When Science Met the Supernatural: The Strange History of the Fourth Dimension Public Domain Review
Mushrooms show promise as memory chips for future computers Phys.org
Constructing the Risk Threshold E-Flux
Climate/Environment
Melissa one of the strongest Atlantic hurricanes so late in the season Balanced Weather
Do you see all that purple? That corresponds to incredibly cold cloud tops around minus-80 degrees Celsius (minus-112 degrees Fahrenheit). Clouds have to be about 52,000 feet tall (or greater) to be that cold.
The fact that Melissa has such a tall, cold CDO, or Central Dense… pic.twitter.com/ilvNjhfmVc
— Matthew Cappucci (@MatthewCappucci) October 28, 2025
A thread of videos from today’s flight into Hurricane Melissa
In this first one we are entering from the southeast just after sunrise and the bright arc on the far northwest eye wall is the light just beginning to make it over the top from behind us. pic.twitter.com/qGdpp7lbCN
— Tropical Cowboy of Danger (@FlynonymousWX) October 27, 2025
Hurricane Melissa collides with U.S. military mission in Caribbean WaPo
***
Global vegetation production may decrease in this century due to rising atmospheric dryness Nature
Indian Farmers Struggle as Climate Change Warps Landscape Foreign Policy
INDIA’S FORESTS ARE SHRINKING IN PLAIN SIGHT Carbon Copy
An E.P.A. Plan to Kill a Major Climate Rule Is Worrying Business Leaders New York Times
Private equity veteran goes all out on extreme weather bets Business Times
Pandemics
A Grim Future Infection Control, Emergency Management, Safety, and General Thoughts
Africa
US Launches Two More Airstrikes in Somalia as It Continues To Bomb the Country at a Record Pace Antiwar
UK military equipment used by militia accused of genocide found in Sudan, UN told The Guardian
The Koreas
S. Korea, U.S. unlikely to finalize tariff deal during APEC gathering: presidential official Yonhap
Japan
The “Mussolini Corporatism” Behind Trump’s Demand For $800 Billion From Japan and Korea Japan Economy Watch
Japan’s rearmament reshapes security in Southeast Asia East Asia Forum
Trump lauds Japan’s ‘great’ female leader, inks rare earths deal Channel News Asia
China?
China and Asean, hit by US tariffs, sign upgraded free trade pact Straits Times
New phrase, new phase? China’s central bank adjusts language on yuan internationalisation South China Morning Post
***
Could China devastate the US without firing a shot? Gary Marcus
Bessent Eager For China Economic Rescue, Beijing Plays Chess, $1.2T Global Tariff Crash Begins Sean Foo (Video)
Germany is sabotaging its relations with China on behalf of Washington Geopolitical Economy Report
Berlin urges ‘dialogue’ with China after EU trade bazooka threats Euractiv
1st US heavy rare earths separation facility planned in Louisiana Asia Times
Trump to Host U.S.-Central Asia Summit on November 6 Times of Central Asia
Syraqistan
Palestine and the Making of a New New World Steve Salaita
IDF Chief on Gaza: ‘The War Is Not Yet Over’ Antiwar
IDF Disposes of Huge Piles of Construction Waste and Rubble From Israel Inside Gaza Haaretz
Leaked: How British Intel Infiltrates Lebanon Kit Klarenberg
European Disunion
EU plays hardball: If you won’t seize Russia’s cash, open your wallets Politico
Belgium is ‘turning into a narco-state’, says judge in furious open letter Brussels Times
The ticking bomb of European rearmament Middle East Eye
Consequences of the Military Buildup German Foreign Policy
Why German rearmament isn’t happening Responsible Statecraft
New Not-So-Cold War
Russian Envoy Concludes Trump Completely Co-opted by Neocons & Europeans Alastair Crooke (Video)
Trump responds to Russian test of unlimited-range cruise missile RT
Belgian defense minister threatens to ‘wipe Moscow off the map’ if Russia launches missile at Brussels Anadolu Agency. What is going on in Belgium?
Living Dangerously Big Serge
SITREP 10/27/25: Pokrovsk Reaches Its Final Arc as Russian Bulldozer Plows Ahead Simplicius
Zelensky Warns Russian Oil Industry Will ‘Pay Even More’ as Ukraine Plans Deeper Strikes Kyiv Post
Russia’s Lukoil to sell international assets as a result of new US oil sanctions Intellinews
U.S. Steps Up Pressure on Hungary to Cut Off Russian Oil OilPrice
South of the Border
GOP Sen. Rick Scott Warns Maduro Should ‘Head To China Or Russia’: ‘Something is Going To Happen’ Latin Times
Venezuela Exposes CIA ‘Casus Belli’ Plot, Arrests Suspected Operatives Orinoco Tribune
🚨Dragon Field Fallout:🇻🇪Maduro Suspends All Energy Deals with🇹🇹Trinidad & Tobago Amid🇺🇸US Military Buildup.
🧵 https://t.co/OfMGtZAIgA pic.twitter.com/N1DP7NQEaD
— Francesco Sassi (@Frank_Stones) October 28, 2025
Are We A Week Away From An American Invasion of Venezuela? Ian Welsh
L’affaire Epstein
Lawsuits against banks with Epstein ties may shed new light on financier’s crimes The Guardian
Trump 2.0
Treasury Chief Bessent Says He’s a ‘Soybean Farmer’ Who Has ‘Felt the Pain’ of Trump Tariffs Common Dreams
Trump confirms secondary physical included MRI, cognitive test The Hill
It’s Not a Ballroom. It’s a Bunker. Jessica Wildfire
Trump Is the Shitcoin President Gizmodo
Democrats en déshabillé
Left-wing ideas have wrecked Democrats’ brand, new report warns Semafor
Graham Platner Campaign Appears to Be in Free-fall as Another Key Aide Quits The Maine Wire
The Great Leftist Ignorance Scam Matt Taibbi. Arguably says just as much about Taibbi as it does Platner. Even if all the politicians Taibbi lists are indeed scam artists, we should be careful about throwing the baby (working class struggles) out with the bath water (liberal identity politics). The fake leftists are easy to poke fun at, but isolating “left movement” to electoral politics and the many flaws of these politicians ignores the many current fights taking place across the country that use tactics long favored by progressives. They might include people who are culturally conservative with those who are culturally liberal, but they are overwhelmingly concerned with class struggle. Taibbi sounds like he could benefit from thinking about which side of that line he’s on.
