Sick of this Shit Publications

I’m Nick Paro, and I’m sick of the shit going on. So, I’m using poetry, podcasting, and lives to discuss the intersections of chronic illness and mental wellbeing, masculinity, veteran’s issues, politics, and so much more. I am only able to have these conversations, bring visibility to my communities, and fill the void through your support — this is a publication where engagement is encouraged, creativity is a cornerstone, and transparency is key — please consider becoming a paid subscriber today and grow the community!

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Diogenes Club | E29 - Parent Talk on Bullying and AI with Ashleigh

Nick Paro — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 13:38:26 GMT

Diogenes in Review

With Dr. Eric Lullove sidelined by a hearing, Nick Paro handed the second chair to Ashleigh Alauren for an hour on the thing neither of them has solved: raising kids inside AI and online bullying. Nick talks about family pulling Roblox off both kids’ devices — his are 13 and 10 — because the platform has repeatedly been used to lure children, and because its open world-builder lets users push white nationalist content and subtle grooming with almost no monitoring. He and his wife told the kids why, rather than just deleting the app. Ashleigh, whose daughter is starting fifth grade and whose son is on the spectrum, came in from the opposite position: chats off, tablets allowed, and an honest admission that she didn’t know Roblox was that bad. That asymmetry is the engine for the discussion — one parent who has done the research, one who is asking the questions most parents are too busy to ask.

Both hosts hold what Nick calls “dueling views” on AI, and neither pretends otherwise. Ashleigh uses it to while researching the Epstein Files to map financial records and assemble fraud timelines she has submitted to Senator Wyden’s office; she also describes the same capability pointed the other way, at people who can be targeted by anyone willing to ask the machine. Nick’s framing is the tool argument — a hammer drives nails and has also been used to kill, and we don’t call it a murder weapon — which puts the burden on the user and, for children, on the parent setting the guardrails. He says his daughter uses a creativity-focused chatbot and that she has told him it sometimes steers more explicit than she is comfortable with; the point he draws is not that she should lose the app but that she told him at all, because the family built the trust for it. Nick’s sharpest line lands on training: “AI is like a toddler with access to all the information in the world. And if we don’t take the time to train it and teach it like we would a child, it’s going to turn out to be an asshole.” His conclusion follows directly — don’t bully the AI, because that behavior bleeds back into the model, and into your kids’ assistant. The two of them go looking for a parent resource that ranks platforms by safety, find that neither knows of one, and openly ask the audience to help build it. That gap is the honest takeaway of the episode, and it is left standing.

“But my job isn’t to be your friend right now. It’s to make sure that you can go out into the world and not be a complete asshole.” — Nick Paro

Nick’s practical throughline is boundaries you model rather than announce. He takes “anything but yes means no” out of the physical-consent context and applies it to toys, food, and screen time, and he stops tickling his son at the parts of the body his son has ruled off-limits — a small demonstration that a stated boundary gets honored. Consequences are natural, not arbitrary: miss the bus, and the consequence is an alarm and a ride, not a confiscated tablet. He and his wife also refuse to let their older child be adultized into a caregiver role for her brother, a pressure Ashleigh describes her own daughter carrying at another household. Leilani, in the chat, supplied the compression: children want healthy boundaries, and so do adults. Nick also checks himself on “touch grass” — he names it as ableist, since for some people online community is the social interaction available, and he credits Substack with some of his closest friendships. The episode closes on two instructions worth keeping: Ashleigh’s borrowed Ted Lasso rule to be more curious and less judgmental before you join a pile-on, and Nick’s blunt version of the same advice — talk to your kids, treat them like people, and just suck less.

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Nick’s Notes

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Intelligent Masculinity | With Kyle Pacheco

Nick Paro — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 20:01:16 GMT

“So using the words to just tell somebody you can be vulnerable won’t necessarily gain the action that you intended to give. I would say that just like children, modeling that you’re vulnerable is much more of an effective way.”
~ Kyle Pacheco ~

Masculinity In Review

Kyle Pacheco ( ) spent an hour this week describing a pattern most men will recognize and few will name out loud: you don’t learn manhood, you copy it. He talked about mirroring men he now knows were harmful, about a stepfather’s affair that reshaped his sense of what a father is, and about the moment he realized the friends around him didn’t actually care about him or each other. What makes this conversation matter isn’t the wreckage — it’s what he did with it. Kyle treated his own past as source material to be studied rather than a story to be defended, and that distinction is the entire practice. Better humaning is not the absence of bad models; it’s the deliberate work of becoming a better one.

The sharpest idea Kyle offered is that vulnerability can’t be granted by announcement. Telling a man “it’s okay to cry” leaves him exactly where he was, because the invitation costs you nothing and proves nothing. “You’re not showing me your vulnerability,” Kyle said, “so why would I be vulnerable?” His alternative is to go first and keep going first — say out loud at work that you go to therapy, name the ADHD, admit the thing you’re still bad at. He described people at his job responding to that openness who “probably wouldn’t have done it on their own,” and later described colleagues pulling him aside for conversations he never solicited: “I didn’t walk up to them and say, you can talk to me anytime you want. They perceive it by the way I act.” The safety was never offered — it was demonstrated until it was believed.

The modeling runs closest to home with his kids, and Kyle was clear that the most honest thing he does as a father is apologize. He admitted he sometimes raises his voice with his four-and-a-half-year-old instead of slowing down, and that his repair now sounds like: that was a mistake, I’m sorry I raised my voice, and what you were doing still isn’t okay. That’s accountability moving in both directions in the same breath — the father holding himself to the standard he’s asking his son to meet. He extended the same logic to his marriage, noting that the relationship his son sees every day for eighteen years is the template, right down to whether affection is something men show in front of other people. Kids pick up far more than we credit them for, which means the lesson is being taught whether or not we intended to teach one.

