Archive for category Commentary
I’m Not Saying Neil deGrasse Tyson Is an Idiot
Posted by Bill Storage in Commentary, History of Science on March 19, 2026
A clip from a 2023 interview with Neil deGrasse Tyson is making the rounds. The key move comes here:
“you can say Trump is an idiot… get him out of there. But wait a minute. There’s still the matter of the 80 million people who voted for him.”
That “but wait a minute” frames the opposition view in a compressed, caricatured form, then pivots to what Tyson wants to emphasize, the scale of voter support. It’s a familiar courtroom tactic: summarize the other side just enough to dismiss it.
Grammatically, it is steelmanning. He states the strongest version of the anti-Trump position without owning the offense, then challenges the adequacy of the idea that we can “just swap the leader.” The logic doesn’t require him to endorse the insult, only to note that it fails to persuade tens of millions of voters.
The framing isn’t neutral. My Kuhn/Feyerabend reflex kicks in whenever a scientist steps into politics. Kuhn reminds us that observation is theory-laden. Tyson’s background inclines him toward a systems view, voters as the underlying structure, leaders as surface phenomena. That’s a perspective, a model, a theory. Evidentiary support?
Feyerabend helps with the second layer. Tyson doesn’t speak as just another citizen. He speaks as a public scientist whose words hold epistemic weight because of a lab coat. He carries borrowed authority. In a lab, that authority is constrained and earned. In politics, it floats freely. What sounds like analysis can double as worldview advocacy with a credentialed accent.
Tyson’s brand is built on empiricism – evidence-based thinking. When he wades into polarized territory, the man-of-science hat amplifies his inferences beyond what he literally says. The clip explicitly avoids calling Trump and voters idiots. Yet by staging a hypothetical view as “Trump is an idiot, remove him,” it hands audiences a simplified target. In the echo chambers where the clip circulates, the move often completes itself. The conclusion becomes, “people who disagree are ignorant,” now tacitly endorsed by an astrophysicist.
From what surfaced in reactions to the Tyson clip, viewers do leap to exactly the conclusion: “yeah, those voters are uneducated (or they would know Trump is an idiot).” Comments frame large voter blocs as gullible, anti-intellectual hilljacks, with Tyson positioned as the authoritative validator. The authority halo makes it potent. The leap feels licensed because the astrophysicist said (implied) it.
Let’s examine the alternative Tyson the scientist might have taken. Treat the 80 million votes not as a rhetorical endpoint but as a dataset. What motivates them? Economic stress, distrust of institutions, cultural alignment, media ecosystems? Which of those factors are well supported, which are not? That would model inquiry rather than closure. It would look like science, not like New York Times propaganda.
Instead, he treats the voter count as brute fact. The “spinning wheel” metaphor does the work. It gestures at a cycle of anger without examining its causes. American political theory has long assumed exactly this kind of friction, not as a bug but as a feature of competing viewpoints. The mess is structural. Has Tyson read the Federalist Papers?
Tyson teaches, by implication, that you can borrow the prestige of science to shortcut messy social inquiry. When expertise bleeds unchecked into values-laden domains, it inadvertently – in the most charitable interpretation of his words – credentials tribal intuitions instead of challenging them.
From the lens of science, the issue isn’t Tyson’s conclusion but his method. When scientific authority migrates without marking its limits, it can validate the intuitions it ought to probe. Listeners don’t just hear the argument, they hear who is making it.
Public scientists don’t need to stay in their lane, but when they step out, the burden shifts. They should, above all else, reinforce the habit of interrogating assumptions with rigor. Less metaphor, more mechanism. Otherwise the lab coat becomes too persuasive, for all the wrong reasons.
Avuncular Aloofness as Superstructure: New York Times’ Khamenei Framing through a Marxist Lens
Posted by Bill Storage in Commentary on March 3, 2026
New York Times, February 28, 2026: “Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Autocratic Cleric Who Made Iran a Regional Power, Is Dead at 86”:
“With his spectacles, Palestinian kaffiyeh, long robes and silver beard, Ayatollah Khamenei cast himself as a religious scholar as well as a writer and translator of works on Islam. He affected an avuncular and magnanimous aloofness, running the country from a perch above the jousting of daily politics.”
Washington Post, February 28, 2026: “Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, is dead at 86”:
“With his bushy white beard and easy smile, Ayatollah Khamenei cut a more avuncular figure in public than his perpetually scowling but much more revered mentor, and he was known to be fond of Persian poetry and classic Western novels, especially Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables.”
Khamenei was killed on February 28, 2026, in joint U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran. The New York Times led its piece with his avuncular and magnanimous aloofness. Oh, and a religious scholar. The Washington Post opened its obit with a bushy white beard and easy smile. A soft spot for Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. Both papers called him “avuncular.” Anything odd there? No?
