Ted Gioia
Published 5 Nov 2018This is the latest installment in a series of informal, unscripted videos featuring music historian Ted Gioia. In this video, Gioia talks about the legacy of jazz saxophonist John Coltrane. For more information on Ted Gioia, visit his website at http://www.tedgioia.com or follow him on Twitter at / tedgioia
September 25, 2026
John Coltrane, Prophet and Seer
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How True was Lord of War? Surplus from the Warsaw Pact (w/ Val Forgett)
Forgotten Weapons
Published 20 May 2026When the Soviet Union collapsed, there was a gold rush for the surplus guns held by all the various newly independent republics, as well as the Warsaw Pact nations. Lord of War is not far off … and Val Forgett was there, bringing guns into the US for Navy Arms.
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September 24, 2026
More than you ever wanted to know about the Teapot Dome scandal
At The Grim Historian, Carlyn Beccia has a long, long post about the scandal that (probably) killed President Harding: the Teapot Dome scandal.
“The Teapot Dome scandal” by Clifford Berryman, 1924
Granger Collection
Washington, 1922. Somewhere around H Street, a piano is still playing after midnight. The car turns off the avenue and slows outside a townhouse with the shades already drawn.
Warren Harding steps onto the sidewalk. Presidential seal on the door he just closed. Another beautiful woman on his arm, history declined to name. He doesn’t look around. He doesn’t have to.
Warren Harding is handsome. Everybody always says so. He was a notorious ladies’ man, carried on a fifteen-year affair with one married woman, fathered a child with another, and left historians enough love letters that we know far too many bawdy details about “Jerry”. (Jerry was the nickname he gave his penis.)
[…]
Either way, Harding’s genial personality probably helped. Harding liked people, people liked Harding. He had what the kids call the rizz. (Or so Jerry claimed.) And he must have had some charisma because 1920 voters handed him one of the biggest landslide victories in American history.
Now, Harding liked bringing his buddies along for the ride. Men seeking government jobs drifted through the rooms alongside men who already had them.
Attorney General Harry Daugherty is here. Daugherty is Harding’s longtime political manager and friend. Daugherty would soon become engulfed in investigations involving influence peddling and government property, and would refuse to surrender records to Senate investigators. Calvin Coolidge eventually forced him out. He later stood trial twice on charges of defrauding the government. Neither trial produced a conviction.
Harding’s unofficial fixer, Jess Smith, was there too. He technically held no federal office but nevertheless had a desk and room inside the Justice Department, used official stationery, dictated to department secretaries, carried government files, and gave orders people obeyed. Jess Smith died by suicide in 1923 while corruption allegations were swirling around the Justice Department.
The cluster of men who swarmed around Harding became known as the Ohio Gang?—?old political friends, poker companions, fixers and assorted hangers-on who had followed him to Washington and discovered that federal office came with considerably better party favors.
Harding’s cabinet, 1921. A few members of the Ohio Gang are hiding among the respectable people. They look very serious here. After hours was another story.
[…]
For years, Theodore Roosevelt and other conservationists had worried that private companies would simply gobble up America’s petroleum reserves. So Roosevelt ordered federal geologists to identify oil deposits worth protecting. Taft then withdrew millions of acres from private development and established naval petroleum reserves in California. Woodrow Wilson added another in Wyoming. In 1920, Congress gave the Navy power to manage and lease all three.
The reason was not complicated. American battleships were switching from coal to oil. If another war came along, perhaps it would be prudent for the United States Navy to own some oil.
Wild concept.
So the government had locked away huge underground deposits in California and Wyoming as an emergency stockpile. Together, the three reserves were believed to contain roughly 435 million barrels?—?about as much oil as the entire United States produced in a year.
There were two big California fields, Elk Hills and Buena Vista, and one Wyoming reserve called Teapot Dome.
Teapot Dome was not even the great petroleum monster of the group. Elk Hills would eventually become one of the country’s most productive oil fields and produce its billionth barrel in 1992. Teapot Dome, by contrast, occupied just 9,481 acres and produced about 22 million barrels during its later decades of federal operation.
Teapot Dome simply had better branding. It was named for a nearby sandstone formation that allegedly resembled a teapot.
Teapot Rock on an old postcard from around 1922
Public DomainYes, that’s a teapot. Apparently, Wyoming whiskey was excellent.
