Random Thoughts by Mark Milliorn

The Roman Seal Box

milliorn@nmsu.edu (Mark Milliorn) — Sat, 6 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0600

There is a scene in one of my favorite movies, Roxanne, where Steve Martin’s character sits down to write a letter. But he does not merely grab the nearest ballpoint pen from the coffee mug, rip a page out of a legal pad, and start scribbling. No, this is a man who understands civilization. He opens a desk drawer and begins searching for the perfect stationery. Then he selects the perfect pen. He is not just writing a letter. He is preparing a small act of theater.

How wonderful!

Compare that with a modern text message.

“u up?”

There it is: the collapse of Western civilization in three characters and a question mark.

I still like letters. I like to write them. I assume I would like to receive them, although, at this point, that is mostly theoretical. I have heard rumors that people once received personal letters in the mail, but that may be one of those apocryphal stories, like rain following the plow, or a city council’s lowering taxes.

There was a time when the mail was exciting. You opened the mailbox and found something besides bills, campaign flyers, and a postcard from your dentist featuring a cartoon molar water-skiing. There might be a letter. A real letter. From a real person. Written by hand. Folded carefully. Slipped into an envelope. Addressed by someone who knew where you lived and, more importantly, thought about you long enough to find a stamp. There is a little magic in a letter that has touched both the hand of the writer and the hand of the reader, carrying across the miles not just words, but evidence of affection.

Now the mailbox is mostly a metal spam folder with hinges, a temporary repository for grocery store advertisements and assorted junk mail.

But I still like the ritual of writing letters. Occasionally, I like to go whole hog and I get out nice stationery—not “printer paper from the bottom drawer” nice, but actual stationery—but paper that suggests I might own a smoking jacket, a globe, and opinions about port wine. Then I choose an old fountain pen (preferably one temperamental enough to remind me that convenience is the enemy of character). A fountain pen does not simply write…It negotiates. It makes demands: “Hold me correctly!” “Use decent paper!” “Do not rush!” “Do not press down like you are filling out a loan application!” “Write legibly!”

Then, when the letter is finished, I sometimes close it with a wax seal.

Now, we are getting somewhere.

A wax seal turns a letter into an event. Without a wax seal, an envelope says, “Here is some correspondence.” With a wax seal, it says, “This may contain news of inheritance, betrothal, or troop movements.” It gives even a note about lunch the dignity of a royal decree.

The process itself is ridiculous in the best possible way. You light a little flame, melt sealing wax, drip it onto the flap, and press a seal into it. For one brief shining moment, you are not a person sitting at a desk in the age of password resets and software updates, you are a Venetian doge, a Tudor minister, or a minor nobleman with troubling peasants and a cousin in exile.

Of course, the modern postal system does not fully share my enthusiasm. A wax seal can be torn off, smashed, smeared, or otherwise brutalized by sorting machines that treat envelopes the way airport baggage handlers treat guitars. The U.S. Postal Service, which can deliver a birthday card across the continent for the price of a candy bar, is still not really designed for my eighteenth-century correspondence cosplay.

But I have an answer…Or at least I have the beginning of an answer, which is more or less the same thing in blog form.

I need a Roman seal box.

Let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up.

In the Roman world, important documents were sometimes sealed using little containers called seal boxes. The document, often written on a wax tablet or on folded material, would be tied shut with string. The string would pass through or around the box. Wax would be placed inside the box, and then a signet ring or seal would be pressed into the wax. The box protected the wax seal from damage, while the seal protected the message from tampering.

That is the kind of sensible over-engineering I admire.

The Roman seal box was usually small, often made of bronze, and sometimes decorated. It had a base and a lid. The cords holding the document closed ran through slots or holes. Once the wax was sealed inside, you could tell whether anyone had opened the document because the cord would have to be cut or the seal broken. In other words, it was ancient two-factor authentication, except instead of a six-digit code texted to your phone, it involved string, wax, metalwork, and suspicion.

The steps are simple enough. First, write your letter. This is already where most modern people drop out, because writing more than two sentences without autocorrect or emojis now counts as a survival skill. Second, fold the letter. Third, wrap it with string or ribbon. Fourth, pass the string through the seal box and tie it up. Fifth, drip wax into the box, press your seal into it, and close the lid. Sixth, send the letter to someone who either will be delighted or will be deeply concerned about your mental state.

I want one.

Not an original Roman seal box, of course. That would belong in a museum, or at least in the hands of someone who knows the difference between “patina” and “I dropped it in the driveway.” I want a cheap modern version. Something made for the eccentric letter writer. Something you could buy in a set with sealing wax, cotton cord, and a little brass seal engraved with a cat, a family initial, or the words “You Have Been Formally Notified.”

Why does no one make these?

We live in an age when you can buy a plastic banana slicer, a Bluetooth toaster, and a phone case shaped like a waffle, yet I cannot easily buy a Roman-style seal box for mailing personal letters. This seems like a failure of capitalism. We have 47 kinds of toothpaste, but no affordable device for making my correspondence look like it was intercepted on the Appian Way.

