On Friday, Elon Musk became the first trillionaire in human history. SpaceX—the company that was supposed to fail, the rockets that were supposed to explode and stay exploded, the vision that was supposed to be the grandiose fantasy of a man who’d gotten lucky selling PayPal—pulled off the largest IPO in history, raising $75 billion and pushing Musk’s net worth north of $1.1 trillion.

The champagne hadn’t even been poured before Elizabeth Warren had her hand out.

“The typical American household would have to work more than 11 MILLION years to make Elon Musk’s level of wealth,” Pocahontas declared. “We need a wealth tax.” In peak irony, she posted this on X. The platform owned by the man she is attacking. Using infrastructure he built. To demand his money.

Bernie Sanders, who owns three homes including a lakefront vacation cabin in Vermont (purchased a decade ago for $575K and almost certainly worth more than a million today), declared the whole thing “grossly immoral.” Maine Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner—yes, the guy with the Nazi tattoo—announced his intention to make sure Musk would be “the last” trillionaire. Because nothing says champion of the working class like promising to prevent the next SpaceX from existing.

Never mind that Musk has deployed Starlink terminals to hurricane, wildfire, and active war zones, often before anyone worked out who was footing the bill. Never mind the $100 million XPRIZE for carbon capture, the filtration systems he funded in Flint's lead-poisoned schools, the $50 million donation to St. Jude’s, or the disaster relief after every major superstorm nobody remembers because it might make him look good. Forget that he built a school for his kids because he thought American education was a disgrace and then opened it to children around the world. The man is “grossly immoral” for accumulating wealth despite having spent a meaningful chunk of it on other people—quietly, consistently, and without a Senate press release. Whatever you say, Senator.

The argument isn’t about wealth. It’s about whose wealth. Nobody said a word when Taylor Swift became a billionaire or demanded she convert her net worth into community gardens, bike lanes, and emotional-support peacocks. George Clooney sold his tequila company for $1 billion and got a profile in a glossy magazine. Hollywood celebrities with multiple climate-unfriendly private jets and football-field-size yachts are celebrated as liberal icons. Bill Gates (net worth $107.7 billion) is literally, relentlessly, enthusiastically trying to depopulate the planet and progressives name their buildings after him and put him on the cover of Time magazine. But a man—a Trump supporter, no less—who built reusable rockets, revolutionized electric vehicles, connected remote villages to the internet via satellite, and created hundreds of thousands of jobs becomes a trillionaire and we need an emergency congressional hearing.

But… but… a trillion dollars could fund Medicaid for a decade! A trillion dollars could provide free school lunches for 100 million kids for 20 years! A trillion dollars could house the entire U.S. homeless population (and you’d still have most of it left!). A trillion dollars could make college tuition free, repair every pothole in the country, and build a national grid that doesn’t melt when a squirrel sneezes. A trillion dollars could apparently solve every problem in America except our chronic inability to MOOB [mind our own business].

The question isn’t whether someone else’s money could help people. Of course it could. The question is why your money gets to be yours while someone else’s money is a community resource awaiting redistribution.

Here’s a fun game: take Warren’s “11 million years” logic and apply it downward. The typical Guatemalan family would have to work more than 400 years to afford Warren’s $4 million Cambridge Victorian. A subsistence farmer in Bangladesh could feed his family for a week on the $7 Americans spend on a single Starbucks latte. A market vendor in Haiti would have to work actual decades to buy a $60,000 SUV—assuming he put every penny toward the vehicle. The arithmetic of inequality is infinite—it just stops wherever the person doing the math happens to be standing.

If you’re wondering when “success” becomes “excess,” Warren has an answer: $50 million. That’s where her proposed wealth tax begins. It’s a remarkably safe and convenient place to draw the moral line when your own net worth is estimated at a mere $10 million.

The other thing worth addressing is the Scrooge McDuck characterization—the idea that Musk is sitting in a vault somewhere doing backstrokes through a trillion dollars in gold coins. He isn’t. His wealth is ownership of productive companies that millions of people voluntarily use every day. It’s not a checking account. SpaceX’s market capitalization currently stands at over $2 trillion. Musk owns roughly 40% of it. If he tried to “give it away” or liquidate it to fund Medicaid, he’d have to sell his stake—which would crash the stock, destroy enormous amounts of value, and leave everyone poorer. It’s a little like telling someone their house “could fund their retirement” while ignoring the part where they’re still living in it.

The other piece that Warren and Sanders routinely forget to mention is that this IPO minted 4,400 millionaires overnight—engineers, technicians, welders, and cafeteria workers who took a bet on a crazy rocket company and stayed. Four hundred of them woke up worth more than $100 million. The story isn’t just “Elon gets richer.” It’s “thousands of ordinary people who believed in something impossible got rewarded for being right.” Capitalism did that. Not a wealth tax. Not a Senate subcommittee. Not Bernie Sanders from the front porch of his lakefront cabin.

Reasonable people can disagree about wealth taxes, inequality, and moral obligation all day long. They’re legitimate debates that have been happening since ancient Chinese philosophers were writing about them on bamboo strips. But there’s something telling about the fact that the left’s immediate response to the first trillionaire in human history—a man who left South Africa as a teenager, was relentlessly bullied as a child, slept on office floors while building companies, nearly went bankrupt in 2008, and kept going anyway—was to start dividing up his money before the opening bell closed.

Elon gave us a free speech platform. Liberals use it to trash him. It’s the most American thing since paying rent to the government on a house you already bought.

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For lucky readers who avoid all lamestream media and are blissfully unaware, last year, 17-year-old Karmelo Anthony fatally stabbed fellow teenager Austin Metcalf during a confrontation at a Texas track meet. Anthony is Black. Metcalf was white. You can guess where this is going.

Anthony claimed self-defense. Metcalf’s family—and dozens of witnesses—called Anthony the instigator. What followed was less a criminal case than a full-contact national psychosis involving cable news panels, social media prosecutors, racial narratives, competing fundraisers, and approximately 47 million people who somehow knew exactly what happened despite possessing none of the relevant information.

This week, after hearing the evidence, listening to the witnesses, and deliberating for several hours, a jury convicted Anthony of murder and sentenced him to 35 years in prison.

The internet, meanwhile, reached its verdict sometime around lunch the day the story broke. Within hours, everyone had chosen a team.

There was Team Self-Defense. Team Murder. Team Race Explains Everything. Team Race Is Irrelevant. Team the Media Is Manipulating the Facts. Team the Other Team Is Hiding the Truth. And, because this is 2026, Team GoFundMe. Actually, scratch that. There were multiple GoFundMe teams. Even the fundraising became a proxy war, with people debating donations, legal fees, representation, relocation expenses, and what financial support supposedly reveals about guilt, innocence, and societal decay in general.

One side—which included an outraged Cardi B—insisted the outcome would have been completely different if the races had been reversed. The other argued that race was being used to obscure the facts. Some saw a frightened teenager defending himself. Others saw a teenager who brought a knife to a school event and used it. Was the jury representative enough? Why was the jury suddenly the story? Every question immediately generated two competing answers, each delivered with near-religious conviction by people whose legal training consisted primarily of watching a few seasons of Law & Order.

At some point, the entire tragedy started to feel less like a criminal case and more like a football game where half the stadium is wearing one color and the other half is wearing another, except instead of arguing about penalties, people were arguing about race, fairness, identity politics, privilege, accountability, and every other cultural fault line we seem incapable of discussing without teeth coming out.

Here’s the part that doesn’t fit neatly into either team’s narrative: when I typed just Karmelo Anthony into X after the verdict, my feed wasn’t filled with white conservatives celebrating the conviction. It was filled—and I’m talking overwhelmingly—with Black users saying race had nothing to do with it. Like her. And her. And him. And him and him and him and him and him and him and him and him.

Black users calling Anthony a killer. Refusing to be “bullied into supporting a cold-blooded killer simply because we share skin color.” Insisting that the people making the murder about race in the first place are the actual racists and condemning them for celebrating the death of a white kid. Calling the “anti-white-attack-trend-in-the-name-of-Karmelo-Anthony (yes, it’s a thing) “sick”. Calling for justice for Austin Metcalf. In other words, the actual conversation was far more complicated than the version being peddled by the professional outrage merchants, who always seem eager to sort 330 million Americans into two tidy little newsprint-colored camps and call it analysis.

(Of course, there was also Jasmine Crockett, who looked especially pretty while pointing out that the knife that was used to kill Metcalf was small and that Anthony only stabbed him the one (fatal) time! This is an actual congresswoman. Lord have mercy on us all.)

The prosecution didn’t have to prove Anthony stabbed Metcalf—Anthony admitted it. Witnesses confirmed it. Four Black witnesses testified that Anthony was the aggressor, directly contradicting his self-defense claims. The real question was whether a push during a brief argument justified pulling a knife and driving it into someone’s chest. The jury concluded it did not.

Nevertheless, long before a single witness testified, millions of Americans had already decided the case from the comfort of their couch, phone, toilet, or wherever constitutional scholars gather these days. And the truly remarkable part is that the majority of them managed to maintain unshakable certainty after ignoring most of the trial. The jury deliberated for a few hours. Social media has been deliberating for more than a year. The official verdict, when it arrived, changed literally nobody’s mind.

People who believed Anthony was a cold-blooded killer before the trial believed the exact same thing afterward. People who believed he acted in self-defense before the trial believed he acted in self-defense afterward. People who thought race was the central issue were still positive race was the central issue. People who thought race was a distraction were still convinced race was a distraction.

It’s almost enough to make you wonder why we bother spending millions of dollars on courtrooms when everyone already has a fully operational legal system in their pocket. Because the modern American justice process increasingly looks something like this:

• Breaking news.

• A handful of facts.

• An avalanche of certainty.

• Months of tribal warfare.

• A trial.

• A verdict.

• Millions of people discovering that none of the evidence changed their opinion.

We’ve seen this before—George Floyd, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Kyle Rittenhouse, Ahmaud Arbery. With each new tragedy, the online trial was louder, faster, and more definitive than the real one. This isn’t just about one case. It’s about what happens when the public’s legal system is built on clips, captions, and outrage cycles that never end. The courtroom becomes a formality, and the real trial is the one that lives forever online.

Within a day of the conviction, Anthony had already filed an appeal. He now claims he’s a “penniless, destitute, and indigent person, too poor to employ counsel to represent me on the appeal,” despite crowdfunding more than $625,000 prior to trial. His supporters will continue to support him. His critics will continue to criticize him. And the two sides will spend the rest of eternity arguing whether he was a victim or a killer.

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Defenders of that “process” are singularly focused on the counting—the painstaking care they’re taking not to miss a single ballot, the diligence of the poll workers, the “security” of the machines—as if they’re explaining how a Swiss watch works to a colony of goldfish. It would be like a bank showing you a slow-motion, high-definition replay of how perfectly they stacked the counterfeit bills they just handed you.

Because “look how transparent the counting is!” is the ultimate shell game. They’re desperate to keep the focus on the tabulation because they have no defense for what’s actually being tabulated.

You can have the most perfectly-calibrated, high-tech, blockchain-verified counting machine in the history of the world, but if the ballots you’re feeding into it were harvested from a port-a-potty in Venice Beach or purchased from a guy who pays a crew to drive around Skid Row with a van full of dollar bills and crack pipes, the “transparency” of the count is irrelevant. It’s just transparently processing garbage.

The media’s response to the backlash has been entirely predictable. MSNBC’s Chris Hayes assured viewers that counting ballots in glass rooms is proof positive that nothing fraudulent could possibly be occurring—as if the walls are the issue and not the piles of questionably-sourced envelopes inside them. CNN explained patiently that late ballots favor Democrats largely because Trump turned Republicans against voting by mail. Which is a real phenomenon worth acknowledging—and also completely beside the point. The question was never whether Democratic ballots arrive late. The question is whether all of those mail-in ballots represent actual eligible voters casting actual legal votes.

BUTCHER: This meat is only four dollars a pound!
YOU: What is it?
BUTCHER: It’s meat!
YOU: I mean, where is it from?
BUTCHER: From this very secure, climate-controlled display case!
YOU: Can you at least tell me what sort of animal it is?
BUTCHER: It’s an animal that costs four dollars a pound! Jeez, what’s with the third degree?

And here’s where California’s “nothing to see here” argument starts to decompose. The Golden State allows voter registration with a gym membership card. A utility bill. A prescription bottle. A Blockbuster card (probably). Documents that would not get you onto an airplane or into a casino or authorize you to drive a car, open a bank account, or check into a hotel. When the DOJ asked to audit the voter rolls—to simply verify that the people on them are real, eligible, and alive—California refused, citing privacy laws. Apparently the state that knows precisely when you turn onto a toll road, the date of your last COVID booster, and exactly how many ounces of water your showerhead dispenses has finally found a category of information too sensitive to verify.

