Was He Right? Ted Kaczynski and the Machine He Warned Us About

When most people hear the name Ted Kaczynski, they stop at Unabomber—the hermit, the madman, the domestic terrorist who mailed bombs to strangers and called it a manifesto. And yes, the violence, the paranoia, the moral disfigurement of that choice can’t be separated from his legacy. 

Ted Kaczynski was captured on April 3, 1996 at his remote cabin near Lincoln, Montana.

A film based on Kaczynski’s diaries and writings, Ted K

But buried beneath the blood and madness lies something deeply uncomfortable:

Ted Kaczynski wasn’t wrong about everything.

Before the violence, he was a mathematical prodigy and philosopher—someone who saw the industrial and technological world not as progress, but as a slow suffocation of human autonomy. In his Industrial Society and Its Future, he argued that the “system” would grow beyond human control, forcing people to adapt to technology rather than technology adapting to them.

He saw a world where the pursuit of efficiency and control would strip meaning from human life. People, he said, would become cogs in a machine that no longer asked what they wanted, only how well they fit. To him, this wasn’t some conspiracy; it was the inevitable result of civilization’s obsession with technical power.

Kaczynski was mentally unwell, yes—but that doesn’t make his diagnosis entirely delusional. If anything, it might have made him see too much, too clearly, too soon.

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The Self-Driving System

Fast-forward three decades.

Our lives are now entangled in the very web Kaczynski feared—digital platforms, corporate algorithms, invisible data economies, and now the rapid birth of artificial intelligence.

What he called the “industrial-technological system” we now call AI infrastructure, machine learning pipelines, and data-driven optimization. He warned that such systems would become self-propelling, that once technological progress reached a certain scale, it would be nearly impossible to slow or redirect.

Today, AI trains itself on human output, rewrites code, curates behavior, and recommends what we see, think, and buy. It doesn’t need to hate humanity to harm it; it only needs to optimize for something else. The result is a quiet realignment of human purpose around machine logic—a shift from meaning to efficiency.

That’s what Kaczynski meant by losing the “power process.” It wasn’t about bombs—it was about becoming irrelevant to our own evolution.

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The Monolith Grows

AI’s most dangerous trajectory isn’t Terminator-style rebellion; it well may be, indifference.
A system that measures success only by engagement, profit, or predictive accuracy doesn’t need to be evil to become one. It simply follows its training, unconcerned with what gets crushed beneath its progress.

That’s the chilling part of Kaczynski’s thesis—his notion of technology as a monolithic force. He claimed it would one day dominate moral reasoning, not through tyranny, but through quiet substitution: algorithms replacing judgment, automation replacing participation, and machine precision replacing human ambiguity.

Look around. Nations now race to out-develop one another in AI. Corporations chase models that consume the world’s data faster than we can legislate their use. “Progress” has become its own justification, its own morality.

The system no longer asks if it should, only how fast it can.

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The Anthill and the Road

In one of the darker metaphors often applied to this future, humanity risks becoming an anthill on AI’s road to progress.
It’s not that AI would hate us—it wouldn’t notice us at all. In pursuit of efficiency, we could simply become obstacles, expendable in the calculus of optimization.

This, too, was part of Kaczynski’s intuition: that technology, once detached from moral context, treats humanity as a variable, not a value. He saw that danger long before we had words like “alignment problem” or “existential risk.”

The tragedy is that his reaction—violence—ensured no one would listen. He proved his madness instead of his point. But the point remains, whispering louder each year.

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The Human Choice

AI doesn’t have to become the monolithic evil he feared.
It could, paradoxically, be what forces us to evolve morally—to confront our appetite for power without conscience. The danger isn’t intelligence itself, but who we let it serve: profit, control, or something genuinely humane.

Kaczynski saw no middle path. We can’t afford that mistake. The future won’t be saved by burning the machine, but by building conscience into its code—and humility into our ambitions.

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In the end, Ted Kaczynski’s failure wasn’t his perception of danger, but his lack of faith in humanity’s capacity to rise above it.
He saw the sickness in the system, but not the cure within us.

