Step right up. This is Barrett's corner of the internet — no filter, no corporate speak, no algorithm curating what you see. Just one human being with a platform, a few decades of lived experience, and something to say about it.
The phrase "on one's soapbox" originates from 19th-century street corner speakers who used empty wooden crates — formerly used to ship soap — as makeshift elevated platforms to voice their opinions. Places like London's Hyde Park Speakers' Corner became legendary gathering grounds for exactly this kind of unfiltered public discourse.
It represents a passionate, impromptu, occasionally self-important lecture on a specific topic — as noted in the American Heritage Dictionary. The tradition is as old as democracy itself. Barrett is simply carrying it forward, one post at a time.
Since I proudly live on the Gulf of America, it was interesting to observe the kerfuffle in the media. Over a year later it still pops up — and most people are still missing the real story. Let me fix that.
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That fish on the menu labeled "White Fish"? It might be Swai — farmed in the Mekong Delta, one of the world's most polluted rivers. I've been sounding this alarm for decades. It's time you knew.
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I dove the USS Spiegel Grove just one year after she was sunk — lying on her starboard side, disorienting and massive. A parrotfish didn't care at all. Neither did the SEALIFE Camera judges. Most humorous photo of the event. I'm still smiling 22 years later.
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