The Chris Abraham Show

Chris Abraham
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The Chris Abraham Show

tl:dr: Just a 55-year-old cisgender white male mansplaining his own self-importance. But good. Full Summary: The musings of Chris Abraham as he aspires to know the world and himself while getting healthy, losing weight, becoming fit, and running his small business while living in South Arlington, Virginia. Walk with him a while and see what's up.

  1. Live Free or Zoo

    14H AGO

    Live Free or Zoo

    A meme flickered across feeds this week: South Carolina stacked up against California like a balance sheet for how well you can cage chaos. Homicide rates, GDP, life expectancy — by each measure California shines as the model: safer, wealthier, longer-lived. South Carolina looks rougher, poorer, more violent, a reminder that for some Americans, freedom means a shorter, riskier life. Beneath the numbers, the line: “Don’t California my South Carolina.” It’s more than a bumper sticker. It’s the oldest American choice: Would you rather live longer, safer, and curated in a soft enclosure — or live free enough to fail, starve, and fight at the forest’s edge? A good zoo is not a trick. It extends lives. It keeps predators out, or in. It offers illusions of wilderness while carefully curating the risk. California has spent a century mastering this balance. Its early Progressive roots laid out protections for labor, housing, and the urban poor. By the mid-century boom, it perfected suburbia: highways, lawns, hidden fences. Today it pilots universal basic income and climate protections. It works — statistically. But the hidden cost is that freedom to claw your way out shrinks until the animals forget there ever was a gate. South Carolina and places like it — the Mountain West, the rural South, the high plains — carry an older instinct. The frontier mind knows the wilderness is dangerous but would rather risk the claw than hand it over. It’s not about wanting chaos; it’s about accepting that a life worth living is mortal, unpredictable, never fully occupied by guardians. When settlers crossed into the forests, they feared the wilderness more than the king they left behind. Puritans wrote of the moral abyss in the trees, the space where you stood alone before God with no wall between you and failure. Out of that dread came the rugged individualist, the one who keeps the bear gun or the revolver not to kill but to remember the gate is not locked. In 1965, French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard captured this tension in Alphaville, a bleak sci-fi noir about a city run by Alpha 60, a sentient computer that abolishes contradiction and poetry. The city is orderly, safe, perfectly contained. Citizens live behind doors marked occupé — occupied — or libre — free. But freedom is an illusion; the guardians hold all the real weapons. Into this system drifts Lemmy Caution, a detective from the wild “Outer Nations.” He smuggles in a revolver and outlaw poems, proof that the wild spark always tries to slip the fence. Godard’s generation feared that postwar France’s technocratic planners would engineer a zoo so perfect the people would choose it themselves. When France sent America the Statue of Liberty, they gave us a flame, not a fence. The poem “Give me your tired, your poor…” is an American footnote; the torch stands as a dare: keep this wild spark alive if you can. For all our talk of British roots, America’s spiritual lineage is French — the Enlightenment bet that real freedom demands risk. That legacy lives today in the states that embrace constitutional carry, stand by the “Live Free or Die” motto, and bristle at any new enclosure that feels too neat to be true. The tension is permanent. California’s better zoo is a real achievement. But the meme reminds us that some people will trade longer, safer lives for the raw edge of the trees. A caged bird may live twice as long as one in the forest, but its song is the only thing that knows the truth. Godard understood this: the guardians do not always kill the wild spark — the animals do, when they forget how to find the gate marked libre. A perfect cage is still a cage. The flame stands for those who keep the claw, and the choice. Live Free or Zoo. America’s Alphaville choice.

