Thanksgiving (The Truth No One Wants to Hear)

 

For those who gave everything and watched the feast continue...

It’s cold tonight.
Not the kind of cold that bites your skin—
the kind that seeps into your bones
and stays there,
like regret.

They called today Thanksgiving.
Someone even shipped in frozen turkey,
mushy stuffing, and little paper flags for the tables.
We ate from trays under tin lights,
pretending it tasted like home.
But home is a sound, not a place—
and that sound has been gone a long time.

I watch the others laugh.
They still believe
this is for something.
I used to believe that too.
I was 19, skinny and full of slogans.
I thought freedom was a flag, and justice a rifle.
Turns out, freedom’s a bill
someone else pays,
and justice is just
a word whispered in the dark.

We buried two boys yesterday.
One was 20.
One had a baby girl back home.
We didn’t have coffins— just body bags, zipped and tagged.
We carried them through the sand
like pilgrims dragging their dead to winter ground.
Somebody whispered a prayer.
Somebody else just stared.
The sky didn’t flinch.

This is the true Thanksgiving.
Not tables, not turkey, not candles, not parades.
It’s a meal you choke down
with blood still on your hands.
It’s carving up your own soul
so others can carve a turkey in peace.
It’s watching a country
forget what you paid, and still, still, hoping it stays worth it.

If you’re reading this,
I didn’t make it.
My hands are shaking now.
The pen keeps slipping.
But I need you to know—
this isn’t bitterness.
This is honesty.
This is the smell of iron,
the taste of blood,
the sound of a boy
calling for his mother
as he dies in a land
that will never utter his name.

When you sit down to eat, don’t thank me.
Don’t thank anyone like me.
Take a bite, and remember what it costs.
Ask yourself if you’re still worthy
of the feast, or if you’ve traded it all
for apathy and Black Friday sales.

I gave everything for this place.
Even now, bleeding into the dirt,
I’d do it again.
Because someone has to.
Because that’s what we do—
we burn so you can glow.

Happy Thanksgiving.
Eat well.
Live well.
And for God’s sake, remember who has allowed you to have this feast today.

Privacy: The Last Thing Standing Between You and Chains

“The moment you stop caring about your privacy is the moment you’ve agreed to be a slave.”

Let’s be honest. Most people don’t give a damn about privacy. 

They shrug, sip their latte, and say, “I’ve got nothing to hide.” 

Cute. That’s the kind of reasoning a sheep gives right before it’s marched into the slaughterhouse.

Privacy isn’t about hiding your porn searches or your sketchy Amazon orders. Privacy is about power. 

Whoever holds your data controls the narrative of your life. 

And if you think that’s some dystopian, tinfoil-hat paranoia, let me give you a hard slap of reality: governments, corporations, and even your goddamn smart fridge already know more about you than your closest friend. 

And they’re not keeping that knowledge to knit you a birthday sweater.

1. Privacy Is the Armor You Don’t See Until You’re Naked

Imagine walking through a crowded street naked. Not just without clothes—without skin. 

Everyone can see your pulse, your lungs, your bones, your weaknesses. Creepy, right? That’s exactly what giving up privacy looks like.

Your search history. Your purchases. Your private messages. Your location data. Piece by piece, it’s stripped away until you’re a raw bundle of vulnerabilities walking around for anyone to exploit. 

Hackers. Predators. Corporations. Politicians.

Privacy is your armor. Lose it, and you’re just meat waiting to be carved.

2. Data Isn’t Just Numbers—It’s Ammunition

Think about Cambridge Analytica. A bunch of nerds with spreadsheets manipulated the psychology of millions and swung elections. 

Not by guns, not by tanks, but by Facebook ads. Your data isn’t boring metadata—it’s weaponized insight.

Your habits, fears, and insecurities become strings someone else can pull. 

Buy diapers every Tuesday? Congratulations, you’ve just been profiled as a stressed-out parent—ripe for political propaganda about “family values.” 

Click on late-night conspiracy videos? Perfect, you’re now a recruit in someone’s ideological army.

