HistoryExtra
Published 4 Nov 2025From sunrise in the fields to the heat of the brew house, Ruth Goodman reveals the untold story of how the Tudors really worked.
Forget silk-clad courtiers – most people in the 16th-century toiled from dawn to dusk just to keep food on the table. Men ploughed, hedged, and hauled in the fields while women brewed ale, milked cows, churned butter, and raised children – often all at once. Every Tudor household was a finely balanced machine of survival.
In this episode of her new series on Tudor Life, historian Ruth Goodman explains how every pair of hands mattered. It wasn’t as simple as “men’s work” and “women’s work”. You’ll hear how the two worlds were completely intertwined. And what about those who were unable to work? This video sheds light on an innovative 16th-century welfare scheme that made all the difference.
Filmed on location at Plas Mawr – an Elizabethan townhouse in Conwy, North Wales, now in the care of Cadw – this series with Ruth looks beyond the royals who often dominate the headlines, and considers the everyday routines of those living in England and Wales in the Tudor era.
00:54 How did Tudors earn money?
03:20 Where did men work?
08:15 What if you were unable to work?
March 13, 2026
What did ordinary Tudors do for work? Inside the 16th-century daily grind
March 9, 2026
A lot of real problems could be fixed with $16 trillion
On his Substack, John Robson observes that there are huge numbers of problems — real, measurable problems — that could be ameliorated or completely solved by the application of $16 trillion dollars. But instead, the governments of the western world have pissed that up against the wall on unsuccessful efforts to address climate change:
In the Epoch Times Stephen Moore of the Heritage Foundation writes “Environmental scholar Bjorn Lomborg recently calculated that across the globe, governments have spent at least $16 trillion feeding the climate change industrial complex. And for what?” A splendid question. Of course some people would say “Well, to keep the sky from catching fire, duh”. But since the reduction in emissions has been trivial, it wasn’t a great bargain. Plus, Moore being an actual economist, he drills in on the key point: “But it’s much worse than that. In economics, there is a concept called opportunity cost: What could we have done with $16 trillion to make the world better off?” So, after carving “Opportunity cost” over the entrance to our academy, we ask anyone who enters to suppose that you are a do-gooder, and a green one at that. And suppose that someone had offered you sixteen trillion bucks back in 1995 to do good with. Whatever you wanted. Malnutrition in Africa. Plastic in the oceans. Loss of habitat. Safe drinking water for people in South Asia or even on Canadian aboriginal reserves. Literally anything. What could you have accomplished, or at least attempted? This question was long ago posed by Lomborg, albeit only with $75 billion imaginary dollars, to a panel of experts who concluded climate change was far down the list of spending targets. And yet governments said no thanks and spend all $16 trillion fighting “carbon pollution”. And for what?
In their defence those same governments might be tempted to point to the lack of warming and say something like “See, it worked! Sure, $16 trillion is a lot but we saved Earth from runaway heating so be grateful.” However they are also the ones who lament that the planet continues to warm, heat, bake and boil. So even if they’re right, they’re wrong. And either way, the money really was all wasted.
Of course they might say no, see, it would have been way worse without that spending. And as we’ve noted before, one of the many slippery things about climate alarmism is just how fast they think changes in CO2 produces changes in temperature and via changes in temperature, changes in weather. It’s very difficult to pin them down on just when the really troubling impacts began to be palpable, not least because they generally say we’re already in a climate crisis that’s about to hit. But even the models, and here we include hysterical ones like RCP8.5, do not generally suggest that the temperature today would be a whole lot higher if we’d stayed on the emissions track from 1995 instead of, well, staying on it, with Western nations declining due to increasing energy efficiency not political grandstanding and China, India and others more than taking up the slack.
To be fair, it would not be illogical for such persons to say, or shriek, that it proves $16 trillion was just peanuts, we should have spent $160 trillion or $48 quadrillion or 4 Triganic Pus or something of that sort. And they did.
For instance, just over two years ago Bloomberg actually ran a column saying “$266 Trillion in Climate Spending is a No-Brainer”. And we agreed, sardonically, since the whole world GDP seems to be around $96 trillion as nearly as anyone can estimate it. (We are not convinced most alarmists who toss such numbers around, like former Canadian Environment Minister Catherine McKenna who wanted “trillions in infrastructure investments from both governments and the private sector”, can tell you off the cuff to within an order of magnitude what, say, the current US or Canadian GDP is.)
March 7, 2026
Reported preference versus revealed preference – know the difference
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Devon Eriksen encapsulates the experiences of so many companies who found a male-oriented market and then they try to make their offerings more appealing to women:
Most business suicides are induced by not understand[ing] the difference between reported preference and revealed preference.
If you run Testosterone Studios, maker of Angry Muscular Axe Guy Kills Demons in Hell, you might notice after a while that not very many women buy your games.
Since your stockholders have a profound moral objection to other people having money and not giving it to them, they want you to correct this problem, stat.
They want you to make Angry Muscular Axe Guy Kills Demons in Hell 2 sell to men AND women. So you sigh, shrug your shoulders, hire a bunch of female consultants, and ask them “What do women like?”
