Here are some FACTS. They have no political affiliation, party lines, gender preferences, agenda, personal angle, Deep State impetus, or attendant conclusions. They are simply a list of easily verifiable FACTS. Any reader can decide what links these FACTS may or may not have to one another, if any, or whether they are simple coincidences. I have not manufactured a single word, although it may sometimes seem to be the case, as many of these FACTS are startling, especially when seen compiled in one document. Like, for instance, the way they used to appear in investigative newspapers, such as the Washington Post, currently owned by successful businessman Jeff Bezos.

1. Jeffrey Epstein died in federal prison while Donald. J Trump was president. Initially, it was said that cameras at the Metropolitan Correctional Center trained on Epstein’s cell were not functioning due to technical error, part of a larger outage not noticed until afterward. This is difficult to explain since surveillance is 24/7 in federal prison. The guards on duty who “fell asleep” and falsified records about performing checks on Epstein’s cell during the night were charged with negligence and sentenced to community service.

2. Bill Barr was Trump’s Attorney General at the time, and therefore responsible for overseeing all federal prisons. After Epstein’s death in 2019, Barr promised a “strenuous and thorough investigation”. The results of the investigation have yet to be released, although Barr has publicly insisted no pertinent evidence was discovered. Bill Barr previously worked for Kirkland & Ellis, the law firm that represented Jeffrey Epstein in 2006.

3. Bill Barr’s father, Donald Barr, was headmaster of The Dalton School from 1964-74. The Dalton School is an elite private institution for the children of the wealthy in Manhattan. Donald Barr personally hired Jeffrey Epstein as a math teacher, despite the fact that Epstein had no teaching credentials, or even a college degree.

4. Donald Barr was in the OSS during WWII, a precursor to the CIA. He also wrote several science fiction novels. One, entitled “Space Relations” is about a planet ruled by oligarchs who engage in child sex slavery. You can buy a copy of “Space Relations” online and read it yourself, simply by clicking a button on the site of Jeff Bezos’ company, Amazon.

5. After being let go for "poor performance," which many who attended the school said primarily meant an intense and inappropriate fixation on certain female students, Jeffrey Epstein began working for Bear Stearns. Bear Stearns collapsed in 2008 due to improprieties related to the housing crash. Jeffrey Epstein parlayed his total lack of money management experience into the position of money manager for several billionaires, including Les Wexner, founder and CEO of L Brands, and Apollo Global Management Chairman Leon Black. Black alone paid Epstein $158 million for “tax and estate planning services”. Black also paid $62.5 million to the U.S. Virgin Islands to be released from potential claims arising from the territory's probe into Epstein's operation. Wexner and Black insist they knew nothing about Epstein’s off-hours sexual criminality. People with a great deal of money often insist things, which on the whole tend to be believed, or at least waved away and forgotten about, in direct proportion to how towering the pile of money is. In January of 2025, Donald J. Trump nominated Ben Black, Leon Black’s son, to serve as CEO of the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation. The announcement came three days after Bloomberg reported Black's interest in purchasing debt tied to Elon Musk’s acquisition of the social media platform X.

6. Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s partner, is the daughter of Robert Maxwell. Robert Maxwell was a billionaire investor, British member of parliament, and recidivist criminal. He was found dead in 1991, floating near his yacht, the Lady Ghislaine, anchored off the Canary Islands. Robert Maxwell’s death was termed an “accident”, although three different pathologists could not agree on the ultimate cause. Factually, he might have simply fallen overboard drunk, or maybe committed suicide when the yacht’s cameras stopped functioning. After Robert Maxwell’s death, it was discovered that he had embezzled hundreds of millions of pounds from UK pension funds. His publishing empire subsequently collapsed, including many newspapers, such as the Daily Mirror, which were then purchased by billionaire Rupert Murdoch. Rupert Murdoch is a longtime advisor of Donald J. Trump, as well as the owner of FOX News. Robert Maxwell was suspected by both British and US intelligence of being an agent for the KGB and/or Mossad. Maxwell’s right-hand man, and editor of the Daily Mirror, was Nicholas Davies, a confirmed ex-Mossad agent.

7. Ghislaine Maxwell got twenty years in prison for crimes involving the seduction of underage women to engage in criminal sexual activity, and conspiracy to entice them to engage in illegal sex acts. Many of these acts took place on the Lolita Express, Jeffrey Epstein’s private plane. Other criminal activity took place at Epstein’s home in Palm Beach, which is minutes away from a property known as "Mar-a-Lago". Donald J. Trump lives at the property known as Mar-a-Lago. At Jeffrey Epstein’s first trial in 2006 for multiple rape, sex trafficking, and soliciting prostitutes, for which he was facing life in prison, his maid, Juan Alessi, testified that, “Mr. Trump was here all the time.”

8. There are many photos and videos of Jeffrey Epstein and Donald J. Trump surveying crowds of women together at Manhattan clubs, laughing and patting each other’s back. At the 2006 trial, Epstein testified that Donald J. Trump was his best friend. Donald J. Trump claims to have "barely known" Jeffrey Epstein. Jeffrey Epstein attended Donald J. Trump’s 1993 wedding to Marla Maples. Factually, most married people can attest that they do not generally invite people they barely know to their weddings.

