Flaming Hydra (00:11.097)
Good morning. It is October 31st, the grand culmination of the season for playing the costume or get up guessing game when you're out and about in the city. It's still cloudy in Manhattan, but the rain is all gone and they say the wind is rising. And this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Skoka, taking a look at the day and the news.

The Miami Herald is reporting that a US military attack on Venezuela is imminent. Trump administration, the Herald writes, has made the decision to attack military installations inside Venezuela and the strikes could come at any moment. Sources with knowledge of the situation told the Miami Herald as the US prepares to initiate the next stage of its campaign against the Solas drug cartel. The Herald's reporting that the strikes could come any moment.

Updates and amplifies coverage from the Wall Street Journal. The Journal reported yesterday evening that the Trump administration was making plans for strikes. The Trump administration, the Journal wrote, has identified targets in Venezuela that include military facilities used to smuggle drugs, according to U.S. officials familiar with the matter. After directly relaying the claim from those officials that this is an attack on drug smuggling facilities, the Journal then offers

A different focus of events. The journal writes, if President Trump decides to move forward with airstrikes, they said, the targets would send a clear message to Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro that it is time to step down. While the president hasn't made a final decision on ordering land strikes, the journal writes, in the story it put up last night, the officials said a potential air campaign would focus on targets that sit at the nexus of the drug gangs and the Maduro regime.

You have to get considerably deeper into the story before the journal explains that Maduro denies involvement in drug trafficking. And the story says, putting forth evidence, officials have also called Venezuela a central hub of terrorist activity and have claimed that Maduro's regime is running the cartels. Okay, that was for editing purposes. The segment recorded earlier this morning here.

Flaming Hydra (02:31.243)
is a 10 second sample of what the afternoon background noise levels are.

Flaming Hydra (02:51.212)
This concludes the transitional tech segment. The idea then here in the year 2025 is that the Trump administration thinks it's going to be able to carry out regime change by remote control with airstrikes, an approach that has been extraordinarily well tested and has produced an extremely consistent body of results.

In other news about the enthusiasm with which people greet their liberators, The Washington Post has a report on an intervention by Donald Trump closer to home at the Kennedy Center. Nearly nine months after Trump became chair of the center, the Post writes, and more than a month into its main season, ticket sales for the Kennedy Center's three largest performance venues are the worst they've been in years.

according to a Washington Post analysis of ticketing data from dozens of recent shows as well as past seasons. Tens of thousands of seats have been left empty. Since early September, 43 % of tickets remained unsold for the typical production. That means that at most 57 % of tickets were sold for the typical production, and some tickets may have been comps, which are given away, often to staff members or the press.

That compares with 93 % sold or comped in fall 2024 and 80 % in fall 2023. As another point of comparison, the post notes that the vacancy rate was only 34 % in 2021 when the center was reopening from COVID. The post then gets a quote from a former Kennedy Center staffer, given the unprecedented takeover of a nonpartisan arts institution, combined with the inexperience and rhetoric of the new management, I expected a decline in sales. However, it is true.

Flaming Hydra (04:51.118)
In an anecdote illustrating that last point, the Post writes, The center moved Parade, a Tony-winning musical that ran from August 19th to September 7th, from the 2364-seat Opera House, where it was originally slated to run, to the 1160-seat

seat Eisenhower Theater. In the last few days of its run, 43 % of seats were available. On the front of the print edition of this morning's New York Times, the big photo is of the aftermath of the police raid and or massacre in Rio that we discussed yesterday. Of a crowd lined up in the background looking over a line of dead bodies covered in

They're either sheets or tarps or blankets. The story is on page A8. Over 130 killed in bloody crackdown on drug gangs in Rio de Janeiro. Toll of violent raids by Brazilian police. Spurs are reckoning.

The story recounts how, after the police announced that they had killed 60 or so criminals, local residents searched the woods and found scores more bodies than the ones the police had wanted to take credit for. On the top right-hand side of the front page, the headline package is, Truce on Trade by Trump and Xi, a Swage's Worry, Stabilizing Economies, but Plan to Resume U.S. Nuclear Tests, Wakens Proliferation Fears.

That second subhead certainly rebalances the question of whether this was on net a good day for everybody. Ahead of the high stakes meeting between President Trump and Xi Jinping of China on Thursday, world leaders were hoping for news of an economic truce that could help stabilize the global economy. The Times writes, they got it. They got something extra as well.

Flaming Hydra (06:42.38)
intensified concerns about whether the world is entering a new era of nuclear weapons proliferation among global powers. Every silver lining has a mushroom cloud. Next to that is a news analysis piece. China's win, allowing US to claim one. As Trump pumps fist, Beijing's grip tightens. Boy, it sure seems like when Trump goes overseas, the Times' coverage of him gets considerably less deferential.