Privacy isn’t just “your business.” It’s the battlefield where wars are fought in silence.

3. The Illusion of Convenience Is a Trojan Horse

Alexa turns on your lights. Google Maps saves you five minutes. TikTok entertains you for hours. And in return? You’ve opened the gates to your castle, invited in the enemy, and asked them to please make themselves comfortable.

Convenience is the drug, and your data is the price of the hit. 

Every “free” app, every “smart” gadget, every biometric scanner—each one siphons another piece of your freedom until you’re left with nothing but the illusion of choice.

And here’s the brutal truth: once you hand it over, you don’t get it back.

4. Without Privacy, Freedom Is Fiction

Think of authoritarian regimes. East Germany’s Stasi. Stalin’s Soviet Union. Mao’s China. What made them terrifying wasn’t just guns or prisons—it was the suffocating awareness that every word, every whisper, every action could be reported.

Now replace the informants with algorithms. 

Replace the neighbor snitching with Alexa’s microphone. 

Replace paper files with databases holding your entire digital life, ready to be cross-referenced, judged, and punished.

Without privacy, freedom is nothing more than a marketing slogan.

5. If You Don’t Fight for Privacy, You Don’t Deserve Freedom

Here’s the harshest truth of all: nobody’s coming to save you. 

Governments won’t protect you. 

Tech companies definitely won’t protect you. 

And your neighbor is too busy binge-watching Netflix to even notice what’s happening.

So the responsibility is yours. You either fight for your privacy—or you surrender it. There’s no middle ground.

• Use encryption.

• Delete what you don’t need.

• Stop giving away your soul to “free” apps.

• Question every data request like it’s a stranger asking for your house keys.

The Call to Arms

Privacy isn’t some abstract legal right written on parchment. It’s the last shield between you and control. Between you and manipulation. Between you and slavery.

The question isn’t whether privacy matters. The question is whether you’ve got the guts to defend it.

Because here’s the final truth: if you won’t fight for your privacy, don’t be surprised when you wake up one day and realize you’ve been living as someone else’s property.

And by then, it’ll be too late.

 

The Last Illusion: Why Your Privacy Rights in 2025 Are the Thin Line Between Freedom and Slavery

Let me hit you with a truth that’s going to sting: privacy isn’t about hiding your dirty secrets. It’s about power.

In 2025, if you still believe privacy is just “something for criminals, cheaters, or the paranoid,” you’ve already lost. 

You’re the pig walking happily to the slaughterhouse, humming a TikTok jingle, while the butcher sharpens his knives.

Privacy is oxygen. 

You don’t notice it until someone takes it away. And by the time you’re gasping for air, it’s too late.

1. Privacy is the Armor That Stops Predators

Every empire has hunters. Kings had spies. Dictators had secret police. Corporations now have algorithms.

When you let your privacy die, you become prey. 

Every text, search, or late-night click feeds a machine designed to predict you better than you know yourself. 

Forget “Big Brother.” In 2025, it’s “Big Algorithm,” and it doesn’t need to watch you—it already knows you.

Example?

• Target knew a teenage girl was pregnant before her father did.

• Facebook can guess your political leanings within a handful of “likes.”

• AI can map your face in public, match it to your social media, and pull your life story—all before you’ve even bought your coffee.

You think you’re walking through life freely. 

But you’re already a tagged animal.

2. Privacy Is About Power, Not Porn

Lawyers will tell you: rights aren’t about what’s common. They’re about what’s critical. 

You don’t defend speech for the popular, you defend it for the unpopular. Privacy is no different.

The myth is: “I’ve got nothing to hide.” That’s the same as saying, “I don’t care about free speech because I have nothing to say.”

Bullshit.

Privacy isn’t about whether you’re innocent—it’s about whether you’re defenseless. Once someone has your data, they don’t need your permission to weaponize it. 

Insurance companies, governments, scammers, foreign states—they’re all locked and loaded with the ammo you handed them for free.

3. Privacy Is the Battlefield of 2025

Soldiers know terrain wins wars. In this century, the battlefield isn’t mud and blood—it’s data. Whoever controls the data controls the high ground.

