I’m going to have to move. The story of why is not the reason for this substack, but it is the catalyst for it.

Looking at houses on Redfin or Zillow or wherever, I’m struck by the design of newer homes that have proliferated in the Seattle-area. Cybertruck bone structure, executed with Stepford Wives uniformity, and finished in a paint job that’s a “Where’s Waldo” shoddy materials and construction.

Forget “built to last,” sustainable building, or run-of-the-mill pride in craftsmanship, it seems every motivation today can be distilled into money. How much does it cost to build? How fast can I make a buck? How do I ensure the widest possible ratio of dollars spent to dollars made? And I haven’t even gotten to the color.

Intuitively, I balk at the color black for a home. In a Pacific Northwest climate that can run 20+ degrees above average for 10+ days each summer, my second observation after the ugly box-shape is why are they all black or dark gray?

Weird choice, and so ubiquitous that I finally asked Claude about it. Apparently, dark colors are not only slimming in clothing, they hide flaws on buildings. Uneven siding, cheap trim work, seams, touch-up paint that doesn’t quite match — all of it disappears in low-contrast dark tones. The old, every woman is a ten in the dark kind of thing.

The other thing about black/gray homes in the age of scrolling is that listings are optimized for smartphones. A thumbnail of a white house with blue trim is meh but the same house in charcoal with black windows pops immediately.

Which begged the question, how the fuck did this become a thing? Well, it turns out that standards of structural beauty can be brainwashed into people as easily as physical beauty ideals. Think of it as looksmaxxing for the home.

Once upon a time, HGTV shows featured a new type of farmhouse, one juxtaposed with austere industrial-modern aesthetics — black steel windows, black door hardware, matte black fixtures. Back then, it was edgy and a pricey detail (actual steel windows, blackened metal). But the look got popular and cheap versions flooded in — vinyl windows painted black, MDF trim in dark tones — so now the signifier is everywhere even though the thing it originally signified (custom metalwork) isn't.

Combine lack of originality with herd behavior and voilà, you get shitty black boxes that will fall apart in less than 10 years. It’s discouraging and a little alarming that many neighborhoods in the Seattle-area have been contaminated by these eyesores. I click on a house in my price range on the map and there it is—the invasive black box.

I predict that, like the Nagel paintings and Memphis-style sofas these liberally dubbed “farmhouse” homes will go the way of the dodo bird. I will celebrate when they do.

In the meantime, I have a house to find.

They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, Sydney Pollack’s underrated 1969 film, is, in my opinion, a great analogy of the 1960s. It captures the turbulence of a decade marked by the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movement, the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, and the cultural upheaval of Woodstock and student protests. Beneath the story of a grueling Depression-era dance marathon lies a reflection of a society grappling with exhaustion, disillusionment, and the fragility of hope. More than half a century later, it also has a chilling resonance with our own seemingly inexorable dance toward fascism.

The parallels to our political climate are evident. Across the globe, democracies are increasingly strained by authoritarian movements that thrive on fatigue and fear. Hungary, India, Turkey, and Brazil have each faced the steady erosion of democratic institutions under populist strongmen. The United States is not immune to this trajectory; rather, it is moving in lockstep with a global surge of fascist currents. The dance floor has expanded, and America is among its most prominent stages.

Like the contestants in Pollack’s film, citizens today are subjected to relentless cycles of crises. Since 2020, Americans have weathered a barrage of disinformation, legal upheavals, and manufactured emergencies—from conspiracy theories about stolen elections to inflammatory narratives around immigration and disaster relief. The effect is cumulative: exhaustion becomes a political weapon. Studies show that two-thirds of Americans report being “worn out by political stress,” while nearly three-quarters are actively avoiding news. In such conditions, fatigue drives many to accept simplistic promises from those who present themselves as saviors. This is the fertile ground in which fascism takes root.