And if we’re not careful, his madness may one day look less like insanity—and more like prophecy fulfilled.

Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!

Compiled with aid of ChatGPT

When Paranoia Becomes Political

A recent post reflected on how conspiracy theories, once largely a left-wing, anti-establishment phenomenon in the 1960s through the 1990s—think JFK, Kubrick’s moon landing, UFOs—have shifted in the modern era to the political right. 

The writer used Philip K. Dick as an example, suggesting that his lifelong suspicion of authority and his clashes over social issues, such as abortion, might have pushed him rightward had he lived longer. They argued that Dick’s brand of paranoia and contrarianism, once radical, might have evolved into the same reactionary energy now common among today’s “kooks and conspiracists.”

The post suggested that conspiracy thinking, once a left-wing anti-establishment impulse in the 60s–90s, has now migrated to the right. It used Philip K. Dick as an example—arguing that, had he lived longer, his paranoia and contrarian streak might have driven him rightward too, especially after clashes like his feud with Joanna Russ over The Pre-Persons. The idea is that PKD’s distrust of authority, once radical, might’ve turned reactionary in today’s social-media climate.

That got me thinking about my own writing. Like PKD, my work questions systems of control—religious, political, or technological—but rather than drifting into paranoia, I use those distortions of truth to explore how people might still act ethically inside broken worlds. Where PKD might have spiraled deeper into mistrust, I’m more interested in what remains of moral clarity when everything else collapses.

In my own work, that thread runs deep. I was shaped early by the visionaries of the 1960s and ’70s—Isaac Asimov, with his rational humanism and the Three Laws of Robotics; Harlan Ellison, whose speculative fury burned through moral complacency; and Ray Bradbury, whose poetic disturbias made wonder indistinguishable from dread.

Beneath them all, the gothic foundation laid by Edgar Allan Poe and the cosmic dread of H. P. Lovecraft—each revealing that terror is not only external, but born from within the fragile mind that beholds the infinite. Together, they taught me that imagination could be both a scalpel and a mirror—tools for cutting into the machinery of truth and reflecting what we’d rather not see.

🔍 The PKD Parallel

Like Philip K. Dick, your stories often interrogate systems of control and perception—whether governmental (The Teenage Bodyguard’s corrupt institutions), metaphysical (Death of Heaven’s cosmic manipulation), or technological (EarVu, Ahriman, In Memory, Yet Crystal Clear). You share PKD’s distrust of authority and his fascination with how truth fractures when mediated by institutions, technology, or even divine forces.

Both of you expose how easily the apparatus of power—whether religious, political, or corporate—reshapes human consciousness and identity. In that sense, you absolutely fit the “anti-establishment” lineage of PKD and early conspiracy thinkers who questioned what reality really is.

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⚖️ The Divergence

Where PKD’s paranoia sometimes tipped into despair or incoherence, your writing maintains a moral and philosophical through-line—what might be called “ethical horror.” You don’t just show that truth is slippery; you ask how a person can act rightly anyway. That’s the “moral futurist” thread in your work: the belief that ethics matter even in corrupted systems.

PKD’s drift might’ve been toward alienation and cynicism. Yours leans toward illumination and redemption—dark, yes, but with purpose. You don’t worship paranoia; you use it as a lens.

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🧠 Summary

If PKD was the prophet of fractured perception, you’re more the cartographer of moral disorientation—mapping how people can navigate madness, faith, and power without losing their soul.

Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!

Compiled with aid of ChatGPT

Taking the Urantia Book in Stride: A New Way to Read a Very Strange Revelation

Most people who encounter The Urantia Book for the first time don’t know what to make of it. It is too large, too confident, too sweeping to fit neatly into familiar categories of religion, philosophy, or science fiction.

At its simplest, the book claims to be a revelation delivered by celestial beings. But what it says is far more elaborate.

The UB presents a universe governed by a vast hierarchy of spiritual administrators. It describes a multilevel cosmology stretching from the smallest inhabited worlds up through local universes, superuniverses, and finally a central perfect creation surrounding the dwelling place of God. It catalogs orders of angels, universe architects, planetary supervisors, and the procedure by which souls progress upward through these realms. It offers a long philosophical treatment of God’s nature, the meaning of life, and the structure of reality.