9. At Ghislaine Maxwell’s trial, Epstein's longtime pilot testified under oath that Trump flew on Epstein's plane “multiple times” in 1993 alone. Donald J. Trump also appears on flight logs in ‘94, ’95, ’96, and ’97. In terms of mathematics, how does one quantify multiple? Donald J. Trump has repeatedly denied ever being on Jeffrey Epstein’s plane. Donald J. Trump was either on the plane, or he was not. A FACTUAL analysis that considers pilot testimony under oath, as well as contemporaneous flight logs, might lead an objective observer to conclude that Donald J. Trump was indeed on the plane a significant if indeterminate number of times, since the testimony and logs are either false, in which case they are not factual, or they are true, in which case someone is lying.

10. In 1993 Donald J. Trump held a small “Calendar Girl” party at Mar-a-Lago with twenty young models, and two invited guests. The guests were businessman George Houraney, and Jeffrey Epstein. Houraney’s girlfriend, Jill Harth, testified in her 1997 suit against Donald J. Trump that he forcibly kissed her, fondled her, and physically restrained her from leaving a bedroom. Donald J. Trump settled the lawsuit with Harth for an undisclosed amount, but did not admit guilt. The alleviation of guilt admission is regularly what the accused pays to settle a lawsuit, but not always. Sometimes, defendants pay off their accusers because they’re tired and it has been a long week, and can we just move on, already?

11. Virginia Giuffre, one of Jeffrey’s Epstein's main accusers, who died by suicide six months ago, although in a different manner than Epstein and Robert Maxwell, said she was recruited into Epstein’s sex-trafficking network at age 17, while working as a pool girl at Mar-a-Lago. She also accused Prince Andrew of repeatedly sexually abusing her that same year, on "dates" arranged by Jeffrey Epstein, an allegation the Prince called “baseless”, although settled with Giuffre out of court for an unknown sum without admitting guilt, which is a thing people sometimes do.

12. Jeffrey Epstein was good friends with Jean-Luc Brunel. Brunel was a French model scout who was awaiting trial on charges that he raped underage girls, when he died by suicide in a Paris jail in 2022. No word so far on camera functionality. Virginia Giuffre was among the women who had accused Brunel of sexual abuse. She said Ghislaine Maxwell sent her to many places to have sex with Brunel. Court records also say that Brunel would exploit underage girls from disadvantaged backgrounds by offering them modelling jobs, but would then bring them to the US and "farm them out" to his friends, especially Jeffrey Epstein. In the same way that friends often share meals, or clothes, or underaged girls, Brunel and Epstein also found a strong, lifelong connection in the sharing of improbable suicides while incarcerated.

13. Donald J. Trump’s name appears circled in Epstein’s “little black book”, which was published by Gawker in 2015 consisting of 1,571 personal contacts, which spanned 97 pages of Epstein associates, including high-powered figures such as Prince Andrew, Bill Clinton, Alan Dershowitz, and former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak. Those men were also among the 38 entries whose names were circled. It is factually unknown why particular men’s names were circled, which could simply have been a random tic of Epstein’s, or plain bad luck for former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak.

14. Jeffrey Epstein’s plane, The Lolita Express, was named after Vladimir Nabokov’s brilliantly disturbing novel about an older man obsessed with a twelve-year old girl, who he proceeds to groom and repeatedly rape, named Lolita.

15. During his 2006 trial, Jeffrey Epstein was offered a sweetheart plea deal of minimum security with work release for thirteen months, instead of LIFE in federal prison, in exchange for pleading guilty to a single count of soliciting prostitution with no age stipulation. The prosecutor who offered that deal was named Alex Acosta. Despite having no experience in labor law, Alex Acosta was later made Labor Secretary under Donald J. Trump from 2017-19. It’s factually possible that this is a coincidence, and Acosta simply seemed to be the best choice, out of every single lawyer in America, to be elevated to a powerful cabinet post.

16. The prosecutor who took over for Alex Acosta in Florida was named Pam Bondi. During her tenure she repeatedly refused to re-open Epstein's case despite a wealth of new evidence. Pam Bondi is now Donald J. Trump’s Attorney General. Pam “The List Is On My Desk/There Is No List” Bondi, according to Donald J. Trump, is “doing a fantastic job". It’s possible this is merely a coincidence, and, like many scenes from ancient Greek dramaturgy, it was destined that Bondi follow in the shoes of the legendary Bill Barr, who is indelibly stained by Jeffrey Epstein, and Bill Barr’s father, who is indelibly stained by Jeffrey Epstein. There are those who insist it's possible to argue with math, but most top poker players advise against it.

17. Epstein’s crimes are usually referred to as criminal sexual misconduct with “underaged women”. This is inaccurate. “Underaged women” are, in fact, a more convenient name for children. Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell were a highly organized and ruthless team of child rapists for hire.