Karine Jean-Pierre is hawking her pro-Biden book. Pressed by @AymanM on whether she regrets defending Biden’s financing and arming of Israel, she says: “As a black woman who is queer…”
Jean-Pierre starts many of her sentences with this even when wholly unrelated to the topic. https://t.co/krQeEhcJNB
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) October 26, 2025
Police State Watch
ICE’s Hiring Surge Is Already a Disaster Doomsday Scenario
ICE Tear Gas Disrupts Halloween Parade as Trump’s Chicago Crackdown Spreads Common Dreams
Trump plans to install Border Patrol officials to lead a more aggressive migrant crackdown NBC News
Real-life ‘RoboCop’? Chinese policeman beats paralysis with spinal interface implant South China Morning Post
Accelerationists
‘Abundance’, De-regulation, and the Demolition of Democracy Ann Pettifor
Imperial Collapse Watch
Trump Hasn’t Learned the Lessons of America’s ‘Forever Wars’ WPR. Perhaps a lesson that will never be learned by the ruling class.
Pentagon reportedly upset over Netflix’s nuclear war movie ‘A House of Dynamite’ Task & Purpose
AI
Jet engine shortages threaten AI data center expansion as wait times stretch into 2030 — the rush to power AI buildout continues Tom’s Hardware
Exclusive: Amazon targets as many as 30,000 corporate job cuts, sources say Reuters
Economy
First Brands: Are The Cockroaches Coming Home to Roost? Racket News
Class Warfare
Library Admins Are Using Public Money to Hire Union Busters Against Workers Truthout
Eugene Debs and All Of Us Hamilton Nolan
Antidote du jour (via):
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
110 comments
Comments are closed.
“U.S. Steps Up Pressure on Hungary to Cut Off Russian Oil”
I still find this hard to understand. During the US elections last year all the EU leaders were trashing Trump and were backing Kamala to win. The UK even sent a staff group of 100 people to help make it so. There was only one leader in the EU that was really defending Trump and that was Orban of Hungary. And yet now between cancelling the Hungarian summit and demanding that Orban halt all Russian oil deliveries, this would wreck Hungary economically and may help Orban be defeated in next year’s elections and it would be an EU-approved globalist that would replace him. To top it all off, Trump is now siding with all those EU leaders that were trashing him. There is no sense of gratitude with Trump – nor even common sense. He would lose his eyes and ears in the EU when Orban goes and be dependent on what the Europeans tell him.
Planning three hours ahead is not a capability for U S leaders, check “Pivot to Asia “ and rare earth materials along with upstream medical feedstocks for confirmation
Being a friend to the US is deadly. Will these fools ever learn?
No good deed goes unpunished.
Trump has plainly learnt off us Brits:
“During the Second World War, the Karen sided with the British with the promise that we would be given our own independent country after the war. The Burmese military, the Burma Independent Army (BIA), sided with the Japanese. After the war, the British betrayed the Karen and we were not given our own country, but were instead part of the independent Burma. The BIA accused the Karen of being a lackey of the British colonial government and escalated repression and attacks on the Karen.”
Aung San suuKyi’s dad was Aung San, who founded the Tatmadaw and fought with the Japanese until they began losing, when he switched sides. No wonder she kept telling us Rohingya are terrorists…
Like Ukraine, the Brits are always on the worst side, backing the Nazis.
Regarding First Brands “ It is still too early to tell what the final loss total is for First Brands. With nearly $12 billion in debt, the losses will be substantial and will hit CLO managers, private credit fund managers, insurance companies, which insured some of the off-balance sheet transactions, investment banks (primarily Jefferies), and public accounting firms (BDO). All will get a dose of pain and humility.” I predict the first line of loss will be the workers whether factory floor or management office that bite the bitter sausage that our political economy makes
“When Science Met the Supernatural: The Strange History of the Fourth Dimension”
When this article mentioned Edwin A. Abbott’s satirical novella “Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions”, I noted that it made an appearance in popular culture not that long ago-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-wqtqo3DFdo (1:30 mins)
My introduction to the 4th spatial dimension was in Carl Sagan’s Cosmos. The concept has certainly evoked many interesting thought exercises over the years.
What if…what we experience as gravity is a 3rd dimensional manifestation of a 4th dimensional phenomenon?
What if…we could build equipment to measure 4th dimensional phenomena? How could we do so within the limitations of our 3rd dimension existence?
What…would be the nature of quantum reality in that 4th dimension? Again, is what we experience merely a 3rd dimensional manifestation of 4th dimension phenomena? (akin to a circle being a 2nd dimensional manifestation of a 3rd dimension sphere. And why are all orbits -conic- sections?). What would be the nature of that phenomenon such that it manifests the way it does in the 3rd dimension?
So many questions; so few answers.
> Mushrooms show promise as memory chips for future computers Phys.org
>> can be grown and trained to act as organic memristors, a type of data processor that can remember past electrical states.
What could go wrong?
What happens if they accidentally use “magic mushrooms”?
My laptop has been microdosing for some time now, and occasional outbursts, bombasts and/or introspection at this turning point intersection in history are hardly coincidental.
Then we will have ‘real’ quantum computers.
Either that or AI computers that will be hallucinating like crazy.
Fungi have minds of their own. They will be around long after humans self-destruct.
The Maine Wire is right wing propoganda. If you read the article you will find that the new resignation is because of a child on the. way, and no other evidence of a free fall is shown. He continues to draw large crowds, I don’t see road signs disappearing. His polling is still strong where it matters, here in Maine.
I had dinner with an old friend, far more conservative than I am, though a good liberal, a few nights ago. I wasn’t planning on bringing up Platner, because she is an ardent Zionist, and I didn’t want to engage. She did bring him up, though, and said, “my mother was a holocaust survivor, and I had no idea what a totenkamf was. I don’t give a shit what kind of stupid tattoos he got. He’s saying the right things and we need more candidates like him.”
For what it’s worth, in my world, people start restructuring their load pretty far out. Ambitious people don’t wanna risk doing poorly or dropping the ball if there are complications during a pregnancy. And they don’t want to spend six months at the head of a big project only to hand it off to someone who will take the credit while they are on leave for leave, often a long leave created by stacking up leave and vacation days.
