I'm Not Allowed to Tell You There's Ice on the Roads

A meditation on whiskey, Columbo, and the end of civilization as we know it.

Politics is starting to watch like a bad sitcom.

I feel like absolute garbage today. My liver’s been giving me hell lately. Turns out 15 years of heavy whiskey drinking catches up with you. I know, shocking. Who could have predicted that treating your internal organs like a college fraternity (Sigma Alpha Cirrhosis) would have consequences?

I’ve been sober for a while now. Mostly sober, anyway. I had one magnificent slip-up when the Epstein file dumps started coming out a few weeks back. Spent five glorious days hopelessly drunk because I couldn’t stop reading those documents and wanted to cry. Or scream. Or both. Possibly while eating an entire sleeve of Oreos and watching old Columbo episodes. (Peter Falk would have solved the Epstein case in 47 minutes including commercial breaks, by the way.) But that’s a different article for a different day.

Since I’m not drinking myself into oblivion anymore, we hired two Filipino researchers. Sharp kids who know how to dig through news stories trending online. They’re better at the internet than I am, which isn’t saying much because I still type with two fingers like a confused pelican pecking at a keyboard.

I asked them to find something that wasn’t just more evidence of civilizational collapse. Maybe a dog saving a baby. A guy inventing a new sandwich. Something wholesome.

They came back with dozens of stories. Mass deportations. Government shutdowns. More names from the Epstein files connecting billionaires to both political parties.

Then they found one story that’s funny in that special way that makes you question whether we’re living in a reality show where nobody told us the rules.

Before a major winter storm in late January, the Department of Homeland Security allegedly told FEMA not to use the word “ice” in any messaging or signage. During a winter storm. Where actual frozen water falls from the sky and kills people on icy roads.

Why? Because it might cause “confusion or online mockery” with ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

I am not making this up. I wish I were making this up. If I were making this up, I’d make it less stupid because nobody would believe me. CNN reported it. NPR reported it. The United States government tried to ban a weather term during a weather emergency because they were afraid teenagers might make memes about them on TikTok.

Some DHS official, making approximately $147,000 per year of your tax dollars (which works out to about $70 per hour to be this catastrophically stupid), sat in a conference room (probably one of those depressing government conference rooms with the flickering fluorescent lights and the motivational poster that says “TEAMWORK” with a picture of people rowing a boat) and said this out loud to other human beings:

“We can’t let FEMA use the word ‘ice’ in their storm warnings.”

And someone else in that room, also making six figures, also a fully grown adult who presumably passed some kind of employment screening, nodded thoughtfully and said “Good point, Brad.”

(It’s always a Brad. Or a Chad. Sometimes a Kyle. Never a Steve. Steves are usually the ones trying to stop this nonsense.)

Multiple people agreed with Brad. Someone took notes in a Microsoft Teams meeting. (You know someone typed “ACTION ITEM: Eliminate ice from vocabulary” into a spreadsheet.) It went up the chain of command. Forms were filled out in triplicate. Possibly quadruplicate. Orders went out to FEMA on official Department of Homeland Security letterhead with the official seal and everything.

Picture that conversation:

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“Sir, there’s literally ice on the roads. People are going to die if they don’t know about the ice.”

“I don’t care, Johnson. Call it frozen precipitation.”

“But ‘frozen precipitation’ could mean snow, or sleet, or freezing rain, or—”

“Winter weather hazard, then.”

“That’s incredibly vague, sir. People need to know specifically that there’s ice on the roads so they can—”

“Slippery road conditions!”

“We already have a term for frozen water on the ground, sir. We’ve had this term for literally thousands of years. Cavemen had a word for it. It’s called ICE.”

“DO YOU WANT TO TREND ON TWITTER, JOHNSON? DO YOU WANT PEOPLE MAKING MEMES ABOUT US? DO YOU WANT SOME BLUE-HAIRED TEENAGER IN PORTLAND TO MAKE A TIKTOK THAT GETS 40 MILLION VIEWS?”

“I want people to not die in car accidents because they didn’t realize there was ice on Interstate 95, sir.”

“Noted and disregarded. Moving on. Next agenda item: should we rename hurricanes to ‘large rotating weather events’ to avoid offending people named Katrina? Also, Legal wants to know if we can trademark the phrase ‘unexpected moisture.’”

(I’m joking about that last part. I think. Although at this point, who the hell knows.)