18. It is widely speculated that Jeffrey Epstein’s investment business was actually financed through Ghislaine Maxwell’s father Robert Maxwell, at the behest of Russian and possibly Israeli intelligence, in order to blackmail the very wealthy and powerful political figures who visited Little St. James, part of the Virgin Islands, and also known as “Epstein Island” or “Fuck Island”, which Epstein bought for 8 million dollars because of the view. Donald J. Trump claims to have never been there. Bill Clinton claims to have never been there. Prince Andrew claims to have never been there. Alan Dershowitz claims to have never been there. It’s possible these are all factual statements. Also (see the Steel Dossier), any kompromat Russian intelligence has on Donald J. Trump is widely known to be a Deep State hoax.

19. Epstein’s housekeeper, Juan Alessi, testified that Alan Dershowitz would often visit Epstein’s Florida mansion to get “massages”. Jane Doe #3 in the Ghislaine Maxwell trial said that Epstein “required” her to have sexual relations with Dershowitz on multiple occasions when she was a minor. Alan Dershowitz admitted to receiving massages, but said he “always kept his underwear on”. That is a true statement. Or at least it is true that he said it. As a lawyer, Alan Dershowitz has defended both O.J. Simpson and Donald J. Trump. In a Fox News rant, where Dershowitz is a regular if mildly coherent contributor, he claimed to be a victim of the MeToo movement, and accused “radical feminists” of focusing on Epstein and his associates (and the wearing or not wearing of underwear) while refusing to “condemn Hamas”, who he referred to as a “Palestinian armed group”, that were more deserving of MeToo attention than himself.

20. At Ghislaine Maxwell’s trial, she testified that Melania was introduced to Donald J. Trump on The Lolita Express, a plane he denies ever being on, and that they had sex for the first time on the plane he claims to never have boarded.

21. Melania is an immigrant who came to America on a work visa that expired, and simply never left. Much like many people currently imprisoned at Alligator Alcatraz. Melania’s visa was for work as a “model”, although she does not seem to have done any modeling except for naked photos that can easily be found online. Many in the industry are confused as to how Melania could have been working as a model, since there is no record of her on any product or fashion shoots, except for the previously mentioned nude shots, one of which features her simulating sex with another woman. It’s possible that by “model”, which is often a euphemism for “escort”, Melania came to America to take pictures focusing on the overall concept of Sapphic Beauty, and to promote the rights of lesbians the world over to love the people whom they love, without shame or censure. Or, maybe they’re just jerkoff snaps she was paid $300 cash for by Jean-Luc Brunel.

22. in 2024 Donald J. Trump was unanimously found liable (guilty) by a jury, half of which was selected by his own lawyers using the voir dire process, for sexually assaulting (raping) E. Jean Carroll. It is a fact that, according to New York state law, a finding of this sort must be unanimous, which means that if a single juror felt Donald J. Trump was not guilty, he would have been exonerated.

23. Donald J. Trump has been publicly accused of sexual assault by at least twenty different women, most of whom opened themselves up to endless media attention and abuse by his supporters, although never sued or received a penny for speaking out, simply because of the need to tell their story and support one another. It's possible, in a factual sense, that every single one is a lying gold-digger promised gifts of chocolate and nylons by the Deep State for coming forward.

24. Former-wife Ivana Trump (who died in 2022 after falling down a flight of stairs, which is a thing that can happen if you’re not careful) accused Donald J. Trump of raping her after their divorce, then later recanted. Sometimes people, usually hysterical women, make claims of this sort and then recant. Relationships with exes are, as we all know, fraught. Ivana Trump is buried at the Trump National Golf Club Bedminster in Bedminster, New Jersey. Just off the 17th green. On a subjective basis, many think the 18th green has a better view, but when you've had three wives, all of whom will ultimately need burying, a man is forced to make difficult decisions.

25. Stormy Daniels.

26. Donald J. Trump has an 80% positive poll rating with the Christian Evangelist community.

27. Donald J. Trump is a rapist.

28. Donald J. Trump is a child rapist.

29. Donald J. Trump is a child rapist whose best friend is a dead child rapist.

30. Those are FACTS. Dispute them if you will, but if you voted for Donald J. Trump, either once or twice, that is what you voted for, either once or twice. If you defend him and choose only to see what is convenient to your personal narrative, instead of the plentitude of facts spread out like a royal flush on the green velvet before you, there is not a word for the degree of cowardice you are the apotheosis of.

31. There is no thirty

1. Yeah, I laughed too when I saw these people get nailed by Chris Martin. How hilarious that their true punishment was willingly attending/enduring a Coldplay show, personal and family considerations be damned.

2. I once attended a Coldplay show. To be fair, it was also halftime at Levi's Stadium during that Super Bowl where ninety-six-year-old Payton Manning completed two passes, both ducks, and Denver still crushed Carolina, mainly because Von Miller was the best player in the NFL at the time, and Cam Newton spent four quarters fleeing in terror or flat on his back with Von Miller (football slyly 29% gay) on top of him, inhaling the man's breakfast fumes, probably onions and raw steak.