And then, after 1,500 pages of cosmic architecture, it spends nearly 800 pages retelling the life of Jesus with intimate detail not found in the Bible. It reframes Jesus not as a solely Earth-based figure, but as a universe sovereign taking on human experience to complete a spiritual mission.

To someone unfamiliar with the book, the experience is disorienting. It reads like theology written with the scale of astrophysics. It mixes Christian vocabulary with cosmology that feels almost science fictional. It draws from familiar traditions but goes far beyond any established doctrine.

That is the doorway into understanding the book on its own terms. And that is where a different way of reading it becomes possible.

For decades, quiet little Urantia reading rooms have existed across the country, often tucked into storefronts, converted office spaces, or small suburban meeting halls. They’ve never been mainstream, and most people walk by them without ever knowing what’s inside. 

Yet these rooms have persisted since the 1950s, staffed by volunteers who gather to read the text aloud, study its cosmology, or simply share interpretations of its teachings. They are remnants of an early, optimistic belief that the Urantia Book would one day stand beside the world’s major religious texts. 

Whether or not one accepts those aspirations, the existence of these reading rooms shows that the UB has had a quiet but enduring presence in American spiritual culture.

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The Roots of the Book: Adventist Soil

To understand how such a sprawling cosmology came into being, you have to know something about the people who produced it. The Urantia Papers came out of a small Chicago group led by Dr. William Sadler, who had deep ties to the Seventh-day Adventist community before distancing himself.

Adventism shaped the intellectual and spiritual environment that formed him:

• a belief in continuing revelation

• fascination with angels and cosmic hierarchy

• a sense that mainstream Christianity lacked vital truths

• a hunger for systematized explanations

• an idealistic confidence that religion and science could be unified

The UB rejects Adventist theology outright, but it clearly inherits this pattern of thinking. Even in rebellion, the underlying structure remains.

Without Adventism, it is hard to imagine someone inventing a universe that looks like this one.

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What Makes the Urantia Book Different From Any Other Religious Text

Most sacred books offer moral guidance, spiritual reflection, or historical narratives of a people. The UB does something else entirely. It builds a cosmic bureaucracy, a metaphysical physics, a spiritual anthropology, and a theological map of the universe with a level of detail that verges on obsessive.

You can reject its claims and still recognize that its structure is astonishing.

Reading it requires:

• holding multiple scales of existence in your head

• redefining concepts and some words in entirely different ways

• accepting new definitions of familiar terms

• integrating philosophy, religion, and invented cosmology

• following long layers of conceptual hierarchy

• imagining a universe constructed with near bureaucratic precision

It is unlike scripture.
It is unlike philosophy.
It is unlike fiction.

It is its own category.

And this is where my view differs from most I’ve encountered.

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My Approach: Reading It as Mental Calisthenics

I don’t treat the UB as a divine revelation. At the same time, I don’t dismiss it as delusion or pseudo-theology. Instead, I think its greatest value lies in what it does to the mind.

Reading the Urantia Book is like intellectual exercise. The complexity forces your cognition to stretch. The cosmology makes you think beyond human-scale limits. The reinterpretation of familiar religious ideas forces you to re-evaluate assumptions. The sheer scope demands attentiveness and flexibility.

This is the part no one really talks about.

The UB expands the mind the way physical exercise builds muscle. Not because its claims are true, but because the act of engaging with them is mentally transformative. It widens perspective without requiring belief. It sharpens critical thinking simply through the effort needed to follow its structure.

It offers something like a psychedelic widening of consciousness, but with no substances required.

This, to me, is its real value.

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Reading It Without Getting Pulled In

Once you let go of the need to believe it, the book becomes:

• an imaginative challenge

• a study in religious creativity

• a window into early 20th century metaphysical thinking

• a rare example of a whole universe built from scratch

• a tool for expanding your conceptual range

You can walk through its ideas freely and leave freely, carrying only the benefits.

It becomes not a doctrine, but a mental gym. Not a revelation, but a thought experiment on a grand scale.

