Thursday Night Links

• The book of my enemy has been remaindered, and I am pleased. In vast quantities it has been remaindered. Like a van-load of counterfeit that has been seized and sits in piles in a police warehouse, my enemy’s much-praised effort sits in piles in the kind of bookshop where remaindering occurs. Great, square stacks of rejected books and, between them, aisles one passes down reflecting on life’s vanities. [Clive James]
• Kansas City’s favored quarter is immediately visible on nearly every kind of thematic map of the region you could draw. Indeed, it is one of the cleanest representations of the concept anywhere in the country. A clear wedge of high-income neighborhoods starts in the vicinity of the Country Club Plaza and stretches to the southwest, pulling in a thin wedge of KC to 75th Street and all of urbanized Johnson County. [Kansas City Urbanism]
• Everything was fine until 2007, when Hershey, along with several other industry groups, did in fact lobby the FDA to change the standard. They did so under the banner of the Grocery Manufacturers Association, perhaps so some of the chocolatiers wouldn’t know what was happening until it was already underway. Hershey’s then-spokesman Kirk Saville defended the choice, telling Pennsylvania’s Patriot-News that “there are high-quality oils available which are equal to or better than cocoa butter.” Shortly after, the chocolatier Gary Guittard began a countercampaign called “Don’t Mess With Our Chocolate.” [Grub Street]
• Rumsfeld in his pre-Iraq years pushed this concept of operations around speed of maneuver and battlefield transparency. The whole idea was that you wouldn't need protection because your decision making cycle would be so short, and your battlefield picture so accurate, that you'd be able to destroy the enemy before they had a chance to fire back. Of course, it didn't turn out that way. The US army massively up-armored during the Afghan and Iraq wars. All these hulking purpose built vehicles were introduced with heavy plate and thick glass and remote turrets. Units in the field would add on aftermarket protection of their own by welding steel sheets to their side doors and whatever. Now this same logic is being applied to bases in the rear and critical infrastructure. In the 21st century, to survive, you must get smarter, more furtive (hide) and - as a last resort - grow armor. [@TheMindScourge]
• One midwit trap many fail to avoid is the belief that military operations are planned around elections, or that elections matter at all when it comes to the continuity of the geopolitical agenda of the ruling class. That is formulated by think tanks and enacted over decades. [@FoolOfD]
• "Our natural gas business in particular is benefiting from increasing LNG exports, rising power demand, and industrial expansion and is capitalizing on significant opportunities for investment across our footprint," said Kinder. "We expect those investments to generate attractive returns, driving future earnings and cash flows to support a growing dividend and maintain a strong balance sheet, all while helping meet growing energy demand in the United States and the world." [Kinder Morgan, Inc.]
• "As uncertainty intensified in Q3, clients turned to CME Group in record numbers to manage risk and capitalize on opportunities," said CME Group Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Terry Duffy. "Our average daily volume reached 29.4 million contracts, the highest Q3 ADV on record. With double-digit volume growth across all six asset classes, Q3 was our second highest quarter ever for revenue and adjusted net income. We launched several innovative new products and generated a new high of $100 billion in average daily capital efficiencies. We also made strong progress in our cloud migration, making CME Group the only exchange to offer clients the choice of both co-location and cloud-managed services to expand access to our markets for years to come." [CME Group Inc.]