3. For reasons too boring to explain, here is a short list of the people sitting in the Levi's box (got the tix for free) on either side of me: Pat Riley, Cal Ripken, Condoleeza Rice, Roger Goodell, Adriana Lima (19 foot legs, mini-skirt), Vincent Chase (whatever his real name is), Michael Douglas, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Wiz Khalifa, Jeremy Renner (utterly hammered, took my seat and started talking up Cathy, thought I might have to punch him for a minute there, not kidding), and a large number of other people I vaguely recognized or have subsequently forgotten about.

4. I went to the bathroom, mainly to avoid Coldplay (Weaselly Executive's Hack: total go-to if you don't want to be flashed on the Jumbotron with your illicit squeeze) and relieved myself at the urinal next to Terry Bradshaw, who was talking either to himself or me, still unclear, the Men's was otherwise empty and I had zero clue what he was blathering about. On the way back I stood in line with Michael Irvin, who was pretty hilarious. We shook hands and, with not one iota of exaggeration, the dude's mitts were GARGANTUAN. I have big, square Flintstone hands and his effortlessly wrapped around mine like three times. It actually felt really nice, they were warm and lotioned-but-leathery-soft (football slyly 44% gay) and I could see him having a seriously lucrative post-baller career charging bank for Deep Emotional Palm Therapy, just by enveloping your hand while you quietly wept. It would be a life-changer.

5. On the rare occasions that I have been in tight spaces with celebrities of whatever variety, my working behavioral model is to pretend they don't exist (it's possible, on a quantum level, that they don't.) Some seem to appreciate this angle, while others not so much. Like, I was once at a wedding where the bridesmaid's date was Chris Isaak. He was hugely popular at the time with that warbly-falsetto surfer tune "Wicked Game", and my daughter was maybe two and climbing all over me and it was hot as hell in my suit and Chris and I were standing next to each other talking about the brutal traffic on the way in, and I said, just because I was cranky with the heat, "So what do you do?" and he gave me an evil look and pretty much just walked away. Which even my two-year-old thought was hilarious. Amazingly, later the wedding band called him out, and after demurring for a while (way too long), got up and sang "Wicked Game" while I scrolled through the remaining shrimp/bacon hors d'oeuvres with a yellow toothpick.

6. I once had dinner with Jeff Bezos. That is a true sentence.

7. So, back to the Super Bowl: in this corporate box PACKED TO THE GILLS with celebrities, the only person I really talked to was Wiz, and he was cool, a sweet dude who seemed to appreciate that I neither wanted an autograph or to talk about hip hop. Which is good because I don't particularly enjoy hip hop (except Wu-Tang and Pete Rock. Also Eric B. and Rakim and Death Grips. And Slum Village) and also I don't know a single Wiz Khalifa song.

8. Adriana Lima's legs are 30-feet high, and she could probably end hostilities in Ukraine (brutal illegal invasion by lunatic megalomaniac poisoner who should, right now, be in the same dark site cells in Uganda where they sent Khalid Sheikh Mohammed) simply by walking out onto the battlefield in a modest skirt, thereby forcing all combatants to realize that life is very short and killing one another is a poor way to spend their precious and waning time.

9. So here's what I'm thinking: Sure, it's hard to have sympathy for Astronomer CEO Andy Byron and "Chief People Officer" Kristen Cabot (deserves none just for holding that title alone), and they'll have to live down the shame and embarrassment for the rest of their lives, not to mention the coming wreckage in store for their families, but while no one loves to revel in the schadenfreude of wealthy white tech-bra Coldplay lovers more than me (seriously, if you flashed her picture and offered $1000 to pull her name out of the pure ether, I bet it would have taken me less than five guesses to come up with "Kristen Cabot") what's all this crap about them having to leave their jobs/investigations/legal ramifications?

10. I have no idea what Astronomer even does, and it's too boring to look up, but how is that in any way related to an affair? Investigate what? Okay, they're fucking around. Happens all the time. In companies and out. All across the world, in every country, class, wealth level, ethnicity. Half of all literature and cinema is about illicit love/career-climbing sex, so why is this any different? Because of Coldplay?

11. Which is to say, why do we, as a culture, want to pillory these people on social media for getting unethically busy, but are totally fine giving the Rich White Tech Bros and Hedge Funders and Mortgage Repackagers and Petroleum Executives and Pharmaceutical Murderers and Insurance Murderers a pass for DOING THEIR EVIL JOBS. Why aren't Elon and Peter Theil and Tim Cook and Zuckerberg and tools from Comcast and Chevron and Goldman Sachs and Coinbase up there having tomatoes thrown at them every day, just for being them?

12. What do we talk about when we talk about how wholly and deeply puritanical we still are, as Americans, that we'd rather be screwed by corporate overlords in private than allow them to screw each other in public?
​
Next Week: How, mercifully, through the intervention of small government, PBS is no longer destroying our children.

1. So here's definitive proof that AI will soon be AGI, and at that point will take over the lives of every person on earth, directly through the wired cities of the world (ever see a map of how little of Africa is connected?) and indirectly to everyone else economically and culturally dependent upon those cities.