So Fall wanted control of all three reserves, and Harding gave it to him. On May 31, 1921, the president signed an executive order transferring administrative authority from the Navy to Fall’s Interior Department.
Shortly thereafter, Fall undergoes a miraculous financial renaissance. Remember Fall’s ranch with ten years of unpaid taxes and the general Grapes of Wrath ambiance?
Yeah, so by June 2022, Fall pays those taxes. He buys neighboring property. He makes substantial improvements to Three Rivers. The formerly cash-starved rancher suddenly throws money around like he’s discovered oil under the sofa cushions.
He had not. He had discovered oilmen. Two of them, specifically.
[…]
Meanwhile, President Harding was having a truly shitty year. In the spring of 1923, Jess Smith was dead, Charles Forbes had resigned from the Veterans Bureau in disgrace, and Fall had quietly resigned from Interior to work for none other than Harry Sinclair.
For once, it wasn’t Jerry keeping Harding up at night.
So that summer, Harding left on a cross-country speaking tour. During this time, Harding reportedly told a journalist: “I have no trouble with my enemies … But my goddamn friends … they’re the ones who keep me walking the floors nights!”
Those friends would drive him to an early death. On August 2, 1923, Warren Harding died in a San Francisco hotel room, probably of a sudden heart attack. He was only 57 years old.
Then Calvin Coolidge became President, and he wasn’t into playing footsy with poker players.
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The benefits to US national security from the Greenland agreement
I’m sure some in the Canadian relic media will try to spin the US-Greenland-Denmark agreement as somehow threatening to Canadian sovereignty, but if it does in some way it’s clearly not the main focus from the US viewpoint:
US President Donald Trump diplays the Greenland security deal with Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen and Greenland Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen.
Photo via CDR Salamander
We’ve kept up reasonably steady reporting the last couple of years on Greenland. I was never quite sure where it would come out, but I was confident that it would be — non-inclusive — in between the two extremes we heard coming out of the overly excitable and narrowly sourced commentariat of the U.S. invading or the U.S. being kicked out … and it did.
I have to give a nod to our Australian friend Liz Buchanan who gave some great observations on the issue on the Midrats Podcast back in September of 2025 and January of this year.
The full text of the agreement can be found here if you want to read it in detail, but let’s stick to the big pixels, as it is really a good news story for everyone … especially NATO.
Rod Martin created a great executive summary … I’m just going to steal it.
Bravo Zulu to the team that kept working this issue. From a national security point of view, everyone got the most important things they wanted — that’s what matters.
As we like to do here, let’s go to the chartroom.
We should start with something I posted five days ago over on X.
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Small rift in time brings 2021 dramarama to 2026
I still occasionally see people going about their business wearing WuFlu masks. I try not to overtly point and laugh, because I’m still pretending to be polite and civilized. Obviously, people should be free to wear or not wear whatever they like so long as it doesn’t harm anyone else. A bar in Greenfield, Massachusetts has apparently been requiring masks for all their patrons since the pandemic but recently decided to ease up the restriction for one night per week, making the masks optional for one day per week. As you might imagine, this move hasn’t gone down well with their customers:
Image via Not the Bee
Crybullying is a way of controlling other people. Predators and psychopaths pose: They deliberately put on sad face or hurt face when they want suckers to lower their guard so they can get what they want.
If you’ve been online today, you’ve probably seen discussion of the mindblowing Boston Globe story about the lesbian bar in Greenfield, Massachusetts that recently decided to start having weekly mask-optional nights, after many years of requiring KN-95 masks or better from patrons. If this is the first time you’re hearing about this, let me just say that no, you haven’t accidentally clicked on an article from 2021. This is happening now.
After the Last Ditch Bar posted their new mask rules on social media, they were immediately buried in rage-inflected comments from people who were in absolute agony over the way the place was just absolutely murdering them.
Sample comment: “You have shattered what I believed your values to be, and you should be ashamed to use the word radical to describe your venue in the same post where you’re announcing a decision to deliberately spread disabling diseases, that we know disproportionately impact marginalized populations, one night each week.”
Did you know that Covid-19 is medically much worse if you’re a politically radical lesbian? Second sample comment: “This is such a stab in the heart to those of us who have no choice but to protect our health. Esp when l0ng c0vid disproportionally affects queer folk.” That’s an interesting observation.
