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It was Christmas Eve in the year 1299, and Pope Boniface VIII was performing his usual holiday rituals around Rome when he happened to bump into a very elderly, 107-year-old man from Italy’s Abruzzi region. According to the semi-official legend, the old man claimed to have been in Rome a century before as
In the year 1157, the Republic of Venice was engaged in a bitter trade war with its archrival the Byzantine Empire. While the rest of Europe was barely surviving thanks to the stupidity of their centrally planned feudal economies, Venice was a place where anyone, even the most illiterate peasant, could work hard,
As the year 1980 came to a close, Americans had just experienced the worst annual inflation in decades. It was the culmination of weak, incompetent leadership combined with massive government spending throughout the stagflation of the 1970s— an entire decade of high unemployment, little growth, and a rising cost of goods and services.
Andrew Jackson was never supposed to be President. When he entered the presidential race in 1828, most of the ‘experts’ viewed him as a joke candidate with no chance of victory. Party insiders assumed that, at most, Jackson might steal a few votes from opposition candidates… but that he was no real threat.
In 1227 AD, Genghis Khan stood at the apex of his power, commanding the largest contiguous empire that the world— even to this day— has ever seen. His campaigns had subjugated vast swathes of Asia, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East, and his name alone struck fear into the hearts of kings. Then
Much has been written about Warren Buffett having sold a substantial amount of stocks. And his company, Berkshire Hathaway, is sitting on a record $325 billion cash pile as a result. Buffett has often said that his preferred holding period for an investment is “forever”. So the fact that he has sold so
It was early January 2020, and weird things were happening in the world. Socialism was on the march in the Land of the Free. Conflict, it seemed, was exploding everywhere, both abroad (North Korea, Iran, Yemen) and at home. And most notably, over in China, the Communist government was literally welding people into
The blood isn’t even dry on the corpse of Kamala’s billion dollar presidential campaign, and the opportunists in her party are already shamelessly jockeying for power. California Governor Gavin Newsom has just called a “special legislative session,” to “Trump-proof” his state and “safeguard California values”. Naturally we’re left wondering, what exactly are those
Well, inflation is up again. You’re probably not surprised, and neither are we. Over the past few months, in fact, we’ve repeated again and again that inflation will keep rising, and even identified some strange reasons why. Remember back during the early days of the pandemic when used car prices went through the
“Wow, these guys are going to be in for a rude wakening about how much power is going to be available. . .” thought Joe Dominguez, CEO of Constellation Energy. Dominguez was one of the attendees last May at a private, invitation-only gathering of energy and tech company CEOs held at Microsoft’s headquarters.
I hate to say it—and I’m sure a lot of you agree—but it’s great to see the right people so upset. The post-election histrionics have been amusing, to say the least. And a great deal of ink has already been spilled discussing the crushing defeat of the big propaganda machine. It’s true, though:
It started with the Antonine Plague in the late 160s AD, most likely a really bad smallpox epidemic that killed 8 million people across the Roman Empire. Then came the barbarian invasions… a tidal wave of migrants pouring across Rome’s northern border and plundering the countryside. The Roman government also bizarrely spent a
At around 4 a.m. on March 28, 1979, the quiet hum of machinery at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania was shattered by a cascade of alarms and error alerts. It started with a relatively minor issue— a cooling pump malfunctioned, triggering an automatic shutdown of the reactor. But it quickly
In the pantheon of human ingenuity, the development of iron and steel ranks up there with the discovery of fire and the invention of the wheel. In fact, the advancement of human civilization would have been nearly impossible without iron—and the steel that it becomes. Metallurgy (and agriculture) are ultimately what brought our
The year was 1991. The shoulder pad fashion craze of the 1980s was finally coming to an end, and Kurt Cobain’s “grunge” look was in. The Silence of the Lambs hit the theaters and swept the Academy Awards that season (with a nice chianti and some fava beans)— Best Actor, Best Actress, Best