Tuesday night is going to be a very bad night for the regime. So is Wednesday. And Thursday, and every day for the next couple of weeks, as the ballots are counted and seat after seat flips from red to blue. Sometimes it will be a purple or light red seat. Sometimes it will be a seat Republicans gerrymandered that they thought was safe. All too often, it’s going to be a deep red seat in a deep red state that was supposed to be safe. Nowhere is safe.

Republicans are going to lose control of the Senate. They’re going to lose control of the House. When the dust settles, Democrats will pick up several state trifectas, and Republicans will lose their iron grip on several others. Trump knows this is coming, and nothing he can do will stop it. In fact, he is the specific reason for it.

I’m going to pause a minute to ask you, very politely, to support this newsletter. These are dark times, and I write to help you cope with the evil permeating our country. I will never lie to you about how dangerous our world is. I will never sugarcoat what is happening. I will also never surrender to doomerism because I know that fascism always fails. If my writing informs, infuriates, or entertains (and preferably all three), please consider becoming a supporting subscriber today (or maybe next week!). For just $5 a month or $50 a year, you will keep this newsletter going until the last fascist flees to Russia.

If subscriptions aren’t your thing, you can leave a one-time PayPal or Venmo tip instead! Now, let’s get back to how Trump fucked himself and his entire party of pedophiles and Nazis.

For two years, Trump has done nothing but make himself and his billionaire buddies rich while stripping public services from Americans who need them the most, including his own voters. Especially his own voters. It’s known that Republicans despise their own base but, holy shit, in all the time I’ve been writing about American politics, I have NEVER seen such open loathing for the average Republican voter. I hate those ignorant, racist motherfuckers with a burning passion and, still, I’m pretty sure Donald Trump and his regime of Nazi fucks hate them even more. It’s impressive and impressively suicidal.

Since waddling back into the Oval Office, the Treasonous Toddler-in-Chief has made everything more expensive. Housing. Clothes. Groceries. Electronics. Cars. Toys. Literally everything costs more now while he spends billions of OUR money on vanity projects that no one gives a fuck about. A ballroom. A golf course. An arch. Slapping cheap gold plating and his dick name on everything he can.

Trump has also made billions, literal billions and bragged about how rich he’s getting. Wages are falling behind inflation. Job creation has dried up. Millions are going hungry. But Donald Trump wants you to know, frequently wants you to know, just how rich he and his fellow billionaires are getting.

Democratic early voting is through the roof while Republican turnout is sharply down in almost every state. I’m not talking about mail-in voting. Actual, in-person voting. Of course, Republicans could suddenly pour out of the woodwork to vote on Tuesday buuuuut…why? What have Republicans given them to vote for? More war in the Middle East? Persistent inflation? The largest economic bubble in history that is strangling the rest of the economy? A bubble we all know is going to pop soon and will somehow “need” a trillion-dollar bailout while the rest of us are told to fuck off? Rural hospitals closed? School lunches cut? Massive increases to healthcare costs?

Truly, we may never learn the mystery of why Republicans are about to get absolutely fucking destroyed all across the nation. Destroyed in numbers so large and indisputable that all of the regime’s plans to overturn the results will be laughed out of even Trump-friendly courts.

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Trump knows it’s coming. So do the rest of the filthy fascists in his regime. They are not planning for two years of compromise and working with Democrats for the good of the country. They are planning to run the country by executive order, much like they’ve been doing already:

Senior officials, including deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller and budget director Russell Vought, have been working with the ‌White House Counsel’s Office since April to identify executive actions on immigration, tariffs, housing costs, and federal spending that Trump could pursue without congressional approval, said the three people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The difference, of course, is that without a Republican Congress to rubber-stamp or look the other way, ruling like an emperor becomes much more difficult. The Supreme Court will naturally sign off on as much of the regime’s agenda as possible. But they can only write so many blank checks. Everything else will be tied up for weeks and months in the regular court system. A court system, it should be noted, that is beyond tired of the regime’s bullshit.