The illusion of reward, too, is central to both the film and the present moment. In They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, contestants chase prize money that is ultimately illusory, drained by deductions and fees. Today, political loyalty operates in a similar way. Pardons for January 6th defendants, campaign donations funneled into insider circles, and promises of patronage through efforts such as Project 2025 form an authoritarian pyramid scheme. The closer one stands to the center of power, the greater the reward, while those at the edges are sustained only by hope. It is a system built not to deliver justice or prosperity, but to perpetuate dependence.

Perhaps the most corrosive element is how this spectacle turns citizens against one another. In the film, dance partners are both essential and expendable, bound together by survival yet forced into rivalry. In contemporary politics, ideological sorting has fractured families, friendships, and neighborhoods. Apps now allow users to filter communities by political affiliation, while online disinformation cultivates suspicion between neighbors. History offers grim precedents: Nazi Germany relied on neighborhood surveillance, while Stalinist Russia encouraged betrayals within families and workplaces. What once united people in shared struggle is transformed into competition for approval and survival.

The audience, both in Pollack’s film and in today’s politics, cannot be overlooked. The marathon existed because there were spectators willing to consume human suffering as entertainment. Modern political life operates much the same way. Rage-bait headlines, fabricated crises, and AI-driven propaganda generate attention, donations, and votes. The spectacle is no longer confined to physical arenas; it streams constantly into homes, monetizing outrage while rendering real lives expendable. As Hannah Arendt warned, totalitarian systems reduce human beings to “superfluous people,” stripped of dignity and used as fodder for the spectacle.

The conclusion of They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? is as devastating as it is inevitable: the recognition that lives have become disposable under a rigged system. The resonance with our current political moment is undeniable. Fascism thrives when exhaustion overwhelms resistance, when false promises substitute for genuine opportunity, and when divisions render solidarity impossible. These conditions are not unique to America, but America’s scale and influence make its descent into authoritarianism a matter of global consequence.

The lesson of the film is not resignation but recognition. Unlike the contestants, we are not condemned to dance blindly until collapse. The machinery of fascism depends upon compliance, upon citizens continuing to believe in rewards that will never materialize. To step off the floor is to reclaim the possibility of solidarity and resistance.

The choice is stark, and the time is short. Fascism is not a distant threat—it is already advancing, here and abroad. The music will not stop on its own. It stops only when enough of us refuse to keep dancing.

Last night, Scott Pelley spoke candidly about the departure of 60 Minutes executive producer Bill Owens. His remarks offered a solemn commentary on the slow dismantling of a 57-year-old institution once synonymous with journalistic standards and integrity. When I first heard the news earlier this week, alarm bells immediately went off — not just because Owens was leaving, but because of why.

His exit isn't about creative differences — it’s about corporate power. Paramount, desperate to push through a merger, is trading editorial independence for the approval of investors and political allies. They want to screen news segments, to censor anything critical of Trump and his regime.

This is not business as usual. It’s the open erosion of the free press — and a warning that even journalism’s strongest pillars can be hollowed out when profits and power come first. Democracy cannot survive without a press willing to speak truth to power. When a platform like 60 Minutes is compromised, the loss ripples far beyond one newsroom.

Scott Pelley’s willingness to speak openly about Paramount’s role was an act of quiet courage. It’s a reminder that the free press is slipping precipitously into state run media —and fast. Through our words, our actions, and our choices, we must be persistent and make it clear — we see what they’re doing, and we will hold them accountable. The survival of real journalism depends on it.

It was the age of facts, it was the age of falsehood; it was the epoch of reason, it was the epoch of propaganda; it was the season of truth, it was the season of disinformation; it was the year of alliances, it was the year of betrayals. We proclaimed friendship with neighbors even as we threatened their sovereignty, making aggressive overtures to annex Canada and Greenland; we championed free speech while dismantling voices that dissented; we upheld justice, yet deported thousands without due process. Tariff wars splintered longstanding friendships as trusted allies became wary adversaries; Ukraine was abandoned, sacrificed to appease Russia’s ambitions. Our national security leaked like a sieve, secrets spilling carelessly, unchecked. Institutions of knowledge—National Science Institute, Centers for Disease Control, NOAA, Department of Education—gutted mercilessly, hollow shells of their former promise. Mass firings swept through corridors of government, loyalty tests replacing competence, intimidation overshadowing impartiality, as threats loomed ominously over judges who dared uphold law above loyalty. A shadow President pulled strings behind the curtain, dismantling the machinery of governance with indiscriminate fervor, accelerating chaos and ensuring instability reigned. Indeed, we lived simultaneously in two starkly opposed realities.