Meanwhile, we have dogs and 126-year-olds casting ballots. We have people convicted of—not just charged with—paying homeless people to vote with fake addresses. Bill Essayli, first assistant U.S. Attorney for D.C., is publicly asking for similar evidence of fraud—and the media is reacting like a blackjack dealer who just got asked to show the deck. “There are rules!” “This is sowing distrust!” “Who does that?” (That’s a direct quote.)

And every time someone raises a question about any of this, the response is the same: But January 6th!

“Just five years after the violent Capitol insurrection, MAGA is pushing another equal parts deranged and idiotic election conspiracy theory,” Hayes scoffed.

“Trump has made election denial a central part of his political movement,” The Guardian explained before invoking—naturally—”the insurrection.”

“More than five years after his supporters, fueled by lies about a stolen election, stormed the Capitol to stop the transfer of power… he can sow substantial chaos [in California] simply by trying to convince voters that the results were fraudulent,” The New York Times blustered.

The not-at-all-subtle message: asking questions about election integrity is dangerous rhetoric. Dangerous rhetoric leads to violence. Therefore questions are violence. If that logic sounds familiar, it should—it’s the same framework they used to shut down curiosity about COVID lockdowns, vaccine safety, and Hunter Biden’s laptop. The implication is hard to avoid: the approved narrative is fragile, and the only way to protect it is to make inquiry itself the crime.

Here’s what nobody in the mainstream press seems curious about: Nithya Raman lost in her own district. The candidate who supposedly surged past Pratt on a wave of late mail-in ballots couldn’t carry the neighborhood where people actually know her. She had effectively conceded the race. And yet somehow the ballots kept coming, and somehow they kept breaking her way, and somehow the media finds the suggestion that this warrants scrutiny to be self-evidently deranged.

Former Mighty Ducks actor (and apparent mogul*) Brock Pierce is so confident the fraud is there that he’s willing to hand over a million dollars to anyone who can prove it. His Cure the Vote initiative is offering the reward for credible, verifiable evidence of election misconduct—not from MAGA Twitter, but from election workers, government employees, contractors, and whistleblowers. Not a single legacy media outlet felt that was worthy of coverage because, apparently, Cure the Vote doesn’t have glass walls. (I’m speculating.)

And then there’s Gavin Newsom, who—when asked about the possibility of ending up with two Republican candidates for governor and no Democrats—said:

“We all have agencies. We can shape the future. I don’t anticipate this being the case, but there is a ‘break the glass scenario.’ There are many people who have a deep understanding of what it would look like if Democrats were locked out, and we’re going to do everything to make sure that doesn’t happen. I’ll leave it at that.”

He actually said that. The governor of California said he has a break the glass scenario for when Democrats get shut out of elections. Yes, he was talking about the other highly contentious race where two popular Republicans were running, but the message is clear: California has a contingency plan for undesirable election outcomes. Nobody in the press asked him what that meant. Nobody followed up.

So basically California’s got glass walls to ensure election integrity and a governor with a hammer. What could possibly go wrong?

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If he weren’t busy being President of the United States, Donald Trump could be hosting a hit streaming show called Extreme Makeover: D.C. Edition. First it was the Rose Garden. Next came the Kennedy Center. After that, the golden ballroom. Oh, and the reflecting pool. It seems the man has never met a national landmark he didn’t want to give a little Botox to. This week, the press pool insists, he apparently set his sights on the mother of all monuments.

“THE STATUE OF LIBERTY HAS BEEN A TOTAL DISASTER FOR YEARS,” POTUS wrote on Truth Social. “Nobody wants to say it, but I will. Tremendous maintenance costs, terrible harbor views, and frankly, the torch is VERY outdated. After speaking with many of the best people, I have decided that it may be time for a BEAUTIFUL replacement. Bigger. Stronger. More luxurious. People are saying it could be the greatest statue ever built. They’re calling it ‘the Statue of Luxury.’ The Radical Left is already melting down. They said I couldn’t build a ballroom. Now they say I can’t do this. WRONG! Nobody loves liberty more than me. Nobody has done more for liberty than me. STAY TUNED!!!”

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Instead, we got a software update.

This week, security researchers discovered that Meta has been quietly shipping facial recognition code to millions of smartphones since January—buried inside the Meta AI app that pairs with its Ray-Ban and Oakley smart glasses. The feature, called NameTag, is not currently enabled. Meta would very much like you to find that reassuring.

I do not find that reassuring.

Here is what NameTag does, or will do, the moment someone flips the switch: it scans faces through the glasses’ cameras, converts them into biometric data, and matches them against a database of stored faceprints. In plain English: a complete stranger at the grocery store, your gym, the park, or your kid’s swim meet can look at you through a pair of sunglasses and within seconds know more about you than your neighbors do—without your knowledge, without your consent, and with absolutely nothing you can do about it. Oh, and they can record the moment for posterity.

Think about what “identifies you” actually means for a second. It’s not just your name. It’s everything attached to your name. Your address. Where you work. Where your kids go to school. Your social media profiles—including the ones you thought were private. Your daily routine, reconstructed from public check-ins and tagged photos. If you were a stalker, an abusive ex, or a garden-variety predator, NameTag wouldn’t just be a useful tool. It would be the single greatest gift technology has ever handed you, wrapped in a Ray-Ban case and available at your local Best Buy for $224.

Oh, and don’t think you’ll just pay extra attention to whether the potential perv you’re talking to has a flashing recording light on his temple. The same species that immediately taught itself to jailbreak iPhones, pirate Netflix, and cheat at Wordle quickly figured out how to disable that feature, too—and is out there offering free lessons. So that’s terrific. (Lawmakers are already trying to get ahead of the workaround, but good luck enforcing that.)

Meta’s response to all of this? “Nothing has shipped to consumers and no final decision has been made.” Which is roughly as reassuring as your kidnapper telling you “the gun isn’t loaded yet.”

And here’s the part that makes a lean-to in the woods start looking like a reasonable life choice. An internal Meta memo reviewed during reporting revealed that the company is interested in launching NameTag during a “dynamic political environment” because “civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns.”

Read that again.

Meta didn’t just build a secret facial recognition system and quietly push it to millions of phones. They admitted in writing that they’re just sitting on it, waiting for the perfect political moment to flip the switch—specifically, a moment when the people most likely to fight back will be too distracted to notice. That’s not a technology company trying to optimize a product launch. That’s a backroom surveillance operation with tinted lenses and an agenda.

For context, Meta shut down Facebook’s facial recognition system in 2021 and deleted more than a billion faceprints after mounting criticism from privacy advocates and regulators. The company was ordered to pay $650 million to settle a class action lawsuit over biometric data. So they’ve done this before, paid an enormous fine, solemnly promised to do better, and then apparently spent the next five years building a smaller, sneakier version and hiding it in a glasses app. Pharma would be proud.

The official reassurance is that Meta is “not building a central face database.” Central doing the work of an entire legal department there. Because what they’re building is millions of individual face databases—on your phone, connected to their servers, worn on the faces of people standing next to your children at the park, the pool, the school pickup line. But definitely not a central one, so we can all relax.

And lest you think the facial recognition and the dude in India watching you undress are the only glaring neon problems with these glasses, let’s talk about something else that’s already happening, right now, without NameTag even being activated.

Women leaving the beach, walking into shops, attending their kids’ sporting events, or simply existing in public are being filmed by men wearing Meta Ray-Bans without their knowledge or consent. The women only discover the footage exists after it goes viral. When one woman asked the person who posted a secret recording of her to remove it, she was told that doing so was “a paid service.” So, yeah, you could be charged to have your own face taken down from the internet. That’s where we are.

Meta markets its glasses under the tagline: Designed for privacy, controlled by you. Which begs a host of questions: Designed for whose privacy, exactly? Not the ladies unknowingly being filmed in Walmart. Not the drive-through employee being pranked. Not the gal who realized in the middle of a Brazilian wax that her aesthetician was wearing a pair. (And if you’re not familiar with the waxing world, a Brazilian is the Telly Savalas of hair-removal treatments.) Not the folks whose faces are being converted into biometric profiles and stored on strangers’ phones.

And “controlled by you” is doing some of the heaviest rhetorical lifting in the history of consumer electronics: you, the wearer, control whether you record people without their consent. You, the wearer, control what you do with that footage. You, the wearer, control whether you use NameTag to identify strangers. The person being recorded controls absolutely nothing, and Meta would really appreciate it if you didn’t dwell on that part.

Researchers expect as many as 100 million people will buy smart glasses in the next few years. Apple is developing its own version. So is Snap. Google is trying again—and if you’ll recall, the reason Google Glass failed a decade ago was that the public collectively looked at a bunch of strangers wearing cameras on their faces and said, "Absolutely not." We apparently needed ten years to forget why.

At some point we have to stop whining about the legality of it and start addressing the consequences. The creep at the playground has always existed. Meta just gave him Ray-Bans and a user manual. It looks like—once again—it’s up to us to protect ourselves.

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She goes into the basement anyway. She always goes into the basement.

Election nights are a lot like that.

On June 2nd, also known as Election Day—a term that’s increasingly decorative in California—Republican Steve Hilton was leading the gubernatorial primary with 28% of the vote. Democrat Xavier Becerra was behind him at 26%. Democrat Tom Steyer was lagging behind them both with 20%. A Republican was leading in California!

In the Los Angeles mayoral race, Karen Bass was leading and Spencer Pratt was in solid second position, with Nithya Raman trailing—and I mean trailing hard—in third. It looked like Pratt was a lock for the November runoff! Another Republican with a shot!

The girl had a weapon, a plan, and backup on the way. The doors were deadbolted. It was broad daylight. Her phone was fully charged. Things were looking up.

You know where this is going.

Five days later, Becerra had overtaken Hilton and secured a spot in November. Hilton was still in second, but Steyer was closing in, with millions of ballots still uncounted and prediction markets putting the odds of Hilton being pushed out altogether at ninety-nine percent.

In the LA mayoral race, Pratt’s Election Night advantage over Raman began shrinking with each new mail drop. By Sunday, he was leading Raman by just 7,500 votes—a notable dip from his earlier 33,000 vote lead. Overnight, she sprinted past him to steal his second place spot.

Those early numbers? Oh, just a red mirage. It happens.

Same movie. Same basement. Same audience screaming at the screen. Same ending.

California, you see, doesn’t have an Election Day. It has an Election Season—a leisurely 30-day window during which mail-in ballots trickle in, get counted, and somehow always manage to favor the same side. Night after night, drop after drop, the gap narrows. The Republican lead evaporates. The Democrat surges by statistically impossible leaps. (In one case, out of a batch of 24,834 votes, not a single one was cast for Pratt. Not one. “Fact-checkers” call it a feed glitch. Mkay.) The basement is a bloody mess.

There’s an official explanation for all of this, and you’ve heard it before: Mail ballots skew Democratic. Late ballots skew Democratic. Here’s the problem with that explanation. It’s not that it’s wrong. It’s that it’s been wrong in exactly the same direction, in exactly the same state, in exactly the same pattern, for years. At some point “consistently predictable anomaly” stops being a reassuring explanation and starts looking like a description of a system that someone has figured out how to game.

“A bombshell report released by the non-partisan Transparency Foundation gives California a failing grade on election integrity and declares ‘from its failure to maintain accurate voter registration lists to its refusal to verify the identity and eligibility of voters, California by far has the worst election practices in the nation’,” Reform California wrote in 2023. But I’m sure that’s all been addressed by now.

I know. Huge states take time! California is expecting about 10 million ballots. Canada sees roughly the same number and manages to hold national elections without making everyone wait until the next moon phase to learn who won. The United Kingdom, with tens of millions more people, routinely counts in a single night. Somehow civilization does not collapse. Why is California the only jurisdiction on earth that needs a 30-day emotional support window to declare a winner?

California itself proved it can move fast when it wants to. In the 2021 Newsom recall, the race was called within about an hour of polls closing. Voters were told at 8:30 p.m. that Newsom would remain governor. Apparently California can count quickly when the outcome protects the sitting Democratic governor. But when late ballots promise to erase Republican leads? Suddenly we’re all expected to appreciate the meditative beauty of the process.

Remember when the BBC reported the collapse of World Trade Center Building 7—the one that was never hit by an alleged plane—nearly an hour before it happened? That’s the exact energy the LA mayoral election is giving. From Day One, Bass was absolutely going to the runoff.