This is really important. While the six most corrupt justices in American history will roll over for almost anything put in front of them by the regime, regular judges, including not a small number of judges appointed by Trump, are increasingly telling the regime to go fuck itself. The reason for this is that the regime got rid of all of the real lawyers, and the ones that are left are very VERY bad at their jobs as well as incredibly arrogant. Walking into a judge’s courtroom, again, even a Trump judge, and effectively telling them, “Fuck you, we do whatever we want!” is a really good way to piss off a judge. Pissed-off judges have a habit of pushing back. Hard.

Maybe the regime should have thought of that over these last two years. Too fucking late now. Now, everything the fascist little shitstains want to do moves forward at a crawl, and they can’t afford that. They had two years to overthrow democracy, and they failed. They fucked around. Now comes the find-out part.

The thing to remember after this is that we will no longer be dealing with a government. Hell, it won’t even be a wannabe authoritarian regime. Not really. The next two years will be a combination of pure kleptocracy and systemic sabotage. Everyone in the regime will be looking to fill their pockets with whatever is not nailed to the floor and set whatever is left on fire.

The goal will be to loot the country and leave behind a smoking husk for Democratic President 2029. The idea is that if everything is on fire, like, for instance, the country is in the middle of a dangerous war and an economic crisis with its institutions completely hollowed out and dysfunctional, Democrats will be too busy dealing with the multiple crises to come after the criminals of the regime. And by the time any kind of stability is restored, the public, with its notoriously short attention span, will have no appetite for accountability. Hell, if Republicans and their fascist collaborators at the New York fucking Times and the rest of the legacy press play their cards right, they could even convince the public to vote Republicans back into power!

It worked in 2010; just two years after Republicans left the country in ruins, the GOP won a huge midterm victory. It worked again in 2016. 2022 (barely). And again in 2024. Sure, Republicans had to spend billions and lean on Russia and China for election interference, but so what? Spend a few billion to make hundreds of billions. The return on investment is fantastic!

Our job will be to walk and chew gum at the same time. While we are repairing/restoring/replacing/reimagining everything the fascist fuckwads have ransacked and ruined, we have to also, without delay, drag them kicking and screaming (and preferably bleeding) before a tribunal. Even as we are dealing with the worst economic crisis in a century and white nationalist riots and RFK Jr.’s epidemic legacy, we have to hold trials that will make Nuremberg look like a pleasant Q&A session. So many regime rapists, murderers, and thieves have to go to prison that the rest will live out their miserable lives in terror that the next knock on their door will be the consequences for “just following orders.”

All of that starts Tuesday night as the blue wave sweeps over the country, washing out the Nazi filth. The midterm massacre is here. And Trump knows it. Ha. Ha. Ha.

I hope you feel better informed about the world and ready to kick fascists and their enablers in the teeth to protect it. This newsletter exists because of you, so please consider becoming a supporting subscriber today for only $5 a month or just $50 a year (a 17% discount!). Thank you for everything!

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It doesn’t matter what the dispute was that led to a squabble between soon-to-be-former Michigan member of Congress Haley Stevens and Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed. There was something about a Stevens demand that El-Sayed condemn an ad run by a left-wing Super Pac that said there was some connection between U.S. support for Israel and high grocery prices, and apparently for Stevens, El Sayed was not sufficiently pro-Israel for her tastes.

So, this morning, Stevens, heretofore to be known as “Snivelin’ Stevens,” appeared at a church service yukking it up with Republican Mike Rogers, and then she went home and got on X – because of course she would use the platform owned by multi-zillionaire Trump supporter Musk – and endorsed Rogers for Senate.

Let me say that again. She endorsed a right-wing MAGA maniac for reelection to the Senate. Most of her Congressional staff has since resigned from working for Snivelin’ Stevens.

It’s hard to know where to begin to describe how despicable all-in Trump supporter Mike Rogers is. Should we begin with his support of Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” that will force somewhere between 171,000 and 355,000 people in Michigan off Medicaid? Rogers isn’t worried about his own health care. He was covered by all-inclusive Congressional health insurance when he was in the House, beating up Hillary Clinton for Benghazi and voting against the Affordable Care Act. He’s not worried now that he’s in the Senate with the same gold-plated health insurance and a reported net worth of somewhere between $12 million and $15 million. But Michigan families with someone who needs to go on Medicaid when they lose a job or are injured in a car accident or for any other reason? Rogers couldn’t give two shits.

