Madison, GA

May 24, 2026

Fifty years ago, the Bicentennial of the Declaration of Independence was a big deal. The celebration sparked a patriotic wave that saturated the culture.

Flags waved, bunting was everywhere, commemorative quarters were issued, and pop culture embraced the event. The theme of independence infused everything. As it often did in those days, Coca-Cola captured the mood:

As we approach the 250th anniversary, the occasion has been much more subdued. Many seem unaware it’s happening. Some are almost hostile, as if the Declaration of Independence shouldn’t be celebrated.

Millions have no idea who wrote it, or why. Since Lincoln, most have emphasized the “self-evident” truths of the second paragraph. It’s a beautiful sentiment that’s almost always (often intentionally) misinterpreted.

When the Declaration was written, what mattered most wasn’t the elevated overture, but the closing crescendo: the salvo affirming independence, after the list of grievances that justified the divorce.

Civil, Peaceful, and Humane

Contrary to conventional platitudes, the Declaration didn’t “found a new nation”. It asserted the sovereignty and secession of thirteen countries, and proclaimed their “separate and equal station”… “among the powers of the earth”.

Great Britain later agreed, by “treating with them” in the Treaty of Paris as “free sovereign and Independent States”. The states that signed the Declaration became their own countries, like France, Spain, or Sweden. That’s why they were called “states”.

The Constitution later created a confederation, not a “nation”. It didn’t reconfigure the states into a consolidated blob. The state ratifying conventions would’ve rejected the Constitution had they known it would produce the “United State” we have today, and Constitution’s advocates assured them such fear was unwarranted.

It wasn’t.

In the early years, states still remembered what the Declaration meant. They guarded their sovereignty and were willing to assert it.

At the Hartford Convention of 1814, the New England states considered seceding. Few denied their right to do so, or would’ve used force to stop them. That would’ve seemed preposterous to a people whose fathers left Britain less than forty years earlier.

During the Missouri Crisis at end of that decade, some Southern states threatened to leave the union if Missouri weren’t admitted as a state; several Northern ones said they’d go if it was. Almost no one wanted leave, but not many thought secession would precipitate a war.

Why should it? It simply means going separate ways. Few acts are more civil, peaceable, and humane.

If secession is illicit, the Declaration of Independence… the most prominent secession document in world history… shouldn’t be celebrated; it should be denounced.

The Main Problem

But if misunderstanding the Declaration explains some of the indifference toward its semi-quincentennial, it’s not the main problem.

It’s not like most people in 1976 were devoted Jeffersonians who considered the Bicentennial a celebration of secession. Like today, few thought of it that way. Americans just knew they loved the country, and wanted to honor it.

Now many of them aren’t so sure… some for political reasons, others because of historical ignorance, cultural illiteracy, or societal grudges. Others may be reluctant to cheer the upcoming anniversary for fear receiving “racist” aspersions.

A few decades ago, demographic grievances were subsiding. But in recent years, they were revived and orchestrated (and new ones invented) to pit Americans against each other. Many believe the Declaration doesn’t matter because they’ve been told it doesn’t apply to them.

Up for Grabs

In 1976, the founders were almost universally admired. Washington and Jefferson were unambiguous heroes. But in subsequent decades, they’ve been “contextualized” into theiving genocidal bigots half the country has been trained to hate.

By definition, any place Thomas Jefferson or George Washington isn’t welcome isn’t America. That now includes certain government buildings, college campuses, and public squares. Across the US several years ago, their statues were toppled, plaques removed, and names effaced.

No wonder there’s ambivalence about the Declaration. It’s almost like that’s the intent!

Half a century ago, in the midst and wake of Vietnam, urban riots, stagflation, and Watergate, tumult was rampant and political differences ran deep. But most Americans still claimed to cling to Jefferson’s observation that “every difference of opinion isn’t a difference of principle”.

Now they barely bother with the pretense. These days, principles are the basis of disagreement. It’s not that disputants have competing proposals to get to a place we all agree we need to go. They want to go entirely different directions.

The very meaning of America is up for grabs: Maybe this place isn’t so great… and never was.

To Have a Country

There are many reasons for this disillusion. Smartphones and social media algorithms have helped shatter society into isolated shards. Fifty years of fiat money has distorted the economy and warped the culture, stunting time preference, undermining trust, and pitting those who receive first infusions of cash from those who must subsist on the crumbs.

These major disruptions would’ve been significant at any time. But they’re stirring a demographic stew that’s nothing like it was five decades ago.

The immigrant floodgates had re-opened only ten years before the Bicentennial, so most Americans were still descended from families that had been here several generations.

They’d imbibed a shared history, common culture, and unifying traditions… which is what it means to have a country. The coalescence of communal myths (many which are true) is essential to formation and sustenance of a cohesive society. In 1976, the United States still had one.

Of about 220M Americans in the mid-70s, almost 90% were of European descent, with blacks comprising most of the rest. Less than 5% of the population was born overseas. Christians comprised 90% of the country. About 60% were Protestant and almost a quarter were Catholic.

Whites are now less than 60% of the population, with this decade featuring the first sustained numerical (not just proportional) decline in American history. The black population has inched up a couple percentage points, to about 14%.

Hispanics rose from under 5% to about 20% of Americans, with Asians rising to 6% from under 1%. Almost 15% of today’s Americans were born overseas. Tens of millions of foreigners are here illegally, so the actual percentage of whites and blacks is lower than official data suggests.

Only 60% of Americans now call themselves Christian, with about 40% being Protestant. Catholics fell from ~25% to around 20%; Muslims and Hindus are about 6%. But almost 30% are “unaffiliated” (up from ~5% in 1976), or claim no religious belief.

Papayas in Oslo

This clearly isn’t the same country as it was in 1976. But not in the way America changed between 1926 and 1976. Or even from 1876 to 1976. New tendencies, evolving styles, and technological advances are inevitable (and healthy) in any society.

Organic changes in sensibility and technology affect what people do, the way they do it, and how they treat each other. But they don’t abruptly alter who they are.

During the half century till 1976, immigration and naturalization rates were (by law) relatively low… and almost entirely from Europe. Since the Bicentennial, the source has shifted and the pace picked up.

Fewer than 150,000 people were naturalized annually in the 1970s. The rate is seven times higher this decade, and the composition is completely different from the Ellis Island influx.

Migrants from Germany, Ireland, Italy, and Eastern Europe often clashed with the original English stock (and each other), but they at least shared a Western heritage that’s alien to many recent arrivals. And closing the gates for forty years allowed exposure and experience to meld ethnic animosities into a more amicable America.

The flood of recent entries comes mostly from Mexico, India, China, the Philippines, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Vietnam, El Salvador, Korea, and Guatemala. The UK is the top European source of US immigrants, but about fifteen countries rank ahead of it.

And this excludes tens of millions of illegal aliens and legal residents who aren’t citizens, each of whom amplifies the extent to which America has changed in such a short time. How many of them have a Jeffersonian pedigree?

After a couple generations, their descendants might. But that takes time. For some (not all) people from certain cultures, there may never be enough. Planting papayas in Oslo is unlikely to ever bear Norwegian fruit.

Common Sense

This isn’t a criticism of immigrants who don’t instinctively grasp the philosophical and cultural traditions of the communities they enter. How would they?

I couldn’t expect to move to Munich and become Bavarian or suddenly be a Sikh because I settled in the Punjab. Why would anyone think someone plopped into Minneapolis from Mogadishu would be an instant Minnesotan?

New immigrants don’t quickly absorb local interests, knowledge, rivalries, or grievances simply because they were hired, bought a house, or got a driver’s license in a certain state… especially (like most recent arrivals) if they came from cultures incompatible with (or antithetical to) Western Civilization. That’s why periodic pauses are needed to let them do so.

To Jefferson, the Declaration of Independence was “an expression of the American mind” that voiced "the common sense of the subject". But if an “American mind” no longer exists, there’s unlikely to be a “common” sense (or shared enthusiasm) of any subject.

Especially the ones that matter the most.

JD

Atlanta, GA

May 21, 2026

“We are forced to recognize our inhumanity / Our reason co-exists with our insanity / And though we choose between reality and madness, it’s either sadness or euphoria.”

- Billy Joel: Summer, Highland Falls

I caught some flak for a recent essay indicting the smartphone as a scourge. But that diagnosis isn’t what raised the ire of several readers.

My offense was calling “We Didn’t Start the Fire” a “bad Billy Joel song.” Upon reflection, I agree that insult was overstated (or, rather, mis-stated) and out of line.

I actually don’t dislike that fast-paced, historical romp through the third quarter of the 20th century. As an avid consumer of history, I’m always snared by the hook beneath such bait.

