I like to check the international news every day just to get a different perspective on things. I was going to bounce around to my favorite foreign news sites this morning to have a look at what the rest of the world saw at the debate last night. BBC has saved me some work and collected observations from around the world.

Presidential debate: How the world’s media reacted

There is much one can say about last night’s presidential debate. I will go with this short series of quotes from the New York Times Dealbook.

What to make of last night’s chaotic presidential debate? The Times’s Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns called it an “ugly melee,” CNN’s Jake Tapper dubbed it “a hot mess inside a dumpster fire inside a train wreck” and The Washington Post’s Dan Balz described it as “an insult to the public.”

From the NYT story CHARTING AN EMPIRE: A TIMELINE OF TRUMP’S FINANCES. A nice interactive graphic showing the sinking ship that docked at the White House in 2016. I remember Mark Cuban remarking that Trump “wasn’t a billionaire”. I tend to think Mark Cuban wouldn’t say something like that in public without something behind it. The full graph from the article.

A good read from Inc Magazine.

Warren Buffett and Bill Gates Call This Man Their ‘Hero’ and ‘Role Model’

“He is my hero. He is Bill Gates’s hero. He should be everybody’s hero.”

I remember the old KKK doing this when I was a kid. Playing the media like a fiddle. And where are their Proud Girls?

Proud Boys rally in Portland draws only about 200 after city braced for thousands

Got my 16 port switch and cables today. Hooked them all up and moved a few things from wireless to wired. As usual it took a while longer than expected. Seems some old devices might have hung on to old IP addresses for a while. An old Apple TV had a really crazy IP address. After much rebooting it looks like it is all working.

Fox News won a court case by ‘persuasively’ arguing that no ‘reasonable viewer’ takes Tucker Carlson seriously

My house is probably 25 years old. It was wired with CAT5 but it was only used for old fashioned POTS two wire telephone. All the jacks around the house (9 of them) are RJ11 telephone plugs. The wires all meet up in the garage at a patch panel near where the old phone service and DSL came in.

This week I removed the old patch panel, pulled all the wires up into the attic and put ethernet connectors on them. Then I went around to all the jacks in the house and replaced them with ethernet connections. Making those plugs was tricky and took lots of re-work (I estimate a third to half of the ones I did were bad). Pushed them through the wall in the attic into my office and made this slick little recessed patch panel. Gonna buy a 16 port switch and put wired ethernet thought the house. There is even a connection outside on the back patio. That stray coax cable is for my Spectrum cable modem.

i like to check out the foreign press. Sometimes it gives a better perspective on what is happening in the US than just domestic news sources. Sometimes a story about events in another country holds up a mirror to what is going on closer to home. A story about Covid-19 in Spain, translated from Spanish but printed in the (domestic) New York Times.

Somehow this was in the Politics section of Bloomberg. I worry that people in the US are forgetting (or being led to forget) that there is a terrible worldwide pandemic going on. The rest of the world is responding while US numbers keep rising.

Scotland Restricts People From Visiting Other People’s Homes