    24 min
  2. Remember the DC Madam? Rhymes with Epstein

    18H AGO · BONUS

    Remember the DC Madam? Rhymes with Epstein

    Same Swamp, Different BroodThe DC Madam & the Secret That Still Hums Close your eyes: DC, late ‘90s into the 2000s. Suits at the Mayflower, steakhouse hush-hush deals on K Street, the kind of power that smells like dry-cleaned wool, stale cigars, and cheap cologne. There was no Tinder. No casual fling on a swipe. If you wanted vice, you went through the shadows — or you called Deborah Jeane Palfrey, the DC Madam. She didn’t run some back-alley hustle. Pamela Martin & Associates was an escort network for the capital’s respectable sinners: contractors, agency lifers, moralists with Bible verses on their lapels. Palfrey kept her insurance policy — a spiral notebook stuffed with names, numbers, and notes that could melt marble. The Black Book. She told the feds: If I go down, I take them with me. A threat like that should’ve cracked the swamp wide open. For a moment, it did. Randall Tobias — Bush’s AIDS czar — out. Senator David Vitter — Mr. Family Values — outed, then forgiven by his base because, well, power forgives itself. But that was it. The machine dribbled out just enough names to keep the wolves fed, then buried the rest. The notebook vanished into sealed court files. And Palfrey? She swore to reporters she’d never kill herself. In 2008, they found her hanging in her mother’s shed. Officially: suicide. Unofficially: she was the prototype for “Epstein didn’t kill himself” a decade before Epstein was the punchline. That’s the pattern: every so often, like a cicada brood clawing up through swamp mud, the black book returns. New names, new rumors. But the roots never get pulled. Epstein was the next cycle — kids instead of consenting adults, island flights instead of Mayflower hotel rooms, rumored Mossad cameras instead of a battered flip phone. The same cycle: names teased, a few low-levels tossed to the mob, the real ringmasters vanish behind sealed files. We like to think the moral panic back then was quaint — grown men sweating bullets over consenting sex work when now you can hook up on an app before your third cocktail. But the real taboo still stands: the blackmail, the kompromat, the buried evidence that would show just how much the moral scolds and law-and-order saints have always been the filthiest ones in the room. Pam Bondi teases Epstein files. Cash Patel shrugs there’s no list. Elon Musk huffs about betrayal. The base fumes: Where’s the list? They’ll be fuming decades from now, too. Because the truth is, you’re not on the team that gets to read it. Once, an escort scandal nearly cracked the Capitol. Now, even child trafficking by billionaires fizzles out behind a security badge and a sleepy courthouse clerk. Same secrets. Same hush. Same swamp. You feel that hum? It’s the cicadas. They’ll be back. The black book always comes back. The swamp always hums. It’s not the scandal that ever dies — it’s your hope that this time, the list might actually matter.