Again on First Brands and losses we can look at the defensive lines to take losses. If private general partners bit first, then the private co. workers before the limited partners get hit (will have to forego the third home). If public the share holders lose first with falling stock price, then the company employees, and finally the C suite takes a scratch. The executives worse case scenario lose the company then have to search for board positions.
“Hurricane Melissa collides with U.S. military mission in Caribbean”
Trump is in trouble now. He could use those ships to aid those people in the storm ravaged parts of the Caribbean. Or he could make them stay on station to continue to threaten Venezuela with. Either way, Trump is going to have to make a decision. Since he is loath to make decisions like this, that is why I say that he is in trouble. My guess is that he will announce that he will help the people there but only cut one ship from that task force to do so for publicity purposes.
How do we know Melissa isn’t a drug runner for the cartel?
I say we take her out!
Nuking a hurricane is always the answer!
Wait now. Something don’t add up here. Bringing spliff into Jamaica instead of out of? Feels like a teachable example of the rule; never use your own product.
Goooooooood Mooooooorning Fiatnam!
It was a greed that couldn’t be quenched, he who ends up with the most digital entries of 0’s & 1’s prevails, devil take the hindmost.
Talking of money, you don’t want to go into battle with a bunch of small change a jingling and a jangling in your BDU, giving away your position in lowest entry monetary units, so everybody in the platoon had long ago gone to Bitcoin, secure since the teens-and silent like a Swiss banker.
Hurricane Melissa collides with U.S. military mission in Caribbean WaPo
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Loves me some historical comparisons, and here’s a beaut!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Hurricane_of_1780
And let’s not forget Hurricane Gilbert on 1988.
It held the record for lowest pressure in the Atlantic/Carribbean at 888 mb until Hurricane Wilma in 2005.
Thanks for link. Some of us have always been smitten by the Age of Sail.
Soggy here at the moment after weeks of no rain. It would truly (not) be a shame if the AGW that Trump denies spoils his nautical conquest plans.
“IDF Disposes of Huge Piles of Construction Waste and Rubble From Israel Inside Gaza”
‘One of the soldiers Haaretz spoke with said he had asked his commanders why the waste was being dumped randomly inside Gaza instead of a proper disposal site. According to him, the commanders replied that since foreign countries would soon enter Gaza to begin reconstruction, they would also deal with the waste the IDF had left behind.’
Yeah, pretty typical that. The Israeli government has always had an aversion to putting their hands into their own pockets. But Israel has been doing stuff like this for decades – like when Settlers divert their sewerage onto Palestinian farmlands because who is going to stop them?
First Brands is a great case study about modern American widget-making on so many levels:
you got the interlocking maze of LPs, GPs;
you got the fairly decent, established brands underlying the company (Fram, etc);
you got de-contenting over the years within the brand widgets to maintain price–so much so that they introduce a new product line, at a higher price, to recapture the specs of the paleo-product line (higher-end Fram oil filters);
bankers/lenders just throwing money at anything that looks like a stable cash flow; management managing brands versus dealing with production and design.
Firat Brands really deserves its own post-mortem.
one has to be genuinely retarded and/or crooked to take an established aftermarket auto-parts company into Ch. 11—especially with the secular backdrop of record-old cars on US roads
Go long 3D printing!
The Pentagon is building the supply chain for it, and it may be the only manufacturing left when the Trump wrecking crew is through.
Am I allowed to say this?
Israelis are Jewish, aren’t they?
As the late, great Al Goldstein, founder of Screw Magazine and general gadfly to his own people once said (I’m paraphrasing) “there’s a kind of Jew that causes us that bad reputation and there’s a lot of them in one place”. I think he was referring to New York, but take it as you will. Those criminal pests cause a lot of pain to self-respecting Jews everywhere. And not only.
I recall that when Israel occupied southern Lebanon they stole dirt. They dug up topsoil to take to Israeli farms.
Trump responds to Russian test of unlimited-range cruise missile RT
Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One on Monday, Trump was asked whether he views the Russian report as saber-rattling. “They are not playing games with us. We are not playing games with them either. We test missiles all the time,” he said.
~~~~~~~~~~~
The President added, ‘we are hearing great things in regards to our hyper-sonic Sputternik testing, a lot of people say this is the greatest testing.’
– ‘Pentagon reportedly upset over Netflix’s nuclear war movie ‘A House of Dynamite’ – Task & Purpose
When thinking about Truth Tellers who expose the Myths of Empire, two names that definitely do NOT usually occur to me are Kathryn Bigelow and Netflix. I assume there is a more “complex” message in this movie that is not reflected in this self-interested hand-wringing by the “Missile Defense Agency.”
Kathryn Bigelow? Yeah, I tend to associate her with that film “Zero dark Thirty.” Usually the Pentagon has a pretty tight grip on Hollywood films that show the US military. They have a liaison office and if you play ball, they let you use military equipment in your films. If you don’t, they give you nothing. That is why the fighters in “Independence Day” were digital – as the director insisted using the name Area 51. But it has been know how some military officers will go in and write parts of the script and I suspect this of the films “Battleship” and “Battle Los Angeles. But here in this film they are showing that missile defense is at the very best a crap-shoot and considered how many hundreds of billions of dollars has been thrown at this problem the past coupla decades, I can understand how sensitive they are about it. Of course the Pentagon could say ‘See! That is why we need to spend all that money on Trump’s golden Dome – so that no missiles will ever hit the US.’ So maybe that is the more complex message.
This is apparently how the Missile Defense Agency apologists try to spin it:
“The internal memo said that the film “reinforces” the need for an active missile defense system, saying the movie “highlights that deterrence can fail.””
Confirmation bias never disappoints. Lots more missiles please!
I’m sure that you mean lots more money please! (snicker)
https://crazypeople.online/pictrs/image/abdf342d-cf81-40cc-bace-906c9dbdd3ee.jpeg
Above pic (meme) pinpoints why I cringed at Bigelow’s films. It shows a burned out soldier, caption “America will come to your nation and bomb every place possible and make a movie 20 years later about how depressed their soldiers were”.
I watched it so you don’t have to. It’s an awful, slow, maddening film, a liberal MIC adjacent defense porn West Wing mind cringefest and the ending is botched.
I kept asking myself “Why wouldn’t they just call Pyongyang? Don’t they even have the number? Get Trump or Dennis Rodman on the horn, stat!”