The U.S., China, Russia, Google, Meta—they’re all generals in the same war: domination through surveillance. And you? You’re not even a soldier. You’re the terrain. Your life is the ground they’re fighting over.

That should terrify you.

Because if you don’t own your privacy, you don’t own yourself.

4. Privacy Is Fragile—And Once It’s Gone, It’s Gone Forever

Philosophers say trust takes years to build, seconds to break, and a lifetime to repair. 

Privacy is worse. Once it leaks, it’s eternal.

Your face on a government watchlist.
Your DNA in a corporate database.
Your embarrassing DM screenshotted and stored in some server farm forever.

There is no “undo” button. You don’t get a reset. 

There’s no amnesty for stupidity once data is weaponized. That’s the brutality of it: privacy isn’t renewable.

5. Privacy Is the Line Between Citizen and Slave

Robert Greene wrote about power. Hemingway wrote about courage. Mark Manson writes about not giving a fuck about the wrong things. Let me fuse them together into one brutal law:

Without privacy, you cannot resist.

A man who knows he’s watched doesn’t rebel. He doesn’t innovate. He doesn’t tell the truth. 

He self-censors, smiles, and obeys. Surveillance doesn’t just kill privacy—it kills the spirit.

History shows this. 

Stasi in East Germany. Mao’s informants in China. McCarthy’s blacklists in America. Surveillance turns humans into hollow shells. 

That’s not “safety.” That’s slavery.

And the worst part? Most people are volunteering for it. 

Trading their freedom for convenience like cheap whores at a digital marketplace.

So What Now?

Here’s where the soldier in me comes out: stop being soft. 

Privacy isn’t given—it’s fought for. 

Every generation gets the rights it demands, bleeds for, and refuses to surrender.

So, what do you do?

• Encrypt your damn communications.

• Stop handing over your DNA to “fun ancestry websites.”

• Use privacy-focused tools like your life depends on it—because it does.

• Pressure lawmakers like you pressure customer service when your Amazon package is late.

• Teach your kids that privacy isn’t optional. It’s survival.

The Call to Arms

2025 isn’t the year of convenience. It’s the year of consequence.

Your privacy is either your shield or your chain. You choose. Because if you don’t, someone else will.

This is the last illusion: that you are free while you’re being watched.
But when the lights are always on, freedom isn’t freedom—it’s theater.

So wake up.
Armor up.
Fight like hell.

Because in this war, the ones who surrender their privacy don’t just lose their data.

They lose themselves.

Privacy or Bust: 5 Brutal, Practical Ways to Protect Yourself in 2025

 

Everyone says “I value my privacy” until an app asks for one more permission and you click “Allow.” 

Welcome to 2025 — the year your data is the battlefield and you’re either armored or exposed. This isn’t polite advice. It’s survival. 

If you’re tired of being tracked, profiled, and monetized, read this and then do the work.

Below are five concrete, ruthless steps — no fluff, no techno-mysticism — to regain control. 

Each one comes with a clear payoff, a real-world example, and the cost you’ll accept if you don’t act.

1) Treat Your Digital Self Like a Government: Reduce Attack Surface

Philosopher: The fewer places you exist, the fewer doors enemies can kick in.

Soldier: Minimal footprint is defensive mastery.

Practical move: Consolidate accounts. Delete services you don’t use. Stop signing up for every newsletter, quiz, and “free” widget. 

Fewer accounts = fewer breaches, fewer data brokers, fewer weird ads.

Example: Audit your last 18 months of logins. If you haven’t used an account in a year, delete it. Use a password manager to generate unique, strong passwords before you delete anything — because you won’t stop using accounts altogether. A single reused password opens a domino line of compromises.

Cost: Slight inconvenience. You’ll trade convenience for security. That’s the point.

2) Encrypt Like Your Life Depends On It — Because Sometimes It Does

Lawyer: Encryption is the presumption of privacy. It’s also your best legal and technical shield.

Disruptive thinker: People hoard complex tech like a security ritual. Keep it simple: use the right tools.

