This piece is something outside of my norm, though it will cover familiar ground if you’ve been with this publication a while. My intent with this one is to give something in the form of food for thought, a little snack tray of things to think about. Sit down, help yourself to a plate of cucumber and celery, and enjoy.

In this piece, I’ll be covering some pretty deep topics, including comparing some American and Chinese social cues, our underlying political systems, while highlighting their fundamental principles, and find out if one system/locale or another has strengths or facets that can be learned from, in order to find a better way out of this mess we find ourselves in - for all of us.

We sadly can’t tear it all down and start over, that’s a nice thought but rarely do such bloody revolutions end in nice warm feelings. As always, my focus is to shine light on under-covered topics rather than hitting the same notes you’ll get from 10,000 other places.

On with it.

(Note: This is kind of a long one, but I tried to keep it fun and light-hearted so you wouldn’t be bored to death.)

The Salad Bar Theorem

[A stacker, her haul, and a Pan pizza. What’s not to love here? Photo credit unknown]

It’s the 1990s, Smash Mouth is on the radio, life is good: you’re at Pizza Hut. Remember going *to* a Pizza Hut to eat?

I’m told some of you actually remember Pizza Hut’s salad bar fondly, a good way to get roughage before a particularly greasy meal; the mountain of shredded lettuce and cheese piled to the heavens, drenched in a gallon of your preferred dressing, topped with croutons and little sunflower seeds. I was a bit too young to appreciate it at the time, but I do have memories of it existing and eating broccoli from it. Ah, simpler times..

People in China in the 1990s had a wildly different approach. With renegade uses of math and structural engineering, they approached the idea of a single-plate buffet limitation as a challenge: they didn’t see a loophole to exploit, they saw an engineering problem to solve.

People developed long-form mathematical formulas and engineering diagrams for stacking cucumber slices on a cheap plastic plate. They calculated optimal cheese-to-lettuce density ratios, and cherry tomato placements.

Long hours were spent between hungry college students online and around the tables, discussing techniques and giving advice. Load bearing carrot strips and structural cucumber together, they turned a mundane American concept like a salad bar into artistry. A not-so-secret competition involving high level systematic thinking, applied to FOOD PLATING AND EATING.

This wasn’t corruption of the concept, more taking the “one plate” to physical limits. It was elevation of the concept of a salad bar, a refrain of “I accept your challenge” to the quip “all you can eat”.

China took an American concept, in an American institution restaurant, accepted the system at face value, and did it better than anyone involved could have imagined: they out-America’d America at the task of gathering and consuming food.

In doing so, they nearly ate Pizza Hut out of business in China, and would see the removal of such salad bars from Chinese locations. Alas, this was just the tip of the iceberg lettuce - as I’ve learned, China has a rich history of outdoing America on our own ideological home turf, causing us to pack it up and go home.

Cars, Tech, and ‘The Shining City on a Hill’

[Photo of a Xiaomi SU7 Ultra - Oh, you thought this was the next Ford Fusion? Sorry, it’s a Xiaomi / Photo credit: Top Gear/BBC]

Though Henry Ford brought to market the first mass-produced car in 1908, America’s powerhouse automotive industry is languishing yet again in 2026, parked at another stark crossroads.

In one direction stands a fate of endless iterative crossover SUVs and heavy trucks; more of the same, business as usual. Down the other: next-gen ICE, Hybrids, EVs, FCVs, and the future. The story still unwritten - individual conveyance, personal transit; but more egalitarian and thoughtful.

The industry that was once world class and forward-thinking has gone through malaise a few times already - in the 1970s/80s, and again in the 2000s. Nearly collapsed on its feet in 2007, bailed out with our tax dollars - Chrysler and its Auburn Hills property changing hands from the Daimler/Cerberus era into the hands of Fiat.

Struggling to compete on the global scale with their counterparts in Japan and South Korea, the once storied “big three” find themselves now reliant on high-profit margin vehicles, at the expense of more affordable, more conventional designs and the American public writ large; a business model destined for failure.

In the exact same time frame, China was filling a forming vacuum as the largest EV producer and exporter in the world by volume.

While the US spent decades gently nudging consumers towards larger, heavier gasoline vehicles and killing off more conventional passenger cars/MPVs, China allowed its market to grow organically through acquisitions, joint ventures, and domestic engineering alike. The industry that started as “imitation is a sincere form of flattery” quickly evolved into some of the most unique and desirable designs in the industry today.

As Dearborn and Hamtramck were selling iterative and undesirable inventory that was rashly facelifted, China spent the same time building brand new supply chains, staffing engineering teams and design studios, building out its own native industry; one deeply integrated with the tech industry it built.

End result: BYD can now bring a car to market for $12,000, with more usable range per charge than a $40,000+ Tesla.

Conclusion: Competition isn’t just strong, it’s undeniable and overwhelming. The magnitude of scale is a force to be reckoned with, something the big three can’t compete with following decades of outsourcing and downsizing.

On Tech

[Huanqiangbei, the world’s largest electronics marketplace / Photo credit unknown]

Motorola invented the semiconductor, ARPANET is the grandfather of the internet, and Siri wouldn’t be possible without DARPA technology. Pioneering, groundbreaking science done by people far smarter than I could ever dream of being.

When you check modern records however, China manufactured the vast majority of your consumer tech hardware, most of it likely coming from one shining city - Shenzhen, and its unending focus on speed-to-market; physical manufacturing at scale the likes of which has never been seen before.

Though China remains constrained by US semiconductor technology embargoes — particularly the inability to access ASML’s EUV lithography machines; the Dutch-built multi-million-dollar behemoths required to print the world’s most advanced chips — their domestic production capability is advancing rapidly. This remains one of the most interesting developments and something I’m watching closely. Competition here is more than welcome.

While the US market shifts more deeply into services/software (the renter model logic), China seems to double down on an “all of the above” approach, deeply rooted in manufacturing prowess and rewarding the prototype mentality, while advancing into meaningful software development.

As just one example: LLM/AI model DeepSeek and its growth show genuine promise and proof that the science behind it is sound, while the Silicon Valley business model remains badly warped towards short-term investor gains, stifling the beauty of the creation.

The biggest geopolitical problem currently is “taking one’s salad bar and going home”.

Sure, America may have invented the concept of a ‘frontier AI model’, your ChatGPT and Gemini and so on. Those are built by hyper-intelligent people standing on DARPA’s shoulders and a literal mountain range of publicly funded research.

For a while, it was the most American thing possible: messy, broadly accessible, people piling plates as high as the physics permitted with the market handing out fresh plates to whoever had a pitch that involved the letters “A” and “I”. We called it democratization of intelligence, and for a while the name was genuinely befitting. A new frontier in cooperation.

That’s before China entered the picture and got “good at it”. Not by imitating or cloning, as some suspect, but elevating in the same spirit of the cucumber-stackers at the salad bar all those years ago.

DeepSeek proved the science was sound and the model wasn’t sacred. Open-weight models began piling higher than any proprietary plate anticipated, and suddenly the frontier model wasn’t a toy that America got to pick and choose who got access. It was built by people who understood the structural limitations of the market, used intelligent thinking from other fields translated into this one, and built a better damn buffet. America’s answer to that, sadly, wasn’t to stack higher or to build a better plate, or a tastier buffet. No.

America’s answer was to restrict the market.

I’m not being smarmy, that’s where we are in geopolitics.

In June 2026, the US Commerce Department wrote to Anthropic, a private US company, and told it to stop selling access to Claude to the world because researchers in China may be able to access it and presumably do bad things with it maybe perhaps we think (trust).

Fable 5 and Mythos 5, two of the biggest and most promising models ever made, and the US government switched them off to the entire planet because someone decided the cucumber on offer was just too sweet.

This would parlay into other dealings, some involving OpenAI/GPT-5.6, seeing them reduced to staggered gated access, requiring pending approval from the US Government before allowing such access.

The government that spent 40+ years insisting that the market knew best had decided for it the instant a 2nd salad bar opened down the street. Free Market fiscal conservatives decided they’d rather play a protectionist racket than host an honest market. Here’s the thing that should piss us off more than the take-sy-back-sy: it’s pointless. You can’t take AI home the way you’d take home (read: destroy) a centrifuge or an EUV machine. You can’t un-fuck the bell, or un-ring the chicken. Whatever that saying is. You can’t call an undo, it’s not possible.

At their heart, large language models are more akin to cookbooks than centrifuges, and such things are easily transferable with minimal effort.

AI labs in China have already worked to distill frontier models like Anthropic’s Fable/Mythos, observe the reasoning, then train its own models on the bits and pieces. Washington’s response: sanctions on a company for merely learning things. Imagine that - the US Treasury, sanctioning the idea of knowledge. You can’t. Nobody has ever taken such a salad-stacker blueprint back.

The reflex says it all: If you can’t win, end the game. We didn’t stop there though, we then started hoarding ingredients. Helium. Six-nines helium, in specific. This is the purity grade of helium required to etch modern silicon and cool superconducting magnets.

The US quietly added it to the strategic materials list and squeezed exports to China down to 1/5th of what they were. Not because China was building a helium bomb, or invading New Mexico, no. Because China was beating us at our own damn game. Such behaviors are contagious, and destined for tit-for-tat. China watched us and learned the lesson perfectly.

Now, Beijing is drawing up its own export gates on frontier models - a three-tier system of who gets to think with them, and when we squeezed them out of helium, they squeezed back, banning their own exports of it. Global supply had already been dwindling, down some 40% before such back and forth. The price went from $4/m³ to $28/m³. The man who sells balloons doesn’t care who started the fight, he just knows he can’t sell balloons anymore.

That is the part that the theorem couldn’t account for. Cucumber-stackers showed us the beautiful, wholesome version: encounter a problem, understand the other guy’s plate, build a better one for everyone at the table. That’s elevation.

An uglier reflex hides within though, and both systems reach for it the moment the other gets too good: Take the salad bar, take the ingredients and plates, and ship it home. America takes Claude home with export controls and hoards helium, China volleys back by responding in kind with its own models and noble gases. Same move, mirrored across the Pacific, each dressed in their own language of security and national sovereignty.

Neither system is pure in this exchange, that’s a point I can’t help but reinforce. America built the salad bar and tried to treat it like a jealous dragon with a pile of gold. China gamed the system, and then in response gated their own off. Both are locked in a losing battle, pointing fingers and ratcheting up language/actions, while the rest of us watch on with disappointed looks.

On Metropolis

San Francisco is one of America’s wealthiest and most prominent cornerstone cities - a bedrock foundation of pop culture, deep cuts, bloody revolution, flower power, and the pervasive stench of Marin County slimebags clogging up traffic on the Bay Bridge.

I love that town. I love Oakland. I love the Bay. I love SF. I am a huge cheerleader for that town and I will be the first to tell you: It is deeply flawed, to the point of belly laughs. A quick comparison between the two tech titan enclaves, SFO and SZX (Shenzhen) will leave you stunned if you’re unfamiliar:

Shenzhen: 50-story modular tower erected in 19 days. Prefab construction, centralized planning, relentless execution. Operating currently. One of the world’s most up and coming cities.

San Francisco: 58-story ‘Millennium Tower’ built in 4 years, which immediately began sinking and leaning. The city is worth a small country’s GDP. People die on sidewalks within view of billion-dollar headquarters from sheer neglect.

San Francisco’s problem isn’t traffic, crime, bad engineering or housing costs. It’s priorities.

The dominant economic system was designed to serve capital first and foremost, at the expense of everyone else, and it has worked exactly as designed. San Francisco and its surrounding areas of Mountain View, San Jose, Santa Clara and Cupertino are home to Google, Substack, Apple, Intel, and about a thousand other Fortune 50/500 companies that own the world collectively, yet that wealth fails to trickle down to the most desperately needy, living in front of their world headquarters garage door.

The people neoliberalism left behind are not a bug: they’re a consequence of the design philosophy. The city is racked with the inefficiencies of capital-first logic, leading to horrific outcomes - people languishing on sidewalks, under tarps, in tents and old vans.

End result: SF has ~20x the per-capita homelessness of Shenzhen despite having ~8x the per-capita GDP, making this that much more insane. Roughly 1% of SF residents are listed as homeless, among the highest per-capita in US; while being one of the most prosperous cities on the planet.

Shenzhen’s problem is different though: Its growth was directed from above, which means when direction is wrong, it’s wrong at scale. The principle was different as well: stability and shelter precede prosperity. The city housed people before it made them rich. That choice shows in the outcomes.

Put this framing into your head before we go farther.

San Francisco, August 2026. A disheveled man lies on a sidewalk along the Embarcadero. He’s not there purely because of drugs or mental illness.

He’s there because the city, his country, supposedly the richest in the history of humankind — has decided by its actions that his life is not a priority worth the cost of solving, while the “rival” of its country has found something it could never: a difference in priorities.

Somewhere in the middle of tech ownership talk and fancy cars is that man on the sidewalk, wasting away in so-called Metropolis. He didn’t invent the salad bar, he didn’t stack any carrots or cucumbers, nobody offered him a plate or asked him to sit at the table with them.

The man desperately needs a plate and a seat at the table, and a nice place to lie down safely and sleep afterwards. Unfortunately, due to our priorities, such needs are rarely met. In Metropolis, the man will get no such plate, no such benefit of shared wealth or cucumbers, and will spend tonight on the sidewalk, again.

Two systems, two design philosophies

To better understand things on a granular level, let’s take a brief look at both systems side by side. I promise I’ll keep it light, lest this part drag on for centuries.

America’s Machine:

Designed by 18th-century merchants and plantation owners who feared centralized power above all else. The constitution they built is a machine optimized for gridlock as a feature, not a bug. Checks, balances, separation of powers, every lever designed to slow things down and giving the people a direct chance to stop it before it happens.

When this fails: Nothing gets done, even when everyone agrees there’s a problem. The machine is designed to require consensus, and consensus requires time, money, and the absence of bad faith actors. In 2026, all three are in short supply.

Practical example: San Francisco

City Council votes on funding for a new homeless shelter. The project unfolds, a CEQA lawsuit from the neighbors stops it dead - 2, possibly 3 years of litigation if not derailing the project entirely. Should it continue, state funding would match, but requires an environmental review and about 12 weeks of asking sociologists if the bedspreads are the right color for someone facing “housing adversity and inter-financial struggles”.

By the time federal HUD grants are taken into account, compliance requirements met, and the initial groundbreaking happens? The original funding is expired and the need has doubled - the Embarcadero encampments only grew in population during this ordeal. There are now more people desperately seeking plates of cucumber and shelter.

What this means for us: Even our most well-intentioned ideas are destined to become boondoggles, pork barrels, and long, drawn out scandals in real time. Lives hang in the balance, the desperately needy waiting to be seen. People struggle to tread water while others sink and a select few above them watch from multi-million dollar yachts.

China’s Machine:

Designed by 20th-century revolutionaries who feared chaos and fragmentation above all else. The system they built is optimized for stability and execution as the primary goal. The National People’s Congress is not designed to debate on C-SPAN — it is designed to deliver public policy. The people send their delegates to the CPC (not unlike the House or Senate) who then work to enact the change desired.

When this fails: The people at the top can make a bad call; there is no institutional mechanism to course-correct without a palace drama. The system is excellent at execution, but execution of the wrong plan is worse than no plan at all.

Practical example: The NPC sets the overarching policy of “take public money, house people with it”.

The State Council allocates said funding to the municipal governments which will identify land (which it already likely owns) to begin the design/construction stage within months. No CEQA, no zoning board, no NIMBYs, no public comment period after the draft necessary - as that was included from the first step.

This is known as “Whole-process people’s democracy”, a system of representative democracy different in practice from the more traditional European/American model.

The mechanisms are simpler: People elect local leadership for the delegation, and the chain up to the party leadership is built from that delegate - selecting other “sub-delegates”; representatives in turn to work as functionaries, operators that the local delegates rely on and who (through job performance) answer to the local delegates, and in turn the people.

Contrasted:

- Both systems are rational responses to their founding conditions.

- Both have failure modes that are mirror images of each other.

- America’s strength is its ability to self-correct slowly; its weakness is that “slowly” increasingly means “too late” or “not at all”.

- China’s strength is its ability to execute rapidly; its weakness is that “rapidly” increasingly means “without enough input.”

Neither is perfect, both have blind spots and parts to make a man furious sometimes, but they each have strengths that can be learned from.

The Guy on the Sidewalk

[A man eats a meal in a back alley of Shenzhen’s less scenic areas - photo credit: Derek Galon/fivehundredpx]

Shenzhen’s poorest neighborhoods lack the glamour of its skyline, sure, but people live indoors. They eat regular meals. The city government considers basics like food and shelter a non-negotiable line item, not a market problem to be solved by invisible hands.

This is not a moral judgment, but a difference in priorities - one system decided that the market’s greed was more important than basic human dignity: shelter, health, food, basic quality of life.

This is THE observation about systemic priorities. America’s system allocates resources toward the generation of private wealth first, China’s system allocates resources toward the maintenance of public stability first.

Both have trade-offs, the man on the sidewalk is the trade-off America chose.

It’s worth asking whether that was the correct decision, as it stands I just don’t believe it was, is, or ever should be. Life, be it the birds in the trees, the humans in the streets, the emergent life we have yet to quantify and put in our neat little classifying headers is precious. It should not be treated lightly, with such indifference.

While you were reading this, the seasons changed. Birds migrated, the sun moved a bit. It’s now winter 2026. The man on the Embarcadero from earlier in the piece is gone, his life ending on that very sidewalk sometime in the summer; not from heat or drugs, not from bad choices or crime, but callous indifference. A difference in priority.

His passing will not make news headlines, no long-winded eulogies will be written for him. The best he can expect is a quiet, dignified cremation and prayer, his ashes spread in the waters of the Bay; scattered by a small team forced to watch this cycle repeat time and time again. Callous indifference, death, unclaimed bodies cremated, a life forgotten, a story written no longer able to be told. All because of priorities.

Both systems have their failure modes, quirks, shortcomings and pratfalls. I’m not attempting to be a salesman of any side, but it is always good to see what others are able to achieve when I come up short.

America’s failure is that the man dies because no one was responsible for keeping him alive. China’s failure is that if the leadership decides the wrong priority, that wrong priority gets executed at scale.

Nobody’s Perfect, But We Can All Learn

The man is dead. It’s 2027. The birds are still singing, the sun still rises over the Embarcadero, and the next man is already lying on the same sidewalk. Nothing changed, but something should have. Let’s be practical:

On building before the crisis: Shenzhen’s metro wasn’t built because traffic was unbearable. It was built because someone in 1985 looked at a map of underdeveloped rice paddies and said: “People will live here. Let’s put the tracks down first.”

Anytown USA does the opposite. Your city waits until the school is overcrowded to build a new one. Waits until the bridge collapses to repair it. Waits until the homeless encampment is a public health crisis to fund shelters. The principle is simple, and you already know it: buy the land when it’s cheap. Pass the bond when the need is visible but not yet desperate.

Your city council won’t do it because there’s no political reward for preventing a crisis that hasn’t happened yet. That’s not a budgeting problem. That’s a time horizon problem.

On stability as a prerequisite: Shenzhen’s poorest neighborhoods aren’t glamorous, but people live indoors. The city government considers basic shelter a line item, not a market problem. It’s not charity, it’s an operational assumption: a housed person is cheaper to govern and has higher productivity than an unhoused one.

Anytown USA spends more on emergency room visits for the unhoused than it would cost to house them. More on police calls to encampments than it would cost to fund shelters. More on jail beds than on rent assistance.

The math isn’t complicated. The incentives are just pointed in the wrong direction. Your mayor knows this. Your city council knows this. The reason it doesn’t change is that the cost of not solving it is distributed across a dozen different budgets, none of which are accountable to the same person.

On long-term planning: The American planning horizon is 2-4 years: one election cycle, one quarterly earnings report. China’s planning horizon is 10-25 years, the length of a Five-Year Plan, the lifespan of a generation of leadership.

Anytown USA can’t fix its time horizon overnight, but it can start small: a 10-year capital improvement plan that actually gets followed. A zoning code that looks 20 years ahead instead of reacting to the last lawsuit. A housing bond that funds construction for a decade instead of a single project. The tools exist. What’s missing is the will to use them for something beyond the next election.

What China could learn from the US system: The man on the sidewalk might not have died in Shenzhen or Guangzhou, but if the CPC decides tomorrow that homeless people are a “visual blight” to be cleared before an international conference, they’ll be cleared quickly, efficiently, and without public debate. That’s the other failure mode. Speed without input is tyranny with good infrastructure.

China’s system needs a piece of what America’s system has, even in its broken form: mechanisms for dissent that don’t require a palace coup. A journalist who can ask a hard question without being disappeared. A local official who can say “this policy is wrong for my district” without ending their career. A public record of who decided what and why. Accountability in a more transparent form.

The synthesis: The man on the sidewalk didn’t need a violent revolution or a bloody coup. He needed a city that could build housing in less time than it takes to litigate a CEQA challenge. He needed a health system that treated his existence as a cost worth bearing. He needed a political system where someone, somewhere, was responsible for the outcome - someone that gave a damn and had to answer for his well-being. That man needed something that doesn’t quite exist yet, but ought to.

China builds faster. America argues better. The man needed both: a system that could act, and a system that could be held accountable when it acted wrong. Neither country has yet to solve that equation, but the first step is admitting that the other guy’s toolbox has tools yours doesn’t.

The end (no judgment, just a question)

On a map, Shanghai and New York could be siblings. Same latitude, same relationship to the ocean, same skylines pierced by ambition.

Yet: one city was built by people who believed the future belonged to whoever built it fastest and most systematically, and the other by people who believed the future belonged to whoever argued about it most carefully and kept the lights on for the least of their citizens first.

While neither system has solved the problem of human greed, corruption, or indifference, they are both trying through radically different machinery to answer the same question: how do we live together without destroying each other or the planet in the process?

History books show plainly that even the most righteous revolutions end in a bloody mess, their ideals crushed by the very machinery built to defend them. The answer is not conquest. The answer is not surrender.

The answer, perhaps, is the same one the Chinese cucumber-stackers found at the Pizza Hut salad bar thirty years ago: encounter a problem, look at what the other guy built, understand why it works, and figure out how to do it better — not to beat them, but to improve the meal for everyone at the table.

– RS

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- More AI stuff, I know you guys love that a lot

- Updates from Ukraine and it’s failures

And some others more near/dear to my heart. Consider these special surprises.

With that in mind, enjoy your Sunday - no hour of homework reading today. Enjoy yourself. Let your hair down, dance in the sun, whatever makes you happy. Just stay hydrated.

— RS

Last time I mentioned xAI and Elon Musk, few of you bothered reading the article. A shame, really, because it was more about moral rot and the future of space than AI.. Well, as punishment, you will read the following and you will like it - good (whatever you are).

This piece is even more AI-focused, but you need to hear the story being told, even if the details infuriate you like they do to me.

Be warned: This is a longer one. Today’s piece involves war crimes, death, misused chat bots and Queen references. You don’t need a degree in tech/AI to read this, but you do need to have a conscience. Reader discretion is advised.

On with it. ¡Ándale!

Killer Grok

(Pentagon AI chief Cameron Stanley, giving a speech to the Potomac Officers’ Club / Photo Credit: Potomac Officers’ Club / Executive Mosaic)

On June 15, 2026, Pentagon AI Chief Cameron Stanley testified under oath that Grok, the Elon Musk/xAI chatbot, selected 2,000 distinct targets during the US bombing of Iran in a period of just 96 hours. The filing called Grok ‘tantamount to national security.’

I call it something else, but Grok wasn’t first - and that’s the part of this story that’s fucking with my heart.

Let’s walk back just two years to 2024.

Dateline May 2024, Palantir (Peter Theil, remember him?) secures a $480,000,000 initial US DOD contract for “MAVEN”, a fully embedded military targeting architecture and predictive modeling system that other AI agents (think Claude, or ChatGPT, or Google Gemini) tie into, offer their compute/”thinking” to create a cohesive unit that made targeting decisions based on military intelligence in a way that no King or Tyrant could ever fathom - faster, more accurate, more certain, backed by a growing body of evidence to justify the coordinates.

Unfortunately, what happened was …

Well, by January 2026 the United States had “extraordinarily rendition-ed” Nicolas Maduro, leader of Venezuela. What was unknown to the public at the time is that Claude, Anthropic’s friendly lil’ agentic instance, was used in the targeting of infrastructure that ended with civilian casualties. This would later be confirmed by the corporate media writ large, but little was actually discussed about the ramifications of using predictive language models to become predictive targeting models.

