Obequitation

Caption: To ride around

Bullet Points:

** Seattle’s newly elected communist mayor, Katie Wilson (right), claims she will unilaterally BAN grocery stores from closing down in her city. The government will FORCE them to stay open. “We cannot allow big grocery chains to close stores at will!” Good luck with that, Mayor Wilson.

** People who identify as female at the gym in the Big Apple.

** “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” –Eric Hoffer, The Temper of Our Time

** Secretary of State Marco Rubio responded to European Union officials who are accusing the Trump Administration of violating “international law” by blowing up cartel boats full of drugs. He told them that they don’t get to determine what international law is or how America defends its national security. He also pointed out that the EU wants us to give them nuclear-tipped missiles to protect Europe, but if we want to protect our country from organized, criminal narco-terrorists, that’s somehow a problem. It’s safe to say that they won’t like what he told them, and equally safe to assume he doesn’t care.

** (Turley) “It’s a bold statement, isn’t it?” Those words of  Chicago City Treasurer Melissa Conyears-Ervin hardly capture the moment. Yesterday, Conyears-Ervin declared that her office would no longer invest in U.S. Treasury bonds to protest what she called the “authoritarian regime” of President Donald Trump. It is more bonkers than bold. It makes about as much sense as President Trump saying that he will not eat deep-dish pizza to protest Chicago.

My hometown of Chicago is facing an economic meltdown due to towering debt and massive spending. Mayor Ben Johnson and the unions have pushed self-destructive tax schemes and borrowing plans that would only accelerate the flight from the city and the collapse of the city’s finances.

Now, the person in charge of investing that money is declaring that politics rather than economics will guide investments.

It is the ultimate form of virtue signaling at the expense of others. She is given a fiduciary duty to properly maintain and protect the city’s investments, which are currently facing a rising debt crisis. She says the city will not invest in what Ald. Bill Conway (34th), a former investment banker, correctly described it as “by far the most liquid and secure debt instrument in the history of the world.”

** Do you like metal? I’m asking about Krugerrands. I’m not asking about ‘music’ like Metallica.

** Breitbart reported, “Executives at Ford Motor Company are praising President Donald Trump’s expanded auto tariffs, saying such duties will ensure that manufacturing in the United States is no longer a disadvantage for American companies.”

** Crude would need to stay at $58 a barrel for the next 28 months and then drop to $27 for the next 40 months for gasoline at the pump to drop below 2.25.

** Sweden is beefing up its frigates – thanks Vlad!

The Memes Write Themselves

Fifty

When President Trump recently floated the idea of expanding 50-year mortgages to improve housing affordability, it instantly sparked a wave of headlines and think pieces. To many Americans squeezed by soaring home prices and surging interest costs, the notion sounded like a lifeline: stretch the payments, shrink the monthly hit, and suddenly the American Dream becomes “attainable” again. But anyone familiar with financial engineering recognizes a familiar melody.

This isn’t the first time policymakers have tried to solve a structural supply problem with a demand-side lever, and every version of this tune ends the same way: higher prices, more debt, weaker household balance sheets, and stronger lender balance sheets. There’s a certain cyclical quality to American housing policy. Every few years, a new “innovation” is trotted out to solve the problem no one wants to solve honestly: houses cost too much because we refuse to build enough of them.

Instead of grappling with supply, we get a fresh round of financial engineering designed to stretch buyers farther and longer, interest-only loans, negative amortization, 2-1 buydowns, and now the latest invention from the Wizards of Debt Extension, the 50-year mortgage. On its surface, the pitch seems irresistible. Spread payments over half a century, and suddenly the unaffordable looks “manageable,” at least in the monthly-payment sense that dominates the psychology of home buying. But as one looks at the fine print, it becomes obvious this is not affordability. It’s just time-diluted debt servitude packaged as opportunity.

Start with the basics. A 50-year mortgage barely amortizes. You don’t own more of your home after ten years; you’ve rented equity from the bank at a premium. A 30-year mortgage, for all its own excesses, at least turns you into a meaningful owner over time. A 50-year version keeps you on the hamster wheel, paying interest, watching principal shrink at a glacial pace, and handing an enormous amount of lifetime earnings to lenders.

It creates the illusion of cost relief while quietly multiplying total costs across your working life.

And then there’s the opportunity cost. Those extra decades of payments —decades—are capital that could have gone into retirement accounts, businesses, or even just plain oxygen for otherwise stretched family budgets. Instead, it’s trapped in a mortgage structure designed to keep cash flowing uphill to financial institutions long after a traditional loan would have been paid off.

