You are a baron, to the manor born. It’s a pretty cushy gig. Your great-grandfather did most of the heavy lifting, fighting for the guy who subsequently took over the country, and getting control of a nice slice of land for his trouble. It’s not a lot of land, but it’s enough to provide you…

It’s not Hamlet. No matter how many times your junior high school teacher said “oh, it’s actually based on Shakespeare”, it was all a lie. I suspect, in fact, although there is no way Disney was dumb enough to write it down, that this meme was propagated specifically in order to enable entry into the…

Ignore the original story; Hans Christian Andersen tapped into something, but he was chewing raw leaf compared to Disney’s crackpipe to the psyche. We’re focused on the 1989 film version that kicked off the Disney renaissance, wherein the pre-internet-saturation generation was permanently mkultra’d into a new consensus mythos via VHS. What did Hollywood manage to…

So your government is building camps. This happens. It’s actually pretty common, historically, as the logic of detaining prisoners of war (itself a fairly liberal idea, much more enlightened than the traditional massacre or enslavement and more scalable than ransom) was extended to a domestic or pseudo-domestic population of enemies. Everyone likes to focus on…

Have you ever dealt with someone that has a serious drug problem? It is one of the most frustrating experiences you will encounter, because most of the cliches end up being true. Rapidly, the person is subsumed to their addiction until it is very much the drugs talking. This manifests as an instrumental approach to…

It is clear the Biden administration intends to significantly ramp up its attempt to suppress private gun manufacturing and ownership by using the ATF’s regulatory authority to redefine millions of existing parts and weapons as illegal. Their whimsically detailed spreadsheets and twelve-part “what is a gun, anyway” multifactor tests notwithstanding, there is no good faith…

Writing while events lay fresh on the ground has plusses and minuses. On the one hand, before narratives are concretized (increasingly by force and censorship), key little details stick out that will later become retconned as implausible or forbidden to know about. On the other, we of course do not know how things will shake…

One of the paradoxes of political action is that even once you have an office with formal power and a mandate to govern, it is extremely difficult to get people theoretically “on your side” to do something. In fact, it’s often difficult to figure out who precisely your guys are – in a country of…