The true musical voices. The post The guitarist Rick Rubin called the greatest: “He found a new language” first appeared on Far Out Magazine.

How could anyone not have seen the latest sports gambling scandal coming? I mean, the Supreme Court threw open the doors of sports gambling seven years ago, and rushing into that financial Eden are the professional sports leagues themselves — the NBA, MLB, the NFL — all greedy for the lucre gambling would provide. They become official partners of betting conglomerates — DraftKings, FanDuel, et al. — so they can benefit directly from the flood of gambling to follow, and soon, we are blanketed by ads pushing sports betting. Celebrities without number plump for gambling sites — Ben Affleck, Jon Hamm, Kevin Hart, Jamie Foxx, et al. Why, the First Family of Football, the Mannings — even Archie and Cooper — are prostrating before the gods of Caesars Entertainment. Huge betting salons are built next door to sports venues, with some even inside the walls. Sports networks devote hours to oddsmakers and gambling savants — they have their own shows. Even the successor to the great Rush Limbaugh radio show — the Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show — features a weekly segment called Clay’s NFL PrizePicks, in which cohost Travis urges particular bets on his listeners. All of it pushes one message: Bet on sports, bet every day, bet before the sporting event, bet during the sporting event. All of it pushes one message: Bet on sports, bet every day, bet before the sporting event, bet during the sporting event. And bet on every possible little thing. Bet on who will win and who will lose, sure, but also bet on whether player X will make his next three-point attempt in an NBA game, on whether player Y will gain 55 yards or more in an NFL game, on whether player Z will strike out next time up in an MLB game. And do it from your phone while sitting in the stands watching the game you’re betting on. (RELATED: Danger Signs for Sports Gambling) Everywhere you look in sports media are betting odds, the money line, the over and under, prop bets, the point spread. You can’t get away from it. (RELATED: Sports Gambling Gone Wild) So much money is changing hands so rapidly, with so many moving parts in the gambling business, and players are staring point-blank at so much temptation to screw up on purpose, that some are submitting to that temptation and reaping big hauls of illicit cash for themselves or their buddies, or pro gamblers they’re in hock with. No, you didn’t have to be Nostradamus to see this big gambling scandal coming down the pike. Here’s what went down last week: The FBI arrested 34 people in a wide-ranging conspiracy scandal. Among the 34 were three well-known NBA personalities — a current player, a head coach, and an ex-player and ex-assistant coach. The current player, Terry Rozier of the Miami Heat, is accused of tipping off confederates that he would pull himself out of a game early, feigning injury. This allowed his partners to place “under” bets on his performance. They did so to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars. The coach, Chauncey Billups, was principally arrested for participating in fixed high-stakes poker games that involved mafia names we haven’t heard for a while — as in Genovese, Gambino, Bonanno, and Lucchese. But he may also be “Co-Conspirator 8” in the other FBI case, who, for a relatively meaningless game in March 2023, told a friend that his team, the Portland Trailblazers, would be “tanking” the game, to better their odds in the next season’s draft. His co-defendants dumped $100,000 on the Trailblazers’ opponent, the Chicago Bulls. Damon Jones, the ex-player and ex-coach, was arrested for involvement with Billups in the illegal poker games, but is also accused of telling co-defendants a certain Los Angeles Lakers star was injured prior to that star’s placement on the official injury report for a certain 2023 game. He told them to bet on the Lakers’ opponent. The injured star was most likely LeBron James. And this is only the most recent case. In another high-profile NBA corruption story, Jontay Porter, of the Toronto Raptors, was banned for life last year for pulling a stunt similar to Rozier’s. He told a pal he would be leaving a game early, due to illness, and the pal bet big on the “under” on Porter’s personal statistics. Porter also bet on 13 NBA games, using another’s betting account, and bet parlays that had his own team losing. Gambling scandals hit baseball last summer as well. Two players from the Cleveland Guardians baseball team were suspended for allegedly engaging in funny stuff with first pitches. You can bet on whether a pitcher’s first pitch upon entering a game is a ball, a strike, or is put in play. Luis Ortiz and Emmanuel Clase, the latter one of the best closers in the game, were placed on “nondisciplinary paid leave” as the league looks into suspicious betting activity related to their play. A few of their first pitches upon entry into games were “juuuuust a bit outside,” as Bob Uecker would say. Which might have been fine, except