My grandmother kept a cupboard she called the just-in-case, and for most of my childhood I read it as a harmless eccentricity rather than what it was — a wound made edible. She had been a girl during the Depression, and somewhere in her twenties she had learned to keep tinned beans, sacks of flour, jars sealed with wax and paper, all of it rotated with the humourless discipline of a quartermaster provisioning for a war that had already ended but might, at any hour, resume. Nothing in that cupboard was ever eaten first. It sat at the back of the shelf like a private insurance policy against a world that had once taken everything from her family and could, she believed, do so again at a moment’s notice. [Read More]

Something fundamental is vanishing, and most people will not notice until it is already gone. Not with a declaration. Not with a law passed in the dead of night. Simply, gradually, the option to buy something without creating a permanent record will disappear. The ability to save purchasing power outside of a system that can freeze it, monitor it, or program it will become a memory that seems almost fictional to those who never experienced it. [Read More]

We live in a world where much of our popular media is, to some extent, an extension of a pervasive propaganda apparatus rife with subliminal messages and predictive programming, inundating the populace with subconscious sensory overload effective for sedating the citizenry all too keen to live vicariously through the stories of fictional heroes fighting tyranny and oppression while doing nothing to emulate those actions in the real world. [Read More]