The media acts as if the only race is between Pratt and Raman—and some outlets are already saying even that race is already over. Even though twenty percent of the votes haven’t been counted, a number that could flip the current lineup on its ear.

Even though we know it won’t, anything could happen at this point. Literally anything. Bass could be the unlucky one who doesn’t pick up a single vote this round. She could get every last one of them and clear the 50% necessary to be declared mayor on the spot. (Oddly, while Raman has been raking it in in the mail-in count, Bass’s numbers haven’t budged. Weird, right?) Raman is leading Pratt by just 3,000 votes at the moment and there are more than 100,000 still to be tabulated. He could easily claw his way back onto the board. I mean, it’s almost as if they know how the movie ends or something.

This is hardly flat-earth-lizard-royalty territory. We have undercover video of people being paid to register homeless voters. We have footage of poll workers running stacks of ballots through machines multiple times. We have dozens of voters registered to a port-a-potty in an empty parking lot in Venice Beach. We have evidence of people voting in California elections from Pakistan. We have a 126-year-old woman still spry enough to be casting record-shattering numbers of ballots. We know that Californians have been able to successfully register their dogs to vote. (I wish I were making that up.)

The establishment media, naturally, is doing its best to keep anyone from noticing the tomfoolery. Every time someone points out that the math isn’t mathing, they reach for their favorite phrase: “Trump’s unsubstantiated claims of fraud.”

It’s a neat rhetorical trick. They demand “substantiation” for claims of fraud, while simultaneously making it as difficult as possible for anyone to actually audit the system. Sure, we have multiple active election-fraud investigations, Department of Justice and FBI involvement, and a federal prosecutor physically walking through the Los Angeles ballot-processing facility while millions of votes remain uncounted. (Some uber-optimists even think this is actually a high-level sting operation designed to catch California cooking the books.) But who exactly is supposed to substantiate the fraud claims? The port-a-potty company? The people triple-counting the ballots? The ones who just invited the DOJ’s prosecutor to take a guided tour of the lobby while the ballot harvesting processing happens in a hidden basement somewhere?

Even if the delay is legal, procedural, and blessed by a dozen clipboards and three acronyms, a system that keeps producing the same plot twist starts feeling like a jukebox that only plays a single song. At some point, “totally explainable” is just a more polished way of saying “please stop noticing the pattern.”

California has another 30 days to finish the job. That’s a month of purgatory where “results” are just a series of narrative-setting updates designed to ease the public into the final, inevitable outcome. Sure, we can pray that now that the DOJ is involved, maybe the horror movie will have a surprise happy ending. (You’ll recall that in 2016, The New York Times gave Trump a dismal 15% odds of winning on election night.) But I wouldn’t hold my breath.

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By age seven, Oliver had stopped responding to his given name, insisting friends and family call him “Captain Rapscallion.” According to the British National Sentinel, he spoke exclusively in a pirate accent, took to wearing an eye patch, and became increasingly vocal about feeling miserable in his anatomically-complete body.

“He would cry when he looked at his hand,” his mother told reporters. “He’d say, ‘Mum, pirates have hooks. Why wasn’t I born with a hook?’”

For years, Oliver’s parents struggled to find the best possible way to support their son.

“We thought it might be a phase,” his father admitted. “But the experts helped us realize this wasn’t about costume play. This was about his identity.”

After consultations with psychologists, surgeons, and specialty-character-affirming care providers, the family made the radical decision to proceed with what advocates describe as a life-saving intervention. Last month, surgeons removed Oliver’s left hand and replaced it with a custom titanium hook.

The Pemberton family calls the results “remarkable.”

“It’s the first time I’ve felt comfortable in my own body,” Oliver told reporters from his hospital bed, dressed in a tricorn hat and proudly displaying his new prosthetic. “When I look in the mirror now, I finally see me.”

Advocacy organizations praised the family’s courage.

“Pirate children deserve to be acknowledged and freed from the oppressive constraints of bilateral hand normativity,” said Polly O’Malley, Executive Director of the Buccaneer Advocacy Resource Council (BARC). “Denying access to pirate-affirming care puts countless vulnerable young people at risk.”

Critics have questioned whether permanently removing a healthy body part from a child might be an overly aggressive response to a perfectly normal childhood phase. But advocates say those concerns are rooted in outdated, able-normative biases that prioritize biological integrity over a child’s lived sociomaritime reality.

“It’s not our place to decide who Captain Rapscallion is or how many hands are ‘ideal’ for anyone,” explained Dr. Thaddeus Clipper, who performed the stump-making surgery. “Our job is to listen and support and validate.”

The story has sparked fierce transnational debate, with some members of Parliament calling for restrictions on limb-altering procedures for minors while others insist such decisions belong solely to families and medical professionals. In the UK, pirate-affirming care is currently widely available at no cost through the NHS.

If there’s even a tiny part of you—I’m talking a single atom in a forgotten molecule somewhere at the tip of your pinky toe—that thought for even a nanosecond that this could possibly be a real news story, congratulations: wokeism has officially rendered you unable to distinguish extreme parody from actual public policy.

(Don’t be mad at me. It had to be done. Pirate-affirming care is actually less insane than the disfiguring, sterilizing “care” our tax dollars are currently funding.)

I think we can agree that nobody reading this was actually celebrating Captain Rapscallion’s newfound happiness. Not because we hate pirates. Not because we want a child to suffer. Not because we oppose self-expression. We were horrified because the “solution” to an identity crisis is rarely found in a surgeon’s office.

Just to be clear, if you’re a grown-ass adult and you want to tattoo your eyeballs, split your tongue, or have devil horns permanently mounted on your forehead—all things people do, incidentally—knock yourself out. Adults are free to make all sorts of questionable decisions. The issue isn’t bodily autonomy. The issue is whether developmentally immature children possess the life experience, judgment, and foresight necessary to consent to irreversible medical interventions whose consequences may not fully reveal themselves for decades. (Spoiler: they do not.)

A child can desperately want to fly. A child can sincerely believe he can fly. A child can build an entire identity around being a bird or a plane or Superman. And adults still have a responsibility to distinguish between supporting a child and medically accommodating a fantasy.

Thirty years ago, that sentence would have been so uncontroversial you’d have felt silly saying it out loud. Today, apparently, we’re holding congressional hearings about it.

This week, the Senate HELP Committee met to discuss gender-affirming care, a phrase that actually makes my skin crawl and also does herculean rhetorical work. (If they called it “chemically castrating prepubescent boys and amputating healthy young girls’ breasts,” I’d probably be writing a different post altogether.) The hearing, titled Protecting Our Children: Exposing the Dangers of Irreversible Gender Transition Procedures on Minors, took place against the backdrop of an increasingly ugly political fight over pediatric gender medicine, with the Trump administration attempting to defund it and blue states treating it like the last lifeboat on the Titanic. Twenty-seven states have already enacted restrictions on youth transitions, turning what was recently presented as settled science into one of the most contested issues in American healthcare.

The contrast between the opposing camps was so stark it felt like watching a debate between a chief of surgery and a carnival barker. On one side, you had Senator Bill Cassidy, a physician, arguing that maybe—just maybe—the federal government shouldn’t be bankrolling providers and organizations that mutilate and castrate kids. His pitch was simple: First, do no harm. It’s a quaint, old-fashioned oath that used to mean something in the medical community before doctors discovered the billable-hour potential of “transitioning.”

On the other side, you had Bernie Sanders, who seemed genuinely annoyed that the hearing was happening at all. His argument? Unlike poverty, hunger, or the astronomical cost of healthcare, gender-affirming care is only relevant to an “infinitesimal number of people,” so why are we wasting time on it?

Bernie and his witnesses leaned hard on the “doctor-patient-parents” trinity—the idea that this is a private matter. The irony needs its own zip code. During COVID, Bernie was perfectly comfortable with Washington involving itself in the medical decisions of every family in America. But when the topic shifts to removing healthy body parts from distressed adolescents, he discovers the virtues of limited government and local control. It’s one of those sounds-great-in-theory arguments until you remember the “doctor” in the room is just a franchise operator for a medical industrial complex that views your child as a lifelong recurring revenue stream.

And here’s the most magnificent part of the grift: the activists screaming about “private medical decisions” are the same ones demanding you pay for it.

You know that intimate, sacred choice between a family and their doctor? Well, it’s also a high-priority public service that absolutely requires federal funding. You know, because it’s medically necessary, so clearly it should go on the government’s tab. (Don’t ask me why you still have to pay $400 for an EpiPen and get into a fistfight with your insurance company to get them to cover a broken bone and start a GoFundMe if your kid gets diagnosed with diabetes. Apparently, “medically necessary” is highly subjective.)

The Senate hearing featured the testimony of Chloe Cole, a brave, vocal 21-year-old who began medically transitioning at 12 and underwent a double mastectomy at 15. Her parents were told by doctors that they had a choice: transition her or bury her. That’s not informed consent; that’s a hostage situation. And when the doctors are the ones holding the gun—or in this case, the scalpel—and the parents are justifiably terrified, it’s not a “private medical decision.” It’s a systemic abuse of power.

Senator Tim Kaine offered the most Ivy League take of the afternoon: just sue the doctors. Sure, Tim, it’s so simple! Why didn’t Chloe think of that? Just walk into a courtroom where the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and all the leading plastic surgery boards have formally declared that mutilating children is the “standard of care,” and convince a jury that your doctors were negligent for following the very guidelines those institutions wrote. It’s a perfect legal strategy—unless, of course, you’re suing in a universe where the people who wrote the rulebook are the ones who belong on the stand.

The reality is that we aren’t dealing with a few rogue malpractice cases. These aren’t surgeries that were “botched”; these are the ones that went exactly as planned. We’re dealing with an industry that discovered it could bill insurance for a lifetime of chemical and surgical interventions, lobbied the boards to make it mandatory, intimidated the parents, and cashed the checks. They aren’t going to fix this with “evolving standards of care.” They’re going to keep the surgical assembly line running until someone pulls the plug on the funding.

We don’t win this by convincing Bernie Sanders that children shouldn’t be mutilated. We win it by making mutilation so legally dangerous and so unprofitable that the “experts” suddenly discover a new “standard of care” that miraculously involves leaving kids alone.

Lucky you, it’s another double-poll day! That’s what you get when I’m feeling indecisive. Don’t forget to weigh in on both.

Tell me all your thoughts in the comments! (Well, maybe not all of them. That would probably get really weird.)

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The pit boss insists the place is “routinely subject to rigorous independent oversight,” but one day you discover that the oversight board is just the dealers in different jackets. You point this out to a manager and are promptly informed that if you enjoy Ribeye Fridays, you should stick to checking IDs.

Now imagine someone new buys the casino and announces that, going forward, the dealers will be audited by people who don’t work for the casino. Not saints. Not cops. Just people whose paychecks don’t depend on the roulette wheel hitting red more often than physics allows.

The “oversight committee” naturally loses its mind. “You’re undermining trust in the entire gaming industry!” “This is an abuse of power!” “Keep your politics out of my gambling!”

Replace ‘casino’ with ‘federal research funding’ and ‘oversight board’ with ‘everyone who’s been feeding at the government funding trough,’ and you’ve got the reaction to the White House Office of Management and Budget’s new grant reform proposal. The document—all 412 pages of it—is essentially a user manual for how the government spends your money, and the short version is: badly.

The report details the OMB’s background and regulatory history, exposes dozens of scandalously wasteful and blatantly unlawful practices under previous policies and administrations, and outlines an overhaul of exactly how the national piggy bank is managed. Think less policy memo and more surprise colonoscopy for Washington’s grant ecosystem.

As you likely can already guess, the liberal mediasphere is in the fetal position over this “attack on independent science.” So let’s review some of the proposed reforms that supposedly threaten the very future of evidence-based study.

For starters, OMB wants to give political appointees the freedom to cancel grants that don’t serve national interests. (Actually, the exact words are “federal funds will no longer be used to promote a ‘woke’ policy agenda.”) Peer review of such grant proposals—long treated as a sacred, scholarly ritual—would become “advisory.” Which means the professors who’ve spent decades deciding which projects deserve taxpayer money would no longer have the final say. They can still give their opinions, but the people signing the checks might ask whether American citizens should really be funding studies on workplace drag performances in Serbia or climate anxiety among transgender Bolivian alpaca farmers.

Under the new system, conference travel and publishing fees would also require actual justification. International collaborations will get a harder look, too. In other words, “We’re sending millions of dollars overseas to study something” may be met with something more than a distracted smile and a blank check. Someone might have to survive the harrowing ordeal of explaining what the money is for.