that big money came pouring in late on those first pitches being called balls. They remain suspended as the MLB continues its investigation. In the NFL, at least 13 players have been suspended for gambling violations. And colleges are awash in gambling scandals, touching coaches or athletes at Temple, Alabama, Iowa, Iowa State, LSU, and Notre Dame. Naturally, in the wake of the FBI revelations, the gambling apologists are out in full throat defending their industry. The most common defense is that the legalization of gambling makes the detection of corruption easier. Regulators and sports leagues can monitor betting activity and blow the whistle on unusual betting behavior. This was impossible in the unregulated gambling world. This argument may be partially valid, but the volume of money and bets is so great — and growing so fast — that authorities cannot hope to catch most, and certainly not all, of the shenanigans. This scandal has damaged other favored arguments for gambling, however. One is that athletes today make so much money as to indemnify themselves from temptation. Athletes making millions have no motivation to throw a game, or shave points, or fudge performance in any way. However, the jocks in the FBI case are worth millions. Rozier brings home over $25 million per season. This hasn’t stopped media celebrities from their sometimes stupid takes. The stupidest came from Stephen A. Smith. The ESPN gasbag went full TDA — the NBA gambling scandal is about Donald Trump, he said. The crux of this current scandal is this: Gambling is a vice. The industry can call it gaming and dress it in a three-piece suit and stick it in a top-floor corner office, but it’s still a vice. It always has been and always will be. It is an enterprise where people are trying to make money for doing nothing. Undesirables and ne’er-do-wells will always hover about its fringes waiting to get their fingers in the game. And more gaming scandals are as inevitable as the current one. It’s the tip of the iceberg, FBI director Kash Patel said. Tom Raabe is a writer and editor living in Arizona. He has published a novel, Call of the Prophet, which, he says, is “religious humor with a punch.” It is available on Amazon. READ MORE from Tom Raabe: Reduce the Importance of the Foot in Football Democrats’ ‘Trans’ Intransigence Religious Liberty Cases Return to Supreme Court

It began with a leak — and with it, a warning. In a few short weeks, the personal data of more than a thousand federal officials from DHS, DOJ, FBI, and U.S. intelligence services appeared on encrypted forums used by cybercriminals and foreign operatives. The exposure, first verified by 404 Media, revealed a coordinated campaign against America’s security agencies. It coincided with an intensifying global conversation about cyber resilience and institutional fragility. This isn’t theoretical. It’s now. The United States is confronting a new kind of national security risk — one that bypasses firewalls and firepower alike. Names, addresses, phone numbers, even family details — all published in Telegram channels frequented by hackers, hostile regimes, and political extremists. The group behind the release, a loose collective calling itself “the Com,” mocked U.S. authorities as it published the files. No classified system was breached. The leak came from America’s soft underbelly: its contractors, cloud providers, and commercial data brokers. It exposed not secrets, but stewards. The exposure of federal personnel is no longer an act of protest; it’s an act of coercion. The timing could not be more telling. Days before DHS condemned this wave of doxxing, the Justice Department announced the arrest of an illegal immigrant in Texas who offered $10,000 on TikTok to anyone willing to murder ICE agents. The overlap between radicalization, data exposure, and physical threat is complete. The wall between online incitement and real-world violence has vanished. (RELATED: Meet the Criminals Anti-ICE Protesters Are Fighting to Shield) Almost simultaneously, DHS disclosed that cartels in Mexico were offering bounties for information on ICE and CBP officers operating in Chicago, a disturbing transnational link between organized crime and activist data exploitation. Personal data has become a currency of intimidation, and the market is global. (RELATED: The Human Ledger: How Cartels Reduce Migrant Women to Line Items of Profit) What might once have been dismissed as fringe activism has evolved into a tool of strategic disruption. The exposure of federal personnel is no longer an act of protest; it’s an act of coercion. The architecture of vulnerability is now international, and adversaries are patient. These campaigns are conducted through the dual-use infrastructure of the modern web: built by American companies, powered by cloud stacks, and governed by a legal framework that still treats free expression and national defense as unrelated concerns. Each leak flows through engagement algorithms, commercial data brokers, and biometric search engines that provide adversaries with a near-total map of America’s enforcement