Practical move: Use end-to-end encrypted messaging (Signal or an equivalent), enable full-disk encryption on phones and laptops, and employ encrypted backups. Use a hardware security key (FIDO2) for accounts that support it for phishing-resistant two-factor authentication.

Example: A journalist under digital attack can keep sources safe by using Signal’s disappearing messages and a hardware key for their email account. An encrypted backup saved off-device means data survives theft without giving attackers readable access.

Cost: A small learning curve and a couple of dollars for a hardware key. Accept it.

3) Compartmentalize — One Identity, Many Fortresses

Robert Greene would love this: play the long game by creating asymmetry. Don’t be a single, centralized target.

Practical move: Separate identities for separate tasks. Use one email for financial/institutional matters, another (or burner addresses) for newsletters and accounts that will spam you, and a throwaway for casual sign-ups. Run sensitive browsing in an isolated browser profile or a separate OS profile. Consider a separate phone number or burner SIM when sign-ups require that extra friction.

Example: A small business owner keeps payroll and bank logins behind a dedicated, rarely-used email and never uses that email to log into social sites. When their social account is phished, the attacker can’t leap to payroll systems.

Cost: Mild complexity and habit change. But you become harder to de-anonymize.

4) Deny Surveillance by Design — Control Devices and Permissions

Soldier: Control the field. If the enemy can see you, you lose initiative.

Practical move: Audit app permissions right now. Revoke microphone, camera, and location access unless an app absolutely needs it. Turn off always-on voice assistants. Disable Bluetooth and Wi-Fi when not in use. Prefer privacy-respecting hardware and software (search for audited firms and models). Consider open-source alternatives where practical.

Example: People complain about “listening” ads. Often the real culprit is broad app permissions and shared SDKs. Revoke microphone and location rights for social apps and watch targeted ad relevance drop.

Cost: Loss of some convenience (e.g., “Find My” features, personalized local recommendations). Decide which comforts are worth your privacy.

5) Go Analog Where It Matters — Paper, Cash, and Offline Habits

Philosopher: Some things must be pulled out from the stream to be pure again.

Lawyer: Physical records and paper chains can be evidence — and limits to digital overreach.

Practical move: Use cash for privacy-sensitive purchases when feasible. Keep minimal personal data in cloud documents; store sensitive records offline in an encrypted drive or a locked file box. Shred physical documents that contain personal data. Periodically search data-broker sites and file opt-out requests (yes, it’s annoying — do it). If the stakes are high, consult a lawyer familiar with privacy laws in your jurisdiction.

Example: Someone concerned about family privacy pays certain contractors in cash and keeps copies of legal or health documents off the cloud and in a locked safe. When a mass data breach occurs at a popular document-storage service, they’re unaffected.

Cost: Time, discipline, and occasionally higher friction in daily life. But fewer digital breadcrumbs.

The Brutal Truth You’re Dodging

Every click is a vote for surveillance. Every “Allow” you approve is a key you hand to an invisible landlord. The modern privacy war isn’t won with outrage; it’s won with systems and habits. You’ll never be perfect — but perfect is an excuse for paralysis.

Pick one of the five above and implement it today. 

Don’t try to swallow everything at once; change fails when it’s a performance instead of a habit. 

Start surgical. Build muscle. Expand.

Call to Action — Do One Thing, Now

Open your phone’s app permissions screen. Pick three apps. Revoke microphone or location access for at least one of them. That’s your first move. Do it right now.

After that, schedule a 90-minute “privacy drill” this weekend: audit accounts, enable a password manager, buy a hardware security key, and delete unused services. Do the discipline. Build the walls. Then sleep easier.

Privacy is work. 

Either you do it, or you become the product. 

The choice is yours — and this is the year you stop pretending you’ll “get to it later.”

Where Did Halloween Start?

The Night That Refuses to Die

Let’s be honest—Halloween isn’t just about plastic skeletons, overpriced candy, or awkward office costume contests where the intern dresses as a “sexy Wi-Fi router.” 

Halloween is something older. Darker. 

