Good morning. It is October 21st. It is the kind of morning here in New York City that gives autumn and New York their positive reputations. And this is your indignity morning podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

Congratulations to the Toronto Blue Jays who are going to the World Series after a late game go ahead home run by George Springer beat the Seattle Mariners in Game 7 of the American League Championship Series, condolences to the Mariners, and the Blue Jays' reward for fighting back from the brink of elimination will be the chance to play the Los Angeles Dodgers. 

President Donald Trump has begun demolition work on the White House. The Washington Post reported yesterday, with photos, that heavy equipment was smashing into the facade of the East Wing as part of Trump's plan to subordinate the entire White House structure to a bloated ballroom paid for by money extorted from ultra wealthy donors. “Despite” the Post's writes, “his pledge that construction of the $250 million edition wouldn't interfere with the existing building.” 

The New York Times did not bother to try to match the story in time for its print edition, despite the power of the visual metaphor, while the Trump administration offered its own contrasting assessment of how newsworthy it was, by ordering Treasury Department employees, who have a good look at the demolished side of the building, to stop posting photos of the destruction, according to the Wall Street Journal. “‘As construction proceeds on the White House grounds, employees should refrain from taking and sharing photographs of the grounds to include the East Wing without prior approval from the Office of Public Affairs,’ a Treasury official wrote on Monday evening, in an email to department employees viewed by the Wall Street Journal. A Treasury Department spokesman,” the Journal continues, “said the email was sent to employees because photos could potentially reveal sensitive items, including security features or confidential structural details, including, but not limited to.” It's sort of refreshing to see someone in the administration using obfuscation and omission rather than just entirely lying. The spectacle of Donald Trump sending crews to rip open one side of the White House is in fact sensitive, even if it's not really a security issue. 

Graham Platner, the would-be insurgent youth candidate in the Maine Senate Democratic primary, revealed yesterday in a friendly interview with the Pod Save America podcast that the opposition file against him includes not only his rough around the edges Reddit posting history, in which he expressed his leftist and anti-militarist beliefs in terms outside the usual bounds of respectable political discourse, but also the fact that he has a gigantic Nazi Totenkopf tattoo on his chest. His explanation is that 18 years ago, he and some buddies were drunk on leave in Croatia and picked the skull image off the wall of a tattoo parlor without knowing what it meant, which is at least a
plausible explanation of how he got the tattoo, but a pretty inadequate explanation of why he still has it. Once again, don't get too attached to your candidates. 

On the front of this morning's New York Times, a constellation of stories running diagonally across the page paints a picture, as the Times might say, of a larger situation in the world. In the top right, in the lead news spot, two columns wide, the headline is “Power Thirsty AI Frenzy Insights Fury Across Globe. From Mexico to Ireland, activists cry foul as data centers deplete resources.” 

Then nestled up against that is “Splurge by Rich, as many strain just to get by.” 

And then down in the lower left, finishing the series is “Gold Rush of 25. Dig up heirlooms and cash in. Soaring prices prompt sprint to Manhattan.” Some real good times going on in the culture there. 

The story up at the top is illustrated with a picture of someone holding out their hand under a water tap with no water coming out. “When Microsoft opened a data center in central Mexico last year,” the Times writes, “nearby residents said power cuts became more frequent. Water outages, which once lasted days, stretched for weeks. The shortages led to school cancellations and the spread of stomach bugs in the town of Las Cenizas, said Dulce Maria Nicolás, a resident and mother of two. She is considered moving. Victor Bárcenas, who runs a local health clinic, has stitched up children by flashlight. In December, he was unable to give oxygen to a 54-year-old farmer because the power went out. The patient was rushed to a hospital nearly an hour away. Their experiences,” the Times writes, “are being echoed elsewhere as an artificial intelligence building boom strains already fragile power and water infrastructures in communities around the world.” The story goes on to say, “as data centers rise, the sites, which need vast amounts of power for computing and water to cool the computers, have contributed to or exacerbated disruptions not only in Mexico, but in more than a dozen other countries, according to a New York Times examination. In Ireland, data centers consume more than 20 % of the country's electricity. In Chile, precious aquifers are in danger of depletion. In South Africa, where blackouts have long been routine, data centers are further taxing the national grid. Similar concerns have surfaced in Brazil, Britain, India, Malaysia, the Netherlands, Singapore, and Spain.” But at least people are getting useless advice, atrophied educations, and deepfake propaganda videos out of it. Later on, the Times writes, “in a gleaming office tower wrapped in solar panels and a 3D LED screen in the city of Querétaro in central Mexico, an official spearheading the country's transformation into a data center hub said interruptions to power and water were the price of progress. ‘Those are happy problems,’ said Alejandra Sterling, the director of industrial development for Querétaro, where many of Mexico's 110 data centers are. ‘Not for the people that suffer it, but for the development of the place.’” 