“We Didn’t Start the Fire” isn’t a bad song. But everything is relative, and I’ve always preferred Joel’s earlier work. Apparently, Joel did too… describing the rapid-fire single as a “terrible piece of music” that resembled a “dentist’s drill”.

As my family will attest, I’m a big Billy Joel fan. For decades, my wife and sons have endured evenings when his music played for what must’ve seemed like endless hours. Because it did.

But most of what I inflicted on them was recorded at least a decade before “We Didn’t Start the Fire” was released.

Dilapidated Scene

I arrived naturally at my tendency to deepen grooves on Billy Joel records. My mother often played his music, so I grew up listening to all the early albums. Even as a kid, the rhythm and writing captivated me. I’d often listen while seated on the floor, reading the lyrics from the liner notes.

To my young ears, the music was mature. To my middle-aged mind, it still is. I was later surprised to learn how young Joel was when he wrote albums of such intricacy and nuance. He was 28 when he released The Stranger, still one of the best records ever produced.

But all his output from that time was terrific. Much of it depicted or reflected the bleakness of New York during the years when the city felt like it was told to “Drop Dead!”.

The covers of the Turnstiles and 52nd Street albums evoke the aura of the era. “Movin’ Out” opens The Stranger by expressing aspirations of the downtrodden to escape the endemic dilapidation. The apocalyptic “Miami 2017” ends Turnstiles by recalling when the Big Apple was blown up.

Piano Prowess

Even to a ten year-old, the phenomenal “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant” (Joel’s best song), the melancholic “Piano Man”, and the nostalgic “New York State of Mind” told absorbing stories with vivid pictures. They only got better as I got older.

“Root Beer Rag” is a rollicking testament to Joel’s piano prowess (do yourself a favor and click this link), while few songs capture the cynicism, decadence, and lavish ambivalence of the mid-Seventies better than “I’ve Loved These Days”.

After saying “Goodbye to Hollywood”, Joel returns to “Summer, Highland Falls”… a seductive roller-coaster of contradictory lyrics and undulating arpeggios that reflect the bipolarity and artistic schizophrenia Joel suffered during this period. A few years later, “My Life” seemed to suggest the singer was pulling things together, and offered a moral too many of us have missed.

But of all Joel’s songs, “Vienna” remains my sentimental favorite. The music is poignant and the message timeless. It’s also personal. After the untimely death of one of her closest friends, my mother used the lyrics to impart a lesson that’s remained with her elder son. (I wrote about that here).

Just because I’m partial to Joel’s mid-Seventies work doesn’t mean he didn’t make great records after 52nd Street. Early ‘80s output like Glass Houses and The Nylon Curtain were more inconsistent, but feature several standout songs.

“Allentown” is a potent reflection on a bright past for one generation, a blighted present for the next, and widespread disillusion that’s probably more applicable now than when it was written.

At Their Peak

Some of my fondness for early Billy Joel is nostalgic. But I think it’s warranted. The Seventies were rife with economic, political, and cultural turmoil, much of which is being revived today.

But the music and movies of that decade were generally intelligent and well-crafted, and usually respected the audience enough to expect its attention.

During the five years between Piano Man and The Stranger, films like the first two Godfathers, Chinatown, One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest, The Outlaw Josey Wales, Network, Jaws, The Sting, Three Days of the Condor, and The Day of the Jackal were released.

The Beatles were gone, but the Stones were still rolling. Bands and songwriters like The Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, Gordon Lightfoot, Led Zeppelin, Stevie Wonder, Rod Stewart, Bruce Springsteen, and Elton John simultaneously graced the airwaves while at their peak.

So did Billy Joel.

JD

Atlanta, GA

May 19, 2026

For months, foreign forces have attacked a rural district in northern Kentucky. Mariam Adelson, John Paulson, Paul Singer, and other out-of-state interests have heaved $25M over the wall, the most artillery ever unloaded on a congressional primary. The unprecedented barrage doesn’t reflect who the outsiders want in; it’s about who they need out.

The Trump Administration is manning the catapults. Yesterday the Secretary of Defense flew into Kentucky join the assault. Last night Donald Trump posted a plea from the Oval Office for the people of northern Kentucky to rid him of this turbulent incumbent.

What’s going on? Who’s this thorn in the side the president wants pulled?

Crossing the Line

The object of ire is Thomas Massie, a constitutionalist, sound money advocate, principled libertarian, and often the lone “no” vote when Congress decides to do something stupid. He’s also the man Donald Trump endorsed in 2022.

Unlike almost every other politician, Massie has always respected his oath of office, and he actually reads and publicly critiques bills on which he votes. No wonder he’s compiled a long list of enviable enemies.

He opposed lockdowns and other bipartisan “emergency” power grabs, renounces money printing, resisted Russiagate, demanded an in-person vote on the CARES Act, decried medical mandates, tried to thwart “kill-switches” in cars, combatted the climate hysteria, denounced every boondoggle budget since he’s been in office, and insisted on Congressional declarations before launching wars.

In other words, Thomas Massie is what used to be known as a “conservative”.

Yet Massie’s detractors call him a “contrarian”, as if being a “conformist” is supposed to be a compliment. After Massie insisted Congress actually vote in person on the $2.2T CARES Act, Donald Trump (of all people) had the gall to call Massie a “grandstander”.

Despite Massie voting with Republicans more often than any Republican, some Trump sycophants label him a “liberal” or a “Democrat”, as if those words are synonymous with anything their president doesn’t like.

The animosity has only increased since Trump returned to office. But why? What changed since Trump endorsed Massie in 2022?

Thomas Massie hasn’t.

After campaigning to cut spending and reduce the deficit, Trump resented Massie opposing the profligate “Big Beautiful Bill”, which prompted the president to post that Massie “SHOULD BE PRIMARIED”.

The president and his donors were furious when Massie opposed their wars, criticized Israel, and demanded the Epstein documents be released. Massie’s revelation that every member of Congress has an “AIPAC babysitter” didn’t ease their anger.

Massie has made clear that among pundits and politicians who claim to be “conservative”, actually being conservative is a big problem. It’s fine to utter platitudes about the Constitution and to say conservative things, but walking the walk is crossing the line.

Warm Body

So the party guardians decided to oust the most conservative member of Congress. Lindsey Graham (who once said “enough is enough” regarding Trump) is endorsed by the president. But Thomas Massie (who defended Trump thru two impeachments) has to go.

All Massie’s antagonists needed, as Trump put it, was a “warm body”. They found an oatmeal in skin called “Ed Gallrein”, another interchangeable part in the corrupt gears of the political machine. As loyal as Graham, Gallrein quit the Republican party when Trump was first elected.

During this campaign he’s refused to debate Thomas Massie, and has avoided appearing with his opponent. He doesn’t answer standard questionnaires. At carefully managed campaign events, he rarely addresses constituents’ concerns.

But to give his “campaign” credit, it’s probably smart to avoid a smarter, more well-read, informed competitor who would quickly expose the candidate as an empty shell.

And it might work. We’ll find out in a few hours.

“Ed Gallrein” is the warm body Trump wanted. So warm that he may as well be room temperature. At this point, that might be all he needs. If so, the rest of us will get what we deserve.

If we didn’t, we’d have more than one Thomas Massie in office already.

JD

Atlanta , GA

May 14, 2026

Has any century started worse than this one?

It’s a question typical of our short-sighted, self-centered, attention-deprived age. The answer seems obvious, and can be sought by looking a hundred years into the rearview mirror.

There we see… closer than they appear… Theodore Roosevelt, the San Francisco Earthquake, the Federal Reserve, the income tax, the direct election of Senators, Woodrow Wilson, the Great War, the Russian Revolution, the Spanish Flu, the Treaty of Versailles, the Black Sox, and Prohibition.

Peak America

But let’s give this century its ignominious due. It has its own litany of self-inflicted calamity, exacted by meddling sculptors and know-it-all painters whose only tools are jackhammers and spray guns. And, to be fair, their work isn’t done!

In retrospect, the 1990s might have been Peak America… the blowoff top of a great bacchanal. The Soviets fell and prosperity reigned. History was at an end. The party was on. The US then succumbed to what economics calls the law of diminishing returns, and approached what Calculus refers to as the limit.

After running up the credit card and hitting the casino, America raided mom’s wine cellar and ransacked dad’s liquor cabinet. Then it passed out on the lawn, empty bottles and smoldering cigarettes strewn across the yard as the morning sprinkler sprayed its face.

It’s been hungover and searching for its car keys ever since. Along the way, it’s tripped and stumbled into expensive errors. Thousands died in reckless wars. Millions were impoverished by rigged capital markets. Lockdowns closed countless small businesses while enriching big competitors. Medical mandates evicted millions from jobs.