All of the bar’s efforts to calm the storm made it worse, and a community forum hosted by trained facilitators crashed and burned. I’m not going to describe that event or summarize it, because you should read every incredible detail yourself. Here’s the link again, in an archived form that gets you around the paywall and probably requires you to scroll down a bit to get through some blank space at the top. As a preview, though, one of the facilitators was white, which devastated the terrified attendees and made them feel that they were in extreme danger.
The mandatory mask-wearing somehow became a totem of belonging to the patrons of the bar and after so long, they are now reacting very strongly to any attempt to dilute their shared community with non-mask-wearing heathens.
September 23, 2026
The Korean War Week 118 – The Outpost Armor – September 22, 1952
The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 22 Sep 2026This week we take a look at the hilltop armor used by the UN for the outpost war — the pros and cons. There’s still plenty of fighting this week, for Old Baldy, for Outpost Kelly, and behind the scenes a whole lot of South Korean POWs held by the UN may be soon going home.
00:00 Intro
00:48 Old Baldy
02:50 Outpost Kelly
06:42 The Tanks
09:26 Korean Guerrillas
12:00 Civilian Internees?
15:10 Summary
15:22 Conclusion
15:58 Mobilisation
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September 22, 2026
Trumpian economics – making Mercantilism great again
President Donald Trump is remarkably inconsistent on a lot of issues, but one thing that keeps coming back is his apparent allegiance to protectionism and mercantilism:
Politics is an industry in which ideas demonstrated to be ineffective and morally reprehensible live on long after they should have died. That’s the case with President Donald Trump’s fondness for mercantilism, as he espouses hoary old nostrums about the alleged benefits of hoarding money and preventing Americans from using their capital to purchase desired goods from other countries. Like a throwback to the 18th century, the president mistakes accumulating the means of exchange for building actual prosperity, as if we’d all be better off with overstuffed wallets than with the things our funds can purchase.
“Losing” Money on Voluntary Transactions?
Last week, when asked about the eternal political bogeyman of “trade deficits”, Trump responded, “If we lose $50 billion a year with a country, and we say, ‘we’re not going to trade with you anymore’, we don’t lose $50 billion a year. It’s very simple. Right?”
The president’s comments continued a theme he’d expounded on Truth Social, where he wrote, “If we stopped Trading with every country that we have a Deficit with, which is most of them, we would make, at least, 1.5 Trillion Dollars a year.”
Earlier this month, the president threatened to entirely stop Americans from trading with businesses in countries with which the Unted States runs a trade deficit — that is, from which we overall buy more than its residents purchase from Americans. His position seems to be that we’re better off hoarding cash than we would be using (or losing, from his perspective) our money to purchase things that we want.
But as the late economist Milton Friedman commented during an earlier incarnation of the eternal debate over the “fairness” or lack thereof of international trade, “the goods and services we import, they provide us with TV sets we can watch, automobiles we can drive, with all sorts of nice things for us to use. The gain from foreign trade is what we import. What we export is the cost of getting those imports. And the proper objective for a nation, as Adam Smith put it, is to arrange things so we get as large a volume of imports as possible, for as small a volume of exports as possible.”
[…]
Everybody Benefits From Free Trade
“Nothing, however, can be more absurd than this whole doctrine of the balance of trade”, Smith warned in An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, published in 1776. “When two places trade with one another, this doctrine supposes that, if the balance be even, neither of them either loses or gains; but if it leans in any degree to one side, that one of them loses, and the other gains, in proportion to its declension from the exact equilibrium. Both suppositions are false.” In fact, he pointed out, “trade which, without force or constraint, is naturally and regularly carried on between any two places, is always advantageous, though not always equally so, to both”.
As Smith’s criticism makes clear, the ideas of “balance of trade” and “trade deficits” are archaic throwbacks to mercantilism, even though they’re still popular among politicians playing to ill-informed voters. Smith’s points prevail among economists even in cases where one country burdens its population with trade barriers while allowing relatively unhindered exports.
