Esoteric Meandering Shouting Into the Void

Dwain Northey (Gen X)

On Christmas Day—because irony deserves a holiday—Dumb Donald, self-anointed President of Peace and Ultimate Arbiter of Christianity™, decided to cast his benevolent gaze toward Nigeria. Not because he could find it on a map, of course, but because someone whispered the magic words: persecuted Christians. And just like that, he saddled up his imaginary white horse, ready to rescue souls abroad while casually kicking actual Christians out of his own country.

It’s a remarkable theological achievement, really. In Donald’s version of Christianity, faith is less about belief and more about complexion. Christianity, as practiced by Dumb Donald, is a heritage brand—best enjoyed by those of Northern European descent, preferably with a red hat and a vague memory of Sunday school. Nigerian Christians? They’re useful props. American Christians who happen to be brown, Black, Latino, or inconveniently foreign? Well, Jesus may have said “love thy neighbor,” but he never specified which neighbors, right?

So there he is on Christmas, invoking Christ’s name while deportation buses hum softly in the background. Christians from Haiti. Christians from Central America. Christians from Africa. All practicing the same faith, praying to the same God, celebrating the same birth—but apparently failing the pigment test. Somewhere between the manger scene and the ICE raid, the Beatitudes were quietly rewritten: Blessed are the pale, for they shall inherit the talking points.

Donald’s concern for Nigerian Christians is especially touching given his long-standing interest in Africa, which previously peaked at calling entire nations “shitholes.” But Christmas miracles happen, and suddenly Nigeria is sacred ground—at least rhetorically. Not because its people matter, mind you, but because their suffering can be weaponized in a culture war sermon back home. Nothing says “peace president” like exploiting tragedy abroad while manufacturing cruelty at home.

And let’s not forget his new role as Global Peace Broker, a title he bestowed upon himself sometime between a Truth Social rant and a golf swing. The man who couldn’t broker peace between a salad fork and a steak knife now fancies himself the savior of Christianity worldwide. The irony is almost biblical—Old Testament smiting levels of irony.

What makes this performance truly Christmas-worthy is its complete inversion of the story it claims to honor. Jesus: a Middle Eastern refugee, born into poverty, fleeing state violence. Donald: a billionaire nativist, terrified of refugees, wielding state violence. If Christ showed up today, he’d be questioned at the border, detained, and deported—unless, of course, he agreed to tone down the compassion and lighten up the skin tone.

So yes, Dumb Donald rode into Christmas declaring himself the defender of Christians everywhere—just not the ones who live next door, pick the crops, clean the hotels, attend the same churches, or pray in a different accent. In his gospel, Christianity isn’t about love, sacrifice, or peace. It’s about optics, outrage, and exclusion.

Peace on Earth, goodwill toward some men. The rest can get in line for deportation.

Amen.

Dwain Northey (Gen X)

Somewhere along the corporate evolutionary timeline, we collectively agreed that if someone had a title, a calendar full of meetings, and the power to approve PTO, they must therefore be a leader. This is how we ended up with a surplus of managers and a famine of leadership.

Let’s clear up the apparently counterintuitive truth: most managers are not leaders, but many leaders end up being managers. The confusion comes from mistaking authority for influence and proximity to power for the ability to inspire anyone beyond quiet compliance.

A manager is, at their core, a systems operator. They manage processes, schedules, metrics, compliance, deadlines, and spreadsheets with colors that imply urgency. Managers ensure things happen on time, within policy, and according to whatever framework was introduced at the last offsite. None of this is inherently bad. In fact, good management is necessary. Planes should be fueled. Payroll should be accurate. The meeting should probably start at 10 if everyone was told it starts at 10.

But leadership? Leadership is something else entirely.

A leader shapes direction, not just execution. Leaders create meaning where there is none, clarity where there is confusion, and momentum where morale went to die sometime around the third “re-org.” Leadership isn’t about enforcing rules—it’s about earning trust. And that’s the problem: trust cannot be mandated, KPI’d, or auto-filled into a performance review template.