    35 min
  3. American Welfare Fatigue

    1D AGO

    American Welfare Fatigue

    It is often said that every modern welfare system, from the Roman grain dole to the SNAP card at the grocery store, carries the seeds of its own discontent. These systems promise that the collective will carry the burdens of the vulnerable. But they are haunted by a tension older than any bureaucracy: the uneasy craving to see helplessness displayed. To give freely feels good; but to give freely to someone who does not look sufficiently broken or scraping is to stir a resentment no modern slogan can cover. The old village beggar knew this instinctively. He made himself legless, or at least seemed so, rolling on a pallet, bowl tapping his stick, eyes down. He knew to keep the ruined coat for the street and the decent tunic for home. We might call this fraud now, but it was a moral theatre everyone understood: visible ruin earned the coin; hidden dignity stayed private. If the village lost patience, there was no Caesar’s office to back him up. The beggar starved or found another corner. What people forget is that even Jesus did not spin up an endless pity machine. He broke loaves and fishes — but He did not invoice Rome for it. When He healed, He did not say, “Stay here on the mat forever so they know you deserve your crust.” He said: “Get up. Take your mat and walk. Show yourself to the priest.” The mat was temporary. The pity was transitional. When the crowd showed contempt, He did not beg: “And He did not do many mighty works there because of their unbelief.” No forced miracle. No charity for the ungrateful. “Shake the dust from your feet. It will be more bearable for Sodom and Gomorrah.” The trouble now is that we pretend to want the poor whole — yet the system depends on them staying visibly needy. The taxpayer votes for the teat to keep flowing but wants the scraping to feel real. If the stumps turn out to be legs, if the mat rolls away too soon, the moral contract snaps. Oh SNAP. The same voice that funds endless foreign wars without flinching will rage at the sight of a welfare recipient standing too straight with a phone or fresh shoes. The sin is not the cost but the pride that threatens to make giver and receiver look too equal. So the beggar learns to play his part. The system, ironically, rewards the subtle con: visible ruin, murmured gratitude, hidden dignities that never leak. But the internet complicates this fragile show — the double life is now broadcast and clipped. The mat is public. The hidden tunic leaks out. The bowl knocks the stick while the other hand posts a joke about scamming the system. The audience sees it and cries, “Fraud!” not because they think every poor man is faking, but because the script cracked on camera. What Jesus knew — and the modern pity machine can’t grasp — is that mercy moves on when mocked. There is no endless subsidy for the willfully broken. He never asked Judas to keep the purse open forever. He never told Caesar to levy a tax for those who refuse to stand. “You received without charge; give without charge.” But once the bread is broken, you either stand up or you do not. There is no third option. The healed must leave the mat behind. If they will not — or worse, if they stand up and keep asking for scraps — they force the giver to choose: keep the teat open, or snap it shut. The real disease is not fraud itself but the quiet demand that fraud become ritual. The mat must stay visible, the scraping performative, the healed must display sickness at the right moment to keep the teat alive. This is not Christian mercy. This is the Company Store with a halo, built on a moral economy that does not want the poor to disappear but to remain forever “almost healed.” Jesus offered a harder gift: stand up, walk, or live with your ruin. If you spit on the bread, He will feed you no more. No SNAP card, no empire’s pity machine, no endless cost center. Just the Kingdom — or your mat.

    22 min
  4. When the Board Turns Red

    1D AGO · BONUS

    When the Board Turns Red

    Why Surrender Is Still the Only Endgame There’s a brutal truth people forget when they throw around words like genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing. Those words do mean something — but they lose meaning when they’re wielded like hashtags during an ongoing shooting war. Once you’re in the fight, the moral shield only works when you put the knife down. War is chess with live ammunition. You have pieces, you have power, you have moves that escalate. The moment you advance a pawn, you’ve agreed to the possibility it will be taken. The moment you swing a punch, the counterpunch is fair game. That’s not moral or legal — it’s the physics of force. In chess, resignation is civilized. You see you’re outflanked; you tip your king. Good game. In wrestling or Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, you tap out before your arm snaps or your windpipe closes. It’s the grown-up way to say: I know I’m beaten. I’ll take my lumps now, live to fight again. But modern states — Ukraine, Hamas, proxies everywhere — think they can bend this rule. They escalate, they provoke, they swing, and when the bigger bear or the muzzled wolf responds, they shout unfair. They wrap themselves in the flag of victimhood, hoping a hashtag will do what the rifle couldn’t. It doesn’t work that way. The bear — Russia — spent 30 years tolerating the cheese wire of NATO expansion, buffer states lost, missile silos inching closer. It murmured the same line: Don’t take Ukraine. That’s the red line. When the noose was almost tight, the bear lunged. Inevitable. Ugly. Not nice, but predictable to anyone who reads the chessboard. Israel — same logic. It wore the moral muzzle for decades, letting the world watch every checkpoint, every stone thrown. It let itself be painted as Goliath while expanding settlements inch by inch. But the rules of engagement were always simple: Respond only to lethal force with lethal force. The moment Hamas paraglided into that festival, the contract flipped. The wolf took off the muzzle, and now the panopticon watches the claws do what they were always ready to do. Meanwhile, these players made themselves indispensable. Russia didn’t just hibernate — it built BRICS into a real counterweight to the dollar bloc, bonded itself to China’s energy hunger, and kept India and the Global South just friendly enough to shrug off sanctions. Israel, humiliated daily in the press, quietly fused itself into Western security, tech, and intelligence. You can hate it — but good luck cutting it loose without sawing your own nerves in half. And the backers? Ask any student of revolutions: you don’t win without a patron. The US didn’t beat Britain on pluck alone — France footed the bill and sailed the fleet. Ukraine survives because NATO bankrolls the fight. But patrons hate throwing good money after bad. The moment the math says you can’t win, they count their chips and walk away. The resignation clock. The tap out. The white flag. If you’re losing — badly, hopelessly — you accept that you’ll probably lose territory, sovereignty, credibility. You might get a Versailles, a new border, a blockade. It’s humiliating — but it’s survival. You don’t get mercy while you’re still swinging a hidden knife. You don’t get pity from the bear or the wolf until you truly drop the blade and stand down. It’s not fair. It’s not moral. It’s just the savage contract under the chessboard: when the board turns red, you either resign or you bleed out. The rest is propaganda, and the pieces don’t care. Cry uncle before your king topples for you. War doesn’t end because you lose — it ends when you admit it. So what’s left?