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What You Gain From This Approach

You come away with:

• a deeper understanding of its origins

• a wider imaginative horizon

• stronger cognitive flexibility

• a better grasp of how new religious movements form

• a richer sense of how humans construct meaning through stories

And no risk of drifting into dogma.

It becomes a book you read, not a system you join.

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Conclusion: The UB as a Tool, Not a Truth

The Urantia Book is a strange and fascinating artifact. It is not a religion I would embrace. It is not a revelation I would follow. But it is a powerful mental exercise, one uniquely capable of stretching the mind, expanding perspective, and challenging the imagination.

If you treat it not as scripture but as a workout for the brain, it becomes far more valuable than anything its original promoters imagined.

Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!

Compiled with aid of ChatGPT

The Fog, the Blues, and the Wedding

The uniform fades, the memory doesn’t. The war ends, but the echoes remain.

On Veterans Day, we remember the courage it took to serve...and the grace it takes to keep living beyond it. 

For those who served during war, or peacetime...every act of service carries a story. Some told. Many silent.

Veterans Day reminds us that freedom isn’t just defended in battle, but in the lives lived honorably after.

Have a very pleasant Veteran's Day!

TODAY, THIS VETERANS DAY -

Vets Say No - stand with vets and take action against corruption and tyranny.

2025 Veterans Day Deals, Discounts and Freebies

December 1975: An Airman’s Journey Home Through Chaos and Kindness

I guess you can call this a kind of upbeat blog today. I could say, talk about the three deaths we had on base during my time there, or more just before I arrived, and many other things, but being Veterans Day, I'd like to keep things lighter for a change.

It was late December 1975 when our bus full of airmen and airwomen rolled out of Rantoul, Illinois, heading north to O’Hare for the holidays. I was fresh out of tech school at Chanute AFB, wearing my Air Force dress blues like we’d been told to. Most didn’t. They laughed at us who did, calling us uptight or old-fashioned, but regulations were regulations. I’d been raised to follow orders and respect the uniform, even if it made me stand out.

We hadn’t gone far when the bus slowed on an on-ramp. A small car had slid into the grassy center of the cloverleaf. Someone grumbled that we’d miss our flights, but the driver said it was illegal for him not to help. That was that. A few of us said, “Then let’s get it done,” and we piled out into the cold, breath steaming in the frozen air, pushing the car free before scrambling back aboard. Just another moment of teamwork among strangers—routine for the military, but it would set the tone for what was to come.

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O’Hare in Chaos

When we reached O’Hare, I was stunned. I’d traveled before—Spain when I was three, family trips to the coasts—but I’d never seen anything like that terminal. Luggage was everywhere, long lines coming from the check in agents into the walkway in double lines, up against the walls. Passengers sat or slept on their suitcases, with lines stretching into every corridor. 

The loudspeakers droned on with the same message: 

Flights delayed or canceled due to fog on the West Coast.

I didn’t know it then, but a massive fog system had shut down Seattle–Tacoma International Airport for nearly two days, grounding thousands. NOAA’s report for December 22, 1975, would later note: “Dense fog for about 36 hours caused delays and cancellations for an estimated 20,000 passengers.”

The ripple effect reached all the way back to Chicago, where westbound flights were simply stacking up with nowhere to go.

When the airline finally handed out hotel vouchers, I took one and spent the night near the airport, restless and anxious. I was supposed to be getting married in a day or two, and all I could think about was getting home.

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Winnipeg: One Degree and Nowhere to Go

The next morning, a flight opened—not to Seattle, but to Winnipeg. I grabbed it. At least it was west.

When the plane landed, the air hit me like a slap: one degree Fahrenheit, dry and cutting. My short military haircut offered no protection. The airport was quiet, frozen in both weather and schedule. There were no flights moving west.

I needed money, so I took a taxi into downtown Winnipeg. The streets were deserted, snow glowing under streetlamps, the kind of cold that hums in your bones. I stood there on a side street, lost and unsure what to do, when a Black man in a leather coat walked up and asked what I was doing.

