouTube
Your AI Guy · YouTube
Worth watching? Yes, if you need a practical checklist for evaluating the Qwen 4 launch and understanding the current state of open-source AI competition.
Source: Your AI Guy on YouTube
Right of Boom · YouTube
Source: Right of Boom on YouTube
unDivided with Brandi Kruse · YouTube
Worth watching? For a detailed breakdown of the legal and political fallout surrounding Washington State's Initiative 638 from a conservative perspective.
AI Revolution · YouTube
Worth watching? Yes, for a concise overview of current humanoid robot deployments in media, retail, and research.
Source: AI Revolution on YouTube
Peter H. Diamandis · YouTube
Worth watching? Investors, futurists, and space-industry listeners: a short argument that abundance plus efficiency in space could create quadrillionaires.
Source: Peter H. Diamandis on YouTube
Fox News · YouTube
Worth watching? Essential for understanding the specific grievances of the hardline MAGA base regarding internal party dynamics and foreign policy.
Source: Fox News on YouTube
Your AI Guy · YouTube
Worth watching? Yes, for a detailed breakdown of recent frontier AI leaks, security capabilities, and market volatility.
Source: Your AI Guy on YouTube
Caleb Erickson Dying Breed Forge and Farrier CO. · YouTube
Worth watching? Useful for understanding the specific farrier techniques required to stabilize a severely lacerated equine foot.
Source: Caleb Erickson Dying Breed Forge and Farrier CO. on YouTube
unDivided with Brandi Kruse · YouTube
Worth watching? For a partisan critique of Washington state politics and corporate-government relations.
Peter H. Diamandis · YouTube
Source: Peter H. Diamandis on YouTube
AI Revolution · YouTube
Worth watching? Yes, for a detailed breakdown of the METR report and the specific data points regarding AI-driven acceleration.
Source: AI Revolution on YouTube
Fox News · YouTube
Worth watching? Useful for understanding the specific partisan strategies and legislative conflicts Rep. Fallon anticipates in the upcoming congressional session.
Source: Fox News on YouTube
731 Woodworks · YouTube
Worth watching? Useful for identifying a specific all-in-one tool kit suitable for basic home maintenance.
Source: 731 Woodworks on YouTube
Dr.Tamitha Skov · YouTube
Worth watching? Useful for understanding the technical limitations of solar modeling and the current low-activity status of Solar Cycle 25.
Source: Dr.Tamitha Skov on YouTube
unDivided with Brandi Kruse · YouTube
Worth watching? For a critical perspective on Seattle's new retail revitalization policies and the debate over race-based economic incentives.
Washington Gun Law · YouTube
Worth watching? Useful for understanding the specific legal and political mechanics behind the proposed "retirement swap" strategy and its potential to trigger court expansion.
Source: Washington Gun Law on YouTube
Full watchlist for now — morning X scrape should eventually expand to the full following list. Topic-matched posts also appear on Front, Markets, and AI.