The US Army has an institutional aversion to admitting mistakes
Tom Kratman, retired US Army officer, has strong opinions about a lot of topics, but especially on things related to the US military in general and the US Army in particular:
The US Army, all of the US armed forces, can never admit to a mistake, no matter how trivial. The reason the RS71 became the SR71 was because some senior officer had a slip of the tongue when briefing Johnson, called the RS71 the SR71, and the Air Force, rather than admit the mistake, changed the name. The reason there was no resistance training in Ranger School (that’s POW resistance, not weight lifting) was because someone, Navy, I think, said that the only resistance training in US armed forces was Navy run (they do run the big important school graduates are forbidden to talk about), so the Army and Air Force, rather than let Navy be embarrassed, killed their programs until rather recently. The reason the Army kept the OH-58 Kiowa was because, after being browbeaten into buying that recon helicopter, it would have been admitting a mistake, to say nothing of some measure of corruption and moral cowardice, to switch to the OH-6 which EVERY chopper pilot in the Army would tell you was a better bird for the mission.
And then, just for the cherry on top, we can contemplate my old slimy toad of a scum-sucking battalion commander who, as a brigade commander, browbeat his HHC commander [Wiki] into falsifying a PT test for him and, when the HHC commander went to the IG, and the story came out, was allowed to pin on BG stars and retire rather than being sent to play rock hockey, as he should have been, at Leavenworth. Why? Because the Army had made a number of serious mistakes with him; they let him command two infantry (one of them a Ranger) battalions, and had promoted him to colonel, selected him to command a brigade, and then selected him for promotion to brigadier general. That could never be allowed out because the army cannot admit to a mistake, let alone five of them.
Now, with that inability to admit a mistake in mind, roll back the sands of time to the late 1950s, when a certain Airborne Mafia general, serving as Chief of Staff of the Army, Max Taylor, had, as generals will, an incredibly stupid idea, that he, as generals also will tend to, thought was just fucking brilliant. He created the pentomic division [Wiki]. I’ve written on the iniquities and stupidities of this at length and won’t repeat myself here. Suffice to say it was a disaster, a complete, total, unmitigated, moral, operational, administrative, tactical, utter, unbefuckinglievable disaster from every perspective. One feature of the Pentomic Division was that regiments were done away with and replaced by one or more “battlegroups” bearing the same regimental number but not necessarily under the same command.
The Army could not admit that mistake. So they dumped the Pentomic Division and battlegroups as soon as possible but, rather than reverting to regiments, went to brigades [Wiki] composed of different battalions of different arms and regimental numbers. This was nothing but a way to pretend that the Pentomic Division hadn’t been a mistake, that it had been a great idea that just needed a little fine tuning.
Brigades, by the way, also sucked but not as much as the new, Pentomic 2.0, Brigade Combat Teams suck [Wiki].
Wiki links added for those (like me) who are not intimately familiar with US military formations.
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September 21, 2026
Price controls work … but not the way they’re intended to
Politicians love to intervene in markets, trying to impose their preferred solution to “problems” like high prices. But markets don’t work the way politicians think they do:
Price ceilings don’t manage markets, they destroy them. In 1946 the US meat market collapsed because of it.
The Office of Price Administration set beef ceiling prices during World War II. Ranchers and meatpackers adapted: some held cattle rather than sell at a loss, others shifted product to black markets, and slaughter volumes dropped. The OPA briefly lifted controls in mid-1946 under pressure. Beef flooded back into stores almost immediately.
Then Congress, drowning in constituent complaints about inflation, reimposed ceilings in August 1946. Slaughter collapsed within weeks. By October 1946, beef virtually disappeared from American grocery store shelves. You could walk into a butcher shop in Chicago or New York and find nothing. Scarcity was manufactured entirely by Washington bureaucrats setting prices below what producers needed to cover costs.
Mises explained the mechanism precisely: a price ceiling creates a shortage, which produces political pressure for rationing and further controls, spiraling into comprehensive economic disorganization. The OPA ran that experiment in real time on the American food supply.
President Truman ended meat controls on November 9, 1946. Beef returned within days. The supply existed the entire time. Ranchers and packers simply refused to sell at confiscatory prices, and they were correct to refuse. Coercive price suppression causes economic destruction, and 1946 proved it at the grocery counter.