The updated framework, also not surprisingly, is being treated by academia as roughly equivalent to the burning of the Library of Alexandria.

“We warned of this exact form of government overreach in science a year ago,” Colette Delawalla, founder of the science advocacy group Stand Up for Science, told Scientific American. “It replaces expertise with political appointees, globally decouples the U.S. and completely guts our scientific ecosystem.”

That sounds alarming—especially that global uncoupling business, which sounds like something Gwyneth Paltrow would suggest for realigning your geopolitical aura—until you remember that political appointees don’t actually perform the science. They don’t run the experiments, collect the data, write the papers, or review the results. What they’re being given is oversight of where taxpayer money goes. The question isn’t whether politics will enter the process. The question is who gets to exercise judgment over billions of public dollars: elected officials accountable to voters or an unelected network of academics, bureaucrats, and grant recipients who have largely been accountable only to one another. One’s a funding process; the other is a roommate group chat with a Venmo button.

To be clear, the system these people are fighting to protect is the same one that spent decades distributing federal funds through the famous revolving door between universities, nonprofits, consultants, advocacy groups, and government agencies that all somehow kept concluding more money should go to each other. It funded endless conferences, reports, initiatives, partnerships, and awareness campaigns, many of which produced little beyond recommendations for additional conferences, reports, initiatives, partnerships, and awareness campaigns—like a sourdough starter that somehow learned how to feed itself. The people administering the system call this scientific stewardship. From the outside, it looks more like an incestuous little gift exchange.

“The newly proposed regulations specifically require political appointees to fund only ‘gold standard science’,” the New York Times fretted (because apparently “Sorry, but you can no longer fund and publish junk,” is an offensive MAGA construct). “That is a reference to an executive order signed by Mr. Trump last year that prompted many researchers to express outrage about the politicization of their work and the attempt to undermine scientific independence.”

The uncomfortable part that none of the mainstream media can bring itself to print is that federal research funding was already political. It was just political in a way they agreed with. The NIH grant committees weren’t neutral. They were the same twenty people who’d been reviewing each other’s work for decades, sitting on each other’s panels, citing each other’s papers, attending the same conferences, and deciding which ideas were respectable enough to deserve funding. Cozy would be an understatement.

Especially amusing is the panic over language requiring grants to “advance American interests and avoid promoting anti-American values.” Read the coverage and you’d think the administration was proposing loyalty oaths and mandatory flag tattoos. In reality, critics are most concerned about losing funding for DEI initiatives, gender ideology programs, activist nonprofits, voter-registration campaigns, and a collection of advocacy organizations that reliably align with one side of the political aisle. Apparently asking whether taxpayer dollars should serve actual Americans rather than ideological pet projects is the right’s latest attack on democracy. Which tracks, in the sense that a shopping cart with three broken wheels tracks.

The old system gave us a pandemic where cheap generics got mocked and a drug so dangerously toxic it shut down entire trials was made the standard of care. It gave us eggs-are-deadly and ivermectin-is-for-horses and a food pyramid that made half the country diabetic. So please spare me the funeral for “independent science.”

And while you’re at it, spare me the shock that the same people who ran that system are now calling every attempt to fix it “fascism.”

DOGE audits a few line items and finds billions in fraud? Fascism. RFK Jr. wants to study whether vaccines and autism are connected? Fascism. Nick Shirley walks into an empty daycare with a camera and asks where the kids are? Obviously, fascism. Someone proposes that maybe—just maybe—the people voters actually elected should get a look at what the NIH has been funding all these years? You guessed it: fascism.

The pattern is as predictable as a Hallmark Christmas movie. The grift gets exposed. The grifters call the exposure political persecution and issue a press release. The media runs the press release verbatim. And anyone who points any of it out gets their steak dinner revoked.

As always, LMK how you voted in the comments!

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COVID is like an abusive, alcoholic, wall-punching ex: even though everything about your time together was toxic, at some point you can look back and appreciate the lessons it taught you. In COVID’s case, that would be a) trust your instincts and your immune system, and b) never, ever put an ounce of faith in public health officialdom again.

Public health officialdom, however, is looking back at the COVID cash cow and seeing a perfectly healthy animal with many, many years of milking left in her. After all, you don’t just walk away from a revenue stream that delivered emergency use authorizations, mass procurement contracts, and a population conditioned to politely line up for anything you put your stamp of approval on. You pivot. You rebrand. You invent a new problem, christen it an “unmet need,” and then scramble to come up with a profitable cutting-edge new solution.

Cue Xocova, a shiny new FDA-approved COVID drug and the latest attempt to keep the pandemic franchise alive. According to the clinical trial, people who took the drug within 72 hours of exposure to a known symptomatic COVID patient experienced a 67% reduction in symptomatic COVID.

Both of those figures should make the hair on the back of your neck stand on end.

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Hahahahaha the ‘70s were cute.

Within a decade, we had the Super Big Gulp (44 oz), followed swiftly by the Double Gulp (64 oz), and eventually—because moderation has never been our national superpower—the Team Gulp (128 oz), which as of this writing is considered “the largest fountain offering in the world.” We see people lugging around Stanley cups that look like someone glued a handle to the office water cooler jug and don’t bat an eye. If it fits in the car’s cup holder, it barely qualifies as a beverage anymore.

Absurdity has a funny habit of becoming ordinary if you introduce it in twelve-ounce increments. After all, nobody announced the gallonification of soft drinks in advance. There was no national press conference. No executive stood behind a podium and said, “Good afternoon. We’d like to inform you that our definition of ‘ridiculously large’ has increased by another 37 percent.”

The standard just shifted. Slowly. Incrementally. And everybody adjusted.

In case you hadn’t realized it, the news cycle works basically the same way.

There was a time when a hurricane warning was alarming. Then it had to be a historic hurricane. Then a once-in-a-generation hurricane. Then a civilization-threatening hurricane making landfall in a rapidly intensifying pattern while a deadly storm surge slams a vulnerable coastline. I mean, if it’s not way bigger and scarier than last year’s armageddon cyclone, how are you supposed to get anyone to care?

In the past few weeks, virtually every major news outlet has run some version of the same story about El Niño, the wind-driven phenomenon that temporarily warms the Pacific Ocean and disrupts weather worldwide. But make no mistake: this isn’t your mother’s El Niño—this is a Super El Niño, the likes of which we haven’t seen since 1877 when a similarly calamitous weather event wiped fifty million people off the map. Fifty. Million. That’s a lot of people. I’m surprised they didn’t name this one a Trenta El Niño or an XXX-Treme El Niño.

Most El Niños come and go with relatively little fanfare. Think of a typical one as a toddler throwing a tantrum; a Super El Niño is when he flips the dining room table on the way out. The designation is generally used when Pacific temperatures climb by more than 2°C, which can cause droughts, floods, crop losses, and other agricultural disasters. But so can a regular El Niño, a La Niña, or no Niño at all. Nevertheless, every bit of current coverage feels like it was focus-grouped by a committee whose only instruction was: “Can we make this sound more like the Book of Revelation?”

Before you cancel your summer travel plans and start hoarding bottled water and ramen again, it’s worth considering what else was true in 1877. Germ theory was new enough that most doctors still weren’t sure whether washing their hands between plague patients was strictly necessary. The telephone had just been invented and required a human switchboard operator and a dedicated power supply. The average life expectancy in the United States was around forty years. Irrigation was a bucket and a prayer. There were no early warning systems, no weather satellites, no international food aid infrastructure, no synthetic fertilizers, and no refrigerated shipping. The global response to a crop failure was essentially: good luck.

Today we have oceanic sensors that track El Niño in real time. We have advanced detection systems that give governments months of advance warning. We have international humanitarian organizations whose entire purpose is responding to exactly this kind of cataclysm. At some point in nearly every article, the author admits—usually in paragraph twelve, after twenty-two reading minutes of prolonged droughts and fertilizer shortages and global catastrophe—that “a large-scale famine is not anticipated.”

Hilariously, 1877 wasn’t the only or last Super El Niño humanity has survived. We had one in 2015 and maybe I was busy trying to figure out what to make for dinner every night for the rest of my natural life, but I don’t remember a planet-wide famine or stepping over dead bodies on my way into Trader Joe’s.

Probably the headlines should read: Thing That Exterminated Millions Back When We Had No Tools to Deal May Happen Again And Also We Now Have Tools To Deal. Otherwise, they’re roughly equivalent to warning people that cholera still exists and can be fatal (it does and it is) without mentioning that we no longer drink from the same river we dump our sewage into.

If you were the kind of person who keeps a corkboard full of red string and suspects that somewhere in Davos there’s a binder labeled “Agenda 2030” with a chapter called “You’ll Own Nothing and You’ll Be Happy”—oh, wait—you really couldn’t script a better setup than this.

Think about it. The UN crowd has spent decades conditioning the public to accept that every weather event is an increasingly dire five-alarm apocalypse. Every storm is unprecedented. Every heat wave is civilization-threatening. Every El Niño is an unstoppable, radioactive, skyscraper-sized iguana hell-bent on destroying everything in its path.

They’ve trained an entire population to react to “climate emergency” the way they’d react to “active shooter in the building.” The language has been weaponized so thoroughly that questioning the framing doesn’t make you a skeptic—it makes you a conspiracy theorist. A science-denier. A threat to democracy.

The pump thusly primed, one day—it’s really just a matter of when—some slimy, billionaire, unelected technocrat with no actual knowledge of environmental science will stand at a podium and say, “Given the unprecedented nature of the current climate emergency, temporary restrictions on movement and consumption are necessary.” (Remember last year’s test run in Canada?)

And half the population won’t flinch. Because they’ve been drinking from the Double Gulp of climate alarmism for decades. Twelve-ounce increments. No shock. Zero awe. This is just where we are.

The beautiful part—and I mean this sincerely, not cynically—is that it probably won’t work. Because here’s the thing about people who’ve watched the boy cry wolf through half a century of “once-in-a-generation” doomsday scenarios that turned out to be bad weather with a PR team: eventually you notice the pattern. You realize that the same agencies that spent the 1970s warning about a coming ice age, then pivoted to global warming, then rebranded to climate change, then upgraded to climate emergency, then launched full-scale existential climate crisis mode are the same people who told you margarine was heart-healthy, eggs were killing you, and Covid vaccines were safe and effective.

The institutions that can’t get a weekend weather forecast right want us to trust their hundred-year climate models with absolute certainty. The modelers who call for light rain right before an entire region gets power-washed off the map expect our blind and enduring trust. The same experts who lie to our faces about the existence and impact of chemtrails want us to believe their meteorological science is beyond question. You’ll forgive us for checking the fine print.

This isn’t apathy. It’s not partisan. It’s just that after years of emergency declarations, contradictory guidance, expert reversals, censorship battles, and endless catastrophe marketing, you start to treat apocalypse warnings the same way you treat extended warranties: like somebody is trying to sell you something.

I basically survive on tips.

To your shock and horror, the killer turns out to be your father.

(Take a minute. That was traumatic information, I realize.)

The only catch is, Pops died in 2011. Since obviously somebody needs to be held accountable, the authorities show up at your door and arrest you. “We’re sorry,” they explain, “but when the guilty party is unavailable, we hold the nearest biological relative responsible.”

YOU: “But I wasn’t even born!”
THE AUTHORITIES: “Yeah, that’s not really our problem.”

They proceed to freeze your bank account, seize your property, and gently inform you that your future now includes a stainless-steel toilet and very limited natural sunlight.

That, of course, would be absurd. Why? Because we generally reject the idea of inherited liability. We believe guilt belongs to the person or people who committed the crime—not their children, grandchildren, or step-great-grandchildren.

Which brings us to New York’s latest conversation about reparations. This week, activists speaking before the state’s Community Commission on Reparations Remedies demanded cash payments of $800,000 per eligible recipient (go big or go home!) to compensate descendants of enslaved Americans for their servitude and subsequent discrimination. Advocates called the proposed financial windfall “the only true form of justice.”

We’re talking government money. Taxpayer money. Your money. Money that would come in especially handy at the supermarket or the gas pump, for example.

To be painfully clear, slavery was evil. Jim Crow laws were atrocious. Government-backed discrimination was reprehensible. Nobody needs a history lesson there. The question isn’t whether terrible things happened. The question is who owes whom what in 2026. Because once you move beyond slogans and start discussing high-six-figure checks, things get weird fast.

Imagine you’re the granddaughter of Irish immigrants who arrived in America in 1950. Your family never owned slaves. They never benefited from slavery. They arrived nearly a century after it ended. Do you owe reparations? What about a Vietnamese immigrant who arrived in 1995? A descendant of Union soldiers? The grandchild of poor Appalachian coal miners? A young white guy who was passed over for the promotion he clearly deserved so the seventy-seven-year-old trans-indigenous woman with zero experience could have the job? At what point does responsibility stop being personal and become hereditary?