Kyle also complicated the search for a male figure worth copying, and this is where the episode earns its title. His model turned out to be his grandfather — born in 1932, GOP for most of his life, and someone Kyle disagreed with ideologically — who nonetheless treated his wife with a consistency Kyle hadn’t seen anywhere else, taught him woodworking, held him accountable, and refused to go to bed angry. More striking, the grandfather changed: in his seventies and eighties he came around on people he’d spent decades opposed to. Kyle called that the most impressive thing about him, and he’s right — the willingness to be wrong in public, late, is itself a masculine skill worth mirroring. Intelligent masculinity is not about finding a flawless man to imitate. It’s about being able to identify the specific, transferable behaviors worth carrying forward and leaving the rest.

None of this stays private, which is why the void matters. We didn’t lose young men because someone else was louder; we lost ground because good men vacated the rooms where culture gets made and assumed the next generation would sort it out on its own. Kyle’s answer is to occupy those rooms deliberately — at work, at home, in the neighborhood, and in the in-person communities he’s trying to rebuild alongside the digital ones. That’s the same discipline behind ClearRoot, the civic-literacy tool he’s building to link money, votes, and action so that being upset can become being useful. Modeling and building are the same reflex pointed at different scales.

Kyle Pacheco is the founder of ClearRoot, a senior sales manager, a new MBA, and a father of two who came into this conversation having already done the reflection it asked of him — he said outright he didn’t want to hold back. That preparation is its own answer to the question of how you model better humaning: you show up having already done the work in private, and then you do it again where people can see. He expands this series by demonstrating that the practice scales — from a bedtime apology, to a coworker who finally asks for a minute, to a tool built so strangers can act on what they learn. Refuse to outsource your accountability, live with the consequences of your values, and let people watch you do it.

Sources & References

ClearRoot — Kyle’s civic-literacy and research platform (currently in beta; feedback welcome via the in-app form or contact@clearroot.ai)

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Nick’s Notes

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Chronically Illing Out | E44 - Starting the Week Managing the Stressers

Nick Paro — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 16:35:54 GMT

Ch-Illing In Review

Summary

This week starts with kids leaving for school and ends up somewhere more interesting: how differently wired nervous systems actually process relief. Nick uses music to steer his emotions on purpose — classical when he wants to feel the feeling, wordless electronica when he needs to write code without typing the lyrics he hears. Stephanie describes the opposite reaction, where music “really grates and makes me feel jittery” unless it is so familiar it can sit in the background. Soso lands between them, singing loud in the car but needing silence to write. Three people, one tool, three incompatible results — which is the point the panel keeps circling.

Soso brings in Dabrowski’s overexcitabilities and the idea of twice exceptionality, and Stephanie extends it to synesthesia in the chronic illness community: “our wires are crossed in interesting and just really fascinating ways.” The conversation gains weight when it turns to parenting. Nick describes deliberately taking his son off ADHD medication over the summer so the kid learns his own baseline, and teaching small stims for classrooms where large ones get punished. The honest part is the failure — “I’m not you. Those aren’t going to work for me” — and Stephanie’s answer, that kids bank the tool now and pull it out years later.

The hour closes with Nick playing his own composition, Suite of Dances Movement No. 4, and the panel sending love to Beth Cruz, absent and having a hard week. Which is the practical thesis: the tools are personal, the community is not.

Actions You Can Take

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Nick’s Notes

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Flock Profits by Invading Your Privacy

Nick Paro — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 14:42:27 GMT

There are roughly 120,000 Flock cameras installed across the U.S., yet fewer than 1% of the cars they scan have been connected to a crime.

Because there aren’t strict laws on how camera data can be collected, stored, and used, companies like Flock end up with enormous control over your personal information.

Many communities across the country have already ended their Flock contracts or forced changes to how the cameras operate, from stricter data retention rules to limits on sharing with federal agencies.

The de-Flock efforts are proof that public pressure can get a city to walk away from mass surveillance.

The should matter to you because your State and local governments can quietly hand federal agencies a surveillance network they’d otherwise need a warrant to build.

Flock’s database can be searched across agencies.

ICE, the FBI, and other federal bodies have also reportedly tapped into local Flock networks -- combined with Wired’s reporting of AI based individual movement tracking without a license plate or suspected crime -- this is letting the federal government directly track people’s movements nationwide without oversight or mechanisms for accountability.

Flock profits whether or not the system is used responsibly. Its business model depends on installing as many cameras as possible and collecting as much data as possible, giving the company little incentive to limit access, even as officers and agencies misuse the system for personal or political reasons.

Oversight is nearly nonexistent. With no strict laws governing this data, there’s little to stop officials from using it to track political rivals, activists, journalists, or ordinary residents, turning a “public safety” tool into a means of unchecked government power.