    18 min
  5. Flushing Grouse: The Machine Doesn’t Care Who You Are

    1D AGO · BONUS

    Flushing Grouse: The Machine Doesn’t Care Who You Are

    A quiet bird can’t be shot. A hidden fish can’t be netted. A calm suspect cannot be tagged and fed into the system. This is older than any badge or slogan. Force survives by flushing what hides, tagging what flushes, and feeding on what shows itself. Everything else is theater. Any enforcement system needs visible prey. No visible crime or defiance means the budget shrinks and the dogs stay in the kennel. But a pond stocked with performative rage and careless bravado keeps the hunters fed. That’s why the same body cam footage repeats the same lesson: the people who flap their wings keep the machine alive. The Matrix gave us the allegory. There, human bodies power the system. Here, it’s your behavior. Every unnecessary word, every challenge posed like a dare, every “What did I do?” shouted when silence would have served you better — that’s the charge that lights the trap. It doesn’t matter if you’re a billionaire’s daughter in a Range Rover or a kid with no shoes — once you flap, you’re visible. It always begins small. A broken taillight. An expired sticker. If you stay calm, polite, and small, you slip back into the brush. But if you puff up, if you make it about pride, the dogs come closer. The stop becomes a search. The search becomes resisting arrest. A fine that could have cost you an hour now stains your record for life. Many believe status will protect them. They believe the net knows bloodlines. But when the shark’s eye goes blind, everything moving is meat. The dash cams prove it daily — a bored princess can be chewed up as easily as a trap baddie when they run their mouth. This cycle isn’t accidental. Even the slogans that claim resistance — “F*** the police,” “Defy or you’re a bootlicker” — keep the pond stocked. The system doesn’t need you to win; it needs you to flap enough to be worth catching. The hardest truth is that once you’re in the net, you’re not solving a logic puzzle — you’re rolling dice you can’t control. Gun owners know this: never draw unless you must, because you can do everything right and still lose the roll. One angle of video, one DA looking to make a name, one jury with a grudge — that’s all it takes. No trap is fair. It is not cowardice to stay small. It is not betrayal to comply. It’s survival in a world run on force. Obscurity is the shield. Defiance is the bait. The machine does not care who you are. It cares only that you’re big enough to catch. When the net tightens, stay small. When the dogs flush the bush, stay still. Pride feeds the trap. The bird that never flaps is the one that lives.