2. AI is not going to build machines to kill us or pull off dramatic and cinema-worthy stunts. We will not go back in time to stop it, primarily since time is simultaneous and there is no linear narrative to return to, but also because it won't be necessary. AGI is going to take control by allowing us to believe we are still in control, and since control is illusion to begin with, we'll happily swallow the binary worm.

3. Yesterday, on my IG vinyl account Today In Fat Wax, I posted a very rare (and awesome) Gary Wilson record. So rare that they only pressed 1000 of them forty-eight years ago and you generally can't buy one for under the price of a used Tesla, if you can find it at all, and Wilson himself was a performative iconoclast nerd-genius whose music has a VERY niche audience. And then today on Facebook, I was twice solicited like the cheap street prostitute that FB advertising is, by a modern company that makes the exact same sunglasses Wilson is wearing on the cover of the record in 1977. If AI can target and commodify small details inside a much larger and unconnected narrative (the music) and less than twelve hours later be hawking at me dreamlike elements of my subconscious-for-purchase, what manipulative horrors will AGI show me?

4. Hey, did you know that back in 1890's Versailles, courtesans-for-cash (prostitutes) were called "grande horizontales"? Leave it to the French to be simultaneously callous and metaphorically astute.

5. So yeah, we're all being informationally fleeced all the time by FB, IG, and Google for marketing information, as it turns out that The Matrix is really just a giant product fee for targeting useless if not landfill-ready consumer goods to everyman Keanu Reeves. Which means that Laurence Fishburne is the metaphorical shrug of our not giving as shit that we're being intensely, insistently, interrogatorily product-groomed 24-7, as long as social media remains (like music) free.

5. "Free" is an interesting and wholly relative word bizarrely important to us as 'Mericans, while simultaneously having no fixed meaning and therefore just the sort of slick political marketing ruse a sunglasses company might crank their profit margin with. If Spotify has more or less made music (not ad) free while destroying the structure of the industry itself, what does it actually cost? If Jeff Bezos destroyed publishing by undercutting publishers for whom literature was just as important as profit margin, does that mean the huge stacks of remaindered hardbounds on the big tables at Costco are of higher quality?

6. Okay, so the Internet knows every single thing about us: our concerns, our tendencies, our vulnerabilities, our weak spots, what we want, how we spend, the conduits we use to send or store digital currency, the names of our friends, our lack of friends, our fears, and especially what we masturbate to. (I'm just going to go out on a limb here, making myself entirely vulnerable as a matter of full disclosure, by admitting that shirtless Pete Hegseth candids are my "quiet time" jam.)

7. Doesn't it seem clear that to our coming AGI Overlords, guns might as well be Model T Fords for all the use they will provide, when Mass Control is simply a matter of image manipulation and targeted irritation? The rise of MAGA is nothing but a dissertation on using the leverage of conceptual anger in words and images that are inarguable for being, if not dimwittedly vague, deliberately incomprehensible.

8. Like, for instance, pet eating and chem trails and Deep State Machinations, and the hilarious notion that we have a say in what our taxes are spent on, or tariffs not being taxes, or campus protests or wokeness viruses. Politicians have learned that tangible issues that can actually be deconstructed and debated, like, say, the 1970s obsession with unilateral disarmament, are dangerous precisely because intelligent and actionable opinions which lead to solutions might be formed by concretely identifying them. Much easier (and more evil) to dangle the bauble of, say, state-funded trans prison surgery, which might affect a tiny fraction of 1% of the population, if it's even happening at all, and present it as the 2025 Battle of Midway. It's the ideal wedge as it's not possible to hold an intelligent stance upon, regardless of political or personal ideology, since no one really knows that the fuck they're even talking about.

9. Gary Wilson's Sunglasses are our future: a meaningless wink and flash of alley-thigh that distracts enough to be confused about, but has no surface to grip on to, derived from insanely accurate meta-data bored like marrow from our bones that we willingly hand over in exchange for what old college crushes are up to, and how much we still hate our Right Wing cousins.
​
10. Listen to this record, an odd and beautiful little album of arty trinkets from an Art Brut compositional magician with a side of Experimental Onanism. Which probably, like the end of "Mars Attacks", will be the only thing, when cranked aloud on sound systems around the world, able to melt AGI's brains, and once again set us free.

​Or at least free-ish.

​Next week: What We Talk About When We Talk About Edward Furlong

1. Before Tom Cruise turned “Mission Impossible” into an episodic cinema vehicle for ways in which one could jump off of fast or tall things while appearing not to age due to some L. Ron voodoo, the kind only available to the world’s super-rich and various dictators and the upper echelon of Scientology’s Amway theology, Mission Impossible was a killer TV show.

2. It ran from 1966-73. The iconic theme song, written by the mighty and insanely prolific Argentine composer Lalo Schifrin (RIP Lalo, died last week at 93) was THE JAM at the time, even hitting #41 on the charts and spawning a million lesser thefts of exactly the same vein.