That next story down is Dateline Chicago, though it could be Dateline most anywhere. It starts with people lining up at a food pantry, then switches to business booming on the magnificent mile. “The divide between rich and poor is hardly new, the Times writes, in Chicago or the rest of the country, but it has become more pronounced in recent months. Wealthier Americans, buoyed by a stock market that keeps setting records, have continued to spend freely. Lower-income households, stung by persistent inflation and navigating a labor market that is losing momentum, are pulling back. The top 10 % of U.S. households,” the Times writes, “now account for nearly half of all spending. Moody's Analytics recently estimated the highest share since the late 1980s. Consumer sentiment has risen among high earners, but steadily fallen for other groups. 

And speaking of that exuberant stock market, down at the bottom of the page, the Times pays a visit to a tiny and bustling establishment in Midtown called Bullion Exchanges, where people are flocking to cash in on or invest in the runaway increases in the price of gold and other precious metals. The few commodities whose markets seem to be behaving as if the president is destabilizing the entire international economy and the main sector still enjoying growth and investment, is a preposterously overvalued network of companies circulating the same money back and forth to one another in the name of a purported revolution in artificial intelligence, that most people don't want, and which by most standards doesn't work. 

And so the Times watches people coming and going to deal in solid objects of value. “A man in Yves Saint Laurent's sunglasses, the Times writes, arrived to pick up his gold, only to find his Bitcoin transaction hadn't worked. The quiet hum of transactions was pierced every so often by customers banging on the shop glass to be let inside. A woman entered and asked to buy 10 one ounce gold bars for a total of $41,800. She planned to pay by check. ‘I need to buy more today,’ she said as she began to yell and stomp her feet. ‘No, you cannot,’ Aviana Wills, an employee, told her. She was worried about the woman's check bouncing. ‘Why not?’ The woman squealed over and over.” The woman's agitation did have a point. That anecdote puts gold at $4,180 an ounce. On the unspecified day last week when the Times went to the shop, while the nut of the story reports that as of close of market yesterday, it was at $4,356.30 an ounce. That means her investment, had she been able to make it, would have gone up more than 4 % in a week or less. 

Elsewhere on the front page, the Times puts five reporters on belatedly following other outlets to document what happened in last month's top-to-bottom federal raid of a run-down apartment building in Chicago. The building was a mess, decrepit, crime-plagued, and full of squatters, with a landlord apparently uninterested in improving it. But the Times writes, “what unfolded that night was an ordeal spanning several hours that left residents, Venezuelans and Americans alike, terror-stricken and humiliated. They bolted out of their beds with the sound of heavy footsteps in the darkened hallways, splintering doors, flashbang grenades and barked commands. Restrained at the wrists, interrogated and separated by race and ethnicity, residents were forced onto buses while armed federal agents checked their names and records, determining whether they were living in the country legally or not. Cameo Polk and his brother, Nate Howard, were not immigrants, but they were forced from their apartment anyway, and his brother was arrested after a federal agent found that he had missed a court date related to a years-old drug charge. ‘I don't understand how they decided who they can do that to,’
Mr. Polk said, ‘they didn't treat people like they were American.’” 

In other news about how the government treats people who are and aren't American, the Times found room for the latest boat killing story on page A9 with the headline entirely repeating the Trump administration's tenuous excuses for the murders as if they were solid assertions of fact. “U.S. kills three suspected of smuggling drugs for Colombian rebels.” We covered how much weight that “suspected” is carrying in yesterday's podcast when the story was just online. 

On page A13, there's “U.S. officials questioned on tear gas in Chicago. Judge seeks clarity on agents' tactics.” Specifically, according to the lead, the judge is trying to figure out whether the government violated a court order by using tear gas against protesters and residents in a crackdown on illegal immigration in the Chicago area. 

And next to that, “Appeals court allows president to deploy troops to Oregon. The Trump administration can proceed with deploying National Guard troops to Portland, Oregon under a ruling Monday by the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit that dismissed a lower court's contention that protests in the city have been largely peaceful and under control.” This was a split two to one decision by a panel in which the two judges supporting the measure were Trump appointees. “A Bill Clinton appointee in dissent wrote,” the Times reports, “’today's decision is not merely absurd. It erodes core constitutional principles.’ One judge on the Ninth Circuit has called for an en banc hearing to reconsider the panel's decision, an unusual intervention by the court.” 

And back on page one, in health news, the Times writes, “Food allergies in children dropped sharply in the years after new guidelines encouraged parents to introduce infants to peanuts. A study found. For decades, as food allergy rates climbed, experts recommended that parents avoid exposing their infants to common allergens. But a landmark trial in 2015 found that feeding peanuts to babies could cut their chances of developing an allergy by more than 80%. In 2017, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases formally recommended the early introduction approach and issued national guidelines. The new study, published on Monday in the journal Pediatrics, found that food allergy rates in children younger than three fell after those guidelines were put into place, dropping to 0.93 % from 2017 to 2020, from 1.46 % from 2012 to 2015. That is a 36 % reduction in all food allergies, driven largely by a 43 % drop in peanut allergies. The study,” the Times writes, “also found that eggs overtook peanuts as the number one food allergen in young children.” 

That is the news. Thank you for listening. The Indignity Morning Podcast is edited by Joe MacLeod. The theme song is composed and performed by Mack Scocca-Ho. Get out in the sunshine if you get the chance. And if nothing unexpected gets in the way, we'll talk again tomorrow.