To FEMA’s eternal credit, they pushed back. A FEMA spokesperson said they would continue using “correct and accurate descriptors of weather conditions.” Which is government bureaucrat speak for: “Are you people out of your goddamn minds? We’re not doing that.”

I like to imagine the FEMA spokesperson getting that directive and just staring at it for a solid five minutes. Maybe rubbing their eyes. Maybe checking the date to see if it was April Fools’ Day. And then finally replying with the professional government equivalent of “lol no.”

If you wrote this scene in a novel, editors would reject it. “Too unrealistic,” they’d say, circling it with red pen. “Government officials aren’t THIS stupid. Make it believable.”

This has no logic whatsoever. This is pure, distilled, 200-proof bureaucratic terror of teenagers on the internet.

But DHS banning the word “ice” during an ice storm? That’s just regular Wednesday in America, 2026. We’ve moved beyond satire. Reality is so aggressively stupid that satire can’t keep up. The satirists have given up. They’re all day-drinking now. I saw them at the bar. They were crying into their whiskey and muttering “we can’t compete with this.”

Let’s play this game. What happens when things get worse?

What happens if China launches a nuke? Would DHS tell FEMA not to call it an “atomic bomb”? Would we get an emergency alert about an “unscheduled rapid thermal expansion event” in Los Angeles?

“Citizens are advised that an unexpected rapid temperature increase has occurred in the greater Los Angeles metropolitan area. Initial reports indicate temperatures reached approximately 10 million degrees Fahrenheit. Please remain calm and await further instructions. Do not use the terms ‘nuclear explosion,’ ‘atomic bomb,’ ‘mushroom cloud,’ or ‘complete annihilation of everything we hold dear.’ We prefer ‘spicy sunshine’ or ‘very warm light show’ or ‘aggressive illumination event.’ Anyone referring to this incident as ‘the apocalypse’ will be subject to a $500 fine and mandatory sensitivity training. Thank you for your cooperation.”

You think I’m being dramatic. But we just watched them try to ban the word “ice” during a winter storm. There is no bottom anymore.

These are not serious people running our government. They’re clowns. Dangerous, well-connected, billionaire-adjacent clowns with access to nuclear weapons and laser systems and your tax dollars, but clowns nonetheless.

You know what they ARE worried about distracting you from? The Epstein files. The ones that came out a few weeks ago. The ones that made me drink for five days straight.

Emails between Jeffrey Epstein and people currently in power. Evidence of systemic corruption at the highest levels. Connections between a convicted sex trafficker (who definitely killed himself in jail, just ask the guards who definitely didn’t fall asleep, and the cameras that definitely didn’t malfunction) and senators, congressmen, billionaires from both parties, media figures, corporate executives.

But they don’t want you thinking about that. They want you FURIOUS at some poor Mexican guy named Juan who’s making five bucks an hour shoveling pig intestines in an Iowa slaughterhouse, working a job you wouldn’t do for $50 an hour. Because as long as you’re angry at Juan making five dollars an hour, you’re not angry at Brad making five MILLION dollars an hour by moving numbers around in spreadsheets while his company poisons rivers and lobbies to lower your wages.

As long as you’re fighting over whether to say “ice” or “frozen precipitation,” you’re not asking why both parties protected Epstein’s clients for decades.

The government that banned the word “ice” during an ice storm is the same government that let Jeffrey Epstein run a blackmail operation for decades. The same government that bailed out banks in 2008 while you lost your house. The same government where both political parties had members connected to Epstein but somehow nobody got charged except Epstein himself, who ended up dead under circumstances so suspicious that even people who trust the government were like “Yeah, that’s weird.”

I noticed. Even with a (potentially) failing liver (not counting the Epstein relapse) and a deep desire to just watch Columbo reruns and eat Oreos in peace, I noticed. Our Filipino researchers noticed. You’re noticing right now.

The question is, what can we do about it? Because they’re not going to stop themselves. They’re going to keep banning words, spinning narratives, protecting each other, testing lasers near populated areas without telling anyone, and putting on elaborate theatrical performances for the cameras where they pretend to hate each other. Then they’ll go to the same cocktail parties and laugh about how gullible we all are.

The government banned the word “ice” during an ice storm because they were afraid of memes. The United States government, the most powerful government in human history, the government that won World War II and went to the moon and invented the internet, tried to ban a weather term during a weather emergency because they were terrified that teenagers might make fun of them on TikTok.

Now think about those same people having access to nuclear weapons…

Sleep tight!

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