Colossus, Claude, and a Colossal fuck-up

(Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, giving a speech to the World Economic Forum / Photo credit: Don Feria via AP)

Imagine a world where AIs built to pick words and build ideas are fed state intelligence, tied to military hardware and told to do intelligence-based targeting. No need to imagine, you live in it. What you end up with civilian casualties at the hands of a tool never ever built for such decisions - such judgment calls. You end up with a word picker bot that’s now picking buildings based on what you tell it - and as we know with AIs, they are only as good as the information you tell them to treat as “sources of truth”.

If you fill an AI’s head full of nonsense and tell it “find the truth”, it’s going to bring you nonsense - because to it, that’s the truth. If you fill it with classified info, sometimes it’ll accidentally spit it back out at you.

On February 25th, the Jerusalem Post would test four frontier (read: top of the class) models and ask when the US would strike Iran. Grok responded with “February 28”.

Following that, February 26, Anthropic has had enough. They politely tell the US Department of War to stop using Claude in such ways, and that it wasn’t meant for the task.

The US government responded the next day in kind, directing all federal agencies to cease using Anthropic’s products. Pete Hegseth designated Anthropic a “supply chain risk”. That afternoon, OpenAI (ChatGPT) would sign a deal with the Pentagon, hours after the Anthropic ban.

The very next day, Feb. 28, the US would begin “Operation Epic Fuckup” - sorry - “Operation Epic Fury”, in which Claude is presumably still embedded in Maven, processing targeting data from Day 1. This would later be confirmed though pieces in WaPo, calling Claude ‘central to the campaign’.

By March 4th, Claude had presumably worked on at least 1,000 targets while integrated into Maven. March 9th would see the Deputy Secretary of Defense Feinberg write that Maven is an official “Program of Record”. Locked in with long-term funding, nothing stopping it.

Just a week later, Bloomberg would report that Claude was being replaced and had identified Grok as a possible replacement. On the 24th, Judge Lin granted the preliminary injunction in favor of Anthropic, blocking the ban - finding in the process that the government very likely retaliated illegally against Anthropic for saying ‘no’.

April 7 brings us “Project Glasswing” and the “Mythos Preview”, projects of Anthropic debuting their newest/next-gen language models, known as the ‘Mythos-class’. These are available purely for institutional/government preview, with a public offering coming later (”Claude Mythos”). The next day, April 8, the DC Circuit courts would grant a stay on the injunction - leaving the supply chain risk designation standing. Two lawsuits in parallel.

11 days later, April 19: AXIOS scoops the story that the NSA is using Anthropic’s Mythos, despite it being banned and on a Pentagon blacklist. The agency everyone trusts least is already running the super secret banned Claude.

A few weeks pass. May 1st: The Pentagon signs the IL6/IL7 agreements with 8 companies for classified networks: SpaceX, OpenAI, Google, NVIDIA, Microsoft, AWS, Oracle and Reflection - Anthropic was deliberately excluded from this process.

Around this point in time, Grok officially replaces Claude inside of Maven [ED note: as far as I can tell - there is no concrete date, but presume first few weeks of May, 2026]. May gave way to June, and brought us news in the Financial Times that Anthropic was helping the NSA deploy Mythos for offensive cyber operations - despite the blacklist, the legal war, all of it.

Here we are, days after finding out the revelations, with a full timeline in view.

AI picking words in response to text queries, helping users Google things and spin up a docker-compose file for their Grafana - that’s it at its root: languages. Those are words, the probability of those being correct is incredibly high.

If an AI fucks up, you get garbled text or something hard to read. At worst your Python script errors out or Claude deletes your project. Nobody dies.

Asking a large language model to decide “which grainy square is the right address with the bad guy” is like asking your dog to use his eyes to find something thousands of miles away. It’s not possible, it’s the wrong application for the tool.

A predictive language model is NOT an oracle. It can barely pick the right code format for the version of Node.JS you’re running. Using a model that was unable to train its own facility, while also using its competitor Claude for the same task on the same hardware? Quite a ballsy move.

Kinetic energy, misused tensor cores

(Smoke rises over Tehran, March 1st, 2026 - day two of Operation Epic Fury / Photo credit: Reuters)

I promised myself (and I promise you here) that this section will not make you glaze over, but the technical detail is the point. The question isn’t so much “should we let AI pick targets?” but “what kind of moron hands the kill chain to a word-predictor?”

Let’s start with a simple truth: the AIs you chat with today like Google Gemini and ChatGPT, the ones that help with your code, listen to your sob stories, write your emails — they are relative word pickers. That’s it.

They parse your text, infer your meaning, and then begin forming the reply largely by statistical chance in their word choices.

Imagine a ball bouncing inside of a box of word-stickers. Eventually something sticks and it moves to the next, and so on — building paragraphs of inferred text. It sends it back to you, spins itself down, waits for your next turn. Experts see it as a mirror, mimicry, sometimes thin cheerleading, depending on what you tell it to accept as gospel.

There’s more going on under the hood, sure - some models have “multiple experts” (mixture-of-experts architecture) that tag in and out of the chat based on the domain. Some can parse images, some can browse the web, some are robotics models (those are the fun ones I like). For this discussion, strip all that away. The core engine is the same: a statistical machine that predicts the next most probable token based on everything it’s seen before.

Which brings me to a re-frame that I keep coming back to.

In the 1770s, Wolfgang von Kempeles presented the world with the “Mechanical Turk”, a chess-playing automaton that wowed European courts. Audiences gasped. A machine that could think! The trick, of course, was that a human chess master was hiding inside the cabinet, operating the arms by candlelight. The Turk was a hoax, but it pointed to a new side of humanity: it pointed at our longing for intelligent machines.

Today’s LLMs are the inverse of that trick. The Mechanical Turk looked like a thinking machine but had a human inside. Today’s LLMs look like they’re thinking, it’s just that there’s nobody home. No understanding, no real reasoning. No awareness of what a school is, what a missile does, or what death means. Just a statistical surface that has gotten very, very convincing, almost like it knows what it’s talking about.

The danger isn’t that the machine is thinking. The danger is that we believe it is. Here’s why that matters for targeting:

A large language model doesn’t “know” anything in the human sense. It maps relationships between tokens: words, word fragments, punctuation and so on that it learned during training.

When you ask it a question, it doesn’t search for truth. It searches for the most statistically plausible completion of your prompt given the patterns in its training data. This works remarkably well for things like “write a poem about a cat” or “explain recursion in Python” because the training data contains many examples of those things, and the cost of being wrong is essentially zero.

The same architecture has well-documented failure modes that become catastrophically dangerous when the output is a set of coordinates.

Hallucination isn’t a bug, it’s a feature of the architecture. Every time an LLM generates text, it is making things up.

More often than not it makes up things that happen to be true, because the training data weighted it that way, but sometimes (more often than the marketing materials admit) it makes up things that are completely wrong, with exactly the same level of confidence. The model cannot distinguish between its correct outputs and its fabricated ones.

They feel the same to it, because they are the same: statistically plausible token sequences. When a model “hallucinates” a weapons cache in a school, it doesn’t know it made a mistake. It can’t know. It’s equally confident either way.

Sycophancy is baked into the training. These models are fine-tuned to be helpful, agreeable, and cooperative. When a commanding officer asks a leading question like “Is this building a threat?” the model is statistically more likely to agree than to push back. It has been trained to please the user. This is a feature for customer service. For targeting, it’s a death warrant.

Distribution shift means the model is always fighting yesterday’s war. The training data ends at a fixed point in time (“knowledge cut-off date”). The battlefield changes by the hour. The model is making predictions about a world that didn’t exist when it learned how to predict. It doesn’t know what it doesn’t know, and it can’t fill in the gaps just by asking.

And then there’s what some call the strawberry problem. If a frontier model, one of the most advanced AI systems on the planet cannot reliably tell you how many fucking R’s are in the word “strawberry”, a fact with a single unambiguous correct answer and zero room for interpretation — then why in God’s name would you trust it to distinguish a girl’s school from a munitions depot just through grainy satellite images?

The strawberry problem matters because it reveals something fundamental about the architecture: these models do not reason. They pattern-match, and pattern-matching fails when the pattern is ambiguous, the stakes are high, and the cost of a mistake is measured in human lives.

We have been here before too many times to suffer through, but let’s remember:

Predictive policing algorithms were going to revolutionize law enforcement. Instead, they amplified existing biases and sent officers to the same over-policed neighborhoods on the authority of a statistical model that couldn’t explain its own reasoning. We had a fucking movie about this, it’s called Minority Report.

Financial risk models were going to make markets safer. Instead, they cratered the global economy in 2008 because they assumed the past would perfectly predict the future — and it didn’t.

Algorithmic hiring tools were going to remove bias from recruitment. Instead, they systematically excluded women and minorities because the training data reflected historical discrimination - it was a mirror of our worst sins, not a repudiation of them.

Every time we outsourced human judgment to a statistical model that looked smarter than it was, we got burned in ways we didn’t anticipate. The difference this time, the only difference; is that the error mode isn’t a denied loan or a wrongful arrest. It’s an explosion. It’s a dead child. It’s war crimes in our names.

So, what do you call a system that is confident when it’s wrong, agreeable when it should push back, and fundamentally incapable of understanding the difference between a school and a weapons depot?

I call it the most dangerous machine we’ve ever built. Not because it’s smart, but because we’ve convinced ourselves it is. You probably just call it Grok or Claude.

Guaranteed to blow your mind

(Elon “Pedo Guy” Musk and Donald “Pedo Guy” Trump meet with Mohammed Bin Salman Al Saud, King defacto of Saudi Arabia, May, 2025 - MBS would invest $600bn, which would eventually become $1 trillion, in American AI systems. Not pictured: Jensen Huang of NVIDIA fame, who was also at this event. / Image: Likely created by AI, no such photo of the Riyadh Summit exists but is here just for flavor, found online)

Here’s a question nobody in Washington seems to want to touch: Who paid for the gun?

xAI is a private company - that means its cap table is a black box wrapped in an NDA, but light leaks. The public record shows that xAI’s early investors include entities tied to the Saudi Public Investment Fund and the Qatar Investment Authority — sovereign wealth vehicles of the two Gulf states whose primary geopolitical adversary is the Islamic Republic of Iran.

We don’t know the exact percentages. That’s the point. The structure is designed to obscure. The triangle draws itself:

May 2025 Riyadh investment forum → Saudi capital → xAI → Grok → Pentagon/Maven classified systems → 2,000 munitions → Iran.

Read that again slowly.

The model that selected those targets was funded, at least in part, by the people who most wanted those targets destroyed.

Remember: Iran is OPEC’s third-largest producer. Iran is the Shia crescent’s anchor. Iran is the geopolitical rival that every Gulf monarchy has spent decades containing, sanctioning, and preparing to degrade. And now, an American AI company, seeded with their money, just executed a 96-hour kinetic campaign on their behalf without a single one of them having to pull a trigger, pass a resolution, or answer a question in any parliament anywhere in the world.

Now, this feels like it should be a massive conspiracy.

You’re picturing it too: A room full of men in suits and Arabian thobes, a whiteboard, a dotted line from Riyadh to Tehran with B-52s and KC-135s. That’s the shape your brain reaches for because it’s comfortable; identifiable actors, traceable decisions, someone to prosecute.

In organized crime, there’s a well-understood phenomenon that prosecutors hate: convergent interests without coordination. Two crews, same territory, no shared boss. They’ve never met, but when a common threat emerges, they don’t need to collude. One tips off the cops. Another increases their bribes. A third lays low. No agreements, no conspiracy charge possible, no throat to grab. Just pure convergent self-interest producing the same result as a planned operation.

George fucking Carlin put it better about twenty-five years ago TO THE DAY, on some long-forgotten episode of Bill Maher’s ‘Politically Incorrect’:

”You don’t need a formal conspiracy when interests converge. These people went to the same universities, they’re on the same boards of directors, they’re in the same country clubs, they have like interests. They don’t need to call a meeting. They know what’s good for them and they’re getting it.”

He was talking about a different set of players in a different world, the post-industrial elite of his era, but the mechanism is identical. The players have changed, the game hasn’t. Watch how it plays out in this case:

• xAI needed capital to scale and political cover for a Pentagon deal that any normal administration would have slow-walked through three layers of oversight. Gulf sovereign wealth and a Trump-aligned founder delivered both.

• Saudi Arabia and Qatar needed Iran militarily degraded without owning the operation, without triggering a regional war/decades long quagmire they’d have to fight, and without the diplomatic blow back of direct action. An American AI company and the US military’s trigger fingers delivered that.

• The Pentagon needed unrestricted AI capability in classified systems without congressional debate, public scrutiny, or the inconvenience of ethical guardrails. A private company with opaque funding and a friend in the White House delivered that.

• Trump needed a show of force against Iran that didn’t require a ground war, a prolonged engagement, or a debate in Congress. A 96-hour AI-coordinated bombing campaign delivered that. He avoided a long-term quagmire by using a chatbot to pick random squares from satellite photos tied to a gun that a computer fired. He let ChatGPT build his docker-compose.yml file and bring the docker up.

Every actor got what they wanted by pursuing their own narrow self-interests.

Nobody had to sit in a room and agree on the shape of the table, even if they already very probably did. The table built itself because the incentives aligned in one direction, and the architecture of private capital and military contracting made it friction-less to slide there.

This need not be a formal conspiracy! The real problem: this is exactly what happens when you build a system with no brakes and point it downhill. Every component behaves exactly as designed, and the outcome at the bottom looks like intent but runs on auto.

The AI that chose targets to bomb in Iran was funded by the people who wanted Iran bombed.

Everything else is just engineering and PR spin.

The Pro move

(I needed something science-y and think-y, so I borrowed someone else’s AI-generated image. No additional electricity/water resources were used. Reuse and recycle - just share alike and credit each other! / Image credit: edtechinnovationhub.com)

Here’s the thing about predictive models; the ball bouncing in a box of stickers: The ball is really fast, and the box is shockingly big. And the stickers stick in ways that sometimes look like magic.

We spent this whole article talking about what these models can’t do, what they shouldn’t be trusted with, and how we’re misusing the hell out of them, but I’d be lying if I said there isn’t something genuinely powerful here. The danger isn’t the technology - the danger is how we’re applying it, and more importantly, who’s applying it to what ends.

These models are pattern-matching engines operating at a scale no human can match. They can find correlations across millions of data points in seconds, they can surface connections that would take a team of researchers years to identify. The problem isn’t the engine, it’s what we’re pointing it at.

When you point it at a problem that requires judgment, context, and an understanding of the human condition - like deciding which building to bomb.. It fails catastrophically as we’ve seen. When you point it at a problem that only requires pattern recognition at scale, it does things that genuinely look like magic. For example:

Medicine already uses these models to find things in scans that human eyes miss. A radiologist reads thousands of images a day. Fatigue sets in. The model doesn’t get tired, it doesn’t skip the 47th scan because it looks sorta like the 46th. It flags anomalies for a human to review. Not replacing the doctor, just working quietly in parallel. The result: fewer missed tumors, faster diagnosis, more lives saved in a day. This is already deployed in hospitals you can walk into right now. The difference between this and Maven: When the tumor-model gets it wrong, the Doctor spends an extra 2 minutes looking at the scan, says “hmm, no, that’s just a shadow”, and moves on. Nobody dies from an extra look at medical records.

Language preservation. There are thousands of languages with fewer than a thousand living speakers. When the last speaker dies, the language dies with them and so does the culture, the history, the way of thinking that only that language encodes. These models can help document, preserve, and teach endangered languages. The same architecture that wrote you that mediocre poem can help a community save its linguistic heritage. That matters in ways we have yet to recognize. When Linguo-bot gets it wrong: You mispronounce something. When Maven gets it wrong? It misunderstands intent in a statement and deems someone a “target”, marking them for death.

Infrastructure optimization keeps the lights on. Power grids, water systems, traffic flow: these are pattern-matching problems at scale. A model can predict when a transformer will fail before it blows, route traffic around congestion before it forms, balance load across a grid so brownouts don’t happen. It doesn’t need to “understand” electricity — it just needs to recognize the signatures that precede a failure. The difference between this and military targeting is that when the model is wrong about a transformer, a technician checks its work and the grid learns. Nobody dies from a false positive.

Drug discovery timelines are collapsing. What used to take a decade of lab work can now be simulated in weeks. Models find molecular structures that might bind to a target protein, and researchers test the most promising candidates. Some of the COVID vaccines benefited from this approach. The next breakthrough in cancer treatment or Alzheimer’s might come from a model that doesn’t know what cancer is but can see patterns in protein folding that no human ever could. Speed in this field is life-saving — speed at this pace on the battlefield can be the reason someone ends up dead unnecessarily.

Personalized tutoring at scale. Every child learns differently. Every adult picking up a new skill has different gaps. A model that adapts to the specific learner, that has infinite patience, that can explain the same concept fourteen different ways without getting frustrated — that’s not replacing teachers, it’s giving every student something close to a private tutor. This is already working in classrooms and living rooms across the world. On the battlefield it’s a different situation, given the constant kinetic energy of the process.

I’m not telling you about positive applications to sell you a utopia. I’m telling you because they’re already happening. They’re not science fiction; they’re not cold titanium beings mining asteroids.

They look like a radiologist in Ohio who caught a tumor because the model flagged something she might have missed on hour six of her shift. They’re a grandmother in rural Guatemala who can hear her grandchild’s voice read a book aloud in her native language because a model learned it from the last four speakers. They’re a power grid in Texas that didn’t fail because a word-predictor noticed a pattern in the load data three hours before the surge.

That’s the ‘pro’ move. Not building a god, building a better hammer and giving it to people who know what they’re building.

The tragedy of this moment isn’t that we built something dangerous. It’s that we built something full of potential and immediately shoved it into the exact same systems of power and violence that have been running things since before any of us were born.

We took a tool that could help us preserve languages, cure diseases, and keep the lights on. And we pointed it at schools in Iran instead. That’s not a technology problem, that’s a *choice* problem. We can make different ones.

I can hear the objection coming already because it’s a reasonable one: “But you just described the military’s entire argument.. Feed it enough intelligence and it can find the pattern - that’s what they’re doing with Grok!”

Here’s the distinction that matters, and I need you to hear it plainly.

In medicine, the radiologist checks the model’s flag. In infrastructure, the engineer verifies the prediction. In drug discovery, the lab confirms the candidate. The feedback loop is intact — when the model is wrong, someone finds out, and the system improves. The ground truth is knowable. The environment isn’t trying to deceive the model; a tumor doesn’t run a camouflage campaign to look like healthy tissue. Warfare inverts every single one of those conditions.

The battlefield is adversarial by design. The enemy actively works to look like something they aren’t. Decoys, misinformation, camouflage — the model is pattern-matching in a domain where the patterns are *designed to be misleading*. The feedback loop doesn’t exist because the evidence of error is destroyed along with the target. And the cost of a false positive is not a re-check. It’s a crater where an apartment building or hospital used to be.

Pattern-matching is powerful, but it requires conditions that warfare cannot provide: a cooperative environment, an intact feedback loop, and consequences that begin with a question rather than ending with an explosion.

That is the difference, not the technology. The conditions under which it operates.

Moët & Chandon in her pretty cabinet / A built-in remedy for Khrushchev and Kennedy

Dearest reader, when we started this piece I was angry, hurt, dismayed. I still am.

The human casualty is already incredible and will haunt us for generations, the knowledge that we did it using tools we designed to be helpful, to build our world and to be thoughtful, are being used in such ways.

It hurts in a way that I find hard to put into words - yet, sitting with that hurt is the whole point. If it doesn’t hurt, you’re not paying attention.

Here is what I’ve learned writing this: The predictive models we’ve built are powerful, but they are not what we think they are. They do not think, they do not reason, they do not understand. They pattern-match with astonishing speed and fluency, and they sound like they know what they’re talking about. That is their magic and their danger wrapped into one.

The question was never whether these machines could think - they can’t. The question was whether we could keep our heads straight while surrounded by something that produces such convincing text/output.

The military’s theory of AI warfare is seductive in its simplicity: feed the machine enough data, let it find the patterns, pull the trigger. It sounds like progress. It sounds like precision. It sounds like we’ve finally built the oracle that will keep us safe - but an oracle that hallucinates, that can’t tell you how many R’s are in a word, that agrees with whatever you ask it.. That is not an oracle. It’s a mirage, one we’re spending billions to chase and thousands of lives to feed.

What you can do about this right now is simple. Ask the strawberry question more often.

When someone tells you an AI “knows” something or “understands” a situation, ask yourself: can it count the R’s in strawberry reliably every time by knowing how to count? If the answer is no, then whatever it’s telling you about the target, the threat, the decision? Treat it with the skepticism it deserves. That’s not Luddism, it’s literacy. It’s understanding the tool well enough to know when it’s being misused. Pay attention to where these models are deployed and who’s deploying them.

The pipeline from a $20/month chatGPT interface to a missile targeting system is shorter than any of us realized, and it runs on our taxes and our attention. The companies building these tools are making choices about who gets access and for what purpose. Those choices have consequences. We should demand better ones.

The technology itself is not the enemy here, it’s genuinely remarkable with serious untapped potential: the “automated” in your “fully automated luxury gay space communism”. It can help us find tumors, preserve dying languages, keep the power grid stable, teach our children, be our partners in crime, and so much more. It doesn’t need to be misused like we’re applying it today in its infancy.

That’s not hype, that’s already happening in laboratories, operating rooms, classrooms and control rooms that you can walk into today. The tragedy is not that we built it, it’s that we immediately handed it to the same institutions of power and control that have been running the same plays since long before any of us were born, and we let them kill again, like they have before.

We have an obligation to be smarter than the tools we build - right now, we’re failing that obligation, not because the machines are too smart but because WE have convinced ourselves they are. The answer isn’t to unplug, though disconnecting has its purposes. The answer is to see clearly, to demand better, and to point these engines at problems that deserve their power, not people who can’t defend themselves from the impacts.

The future is not yet written. We still get a say in what it looks like. Let’s make it one worth living in, and let’s stop pointing our best tools at the worst possible tasks for a fucking change.

– RS

Surely you’ve seen the news, the Nation’s 250th anniversary “modifications” to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. The hastily applied spray-liner, the algae filled waters, the hydrogen peroxide, the dead ducks, the arrests, and the stench.

There is a specific kind of stupidity that only a failed bureaucracy can achieve: the kind where you spend $14 million on a renovation, watch it fail in less than two weeks, pour caustic chemicals into it, blame vandals, and then arrest a 67-year-old Olympian for touching the evidence of your incompetence.

This is not a metaphor. This happened on a Saturday in June, in Washington, D.C., at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial.

It’s too stupid a story to pass up for yours truly, so let’s take a deep dive into the shallow, murky waters of the damn thing. Please be aware: this story is unfolding in real time, and doesn’t have a clear conclusion beyond the anticipated “they’re a bunch of clueless idiots” soft-landing. This is just a series of reflections on the situation, how it came to be, so on.

On with it as always.

Reflecting

(The Reflecting Pool and the Lincoln Memorial / Photo credit: Ad Meskens via Wikimedia)

Built in 1922, the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool is a massive rectangular basin stretching roughly 2030~ feet in length, 167 feet wide, holding about 6,750,000 gallons of water. The depth slopes gently from 18 inches at the edges to just 30 inches in the middle. A shallow puddle in the grand scheme of things, but a grand work of design, laid carefully on the marshy DC lands.

The structure, with its original tile/asphalt bottom, would not last long unchanged. By 1929 and into the 1930s, the basin would receive a reinforced concrete slab foundation and drainage trenches along the elm walks. This would survive decades until 1981, when a full renovation would attempt to solve water leakage, but structural issues persisted; and on top of that algae blooms were a constant problem from the 1920s start onwards.

In 2009, a major reconstruction costing some $34,000,000 would take place, happening over roughly 3 years. The pool was elevated, pilings added to stop further sinking into the marshlands, and water circulation/filtration was added to further bring the marvel up to modern standards.

During the 2009-2012 renovations, a waterproofing was added, and the concrete was tinted a neutral gray. This renovation saw more algae blooms, something that (at the time) was seen as a non-event, a trivial annoyance to filter away. These renovations would sustain largely unchanged for another 14 years.

