Grumble Goat

It is a fast paced-world we live in. Every great leap in technology is designed to make life easier: the printing press copies books for us, the cotton-gin picks seeds for us, the computer does all of our computing, and A.I. does all of our marketing and research. So why aren’t we all sitting on the beach? Ironically, all of these advancements have made us busier. Productivity is through the roof. There is no time between things anymore. Don’t squeeze in a lunch between telegraphs, because Beijing is already on the cellphone. And when emails circumnavigate the...

Safety first. Nothing is more important than your health and safety. Especially when traveling. So when we drive, we wear our seatbelts; and when we fly, we pose for full-frontal nude X-ray photographs for the federal agents that confiscate all of our belongings to search in a totally reasonable seizure of our rights. Because safety. We can’t outlaw guns, though, not for safety, guns are protected by the constitution. I mean, our right to property and freedom from unreasonable search and seizure are also protected by the constitution, but that right we have to forgo, because to keep sa...

In the near future, the robots are winning the war against humans. Any human action taken outside of acceptable drone-performance is swiftly punished. Labor is rewarded with an hourly stipend for feed and shelter. Any human luxuries, like soap or floss, are locked behind plexiglass, to be distributed as tokens of good behavior. The tariff wars will determine the market-price of life-hours, and the S&P 5000 bots will calculate the value your accrued hours can be traded out. Out of this darkness, one man will emerge. This one man holds the key, and every human at CVS is relying...

We don’t have a fresh Grumble this week, but it may be time to revisit the topic of ‘Hating Taxes.’ It seems that our government has been taken over by a shadowy, robed cabal of unelected, out-of-touch oligarchs who Hate Taxes.

There are few things as universally reviled in this world as the repugnant idea of taxes. The image of the tax-collector is that of a brutish thug, a member of the League of Evil, sitting right between the mobster hit-man and the concert-ticket scalper. But where did this sinister visage come from? For-profit corporations take far mo...

Descartes argues that the only thing I can be sure of with certainty is that my consciousness exists. Everything else is built on trust. We take for granted that we know everyone in our lives exists and our relation to them is built on foundations of truth. Except for one day a year. There is a day in the calendar that puts us in a Truman Show of our own. We can trust nothing that comes out of peoples’ mouths, and nothing that we see on the internet. Any clear path we see could be a Wile-E Coyote facade pai...

In Humankind’s humbler beginnings, news and rumor were slow to travel. A merchant ship might dock and bring word from other parts of the world. Stories might be embellished over time, Xerxes might be forty feet tall and surrounded by cyclops, Rhodes might have a colossus, Pharaohs might have mummy issues. The village idiot may be spreading rumors of these monsters, while the town crier maybe tempers the news to more realistic proportions. But we live in the modern world of instant gratification. There is no time to fact-check every exaggeration, and DOGE is here to streamline the pr...

Humankind’s origins were a brutal quest for survival. Hunting for food and fighting prey with simple tools was tiring work. And what was the reward for it? Bloody flesh for a meal. Sweets were a very rare treat. Every once in a while our ancestors might risk some bee stings to get a taste of that sweet honey. But now, sugar is in everything. The faucet of high-fructose corn syrup pumps that calorie-rich ooze right into our veins. Staple foods that were once the bland building-blocks of meals are now sticky with sugar. But when everything is candy, ho...

Humans are very small, in the Grand Schematics of Things. Large things have a gravitational force. Large things have very much matter. The Sun controls the spinning of the Earth, the seasons, the day and night. Small things, like humans, don’t have much control over the rotation of the Earth. But we have developed a way for small men to become large. Not with matter, but with money; and while money doesn’t have much matter, money does matter much. Small men with very large sums of money can move the Earth, they control our media, they control our...

It’s that special time of year, again. Not Groundhogs Day, groundhogs celebrate their love all year long. No, I’m talking about Valentine’s Day. It’s a day to celebrate that special someone in your life: your partner, your companion, the person you rely on every day of the year, the person you confide your every thought and wish upon; this is the day to show them how much you care about them by purchasing ultra-processed confectionaries, sweat-factory plushies, and mass-produced greeting cards. It’s wonderfully efficient how perfectly you can symbolically phone-in the metaphor of taking your loved...

Welcome to the second non-annual G.O.A.T. Awards! Awards season is upon us, and just like the Hollywood elite, the content creators at Grumble Goat also need constant positive reinforcement. Enjoy your favorite moments from Grumble Goats past while the Sorting Top Hat of Randomness dictates the winners and losers. Applaud Mat and Veronique as we shower each other with G.O.A.T Awards!

*Grumbles are specifically off-the-cuff, no research went into this grumble.

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