It’s the one night of the year where the mask slips, and we willingly flirt with death, chaos, and the things that make our skin crawl.

But where the hell did it come from? 

Why do we dress our kids like witches and send them to beg for candy from strangers, a ritual we’d call “child endangerment” any other night of the year?

The truth: Halloween was born from fear. Real, raw, ancient fear.

The Celts and Their Night of Terror

Over 2,000 years ago, long before Starbucks made pumpkin spice a seasonal religion, the Celts had Samhain (pronounced “sow-in”). This wasn’t a cute holiday. It was a survival mechanism.

Samhain marked the end of the harvest and the beginning of winter—the season of hunger, sickness, and death. 

On this night, they believed the veil between the living and the dead cracked open. Ghosts, spirits, demons—they all came wandering. And if you weren’t careful, they’d drag you into the dark with them.

So, what did the Celts do? They lit bonfires, wore terrifying animal-skin costumes, and made offerings of food to trick the dead into leaving them alone. 

Imagine it: whole villages in the firelight, wearing skull masks, surrounded by shadows, whispering prayers that death would pass them by.

Halloween didn’t start with candy. It started with terror management theory 101.

Christianity Hijacks the Fear

Fast forward a few centuries. Christianity, as it liked to do, saw Samhain and thought: Nice holiday, we’ll take it from here.

The Church rebranded it as “All Saints’ Day” (a.k.a. All Hallows’ Day), with the night before becoming All Hallows’ Eve—Halloween. 

But no amount of incense or holy water could bleach out the primal fear baked into the tradition. 

People still believed the dead came walking. They just mixed saints, spirits, and sinners into one hellish cocktail.

Even today, the church bells of All Saints’ Day feel more like a warning than a celebration.

Trick-or-Treat: Bribing Spirits With Candy

Now here’s where it gets deliciously twisted. The whole “trick-or-treat” routine? That started as “souling.” Poor villagers went door-to-door offering prayers for the dead in exchange for food. If you didn’t feed them, maybe they cursed your house.

Over time, that practice got boiled down into kids demanding chocolate bars with thinly veiled threats: “Trick or treat.” It’s playful now, but the bones of it? It’s straight-up spiritual extortion.

Candy is just the 21st-century offering to ward off the dark.

The Horror Beneath the Mask

Think about it: Halloween is the one holiday that doesn’t pretend everything is fine. 

Christmas lies and says we’re all merry. 

Valentine’s Day sells the illusion that love is perfect. 

But Halloween? Halloween stares us straight in the face and says: You are going to die. The dark is real. The monsters aren’t gone—they’re just hiding in plain sight.

The Celts lit bonfires because they feared the dark. We plug in plastic skeletons because we fear being forgotten. We put on masks not just to scare away spirits, but to remind ourselves that deep down, we all wear masks every damn day.

Halloween is less about ghosts and more about truth—the truth that death is undefeated, and pretending otherwise is the biggest trick of all.

So, Why Do We Celebrate?

Because for one night, fear is allowed. 

We let the monsters walk among us. We welcome the ghosts. We eat candy to sweeten the bitterness of the inevitable. 

We laugh at the thing that terrifies us most—our mortality.

The Celts danced around the fire so winter wouldn’t kill them. We dance around our fears so life won’t swallow us whole.

Call to Action: Face the Darkness

Here’s the challenge: This Halloween, don’t just throw on a costume and eat cheap chocolate. 

Light your own fire. 

Not literal bonfires—unless your HOA is cool with that—but confront the shadows you’ve been avoiding. The fear you’ve been hiding from.

Ask yourself: 

What ghost still haunts me? 

What mask am I wearing every day? 

What part of me is already dead, and what part is still clawing to live?

Halloween isn’t a children’s game. It’s a reminder that life is short, death is certain, and fear can either paralyze you—or fuel you.

The Celts understood this. They faced the night.

Now it’s your turn. 

A ruthless guide to keeping your soul and your society in an age of hungry algorithms.

 

If 2025 belongs to anyone, it belongs to those who refuse to outsource their will. Here are five brutal, necessary moves to keep power human—and keep the machine clever, useful, and on a short leash.