And many Americans are just fine with this refrain of disaster that resembles a classic Bradbury book or a bad Billy Joel song. The Fourth Turning seems to be upon us. Not only is the pretense of liberty vanishing, the desire for it seems to be as well.

Live and let live is dead. To each his own is not for us.

Sunlight to an Ant

We love to mind each other’s business. And, unlike our benighted ancestors of a hundred years ago, we have just the tool to do it. I’m holding it in my hand, and most of you have it in yours.

This century, we’ve become an hysterical people. Everything is over the top, overdone, overblown, and overreacted to. Even (or especially) regarding people we never met and would never care to meet, or things we know nothing about and about which, in a sane world, we’d not be able to care less.

The smartphone brings “news” to us the way a magnifying glass transmits sunlight to an ant. It hits us more intensely, and less beneficially, than we initially believe. It allows little or no time to think, and often leaves us worse off than had we not been exposed to it at all. We receive so much information that we usually know less than we did before. Our brains slowly fry.

Public opinion can be defined as what everyone thinks everyone else thinks, which inevitably influences what people think they are supposed to think. The smartphone fans these flames, which often burn out as quickly as they ignite.

Silent and Listen

Social media and instant news are not conducive to subtlety and nuance, but rather to instant reaction and plenty of noise. Smartphones stunt reflection and shorten time horizons.

It’s appropriate that “silent” and “listen” are spelled with the same letters. But in social settings, our phones encourage the former yet discourage the latter. They “connect” us superficially from a distance, yet push us apart in proximity.

A random buzz, beep, post, photo, like, link, text, or tweet is sufficient pretext to disrupt a conversation or ignore someone in our presence. Digital correspondents become highest priority.

The world of the real, the tangible, and the personal fades into the background. And, after wading mindlessly thru the self-selected cheer and artificial abundance of other people’s posts, it often feels inadequate.

Don’t get me wrong. The smartphone is one of the most useful, powerful, consequential, disruptive, convenient, informative, miraculous, and remarkable inventions of all time.

But in some ways, it is among the worst. Like most anything else, it just depends how we use it.

Or don’t.

JD

Atlanta, GA

May 10, 2026

If we say anything is Woodrow Wilson’s fault, we are almost certain to be right. It’s a useful heuristic, if not a guaranteed one.

In 1914, Wilson signed a proclamation setting aside the second Sunday in May for Americans to remember their mothers. The idea came from Anna Jarvis, a Methodist “social activist” of a type all-too comm…

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Atlanta, GA

May 5, 2026

I used to say that every president made us nostalgic for his predecessor. I’d no longer go that far.

A few years ago, I decided that every president since Coolidge was essentially the same. They pushed different policies on the margins, especially “hot button” cultural issues that kept the rubes fighting each other rather than combi…

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Adairsville, GA

May 1, 2026

What makes us happy?

The question has animated philosophy since systemic thought sprouted on Aegean shores. For twenty-five centuries, the hunt for happiness has followed countless routes of reflective contemplation and empirical inquisition.

Today, under a cool dawn at Barnsley Gardens, we pick up the scent. Around the preserved…

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Atlanta, GA

April 26, 2026

The “developed world” lives in historically unprecedented opulence.

Few fear famine. Many diseases that had always been fatal are mostly manageable. Shelter is widely accessible, indoor plumbing is ubiquitous, communication is instantaneous, and we can be almost anywhere on earth within a day.

We take it as a given that the light…

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Atlanta, GA

April 21, 2026

Saturday we commemorated the anniversary of the Great San Francisco earthquake and subsequent fires.

This year, on the final day of February, another tremor struck. Or, rather, was inflicted. The epicenter was an unstable seismic zone half a world away.

But this shock came from above. The U.S. government’s sneak attack on Iran unl…

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Atlanta, GA

April 18, 2026

Bully ruins, brick and wall, through the night I’ve heard you call

Sort of sorry for each other ‘cause you had to burn and fall.

From the Ferry to Van Ness you’re a God-forsaken mess

But you’re the damnedest finest ruins, nothing more​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ and nothing less

- From The Damnedest Finest Ruins, by Laurence Harris

It’s been said that if a cow lies down somewhere in California, a seismologist will know it. Such is the density and sensitivity of the more than 700 seismographs scattered across that quivering state.

One hundred twenty years ago, at 5:12a on April 18, 1906, the cows didn’t so much lie down as fall flat. But the seismographs were capturing bigger game.

The ground at the head of Tomales Bay in Marin County shifted twenty feet that morning. The Crystal Springs Dam, situated south of the City directly atop the offending San Andreas Fault, slid eight feet… yet it held, as it would again during the far weaker 1989 temblor.

The City it served wouldn’t be so lucky, and would rue the ruptured pipes that precluded Crystal Springs water from dousing the flames of its burning buildings.

Excepting the Flood Building, the St Francis Hotel, Old St Mary’s Church, and a smattering of Telegraph Hill homes sheathed in Chianti-coated towels, few buildings east of the firewall at Van Ness would survive the inferno.

That firewall saved the elaborate Victorians and Edwardian homes that had more recently adorned the Western Addition and Pacific Heights. Tent cities in Golden Gate Park would house refugees from charred areas till the heart of the city could be re-built.

Aside from rent control, single-use zoning, and “urban renewal” programs, the “Great Fire” (insurance companies and the civic boosters shuddered to call it a quake) remains the most extensive and expensive (in real terms) urban disaster in American history. More than 80% of The City was destroyed.

City Beautiful

A helpful San Francisco heuristic is to avoid flat terrain near the waterfront… or to grab a helmet and handrail if you don’t. When the earth skips a beat, these areas of artificial fill are the ones that start dancing.

Debris from the 1906 cataclysm helped fill the remainder of the natural marsh between the Presidio and Ft Mason, becoming the level land we now know as the Marina District. Like a prairie dog in Wyoming, this detritus poked thru the liquified ground during the 1989 quake, even as more modern structures collapsed upon it.

A glorious Greco-Roman artifact of the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exhibition survived the ‘89 temblor unscathed. The Palace of the Fine Arts helped signal the City’s renaissance after 1906. Its classical dome and Corinthian colonnade now embrace a small pond and wildlife preserve that are the peaceful remnant of an erstwhile lagoon.

The exposition honored the opening of the Panama Canal, and was part of the Beaux-Arts City Beautiful movement that blessed San Francisco as it rose from the rubble.

Like an Amway pitch at a Vegas bachelor party, the devastation of 1906 cleared the ground of prior occupants, and cleaned the slate on which Daniel Burnham could carve his plan for wide boulevards, noble buildings, and grand public spaces.

Burnham rubbed his hands in anticipation, eager to apply his plan to revive the City. But the magnitude of destruction and the urgency to rebuild repelled novel notions, prompting reconstruction to proceed quickly, within the lines of the prior layout.

Only the new Civic Center, with its monumental assemblage of opera venues, concert halls, theaters, libraries, and museums orbiting City Hall, would conform to Burnham’s grand vision.

City Hall was worth it. The dome recalls that of Les Invalides in Paris. In a small victory for local government, it eclipses the height, if not the imperial reach, of the US Capitol in Washington, DC.

Arthur Brown, a graduate of L’École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, designed the building, which burnishes credentials that also include the War Memorial Opera House across the street and Coit Tower across town.

Telamones by Henri Crenier support the west entrance of City Hall, while Doric columns and colonnades along the porticoes, façades, and dome reinforce the structure and theme of this magnificent building.

The Pre-Quake City

But the pre-quake City was also fabulous…and notorious.

Today’s antique shops, fine furniture boutiques, and upscale lofts of Jackson Square were once the Barbary Coast bordellos, bars, and boarding houses from which Shanghai Kelly drugged and dragooned unsuspecting conscripts on arduous expeditions to the far corners of the world.

South of the seedy shows along Pacific Avenue, the descendants of which now occupy the Broadway blocks between Columbus and Kearny, entertainment from a higher brow carried the day… and the nights.

Edwin Booth had his start in Sacramento, but gained traction in San Francisco… overcoming association with his tyrannicide brother to become the most famous actor of his time.

Enrico Caruso brought down the curtain on the old City. The greatest tenor of that (and perhaps of any) age sang Carmen at the Mission Opera House one Tuesday night.

Early Wednesday morning, the undulating floor of his Palace Hotel room woke him, sent him scrambling to the window, and then to the street so he could witness adjacent buildings tumbling to the ground in a procession his hotel would soon join.

The Palace Hotel was rebuilt within a couple years, hosting statesmen and dignitaries from that day to this…including Warren Harding, whose final act was to assume the ambient temperature of its Presidential Suite.

Lotta’s Fountain

Ten years ago, Bill Del Monte died - a week shy of his 110th birthday.