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September 20, 2026
“Honest” graft
Politicians and corruption go together like wine and cheese but not like crime and punishment for some reason. It’s almost as though the path to wealth and influence goes through political connections rather than economic efficiency and innovation. Chris Bray points out the difference between the “honest” graft of days gone by and the kind of all-consuming corruption we see far too often these days:
Tammany had honest graft: They said they would build a bridge or a park, and then they built it. The cost would be sort of not nakedly obscene, and no money would be missing if there was an audit. But by the most remarkable coincidence, the land where the park or the highway or the approaches to the bridge would go turned out to be owned by very close friends of the Tammany machine, who then got paid a nice little premium for the acquisition of land that was needed for a public purpose, and maybe the people who sold the concrete and the lumber and supplied the labor also turned out to be awfully close friends of the politicians who approved the project, but at the end, there’s the bridge. There’s the new highway, and it cost something within shouting distance of what you would expect the thing to cost. It added up, but they did some fairly polite stealing. There was respect in it. It wasn’t honest, but it wasn’t wide-open looting.
An extremely common form of graft in American politics is the “Three Bs” that Robert Caro famously described in Texas politics: beef, bourbon, and blondes. Cocktails, steak dinners, and maybe if you were a legislator who played ball a nice young lady came and visited your hotel room during the legislative session. But that graft was about topics like who got the state highway contract. Some money traded hands, there was dishonesty in the allocation of public resources, and the highway got re-paved.
The Quality Learing Center model, or the high-speed rail model, or the 800 hospices in Los Angeles with patients that never died, all represent a model of grift that comes from a culture of complete shamelessness. In California, nearly 700 non-profit corporations exist to provide shelter to the homeless, and over 500 non-profit corporations exist to prevent homelessness and provide social services to the homeless or to people who may become homeless. There’s quite a bit of overlap between those categories, so there aren’t 1200+ non-profits, but there are hundreds, and they have billions of dollars in income.
Some are entirely legitimate and do real work. There are people in California who will be fed and sheltered tonight by a non-profit corporation that will keep them from sleeping on the street. It’s not at all my argument that no one in any non-profit anywhere ever does anything real. But the overall picture is theft, and the premise that the flood of money is ending homelessness (or is meant to) is a lie, and a dark one. Gavin Newsom presented his ten-year plan to end chronic homelessness in 2008.
Update, 22 September: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.
There are wedding gifts and there are wedding gifts
Gift-giving has been a thing since caveman days, they say, but sometimes gifts carry strings along with them that are impossible to ignore, or as The Grim Historian puts it, “never let a mobster pay for your wedding”:
Nothing says “just a wedding gift” like the benefactor whose role stayed secret until ProPublica had to put an arrow over his head.
Photo: Laura Gordon Photography via Instagram; annotation/source: ProPublica.
My Grandma Ella had a rule about gifts, usually delivered while waving a wooden spoon over a white apron so stippled with tomato sauce it could have been entered into evidence.
She would say, “Never accept gifts. That’s how a rich man turns you into a beggar.”
That may sound cynical, but no Italian survives a lifetime of weddings, funerals, Sunday dinners, and relatives saying “forget about it” without learning that generosity has a very long memory.
A gift creates an imbalance. You give me something. Now I am indebted to you. Sure, you may insist it is “just a gift.” But I have seen enough crisp white envelopes exchange hands to know there are gifts, and then there are … gifts.
Say I give you a hundred dollars and tomorrow you hand me a hundred dollars back, congratulations…we have invented banking. Or say you sign up for my breathtakingly grim history newsletter. I have provided you a service in exchange for your 5 ducats, but we are all clear on the bargain.
But suppose I give you something you can’t return. Not tomorrow. Not next year. Now the books stay open. And a man who keeps your books open is not your friend. He owns a piece of you.
Which brings us to Donald Trump Jr.’s wedding and who owns him.
ProPublica reporters Justin Elliott, Brett Murphy, Joshua Kaplan and Alex Mierjeski reported this week that Umar Kremlev — a Russian businessman closely associated with Vladimir Putin — gifted Trump Jr. and Bettina Trump quite the wedding shindig in the Bahamas.
According to records and interviews ProPublica reviewed, Kremlev paid to rent a private island, covered an elaborate fireworks show, and had his team help organize the festivities. There were helicopters, seaplanes, oceanfront villas, and a five-tier funfetti cake flown in from Florida. So not exactly the crystal punch bowl from Aunt Linda.
Fortunately, after ProPublica published its story, the newlyweds fessed up. Yes, Don Jr. and Bettina Trump have a wealthy Russian benefactor (sorry, “friend”) granting party favors. Then they made a statement that would have my Italian grandmother shaking her mano fica.