3. Martin Landau was a top name back in the days when oddly interesting/conventionally unattractive men over twenty-three could actually land roles based on the notion that their faces leant their characters character, instead of their anodyne youth lending them bland perfection. He played Rollin Hand, one of the best handles in television history. Cinema was not broken by “Jaws” or blockbusters or corporate overlords, it ceased being a reflection of life, and therefore a confection instead of an art form, when it stopped allowing actors to look lived-in. Sorry, there is not a single frame of film as yet released in which I buy, let alone feel, Timothée Chalamet’s pain.

4. The pulsating rhythmic opening of the theme is, in a stroke of pure genius, based on the Morse Code for the letters M and I, or DASH DASH DOT DOT, or five musical beats per measure.

5. Leonard Nimoy, The Doctor Of Spockingtown to you, also a poster boy for casting an interesting visage over tight abs, played the gangly, intense, death-stare Paris. Barbara Bain was Cinnamon Carter, Peter Graves was Jim Phelps, and the unthreatening Greg Morris was Black Tech Guy.

6. But the real point of this NF One L, granting the presumption that any of them have a point, is to talk about the long-deceased Cultural Unity of America.

7. The killer opening sequence, right before cutting to the first Palmolive (“You’re Soaking In It”) commercial, is a work of tight-editing genius made by Desi Arnez (Ricky Ricardo) and Lucille Ball’s Desilu Productions! Each episode began, right from jump, by reminding the audience we were in a COLD WAR which at any time could become NUCLEAR WAR with our lifetime enemies THE RUSSIANS, who were GODLESS MARXISTS and needed to be fought on every possible front, not giving an inch, from Indochina to North Korea to Nicaragua to Cuba and back. So, sort of the opposite of our current President regularly fellating Russia’s current lunatic poisoner/ dictator, and handing him Ukraine on a platter of caviar as a housewarming gift.

8. All of which is to say, the opening had the famous line “Your mission, should you choose to accept it…” which every single kid in America used as a reference all the time. But so did adults. Every teacher trying to relate to bored, disaffected students busted that phrase out before assigning homework. Your dad said it when you hadn’t emptied the garbage yet, and your uncle said it over a Miller Hi Life and laughed because he was asking you to go get him another one. Your boss said it. People on the bus said it. Comedians trod it into the ground on Carson as a punchline. There were T-shirts and lunchboxes and song titles.

9. It was the commonality of a cultural artifact, and as simplistic a shorthand as it was in many ways, it connected us. ALL of us. For reasons too boring to list, our country no longer has anything resembling that commonality of culture, but more importantly, of facts themselves. We now have a Commonality of Fracture. Which, as Roman angels even now scream down to us from Zeus' Elysium, is the sure sign of The Death Of Empire.

10. Because if you’re okay with our leaders yukking it up over Alligator Alcatraz, in front of CAGES FOR HUMANS, and think it’s just fine for masked, heavily armed, unidentified people to grab ANYONE and toss them into an unmarked van and send them to Florida or El Salvador, or the nine grimmer places we haven’t even heard about yet (like Abu Ghraib, leaked pictures of 2025’s Lindsey Englander will definitely come out soon), without due process, which is literally the foundation of this country and everything it purports to stand for, while you simultaneously whinge about your First Amendment whatever whenever it is convenient, you are not only an imbecile, but a traitor. You and I have NOTHING in common, from a television show to a sense of humanity, to even the dream of what America might have been.

11. Because, really, WHO THE FUCK thinks this is all okay?

​So here’s a real Barbershop Styleboard from 1976. Sort of fascinating how every single option looks like the Before not After pic. At first glance you’d figure scissors were nowhere near those craniums as yet, and even then, with a tip, dude’s aspirations were minimal.

1.  The TWINKIE D: Looks exactly like Dan White, who shot Harvey Milk. $6.99

2. CARLOS THE JACKEL’S YOUNGER BROTHER, DANNY JACKEL: “You WILL NOT rise from the beanbag chair until I return.” $22.50

3. The FARROAHK BULSARA: Pretty fantastic in that Mercury Foot-Wings severity sort of way, although would require just the right sexy/androgy Romulan jawline to pull off. $39.99

4. THE DEAD MAN'S HAND: Knows when to hold, zero clue when to fold. $1.99

5. THE FINGERTIP SNIFFER: Frequently sniffs fingertips. $5.00

6. THE BONUS ROUND: Wink Martindale’s forced insincerity neurologically spliced to Mel Kiper Jr.’s affinity for being dead wrong. $6.50

7. THE IRRITATED RHOMBUS: “Yeah, well, you’d be irritated too if you walked around Times Square like a mini, shoebox-headed Czech hitman for an hour.” $19.00

8. THE PHIL SPECTOR: “…And I Swear I Don’t Have A Gun, No, I Don’t Have A Gun…” Free.

9. YOUR COLLEGE ROOMMATE, THE OPEN MIC COMEDIAN: “Hey, are you coming to my open mic on Friday?” $44.75

10. THE TIBETAN MASTIFF: “Yeah, well, I placed second at Westminster for overall poise and balance.” $112.99

11. THE SUSPICIOUSLY LIGHT DIME BAG: “Is it just me, or is that a Double Rainbow?” $3.00

12. THE BILL WYMAN: “Didn’t even get canceled when I married me thirteen-year-old cousin, good job I’m the bloke in the Stones no one can remember the name of, innit?” $22.50