Most managers fail at leadership because management rewards control, while leadership requires vulnerability. Managers are promoted for hitting numbers, maintaining order, and not rocking the boat. Leaders, meanwhile, often rock the boat so hard they get water in their shoes—and then teach everyone else how to row.

This is why you can have a manager who has supervised people for twenty years and still has no idea how to lead them. They default to authority: “Because I said so,” “That’s policy,” or the timeless favorite, “My hands are tied.” These phrases may keep the org chart intact, but they kill engagement on contact.

Leaders don’t hide behind policy. They interpret it, challenge it, and occasionally take a hit so their people don’t have to. They listen more than they talk, and when they talk, people actually stop scrolling. Leaders don’t need to remind you they’re in charge—you can tell by the way people choose to follow them, even when no one is watching.

Now, here’s the twist: many leaders eventually become managers, often against their will. Organizations notice someone who motivates others, solves real problems, and makes chaos slightly less chaotic—and immediately reward them with a title, a bigger inbox, and six standing meetings that could have been emails. These leaders succeed as managers because they lead through the role instead of hiding behind it.

They still manage tasks, yes—but they also manage morale, context, and purpose. They understand that people are not resources, culture is not a poster, and “open-door policy” means nothing if walking through that door feels like career suicide.

So why do we have so many managers who can’t lead? Because we promote for technical competence and punish emotional intelligence. We measure output, not impact. We confuse being indispensable with being effective. And we still act shocked—shocked—when teams burn out, disengage, or quietly quit while updating their résumés.

Leadership isn’t about rank. Management isn’t about wisdom. One is a role; the other is a skill. When they overlap, organizations thrive. When they don’t, you get compliance without commitment—and a lot of people wondering why “nobody wants to work anymore.”

The truth is simple, even if it’s uncomfortable: anyone can be given the power to manage. Very few earn the right to lead.

Dwain Northey (Gen X)

Somewhere between a gated golf community and a buffet groaning under the weight of shrimp cocktail, Volodymyr Zelenskyy has apparently been summoned to Florida to discuss a “peace deal” for Ukraine with Dumb Donald—because nothing says gravitas like geopolitics conducted in flip-flops, under a chandelier shaped like a bald eagle clutching a tax write-off.

The premise, we’re told, is peace. The fine print, as always, is surrender—tastefully framed as “compromise.” In this version of diplomacy, Ukraine gets peace the way a mugging victim gets “closure” after handing over their wallet, phone, and dignity. Putin, naturally, gets everything he wants, because in Trumpworld the customer is always right—especially if the customer is a strongman with a taste for annexation and a fondness for shirtless photo ops.

Trump’s peace plan, if you can call it that, appears to be a real estate transaction where Ukraine is the distressed property and Russia is the buyer with cash and a menacing stare. “Look,” Trump might say, “it’s a beautiful country, tremendous land, but maybe too much land. Nobody needs that much land. We’ll give Putin a little—okay, a lot—and everyone’s happy.” Everyone, that is, except the people who actually live there.

Zelenskyy, meanwhile, plays the role of the earnest negotiator invited to a rigged poker game. He’s there to discuss sovereignty while the house rearranges the furniture and quietly removes the exits. The ask is simple: give up territory, accept Moscow’s terms, smile for the cameras, and call it peace. Acquiesce now so the adults—by which we mean the autocrats—can get back to carving up maps like deli meats.

What makes this spectacle truly inspired is the scale of the giveaway. This isn’t just Ukraine on the chopping block; it’s a clearance sale on American influence itself. Eastern Europe? Toss it in. Asia? Why not—Putin might like a side dish. Alliances built over decades? Outdated. Democracy as a principle? Too messy. The Trump Doctrine, if it deserves the name, is simple: if a bully wants something, give it to him and declare victory.

And then there’s the sales pitch. We’ll be told this is “strength,” that surrender is savvy, that abandoning allies is actually leadership. We’ll hear that war is bad (true), so any peace—no matter how unjust, unstable, or humiliating—is good (false, but convenient). It’s the geopolitical equivalent of turning off the smoke alarm by removing the batteries and congratulating yourself on a quiet house.

