Patronage, Malice, or Incompetence

You ever notice how paying taxes is like putting gas in a car you’ll never drive? You fill it up, they thank you, and then they drive off to who-knows-where while you’re left standing there like an idiot, waiting for a ride that’ll never come. They’ve got a tank full of your cash, and you’ve…

We Die Young

In Seattle, there was a peculiar thing that happened in the late 80s and early 90s. The weather was always wet, the skies mostly gray, and the streets slicked with rain and possibility, though neither one seemed to go anywhere. And so it was, in the birthplace of grunge—when the amplifiers hummed with distortion and…

Judging At Your Worst

I woke up with the distinct feeling that my skull had shrunk during the night and was now squeezing my brain like a lemon. My throat felt like I’d gargled glass, my nose was clogged like someone had crammed a sponge up there, and the pressure behind my eyes was so intense it felt like…

Crime as a Service (CaaS)

Governments, in their endless discourse on law and order, position crime as an ever-present social ill—an inherent flaw in the human condition, to be tolerated, managed, and occasionally suppressed. This narrative is comforting in its simplicity. It suggests that crime emerges organically from the social fabric, as natural as disease or poverty. But this is…

The Censorship Machine

The state, in its ever-expanding quest for control, has constructed a repressive apparatus that thrives on the unlimited exploitation of taxpayer money. This apparatus is not designed to serve the people, protect their rights, or uphold the law. No, its true purpose is far more sinister: it exists to censor the truth, to silence dissent,…

Institutional Distrust

You know what’s really funny? And by funny, I mean absolutely fucking infuriating. The erosion of trust in our so-called “institutions,” the ones we’re all supposed to blindly trust, like good little citizens. Yeah, that’s right—the government, the TSA, all those folks who are supposed to keep us safe from the big, bad world out…

Norming Mental Illness

There is something profoundly disconcerting about the state of our current culture, and it is this: we seem to have collectively decided that the mentally ill should dictate our cultural norms and political platforms. This is not an idle observation or a mere rhetorical flourish; it is a documented reality, one that ought to give…

A New Golden Age

There was something pitiful in Fukuyama’s vision, a kind of intellectual resignation that only emerges from the deepest well of cultural despair. The Western world, once so confident in its destiny, had by the late 20th century become a wasteland of exhausted ideals. Its great philosophical traditions—rationalism, enlightenment, progress—had all run aground, and what remained…

Now Do Social Media

In the digital age, where the abstract and the tangible blur into one another, the existence of social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok represents not merely a technological advance, but a profound and unsettling transformation in human behavior and consciousness. These platforms, armed with algorithms that dissect and manipulate human desires, have become…

Unburdened By What Has Been

I’ve been hearing some snickering about this “What Can Be, Unburdened By What Has Been” thing. Let’s call it WCBBWHB for short, or not, because that’s just ridiculous. The more I think about it, the more it sounds like the kind of babble you’d hear from someone who’s had a few too many mimosas at…

DEI Utopia

Ladies and gentlemen, let’s talk about DEI, or as I like to call it, the Department of Euphemisms and Insanity. You see, DEI is this wonderful tool we’ve created to ensure we can cram more women into roles where they historically never quite fit—like firefighters. Now, before you get all huffy, let’s get one thing…

Prison Sex

You know what’s really funny? The state. Oh, they’re hilarious. They strut around in their fancy suits, promising to keep us safe, to make our lives better, to uphold justice. But let’s be honest, they’re about as effective as a screen door on a submarine. They can’t fulfill any of their grand promises because, at…