I read Karl Marx closely. Some of my fellow Marxists forget Marx when it’s convenient. You all know the mechanism: the narrative superstructure serves the interest. What gets foregrounded – the beard, the smile, the poetry – and what gets backgrounded is never neutral. It’s selection bias dressed up as multi-perspective objectivity and eloquence.
If I learned one thing from Das Kapital, it is that interest controls that lens. What you choose to put in the first paragraph is the tell. What you omit, or bury at the bottom of the piece, says more. He exported death, you disgusting rag. Here’s the omitted ledger that actually defined the man who held absolute power from 1989 until last week:
The poetry was real enough. It defines Khamenei’s 37-year rule just as much as Hitler’s watercolor hobby defined his. Yet these respected journals lead with the his “easy smile” the same way they opened Baghdadi obits with “austere religious scholar.”
This garbage is sheer institutional reflex. The Times’ default mode for anti-Western authoritarians is the “complex man of culture” framing. Raw moral clarity (“ruthless theocrat who turned Iran into a prison state and terror sponsor”) must be too binary for the elite reader. Iranians danced in the streets and shouted from rooftops; the Times writers stroked his bushy beard. Was that acknowledging complexity? Or just laundering priority. Ho ho ho.
These papers once prided themselves on skepticism toward power. Yet when the power is cloaked in anti-Western theocratic rhetoric, the victims become statistics lower in the column. The audience might skew toward people who prize balance and distrust moralistic takes as simplistic or right-wing. The Times’ superstructure of polite, nuanced prose protects the base. They wouldn’t want to alienate certain geopolitical narratives of their intellectual base. What they sell as the bravery of complexity is just cowardice and pandering dressed up as erudition.
I canceled after the Baghdadi religious scholar stuff. John, how can you still read this shit?
Postscript Mar. 4 – Supplemental rant:
The New York Times is held to have high standards in prose. Forget the politics for a minute. Both obits, NYT and WaPo, open with “With his…” and then wander into complete loss of agency. How do those spectacles relate to magnanimity, ruling from a perch, and death to America?
Are they using “with” as a preposition? Or as a false subordinating conjunction, or a false relative pronoun? It’s a multipurpose crutch, to pad length, to layer innuendo and dilute syntactic warrant. Cowards.
The prepositional phrase it introduces is used adverbially to set scene, but it functions like a weak subordinating clause or appositive, tacked on to introduce a description without committing to a strong main verb anchor. That is, to avoid taking responsibility for their underlying message. Karl Marx gets it.
Given their shared use of “avuncular” and their imputation-laden abuse of prepositional phrases, I wonder if the two rags share an uncle, AI-incense or the like.
Anger As Argument – the Facebook Dividend
Posted by Bill Storage in Commentary, Ethics on January 16, 2026
1. Your partner has ordered the trolley conductor to drive away. If you order her to step out of the vehicle, and you briefly set foot on the track, you can repeatedly shoot her in the head and send the trolley careening out of control, possibly taking out another commie liberal, and the president will hail you as a hero. What do you do?
2. You’re at a crossroads and the only way to save your governor’s career and reputation is to take one for the team. Out of nowhere the frazzled ICE agent you’ve been threatening for days steps onto the trolley track. You can choose to sacrifice yourself in a final heroic act, slamming into that threat, keeping the governor safe and leaving your child an orphan. Do it now, or let Trump’s chaos reign. What’s your move?
The original trolley problems aimed at making you think. It was a philosophical puzzle used to explore moral reasoning, utilitarianism and deontology. Both versions above turn the trolley problem into a caricature. One paints federal force as the unstoppable threat that must be violently halted, the other paints civil disobedience as the lethal danger that must be neutralized. Each is designed to elicit tribal fervor.
These caricatures work on Facebook not because they clarify moral structure but because they flatter the reader and stage moral theater. The audiences already know who the villain is and get to enjoy the feeling of having seen through it all. Smug sarcasm supplies the laugh track.
What’s most depressing is the way such “humor” gets conscripted. Old fashioned wit punctured pretension and left everyone a bit exposed. This humor is ritualized sneer, a war cry that signals membership. Moral superiority and righteous indignation arrive prepackaged.
Whichever side you pick, your rage is justified. Anger becomes proof of righteousness. If I can mock you, I don’t need to understand you. If I can make others laugh at you, I don’t need to persuade them. Emotional reward comes first, the argument is decorative trim. I am furious. Therefore the offense must be enormous. My fury is not only justified but morally required. Anger stops being a response and becomes evidence. The hotter it burns, the stronger the proof. On Facebook this logic is amplified.
Philosophy, ethics, and moral reasoning slow things down. Facebook collapses time, context, and agency into a single cinematic moment. Pull the lever and cue the likes. Facebook rewards train people out of moral curiosity. Once sarcasm becomes the marker of insight, asking a genuine question is read as weakness. The platform punishes those who don’t escalate.