But the bigger story isn’t what 50-year mortgages do to individual households. It’s what they do to the entire housing market. “Affordability”, defined as how much you can borrow, is very different from affordability defined as how much homes cost. Every time we stretch loan terms, relax underwriting standards, subsidize rates, or invent new ways for consumers to pay more for the same house, we bid up prices. Not because fundamentals changed, but because policymakers keep supercharging demand while ignoring supply. A 50-year mortgage is simply a longer lever.

Lowering the monthly payment on a given principal amount lets buyers bid more. And because nearly all buyers face the same constraints and the same psychology, the market quickly reprices to the new maximum payment capacity. That means the benefit is competed away almost immediately. The house that costs $600,000 under 30-year norms soon costs $700,000 under 50-year norms, because the marginal buyer can now stretch farther. Sellers see the higher capacity, and prices adjust. Poof, your supposed affordability improvement is gone, replaced by higher valuations cemented into the market.

If 30-year mortgages were the accelerant for post-war home prices, 50-year mortgages are the turbocharger for the 21st century. They don’t solve anything. They enable the duplicate square footage to command a higher sticker price, while pushing households further into long-dated debt obligations with weaker amortization and higher lifetime interest costs. And critically, once prices rise to match the new financing capacity, buyers are permanently locked into these longer terms. You can’t unring the bell.

A system built on 50-year debt can’t suddenly revert to 30-year norms because the price structure won’t allow it. The irony is that the whole scheme is marketed as a solution for younger buyers, millennials, Gen Z, and the next crop coming behind them. But in practice, it ties them to debt well into their sixties or seventies, cannibalizes their future savings, and props up asset prices that older generations already own. It’s financial engineering masquerading as compassion, and it’s no accident who benefits.

If policymakers truly cared about affordability, they would remove the regulatory bottlenecks and local restrictions that choke off new supply. They would make it easier to build homes, not make it easier for banks to claim a larger share of borrowers’ future earnings streams. A 50-year mortgage is not a doorway to the American Dream. It’s a longer hallway to the same room, except the rent is higher, the lights are dimmer, and you never quite arrive at the end. It will inflate home prices, enrich lenders, and leave consumers with more debt, less wealth, and a housing market even more disconnected from real incomes. Affordability doesn’t come from stretching the loan. It comes from building the house. And until we fix that, every “solution” like this is just another way of making the problem worse, slowly, quietly, and over half a century.

Kipling and the Rotten Apple

I’m an unapologetic fan of Rudyard Kipling. I have most of what he wrote on the shelf easily at hand in my personal library here at the White Wolf Mine. Will my grandchildren read it? They’re all good students, but I’m not sure that they ‘read’ the way that I do.

If you’ve never read anything by G.K. Chesterton or Rudyard Kipling, you are missing out. Both British writers were at the height of their powers toward the end of the Victorian period, and both are out of fashion in academia today, which is one in a long list of indictments of academia today, if you ask me. And you should always ask me.

Chesterton (1874-1936) was an essayist and fiction writer; he wrote the Father Brown detective stories, essays on various topics, and Christian apologetics (he was Catholic). His writing is consistently witty and profound, but also easily approachable – a rare combination.

Kipling (1865-1936) is better known, having been widely read and anthologized, and having turned down an offered knighthood and the position of Poet Laureate. Among his most famous poems are “If,” “Gunga Din,” and “The Power of the Dog.”

What do these great writers have to do with the fate of NYC?

They both communicated the traditional – one might even say conservative – wisdom that New York voters rejected last Tuesday. A common principle among conservatives is to show respect and deference to traditions and ideas that have stood the test of time. That doesn’t mean resisting all change – the geniuses who wrote our constitution built into it the means of amending it over time, for example – but it does mean having the humility to learn from the wisdom of our forebears.

And it cautions us about the arrogance of assuming that we know more than anyone ever, and can thus overturn existing systems and build a perfect new world, or political system, with no unintended consequences. Chesterton summarized these two mindsets in a parable that has come to be called “Chesterton’s fence.” It describes a foolish person walking through the woods and coming across a fence at the edge of a meadow. He doesn’t know why it’s there, and since it impedes his progress, he wants to tear it down.

Chesterton suggests that if you don’t understand why the fence is there, you shouldn’t tear it down until you do understand. The implication is that once the wall is down, you’ll find out why it was there, to your regret. For example, the horses or the bull that the wall had enclosed might show up, trample or gore you, and then escape.

In 2025, this concept can be paraphrased as “FAFO.” And I think New Yorkers just voted to tear down Chesterton’s fence – the FA phase – and they’re soon going to find out.