In this Floridian fever dream, the world is reduced to a handshake deal struck over dessert, with Zelenskyy expected to nod along while the ink dries on his country’s dismemberment. Putin wins land, legitimacy, and momentum. Trump wins headlines and the illusion of being the guy who “fixed it.” The rest of us get a master class in how to lose a century’s worth of credibility before the valet brings the car around.

Peace is a noble goal. But peace that requires the victim to kneel while the aggressor sharpens his knife isn’t peace—it’s rehearsal. And if this is the deal being floated under the palm trees, then the real casualty isn’t just Ukraine’s borders. It’s the idea that the United States still stands for anything more than a bad bargain sold loudly and signed quickly, while the world watches and quietly updates its assumptions.

But here’s the plot twist that ruins the whole Florida Man morality play: Zelenskyy may have already walked into this sunburned negotiating room three moves ahead of both Trump and Putin. While everyone’s busy assuming Ukraine is about to be strong-armed into surrender, Zelenskyy quietly slides a condition across the table that sounds reasonable enough to pass the Trump sniff test: fine—maybe land changes hands, but only after a 60-day cease-fire and a legitimate vote by the people who actually live there.

This is where the record scratches.

A cease-fire? That thing Putin treats like a smoke break before the next shelling? And a vote? An actual vote, not the “99.7% approval” kind that magically appears after tanks roll through town? Suddenly the deal stops looking like a giveaway and starts looking like a trap—for the guys who thrive on chaos, fear, and rigged outcomes.

Because here’s the inconvenient truth: if the guns go quiet for 60 days, the propaganda loses oxygen. If international observers show up, the sham referendums fall apart. And if people are allowed to vote without soldiers “helping” them fill out ballots, the Kremlin’s fairy tale about liberated regions may collapse faster than a Trump casino.

Zelenskyy’s move is diabolically simple. He’s saying: If these regions truly want Russia, prove it—without bombs, without coercion, without fantasy numbers. Suddenly Putin has to choose between peace and control, and history suggests he hates peace almost as much as he hates transparency.

Trump, of course, might still call this a win. He’ll wave his hands, say “people voted, very fair, very legal,” and take credit for inventing democracy sometime between the cheeseburger and the press conference. But the irony is delicious: the man who distrusts elections everywhere else might accidentally endorse one that exposes the lie at the heart of Putin’s imperial cosplay.

So while Florida plays host to another episode of America’s Got Autocrats, Zelenskyy may be the only one in the room actually treating peace like something more than a branding exercise. He’s not rejecting compromise; he’s redefining it in a way that forces the loudest strongmen to do the one thing they fear most—stop shooting, step back, and let people decide.

Which, in the end, may be the most subversive move of all.

Dwain Northey (Gen X)

It’s truly impressive—Olympic-level, even—the flexibility required to believe that Donald John Trump, wannabe emperor, is not trying to be an authoritarian while doing authoritarian things with the enthusiasm of a man speed-running a dictator starter pack.

Executive orders? Oh, those were egregious—constitutional vandalism, tyrannical overreach—right up until Trump discovered them. Then suddenly they became rugged expressions of freedom, bald eagles flapping majestically in the wind of unilateral power. When Obama did it, it was the end of the republic. When Trump does it, it’s just “decisive leadership,” preferably signed with a Sharpie thick enough to be seen from space.

And let’s talk optics—because dictators love optics. Bulldozing the East Wing? Slapping his name on the Kennedy Center like it’s a Vegas casino? Wanting his face minted on a commemorative coin while he’s still very much alive and tweeting? Totally normal stuff, folks. Nothing screams “humble servant of democracy” like treating national institutions as personal branding opportunities. The Kennedy Center wasn’t built to honor art and culture—it was clearly just waiting for gold letters spelling TRUMP.

Historically, living presidents don’t put their names on monuments, buildings, or coins. That’s not because they can’t—it’s because democracies tend to frown on personality cults. But here we are, watching Trump speed past norms like they’re speed bumps in a Walmart parking lot, while his supporters insist, “This is fine.”