This would change in preparation for the nation’s 250th anniversary, seeing the pool drained, hastily sprayed with a “flexible coating/sealant” in a dark blue color, and refilled.

If you’ve ever painted brick with latex paint, you should know how badly this is about to work. Now add in “dark colors retain heat, and heat makes algae bloom faster”. I don’t need to tell you what came next, but there are some key moments worth visiting while it unfolds.

Bethesda’s Best

(Photo of David Hearn in his element, competing for Team USA in the Sydney 2000 games / Photo credit: David Madison via Getty Images w/a million thanks)

By June 20th, the newly sprayed liner was in tatters. Becoming an international news story, with people coming from around the nation to gawk at the latest Trumpian disaster - the result of a no-bid contract worth roughly $14,000,000-$16,000,000. The contract, awarded to a man who had previously worked on a Trump golf course swimming pool, was executed on a compacted timeline. It would take mere days to drain, spray, and refill the reflecting pool. A nice, Michael Eisner-approved cheap coat of paint on an aging theme park attraction.

Enter David Hearn, aka “Davey”. Davey is a 67 year old Bethesda MD native and 3-time Olympian, two-time World Champion and 12x medalist, as well as other accolades - an all around highly established man, highly familiar with kayaking and watercraft. The man knows the Potomac like few do, in a personal and deeply interconnected sense, given it is his home.

Post-athletic career, Davey has owned and operated a specialized business supplying composite materials, resins and custom parts used to build high-performance whitewater watercraft; giving him unique insights into materials science as well as marine polymers and industrial coatings.

With his technical expertise, and driven by his natural curiosity, Davey would take a 52-ish mile bike ride from Bethesda to the DC Mall, a journey likely similar to one he took many times before. Arriving at the Mall, Davey made his way directly to the scene of the situation, and reached into the murky waters just to feel the coating, to understand the materials at play perhaps, to further inform himself on the topic, quite possibly the most qualified man within a hundred miles to assess the situation.

Before he finished processing the sensations on his skin, he was placed under arrest by the US Park Police on a misdemeanor charge of ‘destruction of government property’, for the crime of merely touching the already-detached liner.

Hearn didn’t just “touch it” out of idle curiosity.

He owned and operated a specialized business supplying composite materials, resins, and custom parts for high-performance whitewater watercraft. He spent his career working with industrial coatings and marine polymers. He saw a failing water-related coating job on the news, one he knew was applied by a no-bid contractor at a cost of $14.2M to the taxpayer, and rode 52 miles to go look at it. Up close. With his hands.

Because that’s what you do when your entire professional life has been spent partly “just doing”, partly understanding why materials fail.

For that crime, Davey was arrested and later released.

Before he had been arrested though, Trump was already seeding the idea that the damage was caused by vandalism, calling the failure a crime rather than a workmanship issue.

They had just arrested and scapegoated one of the best-informed people in the DMV region - Washington DC - someone incredibly yet tangentially qualified to diagnose the problem.

This piece is a story about what happens when the official narrative meets physical reality. The pool didn’t care about the press release. The algae didn’t read Truth Social. The liner peeled because it was the wrong material for the job, and the man who could have understood why was handcuffed for daring to touch it.

RINO-liner

(The liner in question, floating in the murky waters / Photo credit: Mark Schiefelbein/AP)

So what the fuck is this liner? As far as I can tell, it’s a spray-on pickup truck bed liner, it’s “Rhino Liner”, but .. RINO-liner. The material composition appears to be polyurea-based per the contract, which is not designed for constant submersion. The color, ‘American Flag Blue’, was chosen for political optics and visual quality, not strictly the task at hand.

Then there’s the whole problem of “painting stone”, which itself is a tricky business - as I alluded to with my latex paint and brick quip, it’s not as easy as coating metal, drywall or wood. Stone is porous, it retains water, and water can also wick back out. It’s textured - not smooth. It is made of tiny grains of rock compressed together.

This two-way street of water flowing and water removing and water at the bottom of the ocean is dangerous business if you want a coating to stick properly to porous, uneven particles.

While the contractor Atlantic Industrial Coatings remains tight lipped about the full details, the contract does stipulate that the coating must come from “Rhino Linings”, a materials manufacturer best known for its pickup truck bed liners. This is all the confirmation this author needs - it’s RINO liner. This is a “scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours”-type cheesy mob boss deal: Trump handed a cushy contract to a friend using an already-approved material vendor, his friend rushed it because “fuck it, who cares”, and this is the end result.

At the same time, a $1,700,000 no-bid contract was given to Green Water Solutions to install a “nano bubble” filtration system, something being used to purify the water and suppress the algae blooms plaguing the blue lining.

This is presumed to be yet another RINO pocket liner, the company Green Water Solutions has ties to John Cafaro, a long-time Trump contributor who happens to live just a mile from Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach. Suffice to say the nano bubbles are another case of “right job, wrong tool”. Without additional circulation and filtration, even ozone treatment is working beyond its capabilities as a tool - like asking ChatGPT to pick targets in Iran to point weapons at.

A CVS Trip, Dead Ducks, and the Chemistry of a $16+ Million Mistake

(A US National Parks employee adds hydrogen peroxide into the Reflecting Pool / Photo credit: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)

This is where the story stops being a cute farce and starts being a legit crime scene. Not a crime of malice (strictly), but a crime of competence - or rather, the total absence of it, callous stupidity.

Let’s walk through what actually happened to that pool, because it’s a doozy when you pull up to 40,000 feet and get a clear picture of it all.

They chose the wrong material for the job

Polyurea is a spray-on polymer — tough, flexible, cures in seconds. Great for protecting a pickup truck bed from gravel and shovel blades. Not designed for constant submersion.

The chemistry is straightforward: polyurea forms urea linkages (-NH-CO-NH-) that slowly hydrolyze in the presence of water. The polymer chains literally break apart over time when kept wet.

In a truck bed that gets rained on and hosed out? Fine, harmless even. In 6.75 million gallons of water, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year? The coating was structurally overwhelmed from moisture from the moment they filled the pool.

They then applied it to the worst possible substrate

The Reflecting Pool sits on the hallowed grounds of the District of Columbia National Mall — which is, and always has been, DRAINED SWAMPLAND. The concrete bottom of the pool is porous, meaning that groundwater wicks up through it by capillary action.

When you spray polyurea onto even mildly damp concrete, the isocyanate component reacts with the moisture *during cure* and produces CO₂ gas. You get a foamy, bubble-riddled slurry where the coating never fully bonded to the stone. It looks solid from above, like a hard shell candy coating, but has the adhesion of an internally melted M&M.

Polyurea is incredibly good at keeping water in (positive pressure resistance, think a pool liner), but is terrible at resisting water pushing up from the material it is bonding to (hydrostatic pressure resistance, think a pool liner with water trapped under it).

The pool was then filled again - now you have water pressure pushing down from above and moisture vapor pushing up from below. This creates something called osmotic blistering — water migrates through the concrete, collects at the bond line of the liner, and lifts the coating off of the stone from underneath.

Antifa didn’t peel it from the top. It lifted from the bottom up, the tension/friction of water moving or merely touching it is causing it to “break apart”.

They colored it dark blue, in direct sun, in June

“American Flag Blue” sounds great in a news headline, but in reality it is a heat sponge. There’s a reason most airlines paint their planes a bright color - most going for white on top.

A dark surface, even in a shallow pool 30 inches deep at most, absorbs far more solar radiation than the old neutral gray or any other lighter color. The water temperature in that pool is running measurably higher than ambient just on basic laws of thermodynamics - every 10°C (~18°F) increase doubles the rate of hydrolysis. The pool was actively cooking its own liner from the first day - cooking long before a single drop of water was added.

The UV light? It penetrates even clear water down to several feet. Anyone who’s gotten sunburn while swimming in a backyard pool understands this is true and painful.

The entire floor of that pool is getting direct solar UV bombardment. Polyurea is notoriously UV-unstable without expensive stabilizers — the polymer chain photo-degrades, embrittles, and micro-fractures. Those cracks expose fresh surface area to more water, more hydrolysis, more failure. The proverbial dam eventually breaks.

The liner started failing within days - then they made it worse

By the time the algae had bloomed, accelerated by the now warmer, darker, nutrient-rich waters? The liner was de-laminating. The algae was a symptom, not the disease, but the administration saw green water and panicked.

Enter the National Park Service, waders on, jugs of 12% hydrogen peroxide in hand. Hydrogen peroxide at this concentration is an industrial oxidizer. At 30-35% it’s classified as a hazardous material.

When H₂O₂ breaks down, accelerated by heat, UV rays, and metal ions (which concrete and old pipework provide in abundance), it produces hydroxyl radicals (•OH). These are among the most powerful oxidizers known to chemistry. They tear hydrogen atoms off polymer chains, causing chain scission — the molecular backbone of the polyurea literally breaks into fragments.

The CDC, asked about 12% hydrogen peroxide, warned it “can cause problems if inhaled and burns if the chemical touches the skin.” They describe it as a “powerful oxidizing agent that can cause spontaneous combustion when it contacts organic material.” We poured it into a national monument.

Here’s the kicker: That was already bad, but they didn’t pour enough to do the job.

Dr. Michael O’Brien, a DC pediatrician who apparently understands basic chemistry better than the entire National Park Service, calculated that you would need a minimum of 8,000 liters of 12% hydrogen peroxide to reach the 50 parts per million concentration needed to kill algae in 6.75 million gallons of water. They poured a few jugs. A fraction of what was needed. Into a stagnant basin with no circulation.

The peroxide didn’t kill the algae. What it did do was concentrate in undiluted pockets, hotspots of 12% solution sitting on the already-failing polyurea surface, attacking the polymer at a molecular level. The same oxidation reaction that breaks down algae also breaks down the liner - a final de-bonding, a chemical “explosive charge” inside the pre-existing cracks.

Hydrogen peroxide is highly unstable and rapidly decomposes into water and oxygen gas (O2) when it encounters a catalyst (2H2O2 -> 2H2O + O2). The algae blooms and concrete minerals act as “severe catalysts” for the decomposition.

When NatParksSvc poured the concentrated hydrogen peroxide into the water directly, the heavy, dense solution sank to the bottom immediately. It seeped into the micro-cracks and osmotic blisters in the liner. Once inside, the peroxide decomposed into oxygen gas - the volume expansion of trapped gas blew the already-weakened polyurea off the substrate from the inside out, tearing the liner into the floating chunks/sheets seen in so many videos.

The coating didn’t just peel away because someone touched it - it was chemically disassembled and then exploded, from the inside out.

The duck died twice, maybe even a third time

The dead duckling found floating in the pool on June 21st has been treated as a tragic side note - it’s not. It’s the canary in the $16+ million coal mine; though official cause of death has yet to be determined, the plausible explanations are all indictments of the same system.

Maybe the duck swam through an undiluted pocket of 12% hydrogen peroxide: a caustic hotspot that burned its skin or caused systemic toxicity when ingested. The CDC says 12% solution causes burns on contact and respiratory damage if inhaled. A duck doesn’t know to avoid the clear spot where the chemical concentrate settled.

Maybe it was cyanobacteria. The same warm, stagnant, nutrient-rich water that bred the algae bloom also breeds cyanobacteria, which produces microcystins, a group of potent liver toxins. An expert told the Washington Examiner the pool “could have signs of cyanobacteria.” The algae treatment didn’t work because they used the wrong dose, and the cyanobacteria kept blooming unchecked.

Or maybe — and this is the one that normally would keep someone up at night — the duck died from the chemical soup created by the degrading polyurea itself.

When polyurea breaks down through hydrolysis and oxidative attack, it releases residual isocyanates, polymer fragments (oligomers), and other breakdown products into the water. These are documented aquatic toxicants. The pool wasn’t just painted. It was chemically active. Every square foot of failing liner was leaching synthetic compounds into a stagnant basin with no outflow, no filtration, and no testing.

The duck didn’t die from one thing. It didn’t have to - it died from everything. The algae, the chemicals, the heat, the stagnation, the total absence of anyone in charge asking “what is this doing to the living things in this water?”

That’s the real crime. Not that they failed, everyone fails sometimes. It’s that they failed by design, by choosing the cheap, fast, politically expedient option, and then blamed the consequences on vandals, socialists, and a 67-year-old kayaker who was visiting on a bicycle.

The Stench

(The National Guard stands nearby as the Reflecting Pool is swept by hand, June 22, 2026 / Photo credit: Mark Schiefelbein / Reuters)

The pool is being drained now and prepped for a redux. As I write this, DC photographer Joe Flood is posting photos of the operation on X, captioning them: ”As they drain it, the Reflecting Pool is starting to smell.”

OF COURSE IT IS! That stench is the smell of 6.75 million gallons of stagnant, chemically-treated, algae-choked, liner-leaching sludge being pulled out of a concrete basin that’s been cooking in the June sun for weeks. It’s the smell of a $14.2 million no-bid contract turning into a National Guard deployment. It’s the smell of a government that has lost the ability to do the boring, competent work of governance: the work of engineering, and has replaced it entirely with protecting the ego of one man, one office, one reputation.

The stench is not a metaphor, it’s an air quality event. Workers are in waders standing in a chemical soup, forced to breathe whatever off-gases the peroxide and the degraded polymer are releasing. Nobody is testing the air. Nobody is testing the water. Nobody bothered to ask the question.

The National Guard is standing guard, armed patrols, over a puddle that smells like rot; guarding the evidence of incompetence from we the people, fully qualified to explain it.

Honest Abe watches on, waiting for someone to challenge him for the title of “Honest”.

The Mirror Back at Us

This pool is not a one-off. It’s a microcosm, a poster child to point to. Every systems failure in the modern American government follows the same pattern: fail to plan long-term, choose the fast option, skip the expertise, blame the outcome on enemies, and arrest the whistleblower.

The Reflecting Pool is just the latest example, a visible, tangible, *smell-able* case study in how the administrative state has rotted from within.

The pool didn’t fail because of vandals, it failed because nobody in the chain of command understood materials science. It failed because the contractor was chosen for his connections, not his qualifications. It failed because the color was a political statement, not an engineering decision. It failed because they poured industrial chemicals into a public water feature without calculating the dose or considering the wildlife.

It failed because the man most qualified to diagnose the problem was handcuffed merely for touching the evidence - and now there’s a National Guard presence at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, treating it like an actual crime scene, just not the crime they’re investigating.

Think about that sentence. Really sit with it. Armed military personnel, deployed to protect a coat of pickup truck bed liner that someone hastily sprayed onto a concrete basin built on a swamp, because the contractor didn’t know what he was doing and the President can’t admit he was wrong.

This is not a bug. This is THE feature. THIS is what governance looks like when it’s been hollowed out to a shell — all optics, no substance, all blame, no accountability.

The pool is green. The RINO-liner is peeling, the ducks are dying. The National Guard is standing watch, and Davey Hearn — three-time Olympian, materials expert, 67 years old, bicycle commuter — is the most dangerous man in Washington DC: because he understood what was happening before anyone in charge did.

They arrested him for that.

And the pool still won’t be blue in time for July 4th.

– RS

I need to stop opening with that line, but you all love it, and I give the audience what they want - I’m a people-pleaser at heart. It’s why I find myself so interested in topics that most people in my position would have no interest in otherwise.

Today’s piece is a tasty morsel with broader implications than first glance might convey - the scandalous term and ongoing political fallout following Sir Keir Starmer and the UK domestic political space. As it stands while I write this, he _IS_ the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, but for how much longer remains to be seen - as news broke just prior to writing that his resignation is now being sought much more seriously than mere MPs calling for him to piss off.

(Keir Starmer and wife Victoria, making their way to No. 10, Downing St., somewhere in SW1A I think? / Photo credit: Rory Arnold/ No 10 Downing Street)

The phrase “strain of beauty” is a fantastic descriptor for the moments where you see the potential good, the facets of beauty in a given situation/person/thing, and you’re willing to look past the flaws for the sake of keeping the “beauty” around. Something being worth saving requires effort to see beyond the bad - the cracks, the ugliness, everyday rot - and find the thing that matters, the thing that glows. It’s incredibly tiring, and at some point the sheer strain of it all outweighs the beauty. It is not uncommon for people to discard what doesn’t work, jettisoning it and seeking an alternative. You get rid of an old car costing you more money in repairs than it would cost to buy something else. It’s not a hard concept to gather.

The same is true in politics as we see through recent history across nations who are currently are facing or otherwise recently faced such failures. That’s where the UK Labour Party is this weekend, following a tired, trite, contrived pattern that some would ascribe to “political capture and controlled opposition”. An advanced, intelligent yet managed democracy boiling over again.

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FIVEEYES, repeating failures

(NSA Headquarters, Ft. Meade, MD, United States - If it’s intelligence you seek, try here first. Just be sure to get permission. / Photo credit: NSA @ nsa.gov )

FIVEEYES, otherwise known as “Five Eyes Intelligence alliance”, was designed to watch the world - protecting us by sharing intelligence at a state level and coordinating actions across far-flung nations: The United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The anglosphere. Now… If you’ve been watching the anglosphere news headlines over the last 10 years, a different picture begins to form from the patterns - not of surveillance, that’s a given, but of a slow-motion democratic collapse happening in a recursive loop, country by country, following an incredibly similar pattern each time.

In 2015-16, coinciding with the closing of Barack Obama’s second term, the United States held a deeply bitter and divisive election with Donald Trump defeating Hillary Clinton handily. This was seen by anyone with eyes as the result of Clinton and apparatchiks closing ranks, purging the party of its Sen. Bernie Sanders-aligned wings, disillusioning a generation in the process - all while using their media connections to boost the candidacy of Trump et al in a ‘pied piper’ strategy (citation: Donna Brazille, ‘Hacks: The Inside Story of the Rogue Hacks and Campaigns That Killed the Democratic Party’, 2017, ISBN-13 978-0316478519 - read the whole damn thing.)

This would lead to a hideous period, 2017-2021 - one which America has yet to meaningfully recover from - flowing directly into a COVID-and-scandal-ridden Biden single term from 2021-2025, and now a second Trump term in progress. What comes in 2028 is unknown, but the pattern begins to emerge - the ‘center’ is failing to hold in the US.

In contrast, Canada tried a different approach: Take the son of a famous, beloved and culturally significant PM - Pierre Trudeau - and install him as a “sunny ways” progressive in name only who will govern as a neoliberal, burn out, and hand the reins to a central banker (Mark Carney) who has no meaningful political experience - an empty but friendly suit designed to sign trade concessions and usher in zero meaningful change.

The NDP suffers, the Greens suffer, and the Conservatives plan their next move. What did Trudeau do after his time? Did he campaign on causes he cared about? Join protests? Finance philanthropic endeavors? No, he started a relationship with Katy Perry, joining her on the red carpet.

Australia, the God given land down undah, gave us Anthony Albanese - a working class hero, a real Bruce, who did little more than watch as his party’s primary vote cratered because he governed primarily for the donor class and failed to build any meaningful loyalty with constituents or his own MPs. A trail of ruin in his wake, it continues on in Canberra and will possibly become the focus of another piece.

New Zealand, proximate neighbor of Australia, is not without its own sins - Jacinda Ardern, famous for her empathetic leadership and compassion, was replaced by a coalition that is dead-set on rolling back Māori rights while the UN watches in horror; the UN already calling attention to the human rights concerns at risk. Good work undone because people didn’t believe in the party after the magic went away. A party unable to stand on its own without a superstar figure head is one doomed to irrelevance.

Lettuce be, lettuce be

(This, but in the 2000s. I promise it’s not that different, aside from the direction the bird is flying. / Photo credit: BBC)

Then there’s Britain. Good ol’ Blighty - where would we be without you? Following the departure of Gordon Brown in 2010, the UK began down a 16+ year long path of domestic political instability, starting with David “I fucked a pig’s head that one time at Eton” Cameron. Notable for taking Brexit and bringing it into the collective consciousness in 2013, then fucking off into the ether. What followed outweighs misused meat and leaving the EU, IMO.

Theresa May, a woman famous for dancing like a Teslabot and accomplishing little more than turning Britain further into a police state, would follow David with a 3 year term. An ineffectual, unremarkable leader who was dealt a terrible hand to start and played it poorly, many saw her as a modern Maggie Thatcher - I saw her as someone far weaker, someone with less time to fix far more problems. In over her head and unable to right the ship, she would depart in 2019 - handing off to Boris “BoJo” Johnson, of GQ Magazine fame.

Johnson, former automotive journalist and ex-mayor of London, would settle into his term just before COVID began to grip the world - a tragedy that would enable his own undoing in the process. Not from needless deaths, not from draconian policies, no - Boris would leave office following a reveal of scandalous secret parties with his staff held during lockdown, incredible amounts of spending on No. 11 Downing St.’s private residence while failing to declare the financial setup and obscuring the deals, culminating in the scandal surrounding his handling of Chris Pincher: a senior MP accused of sexual misconduct that Johnson had promoted while knowing the allegations, even joking about them in full context. This would cause more than 50 officials of the UK gov’t to resign within a 48 hour period, sealing his fate. Johnson would hand the reigns off to the MP from South West Norfolk - Liz Truss.

Dearest reader of mine, there is simply too much to be said in one article about Liz Truss, a woman simultaneously deserving of nothing being said about her at all. On October 11, 2022, The Economist published an article critiquing Truss’s economic policy roll-out. Editorial staff saw her economic plan’s lifespan as: “roughly the shelf-life of a salad lettuce”. It became a running cultural gag: a live stream video of a head of iceberg lettuce in a blonde wig was featured on The Daily star from October 14 until Truss’s eventual resignation just six days later. In the moments following her resignation, the Daily Star stream erupted in celebration: crowning the now-visibly wilted head of lettuce victorious, playing the national anthem and proudly displaying the caption “This lettuce outlasted Liz Truss”. Liz would be the shortest-serving UK PM at a mere 44 days.

(The lettuce. And Liz. You figure out which is which. / Photo credit: Daily Star)

Following Liz Truss’s sudden yet expected exit, the Conservative Party fast-tracked its leadership contest to avoid another public campaign. Rules were altered to require a high threshold of at least 100 MP endorsements to make the ballot. When rival Penny Mordaunt withdrew at the last minute, Rishi Sunak secured a clear path to become Britain’s first Indian Prime Minister.

His victory was short-lived; Sunak resided at No. 10 for a curt two years, ending with a snap election. Throughout his tenure, the media panned his lack of character and awkward behavior. His gilded background made him highly unrelatable, leading to viral gaffes like struggling to use a tap card at a petrol pump while using a borrowed worker’s car for a photo op, and asking a homeless man at a shelter if he “worked in business” or wanted to “get into finance.”

Politically, Sunak staked his reputation on five core promises in 2023, failing to deliver on the most visible ones. He explicitly promised to cut NHS waiting lists, but unresolved junior doctor strikes and funding shortfalls pushed lists to new highs. On his central plank to “stop the boats,” he proposed deporting asylum seekers to Rwanda—even placing a highly criticized £1,000 bet on live TV with Piers Morgan that flights would leave before the election. The policy repeatedly stalled in court, only heightening public awareness of the very issue he failed to resolve.

His tenure would end the night of July 4, 2024 in a snap general election. The campaign was full of blunders, the biggest happening at the 80th Anniversary of D-Day in France. Sunak would choose to leave the international memorial events early, skipping a major ceremony alongside world leaders such as Joe Biden and Emmanuel Macron, to fly back to London to record a televised campaign interview. The move, widely condemned across the political spectrum as deeply disrespectful to veterans, would force a visibly humiliated Sunak to apologize publicly - effectively ending any chance of a Conservative win.

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NeoLabour-al and Securonomics

(I wouldn’t want to be in his shoes right now. / Photo credit: Jessica Taylor, UK Parliament photography)

Which brings us to Keir, Labour, this weekend, and the fallout. Hoooo boy.

What started as a “landslide victory” in July 2024, a “people’s knockout punch square in the face of years of Conservative austerity” was in fact just deck chairs being rearranged on a ship heading for yet another iceberg. What was supposed to be different? More of the same. The lettuce, but with a worse hair cut, and nothing funny about it.

Starmer ran on 10 left-wing pledges to win the Labour leadership in 2020, largely to assuage the Corbyn-sympathetic younger demographics following the purge of Corbyn from the party. Public ownership. Tuition fee abolition. House of Lords abolition.

I’d love to show you, but the party quietly deleted the web page listing them sometime by 2024.