footprint. Tech platforms treat these exposures as content. Intelligence services treat them as reconnaissance. (RELATED: The Four Rings of Terror — How Violence Targets Conservative America) The ecosystem of exposure is vast. Misconfigured cloud vendors. Unsanctioned contractors. AI facial recognition models trained on billions of public images. In several confirmed cases, ICE officers were identified from protest footage, cross-referenced through facial search engines, and linked to home addresses purchased from data brokers. This is not accidental exposure; it’s precision targeting achieved without a single exploit. (RELATED: DOJ Files Charges Against Antifa) Hack-and-leak operations once belonged to state intelligence agencies. Today, they’re hybridized. Iranian operatives indicted in 2023 for election interference combined phishing and document dumps to shape narratives. Russian and Chinese cyber units continue to stockpile personnel data, not to exploit it now, but to weaponize it later. The goal isn’t secrets. It’s leverage. When federal agents can be named, traced, and shamed, hesitation replaces deterrence. (RELATED: DOJ Cracking Down on CCP Espionage) Domestically, the pattern repeats. In Los Angeles, activists live-streamed themselves following an ICE officer home. In Chicago, a local official helped run a Facebook group that tracked immigration agents until the Justice Department intervened. Such acts, local in execution and global in implication, are studied by foreign analysts as blueprints for hybrid warfare. They reveal not dissent, but weakness. (RELATED: Newsom’s Search for the Secret Police) This shift is now officially recognized. On Oct. 9, 2025, the Department of Homeland Security issued a public condemnation of what it called a “dangerous escalation” in the doxxing of federal officers. DHS Secretary Kristi Noem stated: “Threats to our personnel are threats to national security.” It was not the language of workplace safety, but of state defense. The adversary had found an open-source route into America’s security apparatus — not through classified systems, but through the data exhaust of the digital age. (RELATED: Abusing Border Patrol Agents: Echoes of Vietnam) The infrastructure enabling this sits largely beyond U.S. jurisdiction. Telegram is opaque by design. PimEyes, the facial search engine implicated in several doxxing cases, operates abroad and answers to no American regulator. The average activist or foreign proxy now wields more open-source reconnaissance power than Cold War intelligence officers once did. A single search can unmask a federal agent; a single upload can follow them for life. (RELATED: The Geography of Defiance) Abroad, the pattern holds. In Northern Ireland, a massive police data leak exposed nearly every officer’s name, prompting relocations and resignations. In Israel, Iranian-linked hackers released private records and photographs of Mossad personnel. Across Europe, judges and counterintelligence officers have been publicly identified by extremist groups. Each example reinforces the same point: when anonymity erodes, deterrence fails. Yet Washington lags behind its allies. There is no national mechanism to remove federal personnel data from commercial aggregators, no cohesive strategy for securing contractor databases, and no unified doctrine that treats the weaponization of identity as a core threat. In this vacuum, adversaries need not hack anything. They can simply collect, correlate, and wait. DHS reports a sharp rise in harassment of officers. Security briefings now include “digital hygiene” once reserved for covert agents. Recruits are warned that anonymity can no longer be assumed. Veterans quietly ask whether their families can still be safe. These are not abstract fears — they are operational realities. To treat doxxing as mere online cruelty is to misunderstand its purpose. It is a calibrated instrument of pressure. Each exposure slows an operation. Each hesitation weakens deterrence. Foreign powers need not infiltrate our agencies when exposure alone can paralyze them. Defending America’s security workforce now requires more than cybersecurity. It requires counterintelligence at the level of human identity. The U.S. must move from reactive mitigation to preemptive control — limiting commercial access to federal data, criminalizing the deliberate exposure of security personnel, and compelling platforms to treat doxxing not as speech, but as sabotage. National security begins where digital privacy ends. Doxxing is not the conclusion of an attack. It is the opening act. The names circulating on activist channels today may appear in coercion campaigns tomorrow. If the United States cannot protect the operational silence of those who protect it, its next great breach may not involve stolen files, but something subtler: a nation made transparent to its enemies. “Secrecy is not the opposite of democracy,” the piece might well conclude. “It is what keeps democracy alive.” READ MORE from Kevin Cohen: How Cuba Is Becoming Beijing’s Caribbean Outpost Germany Revoked a Terror Supporter’s Citizenship. Why Can’t America? Poland’s Fusion of Hard Borders and Human Duty