Three years earlier, he was the lone attendee at an annual reunion at Lotta’s Fountain. Since he was a kid, a dwindling group of survivors gathered at the same time each year, to recall the event that defined their lives.

Named for entertainer Lotta Crabtree, the fountain was originally erected to water horses on Market Street. But in the aftermath of April 18, 1906, it became the place to post notes to find or inform scattered loved ones in the wake of the quake.

One morning 34 years ago, I awoke early to witness the commemoration. But I paid respects by keeping my distance, watching the ceremony from across Kearny Street. In the pre-dawn darkness, firefighters and city officials encircled the fountain, honoring the few frail survivors who shared knowing nods and heartfelt hugs.

A wreath was affixed to the fountain at the minute the San Andreas slipped. After a moment of silence to recall the devastation and honor the dead, attendees sang San Francisco to praise the City and recognize resilience tragedy can inspire.

No witnesses remain from the Great Quake. But a crowd still gathers to pay respects. They’re there the minute this note is sent, hanging a wreath on Lotta’s Fountain.

JD

Augusta, GA

April 16, 2026

“It seemed as if this land had been lying here for years, waiting for someone to lay a golf course upon it.”

- Bobby Jones

My grandparents grew up in Augusta. My grandfather lived down the street from Ty Cobb, and became childhood friends with Cobb's daughter, Shirley.

My grandfather’s older brother was a local businessman who was …

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Atlanta, GA

April 14, 2026

“What they have done is engage in this act of economic terrorism against the entire world. As the President showed, two can play at that game.”

- Vice President JD Vance

The war with Iran was lost the moment it was launched. There’s no “winning” a fight that can only make everything worse.

Before the war, the US military offered the illusion of Mideast security. For half a century, like a mob boss running a protection racket, it pledged to defend Gulf monarchies if they’d price oil in dollars and recycle sales into U.S. assets.

This buttressed dollar dominance while keeping US domestic prices under control. But Iran called the bluff, with the petrodollar part of the pot. Their retaliation has revealed America’s far-flung empire to be as much a target as a shield.

The Nuclear Option

Donald Trump’s undeclared Persian war is reckless, stupid, and unnecessary. Prior to being Pearl Harbored, Iran had no nuclear weapons, nor was it aiming to acquire them. U.S. intelligence and international inspectors repeatedly reaffirmed this before the “Twelve Day War” last June.

On the eve of the current calamity, Iranian leaders offered the same assurance. President Trump agreed last summer, by bragging that he’d “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear capability.

Even if Iran were lying (tho’ in this conflict they aren’t the combatant that’s tended to do that), they have no ability to strike the U.S., and had no reason to do so. Like “liberating the Iranian people”, the four-decade nuclear excuse is tired propaganda to whet popular appetites for this idiotic war.

But the Iranians have now been given reason to want nuclear weapons. And they’re using the one they’ve always had. They’ve shackled the Strait of Hormuz, thru which a fifth of global oil and up to half the world’s fertilizer flows. The war has become largely about clearing the passage, which was open before the U.S. and Israel picked this fight.

Even now, Hormuz isn’t “closed”. Like bootleggers in a neighborhood run by a mafia family, ships can pass at Iran’s behest. Iran (justifiably) claims the fees are reparations for deaths and damage this war has inflicted. While this mechanism might not make the Iranian regime rich, it provides newfound leverage to make a lot of people poor.

U.S. bases and warships are out of the way, and have been exposed as out of date. The US government has extracted trillions from its taxpayers to start unnecessary wars with archaic equipment. This misadventure has made the folly obvious. Most regional bases have been blown by drones from their oases in the sand, and ships have been chased to sea by Iranian strikes.

American sanctions and permission are hardly relevant. Iran controls the turnstile, and is making its mint. To access the strait, captains of invited vessels must send a couple million dollars of bitcoin to a designated wallet. This payment is immediate, evading any penalties the U.S. might want to impose.

Irresponsible and Shameful

It’s hard to imagine a bigger mess, or a more shameful way to have made it. Especially since the turn of last century, almost every US administration has been awful (for a catalog of the most egregious rogues, go here).

But has one ever more irresponsible or dishonorable? It’s as if the Trump team takes pride in embarrassing (or killing) leaders it lures to negotiation.

After twice attacking Iran during ongoing talks to (ostensibly) avoid war, last week it claimed Pakistani mediators it selected were lying when they included Lebanon in the latest “ceasefire”.

Never mind that the Pakistanis were reading a script the White House wrote, or that Iranians would never have agreed to a ceasefire that excluded Lebanon.

Obviously it did. We all saw what it said. The announcement explicitly included Lebanon. Claiming otherwise is like Iran continuing to attack Tel Aviv because it assumed Israel wasn’t part of the pause.

But after four decades blaming Iran for mischief in Lebanon… and even using the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing as a justification for this war… Trump sycophants (it’s astounding that any remain) now insist Lebanon has nothing to do with Iran!

This isn’t the first time in this conflict that the U.S. government has undercut mediators it selected. Last month, U.S.-selected Omani mediators assured the world Iran was willing to deal. The day after they made that announcement, the American military sneak-attacked Tehran.

Predictably, the current “ceasefire” seems to have fallen apart. It was apparently a ruse to escape Donald Trump’s genocidal threat to wipe-out a civilization, and to allow the US and Israel time to re-load. Immediately after it was announced, Israel attacked civilians in Lebanon. So Iran continues to hold Hormuz.

Blockading the Blockade

But what if the Iranians aren’t the ones who want the strait closed? Sealing the passage is like blockading itself. Aside from excluding US and Israeli ships, that makes little sense.

Which is why Hormuz isn’t shut. It’s open to anyone who pays to pass. To keep the lights on and bellies full, for most countries and companies the toll is worth it. While their fee is in effect, Iran is being funded.

Daft as it is, the Trump Administration is sentient enough to recognize this. But they also knew Iran would close the strait if it were attacked. By attacking anyway, the Americans and Israelis either didn’t care about the closure… or wanted it to occur.

Irked that Europeans didn’t rush to help clean up their mess, the Trump team created a pretext to seal Hormuz themselves. Like George W Bush “abandon[ing] free-market principles to save the free-market system,” the administration is closing the strait in order to open it (note that when discussing any of this disaster, Congress never comes up).

Yesterday, it imposed a blockade outside Iran’s toll booth. Prices for physical barrels of oil floated higher. They’d approached $150 last week, before the blockade was announced. They’re now more than $50 above the paper futures, which also rose.

Whatever fuel remains available won’t get cheaper. Fertilizer also isn’t getting thru, meaning large chunks of this year’s crops won’t get planted. In Europe, Asia, Australia, and other regions reliant on Middle Eastern resources, tanks and shelves could empty within months.

The easiest way to open the strait is for the US government to stop attacking Iran, quit supporting Israel, remove all personnel and resources from the region, and mind its own business. It should’ve done all this anyway. Years ago.

Instead, another war rages on.

What has it wrought? The illusion of US protection is shattered, the reality of American imperial overreach was revealed, dollar hegemony was (further) dented, Iranian regional power is enhanced, and global antagonism against America has been heightened. And all this was paid for (so far) with billions of dollars we didn’t have and hundreds of innocent lives that can’t be replaced.

The Real Enemy

Much is made of tankers headed to the U.S. to carry American oil and gas to deprived places. This sounds good. And for some connected interests, it will be.

But the U.S. doesn’t have capacity to supply all the deficiencies and distortions caused by its government’s mayhem in the Middle East. Supply shocks and increased demand will raise prices for American consumers, and wreck economies across Asia and around the West.

Perhaps the U.S. government is winning its war, but Iran isn’t the real enemy. Maybe it’s the usual victims who are the real targets of this attack.

JD

PS - Bad as this administration has been, others have also been awful. Here’s a catalog of the worst and best presidents the US has had:

Atlanta, GA

April 9, 2026

“We appreciate beautiful things not for their utility only, but also for what they are in themselves; or more plausibly, for how they appear in themselves.”

- Roger Scruton

Brittain Hall is what a college building should be. Its neo-Medieval tower, Gothic cloister, and dormitory wings anchor East Campus at Georgia Tech.

Set back from the street, it’s approached across a classic lawn and a traditional quad. Doric pillars adorn the forecourt. On each, a corbel bust depicts a scientist or artist representing the subjects taught at Tech when Brittain Hall was built.

Several Tech departments collaborated on the construction. The School of Ceramics manufactured tiles that formed the tower floors, the Textile College made the tapestries gracing the President’s Dining Room, and Mechanical Engineering provided wrought iron fixtures in the main hall.