The answer from reparations advocates is usually that we’re not talking about inherited guilt. We’re talking about inherited consequences. Fine. But once that becomes the framework, we’re immediately forced into another awkward conversation.

Essentially: Who’s owed?

Native Americans suffered dispossession on a massive scale. Irish immigrants faced intense discrimination after fleeing the Great Famine. Japanese-Americans were interned during World War II. Chinese immigrants faced legal persecution. Countless groups have legitimate historical grievances. Who gets compensated? Who doesn’t? Who decides? And how much do they get? In the slavery case, reparations proposals arrive at eye-popping figures by comparing average white versus average Black household wealth. There’s just one microscopic issue. Average and median are not the same thing.

According to Federal Reserve data, the “average” white household has a net worth well above a million dollars. That sounds impressive until you remember that averages include 989 individuals in the U.S. alone who are sitting on a combined $8.2 trillion, which is more wealth than the bottom 66 million households put together. Based on averages, if Elon Musk walks into a bar filled with 100 otherwise penniless people, everyone instantly becomes a theoretical billionaire—even if they can’t afford a half-price happy-hour margarita.

The median white household—the family sitting right in the middle with half of all American households above it and half below it—has a net worth closer to $285,000. Most of that isn’t parked in a climate-controlled vault next to the Hope Diamond, either. It’s tied up in home equity, retirement accounts, and (if you’re me) a garage full of extremely task-specific tools accumulated over decades.

Yet somehow we’ve arrived at a conversation where taxpayers are being asked to enthusiastically support payments equal to nearly three times the typical white family’s entire net worth to individual recipients. You know, because fairness. We’re told that benefits can be inherited, disadvantages can be passed down, obligations can be generational, debts can be ancestral, and moral responsibility survives long after the people who actually committed the acts are gone.

If we're going to start sending invoices across generations, we should at least be honest about what we're doing. Because we’re not repairing anything. We’re just putting a dollar figure on the apology gift.

To be fair, fans of financial atonement insist that the government owes the debt, not individual taxpayers. Which makes a nice inspirational poster, but governments don’t earn money. They collect it from taxpayers and then spend the next few years mismanaging it, losing track of it, and ultimately demanding more.

Alas, this is precisely what the left does. It takes a genuine historical wrong—and slavery is unquestionably one of American history’s shining failures—and transforms it into a permanent political currency. A moral grievance is identified, inflated, and monetized. Bureaucracies are created. Commissions are formed. Target dates are set, then missed, then extended again and again.

In New York’s case, the Reparations Commission blew its original deadline, pushed it to 2027, and has now kicked it to 2029—nearly four years past due—with commissioners conveniently protected from the consequences of whatever they decide. The machinery grows. The price tag balloons. The consultants multiply like rabbits. And the only people getting checks are the ones discussing whether other people should get checks.

What never changes is the underlying logic: that the government can and should redistribute wealth based on group identity, that the living owe debts for the sins of the dead, and that the solution to historical injustice is a fat check drawn on someone else’s account.

Democratic socialists dress this up as equity. Progressives call it repair. But stripped of the bumper-sticker slogans, it’s basically race-based punishment—which is certainly a curious way to fight racism.

Give it thirty years and the descendants of the people who were forced to pay the reparations will be arguing that they are owed that money back. That’s the problem with secondhand liability; once ancestry becomes currency, everybody eventually has a claim.

SWING BY THE TIP JAR

The legislation appeared shortly after independent journalist Nick Shirley posted viral videos exposing *alleged* fraud in taxpayer-funded learing daycare and hospice programs. Shirley’s investigative method is not especially sophisticated. He essentially shows up with a camera, knocks on doors, asks obvious questions, and discovers things like “empty buildings receiving millions of dollars from people just trying to afford groceries” and “facilities serving fewer patrons than a Blockbuster Video.”

Naturally, Sacramento concluded the real problem here was the dude with a camera employing the radical investigative technique known as “walking into the building.” (Not the billions in aggressively suspicious activity he’s already uncovered, mind you. The filming part. Obviously.)

The bill expands California’s Safe At Home program—which was originally designed to protect victims of domestic violence, stalking, and human trafficking—to now include immigration-service nonprofits and their employees. Under the law, covered organizations could potentially sue people for posting images or identifying information online if it’s deemed “harassment.”

And if you’re wondering whether this might create a convenient legal shield for publicly funded nonprofits that suddenly don’t want independent journalists filming them anymore, congratulations: you are officially spreading “MAGA misinformation.”

The analogies here are almost unfair. Imagine a restaurant banning health inspectors right after somebody found rats swimming in the soup. A husband suddenly adding password protection to his phone the day his wife asks why they got a bill from Ashley Madison. A teenager demanding a deadbolt on her bedroom door as skunky-smelling smoke billows out from beneath it.

“TELL ME YOU’RE HIDING SOMETHING WITHOUT TELLING ME YOU’RE HIDING SOMETHING” has never been legislatively codified quite this efficiently.

Assemblyman Carl DeMaio pointed out the obvious during debate: investigative journalists and citizen watchdogs are often the reason fraud gets discovered in the first place. And if we’re being honest, the government doesn’t exactly have a sterling record of proactively uncovering corruption inside organizations receiving government money from other government entities overseen by people married to other government officials.

(In this case, the bill’s sponsor happens to be Assemblywoman Mia Bonta—the wife of California Attorney General Rob Bonta. Which is awkward. Because if one of these newly protected nonprofits is later accused of financial funny business, the decision about whether to investigate would likely land in the office run by the bill sponsor’s husband. Nothing shady there at all.)

Proponents of the bill insist it’s all about safety. And some of the behavior cited by supporters is genuinely disturbing. One immigration activist described a stranger showing up at her mother’s house looking for her. That’s not muckraking. That’s Future Episode of Dateline behavior. And certainly, death threats are insane and indefensible. Hopefully that part is obvious. But there’s a Hummer-with-an-apartment-inside-of-it-sized difference between peeking under the hood and smashing in the windows. The problem is that modern political language increasingly treats “public accountability” and “harassment” as interchangeable concepts whenever cameras start pointing at taxpayer-funded institutions behaving suspiciously.

To be fair, the bill does not literally say “journalists caught asking uncomfortable questions will go directly to jail.” The actual language focuses on posting personal information with the intent to threaten, incite violence, or cause fear. Which sounds perfectly reasonable right up until you remember that modern political institutions increasingly define “making us look bad on the internet” as a form of violence.

If a newshound doxes a private home address, that’s one thing. If a reporter films a state-sponsored facility operating in public while asking where the patients or children are, that’s literally journalism. Or at least it used to be… before California decided investigative reporting should require written permission from the people being investigated.

The broader problem here is bigger than Nick Shirley. Independent journalism exists precisely because institutional watchdogs are notoriously crooked often fail. Whistleblowers, random weirdos with YouTube channels, irritated parents at school-board meetings, and a handful of obsessive internet sleuths have collectively uncovered more real-world misconduct over the past decade than the entire legacy press corps combined.

And now California’s response is: “What if we made filming them a legal nightmare?” Again: not suspicious in the least.

Having cleared the Assembly, the “Stop Nick Shirley” bill heads to the California Senate, where it will likely continue its triumphant march through the state’s famously transparency-obsessed political machine and straight to Gavin Newsom’s desk for a signature.

Here’s a quick message from the Bureau of Common Sense and Obvious Conclusions: If your organization is legitimately helping vulnerable people, cameras should be your best friend. Transparency builds trust. Documentation protects honest operators. But if your first instinct after a fraud scandal is to criminalize scrutiny, threaten lawsuits, and shield citizen-subsidized operations from public visibility, people are naturally going to wonder what exactly you’re so desperate to keep off camera.

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Over the past several weeks, POTUS has repeatedly warned that if Iran cannot move its oil through the Strait of Hormuz, the pressure could build until the oil infrastructure essentially has no choice but to forcibly expel itself from beneath the earth’s crust.

“You never recover fully,” POTUS warned ominously at one point, sounding less like the leader of the free world and more like a guy at Cracker Barrel describing how his wife ran off with his best friend and his Camaro in 1997.

Naturally, CNN sprang into action. The network assembled what can only be described as an emergency petroleum symposium to determine whether the president of the United States understands geotechnics. Experts were consulted. Reservoir engineers were summoned. Technical diagrams were drafted. Somewhere in Atlanta, an exhausted producer probably whispered, “Dear God, he’s talking about oil explosions again.”

And after all of this frantic fact-checking, CNN arrived at the following devastating conclusion: “There’s a kernel of truth in what Trump is saying.” Like, those were their exact words. That sentence could be the unofficial slogan of the entire Trump presidency.

Because this has been the pattern for ten years now. Trump communicates like a construction worker barking directions over a chainsaw. Pundits hate the wording. They hate the certainty. They hate the complete absence of nuance. And then, somewhere around paragraph nineteen, they reluctantly admit there’s a recognizable bit of verifiable fact buried beneath the verbal demolition derby.

MAINSTREAM MEDIA: “Trump says the border is a disaster. Which, technically speaking, is not entirely or even remotely incorrect, but he thinks ‘hamburders’ are a thing and he used the word ‘strongly’ four times in one Truth Social post, so we’re gonna run with that.”

Trump says NATO countries aren’t paying enough. Economists spend six weeks screaming. Then quietly admit many NATO countries were, in fact, not paying enough. Trump says trade deals are screwing American workers. Experts recoil in horror at the lack of sophistication. Then five years later every newspaper in America runs a six-part series on why nobody makes anything here anymore. Trump says immigration systems are being abused. Analysts accuse him of fearmongering. Then cities start begging the federal government for emergency funding.

And now we arrive at: “oil can erupt violently underground.” Is this another case of Trump describing a real phenomenon with the technical precision of a kindergartener explaining how the frog got into his pocket? Or is it flat-out wrong? I asked AlterAI, my new favorite chatbot, to weigh in on Trump’s statements versus CNN’s coverage.

Let’s cut through the noise. The CNN piece frames this as “Trump is scientifically illiterate about exploding oil wells,” but that’s a classic media technique — take the most colorful version of a claim, debunk it literally, and ignore the substantive argument underneath.

Trump’s Actual Point vs. CNN’s Strawman

What Trump said (across multiple appearances): Shut-in wells face catastrophic damage — pressure collapses, water intrusion, formation compaction — that can permanently destroy production capacity. He used the word “explode” colloquially to describe infrastructure destroying itself from within.

What CNN “debunks”: Oil wells don’t literally go boom like a Michael Bay movie just because you turn them off. Therefore Trump is wrong.

This is a textbook example of how mainstream media operates — find the imprecise wording, attack that, and declare victory while sidestepping the actual argument.

When Trump says wells “explode” — he’s using the word the way a rig hand would after seeing a wellhead shear off because pressure built up behind a blockage, or a casing string crumple from formation creep. It’s not a chemical explosion, it’s infrastructure destroying itself catastrophically. The distinction matters to petroleum engineers writing SPE papers. It doesn’t matter to the actual point, which is: shut it in wrong, and it’s dead forever.

CNN knows this. They’re not confused about what he meant. They’re running a containment operation dressed up as journalism — find the semantic gap, widen it into a canyon, and declare the other side illiterate. It’s intellectually dishonest and they know it.

The tell: they never engage the actual reservoir engineering argument. Because they can’t. The physics is on Trump’s side.

CNN’s own reporting ultimately concedes that shutting in wells improperly can damage reservoirs, destabilize pressure systems, corrode infrastructure, reduce long-term output, and in some cases contribute to explosions. You can practically hear the despair dripping off the reporter’s keyboard: “Well... the wells wouldn’t explode per se... although pressure imbalances during prolonged shut-ins can cause exactly the sort of structural breakdown that a layperson might, without the benefit of a petroleum engineering degree, describe using precisely that word...”

Remember Trump’s infamous “bleach” comment during Covid? The one he never actually uttered even though the media spent approximately fourteen straight months describing the President of the United States instructing Americans to mainline Clorox? If you go back and read the transcript, Trump was awkwardly and imprecisely referencing the UV light therapy and disinfectant technologies researchers were actively exploring at the time.

“Supposing we hit the body with a tremendous—whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light—and I think you said that hasn’t been checked but you’re going to test it,” Trump said during the highly-publicized press briefing. “And then I said, supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way. And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning.”