“Friendship doesn’t require a political motive. Generosity doesn’t automatically come with an agenda. And sometimes a wedding gift is simply a wedding gift.”
Just a gift.
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What Caused the War of 1812?
Real Time History
Published 17 Apr 2026The War of 1812 broke out after a series of escalations between Great Britain and the still young United States. The impressment of American sailors into the Royal Navy desperate to crew their ships in the ongoing war against Napoleon, the question if the US could trade with Britain and France at the same time and thus profit of the war, all came to a head after failed negotiations.
(more…)
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September 19, 2026
International travel used to be a true luxury: it’s going back to being a luxury again
I was never a serious globe-trotter and international flights were something I did on the company’s dime or rare trips back to England to visit family. But it was still theoretically possible for someone in my very middle-class cohort to travel extensively for fun. (No longer, of course, as my pension definitely wouldn’t stretch as far as airline tickets.) As Copernican points out, we’re looking at a future — indeed a very near future — where there will be a revived “Jet Set” where it is only the wealthy who can afford to travel:
With the creation of datacenters, artificial constructs, and global internet, being away no longer comes with the same psychological independence that it once did. Many are so hopelessly reliant on the noosphere that they can scarcely function without direct contact to it in one form or another. Particularly zoomers.1 Thus, the idea of “space” becomes as much cognitive as it is physical. Without the cognitive disconnection, the physical disconnection means nothing, and with Starlink now providing access literally anywhere, the wild is often perceived as just as observed and restricted as anywhere else.
The thesis of this argument is that luxury will no longer mean space away from other people (though there will always be a demand for that) but that the near-future will see a sort of throwback philosophy regarding luxury. The capacity to travel.
This article was instigated by recent news updates regarding the airline industry. Namely, that many airline companies are ripping out economy class seating to make space for luxury seats and suites. Simply put, the poor can no longer afford to travel, and many among the former middle-classes cannot either.
Travel is increasingly becoming an economy restricted to the wealthy, international travel even more so. This is something that should be considered when one considers a backup country.2
We see the influencers who once peddled their lifestyles in Dubai and Mexico quietly rolling back home. Part of that is the cost of frivolous travel, and part of that is the result of global instability. I purchased international plane tickets immediately before and after the crisis in the Strait of Hormuz, and the difference in price expressed more than a news article on the oil crisis ever could.
It is unlikely I’ll be traveling internationally again for the foreseeable future.
More, it’s unlikely many people will be traveling much for the foreseeable future at all. Business moguls, billionaires, and those who absolutely must show up in person, sure. But the average vacationer is not likely to lightly book a flight from Las Vegas to Tokyo. As the costs associated with travel increase, the heartland of the United States and the isolated villas to which the wealthy once flocked will see their own membership slowly contract.
One of the reasons why the wealthy prefer owning vacation homes in those places is due to the fact that other wealthy people live there. As that network begins to slowly contract, so too will the value of possessing property in those locations.
The price spikes are likely to be sticky. Those with dreams of the cost of gasoline, diesel, or jet fuel coming back down are (I think) delusionally hopeful. If the inflation of the last few years since the pandemic has demonstrated anything, it’s that enshitification can affect all industries, and once it has, it doesn’t tend to go away. Regardless of how the conflict in Iran goes, the new higher prices are functionally baked into the global economy. That will be its own can of worms for governments to untangle.3
At least there’ll be fewer girls traveling to Brazil to get their body-count reset via the best grift I’ve ever heard of. Soon the trip there will cost more than the $13,000 “treatment”. Seems like a lot of trouble when an AI-partner can just validate all your delusions for you at home.
- About half the population now suffers from a degree of Nomophobia. That is the fear of being without a mobile connectivity device. For those individuals, the concept of being “away from people” is meaningless. Constant connection to the feed has become a psychologically ingrained state. Effectively, such people require a constant connection to the collective human psyche to the point that their sense of self relies on it.
Conceptualizing the Collective Unconscious of a People
- The Billionaire tendency to purchase bunkers in various parts of the world is truly impressive. We’re talking multi-billion dollar facilities built simply to afford these individuals not merely a sense of safety, but a place away from the rest of humanity. They’re buying themselves spiritual and physical space of their own.