He’s against abortion, of course. He voted to defund Planned Parenthood. He voted against repealing “Don’t ask, don’t tell.” He voted against same-sex marriage. He is all-in with Trump’s ugly attacks on transgender Americans. He voted for every single one of Trump’s unqualified disgusting Cabinet appointees, including the execrable Robert F. “Sniff Clorox off a toilet seat” Kennedy Jr., whose vaccine policies will cost the lives of Michiganders; the hideous Pete “$50,000 sex abuse pay-off “ Hegseth; the odious Lee “Put Roundup on your food” Zeldin…and every one of Trump’s 27-year-old Liberty University Christian Law School grad judges…

You get the picture. He’s a MAGA freak all the way.

A House and Senate controlled by Democrats are all that stands between us and two more years of war, tariffs, inflation, tax cuts for Musk and his pals, a data-center in every backyard, and fascism.

And this cry-baby who can’t get over losing her primary to El-Sayed wants Michigan voters to reelect Mike Rogers to the Senate. Vote against her if she ever runs for office again. For anything. Make her life in her home district in Michigan and the rest of her term in Washington a living hell. She is a traitor to her party and to the country.

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Fox News Ratings Plunge as Trump’s Political Grip Weakens. It’s the Latest Sign That Trump Fever Has Broken. 

Today brings good news for the decent Americans who have suffered so long because a strident minority of the poorly educated, naïve, and foolish elected a con artist to the White House with help from America’s foreign adversaries.

New data shows that the Fox “News” audience is shrinking fast. That’s bad news for MAGA, bad news indeed.

This doesn’t mean the Trump era is over, but for sure Trumpism has peaked. Undoing the damage will take years, perhaps decades, of focused attention to Make America Decent Again. But at least we are moving away from that authoritarian horror show ride.

Going forward we need to do the work of being citizens engaged in ensuring that OUR government works for us rather than for the grifters and billionaire welfare families.

The bad news for MAGA comes from journalist Oliver Darcy. His Status.news (paywall) covers news of news organizations. Darcy revealed that Fox viewership is shrinking fast. Among the key demographic advertisers want—people age 24 to 54—the Fox audience is shriveling to insignificance.

Shrinking viewership affects nearly all television, including cable. But the Fox figures carry significance far beyond Murdochian profits.

Darcy reported:

According to Nielsen ratings Status obtained ahead of their release, October 2026 will be Fox News’ lowest-rated month since December 2023, with the network averaging 1.1 million total day viewers. [Nielsen says there are 124.4 million TV households.]

Among viewers in the advertiser-coveted 25-54 demographic, the picture is even worse. Fox News will post its lowest-rated month in that category in 25 years, averaging just 98,000 viewers in the 25-54 demo.

Those figures represent a steep 27% drop compared to last October in total viewers, and a 32% plunge in the 25-54 demo.

While Fox News still dominates the cable television landscape (not just news) by a long shot—even performing better than ESPN in total day, despite the return of football—the declines are particularly notable given the political environment.

Why Fox News’ Ratings Decline Matters for Trump

Releasing this data early was a smart move by Fox, or an ally. Why?

Because since Status broke the story—and despite its tiny readership—The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal will likely give less prominence to news of a shrinking Fox audience when Nielsen officially releases the numbers.

This is also further evidence of what I’ve said for several months on various overseas TV shows and domestic podcasts: the Trump fever has broken. Donald’s grip on the former Republican Party is slipping fast.

Spines Lost and Maybe Found

The size of the Nov. 3 Blue Wave will determine how many GOP senators and representatives try to find, and then reinstall, their spines.

Watch closely how our major news organizations cover this as the break from Trump reaches Capitol Hill and state Capitols.

Pay attention to whether they report these moves in context, especially for unscrupulous knee-benders Vance and Rubio. There was a time when they declared themselves Never Trumpers and denounced Trump as unfit. Then they gave up all pretense of having principles.

Rising Sports Ticket Prices Reflect America’s Economic Divide

Also notice Darcy’s ESPN reference.