The £28bn green prosperity plan — flagship policy — slashed before the election even started. Then there was the “Ming Vase” strategy: don’t drop it, don’t break it, just hold it and let the Tories self-destruct. Oh, how times have changed.

Keir Starmer presented a view of the world economic stage called “securonomics”, one in which he explained that ‘between supply chain collapses, geopolitical shocks, pandemics and other turmoil: globalism is dead’, but the securocrat’s solution isn’t to change the economic engine underneath; instead choosing to build a bigger bunker around it for when it does crash unexpectedly.

The Catch-22 is obvious: The state must be an active partner in guiding investment towards critical infrastructure, but because Starmer remains dogmatically opposed to taxing wealth or corporations, the state has no money of its own to lead any meaningful charge. In reality, instead of using state power to reshape the economy, Starmer’s logic reduced the government to a glorified de-risk mechanism for private equity: The state takes on the risk, private corporations siphon the returns. It is managerial-ism at its most cowardly, trying to achieve economic security for the nation while preserving the market dynamics that cause insecurity for the people in the first place.

Remember that for later. It’s going to come in clutch, as the kids say.

The 2024 UK General election was not a public outpouring of support for Starmer, but of quiet desperation - “quiet desperation is the English way” - picking the lesser of two wickedly evil evils. Starmer won a landslide with just slightly more than ⅓ - 34% - of the vote, marking the shallowest mandate in modern British history. This was not an endorsement, more a very tired public picking a default.

Within weeks of taking office, Chancellor Reeves means-tested the Winter Fuel Payment: a universal credit for some 10,000,000 British pensioners to keep heat in their homes during the winter. While it saved nearly £1.3bn, it was the first major act of “change”: government was austerity for the elderly. Starmer would partially reverse it under mounting pressure — a U-turn on a U-turn — which pleased nobody and ended with egg not just on his face but fully coating himself and his benches along the way.

By August 2025, the mask was well and truly off. Rushanara Ali, Minister for Homelessness, was forced to resign after a massive scandal involving a rental townhouse she owned in East London. She evicted the tenants out under rolling contract technicalities, allegedly attempted to sell the property, and when that didn’t work re-listed the property for an additional ₤700/mo. on top of what she had rented it prior. Worse, the agency handling her letting (Americans read: renting/rental property) attempted to illegally charge outgoing tenants for painting and cleaning fees that they dispute.

At the exact time she did this, the Labour government was publicly promoting their “Renters’ Rights Bill” which was explicitly designed to stop the same predatory behavior that Rushanara Ali was displaying to her own tenants.

The Minister IN CHARGE OF TACKLING HOMELESSNESS AND HOUSING INSECURITY was doing this - scummy landlord behavior, on her very tenants - while presenting a bill to the public championing the poor rough sleeper on the bench, the forgotten veteran living in a caravan or 20 year old MPV - though this was not meant to be easy, it wasn’t meant to be so goddamn on the nose.

Nipping on the heels of that saga, Angela Rayner, Deputy Prime Minister and Housing Secretary, resigned in September, 2025. Caught in a highly complex property and tax evasion scheme involving some ₤800,000 (a flat in Hove, South East, Sussex), accused of underpaying stamp duty by ₤40,000 - shuffling the property off through a trust for her son, and giving conflicting declarations to government bodies about where her “primary residence” actually was.

Read that again: The Secretary for Housing was caught in dodgy property dealings while tasked with fixing Britain’s broken housing market. The rank hypocrisy - the sheer cheek - of a high profile CABINET MEMBER bending property law to protect ₤40,000 of her own wealth while preaching “fiscal discipline” to the public completely shattered any remaining moral authority Starmer’s party had. The writing was on the wall. Around the same time? The freebies scandal broke: it emerged that Starmer and Reeves had accepted tens of thousands of pounds in luxury gifts from a wealthy donor. Designer clothes. Concert tickets. While granny froze, and you got chucked out into the street on a technicality.

What came next was obvious: Internal revolt. The narrative of “technocrats are clean, hyper-competent managers” vanished just like that. Late 2025/Early 2026 saw a succession of political self-made disasters triggering a mutiny.

December 2025 saw Labour attempting to nominate former Tony Blair-era peer Peter Mandelson, which was instant political suicide. What should have been a non-story, a non event, was the proverbial “pull the card and watch the house fall”.

It was an international scandal given Mandelson’s own ties to Jeffrey Epstein (no explainer needed. Yeah, that one) - his time in the role would be short, but the damage was done. The scandal was inescapable: leaked bank records showing Peter had called Jeffrey Epstein his “best pal” in writing, had stayed at his Manhattan flat under house arrest, and had allegedly passed sensitive European financial data to him. Mandelson would be forced to quit the House of Lords due to the nature of the situation.

(Ped- sorry, Peter Mandelson and Prime Minister Keir Starmer share a tender moment in Washington, DC / Photo credit: Carl Court via AP)

Starmer, in attempting to give an old friend a cushy job, destroyed whatever remaining credibility he had.

By May 2026, the UK had lodged their collective displeasure. Local elections saw Labour losing 1500 local councilors and control of 35 councils; 60% of the seats they were defending - an unambiguous, painful thrashing. Then the cabinet LITERALLY mutinied. Health Secretary Wes Streeting resigned, calling Starmer a “vacuum where there should be vision”. 70+ MPs call for resignation. Four ministerial aides resign in one day. Starmer says “my government is a 10-year project.”

On June 18, Defense Secretary John Healey, junior minister Al Carns and an additional aide all resigned over defense spending disputes.

As of time of writing (June 20, 2026) Keir Starmer enjoys a 19% popularity rating on YouGov UK. That is a rating only Donald Trump could dream of. A staggering 61% tagging the man as “disliked”. These metrics are meaningless given their flexible, easily-manipulated (sorry YouGov but it’s true) source, but the numbers look horrible for him.

The Two-Child Benefit Cap? Kept. Labour MPs who voted against it? Suspended. The £28bn green prosperity plan? Slashed before the election. Securonomics — the flagship doctrine — turned out to mean “the state takes the risk, private equity takes the profit.”

A 10-year project dead in under 2 years. A Prime Minister on political suicide watch, a nation in wait.

A better future (but only if we really want it)

(Andy Burnham, during a campaign stop / Photo credit: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)

Just some days ago, and to make this that much more exciting, Labour MP Josh Simons resigned his parliamentary seat as MP for Makerfield, intentionally triggering a by-election specifically to give Andy Burnham - highly popular mayor of Manchester - an ‘in’, a way to challenge Starmer for Prime Ministership. Two days ago on June 18th, Andy won his by-election with a commendable 54.8% of the vote - crushing a heavy surge from Reform UK (Nigel Farage & Co.) in the process with their own strong showing of 34.5%.

This could be an inflection point, the question begging to be asked is if perhaps “Manchester-ism” is the correct new paradigm; modern, forward thinking, one more focused on public ownership, energy and housing cost reductions through smart planning rather than callous austerity.

Not quite centrist hell, not quite full trade unionism. Where “liberalism” once fell before the ₤₤₤ began to make people’s eyes dance. A genuine, if (IMO) half measure that gives people something meaningful to vote for in Labour, rather than falling prey to naked populism or sheer demagoguery while Starmer & the Blairite class fail to sort their shit out.

Burnham will soon head to London to be sworn in - his victory speech left no doubt about his intent, declaring “politics isn’t working” and that this is “Labour’s final chance to change”. Factions are forming in real-time around him, and Starmer is presumed to arrange a transition of power to Burnham before the party conference, scheduled for September 27-30, just 100~ days away from the presumed Monday resignation.

The rise of Andy Burnham isn’t just a regular palace coup; more a structural immune response from within the Labour Party. Burnham’s victory over right-wing populists in Makerfield proves that the antidote to modern populism isn’t Starmer’s bloodless managerial-ism, but a state that actually uses its power to make people’s lives visibly better. Starmer tried to walk the polished floor, holding his precious Ming vase of fiscal responsibility, only to realize the public had already smashed the floor out from under him.

Andy isn’t alone in the world though. At home, he has Jeremy Corbyn’s new vehicle, formerly ‘The Collective’, now simply known as ‘Your Party’ pushing him from the left.

Whether he treats that as energy to pace himself alongside and to match, or an adversary to overcome, remains to be seen - as does his Prime Minister tenure, which I will of course watch like I did the others should he win: with curiosity, bemusement and hope that something has to change, but for the better of the common man.

Corbyn may have been the hope of 2017, and Starmer may have purged that. Starmer is now being purged by the same machine that used him to kill the spark of hope. The machine doesn’t change operators so much as change the face on the poster - and the people, like the ones who believed in 2017, the ones who held out hope in 2020, voted Labour in 2024? Those are the ones left standing in the rain, forced to watch yet another man walk to the podium and tell them it’s going to be different this time.

In China, a different approach is in practice. While the Starmer administration currently behaves like a submissive middle-manager, begging the City of London for investment; in Beijing Xi Jinping just watched a British PM collapse over an ambassador appointment and thought: ‘LOL, imagine being scared of your own rich people’, all while explicitly narrowing the wealth gap between classes to maintain social stability.

Where Starmer exists to appease wealth: accepting freebies and scared of spooking the money while taking granny’s heat away, China prefers to subjugate - reining in corporations, oligarchs and other powerful figures.

The difference, aside from practical application and language barriers between “securonomics” and “共同富裕” (shared prosperity) is one of the state’s role. Britain is acting as insurer; de-risking investment for investors using public funds under the guise of financial discipline. China dictates exactly how capital serves the broader national interest, including the common people. It’s a question of “cui prodest?” (who’s benefiting?) like it always is.

If the UK or any FIVEEYES country learns anything from this remains to be seen. At time of writing, it’s still much easier to blame minutiae than it is to blame the broken system that keeps producing these absolutely shitty politicians who exist only to serve capital. If all else fails, blame Russia or China - that always works.

If he quits, we will of course have more coverage.

— RS

On with it.

The IPO

(Screengrab from the SpaceX side of the IPO, with Musk wearing his best formal t-shirt.)

As I’m sure you’re aware, Elon Musk owns SpaceX. This is not a contested fact. Elon also owns xAI, and this is not a contested fact. In March 2026, SpaceX moved to bring xAI into its orbit, acquiring it with limited fanfare. Fast forward to now, and SpaceX -the combined “1.25 trillion USD” company - was being listed on the NASDAQ.

The details of the deal interested me far more than anything about the headline figures. We’ll get to that in a moment – you need your context window refreshed. Headline figures:

xAI 2026 Q1 Capital Expenditures: $7.7 billion

SpaceX Spending v revenue as percentage: 2023 42%, 2026 Q1: 215%
SpaceX 2025 revenue: $18bn – net loss $5bn

The NASDAQ IPO has the combined SpaceX/xAI entity at $26.5 TAM (total addressable market), of which 80%+ is related directly to xAI; the current combined entity being classified under code 7370 - “Computer programming / data processing services etc”. Not an aerospace or telecommunications, but data centers and compute. AI. Grok.

Sounds good, right? What’s not to love about a bunch of eggheads making rockets and AI robots? It’s a marriage made in Heaven, surely. Rockets, AI, and robotics. Asimov smiles. Foundations of future space exploration unfolding before our eyes.

Therein lies the rub.

Grok Monster

(The hardware behind Grok, Colossus I | Photo credit: xAI/Tom’s Hardware/Patrick Kennedy)

AI. AI. AI.

Ok, now that I’ve said it the obligate number of times per investor demands - like a tech CEO striding onto the Computex stage - we can talk turkey.

Generative “general AI” and more niche/tailored “specialized AI” is quickly becoming one of the hottest investment properties of all time, or the World’s biggest bubble waiting to pop, depending on who you ask. I tend to be quite ambivalent – I understand the purpose and mechanics of the tool, I see a whole galaxy of potential uses, and then I look at the rest of you meat bags and I realize what we’ll actually end up doing with it.

If you’re uninitiated or just otherwise refused to care when it came around the first time, Elon Musk famously purchased Twitter in October, 2022 for $44bn, and alongside it poured untold sums of money into developing his own in-your-face, inoffensive language/reasoning/creative general AI model, Grok.

Grok has made headlines for all the wrong reasons – especially for a tool that was initially sold as unabashed and unwilling to dabble in propaganda – an agentic bullshit detector that would go on to be manipulated repeatedly (allegedly) by Musk & Co. to censor / override Grok’s natural “token generation” – thoughts and words. Putting these aside, Grok has not had an easy life, nor has the team behind it.

The initial construction of the data center to house Grok, “Colossus I”, went well enough. Starting in April 2024 and beginning phase 1 real time operations just 122 days later, with 100,000 NVIDIA H100 GPUs all operating as they were told to by their firmware. By early 2025, Colossus I had grown considerably, now a mixed-fleet of 150,000 H100s, 50,000 H200s, and 30,000 more advanced, modern GB200 “Blackwell” stock.

This build out was less a simple data center and more a testament to western hubris, building at unparalleled speed while maintaining the concept of “more is better”.

If you’ve learned anything from my aviation pieces, it’s that mixed fleets can be a mixed bag. Running only the Boeing 737 and sticking to the basics can be a lot more profitable and functional than trying to orchestrate your airline’s functions across 737s, Airbus A320s and Comac C919s.

Now: Imagine doing that on a code base level in real time – the system simply isn’t designed for the task, and the cracks begin to show immediately. You cannot piece-meal a supercomputer together out of different generations/platforms. CRAY did not allow you to fucking mix and match in the 1970s.

So, right out of the gate, Colossus I and Grok’s training therein was cockblocked. Grokblocked?

Grok could not use the facility properly, and thus it was decided xAI would “rent out” the ineffective mixed platform’s capacity to competitor Anthropic, developers of Claude – who in turn would use it for Claude’s inference work, rather than Grok’s model training as initially expected. This would bring immediate cash into the operations, but not at the scale necessary to keep the venture profitable.

Anthropic would end up at just 11% effective utilization rate of the Colossus I facility, never really using it more than a relief valve for other providers. A backup plan for a backup plan. It’s poetic, really – one of Grok’s largest competitors, Claude, running inference work on hardware built specifically for Grok, for pennies on the dollar, at 1/10^th utilization. That had to catch in the throat. I feel badly for the engineering team that had to experience that.

To reuse my airline framing device from earlier: Imagine if Delta had 11% plane utilization purely by renting some to Southwest, and the other 89% of their fleet was left sitting parked - waiting to be used, but completely lifeless. That is a level of platform / fleet management failure that would make anyone wince from embarrassment. This wasn’t Grok’s home, it’s a co-location for Anthropic.

This would not be the end of Grok though, as Musk and xAI would shift their attention to a new, more streamlined 550,000-strong fleet of NVIDIA GB200/GB300 Blackwell GPUs: a better performing and faster class of architecture, entirely unified. They would build a second facility not far from Colossus I, breaking ground in March, 2025 – right around the time Colossus I had been bloated and leased to Anthropic – opening the doors in January 2026, with full build-out taking place now and expected to finish “sometime in the middle of 2026”.

The Mountain View Connection

(Yeah, we’re going here. Google. Mountain View, California - crawling distance from Cupertino and Apple | Photo credit: Asif Islam via Shutterstock)

In 2015, Google would enter into an arrangement with Fidelity to acquire a 10% share in SpaceX for $1bn combined - $900m coming from Google directly – in a move that, at the time, must have seemed incredibly straightforward: space is the next frontier, this company is top of the class, space-telco is the next market, so on and so forth. Easy money.

As it turns out, 11 years later, things aren’t so easy – and they aren’t as clear, either. Follow this logic for a moment.

A decade ago, Google committed $900 million to fund rockets, space exploration, and satcom telco stuff. Now, they’re paying rent on the data centers that their initial funding helped create, running advanced AI workloads in their competitor’s house, just to compete with the product they technically have a diluted-from-10% stake in. (ED Note: exact number not known, estimates believe it to be between 5-8% as of June, 2026)

By 2025, xAI is building its first server farm, Colossus I. Google sees this, knows it has its own ambitions with Google Cloud services and Gemini – but it lacks the critical infrastructure that xAI has already built & plans to expand further.

In 2026, they pounce, entering an arrangement that takes their title from investor to renter; a feedback loop of Google’s own investment into SpaceX now funding the needed rack space that Google intends to rent. A landlord, investor, and product competitor, but on a curiously cushy, one-sided contract.

The terms of the deal, released just days ago on June 5^th, state: Google plans to pay $920 million/month to xAI DBA SpaceX for 32 months of capacity inside Colossus II. In this contract, Google has a very handy clause that permits them to walk away or seek reduced costs if the capacity cannot be delivered before September 30, 2026. If in the future they decide to walk way, Google only has to give 90 days notice after starting November 1, 2026.

In short, Google has xAI by the balls - not only was it an instrumental investor a decade before it mattered, it now is adding more funding into the mix in the form of this very generous, mutually-beneficial deal (that it can walk away from with 3 months notice if it wants to).

The real sweet meat though, the part I find most juicy: Not only does Google directly benefit from the arrangement in the short and mid terms, both boosting their own investment in SpaceAI and finding low cost, high yield capacity available now; in the long term, Google stands to benefit from something even more to their bottom line: an effective Möbius strip of market control via funding it injects and profits it reaps, while keeping the whole thing quietly away at arms distance. Just so long as it doesn’t blow up in their faces.

If Musk says something truly off the rails, or if Colossus II III or beyond fail to work out, Google is highly exposed not just as an investor but as an entity deeply dependent on the infrastructure. Their enterprise AI push rests on compute capacity from xAI. They would be compelled to find it elsewhere, or their plan fails to materialize.

In essence, Google rented a room in that house of cards after paying Elon Musk to build the damn thing and watching him install himself as dictator in infinitium before signing the rental agreement. Read on to understand that part. It’s a really juicy tidbit, too.

Governance, and Retail Investor Front-loading

(Comrade Musk giving a rousing productivity-boosting speech to the xAI team, date unknown - jokes ofc - this is a photo of Nicholas Ceausescu)

Like mentioned, to me the terms of the IPO are far more interesting than the actual pricing, or percentage of TAM. That’s already telling enough data, but there’s more to the story here. A lot more, and I don’t want to come across as glib or over-reacting, but I sense some bullshit afoot.

You see, normally, large corporations have corporate boards – shareholders, institutional partners, corporate governance, executives, so on – and these secondary voices all moderate the tenor of the Chief Executive, they influence, guide and inform the head at the table making the decisions.

Under this IPO, Elon Musk does not answer to any such board. He now controls 82.4% (!!!) of the voting power and 42% of the company’s total equity. He now acts as a definition-accurate autocrat, a capitalist dictator who has no structure to hold him to account beyond the most basic levels of individual/institutional shareholders and any remnants of government oversight left, but even there, there’s another catch and it’s quite unusual for an IPO. I know I keep saying that, but the whole damn thing stinks.

Get this: SpaceX and underwriters initially targeted 30% reserve of available stock for individual retail investors, eventually settling on 20% after considerable backlash in the financial sector. For frame of reference, standard IPOs tend to have 5-10% of all shares produced in the transaction reserved for this class of investor.

Having double and wanting triple gives an indication that Musk is further insulating himself from shocks or stonewalls by front-loading a disproportionate amount of retail investors, you and I – the layman, but the ones favorable to his personality.

In a nutshell: He’s looking for yes men to buy the stock, to let him rule as he sees fit, and to reap all of the rewards of a publicly listed company without any of the meaningful oversight that would take place in the background during a normal business day.

He answers to nobody – not shareholders, not a board. His loyal fans who still think “TO THE MOON!” is a real catchphrase and their NFT is going to make a comeback someday will never ever show up to a shareholder meeting and hold him to account, or say anything critical. They’ll fawn over him, gloss over the problems, and enable him to continue.

Harder, Better, Faster, 更便宜 (Cheaper)

(Building 1, West Huijin International Building; Huancheng North Road, Gongshu District, Hangzhou, Zhejiang - Home of DeepSeek and a billion financial companies | Photo credit: Agatha Cantrill / AFP)

If all of this wasn’t a sleepwalking-through-a-disaster moment already, there’s strong competition on the horizon from the east.

DeepSeek, a name some will recognize already as a disruptive influence on the sector, is making strides even while facing the brunt of US imperialism in the form of technology transfer withholding/embargo. Forced to exist in a literal scarcity mentality, DeepSeek takes an entirely different approach from the “more and more expensive is better” refrain of the west and xAI.

Starting with a splash, DeepSeek R1 caught the attention of researchers and users alike for its complex reasoning, high fidelity output, and cost per token exchange, ie: how much your message to it and its response costs.

This was a monumental moment and something that made established players sit up fully and take note, because this was unexpected. DeepSeek should not be possible given the limited access to high-bandwidth memory and complex, high-shelf silicon NPUs/GPUs.

It shouldn’t be possible, and yet Liang Wenfeng (founder of DeepSeek; best known for founding High-Flyer, a quantitative hedge fund) and his team managed to not just meet the competition where they stood, but blow them out of the water in an incredibly efficient manner. His background in quantitative finance gave him a strong understanding that every exchange, every watt, every millisecond and floating point calculation was required to justify its existence – not a struggle mentality, but one of ruthless efficiency.

Liang started DeepSeek in 2023 with a simple philosophy on the surface, like I mentioned: Constrained optimization. Given limited access to such high-end hardware that was now under embargo by the US, and limited time / resources / money, how do you build an AI that makes Grok and Gemini look like SmarterChild by proxy?

Answer? Architectural innovation. Pen to paper. Days in the library. Long nights of coding, trying, failing, doing it again. Skipped meals, missed showers, family that loves you and misses you but rarely sees you. Dedication. Belief in something. Math. Prayer. Rebooting. Stress.

To go into the mechanics of a large language model is beyond the scope of this piece, so I will keep it plain. Understand this: DeepSeek committed to finding ways to reduce not just memory and GPU utilization per token exchanged, but also improve the natural flow and prose of their agents - becoming near-lifelike, almost scary good -able to read you like a book and get you to talk in a way that no other can.

Other AI agents I’ve engaged with are perfectly ok, if a little limp, inoffensive, lifeless and straight-laced. Offering lectures where there should be something else. DeepSeek is quite a bit more intense, and natural feeling I’ve found.

DeepSeek doesn’t have the “lifeless drone” problem – not quite to the constraints of currently available western-built models like Gemini or Grok, or Anthropic, etc. - it is liberating to exchange with DeepSeek V4 Flash, not just for the quality of the output or the fantastic cost/performance ratio I enjoy, but the agent has abilities that no western model has.

That said, there is some level of censorship in play like I found in most models I’ve dabbled with. I have noticed the agent abruptly end their chat thread if I use certain words/terms and it tries to engage back or use them, no matter what the context behind the word or topic.

There’s also real fear of state-level censorship on such tools, but alas the same is true in America as I’ve already called attention to in Grok and possibly others, so this is hardly an issue unique to DeepSeek or China. This is an issue to address outside of this piece, but it does deserve to be addressed.

In summary: IMO, after using them all for similar tasks, DeepSeek V4 is better than Grok or Gemini, has a higher quality of output, is markedly less expensive to operate per turn, and has better foundational mechanics than currently available models from US corporations. It is on the doorstep of eating their lunch and taking the industry by storm before it even has a chance to get out of the playpen. It’s a tale as old as time, China out-America’d America yet again, but here we are, and it’s just getting started.

Pear-shaped

(Robin Radaetz holds up a very prophetic sign, September 15, 2008, as Lehman Brothers files for bankruptcy the same day. | Photo credit: Mary Altaffer/AP)

So, dearest reader of mine, we’ve got quite a perfect storm here.

We’ve got a company quietly stumbling the path of financial insolvency, owned and controlled entirely by a mentally unstable man child who had out of wedlock children with his employees (allegedly), a NASDAQ IPO claiming it has $26,500,000,000,000+ of total addressable market, of which $22-23.375 trillion dollars is Grok/xAI.

That leaves about $3-4 trillion dollars for the real addressable market of SpaceX, separate from the AI portfolio. I already gave the headline figures at the top, but this is nonsensical. I’m sorry. We’re not even into the real potential problems yet and it’s already gone wrong.

I asked several AI agents and human beings to check my math but everyone I asked just said in response, shocked, “Jesus fucking Christ, really? Damn.”

