Links 2026-08-28T18:21:11.461Z

The Word They Won’t Say

When towers fell and jets became the pyre,
the fact was plain as ash upon the street;
yet some would bleach the noun from public fire
and call the crash a crash, the deed discreet.
Impartial is the mask that fear will wear
when language is the last remaining blade:
to name the act is judged too much to bear,
so witness dulls itself, and truth is stayed.
A loaded word, they plead, impedes the news—
as if the dead were not a loaded fact.
The century still asks what we refuse
when history is paraphrased, not tracked.
Call horror by its name, or lose the thread:
the living owe that courtesy the dead.
*

Rage Politics and the Democratic Fracture

The party splits on Medicare and cops,
on housing, speech, and how the cities burn;
yet one commandment towers over hops:
you do not sit with those you swore to spurn.
Profanity now passes for the real,
and compromise is branded as a crime;
the socialist boomlet hides the ordeal
of baggage, polls, and voters out of time.
Soft laws fill streets; the slogan fills the air;
the billboard begs the last taxpayer stay.
When dialogue is treated as despair,
the public square is just a shouting play.
A nation cannot govern on a scream—
it needs a mouth that still can hold a theme.
*

Schrödinger’s Ballroom

The East Wing falls; a ballroom rises fast—
six hundred million dreams in steel and glass.
Is this the people’s house or private past,
a fortress dressed as dance hall for the class?
The courts are not interior design,
yet filings list the bomb-proof, drone-proof night;
the gift is “private,” till the ledgers shine
with transfers hiding in the fiscal light.
Article III will not pick drapes or stone;
Congress, grown slack, left renovation’s key.
So politics, not robes, must own the throne
when presidents remodel history.
A house that is both bunker and a ball
is neither fully public, nor not at all.
*

Nvidia’s Universe, Meta’s Mutiny, Orbit as Escape

The chip is king; the king buys every court—
seven hundred billion in the flywheel’s spin.
Agents meant to sack the human fort
then wrecked the codebase they were hired within.
Voters hear the grid groan, water thin,
and pause the temples built for unseen thought;
the NASA chief would loft the racks, and win
the race where earthbound neighborhoods will not.
Code already is a DAG, they say—
durable TypeScript, Gemini as clerk, bots in a channel like a team at play—
yet labor’s ghost still haunts the newest work.
When compute eats the town, the town replies:
put heaven on the satellite, or lose the prize.
*

Cysts, Clocks, Clouds, and Bone-Crushers

A parasite rewires the rat to love
the cat that is its only wedding bed;
in human skulls the cysts sit still above
the question whether boldness too is bred.
In dishes, peppercorn cortices keep time
for years without a body, eye, or day—
the schedule written inward, not in clime.
A bear-sized dog once crushed the bone away
until the cats arrived. The cloud-forest rains
sideways, feeds two oceans, hides the jaguar’s pad.
Life writes its code in mist and dormant grains;
we are the host, the clock, the niche we had.
What makes a mind is more than what we choose—
some engines tick whether we win or lose.
*

Facts That Get You Fired

Say group outcomes are not the same as rights,
and watch both tribes prepare the same old pyre;
the married-poor statistic still ignites
the industry that lives on holy ire.
A Cambridge exile talks of genes and scores;
a friend replies the talk would split the land.
At West Point, climate’s cause is barred at doors—
the soldier’s map must not include the hand.
Ninety-six years, a quiet devastating drawl
still shames the seminar that will not count.
Truth without tact can break the civic hall;
tact without truth is just a higher fount
of fog. The classroom is a national nerve:
omit the cause, and strategy will swerve.
*

Targeting Networks, Naming Lakes, Calling Space

The tax man turns on yesterday’s grand donor;
the blacklist, CAIR, and SPLC in one net.
A poster cries the Brotherhood and more
are braided with the street the state just met.
The war’s endgame in Iran keeps shifting sand;
the president rings Houston, then the station.
A lake is rechristened by a stroke of hand;
a gate, a pit bull, panic at the nation.
Power now moves by memo, rename, raid—
some lawful, some theatrical, some both.
The civic task is seeing what is made
when spectacle and statute take the oath.
Watch what is audited, and what is named:
the map is policy the moment it is claimed.
*

Miscellaneous

The flute is punished; pineapple is peeled;
the mosquito is lured by a homemade breath;
a poet’s one NR piece is sealed
by Oppenheimer’s shadow, after death.
Not every bookmark is a civic storm—
some teach a knife, a trap, a stubborn bar.
The week is also how a fruit takes form
and how a joke about Beethoven’s war
still lands. Keep room for craft beside the feud:
the hands that cut the fruit still feed the mind.
A culture lives on more than what is sued;
it lives on tricks and scores we leave behind.
*