Systems Analysis

In-depth analysis and multi-part series on political, social, and cultural dynamics. Strategic thinking and big-picture perspectives on systemic patterns and civic challenges.

They’ve Been Picking My Pocket for Six Years

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I live in Arizona, and for six years we have been targeted by a coordinated national campaign to scare voters with propaganda about election fraud. It has never produced a shred of evidence, because there was never any evidence to find. The Department of Justice is now demanding the voter files of five million Arizonans. … Read more

The Veto Number Is Real. The Context Is Missing.

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Attack ads will say Governor Katie Hobbs vetoed 401 bills. The public record shows what those bills were, what the veto blocked, and it has cost Arizona taxpayers. Seventy of those vetoes were ordinary legislative friction, the kind that happens between any governor and any legislature regardless of party. The remaining 331 followed a pattern that is documented in the public record and consistent across three legislative sessions.

It is All One Pot of Money

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Americans tend to think about the economy in sectors. The defense industry. The oil industry. The banking sector. The tech giants. This is a useful shorthand for what these industries produce — weapons systems, energy, credit, software — but it describes function, not ownership. The question this piece examines is a different one: at the level where the money actually accumulates, do these sectors exist as separate things at all?

The answer the ownership record suggests is largely no. The same concentrated pools of capital sit at the top of the shareholder lists across industries that are supposed to be distinct, supposed to compete, supposed to be governed by separate regulatory frameworks built around their differences. This piece assembles that picture — not sector by sector, but all at once — and asks whether economic activity at that scale is better described as productive or extractive.

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The Veto Queen Story Is Missing Its First Three Chapters

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Arizona voters will hear that Katie Hobbs vetoed 401 bills. That number is real. The context behind it — the audit that cost taxpayers at least $8.6 million, the structural reasons Arizona was targeted, and the wealth extraction agenda those vetoes blocked — is the part the attack ads leave out.

The Overton Window: Satire Gets Deleted and Extremism Doesn’t

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The Overton Window: Satire Gets Deleted and Extremism Doesn’t

I once reposted a meme showing a hospital patient in an ICE mask with the caption “ICE agents still hospitalized after being shot with cell phone.” It was funny.

Facebook deleted it, and I’ve discovered this is common. Reports from civil liberties and digital rights groups show this is a real pattern: content critical of ICE routinely disappears from major platforms.

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