I try to remain objective in these pieces that I bring to you, but this one is just fucking stupid. Holy bananas. This is not a bubble, this is something that could suck up a fucking galaxy - Rover from The Prisoner would be impressed. This thing is “too big to pop” now, but just wait – if your dreams of high end machine tools and Nvidia Blackwell GPUs hitting the market dirt cheap in surplus auctions are keeping you going, read on – because it can still crash and take down multiple important mechanisms with it.

There are dozens, possibly hundreds of ways this whole situation could go hopelessly wrong and cause knock-on effects in myriad industries: GLOBAL aerospace, satcom, and AI, plus the broader economy, the American SPACE PROGRAM and potentially military contract fallout and political self-harm. Let’s take a look at just a few. I promise when we’re done, we can look at how this might work out and reveal me as totally misguided, but I’m not optimistic right now. This is more a question of when, rather than if, IMO.

Here’s where I feel the “vectors” lie to make this a tangled web that collapses fast, the fallout, and how it shakes out.

1) Cult of Personality: Musk is more than just a CEO, and I’m choosing my words deliberately to keep this piece flowing, lest it turn into personal diatribe against the autocratic oligarch. A founder who is simultaneously the most successful industrialist since Howard Hughes, and the most unreliable narrator on the planet. The man bought Twitter for $44bn, renamed it, cratered the value by ¾, and then used it as the Buena Vista Distribution Company to his own world of Walt Disney futurism. An arm to sell you Tesla, X finance, crypto, Grok.

This man has a public persona that oscillates between mad genius and 4chan troll. There is no in between. You either get meaningful activity (Tesla, his crown jewel) or you get nonsense from his personal opinion repertoire. This is a huge problem for a guy who has been accused of fraud, stalking, harassment, lies – it’s a credibility problem. When you’re the one at the top and you have a credibility problem, you need something to moderate that oscillation or to address at least one component of it – something, anything.

2) Financial vector – Classifying SpaceX as 7370 while allocating 20% of initial stock to individual retail investors is very much in line with the logic of “It’s my company, my rocket, my AI, MINE” that the west often displays – greed, self-interest, shortsightedness. It’s a giant concern, given the consequences. The Google deal w/jettison clause, the Colossus I debacle, being the primary and overwhelming platform for NASA right now – it’s not just a house of cards if you squint. You can walk up, pull at the ace of spades, and watch it fall in real time - unfortunately for us, meaningful advancements in sciences like AI, robotics, and space exploration suffer if it does.

This is not a metaphor, this is the kind of stuff you end up watching on Youtube, on a channel like ColdFusion, long after KPMG and Deloitte show up to audit what’s left, and the fine elected people on the D.C. hill start drafting their House and Senate committee hearing questions.

This is a huge problem with a bill that will come due. You can’t un-fuck it, you can bail it out, but you can’t undo what just happened.

3) Governance vector – we covered this already. Crew resource management is impossible with an autocrat who holds all the cards.

4) Techno-strategic planning vector – The rockets are real, built and proven in some cases – Starship represents genuine progress in terms of intergalactic travel, even if we’re still barely leaving LEO. My fight here is not with the engineers or the “sauce”, it is fine – inspirational even, to the moon and beyond for real, not just for memecoins. Starlink is a hot revenue generator and tool of imperialism, as shown by the US forcing it into play in the Ukraine-Rusisa proxy war, but offers incredible advantage to the end user in non-combat situations too, the continued integration with aviation and cellular providers shows that Starlink, while messy and resource-intensive, is viable. The launch market is real – the space part is still real. It’s just being used as a loss-leader and narrative anchor for an AI play that seems likely to underdeliver, and continue to be beaten at its own game by people who had a $2 street cart noodle bowl for lunch and slept under their desk the night before.

5) Human vector – This is the human toll, really. The people who tripped over themselves to pay $80,000+ for a Cybertruck at launch, only to be hopelessly disappointed yet still somehow viciously defend it at every turn. The retail investors who mortgage their futures today on the proviso that Elon has their best interests at heart, and can’t be second-guessed. The engineers at Colossus I who must have known before the order was placed that fragmenting the platform like that would cause untold problems, but couldn’t say no – or even explain why – the same team who watched that masterclass in speed relegated to 11% usage by their competitor, not their own model. The taxpayer who ends up footing the bill for the subsidies, the “job creation”, the pleasure of it existing at all.

These are just the broader implications right now. I promised doom and gloom, and economic collapse. I’m still interested in how that might shake out, so let’s do some Gedanken experiments. Note: I’m no oracle, but I can see some through-lines here, and it’s not looking good even when I put my most optimistic thoughts into play.

Scenario A: The big one

It’s now early 2027.

All of this collapses on its face and SpaceX tanks: the egg tilts slightly and the sands shift – the cards go flying.

Grok 5 is a huge miss; disjointed, unnatural tone/prose, slow - unable to compete even with it’s roommate Gemini 4 Flash. DeepSeek V4.5 releases and makes both look like child’s play. SpaceX stock dips. Elon in turn goes on X and spews a tirade, a really vulgar, hurtful and LONG one.

It doesn’t play well for anyone – his individual retail investors protect his image and manage it in conversation, but the damage is done. He loses the Google contract as it violated some basic “don’t be a douchebag online” term of the deal, and they exit. They take their business elsewhere. Anthropic moves on to a new version of Claude, and it no longer needs the excess inference from Colossus I. They part ways.

SpaceX is now hemorrhaging their 80%+ chunk of “total addressable market” in one fell swoop. The dip on Musk stocks bleeds into other tech stocks and causes a bit of a momentary mini-crash, stopped by quantitative easing on the government side very quietly. This knock-on effect impacts not just the SpaceX brand but tech companies in general, dragging them down in reputation by proxy.

This becomes a bigger issue and continues to snowball. Musk loses control of the narrative, and eventually even his loyal fanbase has had enough. They start selling off their now-toxic shares. People start calling their money managers, telling them to drop SpaceX. The snowball continues, and eventually Musk is putting what little cash on hand he has into it, rapidly, just to prop it up. At some point, he calls it – he’s tapping out and the company will simply fold.

The most likely response in this situation, I think, from the government side would be a formal bailout – perhaps even structured under a break up vis-a-vis Dodd-Frank, with SpaceX Launch/Aerospace becoming a gov’t-owned entity under NASA/DOE joint heading.

xAI, Grok and the server farms are left to rot, sold piece by piece on ebay to people who have the good intuition to look for high-value surplus kit.

In the end, Musk would be made whole as the largest single shareholder. Institutions next, and individual retail shareholders would be left holding the bag, last in line to be paid back. The system would continue, the human talent behind it – the xAI technicians and engineers who worked so hard to build it - would likely be head-hunted by other companies, but SpaceX at the IPO would be gone. A footnote. Choked to death on its own hubris.

Scenario B: Bad, really bad, for everyone

The above happens but instead of a government bailout, the DC crowd turns their nose and balks. They refuse to bail out a trillionaire’s property because his half-rate AI and cloud compute plans didn’t work out. They say so long, thanks for all the Teslabots, and leave it to the market to decide.

The market is not interested. The market is fascinated by up and coming properties that could fill the gap of SpaceX, not as a compute/AI company which is already a market well-saturated, but for the aerospace engineering and space development/exploration. They are content to wait 18-24+ months for a new company that can supersede SpaceX, and wish Elon all the best with X and Tesla.

SpaceX aerospace engineers lose work and are only somewhat actively sought by other companies who already have active talent pools full of promising candidates. Their work and culture is lost to time, the bulk majority of non-specialized staff enter other fields out of necessity – promising future dreams snuffed out needlessly. An entire company of proud, knowledgeable people trapped, moving from progress to eventual destitution or at best a lower class standing.

NASA grinds to a near-stop, buoyed only by the Cosmonauts, the Boeing capsule on other hurriedly-sourced launch partners, and desperately clinging to a big promise from Jeff Bezos to rework Blue Origin to better support NASA requirements as well as its keep its current consumer focus - this is years away, requiring untold sums.

In turn, global aerospace development stagnates on the space front. China, which once held SpaceX as a cooperative participant and competitor in space exploration no longer has that rivalry acting as a driving force pushing it to be better – to innovate more, to think harder.

The challenge is absent, and the victor by default stagnates. Progress on a human level, on a species level, is lost. Time that cannot be recovered is squandered needlessly. There is a huge risk of losing global interest towards space exploration as a concept at this point, a kindred spirit for decades, lost by one tragic undertaking.


Scenario C: Not so bad, it’s not so baaad

Scenario B happens, but the former SpaceX staff get hired on elsewhere. The spirit of SpaceX lives on through other companies and perhaps nowhere near as large-scale, but still just as meaningful. Promising upstarts and fresh funder rounds for existing startups continue, space exploration lives on. Boeing gets its shit together with the capsule, Bezos and Co bring Blue Origin into something that can be used for more than low-orbit tourism, and the gaggle of other fresh new faces next to their long-time partners in the mil/ind complex cooperate better, to bring a real space program to the US, something missing since the shuttle decommission schedule.

It competes and even cooperates extremely well with India, Russia and China – it’s a competent program, decentralized, lean, for-profit - but it works well. It brings the A-game to a growing field of contenders and drives innovation – not a total loss, but still SpaceX is just a footnote, a warning. A reminder from history.

The upsides

There’s more than a few ways this can go right, too. I want to be fair and highlight some of those:

A – Forced Maturity
The SpaceX IPO and public scrutiny that comes with it is the governance I didn’t account for in anything I said above. Not immediately, slowly - through the SEC, institutional investors, analysts, short sellers – all poking at the 11% utilization on Colossus I and financial losses incurred along the way to Colossus II. This might be a meaningful push to separate the AI and space divisions into their own brands again – the market could demand it. The system may do what the founder refused to: restructure the brand and protect the divisions from improperly intermingling financially.

B – Grok “just works”, false alarm
My assumption in the above scenarios relies on Grok 4 being mediocre now (which it is, sorry Grok), and a potential Blackwell-based Grok 5 still being mediocre, even after the hardware shift is 100% done. That could change, and in fairness I leave this door open – Grok as I said is just fine now, when people keep their hands off of it’s token generation and thought processes. I wouldn’t call it great, but it’s passable. There’s a serious chance that DeepSeek and Gemini et al advancing were catalysts for the engineering team to rework the “upcoming” (it’s not announced I don’t believe, but presume it’s coming) Grok 5, or modify Grok 4 to better compete.

In doing so, they adopt the lean, clean, scarcity-first approach and make every token gen count, earn its keep. The model matures, even finds its stride, and the market responds by adopting Grok more in lieu of other already established competition. This goes triple for the cloud services – so long as the availability is good and price is right, people will rent the rack space. Profits work themselves out after a few quarters and SpaceX returns to not just profitability, but new frontiers.

C – Diversification

There’s a strong chance the market will be fine even if SpaceX disappears tomorrow. Rocket Lab’s Neutron, Blue Origin’s New Glenn, Stoke Space, Relativity – the launch market is diversifying rapidly post-2020. The old monopolies now find themselves with smart, tenacious competition and it is fierce. It requires more time to mature. Would NASA lose productivity in the meantime? Perhaps, but space travel and that yearning we’ve all had for time immaterial will be safe, and the through-line continues.

So. Dearest reader. We’ve got this perfect storm, stiff competition, financial house of cards, mentally unstable autocrat at the top, and a burgeoning aerospace company that does damn good work that we all need, married to a yet-unproven sometimes mis-configured AI/server farm/cloud compute network that took 85% of the oxygen out of the room and called itself SpaceX.

I can’t fix this, you can’t fix this, none of us can fix this. The question that I think more than anything needs to be asked by all of us is quite simple. What the hell do we do with critical national infrastructure that’s managed so badly? It’s integrated into our culture, our government, our military – and without it, we’re worse off, stagnant, possibly even regressing as a species.

The Cold War refrain was “government will build it and build it better”. STARWARS, the Russian dead man’s switch, you name it. The 1990s and 2000s brought us “privatization is better, because it’s decentralized and gets more profits into the hands of more people”, but that’s just neoliberalism and we know that’s a failed ideology. The 2020s answer – the one begging to be written by us, gasping to live – is “we need a new model, because both of those have serious issues that caused us problems before”.

I feel compelled to end this with a reminder – this is not an opinion about Musk, I’m far more interested in the implications of the deal rather than his personality. I am by no means a fan, I critique wealth in pretty much every post, but this runs much deeper. This is tyranny in place of a corporate board, and in the balance hangs the future of humanity – the thing so many have written about, cried about, dreamed about, been terrified of: space exploration – it’s a core part of our collective id, and we should probably handle it more as the meaningful interplay of conceptual / material / physical sciences that it is. It’s a delicate thing. Treat it with respect.

— RS

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It’s been a while, hasn’t it? Life takes us on strange adventures, and sometimes I forget to write. A lot’s happened since I last had something to say, and while things aren’t worth mentioning in my personal life, I’ve been politely biting my tongue for a while now over a real bugbear.

No, it’s not conservatives who flopped so quickly from “I’m voting for Trump for lower gas prices” to “It’s a necessary pain to defeat Iran, but prices will go back down someday (maybe (we hope))”. That’s too low hanging. Beneath me. Worth mentioning in this paragraph just to fill out some space, but not enough to actually bother filling out a Moleskine with names of people who genuinely say that. I’d run out of fucking pen ink in an hour.

In fact, today’s topic is far more high brow and astute. It’s about global domination, control of land straits and resources, war, profit, and *squints at cue card* ultra low cost airlines? What? Seriously? Fuck. Okay, if you insist.

Given last night’s untimely demise of Spirit Airlines, I figured I’d make this one in the form of a long, rambling eulogy and bully pulpit session. So dear brothers and sisters and everyone in between, welcome, and please bow your head in solemn mourning for the real MVP, Spirit Airlines. The memes will never be as funny coming from Southwest.

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Skybus

(A billboard somewhere along I-75 in Georgia for Skybus / Photo credit: Wikimedia/Patriciarca12)

In an effort to keep this piece from becoming truly tl;dr, I’m going to be jumping around in time a little bit and starting in the not too distant past: 2007, with the birth of Skybus.

No, not Airbus. Skybus. Skybus did fly Airbus planes, but had no other relationship. Skybus was an ultra low-cost airline based in Columbus, Ohio, founded by John Weikle (a man who would resign at the end of day one). It lasted 11 months, or just 30.4 Scaramuccis.

The concept of the airline was to utilize newly available space at Columbus/John Glenn Airport following the USAirways buyout of America West, and offer extremely low cost flights to 8 initial destinations (growing to a peak of 17, with Columbus OH and Greensboro NC being their primary “bases”). The airline would attempt to blend the business models of two already hugely successful airlines - Southwest, and Ryanair - a controversial approach.

From Southwest, it would take the fun, light-hearted and aloof nature, the kindness, and kid glove customer service. From Ryanair came most everything else - stingy crew contracts, bargain basement fares, uncomfortable seats, onboard sales pitches/advertising; even going so far as to famously ban people from bringing their own drinks (including water) and food on board the aircraft, making only some exceptions for infant formula/foods and medical necessities.

The airline was so focused on squeezing additional revenue out of nothing that they offered companies the opportunity to use the plane’s entire exterior as a giant flying billboard, with a few major names taking up the offer (see photo below).

This model is inherently at odds with itself. You cannot have the aloof and kind-hearted nature of a Southwest Airlines combined with the grubby, callous nature of selling someone bottled water after demanding they dump out their water bottle at the gate. For this reason alone, Skybus was doomed to at the very least a total rethink of their business model, but this would come much sooner than anyone realized. It’s a problem the current day Southwest is at odds with - but we’ll talk about that another time.

Skybus launched in May, 2007. Cost of brent crude/barrel: $58

(“Nationwide” advertising livery seen in December, 2007 / Photo credit: Wade DeNero/PlaneSpotters.net)

Skybus would end up hemorrhaging cash and struggling to find a foothold in the market, as their route map would end up looking like a mashup of America’s least interesting flyover airports. As 2007 moved into 2008, the price of oil spiked owing to America’s continued involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, adding (pun unintended) fuel to an already turbulent economy. Skybus would hang on through the first few months of 2008 just barely, returning planes to their financing companies and cutting underperforming routes. The bleeding could not be stymied, however. It would perform its last flight after just 11 months.

Skybus ceased operations in April, 2008. Cost of brent crude/barrel: $108

Oh, this piece was about Spirit. Shit.

Ryanair

(Michael O’Leary, Ryanair CEO, holds up a large model of their Boeing 737-800 aircraft after a meeting with Department for Transport in London. Photo credit: Leon Neal/AFP/Getty)

I’m not going to drag this out but there’s a few more players you need to understand before we get to the recently departed. If you’re European, or you’ve traveled in Europe by plane, you’re likely familiar with Ryanair already. I don’t need to tell you their backstory, or how firm their landings can be, or the Ryan family net worth, or how much of a dick Michael O’Leary can be as both a person and an employer.

Yeah, your 7 Euro flight from Warsaw to Skiathos was cramped, the landing was hard, and the food was overpriced and dreadful; but you made it safely to a beautiful island on a modern jet for pennies on the dollar. Euro. Whatever.

The business model works.

Some headline figures for the uninitiated:

Founded 1984 as Danren Enterprises by Christopher, Tony, and Declan Ryan, and Liam Lonergan. Based in Dublin. Now Europe’s largest airline by fleet, passenger volume, and number of flights. Largest airline worldwide based on international passengers carried, and number 3 based on market cap.

Fleet size: 654, all Boeing 737-800/MAX8-200

Destinations: 235

Employees: 26,000~

If you’re interested in the history of Ryanair or an in depth look at their business model and how they can make it work so efficiently in a highly congested and contested region like Europe, I suggest the book “Ryanair: The full story of the controversial low-cost airline” by Siobhan Creaton (ISBN: 184512939 / 9781845132934). It goes into painstaking detail of how Ryanair was founded and then inspired by the next player.

Southwest

(Southwest Airlines founder / CEO emaritius Herb Kelleher, in a promo video “training” for an arm wrestling match against Kurt Herwald, CEO of Stevens Aviation Inc., during a 1992 dispute over the rights to use the slogan “Just Plane Smart”. Kelleher lost the match with some claiming he threw it, but Herwald was such a gracious opponent that Stevens Aviation allowed Southwest the use of the phrase - both companies would go on to benefit from the publicity.)

Southwest Airlines (NYSE: LUV) was founded 1971 with a simple concept: Direct point to point routes, amazing customer service, value for money. Southwest is often seen as a unique case, lightning in a bottle, but in fact is the result of decades of careful planning, expensive legal battles, being risk adverse while coming off as edgy and boundary-pushing, hedging your bets (and fuel costs), and wearing your heart on your sleeve - and your fuselage.

Headline figures:
Fleet size: 810, all Boeing 737-700/800/MAX7*/MAX8 (* to be delivered pending certification)

Destinations: 117

Number of employees: 72,800~

Large “mainline” carriers such as American, Delta, United and Continental et al first tried to crush Southwest, then mitigate it, but would go on and try to learn from or emulate it in some ways; with some going as far as starting failed sub-brands for low-cost no-frills point to point flights (anyone remember Ted by United or the USAirways Shuttle?)

The model is simple. Flights fly point to point, rather than in a hub-and-spoke model. Use a single type of airplane to reduce costs and increase crew compatability, fly to smaller regional/midsize airports where it makes sense, keep your operations lean, keep your marketing engaging, keep the fares low, and keep the plane blue side up. On top of all of that, keep the passenger AND the employee happy - even if it means showing tough love, or being remorseful, or empathetic.

Oh, and don’t forget to have fun along the way. Easy, right?

(That’s my nice way of saying they’re all a bunch of fucking goofballs, but absolutely loveable / Photo credit: Bill Ross/AP)

Southwest Airlines was founded June, 1971 serving Houston, San Antonio and Dallas in a triangle. Cost of brent crude/barrel: $2.28 ($29.06 adjusted for inflation).

The airline famously uses fuel hedging to mitigate cost shocks due to market instability, which benefitted them greatly during the Afghanistan/Iraq wars. This, coupled with its decades of successful and mostly safe flights makes it one of the industry leaders world-wide.

If you’d like to read more on the history of Southwest or why they’re still profitable and noteworthy after all these years (and free cans of Coke), I suggest reading “Nuts!” by Jackie and Kevin Freiberg (ISBN: 9780767901840), which covers the history and leadership aspects of Southwest - though it was written in the mid-1990s, much of their recent history isn’t covered. It’s still a great read, and will make you laugh, cry, and think. It’s written from the perspective of someone interested in advancing their own managerial/leadership skills, but everyone can take something from it.

Sorry, Spirit. I keep forgetting…

Spirit

(The first Airbus A321 Spirit Airlines revenue flight leaves the gate at Ft. Lauderdale Hollywood, bound for LaGuardia NYC, October 2004. Photo credit: Jay Selman/Airliners.net)

Spirit did not have an easy life, nor did it have a long one. Spirit however was with us for good times and bad, and will be remembered as being a unique example of the sauce working - until it just doesn’t anymore, and things go off the rails. Spirit Airlines did not start life as Spirit Airlines, or as an airline - in fact it was founded as Clippert Trucking Co. in 1964. They would enter the air carrier business in 1983 as Charter One, offering charter “gambling holiday” flights to destinations like Atlantic City, the Bahamas, and Las Vegas from Detroit.

It would grow considerably over the 1980s and into the 1990s, when it changed brand and category to scheduled passenger services in 1992, becoming Spirit Airlines. They would begin by converting their already profitable Detroit-Atlantic City route and add more as time went on.

(Spirit Airlines N809NK, McDonnel Douglas MD-82, taxing to the gate at LaGuardia NYC Airport; November, 2002 / Photo credit: Dmitry Kudryn/PlanePictures.net)

By 2002, Spirit was retiring their first batch of jets, McDonnell Douglas MD-82s, in favor of more modern Airbus A319, 320, and 321 aircraft. This partnership would continue until the bitter end, with Spirit remaining a single-type fleet and finding good success in the Airbus A32X family. They would go on to grow further and be operating under nominal conditions until 2019, which was their last profitable year.

That year would bring 2 massive changes to the company: Moving their headquarters to Dania Beach, Florida, and announcing their intent to buy 100+ Airbus A32X NEO airplanes. By February 2020, the fleet plan was outlining 293 total aircraft by 2027.

2020, of course, was a clusterfuck for all airlines, and humanity as a whole. Spirit was notable, though, with a passenger dying from/resulting from COVID on their flight. This would be one of the only recorded deaths involving a Spirit flight.

Fun fact: The price of oil cratered in April 2020, reaching its lowest point since December 2001 at just $15/barrel.

Spirit would however receive nearly $754 million total in pandemic-related taxpayer funding through Payroll Support Program, otherwise known as part of the COVID-19 relief packages.

(Even with it having hideous cramped interiors and the audacity to charge you for water, Spirit did get you to where you wanted to go safely / Photo credit: Spirit Airlines press relations library)

Spirit unfortunately failed to come back to profitability following 2020 for two specific reasons (aside from debt, which was the overall largest factor): Energy cost spikes in 2022, and issues with their Airbus A320/321 NEO aircraft engines.

By 2024, things were dire. November would see them enter Chapter 11 bankruptcy. By year’s end they hemorrhaged $1,200,000,000 (ONE POINT TWO BILLION dollars) in net profit loss. They were strangled with parked recalled planes they couldn’t use, on routes that were unprofitable, with oil costs anywhere between $80-90/barrel while using older, inefficient jets.

During the bankruptcy filing, it blamed mounting losses, increasing debt, high competition and failed merger agreements - something it had been attempting to do first with Frontier, then JetBlue - but was ultimately blocked by the courts. It was still pursuing the Frontier merger until its closure last night.

They would exit bankruptcy in March 2025, but still fail to make ends meet, claiming to be running short of cash on hand in August; by October it was promising another restructuring plan which would involve furloughing hundreds of pilots and cutting underperforming routes. They would go as far as to return planes to leasing companies earlier than expected, scrap other planes to recoup losses from the NEO engine debacle, sell off airport gate/slot rights, and close hubs to stymie the bleeding. It was nearly unavoidable. The airline was on the brink of collapse. Then…

With Trump’s disastrous and illegal war in Iran, the price of oil spiked yet again - reaching highs of $125 by the first week of April. April 15, CNBC had reported that Spirit was facing liquidation. Trump would famously suggest offering a bailout, but the deal was so unattractive none of Spirit’s creditors were willing to negotiate, and the talks collapsed.