What’s especially baffling is how the red-hat faithful somehow fail to recognize the greatest hits playlist he’s borrowing from: Putin’s “strongman patriotism,” Kim Jong-un’s “I alone can fix it,” Xi Jinping’s “criticism is treason.” Trump didn’t invent this stuff—he’s just remixing it with worse grammar and a louder crowd.

He attacks the press. He delegitimizes elections. He demands loyalty over law. He treats the Constitution like a suggestion box. And yet, his followers look at the flaming wreckage of democratic norms and say, “But at least he tells it like it is.”

Yes. He does. He tells it like an authoritarian.

The truly wild part isn’t that Trump wants power—every politician does. It’s that his supporters are so conditioned to hate “dictatorship” in the abstract that they can’t recognize it when it’s wrapped in a red hat, waving a flag, and selling commemorative coins with its own face on them.

If this were happening in another country, they’d be calling it tyranny on Fox News with a dramatic chyron and ominous music. But because it’s their guy, suddenly bulldozers, branding, and executive fiat are patriotic.

At some point, denial stops being ignorance and becomes participation. You don’t have to read Orwell to recognize a strongman—but it helps if you’re willing to stop cheering long enough to look.

And that, apparently, is asking too much.

Dwain Northey (Gen X)

As the calendar prepares to flip from 2025 to 2026, we participate—again—in a quiet, global ritual: we agree that time itself has advanced by one neatly numbered unit. Fireworks go off, resolutions are made, and somewhere a server updates a timestamp. Yet beneath all that confidence lies an unspoken truth: our numbering of years is not a law of nature. It’s a story we agreed to tell together.

Humans have always counted time, but rarely in straight lines. Long before numbered years, we tracked cycles: seasons, floods, harvests, moons, pregnancies, migrations. Time was circular, not progressive. Winter followed fall, spring followed winter, and nothing was ever truly “year one.” It just… happened again.

Numbering years—pretending time has a universal starting pistol—is the strange part.

The system most of the world uses today hinges on an event that wasn’t recognized as a calendar reset when it supposedly occurred: the birth of Jesus. No one in Bethlehem was shouting, “Happy Year 1!” The Romans certainly weren’t. In fact, they were busy doing what empires do—taxing, conquering, arguing, and counting time their own way.

During the Roman Empire, years were often counted ab urbe condita—from the founding of Rome (traditionally 753 BCE). Others marked years by naming the two consuls in office. “In the year of the consulship of so-and-so” was perfectly sufficient. Jesus was born, according to later Christian calculations, sometime around what we now call 4–6 BCE—meaning the central event of our calendar is not only mid-empire but also probably misdated. The reset button was pressed centuries after the fact by a monk named Dionysius Exiguus in the 6th century, who was trying to standardize Easter, not reorganize human history.

So how did this work for the Romans? It didn’t—at least not at first. For centuries, Christians themselves continued using Roman dating systems. The Anno Domini system (“in the year of our Lord”) spread slowly through Europe, gaining traction only as Christianity gained political power. Time didn’t change; authority did.

Which raises the more unsettling question: if we hadn’t chosen Christ’s birth as the hinge of history, what year would it be right now?

That depends entirely on whose story you prefer.

If we kept the Roman system, we’d be in the year 2779 AUC (from the founding of Rome).

If we used the Jewish calendar, grounded in biblical chronology, it would be 5786.

The Islamic calendar, beginning with Muhammad’s Hijra in 622 CE, places us in 1447–1448 AH.

The Chinese calendar counts cycles rather than linear years, placing us around the year 4723.

And if we zoom out and think scientifically—using the emergence of Homo sapiens as a reference—we might be somewhere around year 300,000.

Each number tells a different story about what matters: empire, covenant, revelation, civilization, or species.

So when we say “2026,” we’re not announcing a universal truth. We’re revealing our cultural inheritance. The number doesn’t mark how old the world is, or how far humanity has come, or where we’re headed. It simply reflects which moment someone, long ago, decided was important enough to call “the beginning.”