1) Put Power on a Diet: Control Compute, Control Capability

Philosopher’s cut: Power without limits doesn’t enlighten; it metastasizes.

Lawyer’s clause: License large training runs and require provenance of data, compute, and funding. If you can’t name where a model came from, it doesn’t get to operate.

Soldier’s doctrine: Two-person rule for dangerous deployments, mandatory “dead-man” switch for data centers, and tripwire monitors on model behavior.

Why it matters: Coups grow in the dark. The 2010 “flash crash” and later supply-chain hacks showed how invisible dependencies can whiplash entire markets and governments. 

We don’t need hysteria—we need chaperones. Gate the compute, log the training, audit the pipelines. If someone tries to run a god-model in a broom closet, the lights go on and the party ends.

Example: Stock exchanges use circuit breakers to halt panics. Do the same for runaway model behavior: automatic pause thresholds when outputs spike in risk, reach, or real-world impact.

2) Kill the Mystery: Make Black Boxes Explain Themselves

Philosopher’s cut: If you can’t explain a thing, you don’t own it; it owns you.

Lawyer’s clause: “Right to Rationale.” Any model affecting rights, money, or safety must provide a human-legible explanation, versioned logs, and a human appeal path. Non-negotiable.

Soldier’s doctrine: After-action reports for AI incidents just like aircraft mishaps—causes, fixes, accountability.

Why it matters: Opaque automation is where negligence hides. Remember when a single safety system, poorly understood, could nose an entire aircraft at the ground? That wasn’t “evil AI.” It was blind trust. 

We need model cards, red-team reports, and immutable audit trails. If a system can move money, sway a vote, or gatekeep health care, it must show its work like a nervous undergrad on exam day.

Example: Hospitals adopting clinical decision support should treat the model like a resident: supervised, questioned, and documented. No black-box diktats on human lives.

3) Fortify the Human Perimeter: Cognitive Security, Not Censorship

Philosopher’s cut: Freedom dies when truth feels exhausting.

Lawyer’s clause: Authenticate content, not opinions. Watermark synthetic media, sign real footage (C2PA or equivalent), label bots at the protocol level. No gag orders—just receipts.

Soldier’s doctrine: Train for information ambushes. Rehearse deepfake drills before elections, mergers, or crises. Speed beats outrage.

Why it matters: If a hostile model can’t hack your grid, it’ll hack your head. The cheapest path to power is manipulating attention. 

Don’t outlaw speech; outflank deception. 

Give citizens cryptographic proof of what’s real so they can argue honestly about what it means. That’s how adults fight.

Example: Emergency services and newsrooms coordinate “verify before amplify” drills. A viral clip triggers a 10-minute authenticity check; signed sources get fast lanes. 

The goal isn’t perfect truth; it’s disciplined doubt.

4) Build Manual Muscles: Fail-Safes That Actually Fail Safe

Philosopher’s cut: Convenience is a kindly tyrant. It makes you soft, then sells you a leash.

Lawyer’s clause: Critical services (power, water, finance, hospitals) must maintain manual fallback procedures and off-grid redundancies. Put it in the charter; fund it or lose your license.

Soldier’s doctrine: Air-gap what matters, rehearse the ugly day, and assume comms will die.

Why it matters: Colonial Pipeline showed how a single cyber choke can cascade into panic. The cure is boring: offline backups, hand-operated valves, paper playbooks, and people trained to use them under stress. 

Tech is a force multiplier; it must not be a single point of failure.

Example: A regional bank runs “paper day” once a quarter—core operations on manual processes for four hours. It’s sweaty, slow, and priceless when the lights flicker.

5) Chain of Command for Code: Responsibility You Can’t Delegate

Philosopher’s cut: Tools are innocent. Owners aren’t.

Lawyer’s clause: Strict liability for autonomous actions within defined domains. If your model can transact, it needs insurance, audit hooks, and a named human fiduciary.

Soldier’s doctrine: Clear ROE (Rules of Engagement) for autonomous agents—where they can act, how they escalate, and when a human must take the shot or stand down.