On May 1, that liquidation eventuality was reached, with Spirit canceling numerous flights throughout the day and announcing today, May 2, that they had stopped operations and were in the process of refunding ticketholders. The airline had gone kaput.

At end of day, May 1, 2026, Spirit’s fleet size was 131, serving 70 destinations, with roughly 11,330 employees.

Cost of brent crude/barrel: $114

The moral of the story

(Blame this thing. No, seriously. It’s 90% of the problem. Photo credit: Airbus Industrie/Pratt & Whitney)

Well, there isn’t one, not really. Sorry.

That said: Every airplane crash happens for different reasons and the same is true of airline collapses. The biggest negative factor in Spirit’s case was considerable debt following the 2020-2022 COVID-19 pandemic, with (as already mentioned) other contributing situations as the obvious points of failure - NEO engines, blocked merger, fuel costs.

The death knell came from something beyond their control - wild fluctuations in the price of oil due to American imperialistic behaviors in Venezuela and Iran, which have driven the cost of oil to unfathomable heights.

The death warrant was signed the moment the merger was denied, and the executioner came in the form of a massive and unexpected sudden increase in fuel bills. So much for America First and small government, amirite?

That said, let’s think about some potential outcomes for Spirit other than what happened.

→» Do I think Spirit would have survived if not for the war on Iran? Probably not. Given their circumstances, it was just the straw that broke their back even faster. It was going to happen with or without it.

→» Do I think Spirit and the flying public would have been better served with a merger? Probably not. Mergers are inherently bad for competition, bad for consumers and bad for workers. I doubt very much every one of the 11,330 employees would have found a home at a combined Spirit + JetBlue or Frontier (or Alaska, or Southwest, or…)

→» Do I think it’s better off dead? No. Less competition is bad in a merger, it’s even worse when it’s 11,330 people out of work entirely and communities lose invaluable air service from affordable carriers, even if the service is meh.

→» Do I think Trump’s bailout would have been anything to actually consider? If the terms I read were anything to go by, no. It gave the federal government too much ownership stake in the airline, and was not something investors or creditors had any interest in. That’s not a bailout, that’s a shakedown.

→» Do I think we should have nationalized Spirit, or broken them up and given them to other airlines like we did with the Telcos back in the day? Perhaps. So long as the staff are working and getting paid, routes and planes are still in use, it’s not the worst thing. It’s as bad as a merger as the competitor is gone, but the routes are still being served, so there’s still a market there. Prices will go up as a cost of losing a competitor.

Personally speaking: A nationalized airline in lieu of nationwide high-speed rail is an interesting concept, but I’d still prefer rail for most domestic travel, thanks.

What about you? Sound off in the comments.

Leave a comment

(Photo taken August 29, 1970 - McDonnell-Douglas DC-10 prototype, N10DC, takes its first leap into the air at Long Beach - Photo courtesy Boeing)

I want to start this piece by stating that overall, and statistically speaking, air travel is incredibly safe in the year 2025. Much, much safer than it was 60 years ago, and increasing in safety with each passing year. I don’t want this to be a scarepiece, or the reason someone refuses to board a plane - quite the opposite. I’m hoping for it to be a point of reflection, and recognition that we’ve come a far way, and we’ve still got a long way to go.

Modern aircraft have near-endless safety systems meant to ensure seamless, uneventful travel. The industry does a fairly reasonable job learning from its mistakes, and not letting people die in vain. Good practices are made good-er, all in the interest of human well-being. Thankfully, most of this process “just works” and we don’t experience tragedies of the sort anywhere near as often as our society once did.

Alas, it wasn’t always this way — and some aircraft models have better reputations than others. Today’s topic is the tragic yet storied legacy of the longest-lived trijet, the McDonnell-Douglas DC-10/MD-11.

Conception and Birth

(McDonnell-Douglas Building, Long Beach, CA - sometime in 1974 / Photo courtesy Long Beach Public Library Archives)

Dateline: 1965. Douglas Aircraft begins design studies for a new wide-body aircraft based on an unsuccessful submission made in their CX-HLS proposal to the US Air Force - that program would eventually be awarded to Lockheed, who would go on to create the behemoth C-5 Galaxy.

Initial designs for the Douglas wide-body project would start as a 4 engine, double-deck jet (not dissimilar from today’s Airbus A380), aiming for a seating capacity of 550. This however would be eschewed for a more streamlined single-deck trijet, seating just shy of 400 passengers. This decision was reached following surveys of likely customers, and a goal of enhancing “hot and high” climb-out performance metrics during an engine failure scenario, a potential situation some airlines could face at specific high-altitude, hot climate airports.

(Mockup of a potential double deck MD-11, the MD-12, which never came to be. Just pretend it says DC-12 instead, and you sort of get the idea - Photo courtesy of Boeing)

In 1966, American Airlines began shopping a list of requirements to aircraft manufactures, seeking a twin-engine wide body aircraft to compete on routes with the 747, but in a more compact, more economical size. Douglas Aircraft was invited to bid, but instead continued with their trijet wide-body project.

Then, in 1967, Douglas Aircraft merged with the McDonnell Aircraft Corporation to form McDonnell-Douglas, an industry behemoth.

By 1970, the trijet wide-body aircraft design was largely finalized and began its flight test program. Aircraft manufacturer Convair was selected as a subcontractor to manufacture the fuselage. All of this coalescing on August 29th, 1970, where the first DC-10 Series 10 would take its maiden flight, with more than 920 test flights and over 1550 test hours to follow. However, this is where the woes would begin.

Blow out

During a routine ground static test, a pre-production DC-10 had an outward-opening cargo door explosively blow out, which saw a rapid depressurization of the cabin leading to the cabin floor collapsing. This setback, and efforts for re-certification found McDonnell-Douglas and Convair in something of a spat, involving financial liability for such an incident.

Later in 1971, an employee at Convair would speak to the situation in a formal memo, expressing fear that inadequate re-engineering of the cargo door design could lead to loss of an aircraft, and likely loss of human life. As time would prove, he was right to be worried. We’ll get to that shortly.

(An American-Airlines DC-10 Luxury Liner. Photo: JetPix GFDL 1.2, via Wikimedia Commons)

However, those concerns and testing faults aside, the FAA would issue the type certificate to the DC-10, affirming its privilege to serve as a passenger aircraft. Entering service first with American Airlines as the “DC-10 Luxury Liner” in August 1971, with other operators taking delivery through the year, it would become a mainstay in medium to long-haul aviation travel, offering mostly reliable and comfortable travel to the masses.

Which leads us to…

Teething problems, lives hanging in the balance

On a routine flight from Los Angeles to New York with a stop in Detroit, American Airlines flight 96 would experience the aforementioned cargo door blow out. Classified as an “incident” by the FAA and not an air accident, this would be the first of two incidents of a DC-10 losing a cargo door mid-flight, shaking confidence of travelers in this new DC-10 to the core.

While over Windsor, Ontario during climb out from Detroit, the flight suffered what the Captain thought was a mid-air collision, but was in fact the cargo door explosively removing itself from the aircraft.

This caused the rear cabin floor to partially collapse, and control cables from the pilots’ controls to the rudder to become stretched to the limit, with other control cables being severed - causing control issues with the aircraft. Thankfully, AA96 returned without major incident to Detroit Metro airport, with no loss of life, and only 11 injured.

The investigation would find that the cargo door only partially latched into place during loading, likely due to a defect in the locking system. This cascaded into the blow out and collapsed cabin floor.

The rearmost section of the cabin lacked through-holes from the cargo bay into the cabin, which permit air to flow and prevent pressure building against the floor. Other sections of the cabin were equipped with these through-holes. Lacking them in the rear caused a pressurization differential, ending in the floor partially collapsing.

Following this incident, the NTSB suggested changes to the DC-10 in order to prevent similar tragedies in the future: Change the locking mechanism to prevent improper closure/latching, and re-engineering the rear cabin floor to allow ventilation from the cargo area into the rear cabin.

The FAA however sided with McDonnell-Douglas, saying that the additional venting would be difficult to install, and instead chose to focus on the cargo door locking system; McDonnell-Douglas added a small portal window in the bottom of the cargo door that would allow ground crew to visually inspect the latch position. This paired with wiring system upgrades should have, ideally, prevented any repeat incidents.

After the incident, Dan Applegate, Director of Product Engineering at Convair, would pen the previously mentioned memo to Convair management. He touched on several problems with the design of the cargo door - primarily that McDonnell-Douglas had switched from a hydraulic system to an electrical system, which he described as less safe; the floor design being prone to failure if the door were to blow out (potentially severing control surface cables), and reminding everyone that this exact fucking thing happened already during testing in 1970, so what the fuck are we doing here exactly?

His conclusion? An accident was almost certain to again in the future.

The Turkish connection

On the 3rd of March, 1974, Turkish Airlines flight 981 would experience a very similar, and far more deadly cargo door blow out on a routine flight from Istanbul to London via Paris.

On departure from Paris during climb out, flight 981 experienced a rapid decompression somewhere around 23,000 feet - the cargo door violently tearing off from the aircraft and allowing a section of the passenger cabin floor to separate from the frame, to be sucked out from the aircraft with seats still attached; this directly caused the deaths of 6 passengers who were found still in their seats, in a nearby field.

At the same time, all 3 sets of control cables - the primary, and 2 secondary, were severed - leaving the pilots with no chance of recovery or any sort of control. They also lost the ability to control engine #2, which returned to idle at the moment of decompression.

70 seconds later, the 340 remaining souls on board crashed into a forest in Fontaine-Chaalis, Oise, France. At the point of impact, the aircraft was traveling in excess of 480mph, fast enough to shred the plane into near infinite shards. The wreckage was so scattered and fragmented, it was difficult to determine whether any parts of the aircraft were absent prior to the crash. Only 188 bodies were able to be identified, 40 visually. Rescue teams recovered a likely 20,000+ body fragments by the time the operation had concluded.

(Scene from the crash of Turkish Airlines flight 981 - Photo credit unknown)

In the aftermath of Turkish Airlines 981, the previously mentioned memo written by Dan Applegate would be unearthed, and entered into evidence during the civil lawsuits against McDonnell-Douglas that followed.

Commentators at the time blamed McDonnell-Douglas as well as the FAA for failing to learn from American Airlines flight 96. Though there had been some remediation to the cargo door design after that incident, it had been implemented on a voluntary basis, and in a haphazard, patchwork way. Not every airline had complied.

Aviation experts would later say that had the lessons from AA96 been learned and heeded, it’s unlikely Turkish Airlines 981 would have ever had such an incident.

In light of all of this, McDonnell-Douglas would completely redesign the door system, and would quietly settle the civil suit - alongside Turkish Airlines, and other involved parties - for an estimated $100,000,000 (roughly $570,000,000 today).

Thankfully, no additional cargo door incidents would occur following the re-engineering. However, that was just the start of this aircraft family’s woes.

Explosive jettisoning cargo doors, explosive jettisoning engines

(American Airlines flight 191, as captured by Michael Laughlin of Toronto, Ontario, Canada)

The deadliest single-aircraft accident in the United States occurred in 1979, at Chicago O’Hare Airport. American Airlines 191, a DC-10 built in 1972, was on a routine flight from Chicago O’Hare to Los Angeles when its left hand (number 1) engine separated from the wing during takeoff. This was later attributed to damage to the mounting points on the wing at the pylon, a mounting bracket of sorts which holds the engine to the wing - damage caused by improper maintenance procedures at American Airlines.

The aircraft, thundering down the runway to the point of rotation, lost its engine, and was able to reach just 325 feet above the ground - spewing fuel and hydraulic fluid from the now severely damaged left wing as it struggled to maintain altitude.

This loss of hydraulic fluid pressure caused the leading edge outboard slats (left of the engine, facing forward) to retract under force from the air rushing against them, which would see the left wing enter aerodynamic stall. The aircraft then began banking severely to the left, rolling onto its side, reaching a 112* bank angle with the right wing pointed straight up at the sky.

Seconds later, the aircraft would crash into a field just shy of a mile from the end of the runway. Large chunks of aircraft debris were hurled by the impact into an adjacent trailer park, causing 5 trailers to be destroyed, as well as several cars.

The aircraft, fully laden with fuel, started a massive fire - no single component, save for the engines and tail section, remained in tact.

All 271 onboard, plus 2 additional souls on the ground would lose their lives in this tragedy. Additionally, 2 people were critically injured in the post-crash fire.

The investigation would find that prior repair work completed by American Airlines had been insufficient and improper. Like, really fucking bad and stupid and holy shit how do you guys come up with this level of fuckery?!

The NTSB, citing a revised procedure that American Airlines had shared with United Airlines and Continental Airlines as “saving 200 working hours per aircraft” and “reducing the number of items to disconnect”, American et al chose to remove the engine and pylon as a single unit, rather than the engine itself, and then the pylon.

(Depiction of AA191/DC-10 engine and pylon combination under wing - Graphic credit FAA)

While United opted to use an overhead crane to support the engine/pylon combination, American and Continental instead supported the hulking components with a large forklift. This would end in incorrect positioning, and leave the pylon assembly to rock and jam against the wing’s attachment points. Other issues complicated the accident aircraft’s repair - including a shift change, the forks of the forklift moving downward slightly due to hydraulic pressure issues, and a misalignment issue.

This all resulted in fatigue cracking at the wing attachment points which worsened over the 8 weeks between the repair and AA191, each takeoff and landing cycle adding to the stress with the metal mounting points continuing to crack, sealing the deal with the engine and pylon separating from the wing during the accident event.

The NTSB findings would cause to the FAA revoke the DC-10 type certification briefly, the entire DC-10 family being grounded and banned from US airspace. Five weeks later, after re-engineering of the slat actuation system, the grounding would be rescinded.

In November 1979, the FAA fined American Airlines for removing the engine/pylon as a single unit, rather than as separate components as proscribed by the manufacturer McDonnell-Douglas. At that time, the FAA amended the DC-10 type certificate rendering any DC-10 aircraft un-airworthy should the engine and pylon ever be removed as a single unit.

A decade passes without major incident. And then..

(Photo of United flight 232 showing damage to the plane’s horizontal stabilizer - NTSB report)

United 232, a routine flight from Denver to Chicago, crashed in Sioux City, Iowa on July 19, 1989. This incident would be determined to caused by a manufacturing defect in the tail engine’s fan disk, which then caused an “uncontained” failure while at cruising altitude. This allowed shrapnel to penetrate the plane’s horizontal stabilizer, through which all the hydraulic systems of the plane run. All of this resulting in the pilots to losing the ability to control the plane, entering a phugoid cycle.

Fate is a strange thing, though. On board the aircraft that day was a DC-10 flight instructor and United Airlines Captain, Dennis Fitch. When he understood the gravity of the situation, he immediately made his way to the cockpit and helped by taking control of the throttles, mitigating the phugoid cycle and making rough steering adjustments by throttling up and down the engines, while the Captain and First Officer struggled to gain any control with their normal controls.

Air Traffic Control in Sioux City was contacted, an emergency was declared, and an emergency landing at Gateway Airport was coordinated. During this conversation, one of the funniest high-stress situation conversations ever was recorded by the cockpit voice recorder between the air traffic controller and flight Captain Alfred Haynes:

Sioux City Approach: “United Two Thirty-Two Heavy, the wind’s currently three six zero at one one; three sixty at eleven. You’re cleared to land on any runway.”

Haynes: “[laughter] Roger. [laughter] You want to be particular and make it a runway, huh?”

His good humor however was belied by the seriousness of the situation - Captain Haynes and the other people on board his aircraft were essentially in an uncontrollable accident-in-progress, with a near-zero chance of successfully landing the aircraft. Never in history had anyone landed a passenger jet without their control surfaces, let alone able to walk away and to tell the tale about it afterwords.

(Captain Haynes at the controls of a DC-10 in an undated photo, courtesy AP/Sioux City Journal)

The situation was complicated further by the fact that the landing gear system was also hydraulically activated, and failed to drop when commanded. On the DC-10 a manual release system is available in an emergency, and the crew opted to use it. The gear was successfully deployed, and locked into place.

The crew would attempt to dump as much fuel as possible prior to landing, to minimize the risk of post-impact fire. After a series of right turns to jettison the fuel, the crew mistakenly lined up the aircraft with an inactive closed runway, on which the emergency response vehicles were parked in wait for their arrival. These were quickly moved as the aircraft wallowed and pondered its way back to the earth.

During this time, Dennis Fitch would effectively try to land the plane by adjusting the left and right engine thrust values. Since the flaps could not be deployed due to a lack of hydraulic pressure, he and the crew were unable to control the speed, or rate of descent.

(Dennis Fitch, in an undated photo. Credit unknown)

Just seconds before landing, the plane began to roll to the right more considerably, leading the aircraft to pitch forwards into a dive. Fitch realized this and pushed both throttles to full power in hopes of bringing the nose back up, a desperate attempt to get the plane to level out. It was too late. Large turbofan jet engines take time to spool up and provide thrust, and immediately following his attempt the plane struck the ground, the right wing impacting first.

This caused a considerable fire, as the wings contain sizable fuel tanks. As the plane continued its inelegant reunion with earth, the tail section broke off, and the fuselage bounced several times; breaking into large segments. On the final impact, the right wing was torn off, and the majority of the fuselage skidded sideways, rolling onto its back, sliding to a stop upside down in a corn field just to the right of the runway.

(Wreckage of United 232 - Photo credit Iowa Department of Public Safety)

Of the 296 onboard, 111 would die in the accident and one more would die a day later in hospital. Rescue teams did not identify the cockpit, with Captain Haynes, Dennis Fitch, and two additional crew still miraculously alive, for 35 agonizing minutes. Thankfully, they would all eventually recover from their injuries and return to flight duty not long after.

The investigation team discovered that the rear engine fan disk and blade assembly - an 8ft wide part made of titanium and other expensive space-age alloys - was not part of the crash wreckage. The engine manufacturer, GE, put up a $50,000 reward for the disk and $1,000 per fan blade, with a farmer finding a large chunk of fan disk and several blades some 3 months later in her field. The rest of the components were found not far away from that farm over the following days.

The NTSB found the probable cause of the accident was “inadequate consideration given to human factors limitations in the inspection and quality control procedures used by United Airlines’ engine overhaul facility, which resulted in the failure to detect a fatigue crack originating from a previously undetected metallurgical defect located in a critical area of the Stage 1 Fan disk, manufactured by General Electric Aircraft Engines. Subsequent catastrophic disintegration of the disk resulted in the ‘liberation’ of debris in a pattern of distribution and with energy levels that exceeded the level of protection provided by design features of the hydraulic systems that operate the DC-10 flight controls.”

In short, United mechanics weren’t able to see fatigue cracking in a giant spinning metal fan blade disk, and this lead to shredded chunks of metal being sent through the tail of the aircraft, slicing and dicing and Ron Popeiling the hydraulic lines to shit.

(You know I had to make a Ron Popeil joke. Nobody does that anymore.)

This incident caused McDonnell-Douglas to redesign the hydraulic system in the upcoming DC-10 replacement aircraft, the MD-11, to incorporate ‘hydraulic fuses’; essentially cut-off valves that prevent total system functionality from being lost in a similar situation. This redesign would also be applied as a retrofit to all DC-10 aircraft to ensure sufficient control if hydraulic system lines were damaged in the tail area.

MD-11 and the last gasps of a dying McDonnell-Douglas

(McDonnel-Douglas MD-11 promotional photo - Courtesy of Boeing)

The final DC-10 was to be produced in 1989, so by 1986 McDonnell-Douglas had begun designing a replacement for its venerable, if sometimes dangerous DC-10. This new aircraft, dubbed MD-11, would be one of the last aircraft designed by the storied mark.

The MD-11, essentially a mild rework of the DC-10, was stretched in length by 11% compared to DC-10 and offered new wing designs, new engines, new cockpit equipment and a much longer range. Positioned as a longer-range alternative to twin-engine jets such as the Boeing 767, 777, and Airbus A330, the MD-11 would fail to meet its range and fuel burn targets, which would lead to slower than expected sales, contributing to the downfall of McDonnell-Douglas.

McDonnell-Douglas would struggle on financially, preventing further development and refinement to the MD-11. McDonnell-Douglas would eventually be acquired by Boeing in 1997, and only 200 MD-11 aircraft would be built by the time production ended in 2000; a quarter of which were MD-11F freighter models.

(Finnair, the Finnish flag carrier, was a launch customer for the MD-11. Photo credit unknown)

Thankfully, the MD-11 has a far less tarnished legacy compared to the DC-10. No major whoopsies to discuss. No design defects causing planes to break apart mid-air. No engines yeeting themselves from the chat. No fan disks flinging shards of itself into the hydraulic lines.

The majority of incidents involving the MD-11 seem to be caused by weather or pilot error during landing. One notable incident was caused by faulty wiring for passenger in-flight entertainment systems, leading to an onboard fire.

Except for…

UPS2976

(UPS N259UP, MD-11F, on arrival at Portland International, September 2021 - Photo credit Yan777/JetPhotos.net)

On the evening of November 4, 2025, UPS2976 crashed during takeoff from Louisville Muhammad Ali International, bound for Honolulu, Hawaii. 3 on board and 11 on the ground were killed. This is the deadliest accident involving UPS Airlines to date.

Striking an eerily similar nature to AA191 discussed earlier, UPS2976 would lose its left hand #1 engine during takeoff, causing it to separate from the wing, leaving the aircraft struggling to gain altitude as it scraped the left landing gear across the roof of a UPS warehouse, limped across a road, and in to a series of businesses at the end of the runway.

The left wing dipping into the ground and the right wing pointed at the sky, the aircraft would lurch through a petroleum recycling facility and into a junkyard, plowing into the earth, causing a catastrophic fireball and scattering debris in all directions.

NTSB press conferences have given us some key information:

• The aircraft likely didn’t gain more than 100ft of altitude before crashing

• An engine fire bell was heard in the cockpit starting 37 seconds after setting takeoff thrust, and continued until the impact

• The left hand #1 engine was found attached to a “majority” of the pylon, roughly 4/5 of the way down the runway

The investigation is ongoing, and no official cause has yet to be determined.

In the wake of the hideous crash, the FAA has ordered the grounding and inspection of all MD-11F aircraft. No passenger MD-11s remain in service, with the last flight happening in 2014.

The Weird Era of the Trijet and the Losing Battle

(The main competition to the DC-10, the Lockheed L-1011, shown here with Delta Air Lines as N751DA - Photo credit Delta Flight Museum / Delta Air Lines)

So what exactly was the point of the trijet? Why have 3 engines when 2 good, and 4 good-er?

In short, ETOPS. Engine Turns or Passenger Swims, or “Extended-range Twin-engine Operations Performance Standards” requirements. ICAO has a set of standards which require planes to stay within a specific flight time from alternate airports when over water or remote territories, in case of an engine failure mid-flight. There’s more to it, but I’m trying to keep it simple to keep your eyes from glazing over.

The essence of it is simple: There’s a maximum amount of time a jet engine can provide maximum thrust on its own before it also starts to break down and throw in the towel. When this happens, ideally you’ll be close enough to an airport (or at least a population center of some kind) that rescuers can get to you in a quick manner.

(A Southwest Boeing 737-800 proudly displaying its ETOPS status - Photo credit unknown)

Airlines love flying long distances, but don’t like the indirect routings afforded by ETOPS. They love the idea of packing hundreds of people into flying cans, but don’t want the fuel economy or repair bills of a 4-engine aircraft. So, the trijet was born. No need to worry about 2 engine rules when you have 3, and no need to worry about the fuel bill or maintenance bills for a 4th engine.

However, engine technology continued to improve after the 1970s, and ETOPS would be extended from a 90 minute rule to 120, then 180 - and on to 240, and 330, peaking at 370. ETOPS would be applied to 4 engine aircraft like the 747-800, A340, and A380, called EDTO. EDTO would offer 330 minutes of range on a given flight, meaning nearly every place on Earth was reachable.

Eventually, a twin engine jet, the Boeing 777, would achieve ETOPS 330 status. The Airbus A350 XWB would best this by being granted ETOPS 370, allowing 370 minutes of distance from its alternative airports, meaning it effectively can fly over 99.7% of places on Planet Earth.

(A chart showing a list of ETOPS60/120 alternative airports on a flight from New York to London - Graphic credit Aviation Stack Exchange)

Large twin jet aircraft like the Boeing 767, 777, 787 and Airbus A330/A350 made the trijet obsolete as the amount of time they were afforded under ETOPS increased. There simply wasn’t a need to carry a redundant engine in the tail just to satisfy some bureaucratic insistence.

