The Reticle Limit

The marketed 30x generational leap in AI chips collapses to about 18x once you strip out a one-time accounting trick, and the real hardware improvement underneath both numbers is 47 percent. Not a typo.

This Fucking Guy: Scott Bessent

Scott Bessent built his career finding the gap between what governments promise and what they can actually deliver. Now he's manufacturing that gap himself, and throwing punches at anyone who says so.

The Excuses, Tested

Housing fatalism is the only genuinely bipartisan position in America, and it's very convenient for the two-thirds of households holding the asset. Four excuses, four countries.

Revenue from Nowhere (AI Economics)

A meaningful share of the debt financing the AI buildout is collateralized by one company's promise to buy things from another company that needs that promise to be believed. Oracle's credit default swaps just hit their highest level since 2008. Coincidence is a strong word.

The Empty Toolbox

Reagan raised taxes twice after his own cuts blew out the deficit. The modern GOP position isn't historically Republican. It's something newer and worse.

A year (plus) with Ghost

I traded Substack's algorithmic megaphone for Ghost's quiet independence. The math was fair on hosting costs — but audience growth basically flatlined the moment I unplugged.

August 22, 2026 - Week in Review

Couple of notes on the site before I dive into the week's bounteous posts. First, I have always hated the built in search for Ghost. It is really cursory, and it makes it stupid hard to find things I posted in the past. Basically, it solely indexes the

This Fucking Guy: Trent Lott Was Never Confused About Which Side He Was On

His fraternity house got raided for a weapons cache during the Ole Miss riot. His own memoir tells that story in detail and somehow forgets the part where he led the fight to keep the fraternity segregated two years later.

The Thud

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent's own notepad read: buy Japanese yen, five to ten billion. Three weeks later the same improvisation showed up in the bond market. It didn't work there either.

The Producer Cast His Girlfriend, and Other Things That Killed a Great Show

Linda Thorson never got the chance to fail on her own merits. The show had already done that for her before she read a single line. Here's how The Avengers actually ended, twice.

The Torch Bearer, Not the Mule

Trump wasn't a mutation. He was the guy who showed up already carrying the right key. What that means for whoever tries to inherit the lock — and why Flake's "fever will break" might be right for all the wrong reasons — Part Two of The Oxidizer.

How a Dead Receptionist and a Wiped Tape Created the Best Show British Television Ever Made

Forget the killer robots for a minute. Forget the Op Art sets and the champagne. This starts with a murdered fiancée, a cancelled crime drama, and a contract that happened to expire at the wrong moment for everyone except British television.

House Rules

The Accident

Nowhere else on earth has the thirty-year fixed mortgage. It isn't a market product. It's a 1933 emergency measure nobody repealed, and it's still holding up the roof.

The Bowler, the Leather, and the Long Goodbye

M. Appeal: How Diana Rigg Invented the Modern Action Hero and Nobody Bothered to Pay Her for It

Before Emma Peel, television heroines waited to be rescued. After her, the ones who couldn't throw a punch were the boring ones. Also, the BBC paid her less than the cameraman. Of course they did.

August 15, 2026 - Week in Review

I am still on a hiatus from the dark place, where my digging in on the Civil Rights era kept leading me to worse and worse topics, people, and governments. That shit sucks. And all this "American Exceptionalism" mumbo jumbo requires that you ignore a lot of really

foundation

The Oxidizer

Trump didn't blow up the Republican Party. He removed the rate limit. We're living with the consequences

Political Musing

The Numbers Don't Say That

White men fell from thirty percent of American medical students to nineteen. A Princeton professor calls that proof of anti-white discrimination. It is mostly women applying to medical school, and no repeal reverses that.

Tech

One Laser ...

The 1960 hierarchy was written down and voted on. Everything that did the real sorting afterward had no author.

movies

Down Eros, Up Mars (Ben Hur, 1959)

What Ben-Hur smuggled, what it built, and why $400 million wouldn't buy it back

Political Musing

The Doctrine Was Never the Mechanism

Brendan Carr didn't need the Fairness Doctrine. He needed a merger.

House Rules

Are You a Communist, or Can You Afford a Burrito?

Nobody was arguing about food. Chipotle is a price index, the complaint was about land, and the reply — eat ramen, and are you a communist — is a slogan from a postwar sales campaign for the thing that's now unavailable.

Geoff's Musical Musings

The Lunchbox from Hell: How Solid-State Learned to Growl

The Lunchbox from Hell. My first quality amp, and fond memories indeed.

Political Musing

Domestic "Events"

Mike Johnson has spent his entire career legislating what happens inside your marriage. He has finally located the one bedroom he will not enter.

August 8, 2026 - The Week in Review

Life was pretty busy this week, and my time to obsess over making certain I had a queue of posts lined up was curtailed. As I posted on Monday, the recent stretch I have covered on the Civil Rights era (the lead up to it, and the bat-shit insanity