Why it matters: The fastest way to a machine “power grab” is a thicket of plausible deniability. Assign duty of care. 

Make negligence expensive. 

Elevate “model steward” to a licensed profession with personal accountability—more pilot than programmer.

Example: An algorithmic trading desk registers its autonomous agent the way a company registers a broker. The agent has a risk budget, a kill-switch threshold, and a steward who signs the log. No ghost guns in financial markets.

The Quiet War You Win Every Day

You don’t beat a clever machine with slogans. You beat it with structure, discipline, and a little ancient virtue: temperance, courage, prudence, justice. 

Mark Manson would tell you to stop giving a damn about performative panic and start caring about boring safeguards. 

Robert Greene would remind you that power respects incentives and visibility. 

Hemingway would pour a stiff drink, look you in the eye, and say: "Do the work when it’s cold and no one’s cheering."

Here’s the blunt truth: 

AI isn’t plotting in a castle tower. It’s running in clouds we pay for, written by people we hire, and deployed by leaders we elect. 

If it ever “takes over,” it will be because we traded sovereignty for convenience and responsibility for speed.

Don’t do that.

Call to Action: Pick Your Post, Then Hold It

• If you lead: Implement compute controls, audit trails, and kill-switches. Not next quarter—now.

• If you build: Write explainable systems, log everything, and refuse black-box deployments that touch rights or safety.

• If you govern: Legislate authentication, liability, and emergency drills. Fund the unsexy backbone.

• If you’re a citizen: Practice cognitive security. Verify before you share. Reward leaders who choose safety over spectacle.

The future doesn’t belong to AI. 

It belongs to whoever shows up with discipline and a plan. 

Be that person. Be that team. 

And when the storm comes—and it will—be the one with the lights on, the logs ready, the manual muscle strong, and the courage to say: 

Not today.

Ghosts in Your Head: The 3 Scariest Psyops Since 1940 (and Why You’re Not Immune)

 

The battlefield isn’t out there. It’s in your skull. And the enemy’s favorite weapon isn’t a rifle—it’s your attention.

We like to imagine we’re rational, stainless-steel thinkers with free will. Cute. History says otherwise. 

Power has always hacked perception—quietly, patiently, with the kind of discipline a monk would envy and a hitman would respect. 

What follows aren’t urban legends or fringe stories; they’re documented operations where institutions bent reality until it snapped. 

If you think you’re immune, that’s the first sign you’ve already been tagged.

1) MK-Ultra: When Your Government Test-Drove Your Mind

In the 1950s–1970s, while America was mainlining optimism and suburbia, the CIA ran MK-Ultra—an archipelago of subprojects experimenting with hypnosis, sensory deprivation, electroshocks, and yes, dosing people with LSD without their consent. 

Not just shadowy black sites—also universities, hospitals, prisons. Some files were destroyed in 1973; what remains is bad enough.

The philosopher in me calls this the original sin of the modern surveillance state: treat the citizen as raw material. The lawyer in me notes the obvious—this shredded informed consent and due process. The soldier in me sees an ugly truth: in the Cold War, some suits convinced themselves that weaponizing the mind was just another hill to take.

Example? Frank Olson, a government scientist, died after being secretly dosed. The official story has morphed over time; the fact remains: a man is dead because “let’s see what happens” passed for strategy. 

MK-Ultra wasn’t a clean experiment. It was a moral oil spill.

Why it’s terrifying: It proved a point no one wanted proven: the state will try almost anything if it believes the stakes are existential. It also taught bureaucrats a habit that never dies—if you can’t control facts, control perceptions.

2) COINTELPRO: When Dissent Was Labeled a Disease

From 1956 to 1971, the FBI ran COINTELPRO, a domestic counterintelligence operation targeting civil rights groups, anti-war activists, journalists, and more. 

Techniques ranged from infiltration and informants to forged letters meant to fracture trust, humiliate leaders, and spark paranoia. 

The ugliest artifact is a letter urging Martin Luther King Jr. to step out of public life—psychological warfare masquerading as civic hygiene.