The Architecture department, led by Harold Bush-Brown, designed the building. One of its students created the stained glass for the south window, and carved the sculptures extolling Tech’s advocacy of science.

Bush-Brown was a bridge, from the architectural equivalent of charming Parisian side streets to that of an expressway wiping out an urban waterfront.

Apogee of Architecture

Classical education considered architecture an art. Beauty was not only the objective; it was objective… using symmetry, harmony, proportion, and balance to convey internal essence thru external forms.

Two prominent Atlanta firms were largely responsible for Georgia Tech’s earliest edifices. Bruce and Morgan was known for distinctive towered county courthouses around the region, which likely inspired Tech Tower. Within a few years they produced renditions at Samford Hall at Auburn, Tillman Hall at Clemson, and the Bell Tower at Agnes Scott.

Beside Tech Tower sits the stately Carnegie Building of 1906, designed by Morgan and Dillon to house the school library. Among the more elegant edifices on campus, this Beaux-Arts building was among many monuments to Andrew Carnegie’s desire to fund eponymous libraries.

Featuring dignified ornament, noble inscriptions, and classical accents, Bush-Brown’s Guggenheim Aeronautics Building epitomizes the historicist style and Jacobean aesthetic of the original campus. Unfortunately, it’s about to be replaced by something resembling a glass semi-trailer .

Elegance and refinement predominated at Tech and around Atlanta between the wars. They were mostly inspired by one man.

Francis Smith, who at 23 was younger than many students today, oversaw the nascent years of Tech’s School of Architecture. In retrospect, his tenure inspired the apogee of architecture at Georgia Tech… and coincided with its final flowering around the West.

Smith arrived in Atlanta six years before the guns of August. As it did to much of civilization, the First World War shattered conceptions of beauty, and whether it was worth pursuing. Smith insisted it was. With him, Georgia Tech welcomed the Beaux-Arts curriculum from the University of Pennsylvania where he studied.

Smith fathered the Southern School of Classicism. Professional paternity included student Philip Shutze, who designed (among countless gems across north Georgia) the Swan House and the Temple in Atlanta, the Atlanta Academy of Medicine, the East Lake Golf Clubhouse, and Hirsch Hall at the University of Georgia.

Shutze, whom Henry Hope Reed called “America’s greatest living classical architect”, essentially rebuilt Atlanta during the 1910s and 1920s. Setting a precedent that persisted several decades, Smith and his faculty designed many structures at Georgia Tech.

His legacy includes the original campus architectural plan in the classic style of the Beaux-Arts era. Among his heirlooms was his initial conception… the Whitehead Infirmary erected in 1911.

Smith’s Students produced elaborate renderings worthy of the Grand Prix competition at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Dr. Elizabeth Dowling… who was one of my professors when I studied architecture at Tech… compiled many of these drawings in One Hundred Years of Architectural Education: 1908-2009, co-published with Lisa Thompson.

Architectural Revolutionaries

Bush-Brown retained the tradition… until the Second World War, after which Modern architecture mauled the West. This was when the “International Style” emigrated from Europe. Carrying its baggage were Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, and other cultural Jacobins who despised the bourgeois (whatever that was).

At Georgia Tech, Paul Heffernan led the revolution. A Tech graduate who returned after earning a Masters under Gropius at Harvard, Heffernan presided over the Modernist conquest of Tech’s style. After being trained in (and awarded for) Beaux Arts design, Heffernan began littering the campus with Bauhaus eyesores.

Established at Weimar the year the Treaty of Versailles was signed, the Bauhaus School arose from the rubble of the First World War… among the first artistic compounds of the Avant-Garde. Seeing the shambles the war made of Germany, its young architects were essentially ordered to start from scratch.

Millions were dead, the Kaiser had fled, the Czar was toppled, and the Hapsburgs were deposed. Revolution was in the wind. In the midst of upheaval, bourgeois was out… which stripped rebuilding of antebellum beauty.

And why not? To these architectural revolutionaries, the bourgeoisie caused the catastrophe. The last thing the young socialists wanted was to replicate the culture that caused the war.

“The intellectual bourgeois”, Walter Gropius proclaimed, “was unfit to be the bearer of German culture”. He’d tailor a new architecture to clothe the proletariat.

Gropius founded Bauhaus, which infiltrated Tech when the Institute hired several professors who’d been his students. Its International “Style” (if that’s the right word) relied on rigid lines, austere aesthetic, bland color, and extreme emphasis on function over form. What Roger Scruton called “the cult of utility” was taking over.

Gables, pitches, cornices, and eaves were out - discarded as emblems of “crowns” and nobility that had been swept away. Structural elements remained exposed, unblemished by decorative ornament, appealing facades, or attractive features that exalted the spirit.

Like God, the spirit was dead. Bauhaus buried it. Its acolytes emphasized a grinding “equality”, often expressed in harsh angles, sheer facades, and flat tops (hardly “functional” under heavy precipitation). Gropius detested high ceilings and wide halls, which he considered wasteful grandiosity modernity must (literally) suppress.

“Columns” connoted classicism, so were redesigned and rebranded as “pilotis”, or “piles”, which sounds more workmanlike. Grand entrances were non-existent. Instead, nondescript openings offered almost surreptitious access… as if to sneak entrants into a dystopian speakeasy.

Extolling the efficacy of modern materials, exterior walls went unclothed, boasting the naked prowess of concrete, glass, and steel. To the modernist, “beauty” and “truth” lay in unconcealed architecture… industrial assaults on the visual sense. Fittingly, the actual Bauhaus compound resembled a prison.

Ostensibly constructed for the proletariat, Bauhaus buildings seem deliberately designed to repel people. Even its skyscrapers are squat boxes of sheer walls and stale palettes. Yet we’re all supposed to pretend these sensual affronts aren’t hideous.

Modern architects subjugate form to function. Historically, as in soaring cathedrals, cloistered convents, airy universities, or stately banks, form connoted function. But it wasn’t buried by it. Building design reflected the activity inside, so that passers-by knew what it was… and were enticed by beauty to want to go in.

Particularly in the post-war era, everything changed. Beauty wasn’t “useful”, so it became irrelevant, and had to go. Even (or especially) the upper crust went along. Corporate chieftains, political potentates, and society’s dignitaries accepted whatever glass box, corrugated concrete, ribbon-windowed outrages celebrity “starchitects” told them to inhabit.

Frying Pan to Fire

When Heffernan became architectural chef at Georgia Tech, one of his first recipes was an awful kitchen. The Architecture Building is a Bauhaus abomination. As one who had to study in that place, I wondered if maybe it were built to show students what “style” to avoid.

Heffernan would add other soul-crushing atrocities, including the Hinman Building, Rich Computer Center, Gilbert Library, and Textile Building (mercifully razed a couple decades ago) that anchored his “Academic Village”.

Across from the library, the Skiles Classroom is a modernist hate crime committed by Thomas Bradbury. Bradbury designed many awful edifices around Atlanta, mostly bureaucratic buildings surrounding the State Capitol. But considering the source, his Greek Revival Governor’s Mansion is somewhat respectable.

From the Bauhaus frying pan, Tech fell into the Brutalist fire. Monstrous bunkers like the Chemistry compound and mammoth Physics building were windowless penitentiaries for overstressed students.

This was an age when design was wayward around the West. Not only was Atlanta not immune; one of Tech’s “illustrious” alums did considerable damage to the center of the city.

John Portman’s hulking hotels with enclosed gallerias and towering atriums are people-repellent blights that turn their backs on central cities their existence helped exterminate.

His Peachtree Center in Atlanta and its Embarcadero twin in San Francisco, the Renaissance Center in Detroit and the Bonaventure in Los Angeles, are black holes that suck pedestrians off the sidewalks.

To ensure they stay inside, Portman incorporated Le Corbusier’s “streets in the sky” as hamster chutes connecting his insular enclaves. Often filling entire city blocks, his mammoth buildings feature extended stretches of stark street-side walls.

Portman’s interiors are disorienting and isolating, often featuring circumferential balconies soaring hundreds of feet toward receding ceilings. Glass elevators connect concrete floors, which hover over lobbies laden with retail and restaurants that keep inhabitants from engaging with the city fabric these structures do so much to destroy.

Fortifying the Frontiers

Yet there are signs of revival at Georgia Tech and around Atlanta. An expansive green replaced the demolished Textile building. East of campus, Tech has watered Midtown and facilitated its flowering. Its colleges fertilized businesses, residences, and hotels in an area that was a den of derelicts when I was a student.

Like ancient Rome fortifying its frontiers, Tech has spent recent decades securing these surroundings. Carrying Fifth Street from the main campus, a landscaped bridge is an esplanade to an urban village Georgia Tech has built (and continues to construct).