“Left-wing ideas have wrecked Democrats’ brand, new report warns”
The Democratic party hasn’t fielded a real left-wing idea in decades, probably closing in on ½ a century. It’s the lack of left-wing ideas that has destroyed the party. They’ve pretended that liberal ideals would be the way to hold a solid voting base, but they are wrong. While a leftist often supports ideals put forward by liberals (like equality), a leftist first and foremost wants to ensure that workers are getting their fair share of national income. The elites in the DNC sold out the working class and the leftist within its base decades ago.
It seems to have been a long-term project to rebrand “left-wing” as being all the LGBTQIA+BIPOC blather. An excellent way to make people loathe the idea of anyone left-wing being in charge. The strong identification of this pseudo-left-wing pwogwessivism with the preachy PMC just adds to the offensiveness and irrelevance of the whole business for the majority of working (or unemployed but job-seeking) members of the precariat. Tremendously effective strategy for whatever right-wing masterminds came up with it.
Indeed, it was always comical when Republicans carped that Pelosi is a dangerous leftist, while she herself said openly that Democrats are capitalists and that’s just how it is.
It’s all theater. The real struggle is dividing the spoils of wealth and power up among different elite factions, the working class be damned.
The Belgian defense minister “Soon we’ll have six hundred F-35s in Europe: the Russians are afraid of them because they can’t see them”
Yes, because nothing is scarier than a plane that spends between 80-90% of its lifetime being invisible in the hangar for maintenance. https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/f-35-lightning-ii-still-greatest-fighter-jet-world-sa-080625
I guess the scary part is that people that buy this are so crazy that they can do just about anything unpredictable. Like monkeys with handgrenades situtation.
Europeans especially have to pretend that their F-35s are combat aircraft, rather than an elaborate scheme for extracting ongoing tribute from vassals. A plane that can’t be seen in the skies and can’t be shot down sounds great. They don’t mention that its stealth and safety are due to being grounded.
A Golden Bunker beneath the Golden Ballroom will make a nice accessory to the Golden Dome and Golden Fleet. Maybe a Golden (Elephant) Calf on the White House Lawn would add a nice touch.
Going further, one might envision the Bunker d’Or including a Golden AI Data Center, a Golden Cryogenics Chamber, and so on.
Only thing is that ordinary Americans are left with only Golden Showers by Trump and his buddies
Trickle down economics?
Dick Gephardt would be considered MAGA today; and the Dick Gephardt Democrat is essentially the real base of the Democratic Party
Being that he’s now a lobbyist for Boeing, Turkey, Goldman Sachs, among several other vampire squids, Dick Gephardt’s pivot to pure venality is not only “considered” but IS MAGA today.
Sports Desque:
This is a World Series for the ages, yesterday’s game 3 & 4 (not really, but it went 18 innings) had to have a team lose, and happily for yours truly it was the Torontosaurus Rex (birds being the closest thing to dinosaurs) that went extinct when Freddie lowered the boom again~
Ohtani is otherworldly good, can’t wait to see him pitch tonight.
Amazing game. Ohtani is the real deal, but for am old timer like me, just seeing Sandy Koufax watching the game was pretty cool.
Mushrooms show promise as memory chips for future computers | Phys.org
I have never clicked on a link so fast as I clicked on this one. Bioelectronics are so cool! I wanted to be a botanist but I went into electronics engineering instead and ended up on the software side. From the article:
Mushroom data centers! Mushroom wearables! What if we combined them with some of the emerging tech around power generation from humidity or air tension?! The mind boggles. Think of how much ewaste could be reduced just by switching some standard electronics over to this. How cool!
Soundtrack to accompany that article?https://youtube.com/watch?v=-hlQHYtncww
Mushrooms are so fascinating!
Here’s some keyboard:
Mushroom Playing Synthesizers with Bionic Arms https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2iUZe3o5Po
If anyone wants to see a trippy mushroom music horror movie, then go see THE RABBIT TRAP.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbit_Trap
I think that with advances in DNA and genetic editing we will switch to biologically produced computers, so maybe your dream and reality can be synergized! Instead of having to mine and process mineral components for computers, imagine if you could just grow them with air, water, and nutrients to custom coded DNA. You’d have figure out how to have them replicate only when you want though or I could see some disaster scenarios unfolding.
“ICE’s Hiring Surge Is Already a Disaster”
If ICE units were in a game Like Age Of Empire 2, they would be called “trash” units. Low cost, low value units easily recruited. I would expect no less of ICE. But I am genuinely shocked to see that the FBI are lowering their standards to the same level so that they too will be trash units. In the very first “Police Academy” film, the premise was that standards for police were virtually eliminated by a Mayor so that anybody could join the police force and hilarity ensued. Looks like reality has finally caught up with fiction.
Like this?
https://x.com/MyLordBebo/status/1982890258384777460
RE: The Great Leftist Ignorance Scam
That was some really weak sauce by Taibbi. Since I don’t really like to engage in the knuckle draggers and bots in his comments section, I’ll make reply here on the offchance he might notice.
Taibbi is correct to criticize Platner for his working class claims. There is a difference between owning a business and working for one, and Platner is the owner from what I understand. But a small oyster farm is also not Goldman Sachs and Taibbi goes off the rails pretty quickly after that.
Taibbi has noted many, many times that his father was a journalist and that in his father’s day, a journalist was a working class profession that didn’t require a college education to succeed. The same goes for many others professions. Training came on the job. That is not the case today, and college is now often a stand in for on the job training. So claiming that because these two got educations at elite schools, they are out of touch with reality is just nonsense. Maybe the problem is that we no longer provide on the job training so many more people feel that it’s necessary to go to college in order to make a living.
Also, I went to the same college as Mamdani but I just checked my wallet and there was not a squillion dollars in it. Not even a lousy million! I went to that school not because my family was rich, but because I got good grades at a public high school and corralled a lot of financial aid. He’s painting with a very broad brush trying to claim these guys are phonies based on the educations they received. Are there problems with the curricula at a lot of colleges and universities these days? Yes there are. But you don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. Nobody who goes there is forced to take courses on the deconstruction of Asian feminist basket weaving in French translation and all of these institutions also still offer courses in physics and chemistry, engineering and medicine, and any number of other useful skills. I know, because I took them myself. We want an educated populace, don’t we?