“Feminism!”
“Girlbosses!”
“Strong Female Characters effortlessly outdoing men at everything!”
“Gay stuff!”
So Testosterone Games dutifully makes Petite Feminist Girlboss Replaces Angry Muscular Axe Guy, hoping that men will buy it because they bought the first one, and girls will buy it because it panders to what they were told girls want.
Of course, nobody buys it. The men don’t buy it because it’s not what they liked in the first one, and women don’t buy it because women couldn’t care less about games where you fight demons in hell.
If, instead of asking a bunch of consultants what women like (reported preference), they had looked at games women actually buy (revealed preference), they would have seen something very different.
“Fruit Matcher 3000 for iPhone.”
“Point and Click Alice in Wonderland Studio Ghibli Adventure”
“Something Something Hogwarts.”
And they would have realized, had they two brain cells to rub together, that you can’t please everyone, because some people hate exactly what other people like.
If you want more money, look at who is already buying your product, and see if you can make them like the next one better. Because I guarantee you aren’t already selling to every single male on the planet.
And don’t hire video game consultants.
They don’t know how to sell games, and they don’t care, because they don’t want to sell games. They just hate men, and want to ruin things men like. If you hire them, they’re going to have their fun, cash your check, and ride off into the sunset, while you lose your business.
And indie studios, who know whether they are making Aliens Must Die or Barbie Horse Adventures, will replace you, which is the free market operating as intended.
March 4, 2026
QotD: Socialism
The blunt teaching of history is that socialism is not an advanced stage in the evolution of human society but one of its most primitive stages. A highly articulated form of socialism was practiced among the Incas, the tribe which Pizarro found in control of Peru when he landed there in 1527. All produce, whether agricultural, pastoral or industrial, was the property of the state … In fact, the Incas had not only “communal ownership of the means of production” but a “planned economy”. All the basic features of socialism were present, and the feature which has specially attracted the attention of the archaeologist is that the Incas were in effect a huge bureaucracy … [T]he lesson of history is clear that communal ownership is normal among primitive people, and the institution of private property in the “means of production” is the first big step on the road to civilization.
Ivor Thomas, The Socialist Tragedy, 1951.
February 28, 2026
Just when you think Canada can’t get worse … it gets worse
Unlike most other Anglosphere countries, Canada does not have a resurgent right wing in domestic politics — we barely have a right wing at all — and the governing Liberal Party is constantly trying to steal sitting opposition MPs to achieve a majority of seats in Parliament. It’s no wonder that Alberta’s separatist movement has been active the last few years. In case you still have an optimistic view of Canada’s present and future, here’s a long “state of Canada” post from John Carter that will probably increase the numbers signing up for free euthanasia (“MAID” in Canadian):
The US is now leading Canada 3-0 in international hockey. If you count the Stanley Cup as an occasional international match, a Canadian team hasn’t won since 1993. For a country that has long practically defined itself as the Hockey Nation, this is especially humiliating. Given the continual year-round repetition of the Elbows Up mantra, this is the kind of thing a Roman augur would have interpreted as a portent of divine disfavour.
Months, you say? Oh dear.
Consistent with that interpretation, Canada’s recent humiliations have not been limited to sportspuck losses. What follows is a snapshot in time, headlines from a country beset by interlocking economic, demographic, spiritual, and political crises, a country which has not had good news in so long that it has forgotten what optimism even looks like.
Item: Canada recently watched the worst school shooting in Canadian history, and the second-worse mass shooting after the infamous 1989 Montreal Massacre in which “Mark Lepine”1 shot 14 female engineering students. The shooting took place in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, a small rural village in the country’s north, and claimed the lives of 10 people including the shooter, his mother, his brother, and several students. Dozens of others were injured. It soon turned out that the murderer was a trannie whose brain had been twisted into a psychotic pretzel by psychedelics, legal weed, SSRIs, and the gender woo he was force-fed at school, at home, and on Reddit. This has led to it being referred to as the Tumblr Shooting. Naturally, both the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Canadian media went out of their way to respect the shooter’s pronouns in all reporting and official communications. The media even made sure to give the shooter an AI filter glow-up, so that he could be remembered as the pretty girl we all know he really was deep down inside.
After a desultory and hilariously unsuccessful attempt at scolding the public that the problem wasn’t trannies, but guns or whiteness or something (blessedly, they couldn’t say “men” this time), the Canadian media just dropped it, though not before the government flew the flag at half mast.
Which is how this happened.
Item: A former school board trustee in Chilliwack, British Columbia, was fined $750,000 for failure to respect pronouns. Shooting up a school is bad, but misgendering is unforgivable.
[…]
Item: A xeet went viral in which a leaflib tried to fact check an American poster making fun of 18-month MRI wait times by pointing out that she’d only had to wait six months, prompting widespread mockery from incredulous Yanks.
Pennsylvania, which has about 1/3 of Canada’s population, has more MRIs than all of Canada put together. The Canadian mind cannot comprehend, etc.