“Why are rents so high?” they say. “Because of one-party Democrat rule!” we shout. But they can’t hear us. (Maybe because the Muslim call to prayer is drowning us out?) So in comes Zoltan, and if he does freeze the rent…the housing stock will deteriorate, and rent will become even more unaffordable. (Unexpectedly!)

“Why should we have to pay to ride the bus?” they say. Annndddd…the buses are soon rolling flophouses for the deranged and the addicted and the shiftless, shooting up and treating the bus like a bear treats the woods.

“Let’s jack up the taxes on the evil 1% who already pay literally half the taxes in the city!” they say. Annnndddd… they’re gone. And the city revenues collapse, and the quality-of-life spiral tips more steeply downward, into a death spiral.

Kipling saw all this coming in his poem, “The Gods of the Copybook Headings,” written one hundred and six years ago last month. In the 19th century, copybooks were used in education as models for students to practice their penmanship. On the top of each page would be written a sentence or two, which the students would repeatedly copy below. And because teachers back then weren’t insane or depraved, and didn’t focus primarily on new ways to get drag queens and porn into the curricula, most of the sentences to be copied contained a bit of wisdom or moral teaching. Familiar sources for copybook headings were maxims from wisdom literature, the Bible, and great thinkers. The idea was that students would get a win-win: better handwriting and some moral instruction, too.

Kipling’s poem contrasts The Gods of the Copybook Headings (i.e., traditional, conservative, common-sense/wisdom) with The Gods of the Marketplace (i.e., trendy, faddish, foolishness). I like to call the latter “the Democratic National Platform, circa 1980 – present.” Which is why I’m no poet.

The poem has 10 stanzas, but I’ll share just four of them with you. Stanza 5 sums up the wisdom of peace through strength, and the Second Amendment: “When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace. They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease. But when we disarmed, they sold us and delivered us bound to our foe, and the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: ‘Stick to the Devil you know.’

Stanza 6 describes the results of leftist “free love” and gender feminism: “On the first Feminian Sandstones, we were promised the Fuller Life (Which started by loving our neighbor and ended by loving his wife) Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith, And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: ‘The Wages of Sin are Death.’”

Stanza 7 handles socialist economics: “In the Carboniferous Epoch, we were promised abundance for all, By robbing selective Peter to pay for collective Paul; But though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy, And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: ‘If you don’t work you die.’”

The final stanza predicts the fate of Zoltan’s New York City, and our country, if the socialists take over: “And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins, As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn, The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!”

We should all pray for New Yorkers, because they’re about to receive what they voted for, good and hard. And I hope we can all use what’s going to happen there as a lesson and a cautionary tale for the rest of the country. In the meantime, read yourself some Chesterton and Kipling. You’ll thank me later.

Second US Sharpshooters

Most soldiers inducted into the Union Army during the War of Northern Aggression/Civil War/War Between the States served as U. S. Volunteers (USV). Sharpshooters were the exception. They were regular army, or they were made regular army when they became sharpshooters.

After nearly two years of relatively quiet service on the California and Oregon frontiers with the 2nd California Infantry, Kentucky native Sexton W. Williams secured a transfer into Co. F of the 2nd U.S. Sharpshooters and journeyed east to serve with the Army of the Potomac. The regiment found itself in a very hot place indeed on May 6, 1864, during the Battle of the Wilderness.

The sharpshooters had been supporting General Hobart Ward’s infantry line when a Confederate attack spearheaded by General Joseph Kershaw’s division knocked the Federal line to pieces and fell upon the sharpshooters. “When they were driven back, we charged upon the enemy and checked them until our infantry could form behind us,” Williams recalled. “This was repeated four times, losing over half our number in killed and wounded. My company went in with 21 men, had one killed, six wounded, and two missing. Of the seven captains in our regiment, six were engaged and only two came out with a whole hide.”

During the Wilderness Campaign, the 2nd U.S. Sharpshooters commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Homer Stoughton served in General J.H. Hobart Ward’s First Brigade of General David Birney’s Third Division of Hancock’s Second Army Corps. Private Williams’ account of the Battle of Wilderness first saw publication in the June 9, 1864, edition of the Summit County Beacon published in Akron, Ohio.

Identify the Ship

1

2

Hint: semi-dreadnought battleship built in the early 1900s – a coal burner. Getting the class is good enough.

3

Hint: Named for the 9th Chief of Naval Operations

Haze gray and underway.

4

I think of this as a target.

Identify the Aircraft

5

End