ALL THE BEST PEOPLE ASSURED ME BEIJING HAS EVERYTHING UNDER CONTROL: China’s debt interest costs are soaring above U.S. levels and growing faster than any other budget category as Beijing struggles to prop up growth.

The world is flooded with debt, but while the U.S. and Europe have caused angst on global markets lately, China’s fiscal situation isn’t looking so great either.

In fact, China’s debt has shot up so much in recent years that interest payments on all its borrowing are commanding a bigger share of public spending.

Debt-servicing payments will account for 19.2% of the central government’s general public budget this year, up from 12% in 2014, according to new Conference Board estimates cited by the Financial Times.

That tracks with a separate report earlier this year from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, which also found that 19% of Beijing’s spending is earmarked for interest on debt. That’s more than the 14% of the U.S. federal budget that goes to interest costs.

Ouch.

THE AI ECONOMY STILL NEEDS BEGINNERS. This strikes me as very true: “The result is a difficult paradox: AI can make experienced workers more productive while it could reduce the number of opportunities through which beginners can acquire experience.” We need to figure out how to fix this, fast.

THAT’S DIFFERENT BECAUSE SHUT UP:

Told you that searching the homes of opposing politicians was going to suddenly become bad. https://t.co/iVR18US0dK

— Kurt Schlichter (@KurtSchlichter) October 12, 2026

SQUEEZE TEHRAN HARDER: Funny How the ‘One State’ Crowd Gets Loud Whenever Tehran Gets Squeezed.

NOW OUT, From Andrew Fox, Ghostlands.#CommisisonEarned

EXCLUSIVE: Montana AG Asks Supreme Court to Revive Case Against DEI Training That Allegedly Declared ‘All Caucasians’ Racist. “The training insisted, among other things, that all Caucasians are racist, that they perpetuate white supremacy, that the very notion of race was invented by white people to justify the oppression of people of color, that white supremacy is an ever-present feature of daily life in the United States, and that Caucasians who deny their own racism are merely ‘fragile’ racists who cannot accept their own prejudice.”

ED MORRISSEY: Too Weird to NOT Check First: Did Talarico Have a Mental Health Crisis?

Held: Things that appear too good to be true often are. Also held: Better to wait for confirmation before jumping to a conclusion.

At any rate, it seems that Talarico didn’t get checked into that Ohio psych ward for the last two weeks. It still doesn’t answer the question of where Talarico actually was during that two-week period. The explanation offered – a two-week bout of the flu that had him down so bad he couldn’t even do a Zoom call – is absolutely absurd, especially in the context of a general election campaign. If you or I took two weeks off without any contact with our employer and claimed we were too sick to call, we’d be forced to bring a doctor’s note to save our jobs.

It’s not a HIPAA violation to demand accountability from politicians who disappear in the middle of a job. Better to get that now than to wait until Talarico disappears for months while supposedly representing Texas.

Read the whole thing.

CHANGE: Harvard will stop granting internships to foreign law students.

WOW:

Just so we’re clear…

A federal judge in D.C. signed off on the search warrant for Ilhan Omar’s home. The DOJ had to show probable cause as part of an ongoing criminal investigation into her immigration paperwork. In a district full of liberal judges, that doesn’t happen without…

— Gina Milan (@ginamilan_) October 12, 2026

More here: Federal Agents Raid Ilhan Omar’s D.C. Home.

HEH: ‘Hi, Gestating’: Trump Mocks Hochul, and It’s a Riot.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Gallup: Belief in college importance hits record low.

UGH: Is 8% next? Why mortgage rates have surged, and may stay higher for longer.

Apart from oil prices themselves, general uncertainty about the situation in Iran is also pushing rates higher, as investors want more compensation for unknown risks, said Jake Krimmel, senior economist at Realtor.com.

“The geopolitical uncertainty is a huge part of it,” Krimmel said. “We’re talking about supply shock. That doesn’t just touch oil, but probably everything else with trade.”

Meanwhile, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who has tried to lower bond yields via buybacks to little effect, has blamed much of the rise in bond yields and mortgage rates on energy prices.

It sure would help if Congress weren’t putting $2,000,000,000,000 on the national MasterCard every year.

NO MATTER HOW MUCH YOU DESPISE THE MEDIA…:

Jacqueline and the NYT have tracked down a disputed bakery bill from 6 years ago…but let James Talarico disappear this month for 12 days with no curiosity.

Journalism is dead. https://t.co/KFGFBwMcYE

— Richard Grenell (@RichardGrenell) October 11, 2026

…it’ll never be enough.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Columbus Day Always Puts Me in a Land-Stealing Mood. “These federal Monday holidays always catch me by surprise because I’ve never had a normal job that got days off like that. However, I have a particular fondness for Columbus Day because it triggers the grievance fetishists on the left. True, it doesn’t take much to trigger them — especially these days — but the ghost of Christopher Columbus has been living rent-free in their heads for a very long time.”