Item: Euthanasia via Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) program now accounts for 1 death in 20 in Canada. The overwhelming majority, around 96%, of MAiD recipients are white, despite white Canadians comprising 86% of Canadians in the elderly demographic that dominates assisted suicide participants.
Since 2016 over 76,000 Canadians have been killed by MAiD. Moreover, the program is accelerating: the death toll in 2024 was the highest on record at 16,499. Annual death tolls have risen by around a few thousand every year since the program started, with no sign of stopping. Canada is expected to hit 100,000 MAiD deaths by summer.
Item: While most MAiD victims are elderly and infirm, this is not true in every case. Recently it came out that a 26-year-old man was euthanized, simply because he was depressed over his diabetes-induced blindness. His family allege that he doctor-shopped until he found one who would kill him (she has apparently killed several hundred others).
MAiD was originally billed as an easy, painless out for people with terminal illnesses, a dignified death that would spare them a few months of pointless agony. It’s now being extended to people whose imminent death is not reasonably foreseeable. Several Canadian Armed Forces veterans have been offered MAiD in lieu of treatment for injuries sustained in the course of their service.
The primary goal of MAiD is almost certainly to reduce pressure on Canada’s overstretched public health care system whilst simultaneously reducing the fiscal burden of pensioners on the federal budget. Someone looked at the financials, and concluded that unfunded liabilities were going to bankrupt the country when the boomers reached their 80s. Therefore the government is talking them into killing themselves. However, while they’re at it, they might as well expand the program to hasten demographic replacement within the younger sectors of the population pyramid.
- Née Gamil Gharbi, a detail the Canadian media successfully kept from us for decades as it didn’t fit their narrative that “men” are the problem, rather than men from … certain places.
February 27, 2026
New (or revived) career paths in the age of the clanker
If you work in tech, the future is looking blacker by the day as artificial intelligence threatens to eat more and more tech jobs. Even for a lot of non-tech jobs, the clankers are coming for them too. So what jobs can we expect to thrive in an age of AI agents taking on more and more work? Ted Gioia suggests they’re already a growing sector, we just haven’t noticed it yet and that instead of telling people to learn how to code, we should be telling them to be more human:
This is the new secret strategy in the arts, and it’s built on the simplest thing you can imagine — namely, existing as a human being.
We crave the human touch
You see the same thing in media right now, where livestreaming is taking off. “For viewers”, according to Advertising Age (citing media strategist Rachel Karten), “live-streaming offers a refuge from the growing glut of AI-generated content on their feeds. In a social media landscape where the difference between real and artificial has grown nearly imperceptible, the unmistakable humanity of real-time video is a refreshing draw.”
This return to human contact is happening everywhere, not just media and the arts. Amazon recently shut down all of its Fresh and Go stores — which allowed consumers to buy groceries without dealing with any checkout clerk. It turned out that people didn’t want this.
I could have told Amazon from the outset that customers want human service. I see it myself in store after store. People will wait in line for flesh-and-blood clerks, instead of checking out faster at the do-it-yourself counter.
Unless I have no choice at all — in that I need to buy something and there are zero human cashiers available — I never use self-checkout. I’ll put my intended purchases back on the shelf rather than use a self-checkout kiosk. And I don’t think of myself as a Luddite … I spent my career in the software business … but self-checkout just bothers me. I’ll take the grumpiest human over the cheeriest pre-recorded voices.
But this isn’t happenstance — it’s a sign of the times. You can’t hide the failure of self-service technology. It’s evident to anybody who goes shopping.
As AI customer service becomes more pervasive, the luxury brands will survive by offering this human touch. I’m now encountering this term “concierge service” as a marketing angle in the digital age. The concierge is the superior alternative to an AI agent — more trustworthy, more reliable, and (yes) more human.
Even tech companies are figuring this out. Spotify now boasts that it has human curators, not just cold algorithms. It needs to match up with Apple Music, which claims that “human curation is more important than ever”. Meanwhile Bandcamp has launched a “club” where members get special music selections, listening parties, and other perks from human curators.
So, step aside “software-as-a-service” and step forward “humans-as-a-service”, I guess.
Brookfield, Carney, Freeland, and Ukraine – cui bono?
Melanie in Saskatchewan goes digging in the less-publicly-visible parts of Canada’s massive support of Ukraine to see who is gaining the benefit from all that money and all those political and economic manoeuvres … and you probably won’t be surprised to hear that it’s not ordinary Ukrainians or their soldiers fighting on the front line against Russia:
Image from Melanie in Saskatchewan
I need you to stop for a moment and really sit with this. Ask yourself a question that should make your stomach drop. What if the billions of your tax dollars being sent to Ukraine are not just about solidarity, democracy, or defending freedom? What if they also intersect with private financial interests connected to the very people making those decisions?
Because that is the bombshell.
And once you see the connections, you cannot unsee them.
Canada has now committed more than $25.5 billion to Ukraine. Just days ago, Prime Minister Mark Carney announced another $2 billion in military aid. Armoured vehicles. Equipment. Sanctions. More money flowing outward while Canadians juggle mortgage renewals, grocery bills, and heating costs that feel like ransom demands.