Here’s the Greene-style power lesson: if you can’t defeat a movement, rot it from the inside. 

Isolate the leader. Poison alliances. Make people doubt their friends. The military name for it is “counter-mobilization.” The human name is “ruin them quietly.”

Why it’s terrifying: It turned the national nervous system against itself. Not by argument, but by corrosion. It used the truth selectively, injected lies surgically, and let suspicion do the heavy lifting. Good people started seeing enemies in every mirror. That’s not policing; that’s mind-terrain denial.

3) Operation INFEKTION: A Lie with a Long Half-Life

In the 1980s, Soviet intelligence launched Operation INFEKTION, a global disinformation campaign claiming AIDS was a U.S. bioweapon cooked up at Fort Detrick. 

The seed was planted in a small Indian newspaper and then cultivated through front outlets and sympathetic press until it bloomed into “common knowledge” in parts of the world.

This is the scary elegance of a professional psyop: start small, go slow, pick hosts with high credibility to your target audience, and let the rumor metastasize. 

No shouting. 

Just plausible whispers repeated long enough to fossilize as fact. 

Years later, the residue lingers—mistrust of medicine, paranoia about vaccines, a general belief that someone, somewhere, is lying (which, to be fair, sometimes they are).

Why it’s terrifying: It weaponized doubt in the middle of a public health crisis. People died not just from a virus, but from narrative shrapnel. 

Once trust detonates, the fragments bury deep.

The Pattern: Same Tactic, New Skin

Different decades, different uniforms, same playbook:

• Exploit uncertainty. Ambiguity is the hacker’s paradise. Where data is fuzzy, story wins.

• Hijack identity. Make information tribal. If accepting a fact threatens someone’s community or status, they’ll reject the fact, not the tribe.

• Overwhelm the attention stack. Flood the channel with noise so signal looks like a superstition.

• Make time your ally. Lies sprint; corrections limp. By the time truth laces its boots, the damage is done.

This is where the Hemingway part of me clears his throat: stop whining. 

The world is hard. People lie. 

Institutions—yours, mine, theirs—play dirty when they think they must. You can’t fix human nature, but you can harden your perimeter.

Building Your Psyop Armor (Minimal BS, Maximum Bite)

1. Track the feeling before the fact. If a headline makes you furious, afraid, or triumphant, note the emotion first. That’s the hook. Naming it blunts it. Warriors breathe before they shoot.

2. Interrogate incentives. Who benefits if you believe this? Follow money, power, and prestige like a blood trail. If the answer is “engagement,” congratulations—you’re being farmed.

3. Triangulate, don’t binge. One source is a sermon. Three is a map. Check across outlets with different biases. If a claim can’t survive the triangle, it’s probably a toy.

4. Refuse share-now culture. Delay is a weapon. Give it 24 hours. Most “breaking” stories break themselves.

5. Audit your inputs quarterly. Ruthlessly prune feeds, mute outrage merchants, and diversify who you read. Your information diet is a moral choice.

6. Practice narrative disobedience. Habitually ask, “What would the opposite story look like?” The point isn’t to flip sides; it’s to keep your mind from kneeling.

7. Build small, stubborn communities. Psyops fracture the lonely. A handful of grounded people you can argue with in good faith is stronger defense than any app.

Final Charge: Don’t Be the Product

Philosophy says know thyself. 

War says know the enemy. 

Law says know the line. 

Put them together and you get a way to live in a world where reality is contested ground.

MK-Ultra proved institutions will test your edges. 

COINTELPRO proved they’ll salt your friendships if it protects their story. 

INFEKTION proved a lie can outlive the liar. 

The conclusion isn’t to hide—it’s to harden. The most subversive act in 2025 is a mind that chooses what to believe on purpose.

Call to Action: Pick one practice above and deploy it for the next 30 days. 

Track what you read, what you feel, and what you share. 

Then send this to someone you argue with—but respect. 

Tell them you’re building psyop armor and you want them on your flank. If enough of us do that, the next big operation might hit a wall it didn’t expect: 

people who think before they’re played.