The Latest Flashing Exit Sign for the US Dollar

Notes From the Field By James Hickman (Simon Black / Sovereign Man)  July 13, 2026

Washington has a comforting story about Social Security: yes, the trust fund is running out of money, but not until 2032. That leaves six more years to form the commissions, schedule the hearings, and study a problem that has been obvious for decades.

But last week, a man who used to run the numbers for Social Security itself explained why even a measly six years is optimistic.

America Turns 250 At 125, It Looked Like the End

Notes From the Field By James Hickman (Simon Black / Sovereign Man) July 3, 2026

On the afternoon of September 6, 1901, President William McKinley stood in a receiving line at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, shaking hands with a crowd of well-wishers.

One of the people in the crowd was a young man named Leon Czolgosz... who was patiently waiting with a revolver wrapped in a handkerchief. When he reached the front, he fired twice into the president's abdomen.

Why China Just Overtook The US With The Most Powerful Supercomputer

Notes From the Field  By James Hickman (Simon Black / Sovereign Man) July 1, 2026

Yao Tongbin was one of the most important scientists in Maoist China. He had earned a doctorate in metallurgy in England, spent three years at a research institute in West Germany, and left it all to return to China in 1957.

He spent he next 11 years building China’s first-ever modern missile program, with unparalleled knowledge and experience he had accumulated in the West.

Get Ready for “Business Friendly Socialism”

Notes From the Field By James Hickman (Simon Black / Sovereign Man) June 22, 2026

On New Year's Day in the year 1829, a 29-year-old young lady from Washington DC named Peggy Timberlake married John Eaton— a powerful senator from Tennessee.   Eaton was also close friends with the incoming president Andrew Jackson.

Peggy, on the other hand, was rumored to be somewhat of a harlot. She was openly flirtatious and allegedly promiscuous, and her wedding to Sen. Eaton came only a few months after the mysterious death of her first husband.

You Weren't Crazy 17 Years Ago. You Were Early

Notes From the Field By James Hickman (Simon Black / Sovereign Man)  June 19, 2026

20 years ago, if you recognized how deep America's problems were, it was easy to feel like you were the crazy one.

Banks were handing out mortgages to people who plainly couldn't afford them. Wall Street bundled those mortgages by the millions and sold them on as some of the safest investments around. And the whole structure rested on the assumption that home prices would never fall, so a bank could simply sell the home for more in case of a default.

Congress Passed 133 Broadband Programs. Its Big Idea Is A 134th

Notes from the Field By James Hickman (Simon Black / Sovereign Man) June 15, 2026

There are things that a free market will never do, and it’s usually for very good reasons.  Running fiber-optic cable down a twelve-mile dirt road costs a fortune, and the handful of households scattered along that road will never pay enough in monthly bills to justify the cost of laying the cable.

That’s why private companies don't bother laying fiber in rural areas: the math doesn't work.

Social Security Is Officially Six Years Away From Running Out Of Money

Notes From the Field By James Hickman (Simon Black / Sovereign Man  June 11, 2026

Every spring, the US government performs one of its rare acts of radical honesty: the Social Security Board of Trustees publishes an annual report stating, in plain language, exactly when the program will run out of money.

It arrives without a press conference and with barely any news coverage — just a few hundred pages of actuarial tables quietly uploaded to a government website.

When Leaving Your Home State Becomes a Duty

Notes From the Field By James Hickman (Simon Black / Sovereign Man)  June 9, 2026

In the year 1863, at the height of the Civil War in the United States that must have seemed at the time like an irrecoverable national death, a former bookkeeper turned entrepreneur built an oil refinery in Cleveland’s up-and-coming industrial area in order to capitalize on the market for kerosene.

His name was John Rockefeller. And within twenty years he would control close to 90% of the oil in America. And his Standard Oil would become the largest and most powerful company ever seen.

It Was a Win/Win Deal So of Course They Rejected It

Notes From the Field By James Hickman (Simon Black / Sovereign Man)  June 8, 2026

On November 6, 1906, an American entrepreneur named Augustus E. Staley incorporated his cornstarch manufacturing business in Decatur, Illinois— the first city that Abraham Lincoln came to when he first moved to Illinois at the young age of 21.   Staley’s A.E. Staley Manufacturing Company made cornstarch... which is hardly sexy by modern business standards. But over time his company was a huge success and grew it into a major Midwest food processor.

The Funky Math Behind How The US Economy Could Double In Size. Overnight

Notes From the Field B James Hickman (Simon Black / Sovereign Man)  June 2, 2026

It was September 2006— roughly two years before the 2008 financial crisis annihilated much of the global economy. But Greece was already in deep trouble.  Unemployment was hovering around 9%. Youth unemployment was a staggering 25%. And government finances were in the toilet, with official debt-to-GDP at 100% and annual budget deficits at nearly 8% of GDP.

The deficit issue was especially troubling; as part of the Eurozone, Greece was legally obliged to keep its annual budget deficit below 3% of GDP. But the government was simply incapable of doing so.