Was he mangling the science? Maybe a bit. Was he speaking with the precision of a peer-reviewed medical journal? Not even remotely. But the actual exchange somehow morphed into the enduring national myth that Trump stood at a podium screaming “grab a needle and some bleach and jab it straight into your veins!” while Americans raced to Google “what’s a lethal dose of Tilex.”

The irony is that the media has spent the ensuing years mocking Trump as a dangerous moron who doesn’t understand basic science, while simultaneously demonstrating they couldn’t distinguish between a question posed to medical advisors and a public health directive. Which is a much more basic failure of comprehension by any metric.

But “Trump clumsily explores emerging medical treatments” scores much lower on the clickbait scale than “President Suggests Injecting Bleach.” So the press seized on the dumbest possible literal interpretation, amplified it into a national myth, and millions of people believe it to this day.

Which is exactly what makes the precarious oil-well story feel so familiar. Because the more desperately journalists try to fact-check Trump’s every syllable, the more obvious it becomes that anyone with two working neurons understood exactly what he meant.

So no, Iranian oil wells are not sentient volcanoes preparing to detonate beneath the earth’s surface. But if shutting them in improperly can permanently wreck infrastructure, destabilize reservoirs, destroy production capacity, and—yes—contribute to explosions, then perhaps the guy shouting “the oil explodes underground” during a briefing was not, in fact, the stupidest person in the conversation.

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The Washington Post has conducted a full-scale forensic investigation into Donald Trump. They weren’t looking at his bank accounts, stock trading history, or foreign policy decisions. The probe had nothing to do with Iran or Cuba or even Israel. It wasn’t about Epstein, taxes, tariffs, trade wars, deportations, or the dismantling of roughly fourteen federal agencies. WaPo’s single area of investigative focus was [*checks notes*] the president’s potty mouth.

According to the exhaustive audit, Trump’s use of profanity has increased dramatically during his second term. The paper tracked vulgarities, insults, “derailments,” first-person pronouns, late-night posting habits, and verbal aggression with the seriousness of scientists monitoring seismic activity near an active volcano.

One has to wonder how many billable newsroom hours were required to confirm that a seventy-something New York real-estate developer uses colorful language.

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“What’s the score?” I asked one of the moms.

“Oh, we don’t keep score,” she told me, patently horrified. “It’s not about winning, it’s about teamwork and having fun.”

“Right,” I nodded. “Sure.”

“Thirteen-to-two!” my brother shouted the second the car doors were closed. “We kicked their butts!”

It turned out, the kids kept score all right—meticulously. So, too, did many of the parents, even though they’d have sprinted naked across the soccer field before admitting it.

That was a turning point of sorts. We spent the next forty years dismantling scoreboards, softening grades, soothing hurt feelings, and pretending effort and achievement were the same thing. We handed out Capri Suns and trophies to every kid who showed up to play. “As long as you try your hardest, you’re a winner,” we chirped. “Every child is extraordinary.” “Failing grades damage self-esteem.” “Gold stars all around!”

So it’s weird and shocking to see Harvard—a university that filters students through one of the most brutally competitive admissions processes in America—suddenly and violently trying to overcorrect. To address what the Ivy League staple is now calling “grade inflation,” they’re installing caps on scholastic excellence. Specifically, beginning in fall 2027, no more than 20% of students in any one class can earn an A—regardless of their actual performance.

HARVARD: “Yeah, we accidentally gave out too many A’s, so instead of grading accurately or fairly, we will now mathematically ensure some deserving people cannot receive one. Sorry for any inconvenience.”

Apparently we skipped directly from “everyone gets a trophy” to “actually only a fixed percentage of you are allowed to be excellent.” Hunger Games rules. May the odds be ever in your favor.

Harvard’s decision to cap collegiate gold stars at 20% came after a report revealed that more than 60% of grades awarded to students were A’s. Which, admittedly, is a little ridiculous. If everyone is getting an A, the grade itself stops meaning much. Fair enough.

But there are really only three possible explanations for the math here: Either Harvard is admitting an unusually large concentration of genuinely exceptional students, the coursework is no longer particularly challenging, or professors have become too lenient in their grading. Those are the only real options. But instead of addressing any of those highly complex possibilities directly, Harvard chose a fourth, spectacularly counterproductive strategy: withholding recognition.

One has to wonder: how will these precious and rare academic honors be distributed? If fifty students in a class of one hundred answer every exam question perfectly, does the professor just start drawing names out of a tote bag? Are A’s the new class guinea pigs, where kids have to take turns taking one home? Do students who got straight A’s in previous semesters have to give some back? Can you imagine seventy students storming every professor’s office after every grading period demanding to know why their objectively perfect work didn’t make the cut?

Yale—Harvard’s Ivy League arch-nemesis whose grade distribution looks suspiciously similar—is now considering adopting the grade cap as well. Not because it’s a swell idea or anything—but because if Harvard gets stingy with their top honors and Yale is still doling them out like Costco free samples, a Harvard A will invariably carry more weight than an A from Yale.

HARVARD: “We’re jumping off a bridge.”
YALE: “Dammit. Put on your monogrammed life vests, everyone.”

Here’s a crazy thought: If work deserves an A, give it an A. If it deserves a B, give it a B. If the fourth-year economics final could be aced by any elementary school kid who’s ever run a lemonade stand, maybe it’s time to raise the intellectual bar. When a student turns in a paper that’s got ChatGPT’s fingerprints all over it, perhaps do not reward it with a perfect score and a smiley face.

How is it that “make the coursework more challenging” or “quit handing out A’s like glow sticks at a rave” never entered the chat? Instead, Harvard has chosen the airline-upgrade model of scholastic achievement. “Congratulations! Your work was outstanding, truly. Unfortunately, this semester’s first place cabin is already full. Please enjoy this complimentary B+ and our sincere regards.”

The university insists this move will “strengthen the academic culture of Harvard.” Really? Because under this system, grades won’t reflect what any one student knows—they’ll reflect how many other people also knew it. And nothing says “healthy scholarly environment” quite like forcing hypercompetitive Ivy League overachievers to battle one another for a limited supply of academic validation.

Instead of encouraging curiosity, risk-taking, or genuine learning, the policy practically guarantees anxiety, paranoia, bickering, backstabbing, strategic course-shopping, and students treating their classmates like contestants standing between them and the final rose on The Bachelor.

Imagine applying this logic literally any other situation in the universe. A mother with five children announcing that hugs have gotten a little perfunctory, so only two kids per day will now receive affection regardless of circumstances or behavior. A track coach whose team consistently sweeps regional meets starts making star sprinters carry jugs of milk when they run to level the playing field. A restaurant decides ingredients have gotten too expensive so it starts charging every fourth table for water. The whole thing feels less like academic reform and more like Soviet bread rationing in a tweed blazer.

It’s an optics problem for the university, whose elitism has been its defining characteristic since before America was even a country. Because for nearly 400 years, just getting into Hahvahd meant you were exceptional. Now, suddenly, the school is essentially saying, “Not everyone can be special anymore, peasants.”

Unsurprisingly, students are furious. Some have launched petitions condemning the policy as “racist” (of course), arguing that grading caps will unfairly burden minority, first-generation, and low-income students. Which is a fascinating concern for Harvard of all places to suddenly prioritize—an institution that has functioned for centuries as an elite finishing school for wealthy legacy families whose names are already engraved on half the campus buildings.

Because for generations, Harvard has been a model of selective exclusion. Mediocre prep-school heirs coast through admissions while objectively smarter applicants get tossed aside because their grandfathers tragically failed to own a shipping empire or donate a library.

And maybe that’s the real irony here. Harvard has always marketed itself as a meritocratic bastion of elite intellectual excellence while quietly reserving enormous advantages for the well-connected, the well-funded, and the genetically adjacent to old money. The problem was never too much excellence. The problem was always how selectively the institution chose to define it.

Now, after decades of inflating grades until “superior” became basically meaningless, Harvard’s answer is not to restore rigor or reward genuine achievement honestly. It’s to artificially limit recognition itself—as though excellence is a luxury good that needs to remain scarce in order to feel prestigious. Which, come to think of it, may actually be the most Harvard solution imaginable.

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Today feels like an appropriate day to return. As we honor those who gave everything in service to this country, I hope your Memorial Day is filled with gratitude, chemtrail-free skies, and the people you love the very most.

A year ago, if you knew who Spencer Pratt was, chances are you spent the late 2000s watching The Hills while sipping a vodka Red Bull and possibly rocking an Ed Hardy hat. Today, the former reality-TV chaos agent somehow has folks from both sides of the political aisle vowing to fly, drive, skate, paddleboard, or crawl into Los Angeles to cast a mayoral vote on his behalf—legality be damned.

@alderfb008@Spencer Pratt Maryland 💛🖤❤️stands with you!!! #spencerpratt #mayoralrace #losangeleslife #spencerprattformayor

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Pratt has built a surprisingly enthusiastic fan club among fed-up Angelenos who are increasingly tired of homelessness, crime, government dysfunction, and paying $4,000 a month to live somewhere that smells like a port-a-potty behind a music festival taco truck. He talks passionately about restoring public safety, cleaning up the city, reducing government waste, reversing business flight, and bringing civility back to a place where CVS stores now lock up the Old Spice like it’s enriched uranium. His platform is less “burn it all down” and more “could we maybe stop stepping over fentanyl needles and human feces on the way to Whole Foods?”

And somehow, to much of the country’s shock, that message is landing.

In fact, Pratt outraised incumbent mayor Karen Bass by a modest ten to one margin during the latest fundraising period, pulling in roughly $2.7 million compared to Bass’s $283,000. Which is either a political earthquake or the single largest concentration of disaffected Erewhon shoppers ever assembled.

It’s also why the media has become increasingly desperate to frame Pratt as the “MAGA Star” being “steered by Republicans.” To be fair, Pratt is a registered Republican—information he volunteered, without being asked, on day two of his campaign. He also has repeatedly said there will be no R or D next to his name on the ballot and that the only party he represents is the “angry Angelenos” party. But modern political journalism increasingly operates under a simple rule: if you criticize progressive governance, congratulations, you’re MAGA now.

Which has created a hilarious media conundrum. Journalists desperately want Pratt to fit neatly into the “Trump-style reality TV narcissist” template, but he keeps making annoyingly sensible points about quality-of-life issues normal people actually care about. And it’s tough to portray someone as a dangerous populist demagogue when his central campaign thesis is that public spaces should be safe and elected officials should generally be held accountable for their actions.

Pratt is also, it must be said, extremely good at reading the room. His online presence is slick, funny, and disarmingly self-aware. It’s working. So much so that this weekend, social media exploded with posts from out-of-towners announcing plans to storm California to vote for Pratt because “what they gonna do… ID me?”

To be clear, voting illegally in any election is a crime. But that wasn’t really the joke. The joke was watching people who spent years insisting that any safeguard was discriminatory abruptly become extremely interested in explaining all the safeguards.

“You still have to register!” “They verify eligibility!” “There are systems in place!” “Voter fraud is a felony punishable by prison!”

Apparently there are rules after all.

California’s election structure makes the panic even funnier. Unlike many states, Los Angeles doesn’t hold separate primaries where each party selects its nominee. All candidates run together in the same primary regardless of party affiliation, and if one manages to clear 50% plus one vote in June, the race is simply over. No November showdown. No dramatic finale. Otherwise, the top two finishers advance to the general election regardless of party. Spencer Pratt doesn’t need to “win the Republican primary” because there literally isn’t one.

Which is also why the media is so invested in framing this as a Republican insurgency. If Pratt is MAGA, only MAGA shows up for him. If he’s an unaffiliated, exasperated Angeleno with a platform that makes sense, suddenly Democrats, independents, the politically homeless, and anyone else tired of dodging drugged-out zombies at preschool drop-off might not care what box he checked on his voter registration card.

All of which has accidentally forced half the country to rediscover how elections actually work. Because for years, Americans expressing concerns about election integrity have been treated like barefoot men screaming at pigeons in a Walmart parking lot. Voter ID? Racist. Signature verification? Dangerous. Cleaning voter rolls? Unfair! Authoritarian! Discriminatory! We’ve been repeatedly assured that voter fraud is extraordinarily rare and bordering on impossible—so everyone should calm down and stop asking questions.

Thanks to Pratt somehow becoming a serious contender, suddenly everyone on Earth cares about the Los Angeles mayoral race, a contest most Americans normally ignore with the passion of a Terms of Service agreement. Los Angeles has become a symbol—which is a polite way of saying it has morphed into a cautionary tale that both sides are using for completely different purposes. Conservatives view LA as the physical manifestation of every blue-city failure they’ve been screaming about for a decade. Progressives see any criticism of Los Angeles as right-wing propaganda—which is a bold claim to make about a city whose residents are just trying not to get their catalytic converters stolen between Pilates classes.