- The United States has already floated the idea of a Diesel Export Ban. The US economy runs almost exclusively on Diesel fuel for big-box trucks shipping food and goods around the country. It’s among the least efficient systems globally, but permits people to live anywhere with a (relatively cheap) connection to the intercontinental road network. With the price of diesel now cresting $6 a gallon, it may well reach an unsustainable point for low-value goods. Thus, the consideration of an export ban. Banning diesel exports would preserve low(er) prices in the United States proper while forcing foreign nations to eat the cost on the international market.
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CAMRA and the fight to save British beer in the 70s
On his Substack, Henry Jeffreys recommends a couple of YouTube videos that beer fans might find interesting:
Every so often I vow that I am going to stop wallowing in nostalgia and engage with some contemporary culture: watch some new films, read a new book, and maybe even listen to some new music. But then I discover a treasure trove of old Jonathan Meades documentaries on Youtube and I’m lost. There’s so much good stuff on there that I am very tempted to cancel my Netflix subscription and take out Youtube premium, which means I won’t have to watch the incredibly irritating adverts. That’s another thing that’s not as good as it used to be.
Here’s a few booze-linked things that I’ve been watching recently.
[…]
I’ve long been a real ale enthusiast, in fact I wrote something for the Daily Telegraph on the subject earlier this month. My father was an early member of CAMRA, the Campaign for Real Ale. Meades refers to the organisation, not altogether negatively, I think, as “anti-metropolitanism, anti-modernism”. There’s something distinctly Hobbity about tilting at progress and, to some extent, winning. Live, unpasteurised beer was becoming a rarity by the 1970s, and now it’s easy to find in almost every town and village that still has a pub. It was described as “the most effective consumer pressure group in Europe”.
This documentary from 1977 looks at the battle to save Britain’s traditional beer. It’s particularly worth watching for the young bearded earnest CAMRA members at their conference. There were also a surprising number of women. It makes you realise that while real ale has a stuffy image today, at the time it was fashionable. It was a youth movement, not a bunch of reactionary old men, but young people seeing a problem and doing something about it. It is inspiring. If it wasn’t for these earnest, bearded young men and women (mainly without beards), then much of what we take for granted about British beer would no longer exist. The movement also inspired American craft beer, which in turn inspired British craft beer. It is hard to overstate how important CAMRA was for beer around the world.
Whicker’s World — Englishmen in New York
If you want to see what the state of American beer was like in the early 1980s, watch Alan Whicker’s documentary about Englishmen living in New York. The star is entrepreneur Mancunian Richard Wrigley, who is behind the Manhattan Brewery Co. He says at one point: “I like good beer and there wasn’t any in the States”, and compares the local brew to Perrier. He has taken over a gigantic derelict industrial building and is trying to turn it into a brewpub with brewing equipment from Germany. He’s even shipped over two dray horses at vast expense. Wrigley is completely unflappable, confident that they will open in two weeks even though the work is nowhere near finished. Whicker is such a great interviewer, warm and avuncular, but he keeps pressing Wrigley about the expense and where the money is coming from.
Amazingly the brewery, which cost over a million dollars, did actually open, but it struggled to make money and eventually closed in 1995. Richard Wrigley, who died in 2022, is a fascinating character. He’d make a great subject for a feature film. There’s something of a chancer about him, slightly slippery but very charming. At one point Wrigley says that he has been described as a “conman”, but the Americans mean it as a compliment. It’s well worth reading up on the story of the Manhattan Brewery Co. While it failed, the head brewer Garrett Oliver would go on to make beer at the Brooklyn Brewery in 1994 — a company that would transform beer in New York. By the time I visited the city for the first time in 2003, good beer was everywhere.
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Internal migration patterns in the United States
It’s become a commonplace to see yet another tech company pulling up stakes and leaving California … and the state government seems determined to get rid of many of their biggest economic contributors with new legislation to make life harder for companies and wealthy individuals (see the second item, for instance). But it’s not just California losing population to other states:
Universities in the NCAA Southeastern Conference.
Map from Wikimedia Commons
Americans have long expressed their political preferences at the ballot box and their economic preferences with moving vans. Increasingly, they are expressing a third preference — where their children attend college — and the destination looks remarkably like the other two.