Actions You Can Take

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Nick’s Notes

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Powerful Voices | Building Sustainable Civic Engagement with Amanda McCellon

Nick Paro — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 16:27:56 GMT

Summary

Nick Paro spent an hour with Amanda McCellon, an Oklahoma civic engagement consultant, Choctaw Nation citizen, and former municipal-government insider who spent over a decade working inside local government before deciding to “organize from the community side.” Her argument is blunt and, on the evidence she brings, correct: “democracy dies locally first,” and the first step is simply showing up — to a city council, school board, or county commission meeting, where in most towns “there’s only going to be four or five people in the room at most.” McCellon pushes past the obvious entry points to the ones that actually decide things before they reach a headline: planning and zoning commissions, boards of adjustment, and economic development corporations. “No one shows up to planning and zoning until someone’s building something in your backyard,” she says — and by the time a data center is on the agenda, the fight started years earlier. Nick’s own Arkansas town severed its Flock camera contract after citizen-led outrage; Amanda’s read is that data centers and surveillance cameras are the rare issues pulling both parties into the same room, because “I don’t think the party even matters when it comes to that.”

The receipts back her up. Oklahoma City’s warehouse project died after residents refused to accept Mayor David Holt’s claim that a federal matter left the city powerless — McCellon told organizers plainly that this was “bullshit,” to stay on them and show up in force, and the project was dropped. Shawnee passed a data center moratorium within city limits; Sand Springs and Yukon are running recall efforts against officials who pushed projects through over constituent objections; tribal nations have changed zoning outright to bar warehouses, which she credits with emboldening cities to do the same. Where she’s most self-critical is education: Oklahoma’s minimum wage increase failed, she argues, because dark money ran smear campaigns into a vacuum where no one had done the education work first — and she was reminded at a standing-room-only Tulsa data center forum that two registered Democrat schoolteachers showed up specifically because “we just don’t know why data centers are bad.” Her prescription is unglamorous and free: reach people with facts, expand your own echo chamber, and take the homework she assigned live — pick your city council, school board, or county commissioner, find when they meet, read their most recent agenda, put the date on your calendar, and commit to showing up.

Sources & References

Actions You Can Take

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Join the efforts to unmask law enforcement and de-flock the States:

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Service members can get un-biased information on legal vs illegal orders:

Orders Project
Reach out on Signal: @TheOrdersProject.76

Learn empathy forward, human centered, experiment based Leadership & Growth Courses for Higher Ed & Non-Profit Professionals:

B. Cognition Labs

Nick’s Notes

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Diogenes Club | E28 - The Doctors Are In The House with Dr. Angela Rasmussen

Nick Paro — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 19:38:36 GMT

Diogenes in Review

Nick Paro and Dr. Eric Lullove brought virologist Dr. Angela Rasmussen — science chair of the Save America Movement and co-editor-in-chief of the journal Vaccine — onto Diogenes Club to take apart the executive order directing HHS to split the MMR shot into three monovalent doses by November. Rasmussen’s verdict is blunt: parents can safely ignore it. The president has no legal authority to make immunization recommendations, that power sits with the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, and a federal judge already voided the Kennedy-appointed ACIP’s decisions, which puts the country back on the 2025 schedule. No monovalent measles, mumps, or rubella vaccine is FDA-licensed; manufacturing one would require new phase one, two, and three trials — Lullove pegs the average at seven to eight years and well over 25,000 participants — for a product with no demand. The order cannot produce a vaccine, but it can produce doubt, and Rasmussen argues that is the actual deliverable: “This thing is lying to you to make you doubt the combined MMR vaccine,” and in the face of doubt, people stay home.

The three of them then traced what that doubt costs. Measles needs 95% coverage to stop; the MMR is 97% effective, and Lullove’s sharper number is not the falling vaccination rate but the exemption rate, which he says climbed roughly 80% — from 2.5% to 4.2% — in under a year. Rasmussen’s own epidemiological modeling projects over three million cumulative U.S. measles cases across the next decade, and she flags rubella as the underrated threat to pregnant people, who cannot receive the live attenuated vaccine and must be immune before conception — a problem in states like Arkansas, where Nick notes most counties have no OBGYN at all. Lullove ties the same thread to money: physicians’ Medicare conversion factor has not been inflation-adjusted since 2001, sitting at $33.65 against an inflation-adjusted $65.16, while hospitals collect a statutory 2.4% annual raise. Rasmussen is now pointing her AI and Bayesian modeling work — the same methods she uses to predict viral disease outcomes — at CMS and OMB data to forecast the One Big Beautiful Bill Act’s health impacts down to the county level, and she is careful about the distinction: the models are standard machine-learning classification, not generative AI, and she will publish the data sources and methods. Nick calls the cumulative effect gene pool management. Rasmussen calls it the pathogenesis of fascism. Neither is speaking in metaphor.

People, Orgs, and Terms Mentioned

People:

Dr. Angela Rasmussen — PhD virologist at the University of Saskatchewan, science chair of the Save America Movement, co-editor-in-chief of the journal Vaccine; the episode’s guest.
Dr. Eric Lullove — practicing physician and health policy writer, Diogenes Club co-host, who brought Rasmussen onto the show.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — HHS secretary; Rasmussen argues his decades of anti-vaccine messaging, not just his current office, drove immunization rates down.
Dr. Anita Patel — double board-certified critical care pediatrician joining Rasmussen for a live vaccine Q&A on the Save America Movement channel.
Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove — Rasmussen’s Save America Movement colleague who proposed applying Bayesian modeling to track policy impact.

Organizations / Programs:

Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) — the federal body that must approve vaccine recommendations; currently stayed by court order after the American Academy of Pediatrics’ lawsuit.
Save America Movement — the organization where Rasmussen serves as science chair and is building her health-policy forecasting model.
Vaccine Integrity Project, American Academy of Pediatrics, Infectious Diseases Society of America — the professional sources Rasmussen recommends over the CDC site for vaccine guidance.
Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) — source of the expenditure data Rasmussen is modeling for county-level impact forecasts.