THEY SHOULD BE: Majority of voters concerned about socialists running for office.

The Center Square Voters’ Voice poll found that 55% of American voters are concerned about Democratic Socialist candidates running for and winning elected office in the U.S., while 37% aren’t concerned.

A slew of candidates running as democratic socialists appears to be raising alarms with a majority of American voters.

Of the 55% who are concerned, 35% are very concerned, while 20% say they are “somewhat concerned.”

Those are rookie numbers — or would be, if we explained socialism better.

ALAN K. HENDERSON: Deconstructionism, Class Warfare, and Islamic Terrorism.

THE ENEMY WITHIN: Abdul El-Sayed’s Family Has ‘Long Been’ in Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, Senate Candidate’s Sister Said in Unearthed Social Media Posts.

#JOURNALISM: Don Surber: The story ABC does not want you to see: The Disney subsidiary went after Trump’s sons and failed. ABC scrubbed the URL. I found it.

MONEY LAUNDERING AND ILLEGAL DONATIONS, ALL THE WAY DOWN:

No BS Newshour Episode #427
El-Sayed Scampaign Donors

Elizabeth is a true believer in liberal causes and continues to make small political donations by way of ActBlue—the Democrat online fundraising platform.

(4:36) But somehow, those few dozen small donations she has made have… pic.twitter.com/eW3N6xN5Y6

— Charlie LeDuff (@Charlieleduff) July 22, 2026

More:

(4:36) But somehow, those few dozen small donations she has made have transmogrified into 14,696 donations totaling more than $150,000—the equivalent of eight donations a day, every day for the past five years averaging $9.18.

She says she has contributed to Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic Socialist running for Michigan’s U.S. Senate seat, but not 47 times spanning the last TWO YEARS, as federal filings show.

Shut it down.

ASTROTURF CAMPAIGNS GOTTA PAY THE FOG-MAKERS:  Influencers Got Payouts to Post Pro-Talarico Content.

And just like that he is reminding me of a less drunk (and less masculine, not that she’s masculine) Kamala Harris.

BLUE ON BLUE: The Democratic Socialists Are Furious With That Far-Right Extremist, Zohran Mamdani.

INDEED:

Men respect an honorable enemy. https://t.co/ppvcxNx3VU

— Wilfred Reilly (@wil_da_beast630) October 11, 2026

LIMITED TIME DEAL: Windproof Travel Umbrella – Compact & Withstands Winds up to 100MPH. #CommissionEarned

IS PARIS BURNING? France’s Riots Stem from a Deep Rot.

Rioters carry the flags not of France, but of other nations and terror groups from the Arab world. In Marseille, they were filmed riding motorcycles through the city center, carrying Algerian and Palestinian flags.

For France, it’s been a long way down. Riots and street violence are not new to the French nation. The country’s infamous revolution in 1789 was born amid them. The modern conception of political divisions—right vs. left, secular vs. religious—also traces back to France.

What is unfolding in France is about the continued existence of the French nation itself. It is, to use a French term, existential. It began, fittingly enough, with World War I, the conflict that birthed the modern Middle East and laid the roots for the spread of communism and fascism, and other great ills.

France lost more men than any other nation. An astonishing 1.3 million—nearly 20 percent of all French men aged 18-27—fell in battle. This “deeply scarred its psyche and affected its economy for a generation,” the late historian Alistair Horne observed.

To cover the shortfall, France imported labor from its colonies. The country seemed lost, and poisonous ideologies and divisions crept in. This led to the collapse of the Third Republic and the imposition of Nazi and collaborator rule in 1940.

The Nazi-allied Vichy government that took over was an active collaborator, fighting the Allied Powers and sending thousands of Jews to their death. After the war, the historian Paul Johnson observed that France was “driven by necessity to a fundamental reappraisal.”

Perhaps that “fundamental reappraisal” took things un tout petit peu trop loin: Where Wokism Is a Oui Bit Different.

NO MEANS NO, BUT SO DOES YES.

I wrote for @NRO about the mysteriously absent “no” in the Cornell 7 case :

“The end result of liberal sexual ethics writ large — according to which women seldom say no and they can be, or should be, every bit as debauched as men — has not been a joyful bacchanal but a…

— Inez Stepman ⚪️🔴⚪️ (@InezFeltscher) October 11, 2026

“Feminists understandably balk at the idea that women ought to be at all times under the supervision and control of the men around them. Yet they now claim that ‘no’ is so difficult and so beyond women’s ability that we need to reinvent the old patriarchal structure, this time made more insane by the fact that it’s no longer a woman’s father or husband — who at least presumably love her and have her best interests at heart — who is responsible for controlling or curtailing her sexual escapades, but random fraternity brothers instead.”