If something is free, the product is you. Facebook loves your self-justifying rage because rage compresses so well. A qualified objection is no match for indignation. Agreement becomes a reflex response. Once anger functions as proof, escalation is inevitable. Disagreement cannot be good faith. Arguments cease to be about the original claim and switch to the legitimacy of self-authenticating anger itself.
Facebook provides the perfect stage because it removes the costs that normally discipline rage. There’s no awkward pause, just instant feedback and dopamine.
To be taken seriously, you have to be outraged. You have to perform belief that the stakes are absolute. If your performance is good, you convince yourself. Likes makes right. Everything is existential. Restraint is complicity. The cycle continues. Facebook counts the clicks and sells them to Progressive Insurance, Apple, and Amazon.
___
Via Randall Munroe, xkcd
Crystals Know What Day It Is
Posted by Bill Storage in Commentary, Engineering & Applied Physics on January 9, 2026
Shelley, raising an eyebrow, asked me if I knew anything about energy. She was our departmental secretary at Boeing. I pictured turbomachinery, ablative dissipation, and aircraft landings. Yes, I said, some aspects. She handed me a pamphlet from Adam, an engineer in Propulsion. He was moonlighting as an energy consultant. That’s what the cover said. California law was clear. Boeing couldn’t stop him from doing whatever he wanted on his own time.
The pamphlet explained how energy flowed between people and from crystals to people, but only natural crystals. I flipped a few pages. You could convert a man-made crystal to a natural one by storing it under a pyramid for 30 days. Thirty. Giza pyramids? Or would cardboard do? Would crystals know about days? Would they choose a number tied to the sun? Twelve months in a year. Or the moon? Or a number that changed over geologic time? A billion years ago, when days were 18 hours long, did man-made crystals take 40 days to cure?
Shelley asked what I thought. I said I thought he wanted in her pants. He was an engineer, trained in physics and reasoning. He worked with wind tunnels. Adam knows better and thinks you don’t, I said. Shelley shook her head. She knew I was being charitable. Adam believed that stuff.
On a ski trip with Garrett Turbine employees, Melissa insisted we heat water on the stove. Microwave ovens, she said, rearranged the molecular structure of water. Unsafe. Melissa designs auxiliary power units for jets.
They’re not dumb. They can engineer turbomachinery that doesn’t end in a water landing. People rarely run a single epistemic operating system. Rules are brutal in the wind tunnel. Models either converge or they don’t. Reality testifies. In the personal realm, reality can be more forgiving. You can hold nonsense for decades without a compressor stall.
Some of it looks like motivated belief. Whatever his intentions toward Shelley, something about identity and control was at work. Crystals cast him as holding esoteric knowledge. The thinking followed the role.
Engineers also learn to trust models. That works when physics pushes back. Less so when nothing ever does.
Success doesn’t help. The GE90 turbine’s in-flight shutdown rate is about one per million flight hours on the triple seven. Do that well for long enough and humility thins. An ER doc once told me surgeons are often right and never uncertain. Trained for one, rewarded for the other.
Some ideas live where no one checks them. There’s no Flight Readiness Review for microwave theories. No stress test. The questions about days and crystals never get asked.
What, then, do microwaves do to water? Start with the physics. Microwave ovens radiate photons that excite rotational modes in polar molecules like water. For quantum reasons, the hydrogen atoms aren’t evenly spaced but sit to one side, like Mickey Mouse ears. The molecule is electrically neutral, but its charge is uneven. That polarity makes water responsive to oscillating electric fields.
Melissa translated water’s dipole moment into “warped molecules.” What actually happens is boring. The hydrogen-bond network jiggles, breaks, reforms, then settles back into the same statistical distribution. Heat water on a stove and it happens even more. Ice made from microwaved water freezes normally. Enzymes and bacteria, testifying by the trillions, vote not guilty.
“Excite” and “rotational modes” sound like structural meddling if you distrust boxes that hum. Adam and Melissa use the right nouns, invoke real properties, and gesture at invisible mechanisms. Heat from a flame feels natural; the word “radiate” smuggles in nuclear anxiety.
Crystal mysticism has roots in real science. Mid-century physics pulled quartz oscillators, piezoelectricity, band gaps, and lasers out of its hat. Crystals turn pressure into voltage, voltage into timekeeping, and sand into computation. LCDs followed: apply a voltage, patterns appear. In that sense, crystals do know time. Order responds to invisible forces. Once imagined as intentional, it drifts right on down, lands in nonsense.
The 30-day pyramid transformation launders mysticism through quasi-engineering constraints. Not “chant until Houtu signals,” but “store for 30 days.” A soak time defined in a spec. It feels procedural rather than occult. When Adam’s unwired crystals track solar days, not sidereal time, the scaffolding shows through.