Taibbi went to Bard. Yeah, Bard is pretty crunchy granola. But currently one of my favorite classicists teaches there. Is history unimportant? As they say, those who don’t learn it are doomed to repeat it, and I see a lot of repetition going on right now, and not in a good way. Perhaps more historical education would mitigate some of the destructiveness we are currently witnessing all over the world. Another person affiliated with Bard at one point is NC favorite Michael Hudson. I’d love it if we had some politicians taking Hudson’s economic advice to heart. If Taibbi didn’t get what he considers a decent education at Bard, maybe he needed a better academic advisor. Trying to demean decent schools as nothing but “intellectual spas” for the failings of of a few departments is nonsense.
He really goes off the rails with stuff like this –
“For a likely future Muslim Mayor of New York to even remotely imply that Muslims in New York were victims of 9/11 is infuriating lunacy. ”
Nice straw man. Because he isn’t remotely implying that Muslims were the victims. And there were 3K or so people killed that day, and as Taibbi noites there were lots of Muslims in NYC at the time. I’d be rather shocked if there weren’t some actual Muslim victims of the trade center attacks.
Enough of the shoot from the hip hot takes trying to own the libs. You lose accuracy doing that. In the latest podcast, Kirn goes off trying to claim that the whole Platner campaign is some design by the Democrat party establishment to put in focus grouped manly authenticate candidate or some such. If he or Taibbi noticed that Chuck F-ing Establishment Schumer brought Janet Mills into the race to run against Platner, which would seem to indicate Platner is NOT and establishment approved candidate, then I missed it. I just couldn’t get through all the drivel in the first half hour or so of the podcast.
There are legit reasons to be skeptical of and to criticize both candidates, and NC has provided some in recent days. Maybe stick with that instead of stupid rhetoric designed to please the newfound conservatibe audience.
I’ve followed Taibbi since the eXile days. He has done a lot of great work. And he is under no obligation to report on what I might prefer. But if the best he can do these days is a bunch of snarling, ill thought out, ”own the libs” palaver, then maybe it’s best to not say anything at all. Because the guy who wrote “Hate, Inc” which justifiably called out both sides for their inflammatory rhetoric, while castigating himself for doing it in the past against the conservatives, is doing it again, this time against the other side.
🪦
I was thinking Taibbi was making an issue of Plantner being a product of a fancy prep school, not just fancy college? I think there is a bit of difference.
I did not know that fancy prep schools even existed until I got to grad school and started noticing that their products often do seem to have a mindset different from those of us who went to public high schools. Not necessarily good or bad in general, but potentially very alienating mutually, and unlike fancy colleges, fancy prep schools really are exclusive: they really do draw from people who think they are better than us masses (and I think Taibbi himself is often guilty of this same, well, condescension.) while fancy colleges do try to draw in at least some people who are, well, peons like us. Not a fatal flaw, perhaps, but I would not trust fancy prep school grads who peddle themselves as regular people unless I know much more.
Taibbi did note Mamdani’s alma mater in a rather negative light at the time Mamdani won the primary. That’s the only reason I knew where he went to school.
I hear you on the fancy prep schools though. They are more exclusive and can produce some real jerks. I was in the minority as a public school kid at my college, and there were definitely plenty of kids who were scions of wealth with the bad attitudes. But I did make some lifelong friends with some of the prep school kids who I consider very good people. One guy took on the SF political machine as a low income housing advocate for example. It certainly wasn’t the rule, but there were a few who came from a lot of money and rejected it to an extent (it’s a lot easier to reject wealth temporarily when you know you’ll inherit it eventually).
I thought Nat had some very valid criticisms of both candidates in yesterday’s post, and both are running as Democrats which is a big turn off for me personally, but Taibbi’s stuff is not well thought out and just over the top. Very disappointing to see him take the same route as the corporate media he so often justifiably criticizes.
I too was with Taibbi when he was cast out, but over the past year or so I feel he’s continually missing or at least getting the situation 1/2 wrong. He complains about “upper-class lefties”, but I think he’s one of them and that’s what his problem is.
In the real world, there are NO upper-class lefties who are really lefties (outside of maybe a handful of rare authentic class traitors). Most people claiming to be progressives or lefties who come from the upper-classes are just Liberals claiming to be leftists, but that doesn’t make them a real leftist.
John Babst is in no way an elite prep school. It is a private school that has to accept local students that choose to go there. It is a good school but almost 90% of their students are not boarders. It is not Exeter or Andover.
i have a lot of family members affiliated with fancy prep schools, as both students and teachers. the main way someone can go to fancy prep school and not be hella rich is if their family member works there, or if they get a scholarship. some of my cousins lived in the same town as an exclusive boarding school, and the school offered one scholarship per year to a student from the town they were in. two of my cousins got the scholarship. but i will note that even students who are children of employees or on scholarship tend to be not that poor. they need to either have parents ‘well bred’ enough to land prep school jobs, or have parents rich enough to support them in getting good grades. there might be outliers, but still.
my brother went to a fancy boarding school as an upper middle class student. his classmates were the sons of billionaires. it completely changed the way he thinks about money. my sister and i were the richest in our high school friendgroups, but my brother is convinced our family is poor because he is friends with the actual 1%. the standards for what is normal there are just so different.
By my lights, Kirn is the true source of Taibbi’s downward spiral. You could see it start to form in Taibbi’s palpable admiration for him on his appearance in Useful Idiots years ago. Taibbi’s been in his clutches ever since. It’s a shame even for Kirn, who was a fantastic writer, to slowly wither into this dull paranoiac we see today. If you follow his Twitter threads, you’ll notice his highly predictable MO: something big is always about to happen in response to a recent event (see Mangioni, Epstein Files, Kirk Assassination, etc.). An expose of some QAnon level conspiracy is ever looming on the horizon. And then another squirrel jumps out in front of him (see Mangioni, Epstein Files, Kirk Assassination, etc.). But it’s so much the worse for Taibbi – after making a career of unmasking graft and mendacity – to be taken in by such an obvious huckster whose late-in-life foray into political commentary is just a way of attracting a credulous lowbrow audience.
BINGO!
Kunstler is another one I’ve quit reading. He did valuable work writing about the insanity of the suburb and Happy Motoring, but now he’s just a MAGA culture warrior.
And I agree about Kirn, whom I’ve seen while channel surfing trying to impress Gutfeld on that sad collection of idiots and shills. Taibbi has lost it.