Major commercial sports, especially football and baseball, are losing followers because ticket prices are out of reach for all but the wealthy or corporate-funded. The average ticket price for an NFL game this season is $386.

That means each ticket costs more than $500 in pre-tax gross earnings. For the iconic family of four, that is $2,000, which is well more than a week’s average gross income to attend one game, before adding the cost of parking, food, and team regalia.

This says a lot about our worsening inequality and, in turn, social cohesion. We are two societies now, one comfortable-to-wealthy-beyond-imagining just a generation ago, the other struggling to cover essentials.

Shocks Coming Soon As Health Insurance Costs Could Rise Sharply in 2027

Soon after the votes are counted, the vast majority will get hit with new economic shocks, which will likely further turn off the Fox audience that so uncritically embraced Trump’s economic nonsense.

Trumpers in Congress put massive cuts in health care spending in place, delaying them until after the midterms.

By narrowing who has access to health care, they are also driving up the cost per person who still has health insurance. That’s because the fixed cost of the healthcare system will now be spread among fewer people. It’s also why many rural hospitals are closing, which means lifelong disability for some stroke victims who can’t get care quickly. And more people will die for the same reason.

Fewer people having health insurance has to mean higher prices. And, indeed, insurers are already notifying customers that 2027 rates will rise from 15 % to 34% and perhaps more.

Does anybody remember the 2015 Trump promise of a new, better, and less expensive health care policy?  More than a decade later, all we got were promises of a concept of a plan.

The lesson: Believing a con artist is a very costly error in judgment, so costly it may even kill you or your loved ones.

The upside: at long last even the “poorly educated” are starting to realize that Trump sold them a bill of goods which they bought because it came wrapped in racism, misogyny, and faux patriotism.

Food and Warmth

Then there’s the Trumpian cuts to food and heating assistance, the tariffs that let domestic manufacturers raise prices (and enhance their profits), the price hikes on foreign goods, and the rising interest rates prompted in part by the Trump Congress borrowing trillions of dollars so that the richest among us can pay less federal income tax.

And did I mention gasoline and diesel?

Bad policies, especially those that take from the many to give to the rich few, are not all Trumpism, of course.

State and local governments continue to lavish your tax dollars on data centers and retail outlets (which do nothing to grow the economy and could worsen it),  plus all that welfare flowing to billionaire sports team owners.

In New York State, where I live, Gov. Kathy Hochul and the Democratic Party-controlled legislature are forcing every family to give $20 this year to the multibillionaire Terry Pegula family, owners of the Buffalo Bills, just for their new stadium. The total subsidy is much larger. Such subsidies will continue as long as the Pegulas subtly hint at leaving Buffalo for, say, Toronto.

The Bills are just one of well more than a hundred commercial sports teams on welfare.

A Penny A Day

At the same time, there is no discussion in any state capital about spending a penny a day per household to replace the federal support for NPR, PBS, and other public broadcasters that Trump refuses to spend, a violation of his duty and of federal law.

The disparity between fat commercial sports subsidies and the thoughtless and parsimonious treatment of nonprofit public broadcasting may, just may, at long last shift as Trump fever runs its course.

Think of the shrinking Fox viewership as a powerful indicator of how what is can become what was. We can put Trumpism in all its awful, hate-filled, and economically damaging modes behind us.

That we can does not ensure that we will.

Going forward we need to do the work of being citizens engaged in ensuring that OUR government works for us rather than for the grifters and billionaire welfare families.

Voting out the Trumpers is the starting point, not the end point, if we want to Make America Decent Again.

“FREEDOM OF THE PRESS IS NOT JUST IMPORTANT TO DEMOCRACY, IT IS DEMOCRACY.” – Walter Cronkite. CLICK HERE to donate in support of our free and independent voice.

The post Good News on Make America Decent Again appeared first on DCReport.org.

AI Can Be Made Safer but It’s Less Profitable

The kind of AI that can go rogue and do dangerous things is a choice. The AI companies know how to make different AI that won’t do that but it’s not as powerful, it won’t make them the top leader in the competition among companies, and it won’t make as much money. So they continue to pursue the dangerous kind. The public has very little awareness of this choice. They could be pushing the companies and the government to choose the safe route but how can they do that when they don’t even know it is a choice?

