COURAGE, TRUTH & BOOTY:

  The Fight to Protect Music in the Age of AI In a small studio in Georgia, surrounded by the hum of high-powered GPUs and the faint glow of solar panels, musician and technologist Benn Jordan is waging a quiet war. For over 25 years, Jordan has carved out a living as an independent artist, releasing music under various pseudonyms and building a loyal following. But in recent years, the rise of generative artificial intelligence (AI) has threatened the very foundation of his craft. Tech companies, armed with billions in venture capital, have been scraping music from platforms like Spotify and YouTube, using it to train AI models that generate derivative tracks—often without the consent of the original artists. For Jordan, this wasn’t just an ethical violation; it was a direct assault on his livelihood. “I still enjoy making music all the time,” he says in a YouTube video that has garnered over 600,000 views, “but I have entirely stopped releasing it.” Jordan’s response to this cris...

  The Hidden Cost of Costco’s Convenience: A Tale of Private Equity and Customer Complaints By A. Piratemonk In the sprawling aisles of Costco, where bulk buys and bargain deals reign supreme, shoppers find more than just oversized jars of peanut butter or discounted tires. They encounter a marketplace of services—mortgages, water delivery, custom blinds, even event tickets—all under the reassuring umbrella of Costco’s trusted brand. For many, the warehouse giant is a one-stop shop, a haven of reliability in a world of corporate corner-cutting. But beneath this veneer of consumer confidence lies a troubling reality: many of these services are outsourced to vendors increasingly controlled by private equity firms, and the consequences are starting to show. Steve Hunt, a customer service representative at a Costco in Oklahoma City, has seen this firsthand. A self-described “gadfly” who once ran for mayor, Hunt has spent the past year and a half fielding calls from frustrated members. ...

  The Misguided Gospel of Abundance: How Democrats Risk Losing the Economic Narrative By A. Piratemonk In April 2025, a viral moment on Jon Stewart’s podcast captured the zeitgeist of a growing movement within liberal circles. Ezra Klein, co-author of the book Abundance, described the maddening bureaucratic hurdles blocking the deployment of rural broadband funding under President Joe Biden’s bipartisan infrastructure bill. The process, Klein argued, was emblematic of a broader problem: progressive overregulation stifling progress and creating scarcity in America. The clip spread like wildfire, amplified by Fox News, Elon Musk, and thousands of retweets, resonating as a modern parable of government inefficiency. Stewart groaned audibly; the audience felt the weight of the anecdote. It was a story Ronald Reagan might have told in the 1980s, updated for the digital age. But there was a problem: the story wasn’t true—or at least, not in the way Klein framed it. The cumbersome broadban...

The "Enshittification" of American Power: A Reality Check By A. Piratemonk The provocative term "enshittification," originally coined by author Cory Doctorow to describe the decay of online platforms, has been repurposed by a recent WIRED article to diagnose a supposed decline in the quality and reliability of American global leadership. The article, "The Enshittification of American Power," argues that under a second Trump administration, the United States is beginning to treat its allies not as partners, but as users to be squeezed for maximum value, leveraging its dominance in finance, military technology, and communications to coerce and control. This analysis, drawing on the article and a range of external sources, examines the evidence behind these claims and assesses the current state of America's relationship with its allies. The Core Argument: From Hegemony to Monetization The central thesis posits that the decades-long comfort of American h...

  The 54-Year-Plan How a single memo inspired a movement that is now deconstructing America By A. Piratemonk July 14, 2025 The humidity of a Washington summer hangs thick and heavy, a familiar cloak of stasis in a city built on inertia. But inside the grand federal buildings lining the National Mall, the air is anything but still. A revolution is underway—quiet in its execution, but seismic in its impact. It is a revolution of paperwork, of personnel changes, of executive orders signed with a flourish and regulations rescinded with the stroke of a pen. It is the methodical, deliberate, and aggressive deconstruction of the American administrative state, and it is happening faster than anyone thought possible. The Trump administration, now in the first year of its second term, is governing with a velocity and ideological clarity that makes its first four years look like a hesitant dress rehearsal. The playbook is a 920-page tome titled Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise...

By A. Piratemonk The Phantom Rig: How the GOP Tilted the 2024 Election in Spirit July 12, 2025 On a crisp November evening in 2024, as the sun dipped below the Pennsylvania horizon, the nation watched the electoral map flicker to life. Donald Trump, defying the odds once again, claimed victory over Kamala Harris, flipping swing states like Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Arizona with margins so razor-thin they seemed to defy gravity. The headlines screamed triumph and turmoil, but beneath the surface lay a quieter, more insidious story—one of a voting system not overtly hacked or ballots brazenly stuffed, but subtly, deliberately tilted in the GOP’s favor. This was no traditional rig, with its smoky backrooms and forged tallies. Instead, it was a rigging in spirit, a masterful exploitation of negligence, corporate greed, and partisan bias that amplified Trump’s strengths without ever needing to alter a single vote. The evidence, pieced together from lawsuits, leaked emails, and state...