Perhaps the answer is 3D printing. Surely someone with a 3D printer, a small Etsy shop, and a willingness to indulge harmless weirdos could produce these things. Make them in bronze-colored resin. Make them in faux ivory. Make a starter kit. Call it “The Cicero.” Offer premium editions called “The Cleopatra,” “The Hadrian,” and “The Maiden Aunt Who Still Writes Thank-You Notes.”

There is a market here. It may be a tiny market, but it is a market. There are people who buy fountain pens. There are people who collect sealing wax. There are people who still know what blotting paper is. There are people who own more than one inkwell and are not currently appearing in a period drama. These people need tools. They need encouragement. They need enablers.

Which gives me an idea.

The Post Office is forever lamenting the loss of business. Nobody writes letters anymore, they say. Mail volume is down. The system is under strain. Packages are keeping things alive, but the personal letter has been shoved into history alongside calling cards, hat pins, and people who knew how to fold a road map.

Fine. Then revive the art of letter writing.

Do not merely sell stamps with flowers and lighthouses. Launch a campaign. “Write Someone a Real Letter Month.” Put up posters. Show a grandmother receiving a handwritten note and not one more email beginning, “We value your privacy.” Show a child opening an envelope and realizing that paper can contain affection. Show a man choosing a fountain pen as if the fate of the Republic depends on it.

And then offer a discount for personal mail sealed with wax.

The Post Office could create a special “hand-cancelled personal correspondence” rate. Bring in a letter with a wax seal, and instead of feeding it to the sorting machines like a chicken into a combine, a postal clerk gently hand-cancels it while classical music plays. For an additional fee, the clerk could nod gravely and say, “Very good, sir. We shall see that it reaches Albany.”

And if the letter has a Roman box seal, the Post Office doesn’t charge anything, it will be their way of reinvigorating the lost art of writing letters.

This might not solve the Post Office’s financial problems, but neither has anything else, so why not try charm?

They could sell the supplies right there. Stamps, stationery, envelopes, sealing wax, inexpensive fountain pens, and officially approved Roman-style seal boxes. Put them next to the passport forms and the padded envelopes. Sell a “First Letter Kit” for children, a “Love Letter Kit” for romantics, and a “Complaint Letter Kit” for retirees with excellent handwriting and unfinished business.

There could even be classes. “How to Write a Letter Without It Sounding Like a Hostage Note.” “Fountain Pens: Friend or Ink-Filled Menace?” “Wax Seals for Beginners.” “Advanced Grievance Correspondence.” I would attend that last one just for the refreshments.

Because a letter is not just communication—it is evidence of time spent, time dedicated. It says, “I sat down. I thought about you. I chose words. I made marks on paper. I folded this object and sent it into the world.” A text says, “I was standing in line at the pharmacy and my thumb slipped.”

There is room for both, of course. Text messages are useful. Emails are efficient. Phone calls still exist for people who enjoy panic. But letters occupy a different place. They are slower, quieter, and more deliberate. They do not demand an immediate answer. They do not buzz in your pocket. They wait.

That may be why they feel almost luxurious now. Not expensive luxurious, necessarily, but human luxurious. The luxury of attention. The luxury of paper. The luxury of ink drying before the next sentence. The luxury of sending something that cannot be deleted by accident, buried under newsletters, or answered with a thumbs-up emoji.

So, I will keep writing letters, even if I am mostly writing into the void. I will keep using fountain pens that occasionally blob ink like wounded squid. I will keep melting wax and pressing seals. And someday, when I find or make the right little Roman seal box, I will tie up a letter, seal it properly, and send it off through the modern postal system like a message from a saner, slower, more ceremonious world.

And if the recipient opens the mailbox, sees that mysterious little sealed object, and thinks, “Good heavens, what is this?” then the letter will already have done half its work.

The New Mexico Film Miracle, Now Showing at Taxpayer Expense

milliorn@nmsu.edu (Mark Milliorn) — Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 -0600

New Mexico politicians dearly love the film industry, and why wouldn’t they? It gives them everything politics likes best: celebrities, ribbon cuttings, press releases, big numbers, and a chance to stand in front of a camera while pretending the camera showed up entirely on its own. If a governor or legislator can point to a soundstage, a catered lunch, a movie star hiding behind sunglasses, and a rented van full of assistant auxiliary vice-producers, then, by golly, economic development has arrived!

Or so we are told.

The official story is that New Mexico’s film subsidy is working. Hollywood comes here, spends money, hires people, uses our landscapes, and occasionally blows up a fake gas station somewhere outside Albuquerque. In return, the state writes a very large check, calls it a tax credit, and assures the public that this is how prosperity is made. The whole thing is presented as if the state has discovered a magic well: drop taxpayer money in one end, and out come jobs, glamour, and—maybe—a Netflix series with better lighting than plot.

But before we start polishing the Oscar and naming a new state highway after some producer from Burbank, it might be worth asking the rude question: are New Mexico taxpayers actually making money on this deal?

The answer appears to be no. Not “maybe no.” Not “no, but only if you use mean arithmetic.” More like plain, old “NO”—the kind your banker gives you when you ask whether buying a bass boat counts as retirement planning.