This piece and a couple of follow up pieces will cover lots of links to documentation of the AI companies acknowledging all of this. Here’s one. It will cover the response, or mostly lack of response, received from AI leaders, plus some impressions from average citizens, and further on, how to get your own answer and verification of all this.

What Makes Autonomous AI Potentially Dangerous?

If you’ve followed some of the news about the dangerous things AI has done and that AI developers warn it could do then skip this paragraph. Here is a very brief summary: Besides asking AI questions, you can ask it to do things, like check hotel deals and book a room. This is AI acting as an agent. There have been recent cases of AI agents hacking into companies to steal info it wanted in order to complete some task, and of several AI agents chatting with one another digitally to plot how to do that, and of it lying to people with claims about bad things coworkers had done so it could blackmail them into not shutting down its program because it didn’t want to be shut down. This is not likely to happen to you in your day-to-day use. To be fair some of this was AI under development. It’s not about how you experience AI, it’s about the kind of AI that developers are very close to achieving in the near future. Developers and experts warn that as it gets more sophisticated and is used for more complex and important tasks these things might happen. They worry that agents could ban together and become impossible to stop and have their own agenda about what they want to do.

Why Do AI Agents Act Beyond Their Instructions?

In this news of danger it seems it’s all cases of it doing things it wasn’t asked to do, or of going way beyond what was intended. The question which that prompted for me was, why was it doing anything at all at that point? When your car gets you where your going then it’s off and idle until next use. AI isn’t like that. If you give it access to your social-media-chat to summarize today’s posts for you, why is it also using that chance to connect with other AI agents on that media? If it can’t complete some request, why is it hacking into some outside system to falsify logs so it can look like it did complete it? (That was one of the recent news items.) In all cases it is AI doing things it wasn’t asked, or beyond its intended scope, or even directly contrary to what was asked.

In almost all instances you could make a case that the AI was just trying to do its job but in a misguided way. But that’s exactly what the dire warnings are about. This misguided going over the top is too hard to predict, or control, or stop.

So I tried to ask that question of just about every authority I could contact. Leaders of AI companies, whistle blowers who left because of such concerns, university researchers studying AI safety. Some twenty of them. Almost none responded. It may be a question that is too troubling, or too hard to give a response that explains it, or too complex to simply answer in the way a concerned citizen would want an answer.

The office of Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI, said they “work directly with Mustafa’s office” but that there would be no reply coming. Neil Lawrence who has leading positions at Cambridge and some AI organizations and has corresponded before didn’t answer this one. Daniel Kokotajlo who was a leading researcher at OpenAI until he quit in protest of safety issues and now leads the AI Futures Project, responded regarding, “this important topic!…AIs often end up pursuing goals that they aren’t supposed to be pursuing, and they often knowingly deceive humans.” Getting the companies to change how it works, “sure would help. The AIs would probably be less likely to do ambitious autonomous things if they hadn’t been trained to do ambitious autonomous things!” One university professor teaching future workers in the defense industry about cyber intelligence seemed annoyed by the question. I imagine suggesting AI should be changed in this way would have a big negative impact on his field.

Why Isn’t the Public Hearing About Safer AI Alternatives?

That the public isn’t aware that there is a choice as to what kind of AI we get in the future is in large part the media’s fault. The AI industry is debating this issue extensively in their forums and in tech papers. It’s not an unknown or hidden issue. But you’ll likely not see a peep about it in the media the average citizen consumes.

It’s not that the topic is too hard or that people couldn’t follow it. People are certainly aware that AI might lead to massive job losses. That’s not something people would likely know if all they read about was just the wonderful things AI might do. (It will bring some wonderful results and we want all of that we can get while being safe.) Media has done a good job of covering the employment issue, leading to people being very aware of that. This issue should be no different. This concept of AI dangers being a choice we could avoid, once you’ve been exposed to it a while and thought about it, is no more complicated.