[…]
And to the Ethics Commissioner, Canadians deserve clarity. The Conflict of Interest Act is widely described as a disclosure regime. It relies heavily on what office holders report and on screening mechanisms that operate within defined boundaries. Committee testimony has acknowledged that screen administrators do not know the specific underlying assets within the Brookfield Global Transition Fund and that a significant portion of Brookfield’s broader portfolio is outside those screens. Mark Carney is the architect of Brookfield’s Global Transition Fund. He KNOWS what the assets in that fund are. He also has carried interest structures in that fund. If Konrad von Finckenstein does not take note and act, then I cannot validate the need for his position. We might as well install a potted Boston Fern in his chair, we’d still get the same results.
So the question becomes simple. If an issue of this magnitude does not justify proactive scrutiny and clear public documentation, then what does? Canadians are not asking for drama. They are asking for written determinations, documented recusals, and visible oversight that goes beyond procedural minimums.
Were Canadian Ukraine policy decisions structured, timed, or insulated in a way that ensures there is absolutely no benefit, direct or indirect, to any financial exposure connected to Brookfield-related structures? Have recusals been documented? Has the Ethics Commissioner issued written determinations? Has conflict screening been publicly disclosed?
Where is the paperwork?
If everything is clean, then showing the documentation should be effortless. If everything is arms-length, then release the recusal letters. If there is nothing to hide, then open the books.
Canadians are not children. We understand complexity. What we resent is opacity.
To Moose on the Loose, credit where it is due. Independent researchers willing to comb through filings, contracts, and timelines are the reason these overlaps are being discussed at all. Without that digging, most Canadians would never see the full picture.
Now it is on us.
Share this. Ask your MP. Demand written answers. Demand documentation. Demand transparency from Mark Carney.
February 23, 2026
“The aim always being to shoot the kulaks and who cares about the reasoning?”
It’s funny how the latest crisis always seems to have the same recommendations from the great and the good of the land – give us more money and more power. Pollution? More money and more power, please. Global poverty? More money and more power, please. Climate change? More money and more power, please. So it’s not really surprising that when the great and the good decide that global wealth inequality is a huge and growing problem, well, we all know what they’re going to recommend, don’t we?
As we all know, because we’re all told it so often, global wealth inequality is rising. Therefore something must be done! Punitive taxation and the bureaucrats get to spend everything, obviously.
The one little problem with this is that the aim, intention, is always punitive taxation and the bureaucrats get to spend everything and damn the actual evidence used to support the proposal. It’s all sub-Marxoid ever increasing concentrations of summat and therefore the kulaks need to be shot. The aim always being to shoot the kulaks and who cares about the reasoning?
30 years back — and yes, I am old enough to recall this — it was all about how income was becoming more unequal in its distribution. Therefore punitive taxes, the bureaucrats get to allocate everything and hey, look, we can shoot the kulaks! This all rather fell apart when it was pointed out that the actual effect of global neoliberalism was that income inequality was declining. For which we can thank the work of Branko Milanovic. Who did prove that income inequality was declining under global neoliberalism.
Thus, to my mind, the move to squeeing about wealth inequality. For we need that reason to shoot the kulaks and damn the intellectual perversions required to find it.
And, well, Branko and his numbers again, eh?
New paper on the capitalization of the world with @BrankoMilan just out!
Capital income remains very unequally distributed worldwide, but inequality has slightly declined.
Oh. Global neoliberalism is reducing the inequality of capital income, is it? Why yes yes it is:
Global capital income inequality has declined in the 21st century, with the Gini coefficient falling from 97% to 94%. Over the same period, the share of the world population with annual capital income above $100 increased from 12% to 27%. This implies more than a doubling of the number of individuals earning positive income from interest, dividends, rents, and privately-funded pensions.
That’s alarmingly high, yes. We’d all like it to be lower too. I certainly would. I’d like us all to be living in that bourgeois American upper middle class in fact. $100k a year family incomes, $500k (later in life, obviously) in the 401(k) and all that. You know, bring it on.
We even have a mapped out plan about how we get from here to there. It’s in the SRES, which is the foundation of all that IPCC work about climate change. If we have globalised neoliberalism for the rest of this century then we’ll all be approaching that — in current $ — American upper middle class income. If we power that by going fracking, developing out solar and so on then climate change won’t be a problem either. If we power it by not going fracking and turn back to the use of coal then Bangladesh gets it. But the base idea that all will rise up into those bourgeois pleasures of three squares, a warm crib and choices in life really is in there. And, yes, it’s globalised neoliberalism that will take us there.
So, while it is alarmingly high, that inequality, we’re already solving it as we did income inequality — global neoliberalism. Pity no one gets to shoot the kulaks but there we are, reality doesn’t always accord with desires.
February 21, 2026
QotD: Warren G. Harding’s successful depression-breaking policies
Driven by academia, this is where American history has placed Franklin Delano Roosevelt (in office 1933-1945) and Warren Gamaliel Harding (in office 1921-1923). It is impossible to see FDR absent a “great presidents” ranking; it is likewise impossible to see Harding absent the lowest rungs.
