1.  Let’s say it all together: Ock-TOHHH-berrrrrrr.

2.  Bonus points if you read that like a Swiss Alps yodeler.

3.  We’re more than halfway through the month and I’m in my annual “surely it has to start getting cooler” delusion.

4.  Then mother nature made me a liar by dropping the temps once the sun went down last night.

5.  Whatever.

6.  The fact that I still need to put on shorts for major projects says all you need to know about this place.

7.  Anyway, what’s going on out there?

8.  Slow news week, right?

9.  BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAA.

10.  Phew, that took me out. Let’s go.

11.  North Carolina Republicans announced their plan to redraw our congressional map to give them an electoral advantage.

12.  In a refreshing twist the party declined to wax poetic about balancing representation or standing up for the will of North Carolinians.

13.  Instead, they shared the following.

14.  “We are doing everything we can to protect President Trump’s agenda, which means safeguarding Republican control of Congress,” Senate Leader Phil Berger, R-Rockingham, wrote in a statement. (WUNC, Adam Wagner, 10/13/25)

15.  ffs, I cannot side eye this statement any harder right now.

16.  Surprising nobody, the government is still shut down.

17.  Kristi Noem made a video to play at airport security checkpoints saying — let me check my notes — Democrats in Congress suck and now your TSA experience might too but it’s not our fault even though we control power in all the freaking branches of government.

18.  Or something like that.

19.  Certain airports are refusing to play the video due to its partisan nature, but further research shows TSA-controlled monitors may be running the video regardless of airport policy.

20.  Which is to say pack your game face if you’re heading to the airport ‘cuz God only knows what you’ll be watching in line.

21.  Trump authorized covert CIA operations in Venezuela. On top of bombing their boats, I guess.

22.  Pete Hegseth is ordering troops to read or watch his September 30th speech at Quantico, VA as part of “Warrior Ethos Tasking.”

23.  It was a speech filled with self-proclaimed gotcha! moments that in fact did not get anyone.

24.  A week ago 1,300 employees at the CDC were told they had been let go. Within 24 hours around 700 of them were told they’d received the notices in error.

25.  There is some discussion about whether the remaining 600(ish) firings can occur while the government is shut down.

26.  The jury’s still out on Trump’s “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” offering nine major universities preferential access to federal funds in exchange for agreeing to a list of administration demands.

27.  Four of the schools — MIT, Brown University, University of Pennsylvania, and University of Southern California — have rejected the compact.

28.  Vanderbilt University, Dartmouth College, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Arizona, and the University of Virginia have not publicly responded with a decision.

29.  October 20 is the deadline for feedback, November 21 is the deadline for signing the compact.

30.  Come on, guys, protect your students.

31.  All the cool kids believe in freedom of expression, academic independence, and institutional integrity.

32.  A personal note to my own alma mater: UVA, let’s channel a little Nancy Reagan and Just Say No.

33.  Loudly and publicly.

33.  This has been a firehose rundown on news and is clearly missing escalations happening with ICE.

34.  The violence is accelerating.

35.  The cruelty is the point.

36.  People are getting snatched up in courthouses, from cars in school pickup lines, out of beds in the dead of night.

37.  I see ICE raids and think of Fannie Lou Hamer’s wisdom.

38.  The civil rights activist’s speech to a 1967 chapter meeting of the National Council of Negro Women in Mississippi included this: “We have a long fight and this fight is not mine alone. But you are not free whether you are white or Black, until I am free.”

39.  There is no version in this reality where you can watch people getting grabbed off the street and think that’s on them, I’m doing okay.

40.  None of us are free while this happens to anyone.