On Halloween, young people in Europe now dress up as zombies too. Imagine how our streets have changed — I can hardly tell the difference from any other day. There are guys with blank eyes scaring passersby, another with a dagger through his chest, a couple of girls hiding under veils dressed as black widows, and a bunch of bloody, screaming drunks. As I said, just another ordinary day, thanks to the EU’s immigration policy. Shop windows are filled with tombs, images of hell, and grinning demons, which seems to me a fairly accurate reflection of our postmodern society. Shop windows are filled with tombs, images of hell, and grinning demons, which seems to me a fairly accurate reflection of our postmodern society. Children go trick-or-treating nonstop, much like the government does when it comes to collecting your endless taxes. Everything feels familiar. The common thread in everything we do these days is fear, and I don’t notice anything different about this day compared to any other day in 2025. We’ve survived a pandemic, the climate hysteria of environmentalists, jihadist terrorism, and our own governments. We know fear better than anyone. A few years ago, a song by my friend Santi, from the band Los Limones, sang that science is advancing, “every day we’re on the verge of achieving another invention,” and yet he confessed in the next verse: “If I’m honest, it’s just as cold / and I’m just as scared / as when life was explained with stories.” I don’t know if technology is making us freer, or if this is what progress was supposed to be, but it’s impossible not to shudder every time humanoid robots appear on the news, conversing with their unpleasantly human-like faces. They’re machines that will eventually devour us, and for my part, I’m ready to defend myself the moment I cross paths with one on the street. I’m a born joker, and I’ve been told that humanoid robots get really funny if you pour a glass of water down their neck. It’s nothing personal, just business, WALL-E. There’s no way to oppose the demonic acculturation of Halloween. In theory, it arrived in Europe as a cute anecdote from the commercial tradition of the United States, but once here, the anti-Christian ideological masses went even further, trying to reinstate the original Samhain, the Celtic festival marking the end of summer and the beginning of winter. The Celts believed that on that night, the worlds of the living and the dead merged, and that spirits could cross over into the human plane. That’s why they lit bonfires and wore masks or costumes: to scare off evil spirits or confuse them. Terrified of nonexistent gods, the Celts lit sacred bonfires, left out food to appease the wrath of ancestors and wandering spirits, and the Druids performed divination rituals. What is rarely told is that during Samhain, the Celts offered sacrifices to the gods — both animal and human. Reclaiming Samhain is a bit like throwing a party to celebrate Cain’s murder of Abel, or the start of World War II, or to honor the crimes of the Assyrian kings. Let us recall the poetic delicacy of their campaign diaries: “I flayed as many nobles as had rebelled against me and draped their skins over the wall of the city. Their corpses I hung on stakes around the city.” Some time ago, I found a practical guide for good Christians on Halloween. It may not be very orthodox, but I find it useful. As a good Christian, I plan to go out and toast with friends on All Saints’ Day, Nov. 1, and return on Nov. 2, perhaps looking worse than those dressed as zombies. To preserve the Christian meaning of All Souls’ Day, every time I encounter a zombie wandering tormented through the streets, I think of the souls in Purgatory and offer a prayer to the Lord for their eternal rest. I’d rather spare myself all this homage to the sordid, the ugly, and the atrocious, but since that’s impossible, at least let those pale idiots, with dark circles under their eyes and blood on their bodies, serve the purpose of reminding me that it’s time to pray for those we love so dearly and who are already on their way to eternity. Happy All Saints’ Day to everyone. Blessed be the name of God. Endless rage at the modern age. READ MORE from Itxu Díaz: Where Do Babies Really Come From? France Was Once a Prosperous, Wealthy, and Safe Place A Brief World History of Conversation

by Joseph P. Farrell, Giza Death Star: If you’re a regular reader here you’ll have noticed that I’ve refrained from much public commentary on the sad assassination of Mr. Charlie Kirk last month during his visit to a Utah college campus. My reasons for doing so, or rather, not doing so, were basically two-fold. Firstly, […]

by Mish Shedlock, Mish Talk: Two days ago, I asked Google AI a simple math question that it blew. Google now answers the exact same question correctly. I was stunned to find people defending a blatant math error by Google. It has since rectified its error. Playing Around with Google’s AI Shows Serious Flaws On […]

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