Both men came into office with an economy in tatters and both men instituted ambitious agendas to correct the respective downturns. Yet their policies were the polar opposite of one another and, as a result, had the opposite effect. In short, Harding used laissez faire-style capitalism and the economy boomed; FDR intervened and things went from bad to worse.
Despite these clear facts, in C-SPAN’s latest poll ranking US presidents, FDR finished third in the rankings, while Harding finished 37th. Surveying how both handled the economy, scholars ranked FDR third in that category, while Harding came in at 32. This is a tragedy of history.
America in 1920, the year Harding was elected, fell into a serious economic slide called by some “the forgotten depression“. Coming out of World War I and the upheavals of 1919, the economy struggled to adjust to peacetime realities, falling into a serious slump.
The depression lasted about 18 months, from January 1920 to July 1921. During that time, the conditions for average Americans steadily deteriorated. Industrial production fell by a third, stocks dropped nearly 50 percent, corporate profits were down more than 90 percent. Unemployment rose from 4 percent to 12, putting nearly 5 million Americans out of work. Small businesses were devastated, including a Kansas City haberdashery owned by Edward Jacobson and future president Harry S. Truman.
The nation’s finances were also in shambles. America had spent $50 billion on the Great War, more than half the nation’s GNP (gross national product). The national debt jumped from $1.2 billion in 1916 to $26 billion in 1919, while the Allied Powers owed the US Treasury $10 billion. Annual government spending soared more than twenty-five times, from around $700 million in 1916 to nearly $19 billion in 1919.
Harding campaigned on exactly what he wanted to do for the economy – retrenchment. He would slash taxes, cut government spending, and roll back the progressive tide. He would return the country to fiscal sanity and economic normalcy.
“We need a rigid and yet sane economy, combined with fiscal justice,” he said in his inaugural address, “and it must be attended by individual prudence and thrift, which are so essential to this trying hour and reassuring for our future”.
The business community expressed excitement about the new administration. The Wall Street Journal headlined on Election Day, “Wall Street sees better times after election”. The Los Angeles Times headlined the following day, “Eight years of Democratic incompetency and waste are drawing rapidly to a close”. Others read “Harding’s Advent Means New Prosperity” and “Inauguration ‘Let’s Go!’ Signal to Business”.
The day after Harding’s inauguration, the Times editors predicted “good times ahead”, writing, “The inauguration yesterday of President Harding and the advent of an era of Republicanism after years of business harassment and uncertainty under the Democratic regime were hailed” by the nation’s business leaders. I. H. Rice, the president of the Merchants and Manufacturers Association, told the press, “Good times are now ahead of us. Prosperity is at our door. We are headed toward pre-war conditions … Business men are well pleased with President Harding’s selections for his Cabinet and by the caliber of men he has chosen we know that he means business”.
Under Harding and his successor, Calvin Coolidge, and with the leadership of Andrew Mellon at Treasury, taxes were slashed from more than 70 percent to 25 percent. Government spending was cut in half. Regulations were reduced. The result was an economic boom. Growth averaged 7 percent per year, unemployment fell to less than 2 percent, and revenue to the government increased, generating a budget surplus every year, enough to reduce the national debt by a third. Wages rose for every class of American worker. It was unparalleled prosperity.
Ryan S. Walters, “The Two Presidents Whose Economic Policies Are Most Misunderstood by Historians”, Foundation for Economic Education, 2022-03-05.
February 19, 2026
An American anarchist
I’ve never met Christopher Schwarz, but I’ve read a lot of his writing in books, magazine articles, and blog posts. He’s forgotten more about hand tool woodworking than I’ll ever know, and he’s amazingly generous in sharing his knowledge with others. He calls himself an anarchist, which often puzzles people who only know of anarchism from media-presented bomb-throwing nihilists and conspiratorial Russian stories. Here he explains what he means when he uses the term:
“Chris Schwarz and Meredith Schwarz” by jessamyn west is marked with CC0 1.0 
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I get asked a lot about what I mean by the word “anarchism”, and if I could please explain what I mean when I use that word.
My answer is always unsatisfying. Here’s why.
For the love of creamed corn, why would I publicly discuss ideas that are – for now – a crime in our country? Why would I say – for example – that I think that copyrights and patents on things that use public money are bullshit? That wars are founded on lies? And that the state – in general – seems to be a menace to peaceable living?
That would be stupid. Dumb nuts.
Also, I am a practitioner of anarchism, not a philosopher.
If you want to know more about American anarchism (and aesthetic anarchism, specifically), you need to ask a philosopher, not a front-of-house worker. Read Native American Anarchism (Hachette Books, 1983) by Eunice Minette Schuster for an easy on ramp. Or Josiah Warren’s Equitable Commerce (1852) for the full banana.
The Anarchist’s Tool Chest: Revised Edition by Christopher Schwarz – Link.
Or follow the trail of breadcrumbs left in The Anarchist’s Tool Chest to figure it out yourself. The book describes how to disrupt the furniture industry by building things that never need to be replaced. It’s also about how to jailbreak yourself from a tool industry that offers up aluminum jigs as a substitute for skill.
