GT1-Blog

Posts

America Loves Its Soldiers, Not Its Veterans

America Loves Its Soldiers, Not Its Veterans Somewhere along the way, the country traded substance for spectacle. Outrage became a hobby. Headlines became bait. Every day feels like a new hunt for the villain of the hour, a fresh scandal to gnaw on until the next one drops. We scroll, we rage, we repost, we repeat. The noise gets louder, the attention span gets shorter, and anything that doesn’t scream gets buried underneath the digital churn. In that atmosphere, veterans don’t stand a chance. Their struggles don’t trend. Their battles don’t come with dramatic footage or partisan fireworks. Real suffering is too quiet for the algorithm. It doesn’t spike engagement. It doesn’t sell ads. So it drifts to the margins, pushed aside by louder crises that matter less and perform better. That’s the real tragedy. Not that this country fails to fix the problem, failure you can address, but that it forgets there’s a problem at all. Veterans become background characters in the national story, ment...

THE DAY THE GOVERNMENT REOPENED (AGAIN), OR: HOW AMERICA LEARNED NOTHING AND EVERYTHING BEFORE LUNCH

DISCLAIMER: This is satire. Relax. The real world of politics is already meaner, messier, and far more ridiculous than anything in these pages. While nothing here is meant as a jab at any one demographic, it is, sadly, a pretty fair mirror of just how absurd the U.S. political landscape has become, wobbling along in full daylight. Someone posted a meme that read, “The Government is Open and everyone has a Full Stomach. What will Libs protest next? Is Thanksgiving a Slave Holiday? Does Santa skip Trans chimneys? Was New Year’s created by a Nazi? Stay Tuned, America!!” and my mind, true to form, sprinted straight toward the extreme. Maybe it is because I have been buried in Thompson, Kerouac, Mailer, and, for reasons even I cannot explain, a heavy dose of Anthony Bourdain. Either way, the gearshift slipped, the wheels spun, and this is the story that spilled out. Satirical, absolutely. Far fetched, probably. Yet we live in a moment where truth keeps tripping over its own shoelaces and th...

From Checks and Balances to Power Brokers: The Dangerous Creep of Judicial Overreach

From Checks and Balances to Power Brokers: The Dangerous Creep of Judicial Overreach By Brian Wilson: The Bipartisan Patriot They’re trying to make the Supreme Court into a trade war referee now, like nine folks in robes are gonna rewrite global economics between lunch and closing arguments. That’s not their job. The Court’s there to check power, not run it. But here’s what folks keep missing, it’s not even about granting Trump new power. What’s actually happening is the Court’s hearing a case to decide if existing law, the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act, already gave the president that authority to slap tariffs wherever he pleases. It’s about interpretation, not invention. That law was meant for national emergencies, not some blanket permission slip for economic strong-arming. The Constitution’s clear: Congress sets tariffs, Congress regulates commerce. Always has. That’s in the DNA of the republic. But the Trump administration stretched that old law like taffy, sayi...

Siberian Gothic Expressionism: The Geometry of the Hole

Siberian Gothic Expressionism: The Geometry of the Hole (Hostage / Jacob’s Ladder Variant — Distortion Edition) The cell was a geometry . A crooked architecture of human unease, a box of poured concrete in a country that had forgotten how to distinguish between a jail, a bunker, and a grave. In here, in the hole, dread had its own floor plan. The walls didn’t just contain me; they pulsed with every story I’d tried to bury. And something about the angles was wrong—too many corners for one room, like the place had shifted overnight. This wasn’t a prison. This wasn’t a safehouse. This was the house that lists a little to the left. I had helped other men stand straighter once, taught them how to steady their minds— but none of that mattered here. Not in this room. Not in this captivity, whatever it was. The air had a tilt to it, like gravity was showing favoritism. “Let’s go, you know the drill!” a guard yelled— or a captor. Hard to tell the difference when the voice echoed twice, once fro...

When Silence Is Legal, But Never Moral By Brian Wilson: The Bipartisan Patriot

When Silence Is Legal, But Never Moral By Brian Wilson: The Bipartisan Patriot As they say, something's rotten in the state of Denmark. All these new revelations, the Epstein files, the whispers about who knew what and when. It’s not just the sickness of the crimes themselves; it’s that faint echo of silence that always follows the powerful. Here’s the hard truth that sticks in your throat: under U.S. law, unless you fall into a few narrow boxes, teacher, doctor, cop, caseworker, there’s no actual legal duty to report sex trafficking. None. Morally? You’d have to be hollow not to. Legally? The system shrugs. That’s the jagged place where law and decency split ways, and where any good lawyer, defending whoever’s name shows up in those emails, can wedge a defense clean through the middle of our outrage. I don’t agree with it. Not one bit. But it’s real, and worth laying bare. The Law’s Blind Spot The Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000 was built to hammer the monsters who sel...

The Torture of Halloween: Why I’ll Never Understand Extreme Haunted Houses

Finally completed a project I began back in September. Life has a way of interrupting good intentions, and this one got lost in the “needs work” folder until now. The Torture of Halloween: Why I’ll Never Understand Extreme Haunted Houses By BR. Giga It used to be simple. A fog machine. A kid in a rubber mask. Maybe a chainsaw without the chain if someone wanted to get ambitious. You screamed, you laughed, you stumbled into a pile of hay and bought cider on the way out. That was Halloween — a fun little flirtation with death, nothing binding. Now, apparently, it’s an endurance trial for people who pay good money to be waterboarded in a barn. The Rise of the “Trauma Simulator” They call them “extreme haunts.” That’s marketing language for “legalized kidnapping with a theme.” The participants, or “victims,” as some promoters charmingly brand them, sign multi-page waivers, surrender their phones, and then spend several hours being slapped, force-fed, insulted, gagged, drenched, electroshoc...