At the far end, Philip Schutze’s Neo-Georgian Biltmore Hotel… now owned by the Georgia Tech Foundation and renovated since I was in school… is a nod to history and a worthy object to which neighboring buildings can aspire.

Unfortunately, they don’t. Most Midtown edifices replicate the boxy hives of glass, concrete, and steel that make cities sterile and indistinguishable… rectangular silos of corporate offices, academic dens, or luxury apartments stacked thirty stories into the sky.

But unlike many enclaves that tarnish downtowns, these structures redeem themselves by facilitating exchange with the street. For one thing, people live in them. Shops and cafés adorn ground level, facilitating foot traffic to and from surrounding sidewalks.

Midtown Atlanta is bustling, which is a debt it owes Georgia Tech. At a time when the wider culture seems to be seeking dead-ends, Tech’s architecture may have turned a corner. I hope that’s a harbinger.

Ears and Eyes

Humans are instinctively attracted to harmony, symmetry, ornament, and order. Modern architecture upends (and insults) all of that. It detests beauty, and abhors true art. Its practitioners strive to be esoteric, to baffle the bourgeoisie (a word they loved to wield), and to reject the notion that a light touch can do heavy lifting.

Most design since the Second World War wasn’t demanded or desired; it was inflicted and imposed. The whole point was to flaunt “novelty”, perplex the proles, and revolutionize the public realm. Architects (like most modern artists) aimed less to uplift and inspire than to shock, disorient, or disturb.

One needn’t be an “expert” to recognize obvious beauty. Mozart symphonies, Michelangelo sculptures, and Shakespearean sonnets don’t need pretentious symposiums or academic tracts to convince us of their value.

Only ugliness requires dissertations and lectures. Beauty simply seduces ears and eyes, and captures hearts that long to feel.

JD

Atlanta, GA

April 5, 2026

What is Truth?

It can be hard to know.

Not because it doesn’t exist, but because it’s usually too distant, vast, and complicated to comprehend. Or… like an ocean to a fish or a forest to a tree… it’s too close, and all-encompassing. As Chesterton said, it’s easy to be blind to a thing, so long as it’s big enough.

What we think we se…

Read more

Atlanta, GA

April 2, 2026

[NB: Previous installments in this series are here, here, and here]

When fear is fomented, the first thing most people do is panic. At least they did it in the right order.

Possibly excepting the Great Depression, the official response to covid was the biggest peacetime cataclysm in American history. It was certainly the largest “Public Health” calamity.

The scale and scope of the damage was unmatched. Like the Depression, covid was a government-induced disaster that permanently upended the world we’d known. No one was unaffected, and implications will reverberate far into the future.

It likely launched the Fourth Turning, the chaotic “winter” phase of historic cycles Strauss and Howe described three decades ago. This is a period of convulsion and upheaval, when war, riots, and economic collapse wipe away institutions that rose from the previous trough. As in earlier exigencies during the 1940s, 1860s, and 1770s, it’s characterized by persistent “emergencies” and perpetual crisis.

Roberta Modugno observed that since the sixteenth century, “exceptions to law and morality during a state of emergency seem to have become the ordinary practice of governments.” From 9/11… to the Financial Crisis… to covid… to the latest idiocy in the Middle East, that’s been the theme of the 21st Century.

This decade it’s been amplified, with the tone set from the moment it opened.

Burst Sewer Main

The Constitution doesn’t permit presidents (or any person or body in the U.S. government) to declare a “state of Emergency” to do whatever they want. “Public health” hacks have no authority to issue edicts regulating where people can go, what they must inject, or whether fabrics must cover their face.

Yet, like wastewater from a burst sewer main, authoritarian “guidelines”, restrictions, mandates, and directives poured forth to combat a bug, and did indelible damage without doing a damn bit of good.

Lives were ruined, yet deaths continued... often from causes misattributed to “covid”. Like the Times Square “Debt Clock”, they were relentlessly reported. Daily counts crawled morbidly beneath solemn anchors on the evening news.

But behind the headlines, the collateral carnage piled up (and continues to mount)…without benefit of televised tallies. At least a year of most people’s lives was ripped away, regardless their viral vulnerability or risk tolerance.

Loneliness spread, depression soared, unemployment flourished, opportunities vanished, careers stalled, and suicides spiked. Cancers went unscreened and heart disease undetected. Loved ones were told to stay apart. Elderly relatives died alone.

How many early deaths resulted, or will be caused in coming years? Who knows? But few will be attributed to covid policy, or receive a moment of silence… except from perpetrators who’d prefer we forget.

And for what? Countless charts documented covid cases, hospitalizations, and deaths among and within most every state, county, country, and town. Within or across regions, rates rose or fell almost simultaneously or in tandem, regardless the prescribed policy. None of “mitigation measures” seemed to mitigate anything, except the normal pleasures of daily life.

Lockdowns were always counter-productive, cruel, and lethal. They precipitated loneliness, inflation, high anxiety, deep depression, and a proliferation of drugs, shootings, suicides, and unattributed diseases that weren’t detected or diagnosed.

“Mitigation measures” hit societies like a sledgehammer. Relative vulnerability was routinely ignored. The young and the healthy were treated as if they were old and infirm. In a perverse inversion, children were forced to sacrifice for their elders. Schools closed when nursing homes were sealed. It was like giving everyone chemo to protect a few from cancer.

In most states, these top-down, one-size fits all approaches were applied to a virus that was unusually transparent about who it afflicted. But data was irrelevant and science didn’t matter. Healthy people were redefined as “asymptomatic”, implying everyone was ill and all were lethal.

How Science Works

The worst realization of the covid era was how acquiescent the American people were in surrendering their rights. I wouldn’t have thought it could be so easy.

For perceived “safety”, Americans quickly yielded or diluted even what we’d think matters most. Church, school, travel, family gatherings, friendly dinners, irreplaceable moments in a child’s life, and the last ones in an adult’s.

To the extent these activities remained, many were diluted by “distancing”, carved by plexiglass, or relegated to “virtual events”. The sterility of Zoom replaced the vitality of life.

Neighbor turned against neighbor. Families divided. Friendships were lost. As people were trained to treat their fellow men as disease vectors, suspicion rose, trust eroded, and the fabric of society frayed.

Social gatherings, even employment, became contingent on whether we’d consumed an experimental drug. Dissenters were precluded from work, banned from businesses, excluded from school, or prohibited from entering most establishments.

Millions applauded this apartheid, shunning skeptics as anti-science, grandma-killing vermin. After all, “The Science” said so.

But that’s not how science works. As with any diagnosis or scientific evaluation, the role of “expert” is to assess the situation, provide perspective, and offer suggestions.

Yet determining what to do is an individual philosophical decision, not a collective medical one. It’s not the role of “public health” bureaucrats to require remedies for millions of “patients” they’ve never met.

Yet most Americans went along. They wore masks, took their medicine, kept six feet apart, followed floor arrows on grocery store aisles… and tattled on neighbors who defied the farce.

It was as if we were trapped a giant Kafka novel, with scenes choreographed by Heironymus Bosch. It seemed like it would go on forever. And it might have, had Vladimir Putin not cured covid by changing the subject.

Balalaika from Borscht

When Russian tanks rolled west, the propaganda did a pirouette. A Wall Street expression has it that if everyone is thinking the same thing, no one is thinking at all. This phenomenon is obvious in recent years, when unanimous brains idled in mindless unison.

Moral indignation shifted from demonizing covid dissidents to renouncing Russia. Ukraine flag emojis replaced syringe images. Several hundred replicas of this foreign flag fluttered in Congress!

Among bystanders who couldn’t distinguish a balalaika from borscht, bursts of blue and yellow became the new face masks, implying that anyone not displaying them must be indifferent or ignorant.

But about multi-faceted conflicts in distant lands between people we’ll never meet, it’s OK to be ambivalent. In fact, it’s probably smart. After all, if incessant meddlers minded their own business, most foreign fiascos wouldn’t arise. Had the US government stayed on its side of the ocean, this one wouldn’t have.

Hunk of Meat

Albeit to a lesser degree than many countries that were completely made up, the Ukraine is an amorphous construct. Even its modern Slavonic name means “on the edge”, what Americans might call a “frontier”.

As with Poland or the Punjab, it’s historically been a hunk of meat buzzed by hungry flies, and regularly contested by rival dogs. Over the centuries, Russians, Ottomans, and Mongols tugged it east, whereas Poles, Austrians, and Americans pulled it west.

On occasion, the hounds drop the slab, show their teeth, and turn on each other. Which is why canines from distant neighborhoods should stay on their leash.

The Ukraine is not merely a breadbasket of Europe. It’s its cradle. It’s the land through which the greatest number of European peoples approached their eventual homeland. It’s also the fertile crib of Mother Russia.