Terms / Concepts:

Monovalent vaccine — a single-antigen shot; splitting MMR into three monovalents means six pediatric injections instead of two, with no licensed product to give.
Exemption rate — the share of students opting out of school vaccine requirements; Lullove treats its rise as more alarming than the coverage decline itself.
Conversion factor — the Medicare multiplier applied to each procedure’s work value to set physician payment; frozen in real terms since 2001.
p-hacking — manipulating statistical tests until a result clears the 0.05 significance threshold; Rasmussen’s example of the older version of the trust problem now attached to AI.
Gene pool management — Nick and Dr. Eric’s term for eugenic health policy, adopted after platform moderation flagged the word “eugenics.”

Actions You Can Take

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Service members can get un-biased information on legal vs illegal orders:

Orders Project
Reach out on Signal: @TheOrdersProject.76

Learn empathy forward, human centered, experiment based Leadership & Growth Courses for Higher Ed & Non-Profit Professionals:

B. Cognition Labs

Nick’s Notes

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Intelligent Masculinity | Return of the AngryMaleVeteran

Nick Paro — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 18:03:07 GMT

“For me, a part of masculinity is if you lose, you lose. Okay. I didn’t have my best day. Things didn’t go well. I could have done things different or people just didn’t want me to win. This is a democracy, right? So take that, learn lessons, move forward.”
~ ~

Masculinity In Review

The third Intelligent Masculinity conversation with starts where the first two left off. Nick and AMV spend an hour walking through voter registration marches, USAF Major Jason Watson who is in pretrial confinement (The One Who Stood for the Oath We Swore), the Citizen’s Oath drafted by , and the Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth campaigning in Iowa for Republican Zach Nunn in an apparent violation of the Hatch Act — and every one of those threads loops back to the same question. When the outcome isn’t yours, who are you? The answer they arrive at is unglamorous and demanding, which is how you know it’s real.

The clearest test case is the grift of the sore loser. AMV is blunt about what perpetual election denial actually signals — “it’s the least alpha thing I’ve ever seen in my life” — and Nick pushes him to say why. The answer isn’t about politics; it’s about formation. A man who has never been taught to lose will build a whole economy out of refusing to. The guest traces it back through Trump’s biography — the Emmy, Iowa, sixty-five court losses — and lands on the mechanism that makes it self-sustaining: whining is monetizable, which is why Mike Lindell challenging a primary he lost by eleven points is a fundraising posture rather than a legal strategy. Which means the thing being sold as strength is a business model that requires its customers to stay aggrieved.

The oath segment is where the episode does its most original thinking. Nick reads a citizen’s oath written by Lawrence Winnerman, his Banner and Backbone co-founder — a near-copy of the oath sworn by officers and naturalized citizens, offered to natural-born Americans who never swear anything at all. The guest’s response is better than agreement — he declines to want it required. “I don’t think I would want anybody to have to swear an oath,” he says, then pivots to what he does want: that people ponder it, asking what the Constitution means to them, what the flag means to them, where their courage actually gets spent. An oath extracted is a loyalty test; an oath considered is a mirror. And on the other side, for those who did swear one, the guest is unambiguous — “It never expires. There’s no turn off button for that.”

Keeping faith is the third leg, and it has a name attached: Major Jason Watson, seventeen years in, back in pretrial confinement for calling from the Capitol steps for the impeachment of Trump and Vance. Both men have interviewed him, and both report the same thing — that Maj. Watson insists it isn’t about him, it’s about the movement. Nick sharpens it into a masculinity question: what does it say about a person to accept the consequences of his own values? AMV’s answer refuses the hero frame and puts the weight back on the audience. Maj. Watson threw away a 17-year career because elected representatives wouldn’t spend a fraction of that courage, and the least the rest of us can do is refuse to let it fade into the woodwork. That’s what the November 11th Veterans Day Democracy March is for — veterans, families, and supporters converging on D.C. for the rule of law and legal election results, which the guest carefully distinguishes from January 6th: “we’re not led by a narcissist sociopath who is feeding us lies.”

Then there’s the part that reframes the whole hour. Asked what he gets out of showing up in person — the 1,000 Miles to Memphis march, the immigration conference, the memorial concert — the guest gives the episode its best line: “activism is an antidepressant.” Not a metaphor for morale, but a described mechanism — isolation is the goal from the top, and standing next to people doing the same work is the countermeasure. Nick extends it into an argument about ownership — “the highest office and rank in this nation is voter” — and the guest closes the loop with the sharpest civic instruction of the episode. It is not their seat. It’s the constituent’s seat. So get greedy for seats, outvote the Jeffs, and remember that the worst available option is inaction, because inaction is how the frog boils.

AngryMaleVet is a retired combat veteran — twenty-three years, enlisted at seventeen, Iraq, Afghanistan, Kuwait — who came home expecting to be done fighting evildoers and found the fight relocated. Across three appearances he has become one of our clearest arguments that masculinity is a practice rather than a posture: measured response over reaction, discipline over dominance, service that continues after the uniform comes off. This discussion is his most important yet, because it takes the abstractions the series has been building — accountability, courage, community — and hands you a date, a website, and a first step. Calm and intelligent, as one listener put it in the comments. That’s the whole project.

~ Nick Paro

Sources & References

The One Who Stood for the Oath We Swore an interview with Nick Paro and Maj. Jason Watson
A Discussion with Major Jason Watson with AngryMaleVet
1,000 Miles to Memphis — the 36-day, 1,000-mile voter registration march from Nashville to Memphis
Veterans Fighting Fascism — the Veterans Day Democracy March, November 11th, Washington, D.C.
Banner & Backbone Media’s Citizen’s Oath written by Lawrence Winnerman

Actions You Can Take

Get your Sick of this Shit merch!