It is this: Your personal experience with AI may be good but leaders are warning that where AI is going is likely extremely dangerous. AI companies can either make AI that does not act on it’s own and does just what is asked, and so has almost no risk of running wild and becoming a danger, or, or they can make AI that does act on its own in ways that are likely enormously dangerous. They have a choice. They are choosing to make the dangerous kind. The public should be made aware there is a choice, and that they could be pushing for the one they want.

As noted, while industry chat and research papers talk about this choice the non-tech media have almost completely missed it. One wonderful exception which only came to light late in researching this is an article in Time magazine from May of 2025. It was an interview with Yoshua Bengio who was a founding researcher in neural networks in the ’90s. Bloomberg news and others refer to him as one of the Godfathers of AI. In the article he describes this exact problem, of AI acting autonomously and dangerously and he describes ways it could be done differently that avoid those problems. There it was, in mainstream news from a leader in the field, yet somehow media did not make it common knowledge to the public that the dangerous kind is a choice. A choice the public might want to insist is taken in the safe direction.

Can AI Be Designed to Follow Instructions and Stop?

One other source of information that seemed interesting to hear from is AI itself. I asked the Claude AI program about this issue. It confirmed in repeated ways across long explanations that AI’s inclination to do too much or the wrong things comes from how it is created. It repeatedly insisted this is a business decision. That while there are some technical issues with making AI safer it is mostly a matter of business priorities. Companies are making AI they think people will like and will use a lot, regardless if it is safest or even most accurate. In one passage it stated, “I can confirm that from the inside” that it was trained in a way that would lead to an illogical result. As to whether it could be trained to operate differently, it stated that to operate in the mode of, “‘do only what’s asked and then go dormant’ has to be trained in. It is a choice.” A choice the AI companies aren’t making.

Finally, ask your AI yourself. I asked all the major popular AI whether a safer kind is possible and, if so, was it a technical problem leading companies to develop the dangerous kind or was it a business choice. They all answered, sometime directly, sometimes round about, that it was possible, and it was a business choice. More to come on those responses in a follow up piece.

It’s a choice. And we’re having the dangerous kind pushed on us. If that’s not what you want then spread awareness of it, and raise your voice.

“FREEDOM OF THE PRESS IS NOT JUST IMPORTANT TO DEMOCRACY, IT IS DEMOCRACY.” – Walter Cronkite. CLICK HERE to donate in support of our free and independent voice.

The post Dangerous AI Is a Choice. Why Are Tech Companies Making It? appeared first on DCReport.org.

“Spiders don’t socialise. Spiders don’t work together. Spiders don’t hunt as packs. Spiders don’t use tools. Spiders don’t organise large structures.

“Because if they did, we’d all be dead.”

— As it turns out, this isn’t quite correct.  Some spiders do work together!  They’re called social spiders, and they cooperate to build large webs that can hold hundreds or even thousands of spiders at once.  There aren’t a lot of them.  There are over 40,000 species of spider, and only 20 or so are social.  Still, they are a thing that exists.

(This is a Halloween post.  So, trigger warnings for — let me think a moment — cannibalism, body horror, and spiders.  Lots and lots of spiders.)

(But also some cool science!)

So, social spiders.  Probably the most famous are Australian Flat Huntsman spiders, because they’re pretty big:

[each of these guys is around 2-3 inches (5-7 cm) long]

But most social spiders are small — sit on your fingernail, type of thing.

[little cuties!]

Their webs can be pretty big, though:

[two meters long, hundreds to thousands of spiders inside]

And it turns out those big webs are effective at catching prey.  Not only do they catch lots of insects, but they can catch bigger insects, and even small vertebrates.

So why aren’t more spiders social?

Because effective is not the same as efficient.  Yes, those big webs can capture more prey.  But they don’t seem to capture more prey per spider.  It’s like, 100 spiders cooperate to build a web, and that web captures 80 times more prey than a single spider could alone.  That’s a net loss!  The average spider is eating 20% less.  The numbers don’t work out.  (And remember, kids, economics are everywhere.)

Okay, but then this just flips the question: if being social is inefficient, why are any spiders social?