In a mirror image of Cuba sixty years ago, the Russians consider the Ukraine to be within their sphere of influence. For some reason, the Americans insist it’s part of their own.

It’s possible neither are right. But the Americans are certainly wrong. The US has no business being anywhere near the Ukraine.

Poking the Bear

Almost twenty percent of Ukrainians are ethnic Russians, and forty percent are culturally Russian. When the Soviet Union was founded, the heavily Russian Donbass regions of Donetsk and Lugansk were appended to eastern Ukraine. A few decades later, Khrushchev added another one when he gifted Crimea.

At the time, these decisions seemed relatively inconsequential since these were all Soviet territory, and no Soviet leader thought the empire would collapse. But when the USSR dissolved, the Ukraine went free. When it did, the US assured the Russians that NATO would move no further east.

Murray Rothbard said we can’t be sure a government did something until it’s been officially denied. The same can’t be said of government promises. We know those are lies the minute they’re uttered.

Within the decade, Poland, the Czechs, and Hungary had joined NATO. Five years later, Baltic states were accepted. Despite American assurances, an Atlantic alliance that lost its reason to exist had made its way to Russia’s door.

For eight years the US kept pumping illegal weapons to its Ukrainian puppets, who used them to wage war on Russians in the east. The West spent a decade poking the bear. In February of 2022, it finally woke up.

In response, the Biden Administration funneled billions to its satrap, weaponized the dollar, and attacked Germany by destroying the Russian pipeline that supplied its gas.

By sanctioning Russia, stealing its assets, and evicting it from SWIFT, the U.S. government sent a signal that the dollar system wasn’t safe. Countries took notice, backed away from the buck, traded directly, and bought more gold. Too few Americans followed their lead.

“Mostly Peaceful” Violence

While the US government caused its usual carnage overseas, the home-front was rife with rent-a-riots stoking racial grievance. After a deranged criminal overdosed in Minneapolis (and while most Americans were kept home to avoid a virus), dozens of cities simultaneously erupted in “mostly peaceful” violence.

Although a black man died in a northern state, Confederate monuments were toppled across the South. Predictably, the Jacobins soon targeted the founding fathers. A statue of Thomas Jefferson was removed from New York City Hall. By definition, anyplace that doesn’t welcome Thomas Jefferson isn’t America.

While the culture was being erased, its people were being ripped off. Covid spending and war welfare accelerated price increases to rates unseen since the 1970s. Government debt increased six-fold this century. It’s doubled again this decade.

Such Orwellian monstrosities as the “Inflation Reduction Act”, “American Rescue Act”, and “Big Beautiful Bill” were “paid for” by counterfeiting the currency, which slowly impoverishes Americans by siphoning purchasing power.

Hundreds of billions were laundered thru the Ukraine. But that’s chicken feed. During the first year of covid, almost $7T (!) were fabricated to enrich connected corporations and convince the masses to stay cooped-up.

Yet the exterior gates were flung wide open. For decades, U.S. meddling wreaked havoc across Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America, sending hordes streaming toward the turnstiles that once served as Western borders. The US and Europe were overrun.

In the midst of the “pandemic”, millions of invaders were welcomed in. Many were chaperoned by state-sponsored NGOs that distributed human contraband around the country.

Attempts to oust them are met with outcries. Even requiring citizenship to vote or be included in the census is too much to ask. Since the start of this century, many states are demographically unrecognizable. The chaos and division by which we’re fraught was the inevitable (and perhaps intended) result.

Succored Snake

Mayhem isn’t limited to the US “homeland”. Like the Japanese incursion to Manchuria, the Ukraine war looks like the overture to a tragic opera with many acts. Another opened the next year in the Levant.

There’s a misperception that rancor between Muslim and Jew goes back centuries. But before the 20th century, they got along relatively well. Jews were a small minority in the region, but mostly lived as they pleased.

Antagonism built after construction of the Suez Canal, when European Zionists started infiltrating Palestine. Over decades, Arab property owners were ousted. After the Second World War the state of Israel was established.

For eighty years, fighting continued as Israel kept cleansing. Wars in 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973 strengthened Israel’s grasp on Palestinian land. As Russia was provoked to respond in the Ukraine, Palestinians were incited to fight back.

Through years of Intifada and resistance, they did. Having once held all the territory Israel now claims, they were resigned to begging for their own state. The Likud Party resisted, and surreptitiously funded unsavory organizations to discredit potential negotiating partners.

After years propping Hamas, Israel was bit by the snake it succored. The attack of October 7, 2023 was horrific, the deadliest day in Israel’s history. Almost 1,200 were killed and 250 held hostage.

The barbarity became a convenient (perhaps too convenient?) excuse to annihilate the Gaza Strip. The obliteration has continued since, with civilians targeted, most buildings demolished, and perhaps a hundred thousand killed. This atrocity has all the earmarks of a genocide. And anyone who objected was automatically “antisemitic”.

The Last Country

Israel sometimes refers to 10/7 as its 9/11. In a way it was. Both tragedies became handy reasons to launch wars Zionists long wanted.

About twenty years ago, General Wesley Clark revealed that after 9/11 the Department of Defense had a plan to “take out” seven countries in five years. On the list were Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, and Sudan… all of which have since been destroyed.

But the seventh country was the one Israel most wanted removed. Five weeks ago, at Israel’s behest, the Trump Administration attacked Iran. This war will one day warrant it’s own retrospective. But it seems safe to say it was lost the moment it was launched, particularly because of the reason it was.

Allegiance to “allies” is the flawed rationale that produced the First World War, the most consequential cataclysm in human history. Let’s hope that when this latest fiasco is finished, it still will be.

JD

Atlanta, GA

March 28, 2026

Nobody knows how to make a pencil. But many probably think they could.

Just wrap wood around some lead, add a rubber eraser, a touch of metal, and a coat of lacquer…and voila!…you’re ready to take a standardized test or tackle The New York Times crossword puzzle.

But building a pencil is impossible for any one person to do. Even (or especially) the most ardent busybody has no idea how to make this superficially simplest of things.

Amazing Matrix

Creating a single pencil requires a complex lattice of financing, digging, drilling, growing, picking, pulling, packaging, shipping, trucking, buying, selling, and marketing among millions of people across every continent. Almost none of those engaged in these activities will ever meet one another or know each other’s names, and few are even aware of the thing they’re unwittingly helping to create.

This amazing matrix of seemingly uncoordinated activity was brilliantly described in the 1958 “autobiography” I, Pencil: My Family Tree, as Told to Leonard E. Read.

I first read this insightful essay in 1990, not long after I’d moved to San Francisco. The parable changed my life. It provided a valuable glimpse into how the world works, which is what economics (when done correctly) is supposed to do.

The origins of the commonplace pencil are extraordinarily complex, with components that are remarkably diverse. Were it applying to an Ivy League college, administrators could find ample grounds to admit or exclude it based on a wide array of assorted ancestry.

One of its fathers, as we all might guess, is a tree. But by what other parents was it conceived? What collection of saws, trucks, rope, and rubber were needed to commence the courtship, and plant the seed? And what mineral or material antecedents were conscripted and combined to create these essential ingredients?

As “the Pencil” put it, think of all the mining and metallurgy that went into making steel for the saws, how much growing and weaving was needed to make the rope, and what level of agricultural output was required to feed men in the logging camps when each day ended, and to wake them with coffee when the next one began.

Even the simple eraser is a marvel. It requires rapeseed oil from Indonesia, that it be reacted with sulfur chloride, and then combined with several vulcanizing and accelerating agents from around the world. Pumice from Italy enters the mix. Rubber is added for binding purposes, and cadmium sulfide provides the color.

No single manager, politician, or department secretary has any idea how to coordinate this complicated process for creating this one small part of a humble pencil.

But their presumptions go well beyond a mere eraser. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, you’d have to have a heart of stone to hear their pretensions and not laugh.

Iron must be mined and smelted to build the ships that carry the requisite commodities. Oil needs to be drilled, extracted, and refined to fuel the vessels and trucks that haul those raw materials to far-away ports, or to take the pencil’s ancestral logs to distant mills.

And who builds and runs the millworks? What processes, materials, and manpower are brought to bear to construct any one of these indispensable facilities?

Then there’s the “lead”, which includes graphite mined in Sri Lanka, and that is placed in paper sacks and steel ships guided by harbor pilots and sophisticated navigation systems that are themselves the product of half a billion inputs from every corner of the world (and a few outside of it).

To bring these ingredients together so they can be formed into a pencil and brought to market, trucks and trains made of infinite inputs from countless countries must ride roads and rail that themselves derived from an inordinate web of engineering, financing, manpower, mining, and materials to eventually connect distant countries, great oceans, and domestic cities, towns, and villages where a vast array of intricate interactions combine to create a plain pencil.

