September 5, 2026: The Week in Review

Some housekeeping up front.

For some time now, I have been appending a "Tip Jar" to the end of(most) posts, a way to let people toss a few bucks at me if something resonated. This was a built-in button on the Ghost platform, but I have classed it up with an HTML formatted block, and I have moved to using the 3rd party "Buy me a Coffee". It is a small change, but I wanted to let those who do click that button know that the flow will be a bit different.

It still uses Stripe for processing, but the social bits around it will let you tell me what you found worth opening your wallet, and that would help me feel better about all the time I spend researching and drafting pieces.

Sidebar: I heard a reference that cricket was used to sort both prominent British upper classes for military leadership, and propagated to the colonies to help establish the castes and again filter for the fighters they needed.
The research on this is fascinating, not sure when I will publish, but this is an interesting look at some of the fucked up things the British did in building their empire.

This should be a light week of posting. My queue of scheduled posts is barren, and I might pause the schedule a bit. Lots of stuff happening at work.

Let's get into it:

Sunday, August 30: This is the third installment of the Foundation (Asimov series) reading on the current political state. I began with the question "Was Trump the Mule?" and how Trump wasn't the gasoline poured on a campfire, but the oxidizer that is more than an accelerant. The whole series (3 posts) are at this tag page: "Foundation". The final post, "No Second Foundation" was supposed to go live a week and a half ago, but I preempted it for the Trent Lott "This Fucking Guy" post, and forgot to get it in the publication schedule. Oops.

Here it is:

No Second Foundation

Buchanan proved the grievance was real. Limbaugh proved it had its own infrastructure. The Tea Party proved it could be weaponized. National Review and the Kochs never saw any of it coming — because they were never actually in control.

Sweaty's CornerGeoff Anderson

Monday, August 31: This is the next installment on the affordability thread, where I talk about the epicenter of unaffordability (and it isn't an exurb of New York City, or Woodside California where the Sand Hill VCs have their enclaves) San Jose, California, where housing is about 12x the median income. Sadly, this is where I live, so I inject my lived experience in this:

The Veto Nobody Will Name

My stepfather’s last property tax bill was $785. On a house we sold for $1.8 million. He did nothing wrong, and neither did I, and that’s the problem with letting people like us decide.

Sweaty's CornerGeoff Anderson

Wednesday, September 2: I listened to a podcast about Percy Fawcett, a British adventurer, and one of the threads was that he was "good" at sports (cricket) and that was used in Victorian era Britain to sort the upper classes and prepare them for military leadership roles. This is the first of a three post arc where I rabbit-hole on the British empire.

A Brief History of Keeping the Riff-Raff Out

The English aristocracy spent 800 years running an arms race against everyone else’s money. This is a tour of every weapon they built.

Sweaty's CornerGeoff Anderson

Thursday, September 3: A "This Fucking Guy" treatment of the Chief Justice, John Roberts. When I was digging in to that racist fucker Trent Lott, the early part of John Roberts' career he was in there helping that fucker to help prevent the segregation of Liberty university. I put a pin in it, with an intent to give Roberts the full treatment:

This Fucking Guy: John Roberts Has Never Once Been Talking About Trump

Forty-five years of paper trail, and exactly one time he found the discretion to swing the other way.

Sweaty's CornerGeoff Anderson

Friday, September 4: The second installment of the role of sport and cricket in the Victorian era. This is a deeper dive into Cricket's role in the British Empire, and how it not only prepared upper class British boys for military leadership, but also to help identify and regimen a caste/class system in the colonies to help maintain military order across the empire:

This Fucking Guy: John Roberts Has Never Once Been Talking About Trump

Forty-five years of paper trail, and exactly one time he found the discretion to swing the other way.

Sweaty's CornerGeoff Anderson

That's all I have for this week. A pretty busy week of work, I expected that I wouldn't have much to say but I guess I lied.

Let me know if you like the new share and the new "Buy me a Coffee" block.