Check out the Sick of this Shop!

Join the efforts to unmask law enforcement and de-flock the States:

deflock.me

Service members can get un-biased information on legal vs illegal orders:

Orders Project
Reach out on Signal: @TheOrdersProject.76

Learn empathy forward, human centered, experiment based Leadership & Growth Courses for Higher Ed & Non-Profit Professionals:

B. Cognition Labs

Nick’s Notes

Join the uncensored media at the 1A Collective

Support as a paid subscriber however you can — to help get you started, here are a few discounted options for you

For support, contact us at: info@sickofthisshitpublications.com

Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning into my live video with ! Join me for my next live video in the app.

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Time for Life | E27 - Time for Creativity

Soso's World — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 12:52:45 GMT

Good morning everyone,

In case you have missed yesterday’s Time for Life, this is the link to the episode.

Discover , an amazing member of our community, a who also lives with disability and chronic pain. A trauma informed therapeutic counselor, she provides insights on healing, creativity, and practice.

We discussed creativity as a path to healing, or at least, tried to stay of topic (😆). Jai is a sensitive, animated and multi-passionate person whom I find I have a lot in common with! So… yeah. The discussion went in many directions, but , I think, all of them lively and pertinent to what we seek to do here, which is to Take Time for Life… It was gratifying! Thank you for such an inspiring conversation!

I can’t believe it Thursday. Almost at the end of the week folks! Tomorrow is another day ☺️

Have a good one!

Soso 🌎

___________________

Thank you , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , and many others for tuning into my live video with ! Join me for my next live video in the app.

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Powerful Voices | Fred Wellman - A Lifetime of Service, A Fighter for Missouri

Nick Paro — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 19:00:23 GMT

Voices in Review

Nick sat down with Fred Wellman — retired Army lieutenant colonel, former Lincoln Project executive director, and the newly minted Democratic nominee in Missouri’s 2nd Congressional District — two weeks after Wellman won his primary. Wellman traces his run to what he calls his “split screen moment” last June: Congress arguing over how much SNAP and Medicaid to cut while smearing recipients as loafers, set against Jeff Bezos’s $56 million wedding in Venice. His own 27-year-old son, a full-time bartender, qualified for Medicaid at the time. He puts the district’s losses under what he calls the big billionaire bill at 21,000 to 25,000 Missourians stripped of health coverage, and he charges that incumbent Ann Wagner — 13 years in office, no town halls, a net worth he cites at roughly $26 million per Quiver Quantitative — knows better and votes for it anyway. That is the sharpest thing he says all hour: not that Wagner is a fool, but that she isn’t. “Don’t lie to me. Don’t lie to my face and tell me you care and then vote against my best interest.”

The center of the conversation is disability. Nick raised the Say No to Crip Crow campaign he runs with the Disability Community for Democracy and asked Wellman directly whether he would codify the 1999 Olmstead protections into the Americans with Disabilities Act. Wellman said yes without qualification, then spent ten minutes on why — caregiver support that expires on a renewal cycle, home care workers who are immigrants losing status, and a deliberate choice of vocabulary. He says “warehousing,” not institutionalizing, because “it’s a place to forget what’s there,” and he named Stephen Miller as the architect. Both men are 100% disabled veterans, and Wellman’s answer to the perennial fraud argument is what his fiancée calls an “N of one”: build enforcement to catch the outlier, don’t demolish the system that serves hundreds of thousands. He closed on the USS Abraham Lincoln — sailors kept at sea because, in his telling, the administration burned the alliances and soft power that made port calls possible — and on a day-one agenda: end the tariffs, repeal the trade emergency, ban congressional stock and prediction-market trading, and open subpoena-backed investigations. If you want the through-line, it’s the one Nick named out loud: humanity is not for debate.

People, Orgs, and Terms Mentioned

People:

Fred Wellman — Democratic nominee for Missouri’s 2nd Congressional District; retired Army lieutenant colonel and 100% disabled veteran.
Ann Wagner — the Republican incumbent in MO-02, in office 13 years; Wellman’s opponent.
Nieta Green — CEO and founder of the Disability Community for Democracy, present in the live chat.
Stephen Miller — named by Wellman as the driver behind the June DOJ memo targeting Olmstead.
Elizabeth Dole — former senator whose foundation Wellman worked with on military caregivers.

Organizations / Programs:

Disability Community for Democracy — the disability-rights org running the Say No to Crip Crow campaign; Nick serves as framing director.
The Lincoln Project — Wellman’s former executive directorship, where he worked to peel veterans away from Trump.
Elizabeth Dole Foundation — focuses on military caregivers, the family members caring for wounded and ill service members.
Quiver Quantitative — the analytics source Wellman cites for Wagner’s roughly $26 million net worth.

Terms / Concepts:

Olmstead — the 1999 Supreme Court decision that ended forced institutionalization and required states to provide in-home care services.
Crip Crow — the campaign’s name for the re-segregation of disabled people through forced institutionalization.
Warehousing — Wellman’s chosen word for institutionalization, meaning storage designed so the public forgets who is inside.
“Strong floor, no ceiling” — Wellman’s framing for a social safety net that lifts people without capping what they can become.
“N of one” — his rebuttal to fraud arguments: one abuser doesn’t justify dismantling a system serving millions.

