January
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News / political
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1 min read
Access Granted
Read more . . . →One of these doors opens. Take a guess which. A man in a dark suit with a briefcase, walking into an open vault packed with gold bars. Beside him, a voting booth wrapped in chains and padlocked shut. American flag on the booth, VOTE on the side, the whole setup present and accounted for. He does not look at it. He does not need to. The vault was always the real entrance and the booth was always the display model. The chains are not even new. Somebody put them on a while ago and nobody filed a work order to...
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1 min read
A Gift at Thirty Dollars a Barrel
Read more . . . →Trump spent years calling Venezuela a socialist hellhole. Now he’s buying their oil at a discount and calling it a gift. The man who sanctions countries for breakfast cut a deal for 65 billion barrels of crude from the very government he said he’d squeeze until it collapsed. The price: $30 a barrel, less than a third of market value. The catch: his own officials told House Republicans behind closed doors that none of this oil will hit U.S. gas pumps before November 3. Gas is at $4.09 a gallon, up 27% from last year, mostly because his Iran standoff...
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1 min read
Your Feedback Matters
Read more . . . →They installed the marble to let you know they respect the process. A white marble suggestion box in a government lobby, bolted directly on top of an industrial paper shredder. You can see the shreds through the window at the bottom. Someone ordered this, someone installed it, and a third person signed the purchase order for the marble slab with SUGGESTION BOX carved into it in a font that says “your input is valued.” The funnel between box and blades is seamless. No gap, no pause, no human hand between your written thought and confetti. A slip is going in...
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1 min read
Six Hundred Fifty Million and a Ballot
Read more . . . →Corporations have spent $650 million on the 2026 midterms. That is not a typo. It is a 40 percent increase over the 2024 presidential election, which was already obscene. Crypto firms, online gambling companies, and data center operators account for more than half of that surge. They are not donating because they love democracy. They are donating because Congress is about to decide who regulates them, and they would prefer the answer to be nobody. This is how it works now. An industry invents a product, makes billions off it before anyone writes a rule, and then spends a fraction...
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1 min read
Thirty-One Percent and a Rally
Read more . . . →Trump spent the weekend in Georgia and Michigan, stumping for candidates who are trailing by double digits. His approval rating is 31 percent. Democrats lead the generic ballot by twelve points. The plan to fix this is more rallies. Speaker Johnson called the president this week asking for more campaign money. He didn’t ask for a new strategy or a policy adjustment. Just a check. The Republican playbook for saving the House in 2026 is to put the least popular president in modern history on a stage in Perry, Georgia, and hope volume is a substitute for polling. Forty-five percent...
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1 min read
Sixty-Eight Billion and a Three Percent Raise
Read more . . . →Harvard sits on $68 billion. Sixty-eight. Their investments made 27% last year. And they’re in a standoff with 4,000 grad students over a 3% raise. These are the people who actually teach the classes and grade the papers. They want protections for noncitizen workers and an independent process for harassment complaints. Harvard’s counter-offer: no, and by the way, we don’t think your strike is legal. Eighty-eight percent of the union voted to walk out Monday. The endowment report dropped October 15 showing an $11 billion gain in a single year. The strike deadline is October 27. Harvard spent the days...
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1 min read
15 Years of Mylo Xyloto: Still Sucks
Read more . . . →15 years ago today, Coldplay released Mylo Xyloto. It still sucks. The title sounds like what happens when you pass out on your keyboard, which is appropriate because that’s exactly what the music does to people. This was the record where Chris Martin decided stadium pop needed a Rihanna feature and a concept album about a dystopian love story. Nobody asked for either, and everyone got both. They turned “Paradise” into a ringtone that colonized every shopping mall on earth for two straight years. The whole thing reads like George Orwell filtered through a Hallmark card and set to the...
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1 min read
26 Years of Trouble (the Coldplay Kind)
Read more . . . →26 years ago today, Coldplay released “Trouble.” It still sucks. Chris Martin wrote this because he felt guilty about being a jerk to his bandmates. That’s the whole origin story. A man who fronts one of the biggest bands on earth sat at a piano, played four pretty chords, and sang “a spider web is tangled up with me” like he’d just invented metaphor. The rest of us would just apologize and move on. The piano riff is catchy for about twelve seconds. Then the song does absolutely nothing with it. It just sits there, gently trembling, like a golden...
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1 min read
Two Hundred Workers and a Voting Booth
Read more . . . →A clock factory in Michigan closed this month. Nearly two hundred people lost their jobs. One of them told the AP he’s been a Republican his entire adult life and he’s voting straight Democrat in November. Not a polling shift. A guy who got fired because his president started a trade war, walking into a booth with nothing left to lose. Trump promised tariffs would bring manufacturing back. Instead, they closed a plant that was already here. The parts that factory needed got more expensive overnight, the math stopped working, and management shut it down. Two hundred families in Michigan...
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1 min read
Budget Shopping
Read more . . . →Support the troops. Specifically, the troop who sold this bolt. Shopping cart in a military hangar. One bolt inside. $900,000 on the price tag. The bolt is maybe two inches long. The tag is the size of a luggage label. Fighter jets parked behind him like set dressing for a purchase nobody will audit. The man in the suit is pushing the cart with the self-assurance of someone whose expense reports have never once been questioned. Nobody in this building will be asked to justify the number on that tag. The jets cost more than the town they’re supposed to...
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