🌊 Bad Day to Be a Seed Oil

A very normal news day.

Yesterday, ex-Pentagon officials testified that they saw UFOs; Trump nominated a jacked Kennedy heir dating a Curb Your Enthusiasm star to be his Secretary of HHS; The Onion bought Alex Jones’s Infowars; Mark Zuckerberg became a rapper; and a dude in California dressed up in a bear costume to damage his car so he and his buddies could make some insurance money. In other words, just another Thursday!

Link to 20 Questions! 

–Max and Max

KEY STORY

RFK Appointed to HHS

Donald Trump appointed RFK Jr. to be the secretary of the Health and Human Services Department, which oversees the FDA, NIH, and CDC

• The appointment may be the clearest sign yet of Trump’s anti-establishment vision: RFK has proposed drastically overhauling the agencies he’d now oversee, having deemed them “captured” – i.e., working for those whom it is meant to regulate

• RFK has promised to crack down on pesticides, food additives, pharma marketing, and more. While many blasted the news, others endorsed it

Dig Deeper

• One of the more surprising reactions came from Colorado’s Democratic Governor Jared Polis who celebrated it on X. He listed three RFK quotes and added his commentary:

• “Level the playing field for Americans internationally on drug costs…cap drug prices so that companies can’t charge Americans substantially more than Europeans pay." YES! Colorado currently has an application just SITTING at FDA for us to import low-cost prescription drugs from Canada and we just need their approval

• "In some categories, there are entire departments, like the nutrition department at the FDA that are – that have to go, that are not doing their job, they're not protecting our kids," YES! The entire nutrition regime is dominated by big corporate ag rather than human health and they do more harm than good

• “We’ve got to get off of pesticide-intensive agriculture.” YES! We have tried unsuccessfully to better protect people and pollinators from harmful pesticides here in Colorado and we need all the help we can get to take on big chemical companies and improve human health and the environment! For our pollinators and our people!

• Others were shocked that someone whose views are “vaccine-skeptic” and far outside the DC mainstream could be running the department. We'll have a full deep-dive on RFK and his views next week

KEY STORY

“We Are Not Alone”

Former Pentagon officials testified in a congressional hearing on UFOs, or unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP)

• The hearing – only the second on the topic in 50 years – was part of Congress’ ongoing push for transparency regarding unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP). It follows a 2022 hearing that was the first such one in over 50 years

• In it, a retired Navy admiral testified that an email containing a video of a flying object that had “flight and structural characteristics unlike anything in our arsenal” vanished from his computer, while a defense official testified that the US runs a secret UAP retrieval program

Dig Deeper

• Independent journalist Michael Shellenberger similarly claimed that the Pentagon has a secret program called "Immaculate Constellation," which holds substantial evidence of UAPs. He emphasized that the military possesses high-resolution images and videos of these phenomena

• The Pentagon typically states that there is no evidence linking UFO sightings to alien spacecraft. The former director of the Pentagon’s UAP task force testified last year that of 800 UAP cases his office studied between 1996 and 2023, only a small percentage couldn’t be explained

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KEY STORY

Polymarket Raid

The FBI raided Polymarket founder Shayne Coplan’s NYC apartment and seized various electronic devices

• Polymarket is one of the largest prediction markets. Users try to predict elections, sports, the weather, and more using cryptocurrencies for transactions

• While it’s illegal to place bets on Polymarket in the US, the platform is huge internationally and has raised over $80M in VC funding from Peter Thiel’s fund and others

• It’s not immediately clear why the FBI raided the 26-year-old’s apartment. Some analysts believe the FBI is looking into illegal betting by US-based users on the platform, while a company spokesperson accused the FBI of “political retribution” for Polymarket’s pro-Trump odds during the election

Dig Deeper

• The raid comes after Polymarket made headlines for its pro-Trump odds, which prompted some Democrats to accuse it of election interference. The platform’s odds were slanted by a French bettor who put $30M on Trump to win

• “This is obvious political retribution by the outgoing administration against Polymarket for providing a market that correctly called the 2024 presidential election,” a Polymarket spokesperson told Axios

KEY STORY

The Onion Buys Infowars

The Onion announced on Thursday that it bought Infowars, a website founded by Alex Jones

• In 2022, the families of the victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting won a $1.4B defamation lawsuit against Jones and his company, Free Speech Systems, for popularizing a conspiracy theory that the shooting was staged

• The liquidation of Infowars became part of this settlement and The Onion made an undisclosed bid – with the approval of the Sandy Hook families – for the site and won

• The publication plans to reintroduce Infowars in January as a parody of itself

Dig Deeper

• The Onion did not disclose the purchase price of Infowars, only revealing that it paid “less than a trillion dollars”

• Infowars was founded by Alex Jones in 1999. On the site, Jones regularly discussed government corruption, the New World Order, the globalist elites, and other conspiracy theories. In October, Infowars.com received 13M web visits, roughly the same number as The Economist

• In a live show Thursday, Alex Jones claimed that a group of right-wing investors had submitted a bid that was competitive with The Onion's but that the trustee rejected it