When Xi Jinping walked out of his meeting with President Trump on Thursday, the Times writes here, he projected the confidence of a powerful leader who could make Washington blink. The outcome of the talks suggested that he succeeded.

By flexing China's near-monopoly on rare earths and its purchasing power over U.S. soybeans, Mr. Xi won key concessions from Washington, a reduction in tariffs, a suspension of port fees on Chinese ships, and the delay of U.S. export controls that would have barred more Chinese firms from access to American technology. Both sides also agreed to extend a truce struck earlier this year to limit tariffs. Then the story says,

Recent twists and turns of the trade war should be instructive to them both, according to a Chinese government summary of Mr. Xi's remarks at the meeting in Busan, South Korea. Both sides should consider the bigger picture and focus on the long-term benefits of cooperation rather than falling into a vicious cycle of mutual retaliation, Mr. Xi said. The story then says Mr. Xi's message seemed to be Beijing had proven its capacity to hit back and Washington would do well to remember it.

At the same time, the piece goes on to add, Mr. Xi also seemed to grasp what Mr. Trump needed, a deal that he could sell as a victory at home. The outcome allowed Mr. Trump to claim a win for American farmers and companies, even though China had largely restored the status quo by agreeing to buy soybeans and to hold off on further restricting the export of rare earths. Next to that on the front page is a story about the possible effects of the loss of food stamps on

Flaming Hydra (08:51.606)
older New York residents. But in breaking news today, a federal judge in Rhode Island ordered the Agriculture Department to release the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program funds that the Trump administration had meant to withhold. The judge, ABC News writes, ruled that the suspension of SNAP funding is arbitrary and likely to cause irreparable harm, citing the terror felt by Americans who are scrambling to meet their basic nutritional needs.

back on page one of the Times. The leftmost story above the fold is about the state of Utah's retreat from its position as a leader in addressing the problem of homelessness by setting people up with housing. Utah's proposal for homeless forced move to remote camp is the headline.

To glimpse the future of homelessness policy in the age of President Trump, the story begins, consider 16 acres of scrubby pasture on the outskirts of Salt Lake City, where the state plans to place as many as 1,300 homeless people, in what supporters call a services campus and critics deem a detention camp. State planners say the site, announced last month after a secretive search, will treat addiction and mental illness and provide a humane alternative to the streets, where afflictions often go untreated and people die at alarming rates.

They also vow stern measures to move homeless people to the remote site and force many of them to undergo treatment, reflecting a nationwide push by some conservatives for a new approach to homelessness when embraced and promoted by Mr. Trump.

with outdoor sleeping banned, removal to the edge of town may become the only way some homeless Utahns can avoid jail. Planners say the facility will also hold hundreds of mentally ill homeless people under court-ordered civil commitment, and the effort will include an accountability center for those with addictions.

Flaming Hydra (10:46.786)
An accountability center is involuntary. OK, you're not coming in and out. Randy Shumway, chairman of the state Homeless Services Board, said in an interview, Utah will end a harmful culture of permissiveness, he said, and guide homeless people towards human thriving. An accountability center. Because if there's one lesson that homeless people with drug addiction problems need drummed into them,

it's that the things they do can have negative consequences. No more culture of permissiveness toward people not having a place to live. Down at the bottom of the page, just in time for Halloween, The Times takes a look at how candy companies have started taking the words milk chocolate off their labels and replacing them with chocolate candy.

as they adulterate their products with non-kekow ingredients to make up for the scarcity and increased price of cocoa and cocoa butter. In recent years, the Times writes, longer droughts, extreme heat, and irregular rainfall patterns have suppressed cocoa yields in West Africa, the crop's primary growing region. An infection carried by mealybugs has also spread rapidly.

Financial speculators, the threat of tariffs, labor issues, and other geopolitical factors have compounded the problems. And so the story describes companies replacing chocolate coatings with compound coating and investing in cocoa butter equivalent capabilities. Companies, the Times writes, will continue to look for ways to keep lower quality chocolates affordable, whether through reformulations, shrinking packages, or marketing new products that contain less cocoa.

This last strategy, the story says, is evident this Halloween season. A Hershey's Halloween assortment currently on the market includes light green Kit Kats and cookies and cream fangs, neither of which contain any chocolate at all. That is the news. Thank you for listening. The Indignity Morning Podcast is edited by Joe McCloud. The theme song is composed and performed by Max Kokoho. Good luck finding something non-disgusting to hand out.

Flaming Hydra (13:05.786)
to the children at your doorstep this evening. And if nothing unexpected gets in the way, we will talk again on Monday.