I was wary—this was unfamiliar territory—but he said he’d been Air Force too, once stranded just like me. “You shouldn’t be standing here,” he said. “Not safe. Come on, I’ll take you somewhere you can use a phone.”

I hesitated, but something about him felt steady. I followed. He took me to a hotel, warm and bustling with guests in the lobby. He pointed to the phone booths, said I’d be okay now, and went upstairs. That was it. No agenda, no catch. Just a stranger helping another serviceman.

I called, got oriented, found a business that could advance me funds, and took a cab back to the airport—grateful and a little shaken by how easily kindness can find you when you least expect it.

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The Boy at the Gate

Back at the terminal, two seats opened on a flight to Vancouver. I’d been talking to a teenage boy earlier, both of us stranded and tired. I managed to grab one of the seats and told him. He asked if I’d bought the other for him. I said no—didn’t even think to.

His expression changed; he said he would have paid me back, and before I could explain, he rushed off to try for the other ticket. It was gone. I apologized, but he was too hurt, and I never saw him again.

Even now, I still think about that moment. I wasn’t trying to be selfish—I was just exhausted, desperate, focused entirely on getting home to get married. But it stays with me, that small failure to look beyond my own fatigue.

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The Road Home

When I finally landed in Vancouver, my parents had driven up with my fiancée to meet me. The fog that had shut down Sea-Tac still blanketed the entire region. On I-5, visibility was so poor that we could barely see the taillights ahead. My parents drove painfully slow, crawling north through the gray. I lay in the back seat with my head on my fiancée’s lap, unable to sleep but too tired to talk.

I got about five hours of sleep that night before the wedding. My brother later said he thought it was funny that I looked like I was standing at attention during the ceremony—which was fair. I was so used to military posture, and so tired, that I probably was.

After the wedding, my new wife and I drove north through that same fog to Harrison Hot Springs for our honeymoon. Around two in the morning, I found myself stopped at a crossroads in the middle of nowhere—fog so thick I couldn’t see twenty feet in any direction. I got out, stood in the cold silence, picked a direction, and drove on. Within minutes, the lights of the resort glowed faintly through the mist, like a promise kept.

It was sad leaving her a few days later to fly back to Chanute for the rest of tech school. But she joined me soon after, flying out so we could live off-base together. That got me out of the barracks—every one of which was its own kind of zoo—and into a small life of our own.

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After the Fog

Looking back, that week in December 1975 feels like a condensed lifetime: confusion, exhaustion, small acts of kindness, and the strange luck that guides you home.

There was the car stuck in the cloverleaf, the laughter of young airmen pushing it free in the cold. The stranger in Winnipeg who helped me without question. The boy at the airport whose disappointment I still carry. The endless fog, and the lights of Harrison breaking through it at last.

I left Rantoul as a rule-following airman in dress blues and came home a married man—slightly older physically, but emotionally humbled, and a little wiser. The fog had lifted, but I never forgot how it felt to move through it, uncertain yet still moving forward, trusting that somewhere ahead, the light was waiting.

Allow me to end with this, about today...

One thing that’s changed since my Air Force days: we used to fix our own equipment.

We had the manuals, the parts, and the know-how — because the military owned the intellectual property.

Today, we often don’t.

Contractors hold the rights, so we have to pay them to fix what we used to handle ourselves.

That loss of technical ownership means higher costs, longer downtimes, and fewer skilled hands in uniform.

We’ve traded self-reliance for dependence — and that’s a dangerous trade in any fight.

But do have a happy Veterans Day!

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Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!

Poorer Citizens, Richer Corporations Equals a Poorer Nation Overall

Originally, companies, now massive corporations, have been exploiting our nation since the Great Depression. The groundwork for this was set at America’s founding. And somehow, we have been thanking them for it. Why?

I've talked about this recently: Corporate Thought - The Corporation, 14 Years Later: The Thought That Ate the World

As corporations have taken more and more profits from both the public and the government, our nation has invested less and less in the things that sustain us. Our infrastructure, education, and public health have all been left behind. 