Asking how Adam’s crystals know what a day is would mean letting astronomy into his pyramid. No one in the kitchen with Melissa demands control samples. The beliefs survive by staying small, domestic, and unreviewed. Engineers are trained to respect reality where reality speaks loud. Elsewhere, we’re free to improvise. The danger is not believing nonsense. It’s knowing the questions that would shatter the spell. And doing nothing.
Don’t Skimp on Shoes
Posted by Bill Storage in Commentary on January 2, 2026
When I was a kid, mom and dad went out for the evening and told me that Frank, whom I hadn’t met, was going to stop by. He was dropping off some coins from his collection. He wanted us to determine whether these gold coins were legitimate, ninety percent gold, “.900 fineness,” as specified by the Coinage Act of 1837.
After the 1974 legalization of private gold ownership in the U.S., demand surged for pre-1933 American gold coins as bullion investments rather than numismatic curiosities. The market became jumpy, especially among buyers who cared only about intrinsic value. Counterfeit U.S. gold coins did exist. They were high-quality struck fakes, not crude castings, and they were made from real ninety percent gold alloy. Counterfeiters melted down common-date coins to produce rarer ones. Gold-plated base-metal fakes also existed, but those were cast, and Frank would never have fallen for them. We know that now. At the time, reliable information was thin on the ground.
The plan was to use Archimedes’ method. We’d weigh the coins, then dunk them in water and measure the displacement. Weight divided by displaced volume gives density. Ninety percent gold with ten percent copper comes out to 17.15 grams per cubic centimeter. Anything lower meant trouble.
The doorbell rang. Frank was a big guy in flannel shirt and jeans. He said he had something for my dad. I told him dad said he’d be coming. Frank handed me a small bag weighing five pounds – avoirdupois, not troy. About fifteen thousand dollars’ worth of gold at the time. You could buy a Corvette coupe, not the cheaper convertible, for six thousand. He handed me the bag, said thanks, and drove off in his pickup truck.
A few years ago I went on a caving trip to the Marble Mountains of northern California. The walk in didn’t look bad on paper. Five or six miles, maybe a couple thousand feet of elevation gain. With camping gear, food, and a load of heavy caving equipment, it turned out to be very bad indeed. I underestimated it, and paid for it.
A month before I’d been in Hawaii hiking to and through lava tubes in a recent flow, not the friendly pahoehoe kind but the boot-shredding a‘a stuff. A few days there destroyed a decent pair of boots. Desperate to make a big connection between two distant entrances, Doug drove me to Walmart, and I bought one of their industrial utility specials. It would get me through the day. It did. Our lava tube was four miles end to end.
I forgot about my boot situation until the Marble Mountains trip. At camp, as I was cutting sheets of moleskin to armor my feet for the hike out, I met a caver who knew my name and treated me as someone seasoned, someone who ought to know better. He looked down at my feet, laughed, and said, “Storage, you of all people, I figured wouldn’t wear cheap shoes into the mountains.” He figured wrong. I wore La Sportivas on the next trip.
What struck me as odd, I told my dad when he got home, wasn’t that Frank trusted a kid with fifteen thousand dollars in gold. It was that he drove a beat-up truck. I mentioned the rust.
“Yeah,” dad said. “But it’s got new tires.”
Robert Reich, Genius
Posted by Bill Storage in Commentary on December 25, 2025
Is Robert Reich a twit, or does he just play one for money on the internet?
I never cared about Monica Lewinsky. Bill Clinton was a big-picture sort of president, like Ronald Reagan, oddly. Flawed personally, but who are we to be critical? Marriage to Hillary might test anyone’s resolve with cigars and Big Macs. Yet somehow Clinton elevated Robert Reich to Secretary of Labor. Maybe he thought Panetta and Greenspan could keep the ideologue in check.
Reich later resigned and penned Locked in the Cabinet, a “memoir” devoured by left-wing academics despite its fabricated dialogues – proven mismatches with transcripts and C-SPAN tapes. Facts are optional when the narrative sings.
Fast-forward: Reich posted this on December 23:
“Around 70% of the U.S. economy depends on consumer spending. As wealth concentrates in the richest 10%, the rest of America can’t afford to buy enough to keep the economy running.”
Classic Reich: tidy slogan, profound vibe, zero nuance, preached to the CNN faithful.
Yes, consumption is ~70% of GDP. But accounting isn’t causation. Saying the economy “runs on” consumption is like saying a car runs on exhaust because that’s what comes out the back.
Wealth concentration doesn’t vanish spending:
- High earners save more per dollar, true – but they do spend (luxury, services) and, crucially, invest.
- Investment isn’t hoarded in vaults; it funds factories, tech, startups, real estate – creating jobs and future demand. U.S. history proves inequality and growth coexist.