That book is not the only path. There are other ways to throw a bunch of ball bearings into the guts of the IKEA robots.
Buy antiques or used furniture. The other week I was in Savannah, Georgia, and visited one of my favorite antique stores. The price of handmade antiques has hit bottom. So-called “brown furniture” can be bought for less that the cost of the materials used to make it.
Even though I make furniture for a living, I sometimes save time and money by purchasing vintage industrial furniture for our warehouse, fulfillment center and workshop. Megan’s giant oak desk from the 1960s cost us zero dollars (we just had to move it from an insurance office). Our printer and scanning station? An old workbench from Pennsylvania. Our associate editors’ shared desk? A giant vintage drafting table from Sweden.
And if you think for a moment, there are other industries and organizations that can be farted upon by your actions. The clothing industry is even worse than the furniture industry when it comes to making flimsy crap and abusing workers.
Yes, you can buy ethically made jeans, shirts and socks. Yes, you will pay a premium for these items. And if you can afford that path, great. If you can’t, then buy secondhand clothing.
I’ve always wanted a pair of R.M. Williams boots but could never afford them on a writer’s salary. Last year I found a used pair for about $100 where the owner had ragged out the elastic part of the slip-on boots. It was a stupid easy fix. And now I have boots I shall wear at my funeral.
The other side of the equation is that I’m denying the new-boot-goofin’ industry my dollars. Forever. I don’t have to buy a pair of shoddily made boots that can’t be re-soled and will have to be replaced in a couple years. All my future “boot money” will go to our local cobbler so she can re-sole them every few years.
February 15, 2026
How to Make The Economy Look Better Than It Is – Death of Democracy 03 – Q3 1933
World War Two
Published 14 Feb 2026Death of Democracy returns to Nazi Germany in Q3 1933. See Hitler enforce one‑party rule, sign the Reichskonkordat, tighten propaganda and press control, and expand work programs that feed rearmament. From July to September, follow the legal and cultural Gleichschaltung that normalizes terror and reshapes Europe’s future in this episode.
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February 14, 2026
The EU’s plans to drain the “wine lake” … again
Canada isn’t the only place with rigidly governed agricultural cartels … the European Union has always been a big fan of governing agricultural markets by fiat rather than allowing the markets to sort out how much of which product should be produced. One of the biggest markets actively distorted by EU regulation is the wine industry, where faulty regulations ended up paying for a vast over-supply of wine in the 1980s and 90s. Rather than eliminating the regulatory structures, the EU continues to prefer letting bureaucrats dictate to producers:
When the Common Agricultural Policy was established, it was quickly determined that one of its core objectives would be the protection of farmers, ensuring stable incomes and food security. In the wine sector, this logic translated into strong interventionism aimed at expanding and stabilizing production.
For decades, Brussels subsidized vineyard planting, protected minimum prices, and absorbed producers’ economic risk, disconnecting production decisions from signals of demand. Producing more ceased to be an economic choice and became a politically safe decision.
This approach created a structural market distortion. As wine consumption began to decline across Europe for demographic, cultural, and economic reasons, the artificially incentivized productive structure remained intact and unable to adjust.
It was in this context that, during the 1980s and 1990s, the first major shock occurred, known as the wine lake: massive wine surpluses with no outlet. Even then, Brussels treated this episode as an isolated and temporary phenomenon, ignoring the fact that it was the direct consequence of existing policies. By persisting with the same strategies, the problem ceased to be episodic and became structural.
In the early 2000s, the European Union was finally forced to recognize that the wine crisis was not temporary. However, instead of removing production incentives and restoring the market’s adjustment function, it opted for a new form of intervention: subsidizing the voluntary uprooting of vineyards. The decision to destroy productive capacity ceased to be economic and became administrative, decreed from the European political center, with profound effects across several countries.
This model, presented as temporary, set a dangerous precedent. Rather than allowing less viable producers to exit the market through prices and economic choice, the state began paying for withdrawal, subsidizing the costs of adjustment and normalizing the idea that the correction of public policy errors should be financed with more public money.
This policy did not solve the underlying problem. It merely reduced cultivated area temporarily, while leaving intact the regulatory architecture which had created the initial distortion. The sector became trapped in a cycle of incentivized expansion, predictable crisis, and administrative correction.
It is within this framework that the Wine Package emerges as the European Union’s latest set of measures for the wine sector. The package relies on an administratively planned reduction of supply through financial incentives for vineyard uprooting, complemented by regulatory adjustments, temporary support measures, and crisis management instruments. Instead of allowing the market to adjust to declining consumption, Brussels once again opts for the destruction of productive capacity as a policy tool. Although the package includes support measures and environmental framing, its central axis remains the administrative reduction of supply.
The impact of these decisions is not marginal. The European wine sector represents a significant share of the European Union’s economy, sustaining approximately 2.9 million direct and indirect jobs and contributing more than €130 billion to EU GDP.