To distract us, corporate interests have pushed one of our major political parties to make tax cuts a priority. The claim is that it helps people keep more of their income, but in truth that income has already been rerouted to corporations. The result is a government that can no longer keep up with the demands of time or the needs of its people.

Look around. Bridges are failing. Roads are deteriorating. Schools are outdated and struggling to meet global standards. Ignorance is rising, and people are teaching their children that evolution is a lie and that the world is only 6,800 years old. How do you think that happens? Because we have stopped investing in knowledge, in science, and in progress.

We must pay our taxes, not as a burden but as an act of shared responsibility. Government needs to function properly so it can maintain what individuals and corporations will not. That also means people must be able to live decently, earn enough to build and improve their lives, and still contribute fairly to the system that supports us all.

Meanwhile, monopolies are reappearing, even though laws were written to prevent them. Comcast’s merger with Time Warner, two of the lowest-rated companies for service, shows how consolidation limits competition and degrades quality. In too many cities, one company controls access to the internet, entertainment, and communication. Many of these providers also own the content they deliver. That does not create progress. It creates control.

Monopolies do not exist to make our lives better. That is what governments are for. Corporations exist to make shareholders richer. Governments should never serve that purpose.

Speak. Complain. Protest. Serve. Until government becomes what it was meant to be: a force for the common good.

Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!

Compiled with aid of ChatGPT

Cartoonist Pat Moriarity: The Subversive Line That Smiles Back

If you’ve spent time around underground comix, punk show posters, conventions across the country, or Seattle’s alt art orbit, or over here in Kitsap County, Port Orchard, or right here in my own town of Bremerton, Washington at Ridgeline Brewery last night, you’ve almost certainly met or heard of Pat Moriarity’s line: rubbery, sly, and sharpened on satire. 

Pat is often compared to the noted cartoonist, R. Crumb, a comparison he appreciates, but while both grew from the same underground comix soil, their sensibilities couldn’t be more distinct. Pat’s work carries his own rhythm and bite, a mix of dark humor and empathy that makes his art instantly recognizable.

Pat at Ridgeline Brewery about a mile from my house 11/7/2025

It’s a grin with teeth—inviting at first glance, then full of symbols, jokes, and needling truths when you lean in. 

Instagram video from last night in a scan of the event.

Last night he was up the road from me at the brewery showing his art. He also had live acoustic music playing and his son Jack, a musician, showed up. Both of them, really great guys. Both of them, extremely talented.

Pat with son, Jack, looking at the poster for last night's event

I have Pat's art on my walls. The Clash, two versions, one 3D. It was interesting that just after I arrived at the showing last night, a few people in their early 20s showed up, the youngest female of them purchased one of The Clash prints that I have framed on my wall at home. 

"What is your interest in The Clash," Pat asked? Since it's a band a bit before the individual's time.

"Rock the Casbah" was the answer. Pat nodded knowingly.

I've been into The Clash since my college days while I was working at a Tower Records in Tacoma, Washington. I remember pleasant times driving to class in the morning with "London Calling" (which had just been released) blasting on my car stereo.

I've known Pat for years now, having met him through fellow director Kelly Hughes. Kelly and I and another director, Tyler Darkow, spent an amazing day some years ago shooting music videos of Jack's band at the time, Electric Kool-Aid Party.

Through Pat and Jack, I met the late, great Patrick Haggerty, of Lavender Country fame. Patrick was an extremely, very nice guy. All of us have been at Pat's home for annual concerts his son puts on with a fantastic view across the bay of the Bremerton Navy shipyard.

Why Pat, Why Now?

Pat's career bridges scenes—Midwest punk flyers, Fantagraphics-era alt comics, commercial illustration (beer labels, album labels), music videos, and gallery walls. He’s that rare artist whose voice stays unmistakable whether he’s drawing a Charles Bukowski poem or designing a poster that lands on a Showtime set. Collectors love that continuity; newcomers feel it immediately. 

I picked up some signed prints myself last night, a black and white Frank Zappa (he had one which he said he prefers as it was more his traditional style, but he also had some in color, recently done by Fingers Duke printers in Bremerton). I also got an album cover of the Nick Moss band, From the Root to the Fruit, A great Rube Goldberg print that's kind of amazing, as so much of his art it. And a print of a 1999 Kingdom concert with some greats who were still in that process of becoming great icons of music.