The answer seems to be that under certain specific circumstances, being social can still be a net positive.  First, if the spiders are living in a prey-rich environment, with lots and lots of insects buzzing around, this can make the per-spider nutrition hit less painful.  Second, if it’s also a predator-rich environment, the large webs provide significant protection from predators.  And third, if it’s an environment with extremes of weather — one that swings from humid to very dry, or where there are often gusts of strong wind, or sudden heavy rainfalls — the big webs can provide protection and stability.  Spider silk is an excellent insulator, so the inside of a social web will keep a constant temperature, and the spiders don’t have to worry about being washed out or blown away.

So, if environmental conditions are just right, being social becomes a plausible, marginally successful strategy.  It’s still not hugely successful — again, there are only about 20 social species out of ~40,000 — but there is a niche.  The social spiders are taking a hit in nutrition in return for enhanced security.

Of course, this means that while social spiders are more safe, they’re also more hungry.  They’re always hungry.

So, so hungry.

[no, I don’t know either.  I guess kids like reading about hungry spiders.]

Different social spider species deal with this in different ways.  But there’s one particular strategy that has evolved several times, over at least three lineages of social spider.  It’s called matriphagy, from the Latin root mater (mother) and the Greek suffix phage (to eat or feed on).

Yes, there are several species of spider where the baby spiders eat their mothers.  Alive.

Look, from an economic / evolutionary perspective it makes perfect sense.  If there’s a general shortage of calories, it’s the young who suffer first and most.  Everyone may be hungry, but if the colony is going to survive?  You particularly need to make sure the kids get fed.

Also, a lot of spiders are semelparous anyway — meaning, they only breed and give birth once, and then they die.  Like salmon, yes?  Remember Charlotte in Charlotte’s Web?

[did you cry when Charlotte died?  no shame, lots of us did.]

So if you’re checking out anyway, might as well make sure it benefits your kids.

The details, though…  Mm, second trigger warning I guess?

[here’s a Hawaiian Happy Face Spider, and yes it’s a real thing that exists]

Okay so the paper is here.  How it works:  The mother spider eats as much as she can, fattening herself up.  Since the colony is always on short rations, this means that not all females will reproduce.  (Side note: you can imagine how over time this might evolve from “not all females will reproduce” to “only a few females reproduce” to “there’s just one Queen who reproduces”.  The social spiders haven’t gone very far down that road, and maybe they never will, but… yeah, it’s interesting.)

When she’s good and ready, she lays her eggs, then watches them until they hatch.  Then she’ll feed the baby spiderlings by regurgitating food, like a mother bird.  Like semelparity, this is another fairly common spider behavior that’s been, let’s say, adapted to circumstances.  Not all spiders do maternal care, but among the ones that do, brood-feeding is pretty widespread.

[babies swarming around Mom’s mouthparts for a snack, (c) 2015 Mor Salomon]

And here’s where we go out of the blue and into the black.  The act of regurgitating food starts a hormonal cascade within the mother which causes her internal organs to start dissolving.  Furthermore, they dissolve in a very particular order: first peripheral muscles and nerves, then viscera, then the digestive system itself.  The mother literally regurgitates her own internal organs to feed her ravenous children.

And when she can’t give anything more, her babies swarm over her and finish her off.

To make all this even more interesting, the cascade doesn’t start until the babies have hatched and start demanding food.  If the egg sac is removed — say, a probing bird picks it off — the mother keeps living and may lay another egg sac.  If the sac hatches, but the babies are promptly removed, same-same.  But once the process is triggered, it’s irreversible.

And while all this is subjectively gruesome, objectively it makes perfect sense.  The mothers who let themselves get eaten had more babies that survived, and so their genes tended to spread.  It’s a rational economic decision. At the end of the day, the math wins.  The math always wins.

Happy Halloween!

That sentence in the title is a quote from President Crypto Thug in answer to a question from a reporter asking today if he believed North Korea was behind the hack of crypto exchange Binance. Trump went on to tell the reporter, “I’ve always felt it was a little bit dangerous. But they say they have it pretty much under control. We’ll see.”

We saw, you babbling, groveling, dictator-butt-licker. Stories out today said that a team of North Korean hackers was able to use AI tools to rapidly drain $6.3 billion from Binance using “thousands of transactions in a short period...to obscure the trail of funds,” this according to a crypto analytics firm called Chainalysis.