RUNDOWN
Some Quick Stories for the Office

⚖ Ben & Jerry’s filed a lawsuit against its parent company, Unilever, alleging it was censored over statements about Palestine

🇺🇸 Kamala Harris canceled plans to appear on Joe Rogan’s podcast due to fears of a progressive backlash, campaign officials told the Financial Times

🇺🇸 A Paris prosecutor has requested a five-year prison sentence and a public office ban for Marine Le Pen, France’s leading right-wing politician and an expected candidate in the 2027 presidential election

🇫🇷 Trump's nomination of former House representative Matt Gaetz for attorney general has sent shockwaves through Washington, DC, with multiple outlets reporting shock among prominent politicians on both sides of the aisle

🌍 A study published in The Lancet indicated that the share of global adults suffering from diabetes doubled between 1990 and 2022, from 7% to 14%

COMMUNITY

🧐 Today’s question: What’s a great quote you saw recently? Or if you haven’t come across any gems lately, give us a quote you love!

Community
20 Questions!

Ladies and gentlemen, the Weeknd.

The people have spoken: Trivia is back for a second consecutive week! Many of you commented last week that you wanted another round, and so we decided to slightly up the difficulty. We also would like to have a word with the ~2% of you who thought our names are Walter and not Max. As to those of you who wrongly answered that England's national dish is fish & chips instead of chicken tikka masala, we completely understand.

Let's see how you do this week. Answers next Friday — have a great weekend!

Here is the link.

Last Week’s Responses

Answer key from last week’s trivia edition of 20 Questions.

What is the capital of New Jersey?
Jersey City (4.5%)
Trenton (95.5%)

What is England’s national dish?
Chicken tikka masala (15.6%)
Fish & chips (84.4%)

Which Star Wars prequel came first?
The Phantom Menace (76.8%)
Attack of the Clones (23.2%)

Which novel did Jane Austen NOT write?
Mansfield Park (43.7%)
Little Women (56.3%)

Where did Cam Newton play football in college?
Ohio State (30.7%)
Auburn (69.3%)

What college town is Iowa State based in?
Ames (79.1%)
Iowa City (20.9%)

How many Great Lakes are there?
Four (12.4%)
Five (87.6%)

Finish the title: _____ and the Giant Peach.
James (92.9%)
Jack (7.1%)

Who composed the “Moonlight Sonata”?
Beethoven (55.2%)
Mozart (44.8%)

The name of the Roca founders who write a daily newsletter?
Max (97.8%)
Walter (2.2%) - We need to talk….

In which year did the Chernobyl nuclear disaster occur?
1966 (12.8%)
1986 (87.2%)

Which novel begins with the line, "Call me Ishmael"?
Last of the Mohicans (9.9%)
Moby Dick (90.1%)

What is the name of the scale used to measure spiciness of peppers?
Richter scale (1.7%)
Scoville scale (98.3%)

What is the name of Homer's eldest daughter in The Simpsons?
Lisa (89.2%)
Maggie (10.8%)

If you tipped 20% on a $15 bill, how much would the tip be?
$2.50 (7.7%)
$3.00 (92.3%)

Which mountain range separates Europe and Asia?
Ural Mountains (63.7%)
Caucasus Mountains (36.3%)

Who wrote "No Shoes, No Shirt, No Problem"?
Tim McGraw (24.9%)
Kenny Chesney (75.1%)

Who wrote The Catcher in the Rye?
Aldous Huxley (12.7%)
JD Salinger (87.3%)

Who was Bill Gates’ Microsoft co-founder?
Paul Allen (50.7%)
Steve Ballmer (49.3%)

POPCORN
Some Quick Stories for Happy Hour

🇨🇳 That Pisses Me Off: A mother in Beijing, China, posted a photo of her family eating a meal after her toddler urinated on it. The mother said she was “proud” of her boy

🐻 Beary Bold Move: Four individuals were arrested in California for allegedly dressing as bears, causing $120,000+ in “bear attack” damage to their vehicles, and then filing insurance claims

🎵 Too Much Time on Zuck’s Hands: Mark Zuckerberg collaborated with rapper T-Pain to record a cover of “Get Low” to celebrate his anniversary with wife Priscilla Chan. The song allegedly holds sentimental value as it was playing when they first met at a college party

🚁 Laid Off: Two British soldiers were discovered engaging in sexual activity in the cockpit of an Apache gunship during a routine servicing at a military base

🎥 Are You Not [Same-Sex] Entertained?: Denzel Washington revealed that a same-sex kiss he filmed for Gladiator II was cut from the final version

EDITOR’S NOTE
Final Thoughts

It feels like ChatGPT made up yesterday’s news day with a prompt of “Give me a news cycle if news cycles could take shrooms and drink Red Bull.” It concludes a wild week, and we feel a great sense of solidarity with you for traversing this news landscape with us. Hope you have a great weekend, and we’d like to issue a friendly reminder to not dress up in a bear costume and damage your car for insurance money.

–Max and Max