February 9, 2026
Jamil Jivani on his trip to Washington DC
If you depend on the CBC, the Toronto Star or other legacy Canadian media, if you heard anything at all about Bowmanville-Oshawa North MP Jamil Jivani’s visit to key American leaders in Washington DC, you probably got the story framed as Liberals tut-tutting and disapproving of Jivani, his initiative to make the trip, and how he should leave everything to the government. If nothing else, it further proved that Prime Minister Carney doesn’t actually want better relations with the US, as his entire campaign was based on opposition to Trump and its success in riling up Canadian boomers with the moronic eLbOwS uP nonsense.
In the National Post Jivani discusses the trip and what he’s learned from it:
Image from Melanie in Saskatchewan
It was a whirlwind of a trip, full of excellent conversations. I had meetings with the White House and State Department, including conversations with President Donald Trump, Vice-President JD Vance, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Senators from Montana, Ohio, and Wisconsin, as well as the United States Trade Representative, each sat down with me to share their priorities. Businesses and industries employing thousands of Canadians shared their insights with me on where Canada-U.S. trade fits into their vision for economic growth.
Doors were open for dialogue about how Canada and the U.S. can work together at a time when pessimism gets most of the media attention. Certainly, my 15-year friendship with the vice-president played a key role in opening those doors. But what I found across the board was optimism about how we can move trade negotiations forward. I was particularly happy to hear key insights on how we can make progress on specific sectoral priorities, and the importance of strategic diplomacy. I offered my perspective on why CUSMA is so important to communities like mine in Bowmanville—Oshawa North, and I expressed my hope that CUSMA will continue to ensure Canada and the U.S. both benefit from a special economic and security relationship.
There is only so much I can share without first having the chance to speak with Prime Minister Mark Carney and Minister Dominic LeBlanc. Out of respect for their unique responsibilities in negotiating trade with the United States, it’s important that I debrief them before saying too much publicly and see how we can work together moving forward as Conservatives and Liberals.
However, I do want to point out a key observation related to the need for strategic diplomacy. Mexico — the third partner in our trilateral trade agreement with the U.S. — is further ahead in its engagement with the U.S. than Canada is. On Jan. 28, 2026, Mexico and the U.S. announced formal talks on CUSMA reforms. A week later, Mexico and the U.S. announced a joint action plan for critical minerals. Neither of these announcements included Canada.
Observers of this news would be right to worry that the current Canadian government may be making similar mistakes as were made under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau during the 2017 CUSMA negotiations. At that time, Mexico advanced its negotiations with the U.S. while Canada was largely left out of the process. It was only at the last minute, when a bilateral agreement between Mexico and the US was a real possibility, that Canada was included and our unique trilateral arrangement continued.
It would be a mistake to relive 2017 all over again, if for no other reason than Canadian workers and businesses deserve to have full representation in a process that has such a significant impact on our economy. The workers at the GM plant in Oshawa deserve to know that their government did everything possible to protect their jobs and encourage investment in their industry. All Canadians deserve to know that their elected officials are making the best effort possible to advance our national interests.
Full disclosure: Jamil Jivani is my Member of Parliament, and I fully support his decision to go and I hope that it actually does help make for improved trade relations between Canada and the United States. Bitterness and uncertainty only benefit the Liberal Party and Mark Carney, not ordinary Canadians. Attacking and criticizing Donald Trump plays well in our deranged and sycophantic media, but it makes Trump less willing to deal fairly with Canada on trade or other issues of critical importance to both nations.
February 8, 2026
“Girlboss Gatekeeping” as an evolutionary strategy
John Carter linked to this essay on Substack, calling it “A young mother’s reflections on fertility collapse”:
It’s easy to get caught up in the achievement trap, isn’t it? There are times I catch myself catastrophizing and thinking things like if my son doesn’t get into the right elementary school, then he won’t get into the right high school, and then he won’t get into the right college, and then he won’t be able to get a good job and will end up giving hand jobs for crack behind a Walmart.
Even if time, effort, and expense don’t keep people from having children, narcissism certainly can. There was an article in Vogue a while back entitled “Is Having a Boyfriend Embarrassing Now?“. The article was pretty silly, although it dominated internet chatter for a hot minute. Hiding your man is framed as solidarity with single women, but I think that it highlights just how commodified we all are now. When your brand is all about travel, Pilates, fancy cocktails, and mani-pedis, it’s hard to find space for motherhood in all of that. Yes, I know that there are “parenting influencers” as well, but they are not that common if we’re being honest.
Rob Henderson, another writer and podcaster whose content I thoroughly enjoy, posted an essay on this topic that had a novel take. Dr. Henderson writes about “Girlboss Gatekeeping“, where encouraging other women to forgo having children and focus on their careers may be an evolutionary strategy to keep the number of children low so that there are more resources available for one’s own. I can relate to this since when I was in college, everyone talked about what they wanted their careers to be, but it seemed almost verboten to mention starting a family.