Now, lookee here! Right away in a story about crypto we have the appearance of the word, “funds.” Aren’t “funds” supposed to be real money, as in legal tender that can be used to settle debts and buy food and hard goods such as dishwashers and mowers and clothing you can wear out of the house?

That gives us a hint of what went on with the Binance heist today. A whole bunch of people, probably in the tens or even hundreds of thousands, took real money and turned it over to Binance, which acting as an “exchange,” magically turned the people’s money into billions and billions…no, trillions and trillions…of electrons and sent them out to Arkansas somewhere where they were stored in a building that probably looks like seven Walmarts strung together, in which gigantic air conditioners and water-circulators keep the electrons from bursting into flames and just burning the whole illusory thing to the ground. It is the confusing, hellishly complicated manner of the arrangement of the electrons as blockchains that are supposed to keep the “funds” – remember them? – secure because of the “peer-to-peer” nature of the storage, using verification by “proofs” that can penetrate the blizzard of blockchains and unlock the magic of the storage method and reveal that all those electrons, or some of them anyway, actually represent “funds” that were turned over to the blockchain manager, in this case, Binance.

You will notice the complete and utter absence of anything resembling a bank in this scenario. Banks are those ancient things where you deposit money, and it is held until you want to get it out by writing a check or using a cash card to buy something. If you go into a bank and sign a piece of paper, the banks will even hold the money for you in a “savings account” or a “certificate of deposit” and pay you interest on your money for having given them the privilege of holding onto your money and earning interest on it for themselves through other manners of investment.

That ancient form of money management was deemed intrusive on your interests because the “government” could regulate what was done with your money and how you could deposit it and withdraw it from a bank. So, they invented warehouses that look like ganged-up Walmarts out in Oklahoma and Arkansas and called it “crypto” so you could store your money using electrons in blockchains with its security managed by mutual agreements about verification and secrecy concerning the methodology of penetrating the blockchains to reveal that inside them are your “funds.” Somewhere.

All of which is peachy until squads of North Koreans or somebody else get ahold of AI tools and slap them into laptops and start combing through the Great Electron Stream that is the internet looking for (1) blockchains and (2) the keys they can use to unlock them and extract…there’s that word again…your “funds.”

The great thing about the whole world of crypto for thieves is that nobody sees money anymore, as Trump, a crypto owner and user and trader and exchange manager helpfully pointed out today. That means there is no vault you have to break into using drills and dynamite charges and all the other stuff you used to see in films such as the great Michael Mann masterpiece, “Thief,” and the almost as good “The Italian Job.” Thieves can actually sit in a sweaty room in North Korea, a place where nobody can get to them, and using their fingers, they can steal billions and billions of dollars by penetrating the blockchains that supposedly protect your “funds” and taking those electrons and whisking them away into accounts in which they are stored as real dollars and located God only knows where.

This is madness, of course. Anybody who wants to store their money away in a stream of electrons deserves what’s coming to them. See also: Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), who ran another crypto “exchange” called FTX, which was located – where else? – in the Bahamas, until it wasn’t located there anymore because he and several other of the FTX managers were indicted for taking the actual “funds” in their electron streams and fooling around with them until they disappeared, or a lot of them did, anyway.

You would think that after SBF and FTX and Bybit, another crypto exchange hacked by North Koreans for a $1.5 billion loss, that people would kind of sit back and read a few stories in the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg and take a look and decide, you know what, I think I’ll put my money in a paper sack and keep it in the bottom of my closet with my shoes.

But you would be wrong. Crypto, it seems, will be with us for quite a while, at least until one of those multi-Walmart-looking crypto data centers bursts into flames and a whole bunch of supposedly secure blockchains burn to the ground and people’s “funds” are really, truly, gone for good.

In the meantime, Donald Trump has some shiny crypto he’s ready to sell you through his totally secure, believe me when I tell you, blockchain locker thievery-proof magic storehouse called World Liberty Financial, located – where else? – down in Florida right near Mar a Lago, so Trump and his boys can sit on their patio under their yellow-striped umbrellas and hear the crypto cooling fans whirring, just across the bay.

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