Sources & References

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Listening Louder | Mental Health of Those Who Serve

Nick Paro — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 16:32:19 GMT

Nick Paro and Nieta Greene devoted this episode to conditions aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln and what they call the disabling effects of the current Iran conflict. Nick, an Afghanistan veteran, said the crew spent over 250 days at sea with no port call, lost hygiene supplies and mail service, worked shifts of up to 16 hours, and faced fuel-contaminated water — conditions he ties to multiple reported attempts by service members to go overboard. Both hosts said the crew was due home in May and instead received extended orders with no end date; Nick noted that roughly 5,000 family members pressed the Secretary of the Navy, that members of Congress have called for a full debriefing, and that the USS George Washington is deploying as a replacement, leaving the Pacific without a carrier group. Nieta, who noted that National Recovery Month begins September 1 and spoke about her own psychiatric hospitalization and her brother’s Marine Corps service, criticized national disability organizations for their silence and raised ICE detentions of deployed members’ relatives as a breach of the family care plans the military itself requires. Both cited cuts to VA mental health and rating services as a compounding risk, pointed to Major Watson — whom Nick interviewed recently — as an officer who put a nearly 20-year career on the line to name what he called impeachable offenses, and closed by asking Congress to pass an authorization for use of military force.

Key Takeaways

Call your members of Congress and demand a debriefing on the Abraham Lincoln deployment and a vote on an authorization for use of military force; Nick’s position is that no lawful authorization for the Iran conflict exists.
Register or donate at Veterans Fighting Fascism for the November 11 Veterans Day Democracy March
Track the Say No to Crip Crow campaign.

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The One Who Stood For the Oath We Swore

Nick Paro — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 17:01:58 GMT

The first thing Maj. Jason Watson wants you to understand is that what he did on the Capitol steps was not a good thing. He said it plainly: this is not a first to be celebrated, it is not “oh, goody, we had a military member do this.” An active duty officer had to throw away a career to say out loud what tens of millions of Americans already know, and the only reason it landed the way it did is that nobody else was doing it. He was explicit that other service members should not copy him — there are legal pathways to refuse illegal orders, and the people who should be stopping those orders are the ones in the chain of command with the authority to say no, not the person at the trigger. He asked members who can stomach staying in to stay in, because a military hollowed out of people who understand what is happening is how you end up with a military that looks like ICE. What he did was an act of defiance aimed at us, not a model for them.

If you take the courage and leave the assignment, you’ve missed the whole point.

The assignment starts with red lines. Maj. Watson’s argument is that a person who has never defined the moment at which they will act has already decided to do nothing — they’ve outsourced their freedom to whoever shows up to defend it. He defined his in advance: would this president defy a 9-0 Supreme Court ruling? He did, in April, and the Oval Office victory lap after the Kilmar Abrego Garcia decision made the contempt unmistakable. The one he didn’t see coming was the murder of Alex Pretti — the second in a sequence, filmed, with a government narrative so far from what any American could see and hear with their own eyes that the gaslighting itself became the line. That’s the exercise. Not a mood, not a feeling that things are bad. A specific line, named in advance, with an answer attached to it. Because the checks and balances were never built for a President who tests every boundary and waits to be told no, and you do not need the Supreme Court’s permission to recognize unconstitutional conduct when you’re looking straight at it.

So here’s what he’s actually asking, and it’s smaller than you’re bracing for. The Trump regime is weak. The projection of strength is what a shrinking minority requires to keep ruling from a position of weakness, and Congress still works for us — if we genuinely demanded removal and held our representatives accountable for answering to us, we would be rid of this government. The only thing standing in the way is the perception that it’s impossible and the unwillingness to be uncomfortable. There is something you could be doing right now that you are not. Take that step. You don’t know whether it will be enough, because you haven’t taken it. And for those of us already in the fight, Keira Havens of gave Maj. Watson the line that should reorganize the rest of our year: it is not enough to be right, you have to be effective.

Brave is not the metric. Sincere is not the metric. Ask whether what you’re doing is working, and if there’s something more effective available to you, go do that instead. Millions have shown resolve. It isn’t enough yet. The hardest step is the first one — after that, you’ll want the next.

We’re done being sick of this shit, so now we’re doing this shit.

—

More with Maj. Watson

On Monday, August 17th, Maj. Watson made his first nationally televised public appearance on CNN’s Outfront with Erin Burnett stating clearly that Trump ‘has failed us’ and calls for Impeachment, Conviction, and Removal.
sat down for A Discussion with Major Jason Watson.
You can find previous writings by Maj. Watson on Defenders of Our Republic.

Nick’s Notes

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Chronically Illing Out | E43 - Letting Go Of the Self Judgement

Nick Paro — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 18:42:22 GMT

Ch-Illing Out in Review

Today’s conversation opens where the guilt actually lives: not just in the flare itself but in the apology to the self that follows it. Soso returns after two months away, mid-flare, and asks Nick the question the show keeps circling — how do you accept a limit when the person you’re disappointing is your kid? Our answer: reframing it. Nick names the 80-hour weeks he once called success and now calls a failure to listen to his own body, and Stephanie sharpens it into the episode’s best line: this is “needing an individual solution to a systemic problem.” Beth, waiting since February on a disability claim and heading to two assessment appointments, arrives at the same place from the other side — “I would rather have nothing than to struggle to keep everything.” That reframing is what makes the back half of our discussion cohere rather than veer — because when the conversation turns to an Omaha school district issuing shock gloves to safety officers, and to Arkansas’s Eli’s Law mandating audio recorders in locker rooms, the panel is still talking about the same thing: institutions that answer human need with control. Nick’s counter is a budget argument as much as a moral one — counselors, school psychologists, smaller classes. “It’s people, not surveillance.” Which means the self-judgment and the shock glove share a root: a society that treats a body’s limits as a problem to be disciplined.

