Doing The Math: Interest Expense Is Going To $2 Trillion Annually

Notes From the Field By James Hickman (Simon Black / Sovereign Man)   September 17, 2026

It was January 2000. AOL had just announced it was buying Time Warner in what was then the biggest merger in history. Fourteen dot-com companies had bought Super Bowl ads, one of them starring a sock puppet that sold dog food.   The US economy was growing at one of its fastest paces ever; GDP was up nearly 5% the year before— and that’s real growth, before adding inflation, which itself was just 1.4%.

They Called Refining a Dying Business. Diesel Just Hit $6.

Notes From the Field By James Hickman 9Simon Black / Sovereign Man) September 16, 2026

On Sunday afternoon, the power went out at ExxonMobil's refinery in Channahon, Illinois, a southwest suburb of Chicago.  Oil refineries run at tremendous heat and pressure, so whenever the power goes out, all that heat and pressure has to go somewhere. It’s basic physics. Hence why the plant burned it off through the flare stacks, with black smoke visible for miles.

"Grow Our Way Out of Debt” Is Code for Inflation

Notes From the Field By James Hickman (Simon Black / Sovereign Man) September 14, 2026

Last week, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent sat down for a fireside chat at Southern Methodist University in Dallas and told the room what the plan is for the national debt.

"We don't have a revenue problem," he said. "We have a spending problem." Contain the spending, add 3% growth, and America can "grow our way out of this."

25 Years Later— A Reminder That The World Can Change In An Instant

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

At a time in my life which now seems centuries ago, I was once a young lieutenant, barely a year out of West Point, and I had recently been assigned to lead an electronic warfare platoon.

Whenever my unit wasn't deployed or in the field, most of my duty days were spent in a top-secret facility called a SCIF— the kind of place that was guarded by military police and didn't have any windows.

Here’s An Obvious Example Of A Critical Resource Shortage

Notes From the Field By James Hickman (Simon Black / Sovereign Man) September 10, 2026

In July, the Canadian uranium miner Cameco stopped producing at its mine in northern Saskatchewan (known as ‘Cigar Lake’) for two weeks. Cigar Lake itself was fine, nothing was wrong with the mine. The problem was their sulfuric acid plant— a crucial ingredient in processing uranium ore— broke down.

Normally they would have just bought sulfuric acid from somewhere else while they fixed their company-owned acid plant. But this year that's not so easy.

The Candlestick Makers Are Back, and This Time They're Not Joking

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

In 1845, the French economist Frédéric Bastiat petitioned parliament on behalf of the nation's candlestick makers. They were being ruined, he wrote, by an unscrupulous rival that was flooding the market with light at a price no honest candlestick maker could match.

Government Regulations Now Add $132,000 to the Average New Home

Notes From the Field By James Hockman (Simon Black / Sovereign Man)  September 2, 2026

Somewhere in America there's a local ordinance that tells you which way your garage has to face.  Another one dictates what your fence can be made of, and a third sets how many square feet of window your house needs. A few spell out the dimensions of particular features down to a quarter of an inch.

The National Association of Home Builders, the trade group for the companies that build American homes, has been adding up what rules like these cost since 2011.

Your Mortgage Is Now Competing With Google and the Pentagon

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

Hardly a week goes by without another data center announcement, and the projects have gotten so big that they're now measured in gigawatts.

A gigawatt is a billion watts of electricity. Running around the clock, one gigawatt is enough to supply about 800,000 average American homes— and a single large data center is now built at that scale.

The data center that Meta is building near El Paso is designed for a full gigawatt and comes online in 2028.

Breaking Down $15 billion Spent on California's Train to Nowhere

Notes From the Field By James Hickman (Simon Black / Sovereign Man)  August 28, 2026

In November 2008, California voters approved a ballot measure to build a bullet train from San Francisco to Los Angeles.  It was supposed to be fast enough to make the journey in under three hours. And passengers could hop on by 2020, for a total cost of $33 billion.

Eighteen years later, there is nothing to ride.

Pot, Meet Kettle: China Is Lecturing America About Debt

Notes From the Field By James Hickmasn (Simon Black / Sovereign Man)  August 27, 2026

Several days ago, just as America’s national debt topped $40 trillion for the first time, China's official propaganda outlets took the opportunity to mock the United States over this ominous milestone.

Xinhua is the Chinese government's official news agency, and they published a scathing commentary comparing the US national debt to Frankenstein and his monster. They noted both were "destroyed by the forces they had set in motion," and that America "risks a similar end."

Congress Built This Mess. They’ve Made Sure They Don’t Live In It.

Notes From the Field By James Hickman (Simon Black / Sovereign Man)  August 25, 2026

King Hammurabi of Babylon had a simple rule for home builders: if the house you built collapsed and killed its owner, you were put to death.

That was law #229, carved in stone almost 4,000 years ago. And some version of this rule has existed for most of human history. Even to this day, it’s a tradition among architects to spend the night under a bridge they designed to prove that it’s safe.

 The Whole World Is Stockpiling Like It's 1939

Notes From the Field By James Hickman (Simon Black / Sovereign Man) August 24, 2026

On June 7, 1939, US President Franklin Roosevelt signed a new law authorizing $100 million (a lot of money back then) to buy rubber, tin, tungsten, etc., and put it all in storage.

The United States was still at peace at the time. World War II had not yet broken out, and global trade was still relatively seamless.

Shattering the Myth That Higher Taxes Can Fix the $40 Trillion National Debt

Notes From the Field By James Hickman (Simon Black / Sovereign Man) August 20, 2026

In June of 1944, American soldiers were storming the beaches of Normandy, single-handedly leading the fight to defeat the Nazis.

Back home, Americans gave everything they had. Some 85 million bought war bonds. The top income tax rate hit 94%, the highest in US history. Even ordinary people paid more and more income tax to support the war effort.