COURAGE, TRUTH & BOOTY:

  Bitstream Ballot  Based on the real world story She Won . They Didn't Just Change the Machines. They Rewired the Election. How Leonard Leo's 2021 sale of an electronics firm enabled tech giants to subvert the 2024 election. -By Will Hold Story here: https://thiswillhold.substack.com/p/she-won-they-didnt-just-change-the Bitstream Ballot  By Apirate Monk Chapter 1: Code in the Concrete The Dallas-Fort Worth megasprawl baked under a June 2026 sun, its glass towers reflecting a hazy, sulfurous sky choked with drone traffic. The air, thick with the scent of ozone and burnt plastics, shimmered above the asphalt, a testament to unchecked expansion and a climate teetering on the edge. Kade Navarro, a phantom in the urban labyrinth, ghosted through a Deep Ellum backstreet, his movements economical, fluid—a product of living on the margins of a city that constantly threatened to swallow him whole. His burner phone, a relic of a simpler, less surveilled era, buzzed with a Tor-enc...

  The Shadow of Profit: How Private Equity Reshapes the American Dream By Apirate Monk On a crisp autumn morning in 2017, Linda Harris stood in the break room of the Emeryville, California, Toys “R” Us, her hands wrapped around a chipped ceramic mug, staring at a memo pinned to the bulletin board. The store was quieter than usual, the aisles of action figures and board games eerily still, as if the toys themselves sensed the end. The memo announced what she’d feared for months: the company, drowning in debt from a 2005 leveraged buyout by private equity firms Bain Capital and KKR, had filed for bankruptcy. By March 2018, all 735 stores would close, leaving Linda and 33,000 colleagues jobless. She’d been a floor supervisor for nearly a decade, her pride etched in the Toys “R” Us logo tattooed on her forearm—a symbol of the best job she’d ever had, now fading like the American dream she thought it represented. Linda’s story, one of four at the heart of Megan Greenwell’s Bad Company...

The AI’s Unsettling Prescription for America’s Authoritarian Drift By Apirate Monk In the summer of 2025, as America grapples with deepening political divides and the specter of authoritarianism, a peculiar experiment by the YouTube channel “I Ask AI” has captured attention. By posing a provocative question to ChatGPT—how to halt the agenda of a resurgent Donald Trump—the channel elicited a response that is as chilling as it is methodical. Far from a mere algorithmic exercise, the AI’s analysis offers a sobering diagnosis of America’s democratic fragility and a radical blueprint for resistance. Augmented by insights from recent analyses and public discourse, this dialogue reveals not only the stakes of the nation’s trajectory but also the daunting challenges of reversing it. A Nation on the Brink ChatGPT’s assessment begins with a stark observation: America’s democratic institutions are under siege. “Institutions are being hollowed out. Rules tossed aside. And it’s all about loyalt...