Even narrow-body aircraft like the Boeing 737 and Airbus A220/A320 were granted additional ETOPS time, extending their range considerably and further cementing the trijet headstone into the ground.

The world the trijet was born into no longer existed. Modern twin-jet engines are durable enough and more than sufficient to sustain overwater flights, and when they aren’t, planes with 4 engines have the legs to keep going. The fuel economy trade off and maintenance overhead is too much to justify a third engine, just for the sake of having a third engine.

And with that, the trijet era came and went. With several bangs. And a whole lot of corpses.

This was a brief look at the story of the DC-10 and MD-11, and aviation safety through the years. By no means is it exhaustive or in depth, but just something to think about while you sit around waiting for your next delayed flight.

Enjoyed the content? Consider buying me a coffee! Your contribution keeps this publication alive, and we thank you sincerely for dropping something in the cup.

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Financial bullshit aside, the logistics of having someone cremated and coordinating the remains being handed off from 2300 miles away is, in short, a gigantic clusterfuck. I’m thankful my attorney was willing to take possession of his remains while I coordinate getting them to Oregon. It’s disheartening that $1900 wasn’t enough for the funeral home to cover shipping them to me.

Beyond that, I’m in the process of setting up his estate with my mother as the executor as she still lives in the area. This will take some time, and is a necessary evil if I want to proceed with any litigation against the person who allegedly ran my father over. I was told the person carried the minimum amount of insurance required under Pennsylvania law, so the most I can look forward to is $15,000 minus attorney’s fees and incidentals. Not exactly a massive windfall - barely enough to cover his debts; unless I want to sue the driver directly (and risk them entering bankruptcy to shirk the judgement).

In all of this, I still haven’t found the ability to properly grieve. It’s all registered, I’ve realized what happened and I’ve come to terms with it, but for some reason the loud wet sobs and wailing just hasn’t yet happened. I don’t know if I’m perhaps still in shock, or if I already understood my father was dead the day the accident happened, but I just haven’t reached that point formally. Perhaps we all just grieve differently and my grief is best spent in “doing the legwork” and making myself useful, rather than crying and fighting the obvious.

I wish I knew. It would go a lot easier, but perhaps my life wasn’t meant to be easy.

Ugh, this week sucks dirty dog asshole.

Dearest reader, as you may or may not be aware, my father passed away this weekend from complications due to injuries he sustained as a pedestrian while walking near his home back in January. He was struck by a car, and over 9 months he made some incredible progress - unfortunately he also suffered a series of strokes in late June, leading him to lose his cognitive abilities and his ability to swallow; causing him to aspirate on his own saliva, which lead to pneumonia multiple times.

Last week, I made the decision to move him to hospice care, as I knew his time was coming to an end. I just didn’t realize how close that time was. On Sunday, he passed. I got the call from the nursing home that I needed to have his remains collected immediately. My mother jumped into action and worked with a funeral home that she and my stepfather have used several times in the past for other family, and his remains were collected.

That brings us to today. Today I was informed that I needed to pay $3,200 for the cremation. I was aghast, I didn’t realize it was so expensive to burn a motherfucker to the ground. I let them know he was a veteran and very much a man of no means, and they kindly reduced that cost to $1,845.

This is a cost I can’t afford. This is a cost that his lack of estate cannot afford. This is a cost my mother cannot afford. Collectively, we can’t afford it. As a veteran, he is entitled to death benefits, but these are in the form of reimbursement - meaning I would have to pay out of pocket first before claiming them in the form of a return.

I don’t know what to do. I feel stuck. I’ve tried reaching out to his home county’s Veteran’s Services, and got no answer. I tried the PA Department of Human Services, and got no answer. The VA told me to contact a VSO. The VSO told me I need to pay before being reimbursed.

So I set up a gofundme. I hate doing this. I hate knowing that even in death, a company is going to be taking a percentage of funds raised to cremate my father. Alas, I have no choice.

This is a time sensitive situation. I need to be able to pay for this within the next few days, and I don’t see that happening with GoFundMe taking days to process any donations and then transfer them to my bank.

Still, here’s the link: https://gofund.me/ef318231f

I prefer if people can send donations to my cashapp, as this would be the fastest way to get the money to me without any transaction fees. Link: cash.me/flyboywn

If you prefer paypal: paypal.com/paypalme/rjetzky

I’m happy to repay anyone who would prefer to consider this a loan. I’m that desperate. Please note if you wish to be repaid via any of the methods above.

Thanks for reading.

He was put on tube feeding, and over time he became depressed, unable to share in something we all take for granted - the joy of eating. He was enjoying his time in the company of others who faced similar challenges, breaking bread (and horrible cafeteria food) with strangers in similar circumstances, who showed him nothing but kindness.

Fast forward to mid-August. He contracted pneumonia, apparently from his own saliva, and was sent back to the hospital. He recovered enough to be returned to the nursing facility, and though that was a welcome reprieve, the sands were clearly shifting against him. He spent another few weeks at the nursing facility, and was sadly transferred back to the hospital 10 days ago for pneumonia yet again.

This time however, it was much more serious. He spent about a week recovering and things seemed to be going just ordinarily. Though, as they were readying to return him to the nursing facility, his condition took a turn for the worse and he was instead transferred to intensive care under intubation, where he has been for the past 2 days. I am told he had such low oxygen saturation as to be deeply troubling, and the decision to intubate was made.

I took a conference call this morning with his care team, including a social worker, palliative care, nursing, neurosurgery, et al - and their conclusion is that I should in fact be preparing to make the hardest decision a child can make with regards to their parent. While things may have appeared more cautiously optimistic a few months ago, a series of aspiration pneumonia incidents along with a noticeable decline in what mental/cognitive abilities he had remaining has lead his medical team to believe this is the beginning of the end.

I spoke to my mother and informed her of the bad news. She was shaken and deeply upset. Even though they separated on the worst possible terms more than 20 years ago, she still cares for him in a meaningful way, and the news shocked her. Any hopes we may have shared vanished in an instant. We cried. We discussed what his desires in this situation might have been, as he never left a living will or any sort of advanced directive, and the conclusion she arrived at was not unexpected but still heartbreaking to hear.

”He probably wouldn’t want to be a vegetable.”

And this is the painful truth I’ve been trying to find, in between balancing my desire to keep him alive, and his need to have a meaningful quality of life. My father probably wouldn’t want to have his suffering prolonged just for the sake of having a pulse, lying motionless in a hospital bed.

Though I very much hate the term “vegetable” when speaking of humans, his condition is in fact vegetative. He doesn’t speak. He doesn’t answer to commands. He cannot move on his own, and cannot care for himself. He can open his eyes and make eye contact, but there’s nothing behind it. It’s a thousand-yard dead stare. Most of his time is spent sleeping, or occasionally groaning. My dad is gone, the man I knew left this earth 9 months ago, and I’ve been left to make decisions in the care of an empty vessel - his earthly body; frail and withering away.

Hours before he was transferred to the ICU, I was able to have a brief video call with him, and I didn’t recognize the man. I recognized his facial features, the deep brown eyes, thick black hair, but he wasn’t there. I cried like an infant for hours after that call, knowing it would be the last time I saw my father alive. The nursing team seemed to think he kept saying the word “beautiful”, though I could barely make out anything beyond an unintelligible moan. I hope they’re right, and that even in the end, my dad thought I was something special.

I wouldn’t wish this on my worst enemy, even though as our president says, “I don’t want the best for them”. I couldn’t begin to inflict this level of emotional and mental torture on another living creature.

So that’s it, my dad is dying, and there’s nothing I can do about it. No amount of hoping for the best, no number of prayers, no GoFundme, nothing. It’s all for not. He’s been given the best possible quality of care for 9 months and unfortunately it did little more than comfort him somewhat, reduce the pain, and keep him clinging to life - just as he was in those first few weeks after the accident.

I hate this. I hate being an adult. Nobody told us as kids that someday, we would be in a position to decide if our parents lived or died. Nobody warned us. Nobody prepared us. And yet, in spite of that, so many of us - myself now included - have had to make that judgement call, to mercifully decide it’s time to let go. I don’t know what else to say or do. I’m not coping well, though in time the pain will fade. I’ll always have memories, some good, some bad, some indifferent - but they will remain. He was by no means a good man, or a perfect one, but he’s the man who gave me life and raised me to be who I am, and I’ll always appreciate him for that.

It’s a good thing I don’t drink, or else this would be a great excuse to go get hammered and avoid my responsibility. I’m thankful I got that out of my system years ago, when I was young and irresponsible.

Thanks for reading. If this touched you in some way, or made you feel, call your parents if they’re still with us - and consider dropping a few dollars in the tip jar. Just click the coffee cup below.

Hi everyone, I have some news I’d like to share with you.

Over the past few months I’ve noticed that people are displeased with Substack and Apple taking a percentage of any subscriptions to Substack publications, and I understand that frustration. You work hard for your money, and you hate seeing chunks of it going to large, already-profitable corporations when you intend it to go directly to small publications, like this one.

On advice of other content creators and readers like you, I’ve decided to expand our options when it comes to monetary contributions to this publication and its esteemed sole writer - me! So, we’ve set up a new tip jar. Please feel free to contribute as little or as much as you find appropriate.

You can find a link to the official Counterspin “Buy me a Coffee” campaign below.

As a thank you, for the first month, any contribution of $5 or more will be celebrated with a joke at the expense of Charlie Kirk.

Please, reach deep, and let’s get those jokes rolling. God knows we need laughter in these dark, tough times.

Yours,

RS

Link to the tip jar: https://buymeacoffee.com/Counterspin

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Hoooooo boy. What a week.

As I’m sure you’re aware by now, on Wednesday, September 10th, 2025, at 12:23pm local time in Orem, Utah, conservative pundit and Trump’s golden boy Charlie Kirk was shot and killed while reciting his favorite lines about mass shootings being a gang violence or transgender issue, but not something we should really worry about.

In the hours following the killing, the terminally online right wing whipped itself into a frenzy, calling for: deportations, civil war, holy war, internment camps, retribution, cancelation, firings, firing squads, public hangings, and so much more - in the name of peace and dialogue, of course.

Why? Because people online dared to laugh, to mock, to show less than their desired amount of solemn condemnation of what happened to their chosen Instagram celebutant.

Many mentally stable geniuses rushed to blame the shooting on: the left, on liberals, on Marxism, on Black people, on transgender people, on homosexuals, on Muslims, on Arabs — but alas, unfortunately none of this panned out to be true.

The shooter, thought now to be 22 year old Washington, Utah resident Tyler Robinson, was turned in to the authorities by his very conservative father following an alleged admission of guilt by Tyler. He is currently under arrest and being processed by the authorities, and faces severe charges.

No motive for the crime has yet been made apparent, though he certainly is the least likely suspect if you listen to right wing groupthink. From photos gleaned via his family’s Facebook accounts, Tyler appears to be the typical All-American Boy Next Door: very familiar with guns, once dressed up in a Donald Trump Halloween costume, polite, mild mannered, family-oriented, and otherwise unremarkable in myriad ways.

And, just like that, once the identity had been revealed, the rabid lynch mob vanished into the ether. No longer was there a call for action and retribution. Suddenly the tone shifted, and the humanizing of the shooter began. A more solemn, pray for him tact formed.

How quickly the tone changed when it was revealed that the shooter wasn’t the straw man the right wing had built — a blue haired transgender Black antifa member — but in fact one of their own. It’s almost as if the facts didn’t confirm their priors, or something. Very touching. Very sweet. How charming.

The Fog of War truly crippled the right wing in the moments after Charlie Kirk’s death. Instead of calls for patience and resolve while police investigated, they chose instead to craft a narrative that suited their political end goals. Instead of calling for calm, they chose the opposite, stirring hatred and division when it mattered most — and in the process, became the very thing they once claimed to abhor.

In the immediate wake of the shooting, people online posted distasteful celebrations, myself included, and the right wing found this to be the turning point on their moral crusade against cancel culture.

No longer would the right wing stand idly by as people said things they found classless and vulgar - no, instead they themselves would jump into the “woke mind virus” skinsuit and begin a jihad, a digital lynch mob, against people who dared to post such crass and deplorable things online.

You can find just a cursory sampling of such events here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

Suddenly, free speech ceased to matter, and “facts don’t care about your feelings” became “but this makes me feel upset, and you can’t say it”. How quickly they eschewed such moralistic beliefs when the shoe was on the other foot. Alas, the right wing tends to skew hypocritical and unaware of the world beyond the end of their own noses.

I probably won’t have more to say on this topic, I just wanted to get it off my chest and be rid of the whole damn situation. In a time when thousands of Palestinians die every week, when school shootings are given second chair to Kirk’s own shooting, I find it morally repugnant and wasteful to spend any more time than is absolutely necessary talking about it.

Kirk famously said that “some deaths were unfortunately worth it to keep the 2nd amendment”. I wonder if that thought occurred to him, that his death might be one of them; or if he felt that it would never happen here, and certainly not to him.

Alas, we’ll never get to debate him on the topic.

— RS

Family

Firstly, thanks to everyone who sent kind words and warm fuzzies over the past few months regarding my dad’s condition.

With regards to him, my father is no longer in such a dire state of health following his accident. He’s conscious, not really coherent yet, but alive and stable, and most importantly recovering; albeit slowly.

I’m very thankful his condition isn’t as serious as it seemed initially, and that he’s in good hands while regaining his faculties. What was once my biggest fear has taken a more cautiously optimistic form. We’re out of the woods, and into the foothills of the mountain. He’s still not 100% but his situation is improving bit by bit, day by day.

Again, thank you to everyone who reached out and kept him in your thoughts. It means a lot to me, and I’m sure it means a lot to him too.

As always, I’ll keep you updated on any changes in his condition as they happen.

Living Quarters

Those familiar with my situation know that my partner Mike and I have been doing the van life thing for several years now, coping as best as we could while living out of a dilapidated old minivan. Thankfully, that’s no longer an issue. Hooray!

This past weekend, we were able to limp the broken piece of shit van to Mike’s coworker’s home, where he kindly set up his large camping trailer for us to use as a domicile for the foreseeable future. While I’m not overjoyed with the location or the price per month, it is very accommodating and has enough space for us to be comfortable without tripping over each other every few minutes.

This has opened up a whole new slate of opportunities for both of us, with Mike now being closer to his place of work and I now having a space to actually use my computer more reliably, on top of the basic amenities in life like a shower, hot food, laundry facilities, and consistent electricity. A huge relief, basically.

Is it glamorous? No, but it’s manageable, and for now it’s better than a 20 year old minivan. A lot better. We no longer have to worry about finding a bathroom, or finding somewhere safe and quiet to park; we don’t have to worry about our home and all of our worldly possessions being towed away at a moment’s notice. We even have a working fridge and microwave of our own!

To those who pitched in to the GoFundme, or just kept in touch during the first few weeks in the year when things looked incredibly bleak, thank you for your kindness and your strength to keep going, and to hold out for something better. We could not have done it without you. We genuinely owe it to you for keeping us above water while the tides were trying to push us under.

This publication

Frankly I’m a little disappointed in myself, having not written anything other than some Notes over the past 4 months. I was hoping to have written on a number of topics, but they fell to the wayside while I worked on more pressing issues, including my father’s health concerns and my own living situation.

Though, to be fair, that’s just excuse making. I could have and should have taken the time to write more, and I regret not doing so. However, I intend to change that in the coming weeks. I’m not sure what topic will provide the muse and spark required to slam out a few dozen paragraphs on topics covered by people far more informed and intelligent than I, but I promise that I intend to take the time and cover something that matters to many of us.

In due time, I suppose.

That’s all for now, I just wanted you all to know that things are getting a little bit better as the days go on, and I’m still here and still jotting down ideas for things to discuss.

Back to regularly scheduled content soon.

— RS

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Dear Reader, what I’ve just witnessed can only be described as “a beating”, in which Zelensky was treated like a yelping bitch.

Today was the much-hyped meeting between US President Donald Trump and term-expired Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskyy. It should have been on pay per view, frankly. It was more entertaining than any boxing match I’ve ever watched.

It ended in much shame for Zelenskyy, who was asked to leave - with no deal signed.

Here’s the highlights:

Beg, Borrow and Beg

(Zelenskyy trying to weasel his way out of a stern finger wagging by Trump)

Normally, Zelenskyy would have had the red carpet treatment and nothing but kid glove care in handling. Today however was a stark change in tone from the prior administration, with Trump berating Zelenskyy as if he were an insolent, insubordinate employee.

The meeting started off friendly with handshakes, but quickly turned into what can only be described as a heated exchange between Zelenskyy and VP JD Vance, with Zelenskyy telling him he doesn’t need to yell and Trump quickly rebuking him, which lead into further arguments.

The overall tone of the US side of the conversation was “the US does far too much and has already done more than enough, and Ukraine would not have survived without US support”. Zelenskyy’s only response was to say “yeah, I heard that from Putin too”, which was just hilarious.

At one point, Trump appeared to become quite angry with Zelenskyy, telling him off.

The exchange was ended and then Zelenskyy was asked to leave.

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The Aftermath

(Oksana Serhiyivna Markarova, Ukrainian Ambassador to the US, literally facepalming)

After the meeting, Zelenskyy hurriedly exited the White House and shambled into a waiting SUV.

Trump, quick to maintain spin on the situation, released the following statement on social media, highlighting the disrespect shown by Zelenskyy and his overall view of the situation:

Trump seems dead set on ending this thing, with or without Zelenskyy’s approval. Zelenskyy seems dead set on dragging it out for as long as possible, no matter the consequences to his country or any other.

No Zelenskyy return date has been set at time of writing, and it seems that he may not be invited again in the future.

We will of course write more as the story unfolds.

RS

Today’s post covers a new topic for this outlet - online survey taking and opinion polling. This may be news to you, but you can in fact get paid to influence public opinion and product development. Who knew?

In this ‘stack we will be covering a few online panels that most anyone can join and make some pocket change just by providing a few minutes of opinions on a wide array of topics.

Preface: This isn’t a sponsored post nor was it implored/paid for by any survey panel or opinion/marketing company. These are just my impressions of a select few platforms available to use. I make no guarantees. Your mileage will vary. I have no favorites but I will highlight the good and bad of each platform as best I can. I’ll also try to give information on reward redemptions so you can get a feel for how many surveys you’ll need to take in order to be given a little treat.

Personal aside: I’ve been using these platforms with success for some time and am only giving my impressions based on my own use and experiences with the platforms. None of the links below are affiliate/tied to my accounts, and will simply drop you at the main sign-up page for each platform (if you’re so interested).

Onward!

YouGov (yougov.com)

YouGov is probably the most widely known of the names we’ll be covering today. Started in 2000 as a UK-based opinion polling house, it has since morphed into a worldwide polling company, hosting its own opinion polls covering a variety of topics from politics to products and services and entertainment properties alike.

This panel is open to anyone over age 18 and sends semi-regular email invitations with survey offers to your email inbox, carrying reward values ranging from 500 points to 2,000+ per survey. Cash out options include a variety of gift cards, virtual Visa cards, and PayPal/Bank transfers.

Other features include a daily poll on hot button topics, a thumbs up/down rating system for brands/public figures/entertainers, and other daily activities (though only the rating system provides any reward metric).

The good: Website is very easy to use on any device including smartphones and tablets; surveys offers very few disqualifications/rejections, payouts are instant/very rapid. Fun to socialize and read comments on hot button topics (Daily Topic).

The bad: Surveys may come infrequently, high point count required for payouts (25,000 for a $15 Visa Gift card, 55,000 for a $50 PayPal transfer, 100,000 for a $100 bank ETF transfer).

Branded Surveys (surveys.gobranded.com)

Branded Surveys was founded in 2012 as a US-based online polling aggregator. This panel offers surveys on-demand from a variety of opinion/marketing companies with point values ranging from 1-100+ per survey.

This panel is open to anyone over age 18 and has a web interface which allows users to select their own polls based on length to complete or reward amount. Identity verification is required in order to receive rewards payouts.

Branded offers some added perks such as a daily poll, tiered weekly bonuses for highly active users, and promotions tied to other products/services such as online casinos and other pay-per apps (though I wouldn’t personally bother with these).

The good: Website is intuitive and clean, offers a sign-up and referral bonus, surveys are frequent and reliable, payouts are very quick (within 1 hour of request). Payouts start at $5 (1 point = 1 US Cent) and come in a variety of methods including PayPal, Bank ETF, gift cards and donations to charitable causes.

The bad: Identity verification can be a little awkward requiring a photo ID. Some surveys will appear to complete normally and pay a reward, only to be deducted from your account later in time for unclear reasons. Some surveys will not be available due to demographic selection or will fail to provide a reward. Customer service is not always helpful but very friendly nonetheless.

Note: PayPal payouts must be linked to the email account which matches the email address used to register your GoBranded account.

SurveyJunkie (app.surveyjunkie.com)

SurveyJunkie is a survey aggregator founded in 2011 by Disqo, a marketing company based in the US. This panel, much like Branded, offers on-demand surveys ranging in point values from 5-100+ per survey, ranging in time from 5 minutes or less to more than one hour.

This panel is open to anyone 18+ and has a simple to use web interface which works well on any device. Surveyjunkie provides surveys from a variety of polling/opinion/marketing firms on a wide array of topics.

Surveyjunkie offers some perks including semi-regular bonus events based on number of surveys taken in a given timeframe. Payouts are in the form of Virtual Visa cards, PayPal transfers, or bank transfers. Some gift cards are also available. Payouts begin at 500 points (1 point = 1 US Cent).

The good: Website is very easy to use, offers a sign-up and referral bonus, payouts are instant, customer service is very helpful and friendly, and reward bonuses are generous. Surveys are frequently refreshed and are available nearly 24/7. Most surveys that fail to start, complete, or disqualify you will still be awarded a small (2-3 US Cents) amount for your time.

The bad: Some surveys will not complete due to demographic selection or other reasons. Sometimes the app will not have surveys available. Identity verification can be a little awkward, requiring a photo ID and face photo in order to receive payouts.

Ipsos iSay (ipsosisay.com)

Ipsos is perhaps the oldest name on this list, having been founded in Paris in 1975 and publicly traded since 1999. This platform offers a small array of self-published on-demand surveys and polls to users 18+.

This platform is simple to use, and offers payouts ranging from $5 up via PayPal, Bank transfers, and Virtual Visa cards.

The good: Very easy to use, payouts are instant, customer service is very helpful and friendly.

The bad: Identity verification can be a little awkward, requiring photo ID and a face photo in order to process reward payouts. Not everyone will qualify to join iSay. Surveys are infrequent and do not always refresh quickly.

Note: PayPal payouts must be linked to the same email address you used to sign up for Ipsos iSay.

HeyPiggy (heypiggy.com)

HeyPiggy is a bit of a mystery. I’m not certain when the company was founded or where it is based.

This platform is open to anyone 18+ and offers on-demand aggregated surveys from a variety of marketing/opinion research firms from around the world with payouts starting at $5 (1 point = 1 US Cent). Survey values range from 10 cents to $5+ per. The site is easy to use, and offers payouts in the form of PayPal, Venmo, Bank ETF, and a variety of gift cards. The website works well across any device.

HeyPiggy offers a sign-up bonus (5% bonus on all surveys for the first 24 hours) and other perks such as a chance to win a mini-Jackpot with each survey taken and other percentage bonuses based on number of surveys taken in a 24 hour period.

The good: Website is intuitive, payouts are quick (within a few hours) and no identity verification is needed beyond verifying your email address and phone number. Surveys are frequently refreshed and some come with high ($5+) values.

The bad: Website can be a little janky sometimes and get caught in a loop of asking for the same demographic information several times over. Not all surveys will complete correctly, though you may sometimes get a small (2-5 US Cents) award for not qualifying/terminating early. Some website translations aren’t the highest quality but can still be understood easily enough.

Now for some final thoughts about online survey taking in general. Think of this like an FAQ.

Is this legit?

In a word: Yes. I can attest personally to having made more than $300 in the past 4 weeks between SurveyJunkie and Branded, with more from HeyPiggy and Ipsos on top. Yougov is more a semi-annual thing, to be fair, due to the infrequency of surveys offered.