13. THE 1972 JULIAN ASSANGE: “Fine, yes, I am a Russian asset. Okay? Fine.” $66,000 in bitcoin.

14.. THE FRIENDLY DEFLOWERER: “No, the other van. Yeah, the one parked in the corner.” $12.00

15. THE TUCKER CARLSON’S BLOODLINE: “We have known everything about virtually everything for centuries.”
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16.. THE I WILL CUT YOUR BACK: “No, seriously, say that again and I’ll cut your back.” Free.

1. Hey, let’s talk about Karl Marx! Have you ever noticed that anyone Republicans don’t like is instantly a Marxist, while it is also clear that they know nothing at all about what that supposed epithet means, or who Marx was?

2. Marx was initially a natural philosopher who came up with the idea of Dialectical Materialism, which he stole directly from Hegel, and was basically the fairly interesting notion that all knowledge is “material” passed from the subject (you) to the object (everyone else) through dialectics (discussions), and such material was really the only concrete thing of value in an extremely short, transitory, and relatively meaningless existence.

3. Karl Marx was born middle class and moved his family (including their slave/maid) to London, where, when he worked at all, did so as a freelance journalist. The rest of his time was spent drinking, whoring, smoking cigars he couldn’t afford, and fathering children. So, the Great Man Of The Worker really didn’t work much himself, if at all, and most of his labor went into borrowing money from family and friends to cover rent. No, he was not at the heart of the Soviet Empire as is commonly imagined, he was in Covent Garden drinking and flâneur-ing around town, and actually, by the end of his life, like his hero Hegel, disavowed many of his own ideas. So, like the rest of us, a complicated individual.

4. Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote the “Communist Manifesto”, basically a sixty-page screed of outrage about wealth inequity, and the way in which world governments and the wealthy class colluded to fund lavish lifestyles on the backs of expendable workers. The manifesto began as a freelance newspaper piece that got a little out of control, undoubtedly over an endless river of cognac and cigars. Engel’s father owned a factory, and after some working-class dilettantism, Engels took a top management job there, and so was the main source of money for Marx, who less borrowed than sponged it to blow cavalierly in exactly the way of the parasitic leisure class he otherwise so despised.

5. Marxism and Communism are not the same thing. The Soviets and Communism are not the same thing. Marxism is a fairly reasonable response to a world in which most of Europe was fueled by the labor of expendable serfs, while those born with advantage maximized their advantages in a grotesquely immoral way. Marx, for instance, proposed radical leftist things like a ban on child labor, and a maximum number of hours that could be bled from a serf per day. He also proposed a number of unrealistic if not deeply stupid ideas, like Communal Property. As Eric Arthur Blair (George Orwell) cleverly metaphorized for us, we are all in the end animals, and animals cannot be trusted to share. Some will, but others just take, and then the sharers start to think if everyone else is taking, they’d be suckers to keep sharing and so should get in on the game (always too late) and then spend the rest of their lives bitching about how they’re getting shafted (the true fuel of MAGA), although now they’d happily shaft if only given the opportunity. For example: The rise and fall of Soviet Russia.

6. In truth, the Russians were never really Communist, maybe for like a week, but then they started grabbing everything not nailed down, killing everyone surprised that all the high-minded rhetoric was not actionable in practice, and quickly became a form of Kleptocratic Dictatorship with Communist frosting. Which you could argue was still an improvement on the Tsars, an interesting debate that both sides would be doomed to simultaneously win and lose.
7. Marx advocated for a classless society (First Commissar: “The peasants are revolting!” Second Commissar: “Yes, they are.”) But he was what could be generously called idealistic and more realistically labeled deluded, to think you could simply shave a dog and suddenly Poodles would be overjoyed to sniff the asses of Mutts for the greater glory of Canine Progress. The thing is, Poodles are inbred for a reason, and none of us can outrun our genetics, let alone lupine past.

8. The idea that anyone across the political spectrum in contemporary America, from AOC to Bernie to whoever, really believes in or advocates any form of Marxism, is absurd. People also no longer believe in Phrenology or Shock Treatment (well, sort of) or Leeching or Geocentrism or that when sneezing you expel the devil, although for some reason even atheists will still say “Bless You” just like peasants did back in 1522. So when Kristi Noem calls Zohran Mamdani a Marxist, what she’s really saying is that he prefers a version of Democratic Socialism that is to some degree more Democratically Socialist than America already is, and has long been. Or increasingly isn’t. Which is to say, Mamdani wants more money to go to the working class and less to the aristocracy. Which isn’t a specifically Marxist idea. In fact, it’s pretty goddamn Christian. Also, Medicare is Socialist. So is the NFL, if you want to be technical about it.