Similarly, when I was in college, there was all this talk about how traditional family structure was inherently patriarchal and stifling towards women, and that we needed to move past or do away with marriage as an institution. The people who talked like this were college kids from upper-middle families who were raised by a married mother and father. This plays into another concept from Dr. Henderson called “luxury beliefs“. Basically, these are beliefs that confer status on the people that express them but actually would make things worse for the underprivileged if they were implemented.
I’ve come to realize that so many of the things that we were told or that I used to believe ended up being untrue. That people are born as a “blank slate”. That men and women are the same. That human beings, and by extension, societies are perfectible. That variation in outcomes must be the result of oppression.
If you had talked to me in college, I would have said that I had no interest in marriage or a family. I was all about my career. Things change, though. I met a guy, fell in love, got married, and soon enough, had a baby. I thought that dropping out of my PhD program would have felt more traumatic, but I actually didn’t stress about it all that much. I guess technically I’m on sabbatical, and I could go back eventually, but I probably won’t. I’ve come to realize that lack of ambition doesn’t make me a bad person. I simply have different priorities now. The fact that I’ll never have the word “doctor” in front of my name doesn’t sting that much.
I’m still a little sore from having that kid pulled out of me. The labor wasn’t that bad since I had an epidural, but after the anesthesia wore off, the pain is no joke. I can sit down normally now, but it took a while. Not that I’m whining. It’s just that pregnancy and childbirth can be difficult, and I think that, in all fairness, we need to acknowledge that.
I’m lucky in that my husband and I both have good jobs. Mine is quite flexible, and my boss has been very accommodating about me working from home and working part-time. Not that many people can say that. A brief return to the “girlboss gatekeeping” — I’m really glad my boss is a man. Indeed, I work in STEM, and the majority of people that I work with and in my field in general are men. Of course, things tend to get much shittier when women take them over.
A final thought on fertility has to do with the fact that for a significant portion of young women, it would be embarrassing to be a stay-at-home mom. Choosing motherhood many times means not choosing status. At least not in the way that current society defines it. If you’re wealthy and don’t have to work, then having lots of kids can be a flex, but most people aren’t in that situation. I don’t think that having working parents is bad for kids. In addition to my father working full time, my mother worked a full-time job throughout most of my childhood. It’s probably more important that kids grow up in an intact family with both a mother and a father in the household.
I don’t have any great ideas about how to reorient society and culture to raise fertility, and everyone has to choose their own path. I just figured I would share my own experiences.
February 7, 2026
Liberal horror at a Conservative MP going to Washington to talk trade
Jamil Jivani, Conservative Member of Parliament for the riding of Bowmanville-Oshawa North, is being called all sorts of names by Liberals and their creatures in the mainstream media for his temerity in actually going to Washington DC to try to encourage trade talks between Canada and the United States:
Image from Melanie in Saskatchewan
Mark Carney, I want to speak to you directly for a moment, because this whole episode has your fingerprints all over it.
You have spent months telling Canadians we live in a more dangerous and divided world. You have warned us that this is not a transition but a rupture. You have explained, repeatedly, that Canada must adapt, that middle powers must act differently, that old assumptions no longer apply. It is very serious language. Big language. The kind you deliver slowly, as if the room should be taking notes.
So imagine my surprise when a Conservative MP behaved exactly the way your speeches suggest Canada must behave, and Ottawa promptly short-circuited.
Jamil Jivani went to Washington to try to open a door you and your government have been telling Canadians does not exist. He used a personal relationship with JD Vance, not for applause, not for theatrics, but for the radical act of actually talking to someone who matters. And suddenly, Mark, this was not adaptive diplomacy. It was alarming. Inappropriate. A problem.
This is the part where your credibility starts to wobble.
Because let’s be honest. When people asked you about engaging Donald Trump directly, your response boiled down to “Who cares?” Either because it bored you or because you preferred not to acknowledge that door at all. So when a Conservative tries anyway, the issue is not that the door was touched. It is that someone proved it was never locked in the first place.
Jivani did not freelance. He did not sneak off. He offered this connection to your government first. Openly. Calmly. And it was dismissed. Brushed aside. Not interested. And when he went anyway, your side did not react with curiosity or even grudging respect. It reacted with outrage.
The kind of outrage you see when someone fixes a problem you have been holding meetings about for weeks without ever intending to solve it. Like an office that has spent months discussing a flickering lightbulb, only to panic when someone quietly screws in a new one and sits back down before the chair can call the meeting to order.
And then, almost on cue, came the shiny object.
I am not accusing you of anything, Mark. I am simply asking whether it is coincidence that the outrage over Jivani going to Washington was followed almost immediately by a dramatic announcement about dropping the EV mandate. Was that timing accidental, or was it a convenient way to make Canadians look over there while a Conservative threatened to come back with something measurable. I am not saying it was a distraction. I am just saying the choreography was impressive.
Now, let’s talk about cooperation, because you and your allies invoke that word constantly.
When generalized liberals complain that Conservatives will not “play ball”, what they seem to mean is that Conservatives are not being obedient. Cooperation, in practice, appears to mean standing aside politely while you govern unchallenged. It does not mean Conservatives doing something useful that might work. Especially not if it works where you did not.
And this is where your rhetoric corners you.