- The economy isn’t a closed moral ecosystem: Government spending, exports, debt expansion, asset bubbles, and credit substitution all prop things up, sometimes for a long time and sometimes disastrously. Reich’s “can’t afford” is doing heroic rhetorical labor here.
Reich smuggles in a fixed “enough” consumption – for full employment? Asset bubbles? Entitlements? That’s the debate, not premise.
His real point is political: Extreme inequality risks instability in a consumption-heavy model. Fair to argue. But he serves it as revealed truth, as if Keynes himself chiseled it.
Reich champions “labor and farmers” while blaming Trump’s tariffs for the price of beef. Thank you Robert, but, as Deming argued (unsuccessfully) to US auto makers, some people will pay more for quality. Detroit disagreed, and Toyota cleaned their clocks. Yes, I’m willing to pay more for local beef. I’m sure Bill Clinton would, had he not gone all vegan on us. Moderation, Bill, like Groucho said about his cigar.
Reich’s got bumper-sticker economics. Feels good, thinks shallow.
Lawlessness Is a Choice, Bugliosi Style
Posted by Bill Storage in Commentary on December 8, 2025
Sloppiness is a choice. Miranda Devine’s essay, Lawlessness Is a Choice, in the October Imprimis is a furious and wordy indictment of progressive criminal-justice policies. Its central claim is valid enough: rising crime in Democratic cities is a deliberate ideological choice. Her piece has two fatal defects, at least from the perspective of a class I’m taking on on persuasive writing. Her piece is argued badly, written worse. Vincent Bugliosi, who prosecuted Charles Manson, comes to mind – specifically, the point made in Outrage, his book about the OJ Simpson trial. Throwing 100 points at the wall dares your opponent to knock down the three weakest, handing them an apparent victory over the entire case.
Devine repeats “lawlessness is a choice” until it sounds like a car alarm. She careens from New York bail reform to Venezuelan gangs to Antifa assassination. Anecdotes are piled on statistics piled on sarcasm until you’re buried under heap of steaming right-wing indignation.
Opponents are “nutty,” “deranged,” “unhinged,” or “turkeys who voted for Thanksgiving.” 20 to 25 million “imported criminals.” Marijuana is the harbinger of civilizational collapse. Blue-city prosecutors personally orchestrate subway assaults. Devine violates Bugliosi’s dictum throughout.
Easily shredded claims:
- Unsourced assertions of “20-25 million imported criminals.”
- Blanket opposition to marijuana decriminalization, conflating licensed dispensaries with open-air drug markets and public defecation as equally obvious “broken windows” offenses, even though two-thirds of Americans now support legal pot and several red states have thriving regulated markets.
- Stating that Antifa was plotting to assassinate Trump with no citation.
- Ignoring red-state violent-crime rates that sometimes exceed those of the blue cities she condemns.
A competent MSNBC segment producer – there may be one for all I know – could demolish the above in five minutes and then declare Devine’s whole law-and-order critique “conspiracy theory.” The stronger arguments – recidivism under New York’s bail reform, collapse of subway policing after 2020, the chilling effect of the Daniel Penny prosecution, the measurable crime drop after Trump’s 2025 D.C. National Guard deployment – are drowned in the noise.
The tragedy is that Devine is mostly right. Progressive reforms since 2020 (no-cash bail with no risk assessment, de facto decriminalization of shoplifting under $950, deliberate non-enforcement of quality-of-life offenses) have produced predictable disorder. The refusal of elite progressive voices to acknowledge personal agency is corrosive.
Bugliosi would choose his ground and his numbers carefully, conceding obvious points (red states have violent crime too), He wouldn’t be temped to merge every culture-war grievance. Devine chose poorly, and will persuade no one who matters. Now if Bugliosi had written it…
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the defense will tell you that crime spikes in American cities are complicated – poverty, guns, COVID, racism, underfunding. I lay out five undisputed facts, that in the years 2020–2024 major Democratic cities deliberately chose policies that produced disorder. They were warned. When the predicted outcome happened, they denied responsibility. That is not complexity but choice.
Count 1 – New York’s bail reform (2019–2020): The law eliminated cash bail for most misdemeanors and non-violent felonies, and required judges to release defendants with the “least restrictive” conditions. Funding was unchanged. Result: 2020-2023 saw over 10,000 rearrests of people released under the new law for new felonies while awaiting. In 2022 alone, at least 107 people released under bail reform were rearrested for murder or attempted murder. The legislature was warned. They passed it anyway. Choice.
Count 2 – Subway policing collapse: In January 2020 the NYPD had 2,500 uniformed officers assigned to the subway system. By late 2022 it was under 1,000. Felony assaults in the subway system rose 53 % from 2019 to 2023. This was deliberate de-policing ordered by City Hall and the Manhattan DA. Choice.
