Blog
Current events read through the lens of the essays. Shorter, faster, less polished.
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You Never Had That Right
The last Flock dodge is two claims glued together: you never had a right not to have your plate read on a public road, and the future-despot file is a fantasy because we have not invented new crimes out of thin air. The first confuses a …
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What the Courts Actually Said
The Flock scoreboard in court is currently their side, and pretending otherwise is a gift to the other side. It is also not the Fourth Amendment. A panel can be wrong about the thing it is construing, and this fight is not over.
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Leave You Alone
The new pitch for Flock is that a camera on every road is a civil-libertarian tool, because it means fewer traffic stops. Precision at the stop is real. It is purchased by recording everyone first. That is not leaving you alone.
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Sold as Privacy
Age checks are moving into the operating system and being sold as the private option: one yes-or-no instead of a passport copy on every site. The private option is a gate. On a phone, two companies hold it, and Congress wants to hand them …
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The City's Real Shareholders
A resident stood up at his city council meeting and used a word usually reserved for tech platforms to describe what had happened to his local government: enshittification. The metaphor is more exact than he probably realized, and it …
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You Might Be Right
The Free Press posted a video telling people to stop destroying the cameras that are ‘actually stopping crime,’ and framed objecting to Flock as something only a kidnapper or a thief would do. Here is the argument taken apart, …
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Sold as Local Control
Officers running these systems usually describe them accurately: chokepoint cameras, a short retention window, no facial capture. What they describe less accurately is who actually controls the data once it leaves the camera, who can see …
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Nobody Paid Rent on the Airwaves
Broadcasters hold a scarce public commons, the electromagnetic spectrum, almost free, in exchange for a public interest promise nobody enforces. That unpriced grant is the real defect, and it explains both the networks’ capture of a …
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The Quiet Forgetting
We put a man on the moon with less computing power than a wristwatch, then lost the ability to leave the atmosphere at all. Progress is not gravity. It does not pull forward on its own, and the civilizations that forgot that did not see …
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The Tip Jar Is a Miracle
An unwatched jar of cash on a counter is a small miracle of generalized trust, and trust is built, not bred. It is also a fragile commons that dies fast once cheating spreads. That, and not any slur about peoples, is what immigration …
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The Button Marked Buy
Sony deleted movies people had bought, and the internet fired back: if buying isn’t owning, then piracy isn’t theft. I get the anger. But the slogan is wrong twice, and the wrongness is exactly why the people saying it keep …
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Sometimes You Have Bread
There is a joke going around: with capitalism, sometimes you have bread lines; with socialism, sometimes you have bread. It is funny because it is true. The market’s worst day is a line. The planned economy’s worst day is an …
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Love It or Leave It
A patriotic meme says America is so great even its haters won’t leave. It lands a real punch, and it is right that the nation has genuine enemies. But it spots them backwards. The test of a hater is not whether he criticizes the …
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An Open Letter to Flock
You say you fight crime, delete the data, log every search, and that the misuse is someone else’s fault. Those answers do not survive contact with the product, or with the Fourth of July.
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Disagreement Is Not Aggression
Express a mild opinion in public now and the response often comes back sized for an assault. Somewhere we lost the ability to tell disagreement from aggression, and the confusion is corrosive. A free society is one that settles its …
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Should Is Not Must
I posted a mild opinion online and got a wildly out-of-proportion reply that captured a confusion I have run into my whole life: that a libertarian voicing a preference is somehow the same as a libertarian demanding a law. It is not. …
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The Forgotten Amendment on Representation
The first amendment proposed by the First Congress addressed the size of the House of Representatives and how closely it should track population growth. It never became part of the Constitution. A modern statutory alternative called the …
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The Country That Was an Argument
Two hundred and fifty years ago a handful of men grounded a country not in a king or a bloodline but in an idea about the individual: that you own yourself, that your rights come before any government, and that a government is legitimate …
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The Court Sided With the Soil
The Supreme Court just held that a child born to a tourist here for the weekend is an American at birth. To get there the majority revived a feudal rule that a free people threw off in 1776: that the ground you are born on owns you. Thomas …
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An Open Letter to Dario Amodei
You told Congress that open models are too dangerous to be free. It is the same thing the priesthood said about scripture and the state said about encryption, and it has always meant one thing. Keep the power. Call it protection.
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Flock Is the Most Un-American Company in America
A private company has quietly built a national surveillance grid that records where every car in America goes and rents it to any police force that will pay. It is the general warrant the country was founded to destroy, sold as a monthly …
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Welcome
A short note on what this site is, why it exists, and the kind of writing to expect here.
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The Booth Was the Point
I went easy on mail voting last time. The deeper problem is not the slow count. It is that mailing everyone a ballot quietly repeals the secret ballot, and the secret ballot was the whole defense against buying and coercing votes.
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DOGE Should Have Been Permanent
DOGE had the right mission, and for once someone with power actually went looking for the waste. The mistake was leaving it a temporary executive project instead of doing the obvious thing and making it a permanent institution by act of …
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Pay First, Verify Never
The slow election count, the leaking benefit programs, and the unreadable road signs are the same story: a managerial state that optimizes for throughput and lets integrity rot.
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Clean Rolls Are Not a Conspiracy
Noncitizen voting is rare and not swinging national elections. Clean, verifiable voter rolls are also basic administrative hygiene. Both are true, and the fight in Washington pretends only one can be.
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You Have to Read the Signs
A commercial license is permission to pilot eighty thousand pounds past your family at highway speed. Requiring the driver to read the road signs is not nativism. It is the floor.
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The Two Hundred Billion Dollar Leak
The government’s own books show well over a hundred and fifty billion dollars a year paid out in error. If you actually believe in a safety net, that should enrage you more than anyone.
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Election Night Is Dead
We used to know who won by midnight. Now we wait days for a result half the country will not believe. The slow count is not a fraud claim. It is a legitimacy problem, and it is mostly self-inflicted.