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.

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.

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.

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.

 The Whole World Is Stockpiling Like It's 1939

Notes From the Field ByJames 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.

 How Medicare Became a Slush Fund

Notes From the Field By James Hickman (Simon Black / Sovereign Man)  August 18, 2026

Four years ago this month, Washington passed a law and named it, with a straight face, the Inflation Reduction Act.  Bizarrely, their plan to ‘reduce inflation’, which had been caused by excessive government spending, was for the government to spend even more money. It’s genius!

Even America's Enemies Trusted It With Their Money. That's Over

Notes From the Field By James Hickman (Simon Black / Sovereign Man) August 12, 2026

At 4:15 in the morning on November 4, 1956, Soviet artillery opened fire on the city of  Budapest. And the subsequent firestorm was nothing short of devastating.

Two weeks earlier, students and factory workers had risen up against the Soviet-installed puppet government in Hungary. They pulled down Stalin's statue, rampaged across the city, and even managed to push Soviet forces out of Budapest.

The Tax Collector Now Gets a Cut of What He Finds

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

Arguably the most famous man on the planet throughout the 1700s was the famed writer Francois-Marie Arouet, known to history as Voltaire. He wasn't just a celebrity writer and philosopher, however; Voltaire was also a wealthy capitalist and nobleman who almost single-handedly turned the impoverished region of Ferney into a highly productive watchmaking hub.