And maybe that’s the most honest way to approach the new year—not as a hard reset or a cosmic milestone, but as a shared agreement to keep counting together, even while knowing the math is arbitrary.

Time, after all, doesn’t care what we call it. The Earth will still orbit the sun. Seasons will still turn. And when the calendar reads 2026, it won’t mean the world is new—only that we’ve chosen, once again, to tell the story this way.

Dwain Northey (Gen X)

Imagine, for a reckless moment, that Christopher Columbus—lost, stubborn, and violently confident—looked at the shoreline in 1492 and said, “Well… this is very clearly not India.” Imagine further that instead of slapping a geographical error onto millions of people like a permanent typo, he shrugged and called the people he met what logic might suggest: Americans.

Not “Indians.” Not a placeholder name born of navigational failure. Just Americans. Because they lived here. Radical idea.

Now fast-forward a few centuries. Cue the powdered wigs, the muskets, the self-importance. The Revolutionary War breaks out, and suddenly a group of European settlers are shouting, “We’re Americans now!” Except—oops—that label is already taken. It belongs to the people who have been farming, trading, governing, worshiping, storytelling, and surviving on this land since before Europe was workshopping feudalism.

That little semantic shift would have been catastrophic—not for history, but for ego.

How do you stage a revolution built on stolen identity when the original Americans are still very much present, still very much labeled as such, and still very much excluded from your liberty-and-justice-for-all brochure? It’s hard to chant “We the People” when everyone knows exactly which people were here first—and were already called that.

By the time of the Civil War, the problem compounds. Blue and gray uniforms alike shout about defending “American values,” “American soil,” and “the American way of life.” But which Americans? The ones arguing over tariffs and slavery, or the ones who were marched off their land, renamed, reclassified, and politely erased from the national branding exercise?

Because let’s be honest: calling Indigenous people “Indians” wasn’t just a mistake. It was a convenience. A bureaucratic shrug that made it much easier to pretend the continent was vacant, unclaimed, and available for destiny manifesting. If they’d been universally known as Americans, every treaty violation, every land grab, every boarding school, every forced march would read less like expansion and more like what it was: Americans dispossessing Americans.

That’s not a great look for a nation built on mythmaking.

And imagine the modern fallout. Every chest-thumping proclamation of “real Americans” would immediately collapse under its own historical weight. You can’t cosplay as the original when the originals are right there—still American, still here, still reminding everyone that the name came before the flag.

So perhaps that’s why the misnaming stuck. Because history, like branding, is easier when you control the labels. “Indian” allowed later arrivals to inherit the word “American” without inheriting the accountability. It turned conquest into coincidence and theft into tradition.

Had Columbus gotten the name right, the rest of American history would have had to tell the truth much sooner. And nothing terrifies a mythology-driven nation more than accurate nouns.

Dwain Northey (Gen X)

At some point—probably right around the time the last oil well wheezes like a 200-year-old asthmatic—we’re going to have a collective “oh” moment. Not an aha, mind you. An oh. The kind you make when you realize the thing you’ve been defending with religious fervor was always finite, always dirty, and always headed toward the same fate as rotary phones and Blockbuster memberships.

Green energy, meanwhile, has been standing there this whole time, awkwardly raising its hand like the quiet kid in class saying, “Um… I can do this forever.” The sun keeps shining. The wind keeps blowing. Water keeps flowing. None of these require drilling holes in the planet, blowing up ecosystems, or pretending that quarterly profits are more important than breathable air. And yet, somehow, renewable energy is treated like a risky new fad—right up there with avocado toast and empathy.

The fossil fuel industry, on the other hand, is marketed as eternal. As if oil magically regenerates when you chant “energy independence” loud enough. We act shocked—shocked!—every time prices spike, pipelines fail, or some oil executive quietly admits that, yes, of course they know this stuff is running out, but could we please not talk about that until after the next shareholder meeting?