In 2025, North Carolina gained more than 84,000 residents from other states, more than any state in the union. Texas added over 67,000. California lost more than 229,000, and New York lost nearly 138,000, continuing a migration that has by now acquired the character of a rout rather than a trend. Yet few have noticed that the same states drawing families and factories are drawing something else: students, and with them, the institutions built to educate them.
For most of the 20th century, the hierarchy of American public higher education was as fixed as the Electoral College map of a one-party era. Berkeley, Michigan, Wisconsin — these were the names invoked when a public university wished to be mentioned in the same breath as Harvard. They remain formidable.
But formidable is no longer synonymous with singular.
Consider what the Southeastern Conference, or SEC — an organization whose reputation was built on forward passes rather than research grants — has quietly assembled. Texas A&M enrolls more than 79,000 students, a figure that would have seemed a typographical error a generation ago (see here and here). The University of Florida enrolls roughly 56,000 (see here, here, and here). Collectively, SEC institutions now educate more than half a million students, with total enrollment around 620,000 (see here and here), a statistic that ought to interest university presidents in blue states rather more than it apparently does.
This is not the result of some coordinated Southern strategy hatched in a statehouse. Universities are lagging indicators of demography, not leading ones. States that attract families acquire, in due course, college students. States that generate jobs retain their graduates rather than exporting them, as Rust Belt states have exported so much else.
States that welcome capital acquire, eventually, the tax base with which to build ambitious public institutions. Ambition, it turns out, is portable. The family that leaves Illinois for Tennessee brings its expectations for its children along with the furniture, and both eventually find a permanent address in Knoxville or some other city in the Volunteer State.
Affordability, too, plays its part, and Americans have noticed that a nationally respectable degree from a Southern flagship costs a fraction of what state flagships elsewhere demand for a comparable credential, at a moment when the public’s confidence in the value of a degree generally has become, to put it charitably, provisional.
One of California’s most impactful proposed pieces of legislation has been their “Billionaire tax”:
California’s proposed “billionaire’s tax” on the assets of wealthy state residents enjoys a slim lead in the polls leading up to the midterm elections, though so do two measures that, if they draw more votes, could render the scheme unenforceable. That makes for a high-stakes battle as many prosperous Californians are already fleeing to escape a tax that could force them to surrender ownership stakes in companies they’ve founded. Even if it doesn’t pass, a new report warns that the proposal is based on faulty research and could do vast economic damage.
[…]
The Wealth Tax Scheme Is Based on Unusual Accounting
Now, a new report finds the proposed wealth tax is not only dangerous for California’s economic prospects; it’s also based on bad research. According to the report’s author, Independent Institute research fellow Kristian Fors, “this proposal has been heavily influenced by the work of UC Berkeley professors Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman to justify the concept of wealth taxation”. Saez and Zucman have generated news headlines with their claims that the wealthy are undertaxed in comparison to lower-income Americans. But as Fors points out, the estimate that drew so much news coverage claimed that “the overall tax rate for the top 400 richest households in the nation was 23 percent”, while just a year earlier, Saez and Zucman “estimated that the top 1 percent paid an overall tax rate of approximately 36 percent; the authors found a share of 41 percent for the top 0.001 percent of earners in the most recent year of their survey, a category encompassing billionaires and high multimillionaires”.
The discrepancy, according to Fors, comes from how the economists treat corporate income taxes. Conventional analysis assumes that corporate taxes burden shareholders, workers, and consumers as the tax gets passed on. That results in the earlier estimate of a 41 percent tax rate for the wealthiest. To reach their much lower 23 percent estimated rate, Saez and Zucman used a non-standard analysis — and while the results of that approach won news coverage, they weren’t subject to peer review.
“Saez and Zucman’s empirical work on the California billionaire tax proposal retains these same unconventional accounting practices from 2019 without addressing their conflict with the mainstream corporate tax incidence literature,” cautions Fors.
The Independent Institute report observes that privacy laws prevented Saez and Zucman from drawing on personal income tax and other financial records. They relied on the Forbes 400 list, and “a 2010 study by a group of IRS statisticians found that the Forbes 400 dramatically overestimates the net worth of individuals in their lifetimes when compared to probate records of their estates after death”. Adjusting for that discrepancy produces estimates of “an average effective tax rate of 38 percent between 2018 and 2020, as compared to the 24 percent claimed by Saez and Zucman for this period”.