Kirn is clearly dominating the dialog when it comes to analyzing / interpreting how political media is managing the candidacies of Platner and Mamdani and the narratives of both their supporters and opponents / critics. I do not even think that is a bad thing. Kirn’s views, though reactionary and anarchic, are much richer than Taibbi’s when it comes to how narrative meaning is created and promoted, because he is skilled storyteller with Hollywood experience.
My own politics are wishful in a populist direction. I want to believe. I need to believe some days. Kirn presents a dose of realism that is much needed. I felt Taibbi’s take on Platner began and ended with “Hotchkiss!” That left a lot unsaid regarding what leads someone with prep school education into the Army, the Marines and even a brief stint as a mercenary. Not to mention a veteran’s disability for PTSD. Clearly not Schumer’s choice, but are some of his campaign staff graduates Fetterman’s charm school? And, did those campaign advisers recruit Platner? I do not know which reports to trust, but from the snippets that filter thru, I see reasons to be concerned. Actual reporting is absent here and maybe that is on Taibbi, who presents himself as a political reported while Kirn is just doing really good theatre criticism.
Kirn’s take on Mamdani is much simpler. It is “lightweight”! It seems a valid point. And a telling point against much of the Monty Python Left.
That’s the problem here, the lack of reporting. Since Platner is in my state I did my best to get the facts straight about this latest controversy. Taibbi didn’t bother, left out important information, and got other things flat out wrong. That’s not how he usually operates. The only time I remember him getting something wrong was mixing up a couple very similar government acronyms in the twitter files story, which was an understandable and honest mistake, and he apologized profusely for this very minor mix up.
I liked the reporter/theater critic thing they had going, and Kirn was pretty clear that he’s riffing and working up story ideas. But Taibbi didn’t hold up his end here and as Lauptan notes above, Kirn is becoming increasingly erratic.
On Cimate, lol, don’t worry go back to sleep
Bill Gates Says Climate Change ‘Will Not Lead to Humanity’s Demise’ (NY Times via archive.is)
(bold mine)
This dude, besides being a monopolist and crook, is high as a kite.
I’m not sure how you “improve” the lives of those in the developing world by baking them alive, starving them, and subjecting them to extreme local weather events. See, for example, Jamaica, today.
It would be great if we never had to hear from Bill Gates ever again, except perhaps for his confession to the crimes he and others committed on, in transit to, and otherwise as an accomplice to, the owner of Little Saint James island.
Perhaps if we give both Gates and Trump their Nobel participation trophies then they will go away and play with their toys and leave the rest of us alone.
The rest of us are their toys.
Gates has realized that the damage we’re doing to the planet includes a Great Extinction and huge losses in population for the species that survive. That brings a smile to the face of the man who thinks he can out-engineer Evolution and who stays awake at night trying to figure out how to charge rent to the birds that hang out in the trees around his various mansions.
Interesting to see the German state following the US into a strategy of using military spending as an economic stimulus. The US was all about this after World War II, and arguably still is. It works well because a relatively small body of corruptable people decides on military spending, and the profit levels for military contractors tend to be high, and also independent of the quality of their products.
The problem, of course, is that (aside from actual paychecks), the fruits of the military industrial complex do nothing for the national population. It’s basically a strategy of paying people to dig holes and then fill them up again. Other things that would actually provide value to the people, like infrastructure construction, healthcare, housing, etc., go begging so that the flow of weapons can be continued. 70 years of building an economy around the weapons industry have left the US in the state it’s in right now.
Hopefully the Germans will resist the temptation and find better uses for their national resources.
RE: Could China devastate the US without firing a shot?
Good article, but we’ll see if the quote he included from Scott Galloway is correct –
“I think they’re going to flood the market with cheap, open-weight models that require less processing power but are 90% as good. The Chinese AI sector, acting under the direction and encouragement of the CCP, is about to Old Navy the U.S. economy: They’re going to mess with America’s big bet on AI and make it not pay off.”
In a free market, that would probably happen. But we don’t have an actual free market and never have, despite the nearly religious claims to the contrary. Sanctions, tariffs, etc do not a free market make.
Anecdotal example – I was asked to use AI on the job recently, because like so many, my company doesn’t know what it’s good for, but is going to throw some money at it anyway and hope for the best. I didn’t end up having to use it, but I did ask whether I could use Deep Seek if AI usage was going to be mandatory, and was told that company policy didn’t allow that particular model. I imagine we aren’t the only ones.
I’ve read estimates of AI errors being anywhere from 25% to 45% of its answers. On a written test that would amount to anywhere from a C to an F grade. (Maybe AI developers grade on the curve. / ;)
From TechSpot.
https://www.techspot.com/news/110002-ai-assistants-misrepresent-news-stories-almost-half-time.html
I did ask whether I could use Deep Seek if AI usage was going to be mandatory, and was told that company policy didn’t allow that particular model. I imagine we aren’t the only ones.
You aren’t. I’m currently working with ~25 companies, a mix of US and European (mostly US), many with wholly owned subsidiaries in China. About a third of the parent companies are in strategic sectors (semiconductor/microcontroller/chip design, but nothing cutting edge) impacted by the 2022 export controls on technology to China that were recently lifted under Trump. Another third are defense contractors with military-specific guidelines on acceptable third party model usage. The remaining are a mix of financial services and public sector enterprise with big footprints. Of all of those, literally two (2) are allowing their users to use Deepseek or Qwen (the Chinese open source models) and one of them is a European national champion that is doing it in a massive air-gapped on prem data center under their direct control. The other is a financial services (hedge) that doesn’t care at all about the export/strategic guidelines stuff, they just go with whatever works best for their users.
As part of my work I have API keys for most of the big frontier models for testing with competitor tools. I prefer Deepseek myself for most tasks (I’m mostly doing software development). I usually use one of the big US models when I have to demo for customers – I can’t bring my own keys at work – the difference in how they’re working is staggering. Not exactly in quality of output, the thing about Deepseek being 90% as good as GPT4.5/Claude Sonnet 4 is pretty accurate, but for what I’m doing after a certain point the skill is in how to interact with the model. The big difference is that the US models appear designed to spend as much tokens as possible on their output. This is extremely obvious when you direct the models on agentic workflows or tasks: the US models will do things like script their way around problems or generate piles of documentation you don’t ask for or end by providing a list of things they suggest to do next to continue. Deepseek just does what it is told. It has an annoying personality, sure, but it’s also 3x-5x cheaper than the US models.
re: “The big difference is that the US models appear designed to spend as much tokens as possible on their output. ”
This is very interesting when considered in light of the modern, aka, digital western tech bros desire to ‘tokenize’ all analogue, aka real world things. Analogue vs virtual “ownership”. See also the tech bros “digital ownership” in name vs the physical real world ownership recorded in county, state or country ownership records. Do the tech bros think changing the naming of a thing changes the ownership of a thing?