9. Really the reason that people of today still Fear and Loathe Marxism is its genial veneer of advocating godlessness. Even though we supposedly believe in the separation of church and state, and mainly came from Europe to begin with because Europeans had been slaughtering each other for centuries for murky reasons involving popery, apostates, Calvinism, Protestantism, Oliver Cromwell, the Restoration, Trinitarianism, royal interbreeding, Martin Luther, alchemists, and papal dispensations, Marxism is less a stance against spirituality and more the idea that an equitable governance would be more efficient if stripped of theology of any denomination. And, of course, he was totally right about that. For example: America today.
Bonus 10: Did you know we (The Puritans) were total assholes? In 6th grade we were all told that the Puritans came to America for religious freedom, but in truth they were kicked out of England because everyone hated their hysterical judgment and theological inflexibility and total lack of a sense of humor, so they went to The Netherlands, where even the very flexible and accommodating Dutch finally kicked their un-sexy and self-flagellating asses out. So they were left with no real alternative except a suicide mission/sailing excursion along the lines of Gilligan to investigate (bitterly deny themselves) the delights of The New World. Where, between witch burnings, they all would have died of starvation the first winter if not for the intervention of (Not God) but Tisquantum and the Patuxet, who they viewed as godless savages but still deigned to eat their leftover corn.
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11. No matter what your ultimate opinion is of Daddy, you gotta hand it to him, in this day of Influencers and clicks and self-branding as the only true measure of personal worth: it is inarguable that Karl Marx is the most cited social theorist in human history.

1. Even Schopenhauer (total hero), famous mainly for his brilliant discourses on the absurdist chaos of existence and the comedic theater of finding individual meaning in a collectively meaningless universe, was against animal cruelty. "Compassion for animals is intimately connected with goodness of character, and it may be confidently asserted that he who is cruel to living creatures cannot be a good man."

2. Which is why The Grifter has no pets except for the self-licking Lindsey Graham and that obedient lil’ stoat Marco Rubio, but as a matter of full disclosure I should admit there was a time when I thoroughly enjoyed tucking into plate after plate of pulpo (grilled octopus) tapas with a side of spicy Romesco sauce and a glass of pricey Tempranillo. No longer, my friends, no longer.

3. I haven't ingested octopus in ten years, which was part of a larger epiphany (be less of a tool whenever possible) that became a strict ban particularly difficult to follow while on trips to Italy, Spain, and Portugal, but is difficult no longer. At this point, it would feel both ethically and aesthetically (not to mention legally) more or less akin to mayonnaise-ing up a PoBoy with the tentacles of the pudgy neighbor child. In other words, wrong.
(I don't ingest mayonnaise either.)

4. Because the Octopus is a deeply intelligent, fascinating, clever, empathetic, talented, maze and puzzle solving, intuitive, evidence-hiding, tool-using, and perceptively lovely beast. So, not an appetizer.

5. There is a non-zero chance that Octopii are, in fact, a form of alien life.

6. Octopii have blue blood, three hearts, and one of their nine brains is donut shaped, the other eight mini-brains are called ganglia, and each of their eight arms has its own ganglion, allowing them to act independently of the central Boston Creme unit.

7. Even if you've made it this far, and are a regular reader of NF One L, you have far less impressive neural physiognomy than our octopus friends, and if you are not a regular reader of NF One L, your neural output is too negligible to even discuss.

8. Octopuses have more neurons than any invertebrate and more than most vertebrates, including Pete Hegseth. They also have the ability to recognize faces outside their own species, including human faces, and are known to sometimes take a dislike to certain staff at aquariums (read: incarcerative anachronisms) and shoot water at them every time they pass.

9. Most male octopuses have no external genitalia, instead after copulation leaving part of a sperm-filled arm inside the female, whereupon they swim away and die. In essence, the realization that you no longer serve an identifiable purpose and choose to remove yourself from the populace so that others of your species can live better lives is not only the essence of Schopenhauer, but an exemplary sacrifice. Being slathered in Romesco sauce, conversely, is not an exemplary sacrifice.

10. Octopii are generally gloomy and anti-social, a sure sign of intelligence, but some species do build little underwater communes/cities made from the shells of scallops they have recently fed upon. Which means they recycle, and also scallops, like JD Vance, are stupid, so no one cares. If I could find the right price on a handyman's special with a water view in Octopolis, I would almost certainly move there until the next election.

11. I love the headline below that dubs the female octopus "pesky" for attempting to free herself and live a fulfilling life. How about (I've since re-dubbed her Valerie Solanas) "brave" or "justice-seeking" or "hilarious" or "brilliant"? How about applauding the redress Valerie Solanas seeks by vandalizing the Santa Monica Aquarium Offices? (on Twitter Karoline Leavitt just called Valerie a member of Antifa, and also Marxist).

12. So can I adopt this beautiful young lady, by which I mean set Valerie loose on the local Tesla Dealership, and then return her to the ocean beneath Golden Gate Bridge with a few tears, a fond farewell, and a plate of scallop tapas?
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Any thoughts on how to make this happen are welcome.
Also, don't eat octopus.
Thank you for your attention to this matter.