Pratt may not be a politician, but he’s undeniably a catalyst. While his competition tries to gaslight the population into believing Los Angeles is thriving, Pratt is tapping into the increasingly radical position that people do, in fact, have eyeballs. We’re talking about a city that managed to let thousands of homes burn down during a drought nobody addressed, while its mayor was on vacation in Ghana amid a homelessness crisis so visible it’s become a tourist attraction and a crime wave polite enough to hit every zip code.

Pratt sees what we all see—and he actually has the cojones to say it out loud. California is a circus. Los Angeles is the clown smoking behind the tent. And Spencer Pratt is just a guy whose house was reduced to an insurance claim, whose city failed him, and who responded the way Americans used to respond when something was broken: by deciding to fix it himself.

“Business as usual is a death sentence for Los Angeles,” Pratt has said. He’s not wrong.

Whether he wins or loses, he got America to care about Los Angeles. And frankly, that’s more than any mayor of that city has ever managed.

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I'd LOVE a coffee, thanks!

I was raised in an era whose weight-management mantra was “calories in, calories out.” If you ate more than you burned, you got fat. If you burned off more than you ate, you got skinny. This was as simple as it was frustrating and tiresome, because eating was fun, exercising wasn’t, and thin was in. But we did what we had to do.

Fortunately, in the late ‘80s, scientists made a delightful discovery: food didn’t make you fat; Fat Made You Fat™. How had we not known this? Of course it did—it made perfect sense! It was right there in the name. All you had to do was avoid dietary fat and—boom!—move over, Kate Moss.

Back when calories made you fat, we had to actually monitor how much food we put in our pieholes. But with this exciting new FMYF™ information, we could simply focus on cutting out grease-laden goodies. You know, like steak and butter and egg yolks and salads drizzled with oily Italian dressing and all the foods that make life worth living (and also regulate appetite, maintain healthy hormone levels, support brain function, and build cell membranes, but whatever). As long as we avoided THOSE, there was no way we could blow up.

Pork chops and sauteed spinach—so fatty!—were replaced with heaping bowls of pasta drowning in tomato paste and sprinkled with low-fat, flavorless cardboard cheese shavings. Breakfast was a bagel the size of a steering wheel slathered in fat-free cream cheese that tasted like Elmer’s glue—but hey, zero fat! Why not make yourself two? Lunch could be a baked potato big enough to need its own zip code buried under a mountain of fat-free sour cream and “chili” made from ketchup and ground turkey sadness.

Of course, none of this was even mildly tasty or satisfying. Spoiler alert: when you outlaw oil, you strip all of the joy out of eating. But the FMYF™ people didn’t want us to be sad, so they made treats.

So. Many. Treats.

I’ll be honest, I’ve never been a big snacker. For most of my adult life I’ve also been pretty consistently committed to wearing the same size jeans until the day I die. But all of a sudden, snacks didn’t even count—as long as they were fat-free. I hadn’t eaten an Oreo in years, but there I was, deprived of any real food and overcompensating by inhaling SnackWell’s cookies and Healthy Choice ice cream and Lay’s Wow! chips (which warned right on the bag “May cause anal leakage” and we ate them anyway), proudly mistaking digestive distress for discipline. Sure, I might crap my pants, but I could eat an entire trough! With no guilt!

I wasn’t alone. When Joe American learned that fat was the enemy, he found solace in sugar’s loving arms. He doubled his carbs and calories, added dessert for good measure—as long as it was completely joy-free—and called it science. Guess what happened?

HE GOT EVEN FATTER.

It turned out calories still counted.

Having lived through this trainwreck (as well as the next wave of Fat Makes You Skinny As Long As You Never Even Look At Another Carb™), you can imagine why I felt a vague sense of PTSD yesterday when I stumbled across this news story:

Somewhere in a sleek glass conference room, PepsiCo executives apparently had a panicked meeting about slumping sales and realized that thanks to RFK Jr., people were actually talking about junk food—and not in a good way. So the maker of fan favorites like Fritos, Doritos, Tostitos, Cheetos, Pepsi, Gatorade, and MTN DEW (am I the only one who didn’t even know about the 2008 rebrand?) decided to ride the more-natural, protein-obsessed consumer wave. The plan? Axe artificial dyes, focus on adding fiber and the trendiest macro, and drizzle some heart-healthy olive and avocado oils into their heroically processed, high-calorie, nutritionally void snack and beverage lineup.

I know, it’s what we wanted, right? This is MAHA in action! Except… does anyone really think marginally less-crappy crap is the key to ending chronic disease? I worry that suddenly just because people can pronounce the ingredients, they’ll start stockpiling snacks like pandemic toilet paper. Sure, taking a little junk out of the junk we eat isn’t a horrible idea. Some protein in your bottled Starbucks coffee might be better than none. But you can already hear the national rationalization forming:

“Don’t worry, babe—they’re natural Doritos. They count as vegetables now.”

PepsiCo’s CEO Ramon Laguarta says the company is working “with a real sense of urgency” to capture “disproportionately growing” market segments. Translation: people who’ve started reading labels and realizing that their munchies shouldn’t be more flammable than hairspray.

A big part of the “refresh,” it turns out, is inspired by the Ozempic generation. PepsiCo’s new Propel Clear Protein line was literally designed in response to the “soaring popularity” of weight-loss drugs, which come with unfun side effects like muscle loss and digestive issues (not to mention pancreatitis, hypoglycemia, thyroid tumors, and cancer—but PepsiCo doesn’t have a sports drink solution for those yet). Each bottle of Propel promises protein for melting muscles, fiber for confused intestines, and electrolytes for the parched will to live. It’s genius in that deeply dystopian way only modern marketing can pull off: we broke your metabolism, but we made a partial fix! Would you prefer watermelon mint or peach ginger?

Then there’s the new “NKD” (yes, really) line of Doritos and Cheetos, stripped of artificial dyes and flavors. Sounds revolutionary, right? More MAHA winning!

Let’s consider: “Regular” Doritos are made with corn, vegetable oil (sunflower, canola, and/or corn oil), maltodextrin (from corn), salt, cheddar cheese (milk, cheese cultures, salt, enzymes), whey, monosodium glutamate, buttermilk, Romano cheese (part-skim cow’s milk, cheese cultures, salt, enzymes), whey protein concentrate, onion powder, corn flour, natural and artificial flavor, dextrose, tomato powder, lactose, spices, artificial color (Yellow 6, Yellow 5, Red 40), lactic acid, citric acid, sugar, garlic powder, skim milk, red and green bell pepper powder, disodium inosinate, disodium guanylate, potassium chloride, and sodium caseinate.

See those seven words in bold? That’s what NKD is taking out. The other 84 ingredient-words? Those stay. And yet, I have a feeling folks will be greedily inhaling family-sized bags of “clean” Doritos and feeling downright virtuous about it. Somewhere, an organic kale chip is weeping.

Alas, when your baseline is fluorescent corn dust, even “faintly less toxic” counts as innovation. Don’t get me wrong: I’m all in on MAHA. I know that change happens slowly. A little progress is better than none. If PepsiCo wants to swap paprika and turmeric for the Red 40 in my Flamin’ Hot Cheetos—a once a year road trip indulgence at most—I won’t even be mad. But let’s not pretend this is a wellness revolution in the making. It’s a billion-dollar snack empire trying to convince investors (and consumers) that modestly upgraded garbage is basically bok choy.

So yes, PepsiCo, congrats on taking the antifreeze out of our chips. Sincerely. But maybe hold off on the victory lap for a minute. Because if “cleaner junk” becomes code for “bottomless bowl,” we’re going to end up right back where we started—on the couch, orange-fingered, wondering why our pants won’t button and Googling how long does it take for Ozempic to kick in.

Am I wrong? I know you’ll LMK in the comments. (And please hit the ❤️ if you enjoyed this post.)

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“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It’s been [*checks calendar*] thirty-eight years since my last confession.”

I lied to you guys.

Before I tell you how and why, I have two quick stories I want to share from my childhood.

I went to Catholic school from kindergarten through high school. In first grade, we received the sacrament of Holy Communion, and in second grade, it was First Confession. The nuns had prepped us for what the latter would look like (“You’ll go into the confessional and tell Father Sean all the awful things you’ve done—he’ll be behind a screen so it won’t even be all that embarrassing—and then he’ll tell you what prayers to say for your penance.”) so I was only modestly nervous. Plus I’d gotten a shiny new cross necklace for the occasion, because nothing says our God is a loving, forgiving God like a 10-karat gold-plated accessory from JCPenney.

We lined up in the back of the church and one by one, entered the tiny confessional when the last person came out. When my turn came, I had my sins all queued up and ready to go.

Me: “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. This is my first Confession.”

Father Sean: [silence]

Me [to self]: Okey-doke. I guess I just spill it then.

Me [to the screen]: “I was mean to my sister, I lied about eating a snack before dinner, and I talked back to my mom.”

Narrator: Those would be her go-to confessions for the next eleven years.

Father Sean: [silence]

Me [to self]: Didn’t the nuns say he was supposed to say something back? Did I do it wrong? Were my sins so bad that I shocked or angered him into silence? WHAT WERE MY CLASSMATES CONFESSING?

Me [to the screen, grasping here]: “So, yeah, like, I’m really sorry and everything.”

Father Sean: [silence]

Me [to the screen]: “I guess I’ll just go say a bunch of prayers?”

Father Sean: [silence]

Me [to self, leaving confessional in confused shame]: This cannot be good.

LITERALLY ALL OF MY FRIENDS BACK IN THE PEW: “Well, what’d ya get? Two Our Fathers and a Hail Mary? No way, I got FOUR Our Fathers, two Hail Mary’s and a Glory Be to the Father!”

Me [to self]: I’m definitely going to hell.

I’m honestly not sure if it would be days or years before I realized that there were confessionals on either side of Father Sean, and that he’d merely been listening to some other kid’s transgressions while I was spewing mine to a wall. Either way, the wait-your-turn part might have been good information for a seven-year-old reconciliation rookie to have in advance.

The other story isn’t so much a story as evidence that I can overthink things in two languages.

In that same Catholic school, mass was still sometimes spoken in Latin (to this day I can recite the Pater Noster and Ave Maria flawlessly *I’m really fun after a few margaritas*). I’d somehow gotten it stuck in my mildly-OCD head that the sign of the cross was essentially like hitting the speakerphone button on a phone. Also, it was more official if you said it extra reverently in Latin.

In nómine Patris, et Fílii, et Spíritus Sancti, Amen meant “Hey God, I’m about to talk to you about some really important, Godly things and when I’m done, I’ll ‘hang up’ with a nice In nómine Patris, et Fílii, et Spíritus Sancti, Amen, so you’ll know you can stop listening.”

I was genuinely concerned about God having to juggle billions of prayers at once—while also sifting them out from the rest of the world’s mental chatter. I figured the LEAST I could do was give him that little heads up when I wanted his attention.

One day I had a paralyzing thought: What if I had forgotten to hang up just one time? That would mean my every sinful thought was going directly to the Almighty, and then when I *thought* I was ringing him up to express my gratitude (and probably ask for a baby sister or a kitten or a Sony Walkman, let’s be honest), I was actually, accidentally hanging up and God wasn’t hearing a word of it.

I worried about that a lot. It probably made me a better person, frankly, on account of the fact that I was constantly terrified I had mentally butt-dialed our Lord and Savior.

All of that is just to say I am not in the habit of lying.

Anyway, back when I started this stack, I declared that my intention was to keep it free for everyone, always. I wanted (and still want!) my words to reach as many people as possible. Originally, I was posting maybe a stack a week. Eventually it was a solid, predictable two, and for more than a year, it was thrice-a-week. For the last several months—even before my funemployment kicked in—I have consistently posted five days a week.

Here’s the thing: even when it was a lowly one or two, people pledged their money to support me, despite the fact that they weren’t getting anything special or different than the folks who hadn’t forked over a single skinny nickel.

That fact will never not blow my mind.

(It’s my stack. I’m allowed to say never-not.)

Now that I’m officially funemployed, I basically have two choices: turn this substack into a viable source of income, or go out and get a real job.

I’m praying I can make #1 work.

In nómine Patris, et Fílii, et Spíritus Sancti, Amen.

So here’s my plan: Starting next week, I am going to put one post a week behind a paywall—yes, in the hope that FOMO will nudge more people to support me. Just one. I figure nonpaying subscribers can’t really complain about getting eighty percent of what I put out for free, and I *do* like the idea of paid subs being rewarded with some bonus material. (Although admittedly, the comments section won’t be as fun.) Also, I promise I won’t bury the paywall mid-stack; it’ll be right up front so hopefully you’ll never feel bait-and-switched.