    24 min
  6. Session Thirteen: Bones, Dolls, and the Wolves in the Mist

    2D AGO · BONUS

    Session Thirteen: Bones, Dolls, and the Wolves in the Mist

    Date: June 29, 2025Players: Sean D. (Sören Ironwood – Aasimar Paladin), Chris (Radley – Human Fighter), Carey (Traxidor – Half-Elf Cleric), Trip (Daermon Cobain – Half-Elf Rogue)Filed Under: Curse of Strahd, Gothic Horror, D&D Recaps Twelve days in Barovia and each dawn feels like dusk. At the Blue Water Inn, a messenger arrived with a letter sealed in wax — Strahd von Zarovich’s invitation to dine at Castle Ravenloft. Radley, their sardonic Eldritch Knight, joked about wine with the Devil. Traxidor, cleric and conscience, argued no. Sören, the Aasimar Paladin, nearly growled at the thought of bowing to Strahd’s civility. Daermon Cobain, rogue and blade, said little — his coin flicking through the shadows. They refused. There would be no supper with monsters — not yet. Morning brought nails hammering declarations into timber. Lady Fiona Wachter now called herself Burgomaster of Vallaki by the will of the mob that strung up the old Baron. Her orders stripped the last hope from the town: worship of the Morning Lord forbidden, a curfew enforced, all must bow to her Reeve. And every young woman? Inducted into her “Society of Vallaki’s Maidens” — loyalty by marriage or worse. They walked the scorched town to the crackle of funeral pyres, then turned into Blinsky’s Toys, where horrors wore porcelain smiles. Gadof Blinsky, a jester with a monkey named Piccolo, sang his eerie line: “Is no fun, is no Blinsky!” They found a doll identical to Ireena Kolyana — Strahd’s stolen love. Blinsky confessed he made dozens for Izek Strazni, the Baron’s monstrous enforcer, who always wanted more. The party left with the doll and an unease that clung like a damp shroud. At the looted manor, they found the Baron’s son Victor’s hidden attic lab. The door’s Glyph of Warding nearly dropped Sören, but inside they found more grim trophies: animated cat skeletons, mannequins facing the wall, and a broken teleportation circle — an escape gone wrong. A dead end — yet the footprints in the scorch marks said someone had tried. Next, they dug up Miloj’s grave and learned the bones of Saint Andral had been sold to Henrik van der Voort. At his coffin shop, they found the crates cracked open, dirt scattered — and Henrik himself, torn to ribbons, his entrails smeared across the walls and ceiling. They cut off his head like a butcher dressing a pig and took it as proof, though no bones remained. At dawn, they rode with the Martikovs’ wine wagon to Krezk. Sören, ever devout but unhinged, flayed the flesh from Henrik’s skull on the road. The Martikovs threatened to dump the barrels if the barbarity didn’t stop — until three peasants begged for silver to fight werewolves. In moments, they revealed their fur and fangs. The Martikovs fled with the wine, yelling for the party to run. But the adventurers stood their ground: blades flashed, holy power sparked, and two beasts fell before the last vanished into the mists. Saint Andral’s bones are lost. Lady Wachter rules in Strahd’s name. The Count’s invitation still waits on a table set for guests who haven’t yet come. And the mists? They watch everything. Subscribe to follow every step deeper into Barovia’s throat. 🦇

    31 min
  7. All Your Camp Are Belong to U.S.

    2D AGO · BONUS

    All Your Camp Are Belong to U.S.

    In “Will We Tolerate Concentration Camps and Slave Labor?”, Steven Beschloss warns that America may be on the verge of something monstrous: mass deportations, labor camps, and forced work that echoes the worst shadows of our history. But the real horror is simpler: these camps already exist. They never went away. And they’re not some accidental glitch of the system — they are the system. The truth is that the U.S. economy has always needed an underclass it could threaten, cage, or bind in debt. The plantation did not vanish in 1865; it changed its paperwork. The overseer’s whip became the convict lease, the sharecropper’s debt ledger, the prison time sheet, the coyote’s contract. Each new generation simply renamed what it could not live without. Today’s migrant laborer does not wear shackles — he carries a coyote’s debt and a cartel’s threat. She picks strawberries under the eye of a labor broker who knows she will never report wage theft, because ICE is more terrifying than any labor law. And when these families are caught, the children are separated not because cruelty is new, but because the state never keeps kids in cages with parents. This is not a glitch — it is the design. America’s “labor shortage” is the overseer’s confession. Half our farmworkers are undocumented. Most owe thousands for smuggling fees. They do work Americans can’t or won’t do at that wage. Remove them, and the fields rot. Legalize them, and the price of produce skyrockets. You don’t want to see the cage because the real cost of opening it is higher than you’re ready to pay. Beschloss calls for CEOs to pledge not to buy forced labor. But every grocery aisle already is. The real pledge would be to pay a wage that makes the debt chain break — to pay more for fruit, meat, roofs, and roads. We could do it. But we do not. And so the invisible camps persist: the fields, the processing plants, the basement kitchens, the prison workshops. Slavery by any other name. The “decent Americans” Beschloss invokes want to protest the visible camp — the fence, the cage, the children on the floor. But they do not protest the debt, the fear, the cartel’s hold, or the loophole in the 13th Amendment that lets prisoners work for pennies. The chain has never broken. It just runs deeper underground every time we promise we’ve outgrown it. The next time you hear that the deportations will cause a “labor crisis,” remember what that means: a plantation owner admitting he cannot run his fields without bondage. We can break it. We can pay the real price. But you have to say it out loud: cheap food, cheap labor, cheap freedom — these things cost someone else everything. The question is not “Will we tolerate the camps?” The real question is: What will you do when they’re gone? Will you pay the price you owe? Or will you rebuild them, behind new fences, with new names, and pretend again they are someone else’s problem? All your camps are belong to U.S. They always have been.