So the question becomes: who finally pulls the emergency brake on this generational denial? Is it Gen Z, already side-eyeing the mess they’ve inherited while being told they’re “too idealistic”? Or Gen Alpha, who may grow up genuinely confused as to why adults once powered civilization by lighting ancient dead plants on fire and then arguing about it on cable news?

Because let’s be honest: a large chunk of those who came of age in the late 20th century are still emotionally invested in the idea that change itself is the problem. They were promised infinite growth on a finite planet and took that deal very personally. Suggest solar panels, and they hear an attack on their pickup truck. Mention climate reality, and suddenly it’s 1978 and someone is yelling about gas lines and freedom.

What makes this all especially rich is that green energy isn’t just about saving polar bears or hugging trees—it’s about survival, economics, and stability. It’s about not handing future generations a bill labeled “Good luck.” Renewables are cheaper, cleaner, and—here’s the key word—renewable. Fossil fuels are not. That’s not politics; that’s arithmetic.

So yes, eventually the realization will come. It always does. History shows us that progress rarely happens because the old guard suddenly has an epiphany; it happens because newer generations refuse to keep pretending the emperor’s oil barrel is full. Whether it’s Gen Z or Gen Alpha who finally says, “No, actually, this is ridiculous,” remains to be seen.

But one thing is certain: the sun will still be shining long after the last oil executive insists that green energy “just isn’t practical yet.” And when that day comes, the rest of us may finally stop asking when we’ll realize green energy can save us—and start wondering why it took us so long to admit what was obvious all along.

Dwain Northey (Gen X)

The Turning Point event in Phoenix was billed as a triumphal gathering of the youthful, the righteous, and the aggressively certain. What it turned out to be instead was a three-day Freudian slip festival—a live demonstration of what happens when grievance, ambition, and unchecked self-regard collide on a stage wired with microphones.

Everyone there was supposedly reading from the same script: patriotism, faith, civilization under siege, blah blah republic on life support. And yet, sentence after sentence, speaker after speaker, the mask kept slipping. Not dramatically—no Scooby-Doo unmasking moment—but in the far more revealing way people tell on themselves when they’re convinced the room will cheer no matter what comes out of their mouths.

The most telling moment came when a speaker—introduced as honoring a fallen figure in Charlie Kirk’s image—accidentally referred to him as a grifter. Cue the split-second panic. The verbal record scratch. The frantic backpedaling: “Oh—oops—that’s not what I meant.” Except it very obviously was what was meant, because you don’t trip over the word “grifter” unless it’s already living rent-free in your subconscious. That wasn’t a slip of the tongue; that was the truth briefly escaping captivity before being dragged back behind the curtain.

And that moment summed up the entire event. The Phoenix conference wasn’t about ideas; it was about affirmation. Speaker and audience locked in a feedback loop of applause, outrage, and self-congratulation. It was ideological mutual admiration society—less a political movement than a self-soothing ritual, where everyone reassures everyone else that they’re the smartest people in the room, bravely saying what “they” don’t want you to say, while charging admission for the privilege.

The irony is that Turning Point loves to accuse others of groupthink, yet the Phoenix event functioned like a closed ecosystem where dissent can’t survive and self-awareness goes to die. Every “accidental” phrase revealed the cracks: the obsession with money while denouncing elites, the thirst for power while claiming victimhood, the grift-denial delivered by people who somehow always have a new book, a new donor link, and a new VIP package available in the lobby.

What made it almost impressive was how blind everyone seemed to their own tells. These weren’t hostile journalists catching people off guard; these were friendly rooms, safe spaces of their own making. And still, the truth kept slipping out—about motivations, about money, about the fact that this entire operation runs less on principle than on performance.

In Phoenix, Turning Point didn’t expose its enemies. It exposed itself. A movement so convinced of its own righteousness that it no longer bothers to listen to what it’s actually saying. A conference where the biggest danger wasn’t cancel culture or Marxism or whatever the villain of the week was—but an open mic and an unguarded moment.

Because when the applause is guaranteed, honesty tends to leak out accidentally. And in Phoenix, it leaked everywhere.