Count 3 – San Francisco’s Prop 47 and the $950 rule: California reclassified theft under $950 as a misdemeanor. Shoplifting reports in San Francisco rose 300%. Chain pharmacies closed 20 stores, citing unsustainable theft. The legislature refused every attempt to raise the threshold or mandate prosecution. Choice.
Count 4 – The Daniel Penny prosecution: Marine veteran Daniel Penny restrains a man who was screaming threats on a subway car. The man dies. Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg charges Penny with manslaughter. After two years of trial and massive expense, a jury acquits on the top count and deadlocks on the lesser; Bragg drops the case. Message sent: if you intervene to protect others, you roll the dice on court and possible prison. That chilling effect was the entire point of the prosecution. Choice.
Count 5 – The 2025 Washington, D.C. experiment: President Trump federalizes the D.C. National Guard and surges 3,000 troops plus federal agents into high-crime areas. Result in first 100 days: carjackings down 82%, homicides down 41%, robberies down 31% No gun buybacks – just enforcement. When the policy is reversed by court order, the numbers rose again within weeks. Enforcement works; the absence of enforcement is a choice.
Five exhibits, all public record. No unsourced 25-million-migrant claims, no Antifa conspiracy theories, nothing about Colorado potheads. Five policy decisions, five warnings ignored, five measurable explosions in disorder, and one rapid reversal when enforcement returned.
The defense will now tell you all about root causes. But I remind you that no city was forced to remove all consequences for criminal behavior. They were warned. They chose. They own the results. Lawlessness is a choice.
Carving the Eagle
Posted by Bill Storage in Commentary on November 27, 2025
If Ben Franklin had gotten his way, we’d have an edible national bird. Or no one would eat turkey on Thanksgiving. That might be ok by me.
Franklin was obsessed with it. He pushed for the wild turkey as our national bird. “Bird of courage” he said, roasting the bald eagle as having “bad moral character” for stealing fish from hard-working hawks. Imagine Franklin’s Thanksgiving. Either we’d be carving an eagle, or we’d eat ham, and nobody would miss two weeks of dry breast meat.
America, commerce always first, probably opted for turkey because it’s big and easy to farm, once tamed by government subsidy. Franklin lost that round, but he did get his face on the hundred-dollar bill.
“Turkey!” as an insult peaked in the US in the 1980s, due to National Lampoon’s 1975 Gold Turkey, and then Christmas Vacation (1989). It originated in theater. A “turkey” was a flop show that opened on Thanksgiving, anticipating a run til New Year, and closed fast. By the 50s it was niche. Belushi brought it back. Kids still use it.
Despite Franklin, Congress went with the eagle as the official bird, and 250 years later the turkey’s ultimate revenge was becoming the official insult. Turkey was relegated to grocery store and playground.
That’s a truly American outcome. We didn’t crown the turkey, we commodified it, mocked it, and ate it out of habit. Poor Ben. We turned his bird of courage into a riff for failure. For a man who valued thrift, civic virtue, and self-improvement, that must be the final insult.
If Franklin could see us now, he’d shake his head, pocket his hundred, and call us what we’ve become. Turkeys.
It’s the Losers Who Write History
Posted by Bill Storage in Commentary on November 24, 2025
The victors write first drafts. They get to seize archives, commission official chronicles, destroy inconvenient records, and shape the immediate public memory. Take Roman accounts of Carthage and Spanish on the Aztecs. What happens afterward and indefinitely is where Humanities departments play an outsized role in canonization.
Such academics are the relativist high priests of the safe-space seminary – tenured custodians of western-cultural suicide. Their scripture is the ever-shifting DEI bulletin. Credentialed barbarians stand behind at the gates they themselves dismantled. They are moral vacationers who turned the university into a daycare for perpetual adolescents. The new scholastic is the aristocracy of mediocrity. Historicist gravediggers have pronouncing the West dead so they can inherit its estate.
Several mechanisms make this possible. Academic historians, not primary sources – whether Cicero or Churchill – decide which questions are worth asking. Since the 1970s especially, new methodologies like social history, postcolonial studies, gender studies, and critical race theory have systematically shifted focus away from political, military, and diplomatic chronicling toward power structures, marginalized voices, and systemic oppression. These are not neutral shifts. They reflect the political priorities of the post-Nixon academic left, which has dominated western humanities departments since.
Peer-reviewed journals, university presses, hiring committees, and tenure standards are overwhelmingly controlled by scholars who share an ideological range scarcely wider than a breath. Studies of political self-identification among historians routinely show ratios of 20:1 or higher in favor of the left – often contented Marxists. Dissenting or traditional interpretations that challenge revisionist views on colonialism, the Soviet Union, or America’s founding are marginalized, denied publication, and labeled “problematic.” A career is erased overnight.