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Today I listened to several of my favorite Substacks, and the dialogues were what you’d expect. A thoroughly mind-boggling international breach of a Signal group “war” chat included Pete Hegseth, JD Vance, Marco Rubio, Tulsi Gabbard, and about 14 others—including The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg. Of course, that last person mentioned was not supposed to be there.

And thus began #SignalGate, a colossal episode of capricious stupidity that Saturday Night Live would be hard-pressed to parody. They could save themselves the trouble and just enact the actual group chat thread—except that Goldberg didn’t share the entire thread. He knew that revealing the full thread would endanger undercover individuals.

Actual journalists are writing and podcasting about this, so I won’t dive into the facts here. Still, I want to speak as an independently minded American who believes in what democracy should be. This is a gargantuan problem for the U.S.—a breach so severe that not even former President Trump could distract from headlines about it.

The question I asked myself when I received the breaking news alert was, “How many times has this happened before? How can we possibly feel secure moving forward?” I shudder to ask about the bridges we’re burning with our allies.

I knew about Signal—I used it myself in January to report something suspicious the new administration was doing. The idea that, despite all the resources available to them at the highest levels of government, that grossly unqualified group of individuals believed Signal was a good idea and failed to notice the journalist who (oops) got added to the chat?

Have Putin’s lieutenants been invited? Has China invited itself? Is Israel patched into the party line? Is North Korea listening? What in the fuck is this shit? Imagine the conversations a foreign adversary could be privy to—it makes my head spin. That we have not had a catastrophic international incident may be a miracle, or it may just be a matter of timing. Perhaps something is being planned?

Imagine these idiots sitting in the Situation Room—or whatever those soundproof, impenetrable rooms are called that are reserved for such meetings—scrolling through their group chat history from the last couple of months, trying to decide if maybe someone was included who shouldn’t have been. Absolutely gobsmacking. Now that the damage has been done, the formerly justice-touting-to-the-letter GOP are waving it away as overblown—not a thing. And hey, what about those Tesla terrorists?

Though I’m upset, I am not surprised. The poisonous fruit of this administration has barely begun to ripen. These dipshits in charge of national security will not suddenly be competent tomorrow. No videos from human resources will bring them up to speed on how to do U.S. espionage. We’re stuck until some massive 10.0 seismic movement makes GOP complacency unsurvivable for those cowards and sycophants. Brace yourselves

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I remember being 12 years old and having to move to a new state when my parents divorced. That also meant leaving all my friends and attending a new school—a junior high school. It is well known that children can be cruel. Any adult who does not recognize this is deluding themselves. I remember the feeling of being shunned and publicly ridiculed by the popular girls for no reason other than being new. Once one group of "influencers" targets you, the rest fall in line, making your life a living hell.

Watching Zelenskyy ambushed and attacked on camera in what was clearly a premeditated stunt opened those old wounds. I could feel the heat of humiliation and public shaming as he sat there while two sadists fabricated a situation to discredit and diminish him. It was painful to watch.

US President Donald Trump (C) and Vice President JD Vance (R) meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky (L) in the Oval Office on February 28, 2025 © Andrew Harnik / GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA/AFP

I have read that it was a "shouting match" and that they were "yelling at each other." But they were not. Vance and Trump were raising their voices, while Zelenskyy was trying to defend himself without escalating the situation—while the world was watching.

Anyone with a modicum of empathy was shocked by the Grand Guignol theater at Zelenskyy’s expense. What did the press do? Well, nothing. The Russian state TV journalist was "discovered" and "escorted" out after the show.

No doubt, Putin, the original homicidal "mean girl" in this scenario, was smiling.