Dwain Northey (Gen X)

Billy Beer vs. the Billion-Dollar Grift: A Tale of Fish-Eye Patriotism

There is a very special red-hat logic at work in America today, one best viewed through a malicious fish-eye lens—the kind that distorts reality until up is down, irony is treason, and a decades-old six-pack of mediocre beer somehow becomes the smoking gun for modern corruption.

Bring up the Trump family’s enthusiastic monetization of the presidency—hotels, trademarks, foreign governments renting entire floors, kids with security clearances selling influence like mall pretzels—and suddenly the crowd shouts: “What about Billy Carter?!”

Ah yes. Billy Beer. 1978. A novelty lager so bad it mostly harmed taste buds and aluminum recycling bins. The great scandal: the president’s brother endorsed a beer, it flopped, and America moved on. No foreign dignitaries booked out the brewery. No taxpayers footed the bill. No constitutional scholars had to invent new Latin phrases to describe it.

But in Red Hat World™, Billy Beer is treated like Watergate with foam.

Meanwhile, in the present day, we’re told not to believe our lying eyes as a president openly treats the White House like a family-run Etsy shop—everything for sale, nothing refundable, ethics sold separately. “Totally normal,” they insist, while wearing merch purchased from the same political brand they swear isn’t a cult.

And then there’s the inauguration story—one so breathtaking in its pettiness it almost feels fictional. Jimmy Carter, a man who actually served this country in uniform, lived modestly, and spent decades building houses for the poor, had the audacity to die near an inauguration. According to the fish-eye narrative, this was clearly a personal attack. Flags at half-staff weren’t a sign of respect; they were a sabotage operation. How dare a former president interrupt the pageantry by… dying?

So the demand was made: raise the flags. Optics first. Respect later. Or never.

This is where the “both sides” argument really earns its laugh track. On one side: a peanut farmer with an inconveniently honest family member who sold a bad beer. On the other: a gilded dynasty vacuuming up cash while chanting “America First” like it’s a discount code.

And yet, the red-hat chorus assures us it’s all the same. Everyone’s corrupt. Everyone does it. Which is funny, because if everyone really did it on this scale, they wouldn’t have to keep reaching back nearly fifty years to find a comparison involving a warm, terrible lager.

In the end, Billy Beer wasn’t a grift—it was a joke that expired naturally. The modern version? That joke keeps printing money, demanding applause, and insisting the real scandal is the foam ring from 1978.

Cheers to selective memory. 🍺

Dwain Northey (Gen X)

Kwanzaa is a cultural holiday that celebrates African heritage, community, and shared values among people of African descent, particularly in the United States. It is not a religious holiday, but a time set aside for reflection, learning, and reaffirming cultural identity. Kwanzaa emphasizes unity, self-determination, collective responsibility, and creativity—values intended to strengthen families and communities and to connect present generations with the traditions of Africa.

The holiday was created in 1966 by Dr. Maulana Karenga during the aftermath of the civil rights movement, a period when many African Americans were seeking ways to reclaim cultural pride and rebuild community after centuries of enslavement, segregation, and systemic discrimination. Karenga envisioned Kwanzaa as a unifying celebration that would honor African history and philosophy while encouraging people to apply those lessons to everyday life. Each of the seven days of Kwanzaa highlights one of the Nguzo Saba, or Seven Principles, which include unity (Umoja), purpose (Nia), and faith (Imani).

Kwanzaa is celebrated annually from December 26 through January 1. It was intentionally placed at the end of December to align with traditional African harvest festivals, which celebrated abundance, gratitude, and communal responsibility. Families mark the holiday through candle lighting, storytelling, music, shared meals, and the exchange of meaningful gifts that emphasize learning and cultural heritage.

Although first observed in 1966, Kwanzaa became more widely recognized in the United States during the 1970s and 1980s as schools, cultural institutions, and communities embraced multicultural education and inclusivity. Today, Kwanzaa is recognized each December as an important cultural observance, offering an opportunity not only to celebrate African American heritage, but also to reflect on universal values of cooperation, dignity, and shared responsibility that resonate far beyond the holiday itself.