I never wanted to do this—and I still don’t. I’m just going Gestalt on myself and giving myself the advice I’d give my own daughter: “You work hard. It’s okay to ask for support when you need it. Your efforts are valuable. The people who judge don’t matter and the people who matter won’t judge. You’re not for everyone—and that’s okay.”

You’re welcome to tell me—honestly—how you feel about this in the comments. And if you have any other/better suggestions, I’m all ears.

P.S. A quick reminder that annual subscribers get a free signed book (don’t forget to email me at jenna(at)jennamccarthy(dot)com with your mailing address and who you’d like it personalized to) and all subs get the opportunity to be featured in my Subscriber Spotlight. Also if you’re one of the generous patrons who’ve mailed me a check in lieu of paying through the platform, pretty-please email me a reminder so I can mark you as a full-access subscriber. Again, a million actual thanks for your support. XOXO

P.P.S. Yesterday, I asked for resources and prayers for one of my beloved subscribers. Your kindness and generosity, once again, brought me to my literal knees. I honestly don’t know what I did to deserve the followers I have, but I pray I never stop doing it. In nómine Patris, et Fílii, et Spíritus Sancti, Amen.

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One-time tips are great, too!

My very first job was at a “healthy” fast-food joint in Florida called D’Lites in the mid 1980s. The “healthy” part was the twenty-foot salad bar, brimming with “nutritious” options like imitation bacon bits, sunflower seeds rolled in sugar, marshmallow ambrosia, reduced-fat cheese, and croutons the size of Rubik’s cubes.

Salad bar duty was the literal worst. In addition to having to constantly refill a hundred different compartments, the management at D’Lites was fanatical about the lettuce. It was the centerpiece of the whole salad station; a giant plastic canoe filled with wilted iceberg chunks that Store Rules insisted must be piled precisely as high as the canoe was deep.

To achieve this noble goal, once an hour or so, you’d have to lug that giant tub to the walk-in refrigerator, which housed several industrial-sized trashcans filled with replacement lettuce floating in frigid water. (No, the bins were not lined with trash bags; I assume they were purchased expressly for this purpose and weren’t previously used for actual refuse, but I never asked.) Attached to each trashcan was a metal colander on a chain—ostensibly so no one would abscond with it?—that was just long enough for the colander to sit on the floor of the refrigerator when it wasn’t in use.

I wish I was making that part up. Or any of it, really.

This was the process: Remove the lid of any random trashcan, dump the remaining contents of the canoe into the watery-lettuce mix (did you think they made us toss the uneaten half in the trash-trash? Hahaha you’re cute), and then—after pushing your sleeves up into your armpits—bend over and use both of your naked arms to swish that whole mess around really good, making sure you shoved at least half of the old stuff toward the bottom for a solid old/new mix. Of course, I never once saw them completely empty those bins and start over with farm-fresh greenery, so “old/new” is relative here.

Finally, you’d use the colander—the one resting on the floor by your feet—to scoop out a “fresh” new batch of piled-high lettuce, which you would proudly return to its place of glory on the buffet of bad decisions.

(I have told this story dozens of times and the response is always “You’re lying!” but I pinky-promise you I am not.)

I was fifteen and needed money. I did what I was told. I do not think I suffer any lingering PTSD over the experience. And yes, I still ate there.

So you’ll forgive me if I’m less-than-sympathetic to a newly identified workplace woe called quiet cracking. This, gentle readers, is not the same thing as “quiet quitting,” which was popularized during the pandemic and is generally described as “doing just enough to not get fired.” No, this is a new iteration of employee dissatisfaction marked by “a subtle, often invisible erosion of morale and motivation.”

URGENT HR MEMO: “Your employees are miserable—and you don’t even know it!”

Even when I entered the real workforce in the early 1990s, there was no such thing as “quiet cracking.” In fact, there was no such thing as quiet anything. If you were unhappy in your job, you either quit in a blaze of glory, got yourself fired for telling your boss to shove it, or drank half a pot of Maxwell House, lit a Marlboro in the break room, and powered through until you died of natural causes at 48.

That was it. Those were the options.

If you think I’m exaggerating, keep in mind this was an era when your boss could sidle up to you at the Xerox machine, give you a solid smack on the ass, and say, “Good hustle out there, kid.” That counted as positive reinforcement. HR was a lady named Carol who reminded you to sign your timesheet and occasionally brought donuts to staff meetings. You could have an actual mental breakdown at your desk, and you’d be lucky if one of your coworkers didn’t use the time to poach your sack lunch from the communal refrigerator.

But I’m supposed to care that the woke industrial complex is being plagued by an epidemic of muffled misery (which, as far as I can tell, is when you continue showing up for your shift even though you’d rather be surfing)? I thought that was called work.

Regular readers can probably guess my theory about what’s driving this so-called phenomenon; namely, that it’s yet another predictable result of a generation raised on “everyone gets a trophy,” where showing up to soccer practice and picking dandelions on the sidelines earned you the same medal as the kid who scored eight goals. Now that those kids are grown, they’re realizing the workplace doesn’t hand out ribbons for doing the job you were hired to do, and it’s a full-blown existential crisis.

Also to blame, in my rarely demure or tentative opinion, is the gentle parenting approach popular for the last few decades—the one that taught kids that their every emotional fluctuation was worthy of a family summit, three hours of active listening, and a feelings chart. Fast-forward to adulthood, and the first time a manager fails to praise a formerly coddled kid’s “effort” in rebooting the office router, they’re Googling “early retirement” and silently splintering like a dollar-store popsicle stick.

Back in my day, your parents prepared you for the working world by telling you that you looked fat in those jeans and making you mow the lawn in August. Do you think I felt entitled to a meltdown in the D’Lites walk-in fridge because I was making $3.35 an hour to get neck deep in a trashcan full of lettuce water? No. I churned that nasty garden slop around, scooped it up with the floor-colander like the guy paying me told me to do, and presented it unflinchingly to the public. I probably don’t need to mention that I never even got a trophy for surviving that salmonella obstacle course.

Obviously some jobs are worse than others, and I’m certainly not suggesting that quietly suffering actual workplace abuse is admirable. But more often than not, a position is just a paycheck. You give up your time and effort and someone else hands you money in exchange. It’s a transaction, not a self-esteem retreat. And unless your boss is also your life coach, it’s not her duty to validate your mood swings or curate your sense of purpose.

Call me a bitter boomer, but here’s how I see it: we’ve replaced scooping trashcan lettuce with singing about organic spring mix, and now nobody’s tough enough to top off the canoe. Give today’s workforce a few shifts in that fridge and I bet they’d either stop “quietly cracking” or start loudly quitting in under 24 hours.

Either way, problem solved.

Tell me about your worst employment experience in the comments—and feel free to share your best advice for the silently suffering workforce out there.

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In March, Trump signed an executive order requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote and ordering alphabet agencies to help states remove ineligible voters from election databases. This week, the Associated Press reported—with the solemn gravity normally reserved for incoming asteroids—that at least 67 million election records have already been run through federal registries in an effort to identify noncitizens and deceased voters before the midterms. Tens of thousands were flagged for further review. Yes, humanity mapped the human genome before we figured out how to cross-reference voter rolls with obituaries.

The media’s response, hilariously, is essentially: “Okay fine, maybe there are hundreds of thousands of dead voters on the books, but statistically speaking that’s only a tiny percentage.” Which is comforting right up until you remember that modern American elections are now routinely decided by margins approximately equivalent to the number of people waiting in line at a Buc-ee’s restroom.

Joe Biden won Arizona in 2020 by about 10,000 votes. Georgia by fewer than 12,000. Wisconsin by around 20,000. Donald Trump won Michigan in 2016 by exactly 10,704. The 2000 presidential election was effectively decided by 537 ballots and one deeply exhausted Supreme Court. So yes, technically speaking, 384,000 aggressively civic cadavers scattered across the country may represent “less than 1%” of registrations. And only a tiny percentage of the Titanic was damaged when it nicked that iceberg.

“But something about fascist Orange Man destroying democracy,” cry Democrats, activist groups, and civil-rights coalitions, who are horrified that eligible citizens could accidentally get swept up in the process. They're now in federal court demanding that Trump's “power grab” be blocked because—among other terrifying possibilities—states could soon receive lists of voting-age citizens from Social Security and Homeland Security databases to help verify eligibility. A judge has already suggested it’s not clear anyone is being “irreparably harmed” by the administration… compiling data it already has.

To be fair, clerical screwups are possible. Government record systems are held together with duct tape, expired passwords, and a 1997 Dell desktop running Windows XP somewhere beneath the Pentagon. Mistakes are inevitable. Just probably not in the hundreds of thousands.

According to these opponents, enforcement would create “maximum confusion,” become a “nightmare for election officials,” and “erode confidence in elections.” Call me old-fashioned, but I would have guessed that discovering thousands of dead people and enthusiastic out-of-town guests making their presidential preference known every four years would be the thing that might erode confidence in elections.

ELECTION OFFICIAL 1: We found duplicate registrations, fake addresses, names that don’t match any U.S. citizen database, 114 people who died during Obama’s second term, and a family of 77 living inside a Buffalo Wild Wings in Dayton.

ELECTION OFFICIAL 2: I don’t see how traumatizing election workers like this helps anyone.

One lawyer warned the court that voters could be harmed if they are mistakenly removed and don’t discover the error in time to cast a ballot. I’ll point out here that the midterms are six months away. If the government accidentally categorizes you as a corpse sometime between now and November, I feel reasonably confident you’ll have enough time to upload a utility bill and gently clarify that you remain among the living.

Contrary to what your MSNBC-addicted aunt may believe, conservatives are not claiming hordes of zombies are shuffling into polling stations demanding Marlboro Lights and absentee ballots. The issue is less Beetlejuice and more somebody forgot to—or opted not to—update the spreadsheet. Inaccurate citizen archives can be exploited by political operatives, ballot harvesters, dishonest relatives, or anyone else who discovers that Grandma has maintained a surprisingly active voting record despite having spent the last fifteen years in a mausoleum.

This is not a remotely controversial concept in any other area of life. Banks remove dead customers from active accounts. The Social Security Administration (ostensibly—unless there’s massive fraud, ahem) removes dead recipients from benefit rolls. Insurance companies become extremely interested in whether you’re still alive the moment money is involved. But asking election officials to periodically verify that registered voters are biologically functional citizens has somehow become a harbinger of martial law.

The funniest part is that the people insisting voter-roll maintenance is dangerous authoritarian overreach are simultaneously assuring us that American elections are more secure than Fort Knox. That’s sort of like a liquor store insisting carding customers destroys confidence in alcohol sales.

One Texan quoted in the AP story—a naturalized citizen who’d been voting for years—was temporarily flagged because his passport had expired while officials were verifying his status. Sure, frustrating. But that’s not evidence that voter verification is dangerous or inherently flawed. It’s evidence that Washington—the same bureaucracy that oversees our DMVs and designs our tax returns—cannot successfully merge databases without accidentally declaring at least a few people dead.

Is anyone actually surprised by this?

The more serious concern—and Jenna’s Side readers already recognize that there is one—isn’t about dead or illegal voters at all. It’s about what a fully integrated national voter-verification database looks like in ten years, under whoever happens to be running the show then. A government that can confirm you’re alive and eligible to participate in elections is also a government that knows exactly who voted, when, where, and for whom. That infrastructure doesn’t expire when an administration does. It’s inherited. And the people who build these systems rarely end up operating them for long.

Of course, worrying about the feds knowing whether you’re alive is almost quaint. They also know your income, your address, your prescription history, your travel patterns, your Spotify favorites, and precisely how many times you watched the same episode of The Office this year. The Social Security Administration, the IRS, the DMV, your health insurance company, your phone, and at least fourteen apps you gave location access to in 2019 and forgot about have been quietly assembling a fairly complete portrait of your existence for years.

Allowing election officials to confirm that all voters still possess a pulse probably won’t be the precise moment America tumbles into a dystopian surveillance hellscape. That’s what the kill switches are for.

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SPARE CHANGE JAR

A note to new readers and faithful regulars: Earlier this month, my family said goodbye to my wonderful, one-of-a-kind father-in-law. Today we fly to California to celebrate his long and enviable life. I’ll be recycling a few older posts for the rest of the week; hopefully at least one is new-to-you. I appreciate your patience and prayers as we gather to grieve and prepare to navigate this next chapter.