K-12 and undergraduate curricula worship academic consensus. Here, again, is a coherence theory of truth subjugating the correspondence model. When the consensus changes – when a critical mass of scholars finds an even more apologetic lens – textbooks follow, almost instantly. The portrayal of the European Age of Exploration, for example, went overnight from celebration of discovery to exclusive emphasis on conquest and genocide. American Founding Fathers went from flawed but visionary innovators of a unique government to rich slave-owning hypocrites, especially after the 1619 Project gained academic traction. A generation or two of Humanities college grads have no clue that “rich white man” Alexander Hamilton was born illegitimate in the Caribbean, was a lifelong unambiguous abolitionist, despised the slave-based Southern economic model, and died broke. They don’t know that the atheist Gouverneur Morris at the Constitutional Convention called slavery “a nefarious institution … the curse of heaven on the states where it prevailed.” They don’t know this because they’ve never heard of Gouverneur Morris, the author of the final draft of the Constitution. That’s because Ken Burns never mentions Morris in his histories. It doesn’t fit his caricature. Ken Burns is where intellectuals learn history. His The Vietnam War is assigned in thousands of high-school and college courses as authoritative history.
Modern historians openly admit that they mean their work to serve social justice goals. The past is mined for precedents, cautionary tales, or moral leverage rather than reconstructed for its own sake. The American Historical Association’s own statements have emphasized “reckoning with the past” in explicitly activist language. Howard Zinn (A People’s History of the United States) boasted, “I don’t pretend to be neutral.”
The academic elite – professional mourners at the funeral of the mind they themselves poisoned – have graduated an entire generation who believe Nixon escalated (if not started) the Vietnam War. This is a textbook (literally) case of the academic apparatus quietly rewriting the emphasis of history. Safe-space sommeliers surely have access to original historical data, but their sheep are too docile to demand primary sources. Instead, border patrollers of the settler-colonial imagination serve up moral panic by the pronoun to their trauma-informed flock.
The numbers. Troop levels went from 1000 when Kennedy took office to 184,000 in 1965 under Johnson. A year later they hit 385,000, and peaked at 543,000 when Nixon took office in 1969. Nixon’s actual policy was systematic de-escalation; he reduced US troops to 24,000 by early 1973, then withdrew the U.S. from ground combat in March. But widely used texts like The American Pageant, Nation of Nations, and Visions of America ignore Kennedy’s and Johnson’s role while framing Nixon as the primary villain of the war. And a large fraction of the therapeutic sheep with Che Guevara posters in their dorms graze contentedly inside an electric fence of approved opinions. They genuinely believe Nixon started Vietnam, and they’re happy with that belief.
If Allan Bloom – the liberal Democrat author of The Closing of the American Mind (1987) – were somehow resurrected in 2025 and lived through the Great Awokening, I suspect he’d swing pretty far into the counter-revolutionary space of Victor Davis Hanson. He’d scorch the vanguardist curators of the neopuritan archival gaze and their pronoun-pious lambs who bleat “decolonize” while paying $100K a year to be colonized by the university’s endowment.
Ken Burns said he sees cuts to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting as a serious existential threat. He did. The republic – which he calls a democracy – is oh so fragile. He speaks as though he alone has been appointed to heal America’s soul. It’s the same sacerdotal NPR manner that Bloom skewered in the humanities professoriate: the priestly conviction that one is engaged in something higher than mere scholarship, something redemptive. And the nation keeps paying Burns for it, because it’s so much more comfortable to cry over a Burns film than to wrestle with the actual complexity Burns quietly edits out. He’s not a historian. He’s the high priest of the officially sanctioned memory palace. It’s losers like Burns who write history.
The Multidisciplinarian 
Demonstration Studies: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Policy Frameworks and Educational Pathways in Collective Action
Posted by Bill Storage in Commentary, Interdisciplinary learning on March 28, 2026
At some point we have to confront the labor imbalance head-on. Our guidance counselors still push the same tired pipeline, STEM, pre-med, maybe a grudging nod to business during the late-capitalism era, while a clearly underdeveloped sector sits right outside our school doors, chanting.
The protest industry is no longer a cottage operation. It has matured into a complex, vertically integrated field with roles spanning logistics, messaging, performance, risk management, and, most crucially, optics. Yet high school seniors are given exactly zero structured exposure. We march past an opportunity that stands before us.
A modern curriculum would correct this. Introductory coursework might range from Slogan Compression, the art of reducing a dubious causal claim to five words and a rhyme, to Sign Engineering, where students learn the tensile limits of corrugated plastic under high wind conditions. Advanced pre-college topics could tackle Strategic Outrage Calibration, a delicate discipline balancing moral fervor with camera awareness.
Internships are obvious and plentiful. Students could rotate through departments: Street Presence, Social Media Amplification, and the always critical Rapid Narrative Adjustment Unit, which specializes in pivoting within the first news cycle. Apprenticeships with seasoned professionals would provide invaluable field experience, especially in high-stakes environments where the difference between “grassroots” and “organized” must remain tastefully subliminal.