Disclaimer: Chronically Illing Out is a podcast and weekly roundtable discussion that provides a safe space for real chronic illness and mental health conversations—by people with lived experience. We are not trained professionals—and we do not claim to be—rather, we discuss our stories and current events to build community and solidarity. Know that you are not alone—and if you are in crisis, call/text 988.

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Intelligent Masculinity | With Sean Talbeaux

Nick Paro — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 15:27:10 GMT

“Men need examples. We need to see other men doing the thing so that we can have permission to do the thing.”
~ Sean Talbeaux ~

Masculinity In Review

Sean Talbeaux reached out to Nick Paro cold, and said on air that doing so terrified him. That admission sets the terms for the whole hour. Sean writes What Doesn’t Change on Substack, runs wilderness and psychedelic men’s retreats out of Portland, and coaches men one-on-one in five-month containers he deliberately refuses to extend. His argument is that Intelligent Masculinity has been doing the intellectual half of the work well and the embodied half barely at all — that men are, as he puts it, “really, really good at staying in our heads about” masculinity. This episode is the correction: a conversation about what changes when men stop analyzing their conditioning and start noticing their own breathing.

The clearest through-line is Sean’s account of what patriarchy actually charges men. Not privilege lost, but capacity destroyed: “What it costs men is our humanity. Because we’re specifically taught to not empathize.” He describes the training as nervous-system deep — men learn, he says, “that we might die if we feel.” That framing reroutes a familiar argument. The manosphere, in Sean’s reading, isn’t primarily an ideology problem; it’s a supply problem. Men have real needs for connection and no direct route to meeting them, so they take the sideways one that Reddit and the grift economy have made cheap and available. Naming it that way makes the fix concrete rather than moral — build better containers, and the bad ones lose their monopoly.

Sean’s critique of the men’s-work industry itself is the sharpest material in the episode, and it lands harder because he’s an insider. The retreats are expensive, and the rooms are middle- to upper-class, white, and middle-aged — he had to scholarship his way into spaces he now leads. The rites-of-passage franchises fare no better: he names the ManKind Project and Sacred Sons as models that arrive with a borrowed framework and impose it, which he experienced as “you’re not contacting me at all.” His alternative is almost aggressively minimal. He removes the agenda entirely and tells men in his circles they don’t have to be vulnerable, don’t have to share, don’t have to feel anything. For men whose entire conditioning is a list of things they have to do, the absence of one more obligation is the intervention.

That minimalism pays off in the part of the episode Nick pushes hardest on — whether any of it survives contact with ordinary life. Sean’s answer is that it doesn’t transfer as technique, it transfers as example. He describes a windshield-replacement call that turned into a conversation about a man’s reactivity toward his daughter and ended with “do you want to be friends?” He describes young men interrupting his coffee-shop conversations to say they aspire to talk like that. Both stories argue the same point: the bottleneck isn’t willingness, it’s visibility. And his four-part framework — awareness, relational depth, expansion, integration — is built to be practiced in public rather than performed at a retreat, which is why it starts with something as unglamorous as noticing tightness in your chest.

Nick and Sean converge on the episode’s most uncomfortable claim, and neither softens it. Feminism is not the problem; the danger is what happens when men conditioned across generations to hold power lose it inside a single one. Sean is explicit that this contraction is producing the Trumps, the Hegseths, the Putins, and the ICE agents he cites at Delaney Hall — and equally explicit that managing it is not women’s work to do. Nick lands it plainly: men have an inherent space for existing, “but it’s a lot smaller than we have been taught that it really is. And that’s okay.” The capacity Sean wants men to build is precisely the capacity to hear that without contracting.

Sean Talbeaux is a somatic coach, commercial fisherman, woodworker, and father of a four-year-old who has spent more than a decade in men’s circles, and he has just released Bowing In, a guide covering eight domains of a man’s life for men who want to start this work without a therapist. He and Nick ran past the hour and stopped mid-thought, with a return conversation already promised. What he adds to this series is the missing lower half of it — the argument that intelligent masculinity, if it stays a good idea men agree with, was never going to be enough.

~ Nick Paro

Sources & References

Sean Talbeaux, What Doesn’t Change — Substack
Bowing In — Sean’s guide across eight domains of a man’s life
Joanna Macy’s “Great Turning,” referenced as the frame for the larger shift away from capitalist patriarchy
Ann Kramer’s wholeness framework, from her earlier Intelligent Masculinity appearance

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Diogenes Club | E27 - A System Meant To Harm

Nick Paro — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 21:01:55 GMT

Diogenes In Review

Nick and Eric open on the USS Abraham Lincoln, where the crew has passed 250 consecutive days at sea against a normal carrier rotation of 180 days, with two days ashore in Oman and reporting from the Navy Times and Stars and Stripes describing half-cup rice rations, broken plumbing, no hot water, no soap or toothpaste, and thwarted suicide attempts. Nick, a veteran, refuses the “logistics failure” framing outright: “There is a difference between operational management and just cruelty, and what’s going on on the Abraham Lincoln, and probably other vessels too, is cruelty.” Eric puts numbers behind it — service-branch suicide rates from 18 to 31 per 100,000 — and names the political response, including Pete Hegseth calling the reporting fake news while Senators Blumenthal and Gallego and Congressmen Crow and Levin demand an oversight inquiry. They read the Lincoln as the visible edge of something wider, agency by agency, from a gutted State Department to the money pulled out of the Forestry Service and the National Park Service.