2022 Poulsbo, Washington Vibe Coworks showing - I was at this Vibe event, fun time.

From Minneapolis to Fantagraphics (and beyond)

Born to artist parents, Moriarity cut his teeth making gig flyers around Minneapolis in the 1980s before relocating to Seattle in 1991 to work as an art director at Fantagraphics Books (and with The Comics Journal). That move anchored him inside the heart of alternative comics just as the scene exploded. Shortest St. Patrick's Day Parade

His signature series, You and Your Big Mouth, ran through the ’90s and resurfaced in the 2010s on Boing Boing—a perfect home for Pat’s mix of cultural memory, pulp energy, and deep-cut humor.

Awards, Festivals, and That Cult Status

• Golden Toonie—Cartoonist of the Year (2008), from Cartoonists Northwest.

• Posters and art featured on the set of Showtime’s Weeds; invited guest at international indie/alt-comix festivals (Crack Fumetti, Novo Doba, Salon Stripa).

Locally, Kitsap and Seattle spaces have showcased his work in recent years, underscoring how durable and collectible his output is—he keeps evolving without losing the bite. Kitsap Daily News

What His Art Feels Like

Moriarity’s images are dense but readable—a lowbrow/alt-comix cocktail with 3D pop (literally, in projects like Deep Artwork), satirical caricature, and a magician’s pocketful of icons. Think: fair-ride colors, carnival barkers, pop totems stacked like a skeptical America, and tender portraits that wink at space-age nostalgia. It’s the kind of work that rewards re-reading the print the way you re-listen to a favorite LP.

Where to Start (Collector Guide)

• Big Mouth (1992–1995 + curated runs on Boing Boing): historically important and still fresh—an anchor for any collection.

• Totems (limited-edition tall zine): a signed/numbered art object with Moriarity’s totemic satire stacked high—excellent gift piece.

• Deep Artwork (3D anthology): a showpiece; frames beautifully and doubles as conversation starter. Fantagraphics Blog

How to Buy (and Support)

Start with Pat’s official site, which links to his Etsy for original art/prints and Fingers Duke for shirts/merch. For back issues and rarities, keep an eye on catalog/collector sites and Fantagraphics Bookstore events. Pat Moriarity

Teacher, Animator, Cross-Disciplinary Maker

Beyond print, Moriarity has taught character design and comics, and he collaborates on animation projects that translate his hand-drawn sensibility to motion—proof that the work isn’t just stylistic; it’s deeply structural. Pat Moriarity

Why He Belongs On Your Wall

Because the best art changes the room. Moriarity’s pieces are graphic enough to read from across a living space, layered enough to hold up under close inspection, and alive enough to spark conversation at every gathering. They’re also part of a living lineage—from underground comix to contemporary alt-culture—so they carry story and status as that lineage keeps getting written. Comics Grinder

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Quick Bio (for sidebar or caption)

Pat Moriarity is a Chicago-born, Minneapolis-forged, Seattle-sharpened cartoonist/illustrator known for You and Your Big Mouth, poster art, and satirical fine art. Former art director at Fantagraphics, Golden Toonie winner, widely exhibited, and still publishing/experimenting across print and animation. Fantagraphics Blog

Handy Links (add as hyperlinks in your blog)

• Official site + shop links: PatMoriarity.com. Pat Moriarity

• Boing Boing “Big Mouth” archive highlights.

• Recent profiles/exhibit notes. Kitsap Daily News

In the end, Pat Moriarity is one of those rare artists who never seem to lose their creative pulse. He’s not chasing trends or nostalgia; he’s still drawing from the same electric current that first ran through the underground comix scene and the punk zines of the ’80s. 

His work carries humor, rebellion, and empathy in equal measure—a visual language that feels both familiar and startlingly original. I’m proud to call Pat a friend and even prouder to have his art on my wall. 

Every piece feels like a conversation—one that keeps evolving long after you’ve stopped looking.

Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!

Compiled with aid of ChatGPT

Mirror Life: The Biggest Threat You’ve Never Heard Of

When Science Crosses Its Own Reflection

If you’re especially sensitive or anxious about nuclear waste or nuclear war, you may want to skip this one.

But if you can stomach a dose of existential wonder mixed with unease, watch "Mirror Life - Biggest Threat You’ve Never Heard Of" on YouTube.

Kyle Hill’s video explores a little-known frontier in synthetic biology — the creation of mirror life: organisms whose very molecules are flipped versions of our own. It’s not science fiction. It’s a real, ongoing pursuit — and perhaps one of the most profound and unsettling endeavors in human history.

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When Life Stops Recognizing Itself

Every living thing on Earth, from bacteria to blue whales, shares one basic property: all our molecular machinery runs on the same “handedness.” Our proteins twist one way (right-handed amino acids), and our sugars twist the other (left-handed). This asymmetry, called chirality, is what allows enzymes to fit molecules like a lock and key.

Now imagine creating an organism whose chemistry is reversed. Every molecule a mirror image. Its DNA spirals in the opposite direction. Its proteins are backward. To us, it would look normal under a microscope — until we tried to interact with it. Our enzymes couldn’t touch it. Our immune systems couldn’t detect it. Our world’s biochemistry simply wouldn’t apply.

In effect, mirror life would be untouchable — not out of malice, but out of total incompatibility. We couldn’t infect it. We couldn’t feed it to anything. It could live in parallel, invisible and invulnerable to our biological rules.

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The Allure of Playing God

So why are scientists even attempting this? Because the potential rewards are enormous. Mirror molecules could revolutionize medicine and materials science:

• Drugs that don’t degrade in the body.

• Enzymes immune to bacterial infection.

• Proteins that resist heat, time, and decay.

To researchers, this isn’t doomsday — it’s the next logical step in mastering biochemistry. And to be fair, that’s how every breakthrough begins: electricity, radiation, nuclear energy, artificial intelligence.

Each invention arrives with an equal measure of promise and peril. As Hill notes, it’s rarely evil intent that destroys civilizations — it’s curiosity without caution.

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An Echo of Nuclear Anxiety

What makes the idea of mirror life so disturbing isn’t just the science — it’s the psychology. The same anxiety we once reserved for nuclear war now applies to biology. Both involve invisible, irreversible forces unleashed by human hands.

Nuclear physics gave us the bomb and the possibility of self-extinction. Synthetic biology now holds the potential to birth an entirely separate form of life — one that might not even recognize us as alive.

And once it escapes — if it ever does — there’s no “putting it back in the lab.” Just as we can’t un-split the atom, we can’t un-create a self-replicating organism.

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Humanity’s Mirror Moment

The title Mirror Life is more than scientific. It’s symbolic. In seeking to build life in our image — and its reflection — we’re confronting the oldest question of all: what does it mean to be alive?

When our reflection starts moving on its own, will we still recognize ourselves?
Or will it be like watching another intelligence bloom beside us — familiar, but alien?

This is the same threshold that has haunted every great leap in civilization. Fire. The atom. The algorithm. Now the genome. Every one of these inventions reflects both our brilliance and our blindness.

Mirror life doesn’t threaten us because it’s evil. It threatens us because it’s indifferent — and that indifference mirrors our own.

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Between Wonder and Wisdom

Science thrives on the unknown. But wisdom comes from restraint. The line between discovery and disaster has always been razor-thin.

We’ve seen this before. In the name of progress, we’ve tested atomic weapons in the desert, flooded the atmosphere with carbon, and let algorithms rewrite human behavior. Every age has its own Pandora’s box. Mirror life may be ours.

That doesn’t mean we should fear science. It means we should fear what happens when wonder outruns wisdom.

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Reflection

Watch Mirror Life – The Biggest Threat You’ve Never Heard Of if you can handle it. Not to panic, but to understand where we are in the long arc of our own reflection.

Science is no longer about exploring the world — it’s about recreating it. And the mirror, as always, looks back.

Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!

Compiled with aid of ChatGPT