A token in LLM world is the fundamental unit of text that all pricing is done in, usually at the 1 million token mark. A token isn’t exactly two characters – it depends on the data – but it is less than a word or code symbol. It doesn’t have anything to do with any of the other tech bro usages of tokens, like NFTs. I concede they do need to get a thesaurus when naming these things but the LLM token terminology has been around a long time; it’s related to the vector databases that are used to do the actual heavy lifting under the covers of the model’s processing.
Claude 4.5 Sonnet (the current priciest frontier model) is over $22 per million tokens when prompt output is over 200k characters. They price on prompt input (what you send to the model), prompt output (what the model sends to you) and prompt caching (what you ask the model to ‘remember’ across prompts in the form of system prompts or other context). So you can see how the model manufacturers may have an interest in making their models as chatty as possible on the output. The company I work for currently has some analysis showing the ‘average’ developer doing agentic stuff will generate about $10/day worth of charges on Claude Sonnet 4.5.
As a comparison I bought 50$ worth of API credits from the Deepseek platform two months ago and still have over $30 left. I know how to interact with the models so as not to shoot myself in the wallet on API calls but even so that is extremely cheap compared to the horror stories I hear daily about people racking up $400 bills on something they walked away from overnight.
It’s also nonsense. If good models will be available for free, then that would be good for economy as a whole, even if Sam Altman’s company may go under. It’s like saying cure for cancer costing $1 would be disaster for America, because it could bankrupt Big Pharma.
Taibbi’s latest, no paywall.
Life Imitates Art
https://www.racket.news/p/life-imitates-art
FFS. I think that whack to the head he took recently has put him over the edge.
I dunno. If moving to the right is a sin then at least Taibbi has talent which has always been his real calling card rather than his leftism. I’ve stopped listening to the free version of his podcasts because life is short and all that riffing or the obsessing over ancient news is kind of boring. Both Taibbi and Kirn style themselves as old school reporters more than pundits but the real story now is obviously our erratic president and not Russiagate. The Dems are a spent force and not worth the attention.
The Taibbi/Kirn show is fading IMO because they won’t go after the most important story which is what real reporters do. It’s not like there aren’t other things to read or listen to.
It’s not even moving to the right that is getting to me (and I’d argue he hasn’t that much, but the Democrat party sure has), it’s the lack of reporting. Like you said, he’s not going after the important stories right now, and he’s not getting the facts straight on the issues he does discuss recently.
I’m a paid subscriber because I trust him to provide some honest investigative journalism since there are so few who do a good job of that these days. Hot takes on culture war garbage I can get anywhere for free, which is all it’s worth. Any clown, even me, can do that.
My subscription goes for another few months. If the quality of reporting doesn’t go back to where it was when I started subscribing, well then there’ll be more to donate to NC.
On the other hand, Taibbi’s list of great American achievements is impressive. One very small list of achievements is listing the great American novel “Moby Dick.” I was in middle age when I finally ready it, and I can say that it is the great American novel. All the hubris, the man-conquers-nature, the revenge for past wrongs, the determination to win is in this novel. If life’s iteration is like a fractal, every iteration an expansion of the iteration that precedes it, the novel “Moby Dick” is the great American novel, imo. If you haven’t yet read it, and if you are in middle age and have some time on your hands, I recommend it. If nothing else, you’ll learn more than you ever wanted to know or could imagine about the whaling onboard ship manufactories.
RE: INDIA’S FORESTS ARE SHRINKING IN PLAIN SIGHT
Unrelated to the gist oi the article, I just wanted to point out that there are some serious Darwin Award candidates in the embedded video from the article – https://xcancel.com/GoHimachal_/status/1961452121401987436
Hopefully they all made it off the bridge.
Libertarians do this, too.
Devolution of the old time standard.
How can you tell if someone went to Harvard?
Don’t worry, they’ll tell you.
What weirds me out is how many images I see of Epstein in Harvard-wear. I don’t think I’ve seen anything to indicate that he actually attended that university (though I haven’t looked that hard; he doesn’t interest me that much). Almost like a stolen valor kind of thing.
[FWIW, I did attend Harvard, Summer School 1984 (I was soooo unprepared for that environment, but the things I learned…heh, heh), and, by gosh, I’m a libertarian too!]
I’m good with people stating their priors before their argument as a request to readers to considering their arguments in light of the priors given. I’m good with that.
My problem is with people who state their priors as a demand that I accept, must accept their arguments because said arguments must of course be a moral good based on their stated priors, even if their argument goes against my reason. Their implied moral claim is more important than my reason. That, in effect, is special pleading.
Mushrooms show promise as memory chips for future computers…
Iain M Banks has a nice novel, “Surface detail” where the mushrooms, their mycelia more precisely, spaning many many square kilometers, served as data centers hosting virtual hells where individuals could be hooked up to, in order to convince societies to maintain their hierarchical structure, unless they are sent to hell…
You are far better read on classic sci fi than I: my reaction was, Star Trek Discovery?
Yeah, that was a nice gimmick that of course didn’t make much physical sense. Megan O’Keefe has a trilogy where some fungi play an immense role.
The “arms race”, begun by W. Bush and supercharged by Obama’s “modernization”, a huge corporate cash orgy that so far isn’t really producing much modernization.
In a Looming Nuclear Arms Race, Aging Los Alamos Faces a Major Test (NY Times via archive.is)
America is going great! I mean, seriously, we have people walking up the stairs with this stuff
What the actual f?
No, we created it as a first strike capability. Other nations are upgrading their stuff because W. Bush quit all the treaties!
Elon Musk Doesn’t Say ‘Thank You Enough’ – Top Economist
Author and academic Mariana Mazzucato talks to Mehdi about Donald Trump’s ‘destructive’ industrial strategy and Keir Starmer’s failure to tackle ‘barbaric’ UK inequality.