The second half is where the episode earns its title. Nick reports that a TikTok video of his was taken down under community guidelines for using the word “eugenics” to describe this week’s executive order breaking the MMR vaccine into single-antigen shots — so the hosts adopt “gene pool management” as the term that survives moderation, and use it for the rest of the show. Eric, the medical voice, walks the practical demolition: no licensed standalone measles, mumps, or rubella vaccine exists in the U.S., Merck discontinued Attenuvax, Mumpsvax, and Meruvax II in 2009 and 2010, the order gives HHS 90 days to produce an availability plan that cannot conjure a supply chain, and the buried foreign-manufacturer clause contradicts both the safety rationale and the administration’s own America First posture. From there they turn to what a counter-plan looks like: Eric’s read that Project 2025 has completed 283 of 532 tracked recommendations without a single act of Congress, that most of the near-term damage runs through rule-making rather than statute, and that a 52-seat Senate is the number that stalls it. Nick’s demand is narrower and harder — have the bills, the nominees, and the Supreme Court list written before you win, and stop calling it courage when a politician simply does the job.

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Intelligent Masculinity | Lawrence Winnerman is Back!

Nick Paro — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 18:57:53 GMT

“What if I’m just a fucking grasshopper? What if that’s what I am? Am I not good enough? I mean, grasshoppers exist. Grasshoppers are valid. Grasshoppers bring value to the world.”
~ Lawrence Winnerman ~

Masculinity In Review

This discussion never says the word “masculinity” until the last ten minutes, and that turns out to be the point. Nick Paro brought Lawrence Winnerman back to talk about better humaning, and what they got instead was a ninety-minute demonstration of it — we follow each other’s tangents through Dungeon Crawler Carl, bioweapons research, Apple’s AI strategy, and a children’s fable about an ant. Watch what we do with the hour and you get a working model of the thing Intelligent Masculinity keeps circling: men talking about ideas without performing certainty, and about themselves without apology.

Lawrence’s account of how he writes ends up being our theme throughout. He describes himself as a “pantser” — a writer who works without an outline, letting the story reveal itself — and then admits that his characters feel like real people in another dimension telling him how their lives go. That sounds like a craft anecdote until he explains what he found there: writing a novel set in the fractured United States of 2042, he realized every one of his main characters was queer, and decided to make that his signature rather than a discovery to be edited around. He is 56, and says it has taken him this long to conclude “this is what I’m supposed to be doing.” The self-knowledge arrived through the work, not before it — which is the opposite of how men are usually told to find themselves.

The AI material is where Lawrence is most useful and most alarming, because he is not speaking as a critic outside the industry. Twenty-five years at Microsoft and Amazon ended with him pushed out of a tech program-management career by the same technology he now uses daily; he has a Claude subscription, taught himself MCP integrations and skill creation, and built a working app — Moondark.app — without knowing how to build apps. That dual position gives his warning weight. He walks through a Stanford result in which an LLM trained on bacteriophage genomes generated thousands of novel designs, 300 were synthesized, and 16 of them lived and replicated. His conclusion is not that AI is bad but that the frenzy is driven by the same scarcity logic as bioweapons and nuclear research: get it before they do, whoever they are.

The counter-argument he offers is genuinely structural, and it’s the most practical thing in this discussion. He splits the field into builders and layerers — labs racing to own all human information versus companies betting intelligence becomes cheap and ubiquitous and the interface is what matters. He puts Apple in the second camp and reads its apparent AI lag as a deliberate bet rather than a failure. Nick extends the frame outward: the United States does not have to win the model race to matter, it can be the layer that learns from nations already regulating AI and digital privacy better. Lawrence pairs it with concrete policy — a digital bill of rights covering your likeness, your voice print, your DNA, and a sovereign wealth fund modeled on Alaska’s Permanent Fund, taking public stake in the frontier labs that trained on all of our writing. That is what a reimagined economy looks like when someone stops describing the disaster and starts drafting the alternative.

And then there is the grasshopper. Lawrence’s closing thought — that he hates the ant-and-grasshopper parable because it teaches children to aspire out of their own nature — lands as the episode’s real argument about men. The parable is the whole script: be industrious, be useful, produce, and if you make art or play the fiddle you are the cautionary tale. His rejection of it is not a rejection of work. It is a refusal of the premise that there is one correct shape for a life. Nick’s addition sharpens it further — do not let the ant tell you that you cannot become a butterfly either — and the two of them arrive, through a fable, at a version of masculinity that has room for transformation in it.

Lawrence Winnerman writes The Hinge and the Near Field, co-hosts The Daily Whatever with Dana DuBois, and serves as COO of Blue Amp Media. This conversation covered his serialized queer science fiction, the Rewiring the Republic series analyzing 43-odd fixes for American democracy, the case for an integrative economy built with Ann Kramer, and a hard-eyed read on where AI takes us. He is exactly the kind of guest this series needs — a man who found out what he was in his fifties, said it out loud, and then spent the rest of the hour arguing that everyone else should get to do the same.

~ Nick Paro

Sources & References

The Hinge and the Near Field — Lawrence Winnerman’s Substack, home to his serialized novel and the Rewiring the Republic series
Moondark.app — the void-of-course moon tracker Winnerman built with Claude
Nuclear War: A Scenario and its follow-up on biological war, by Annie Jacobsen — the books driving Winnerman’s threat assessment
Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman — the LitRPG series anchoring the episode’s opening discussion of tragedy and craft

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