The Least of Our Problems

You get the idea. A properly functioning economy and the supply chains that enable it are undeniable marvels. Yet they are incomprehensibly elaborate, and resist central control, political planning, and military misadventure.

It wouldn’t take much sand in the gears to shackle the whole shebang. How much of a Sahara could be caused by corking Hormuz? Dust storms are already swirling, impeding intricate systems on which markets rely.

From Asia to Australia, fuel and food are running low, and rationing has begun. Europe receives about a third of its jet fuel and a fifth of its diesel from the Persian Gulf. How long before trucks sit and planes stay parked? In America, moving vehicles are also paying more:

Manufacturing may also idle. Helium is byproduct of natural gas processing, and is essential for cooling silicon to make chips. If a pencil is complicated, how complex is anything containing semiconductors? We may find out.

Qatar accounted for a third of global helium production. This was erased when the strait was shuttered, specialized containers were stranded, and the Ras Laffan gas complex was disabled by Iranian retaliation for US attacks. This supply can take years to replenish.

Up to half the urea, ammonia, nitrogen, phosphate, and sulfur for fertilizer come from the Middle East. North American farmers are running short, and are reluctant to plant. If they don’t soon, they won’t at all.

As too few asked in 1914, “how long can this continue, and how far could it spread?” The US is sending more Marines to the Middle East, and asking soldiers to get affairs in order.

Russia will ban gasoline exports as of April. What happens if aquatic arteries at Malacca, Panama, Denmark, Bab el-Mandeb, or Suez are suddenly sealed? When routes and resources are strangled, transit stops, the world chokes… and people starve.

Under the circumstances, ignorance of how pencils are made seems like the least of our problems. But indifference to it is how they’re caused.

JD

Atlanta, GA

March 23, 2026

This afternoon, while forlorn passengers spent hours herding thru the Atlanta airport, languishing outside, cattle-chuting around baggage claim, and corralled toward a “security” oasis on a distant horizon, legislators in Georgia were distracted by something inconceivably stupid.

There’s no mess politicians can’t make worse, especially since they cause most of them. But some “cures” are so silly that we assume we must’ve misunderstood them, or that they’re satire to illustrate some unseen absurdity.

Not this time.

Everything is Fake

We live in a world that’s filled with phoniness to indulge our fantasies. Our money is fake. Our food is an affront. The “News” is fabricated. Political opposition is phony.

We even queer our clocks to add implants to summer evenings. Don’t like how light it is at 6p? Just pretend it’s 7p! If nothing else, Happy Hour will start that much sooner.

The diurnal cycle has been distorted for more than a century. Enacted toward the end of the First World War, Daylight Savings Time was among its many calamities.

The idea was to “save energy” with legislation that “changed time” to fool the sun. And ourselves.

So much for “following The Science”.

But noon isn’t arbitrary. It designates the moment when the sun is highest in the sky. That was the gauge every place used to use to set its clocks.

This caused towns to run a few minutes before or behind their neighbors. Brooklyn ran ahead of Manhattan. It was slightly earlier in Ostia than in Rome. Oakland ate breakfast a few minutes before San Francisco ordered coffee.

But that didn’t matter much before the railroads rolled in. To help them run on time, the government decided to dispense with solar increments, and assigned wide swaths of the country the same hour of the day.

When the United States were split into quadrants that carved clocks based on the position of the sun, Georgia was severed. Atlanta and Columbus in Central Time; Augusta, Athens, and Savannah in the East. That’s where they were till the Second World War.

During that conflict, to coordinate transport and envisioning an enlarged airport that would put the city on the map, state leaders wanted to tether themselves to major markets on the seaboard. All of Georgia has been in Eastern Time since.

Because it’s so far (too far) west in that time zone, even during Standard Time Atlanta is almost an hour out of whack. Daylight Saving doubles the distortion. As I write, the government insists it’s 10:21p. Yet the sun says it’s only 8:37p:

Corrupt Clocks

But state “leaders” want our clocks to be even more warped. Lamenting the biannual time change, they want to repeal that ridiculous ritual.

I agree. Let’s ditch Daylight Time and stick with Standard. But they’re plan would turn a biannual annoyance into a perpetual absurdity.

Several years ago, Georgia passed a law that removed the time change. But, in typical political fashion, it did so by keeping the wrong one.

Standard Time, which more closely reflects the real world, would be ousted. The Daylight Saving Farce would be inflicted all year.

This was attempted before. Congress imposed perennial “Daylight Savings” in 1974, but abandoned the flawed experiment even before it was set to expire. As children stood at dark bus stops and sleep patterns became confused, people realized they hated the unnatural attempt to monkey with time:

Half a century after the failed trial with corrupt clocks, memories have faded and common sense declined. So the political geniuses in Georgia are drafting laws to fix the solar system.

This afternoon the state Senate passed a bill that not only makes Daylight Savings Time permanent; it assumes Georgia is at the the same longitude as Bermuda!

Despite being almost a thousand miles to the east, New England, which should be an hour (and probably two) ahead of Georgia, will instead be an hour behind. This is imbecilic.

Most Georgians (and other Americans) despised permanent Daylight Saving Time, and begged to be rid of it. With good reason.

The human body has a circadian rhythm, and the sun is its conductor. When sleep patterns slip from nature’s scales, the whole day is out of tune.

Health slips, performance dips, and accidents increase. Few like waking up three hours before the sun. And added sunlight at the end of the day encourages later bedtimes and disrupts sleep. Regardless what grillers and golfers might think (and I’m both), darkness serves a purpose.

Advocates of sham clocks argue that schedules can adjust after DST is imposed. I’m sure they can. But why not adapt now? If work and school can start later after tricking the time, why can’t they simply start earlier today?

Or maybe we should just put Georgia on Pakistan time, and enjoy daylight till dawn. Who cares what the sun says?

Infantile Age

This nonsense is indicative of our infantile age. We don’t like the way the world works, so we make believe it’s not what it is. Why not pull inches from a foot to make us taller, or add ounces to a pound so we aren’t as fat? Let’s add degrees to the thermometer so we won’t be cold.

But these arguments are probably futile.

Most people don't care what’s real. They just want what they want whether it’s possible or not. They care less about reality than for trying to escape it.

So maybe we should focus on fantasy to make our point.

Football is important in this state. Georgians may not care that they drink morning coffee in the middle of the night or that their kid waits for a bus while it’s pitch dark. But they might mind waiting till 10p to watch “prime time” games. Or staying up till 2a to watch them end.

The University of Georgia would be two hours ahead of Auburn University (only three hours away). That isn’t natural. It’s ridiculous, and warrants ridicule.

Solar Schoolmarm

Each day, like every coin, has two sides. We think we’d enjoy the sun setting after dinner. But will we like it rising a couple hours before lunch? Will we want to begin each day in the middle of nature’s night? Is it healthy to do so? Do we even care?

And do we really want the sun, like a humorless hall monitor, watching over us so deep into the day? A setting sun is a signal. Time to retreat home from a hectic day…perhaps to open a window in the summer, or light a fire in the winter. We lift our feet, pour some wine, and loosen our limbs. We relax, and let our hair down.

These natural inclinations are less instinctive with a solar schoolmarm standing over us. She has her place. But it’s in the morning, to roust us awake and get us going. We don’t need an intrusive day hanging around at night, when we gather at the table or round the hearth, to talk about it behind its back.

From ancient sundials to atomic clocks, devices to track time are intended to tell the truth. But as night follows day, many of us prefer the lie.

Envisioning an extra hour (or two) of evening light, they cheer the deception. It’s easier to see the light than to envision the dark. But no matter how much they finagle their clocks, they’ll get both… and more of the one they don’t prefer.

JD

Atlanta, GA

March 22, 2026

In early March 2020, despite a wave of restrictions around the world, Americans kept living as if nothing would change. By the middle of the month, everything did.

Similar cognitive dissonance seems to be happening now. The Iran War is among the most calamitous blunders the U.S. government has ever made, launched by the same pres…

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Atlanta, GA

March 19, 2026

A couple years ago, my son joined the Air National Guard. I tried to dissuade him, but he wants to be a commercial airline pilot and was convinced the military was the best way to achieve his goal.

My concerns were obvious. Every military parent shares them, especially with the U.S. government making countless enemies…

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Atlanta, GA

March 14, 2026

For the first time since Donald Trump declared a “state of emergency” six years ago, this weekend began with Friday the 13th and ends on the Ides of March. What could go wrong?

Yesterday afternoon, markets closed for the week. As my grandfather used to say when leaving four hours early to catch a flight at an airport twenty minut…

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