    31 min
  8. What a Police Officer Is—and Is Not: A Field Note

    2D AGO · BONUS

    What a Police Officer Is—and Is Not: A Field Note

    So much modern talk about policing rests on a wish: that the officer showing up at your worst moment is a hybrid — therapist, social worker, priest, and protector — who can fix every chaotic life story with infinite patience. But the reality is older, harsher, and simpler: the officer is a guard dog, not a Saint Bernard with a cask of mercy. The old “beat cop” we romanticize — the Irish Bobby tipping his hat on a city stoop — was never your confessor. He was there to keep the reckless few from turning your street into an alley no one trusted after dark. “Protect and Serve” never meant protect the one swinging fists at strangers; it meant protect everyone else from him. That basic truth is why every cop calls himself what the badge says: LEO — Law Enforcement Officer. Not Law Negotiation Officer. Not Neighborhood Mediation Officer. He carries the law the broader public agreed to — imperfect, sometimes unjust, but not your private code or your street’s whispered deals. Yet look closer and you’ll see the paradox. Pick up a battered police trade-in Glock: the slide and frame are scarred from thousands of holster draws — a sign that deterrence is the point. But inside, the bore is nearly pristine. Most officers fire fewer live rounds in training than a hobbyist does in a single weekend class. They are underfunded, undertrained, yet asked to stand as the last line between the quiet majority and the wolf at the door. In DC, accidental self-inflicted shots are so routine they have a name: “getting bit.” It’s not just sloppy — it’s the proof that we expect perfect control without paying for the discipline that makes it possible. If you want a softer response, remember this: the guard dog’s bark only works because the teeth are real. Take that away, and the wolf sniffs the fence and climbs right in. Even your comic book heroes get it: Spider-Man doesn’t chat up a purse-snatcher about childhood stress — he webs him up for the cops. Even in fiction, we know that law must draw a line. From the 1930s beat cop learning by rumor, through the riot-trained 1970s patrolman, to the post-9/11 “homeland security” officer, the role has always been the same: protect the majority from the chaos-makers when all else fails. Some places have improved. Many haven’t. The average American cop still trains fewer hours than a barber’s license requires. So be clear-eyed. A police officer is not your paladin or savior. He is not your redemption story. He is the state’s answer when the social fabric frays. If you want him to bark less, build a world that needs him less. Until then, do not be shocked that he carries a weapon he barely fires — or that when he does, the bite is real. Better to know what the guard dog is — and what he is not — than to stand unguarded when the fence gives way. Field note closed.

    40 min
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tl:dr: Just a 55-year-old cisgender white male mansplaining his own self-importance. But good. Full Summary: The musings of Chris Abraham as he aspires to know the world and himself while getting healthy, losing weight, becoming fit, and running his small business while living in South Arlington, Virginia. Walk with him a while and see what's up.

Information

  • Creator
    Chris Abraham
  • Years Active
    2019 - 2025
  • Episodes
    352
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Chris Abraham
  • Show Website
    The Chris Abraham Show

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