Naturally, certification would follow. A tiered credentialing system would help employers distinguish between casual enthusiasts and those with demonstrated competencies in crowd choreography and chant synchronization. Continuing education would be required, given the field’s rapid evolution and the half-life of yesterday’s outrage, an inescapable facet the multidisciplinary practitioner simply must address.
Demand appears remarkably resilient. Issues may change, but the underlying need for visible indignation shows no sign of decline. Automation threatens many traditional careers, but it’s difficult to algorithmically replicate the human capacity for performative sincerity in front of a camera.
In the end, this is also about equity of opportunity. Not every student need submit to the oppression of differential equations or patient care. Some have a natural gift for megaphones, timing, and the instinctive sense of where the lens is. It seems only fair that our educational system recognize such talent, nurture it, and send it out into the world fully credentialed, well-practiced, and ready to make a difference.
Sustainable outrage demands long-term career planning in high-intensity advocacy. Tomorrow’s performative conviction will require assessment models for demonstrative competence. Recent trends show that raw spontaneity is simply unable to meet market demands. Elite programs won’t eliminate it, they will curate it.
My own experience in curriculum design is limited to outmoded domains of engineering and science. With that caveat I humbly propose, as a rough framework for expansion by high school curriculum professionals, something like the following. Underlying this introductory program would be the doctrine of teaching sincerity as a deployable skill rather than a personal trait:
Students workshop facial expressions and vocal strain until they land somewhere between “deeply moved” and “media-ready.” Overacting is penalized, underacting is remediated.
A close reading of acceptable deviation. How far one can drift from the script while still being invited back.
Live exercises where students are prompted with unexpected cues, then evaluated on how convincingly their responses appear unprompted. Focus on plausible deniability.
The old paradox, solved with mirrors and playback. Students learn to anticipate where to stand, sensory memory, and emotional immersion to achieve authentic, realistic performances.
Each student stages a fully “unscripted” episode, complete with organic escalation and tasteful resolution. External reviewers assess authenticity using a standardized index, revised each year to ensure relevance.
Of course, we must face the market reality that not all are cut out for client-facing roles. Fortunately, the industry is flush with blue-ocean organizational and infrastructural opportunities. Emerging industries eventually discover that selling isn’t merely the visible thing, it’s forging everything that makes the visible thing possible. Examples include:
Third-party auditors who certify that a demonstration meets recognized standards of organic feeling. Think ISO, but for indignation. “This protest conforms to Authenticity Protocol 9001.”
Uber, but for turnout. Need 50 people who look plausibly local, available within 90 minutes, with a mix of ages and photogenic diversity? Surge pricing during major news cycles.
Not quite PR, not quite a legal department. Their job is to anticipate how an action will be reframed within the first six hours and pre-position counter-narratives. A kind of high-frequency trading desk for moral framing.
The field still runs on vibes. That’s inefficient. We will standardize KPIs: chant retention rate, sign legibility at 30 feet, camera capture frequency, virality half-life. If you can measure it, your client will pay for improving it.
Borrowing from theme parks, choreographed “journeys” through a demonstration, emotional arcs, moments of crescendo. Participants leave feeling they’ve had an experience, not just attended an event. Premium tier tickets include curated photo opportunities.
Most demonstrations peak in the moment and fade. A firm that repackages footage, testimonials, and authentic reactions into a longer tail of content will extend the lifecycle, with revenue sharing back to organizers.
As the field professionalizes, so will its exposure. Insurance products, permitting strategy, de-escalation protocols that still look spontaneous. While strictly back-office, they are lucrative and indispensable.
None of these involve changing the underlying product. Visible moral urgency remains the headline. The opportunity is everything that sits just behind it, quietly shaping, measuring, and monetizing what calls itself spontaneous.
Conclusion
Professionalizing an emerging dissent exigence requires a structured, forward-looking framework for youth engagement, one that recognizes protest not as episodic expression but as a durable component of the political expression economy. Data-driven communication competencies in activist contexts can be cultivated systematically, if still described as organic, through pedagogies that integrate growth-minded inclusivity, social-emotional calibration, and context-sensitive cultural fluency.
The task before us is not to encourage participation – that threshold has long been crossed – but to formalize preparation. Absent such efforts, we risk perpetuating an inequitable landscape in which only the informally trained achieve visibility, while others remain under-amplified despite comparable conviction. A coordinated educational response will ensure that future cohorts enter the field with passion, demonstrable proficiency, adaptive awareness, and a shared vocabulary of practice.
In this light, the institutionalization of dissent will align existing educational pathways with an already normalized mode of civic engagement, and, in doing so, quietly resolve the longstanding gap between expression and employability.
ai, education, parody, politics, technology
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