Also good discussion on industrial policy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJz7I4wr0QY
It has been my historical experience that it is quite difficult and often impossible to have honest/detailed conversations about social class experiences (especially among people who have participated in Left politics).
I give Taibbi a great deal of credit for venturing into his own social class experiences and beginning to articulate some of the contradictions he seems to feel both internally and externally.
I think living under government threat of censorship during the Biden years, following his experiences documenting the Vampire Squid during the Obama years, were fundamentally life altering for Mr. Taibbi. I think his experiences with Elon and his media colleagues during the Twitter Files extravaganza was also something you don’t come back from. He’s had his family threatened by the government, his government destroyed by forces he documented, his reputation among “good people”, and his craft, utterly destroyed during his lifetime. I’m not surprised this is where he’s at now. I’m surprised people like Thomas Frank or John Kiriakou aren’t more bitter and, well, crazy after their experiences.
The empire has no clothes. They will destroy anyone who notices their nakedness. It’s a bold thing thing to stand up and do that publicly.
Mercenary Spyware, Device Searches, and App Censorship: Practical Defenses Against Technofascism
News u can use on device security.
By Micah Lee.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6K3dPTV4HU
I have to ask: What happened to that Hidden Tariff (?) / Hidden Costs (?) article and the publication of the number of article comments alongside the article titles?
Notice many of the entities that “donated” to the Epstein Ballroom also “donate” to Dems.
Russian Nuke powered missile: Have they simplified a heat exchange or made one more efficient? New ceramics? No way they launched something that leaves a radioactive plume in it’s wake no matter how loose USSR was with radioactivity in the past.
How did they land it without crashing and polluting everything around?
14,000 km in 15 hours isn’t very fast. That part I believe. The amount of heat is limited especially with a heat exchange.
Yes. That’s what had me wondering. The missile part is not that interesting. They invented a nuclear powered drone piloted by some kind of AI. That’d require a lot of engineering advances to come together.
Dropped off a flat of canned goods at the food bank on my way back from shopping. It was distressingly busy.
This is a Navy heavy county, and this hits home hard:
Military families facing food insecurity in the U.S.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2GshCMtx_E
I cannot believe Congressional leaders did not pass a bill to pay the military. That’s what they normally do. What’s stopping them?
They’ve decided to abdicate any pretense of governance. I don’t get why the Republicans haven’t ditched the filibuster to get it done. They’ve achieved the necessary margins to pass bills just not 60 votes in the senate.
And maybe they’re hoping to encourage a military coup d’etat. Having a number of angry, armed, unpaid and hungry soldiers lead by generals who are also passed off tends to increase the odds of that kind of thing.
re: Protonmail and law enforcement
About compliance and the limits of so-called encryption and user privacy.
by German technology blog TARNKAPPE
use google-translate
Proton received 72% more government requests for user data in 2024
In 2024, Proton was literally flooded with government requests for user information. This isn’t just due to its growth.
October 18, 2025
https://tarnkappe.info/artikel/it-sicherheit/datenschutz/proton-erhielt-72-mehr-behoerdliche-anfragen-fuer-nutzerdaten-im-jahr-2024-321904.html
“(…)
Proton received a record number of 11,023 “legal orders” in 2024
(…)
According to Article 271 of the Swiss Criminal Code, Proton is prohibited from transferring data directly to foreign authorities
(…)
The information in Proton AG’s transparency report, however, is rather vague. While it is clear that 655 orders were contested, it doesn’t specify which data was disclosed when the orders were complied with.
(…)
Currently, Proton is not required to retain data or identify users, but this is likely to change soon due to the new Ordinance on the Surveillance of Postal and Telecommunications Traffic (VÜPF). With the revision of the VÜPF, the company would even be obligated to remove its own encryption for the benefit of the authorities .
(…)”
Another one bites the dust
re: new book on Ukraine War
Ivan Katchanovski provides his latest study open access:
The Russia-Ukraine War and its Origins: From the Maidan to the Ukraine War
Ivan Katchanovski
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/396694016_The_Russia-Ukraine_War_and_its_Origins_From_the_Maidan_to_the_Ukraine_War
Abstract
This open access book examines the Russia-Ukraine war and its origins. Based on analysis of a large number of primary and secondary sources, it provides a systematic analysis of this crucial war, its nature, outcome, possibility of peaceful settlement, violence against civilians, and origins. The book examines the role of such factors as the NATO accession of Ukraine, Russian imperialism, democracy, genocide, and the far-right in the start of the war and traces the conflict escalation ladder, which culminated in this war, to preceding violent conflicts in Ukraine, in particular, the Euromaidan, the Maidan massacre, the Russian annexation of Crimea, and the war in Donbas. The Russia-Ukraine war is the most significant armed conflict of the 21st century in the entire world and in Europe since World War Two in terms of countries involved, casualties inflicted, and actual and potential impact in the world. This book analyzes the involvement of different conflict parties, such as the Ukrainian, Russian, and Western governments, Donbas separatists, and the far right, in this crucial war and in the Euromaidan, the Maidan massacre, the Russian annexation of Crimea, and the war in Donbas, and the nature of these conflicts. This book also examines support for pro-Western/pro-nationalist and pro-Russian/pro-communist political parties and presidential candidates and attitudes towards separatism and joining the European Union, NATO, and the union with Russia in regions of Ukraine in parliamentary and presidential elections and surveys since the Euromaidan.
re: Russia SMO
Jacques Baud with Daniel Davis
Russia’s NEW NUCLEAR MISSILE: The Burevestnik /Lt Col Daniel Davis & Col Jacques Baud
58 min.
https://rumble.com/v70ur8y-russias-new-nuclear-missile-the-burevestnik-lt-col-daniel-davis-and-col-jac.html?e9s=src_v1_sa%2Csrc_v1_sa_o%2Csrc_v1_ucp_a
re: Eugene Debs and All Of Us Hamilton Nolan
from the article:
> For the past 60 years, the Debs Foundation has put on an annual banquet
> to honor some individual of the left who carries on the great man’s legacy.
> This year, the honoree was Bernie Sanders.
and
> … Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who had come to introduce Bernie at the dinner.
FFS. One assumes … hopes … trusts that Debs is spinning in his grave at the soul-destroying abomination that is hereby perpetrated in his name.