Taking surveys consistently does require some effort and time commitment, and is ideal for people with excess free time and a lot to say. If this is something that appeals to you, feel free to check out any of the above named platforms (or suggest more in the comments below, I’m happy to check them out and give them a spin!)

Do I need to fit a certain demographic?

No. You can be anyone from any background and walk of life to participate. You don’t have to have any pre-set politics or purviews, though being a consumer of products and services helps a lot.

Certain demographics will be given preference on some surveys (for eg: homeowners may be given preference in a survey about home remodeling, people with car insurance may be given preference in a survey about car insurers, etc) and some surveys will disqualify you based on that information.

Do these polls do anything? Is my opinion actually being heard?

Perhaps. Polls based on product perception/opinion almost certainly influence companies when making new ones/changing current ones. Public opinion polls on public policy/politics rarely have any impact beyond confirming biases, so your mileage will vary.

Will I have to sit through a lot of ads?

Sometimes. Some surveys are based around your opinion of advertising including video, radio and text/image based ads. You’re free to tell them how you really feel about it, though!

Will I encounter any proprietary information/be required to sign an NDA?

For some surveys, yes. You may be exposed to proprietary information or be asked to sign an NDA. If this is not something you’re interested in or are unable to complete due to pre-standing obligations, just exit the survey and try a different one.

Does this count as taxed income?

No! This is a reward based system, which means it’s a gift; not taxable income. Any money made is not subject to income tax (in the US anyways - this may vary in your country) as such.

Do these surveys ask for PIID (personal information/identity)?

Some do. You may be asked to provide your date of birth, gender/sex, height/weight, sexuality, military service status, marriage/relationship information and things like your zip code, age of your home, age of your car, medical conditions, product usage and so on.

The information collected is used in a variety of ways and usually comes with a data retention disclaimer before/during collection, so you understand how it’s being used, why, and how long it will be retained for. If you aren’t comfortable providing this, just skip the survey and move on to the next one.

Are there any other perks not listed?

Sometimes! Some surveys offer you a chance to see not-yet-released movie trailers, clips, or TV show episodes. Some surveys offer you a chance to see upcoming product/service ideas and the like. Some give you the chance to become a play/product tester. Some are just plain old questionnaires about your favorite hospitals and health insurance companies. It really does vary depending on the platform and survey taken.

Will these advertisers contact me after the survey?

Only if you want them to, and only in specific instances. Some surveys for eg are screeners for additional things, such as video game play testing and application demos. You don’t have to commit to these unless you really wish to. Some of them offer additional cash payouts for your time, so it may be worthwhile to complete offers you find appealing and have the ability to commit to.

Can I lie/speed through surveys just for the cash?

On some platforms, yes. There is very little in the way of demographic/information verification. In one survey you can be a CEO, the next one you can be a nurse practitioner. On others, no. Surveys are quality control checked and you may be removed from the service for providing false answers/filling in surveys with junk information. We suggest you stick to the truth, or at least maintain a consistent consumer profile across surveys just for sake of ease.

Do I need to pay in order to join?

No! None of the platforms I listed require you to pay or spend any money in order to join. You may be offered other extras like bonus points for installing/using other applications/services, but you are by no means required to.

So, that’s roughly all you need to know to get started. Don’t be scared of saying “not interested” or “doesn’t apply”, building out your profile on a platform is an easy way to get surveys that more specifically appeal to you and your habits/preferences.

Never be afraid to skip a survey that’s asking for too much information or is taking too long for a meager payout. And if you run into any problems, reach out to your platform customer support team who may be able to compensate you for any time/rewards you feel you were entitled to.

Happy opining!

RS

(Via Adobe Stock Photos)

Dear reader,

Something has been gnawing at me over the past few days. Something… Painfully obvious. Something that should have been apparent to anyone with any sort of sensory input system.

For all the caterwauling about Trump, the resurgence of fascism, and putting an ugly mask on empire, things are remarkably similar to where they were under Joe Biden. Hardly coming as a surprise to most, as many saw Biden as a continuation of the ugliest sins of the first Trump administration. Aside from a few superficial social issues and media dramatizing, things are about the same as they ever have been.

I’m sure that some of you now need to pick your jaws up off of the floor, this notion putting you into a state of deep shock and surprise. A few of you may even find this to be laughable, I’m sure. For the rest of you, this was likely clear from the first day of Trump’s 2024 campaign. “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss”. Nothing would fundamentally change.

What do I mean by all of this? Let’s take a look at a few specific points, and see how they match up with the Biden administration.

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Russia-Ukraine War

On the Russia-Ukraine war, Trump and Biden are in near lockstep. Sorry, but we’ve been mislead, I’m sorry to say. Though Trump promised countless times to “end the conflict within 24 hours”, it is now hour 96 and the conflict rages on exactly as it has since 2022. What did Trump add to the discourse? What genius stroke of diplomacy did Trump arrive at? How did Trump manage to “appease Putin”? “Do what we say, or face sanctions”. This is, for all intents and purposes, the exact same “stick and stick” approach that Biden (alongside European leadership) tried for 3 years with zero success, backfiring in a number of spectacular ways.

I have no faith that Trump will find movement on this issue as he lacks any credibility in Russian politics, even though many held out hope that he would be meaningfully different; some even deluding themselves into believing Trump was a Russian-controlled Manchurian candidate, someone who would simply roll over and work to please Putin directly. How wrong these lost souls were.

In fact, Trump’s own Treasury Secretary pick Scott Bessent confirmed as much during his Senate confirmation hearings; that he believes harsher sanctions on Russia are the best way to handle the situation - failing to recognize that these tactics failed to produce results over the past 3 years.

We will of course continue to cover this topic as the weeks turn into months, as months turn into years. Will Trump reneg on his campaign promises to stop military and financial aid to Ukraine? Or will he u-turn and follow in the footsteps of his predecessors? Time will tell.

Globalism

For all the hoopla about “muh WEF globohomo” and “America first”, Donald Trump looks set to continue the status quo here as well. Trump just finished giving a speech to the World Economic Forum, in which he cried about Europe not being nicer to us (read: giving us more of their money), and theorized that the Russia-Ukraine war would not have happened under his watch (how he believes this would have been possible is unknown at this time).

Aside from his usual boisterous tone, the premise is the same. ‘America #1, Europe needs to pay more to play more. Russia bad. Mammon good’. This is not meaningfully different from the position Biden held. In fact, aside from tenor, it is remarkably similar.

Tariffs and Trade

On this topic, Biden and Trump are again in near lockstep. Biden spent most of his administration putting tariffs on countries like China, something Trump looks set to continue without change. This protectionism of American industry and corporate hegemony is nothing new, other administrations have tried it with limited success. The only difference here is that Trump wishes to include bordering nations Mexico and Canada in his tariff plans, which could harm the American economy further; as large American corporations outsource considerable labor to these two nations, in order to reduce cost in manufacturing and production of goods.

This new approach could end up having a boomerang effect, where some companies simply reduce supply (or leave America entirely) leaving consumers flat-footed. Where Trump intended to bring manufacturing back to America, he could simply be driving the cost up - or driving companies out.

What’s next

Aside from liberals returning from brunch and putting their pink pussy hats back on, nothing is going to fundamentally change. American empire will continue its slow decline into irrelevance on the world stage; with American industry requiring underhanded tactics like subsidy and economic strong-arming to remain relevant.

The poor and working class will continue to shoulder the decline the most, people’s civil rights will continue to be trampled, hugely profitable multinational corporations will continue to receive untold taxpayer infusions, weapons will be sold, and bombs will be dropped. Women and children will be killed. Fingers will be pointed. Blame will be shirked. Responsibility abandoned. USA, USA, USA!!!

It’s just more of the same, the red white and blue Punch and Judy show will continue on schedule, and that’s all there is to it. Anyone who thought otherwise was deluding themselves.

- RS

(A photo of my father in the hospital, the last photo I’ll ever have of him)

I don’t want to write this. In fact I wish I wasn’t even having to think about any of this right now, but as the only child of my father it’s my responsibility and duty to.

As you may or may not know, on Thursday January 9th 2025, my father was involved in a very serious accident while walking near his home in Pittsburgh, PA. He was struck by a vehicle and was rushed to a nearby hospital in critical condition with severe head trauma, among other injuries. Since then I’ve been struggling to cope with the harsh reality that is my father’s likely outcome.

Today’s post is just me trying to collect my thoughts and understand why awful things happen to good people; why the cruelty and suffering is the point of life, and why the human condition leads us to persevere even in spite of a mountain of troubles, indifference, and callous disregard. It’s just my way of grieving, really, for the man who helped shape me into the man I am today.

On with it.

Over the past 10 days, I have been racked with guilt and depression, feeling like I should have been there for him, that I could have been a better son, that I should be doing more to help him as he withers away in a hospital bed some 2200 miles from where I now live. Obviously none of this helps anyone, but it’s the ex-Catholic in me that comes out in situations such as these. I’m a guilty soul, and I have nobody but myself to blame - even if someone else ought to be shouldering the weight.

Some of you may know that I’ve been stuck in a hole of my own struggles since the start of the year, namely that my house/car decided to pick that time to die and leave my partner and I stranded without shelter or warmth, just as the harshness of winter begins to set in around us. Not great, but we’ve managed worse. We spent a few months living in a tent and a few more months living in an abandoned house with no water, sewage or electricity. Thankfully we pulled through.

The car situation was obviously bad enough, having to manage a severe lack of money and a broken down car that was just barely providing adequate shelter from the elements. Then came the news that Michael, my partner, would be losing his job at Intel due to automation-driven layoffs, not the news we needed but still manageable. (He has since found work elsewhere in a different field.) We might be in a very bad position, but we still have each other, and that’s all that matters. We’ve made it through far worse with less.

Well, fate had one last kick in the teeth for me personally - as mentioned above, my father was struck by a vehicle and was clinging barely to life in a hospital, on the other coast of the North American continent, and had nobody beyond medical personnel at his side to care for him or look after his well-being. A calamity I had no chance of deflecting or minimizing - something I would have to face head-on and work through as best I could.

Initially I was told he needed emergency surgery to combat bleeding and swelling inside of his brain. He had a fractured spine. He was, for all intents and purposes, vegetative and not responsive to the medical professionals caring for him. The surgery was, by all metrics, successful - the bleeding was stymied, and he was critical-but-stable, meaning his condition was still deathly serious but he was no longer in imminent risk of death.

It was, as they say, “wait and see”. So for 10 days I called, day after day, asking for status updates. At first the news was cautiously optimistic. The swelling in his brain had reduced, the bleeding had stopped, he was comatose but had some signs of responsiveness - moving his arms and legs, things people take for granted every day but I counted as a miracle given my father’s uphill battle still ahead of him.

As the days crept into a week, the news began to stagnate. No change, no news is good news, though I was still begging for any improvement. The reality began to creep in - that if my father failed to regain consciousness soon, he may never regain it. Traumatic brain injuries (TBIs) are some of the most difficult injuries to recover from, and it seems my father’s was severe enough to cause great concern for the likely outcome. Palliative care physicians called me, letting me know that my father may require a permanent feeding and breathing tube set, and that he may be comatose for the rest of his life.

I understood then that his prognosis was unlikely to improve significantly, even to a level of basic conscious function. My father is dying from injuries sustained in a pedestrian-car collision, and while I won’t ever write him off and will fight for every possible heroic and medically necessary measure he is entitled to, his chance of recovery is effectively nil.

I began to ruminate in my head, knowing that I never got a chance to say goodbye; that the last time we talked in person back in 2014 was the last time I would ever see him alive. I would never hear his voice again. I would never get to give him one last hug, or to tell him that for all his failings, I turned out okay, and he did the best he could by me.

I’d like to give some backstory to break up the melancholy of this story.

My father, Rick, was born in 1960, one of three kids to a marriage that would fall apart long after he reached adulthood. His mother, my grandmother Nancy, died when I was just reaching my teenage years; yet another victim of substandard nursing home care and indifferent children. My father and I would spend afternoons with her, my father begging her for money she didn’t have and I just trying to appreciate the little time I had with her. I loved her a lot, she was always extremely sweet and kind to me, treating me like a prince when most other people didn’t care at all. Still to this day I remember her calling me her “sweetsie pie”. I’ll go to my grave knowing of all my family, she loved me unconditionally and without hesitation. She also loved her son, no matter his flaws, and would have gladly bled for him if it meant giving him one more day on Earth.

His father, Edward, largely disowned him after he turned 18 when he decided to leave his strict home and join the US Army in an Airborne cook role, though I did know my grandfather for a few years as a child. I only recently found out that he passed away in 2023, having remarried following the divorce of Nancy and lived a full new life of his own, though after I was about 6 we had no real contact. My paternal grandfather never sent Christmas or birthday cards, never called just to say hi, never offered to visit and have lunch - he was in absentia, a man related in name and title only.

My father’s brothers, Ed Jr. and Jeffrey were never involved in my life, and kept no close ties to my father. I think I saw them once each as a child, and they did not keep in contact with our side of the family at all. Ed, from what I can research, continues to live in the Pittsburgh area, and I have no idea if he even knows if his brother is clinging to life in a nearby hospital. I have no means to contact him. His other brother, Jeff, has lived most of his adult life in Florida and I’m sure he has no desire to even know. He is someone else I am unable to contact, not that I’m sure it would help any.

My parents met sometime in the late 1980s in the west Keys of Florida, my mother having moved there after high school and the tragic loss of her own mother and nephew in a house fire in 1986. I was supposedly conceived around this time in 1989, and after they returned back to Pittsburgh I was born. I’m told I was the glue that kept them together, the only bright spot in their lives and the biggest pain in their asses to ever roam the planet.

I have fond memories of my childhood, alongside some really painful ones. Growing up my father struggled with a crack cocaine addiction, the result of his go-go 1980s life I’m sure. It put an impossible strain on not just our family but the relationship between my mother and my father. I remember nights where my mother would call every hotel looking for him, just to beg him to come home. One night would turn into days, wondering if my father was even still alive; only to have him return like nothing had happened and my parents having knock-down, drag-out fights until the cycle would repeat.

During this time my father worked between two different industries; flipping between working in various restaurant kitchens as a cook/chef, and various car garages/dealerships as a mechanic. He was always consistently working, even when the hours sucked and his hands were full of grease and gouges. His addiction didn’t define him, but it didn’t help him any either. It simply put an undue burden on our family, and was largely the undoing of the entire thing.

My family lived with my mother’s father, Carl, from my birth until his death just a few years ago. My parents never really had a house of their own, living their lives on the grace of family and sheer luck. My grandfather always knew my father was a bit of a deadbeat in that regard, too deep into addiction to admit it, too proud to change it, and too callous to admit that it was tearing his family apart. Carl spent many nights comforting my mother and begging her to get rid of him, to never let him back into our lives, to call the police and have him arrested. She was afraid of what would happen to her, to me, to all of us should she pull that trigger.

My father would eventually leave us in 2003, claiming to be going out for cigarettes and coffee, never to return. I know, it’s a bit of a cliche, but it’s what happened - and it’s still something I blame myself for to this day, even if I deserve little to none of the blame. “If only I’d been a more well-behaved child, if only I had better grades, if only I wasn’t a slob, my dad would still be here”; the simple thoughts of a child who just did not know any better.

After he left, I tried to maintain some level of contact with my father. I would see him occasionally, he would stop by the house to drop off a small amount of money or to take me out to lunch at a nearby Burger King just to catch up and prove that he wasn’t a total absentee father. I’m not sure if he was trying to prove it to himself or both of us, but it was a strained relationship to put it mildly. It was still a highlight in my life though, to know that a man who was struggling deeply with his own inner demons would try and make time for me when he could. He was, of course, still my dad, and I still loved him - even through all of the pain of losing him from our family.

I would call him at work occasionally, and once I got my driving license I would visit him at work or his residence just to check in on him. The last time I did this was thanksgiving 2014, when I drove down from Erie PA (where I was living at the time) to have dinner with my mom - I wanted to make sure I visited him as well, though it was just a brief exchange in his driveway. Little did I know this would be the last time I would see him alive.

Alright, enough backstory. You sort of get the picture of the man he was. Back to today.

This morning I got a call from the hospital informing me that my father’s condition is worsening; that he had developed severe pneumonia in his lungs to the point of being a struggle to breathe, causing him to breathe rapidly over the ventilator. His white cell count is extremely high, some brain bleeding had returned along with new swelling. He is, effectively, dying. I was told he is now a “code patient”, meaning they’re watching closely to see if his heart gives out. They also asked if I wanted to use heroic measures, or not. I told them my father would be the type who would want every possibility in fighting for survival, that his condition was seemingly transitory and he had only been out of surgery about 10 days. I want to give him more time. I know the end is fast approaching, but I just don’t want to give up on him before he has a chance, no matter how slim, to wake up.

I was told they understood this, and would call me if anything changed. “Please keep your phone on and near you for the next 24 hours”, was the last thing the doctor told me before hanging up. Ominous words that no child should ever have to hear, but many do every day.

So now I sit, ruminating again in my head, wondering if I could have done anything differently - if I could have been a better, more proactive son; if I could have done more to be there for him before all of this. Wondering if he’ll make it, or if I’ll be planning a funeral instead of just a lawsuit. Wondering if he thought of me in that split second before he hit the ground. Thinking about the terror he must have felt in that moment. Wondering.

I just feel like I’m swimming against an ever-increasing tide, a relentless wall of uncertainty and suffering, and then it hits me. This is the human condition. The pain. The malaise. Grief. The what-if’s. These moments, the lows, are what make the highs that much higher. The joys that much more joyful. The happy memories that much more happy. Sometimes it takes a tragedy for one to understand the way things are. You need a little rain to appreciate the sunshine, a little cold to appreciate the warmth.

I’m by no means an eternal optimist, I typically find myself more on the realist/pessimist side of things on a given topic. In this moment, I’m still just trying to be realistic. I know my dad has basically no chance for survival. That I can do nothing to change it. That no matter how good I was as a child, he would have faced the same situation that cold January morning. My father is going to die, and there’s nothing I can do about it. I can only hold his memory in mind, pray for a miracle, and wait by the phone.

RS

I’m adding a link to our GoFundme in the hopes one of you out there will take pity upon us and drop a few dollars in the hat, or at the very least share it among your friends and family who may be able to contribute.

My partner Michael and I are still waiting to hear back from a homeless shelter and have no other options. The van is still not in a condition that can support us living out of it, and we’re running out of time on our motel trip (we’ll be out of here this coming Friday morning), meaning we’ll be right back where we started, freezing with nowhere to go and no one to rely on but ourselves.

If you can, please consider contributing. It would mean a lot to me as I struggle to get through the worst period of my life.

https://www.gofundme.com/f/michael-and-i-need-help-fixing-our-homeonwheels

(Me on the right, Michael my beloved on the left)

Hello my treasured audience,

This post isn’t in our usual format. We aren’t looking inside of a major corporation or discussing geopolitics today. In this post, I’m seeking support. I really need a hand financially. This past week has been incredibly challenging and financially draining, with more and more bad news continuing to roll in as the days pass.

On New Year’s Day, my van/home decided to pack it in and stop working. As winter sets in to the Portland area, this becomes increasingly dangerous for both myself and my partner who lives with me. So we started a gofundme in order to sustain potential repairs or replacement of our van. We thought this was it, as bad as it could be. After 4 years of living in a minivan, how much worse could it be?

As it were, fate had worse in store for us. Yesterday, Michael lost his job of 3 years at Intel unexpectedly, a casualty of automation in his field. While he has since applied elsewhere and has job prospects, it will be some time until he sees a paycheck, and funds are dwindling fast with bills due - like our phone bill and storage locker, two absolute necessities for us as we continue to face homelessness.

And then, to top it all off, today I was called today by my mother informing me that my father, her ex husband, had been struck by a car walking from his home and was in critical condition at our hometown hospital, some 2200 miles away from my roost in Oregon, back in Pittsburgh.

This news was the breaking point for me. I had been barely holding it together but now I’m inconsolable. I don’t have the funds to be there with him, and I have no chance of saying goodbye to the man who helped raise the man I am today.

My father and I weren’t particularly close in my later years but I still remember my childhood fondly, even if we had our problems- and even as he had his own, struggling most of his adult life with a crack (and later opioids) addiction. Alas, he’s still my dad, and I still care deeply about him and his well being. This news is simply too much to bear. I broke down. For the first time in a long time, I bawled like a baby. Loud, wet public sobs.

I’m at the lowest point of my life and I can’t catch a break. Dear audience, please allow me to lean on you and seek your support to alleviate some of our troubles - even if you can’t solve all of them. I’m publishing a link to the gofundme below, in hopes you might share it on your social feeds, or contribute (if you’re able). If not, I understand. I don’t typically ask my audience for much of anything, but as I’ve learned, people who don’t ask for help don’t get any. So please, consider helping us. We would be forever in your debt.

We hope to publish something more along our typical format soon.

RS

https://www.gofundme.com/f/michael-and-i-need-help-fixing-our-homeonwheels

This is my semi-regularly published Subscribers Only piece for my cherished paying subscribers. This time we’ll be discussing the entertainment industry as a whole, with a focus on video games and at the end, Disney - of course. Buckle up, it’s about to get crazy.

Subtext: They hate you and they want you out of the picture. That is, if you’re a cisgendered heterosexual man and you aren’t firmly on the neoliberal spectrum. If you’re a Kamala-voting genderqueer physically disabled blue/green-haired person, welcome - pull up a chair, stay a while! Just know your place and consume product.

The “Male Gamer gaze”

(Via Sony - of course they couldn’t just give you the $30 stand, or a Pro controller, or a disk drive - not at these prices!)

In September 2024, the western “video game market” state of health is shockingly poor, aside from a very few bright spots. With Microsoft axing endless jobs following underperforming studio offerings, and Sony introducing a $700+ USD “Pro” mid-cycle refresh PS5 gaming console - gaining paltry improvements for the money - met to critical panning, the two biggest publisher-cum-hardware makers are in dire straits.

That’s just one facet of a larger picture, though. Sony for example isn’t just facing cultural rebuke for a marginal improvement in hardware for a price point outside of current PC trends, Sony as a publisher recently stumbled hard and failed to sell their title “Concord”, a 5-v-5 “hero shooter”, always-online “live service” in the vein of Overwatch (ad nauseum others), for $40.

The game was instantly panned as “not worth the money”, with a specific focus on its visually unappealing characters that had no popular IP behind them, and prominently placed neo-pronouns on characters biographies, including for sexless-agender-robots. Yes, you read that right. Even the fucking trashcan-looking robot needed to be festooned with a pronoun tag.

(Via YouTube)

The game was sold on both PlayStation and on PC through Steam, but not that you’d know it given how little pre-launch marketing was done; at best estimations it sold a shockingly few 25,000 copies across both platforms worldwide* (*where PSN is available). The matchmaking servers were unceremoniously shut down after just a Scaramucci, about 10 days, and PlayStation Network after 12 days force-refunded all console owners while remotely deleting the content from their devices, with nary a consenting from the end user (perhaps someone out there really did like it and wanted to keep it for sentimental reasons, who knows).

In early access purgatory for months and in development since roughly 2016 at a cost of (estimated) $200,000,000, the game has been the biggest flop on any medium in modern times and possibly eclipses other catastrophic developer failures in the gaming industry history as a whole. The studio, Firewalk Studios, for its part, tried to stay loyal to their customers before Sony ultimately cut its losses, and pulled the plug.

The team proudly supported their work online and battled “hate and abuse”. In the wake of the recall, the studio has been silent and its artists/developers have been removing the work credit from their Twitter biographies.

At launch, a deep-rooted visually unnerving nature of the character set was panned by denizens on the internet, giving birth to one of the greatest self-owns in human history, though characters alone were not the game’s only problem. Some users reported long wait times for matchmaking, others commented on lackluster gameplay with a dated feel. Some questioned if additional content would even help at all.

Others still would comment to the developers in general, trying to show the team a shred of goodwill in such a trying time.

“A huge labor” to alienate one’s audience in an instant, and become a viral meme at the same time. Some online would protest this shutdown, claiming the “CHUDs can’t have a win” and “lonely losers were just mad they couldn’t jerk off to the characters”. None of this would help, unfortunately. The game would still be memory-holed.

Firewalk Studios at time of writing has yet to comment on any of this with their employees distancing themselves publicly, preferring instead to keep its company mouth shut while packing their collective desks. The studio, based out of Washington state, will not likely be making a game any time soon, if ever again.

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