The film industry creates activity. Nobody seriously denies that: when a production comes to town, people rent hotel rooms, they eat meals, and they hire drivers, security guards, extras, caterers, construction workers, set dressers, location scouts, and folks whose job titles sound like they were invented during a lunch break. Trucks move around. People wear radios and look busy. A local restaurant might sell 200 breakfast burritos before sunrise. Money changes hands. That is all real.

But activity is not the same thing as profit. A fellow can set fire to his barn and create a lot of activity. Firefighters arrive, insurance adjusters appear, lumber gets ordered, contractors get hired, and everybody in the county has something to talk about at the local diner. That does not mean burning down barns is a sound rural-development strategy.

The state’s sales pitch often relies on big “economic impact” numbers. Those numbers count money moving around. What they do not necessarily show is whether the state treasury gets back what it spent. That is the difference between a business’s making money and a carnival’s coming through town. A carnival produces traffic, noise, corndog sales, and temporary employment. But if the town must pay the carnival to show up, pay for the cleanup, and then brag that the cotton-candy stand had a good weekend, somebody ought to check the books.

New Mexico’s film credit is not just a polite tax break. It is fully refundable, which is a fancy way of saying that if the credit is larger than the production company’s tax bill, the state will hand over cash. That money does not fall from the sky—it comes from New Mexico people who paid taxes, including people who will never be invited to a wrap party, who will never meet a star, and who will never get residuals when the show streams in Belgium.

That is where the whole thing starts to smell less like economic development and more like political theater.

The politicians tax a waitress in Roswell, a mechanic in Farmington, a retiree in Las Cruces, and a small-business owner in Deming, then they send part of that money to a studio. Then, when the studio hires a temporary crew in Albuquerque, the politicians hold a press conference to announce that they have created jobs. This is a little like stealing a man’s cow, selling him a glass of milk, and then asking him to applaud your dairy program.

And what kind of jobs are we buying? Some are good jobs. To be fair, New Mexico does have a few skilled film workers: grips, electricians, carpenters, camera people, wardrobe people, set builders, production accountants, and other craftspeople who know their trades. Those jobs can be skilled, respectable, and well-paid…when the work is steady.

But that little phrase—when the work is steady—is where the mule bogs down in the arroyo.

Film work is project work: the production arrives, spends money, hires people, shoots, wraps, and leaves. It is not the same as a factory that opens, runs year-round, trains workers, buys supplies, expands, and puts down roots. It is more like a cattle drive: there may be dust, payroll, and excitement, but when it passes through, the herd is gone.

The state’s own accounting shows that New Mexico is not making its money back from the film subsidy. According to the Legislative Finance Committee, the film production tax credit returned only about 6 cents in state tax revenue for every $1.00 spent in FY25 — meaning state government recovered roughly six percent of what it paid out, while losing the other ninety-four cents from the treasury. That does not mean no one made money; hotels, caterers, drivers, extras, crew members, and vendors certainly did. But it does mean the state’s “return on investment” argument depends on counting economic activity, not actual money returning to the state budget. In plain English, New Mexico is paying Hollywood a dollar, getting back about six cents in tax revenue, and calling the noise in between prosperity.

If you could make a state rich by using tax money to hire citizens…. You could fly by pulling on your bootstraps.

The state also loves to talk about local jobs. Fine. But headcounts can be slippery. When someone says most workers are local, are we talking about total people, total hours, or total payroll? A local extra who works two days and earns pocket money counts as a job. So does a driver. So does a hotel clerk indirectly serving the production. Meanwhile, the larger checks may go to stars, directors, producers, editors, specialists, and imported crew, all of whom show up temporarily, spend some time under our painfully blue sky, and then go home to wherever people say “the industry” without irony.

If the state counts every local extra and driver as proof of transformation, then we need to be careful. A movie set can create the same kind of service jobs that a big wedding, a rodeo, or a convention creates. That does not mean the economy has been reborn. It means visitors came to town and spent money, partly because we paid them to.

Then there is the grand dream of building a permanent cluster of film-related businesses. This is the part where the consultants get misty-eyed. We are told that, if New Mexico just keeps subsidizing Hollywood long enough, the industry will take root here. Studios will expand. Workers will train. Vendors will appear. The ecosystem will mature. One day, presumably, we will all wake up, and New Mexico will be the new Hollywood, only with better enchiladas and fewer agents named Brent. (Yeah—and the Rio Grande will have water running in it 24/7/365!)

Maybe…but film production is famously mobile. It goes where the money is and it’s a target-rich environment. Georgia offers money, Louisiana offers money, Oklahoma offers money, Canada offers money, and the next state governor who wants to hide economic failure will offer money, too. (In fact, only 38 states are subsidizing film production!). If New Mexico builds a film industry that survives only as long as New Mexico keeps writing checks, then we have not built an industry. We have built a hostage situation.

Take, for example, the case of the Sylvester Stallone’s television series, Tulsa King. The first season was filmed in Oklahoma because the state offered sizable subsidies. The next three seasons were filmed in Georgia because Georgia offered a bigger subsidy. You don’t have to be a particularly sharp viewer to notice that “Tulsa” no longer looks like Tulsa. (The Georgia Department of Audits and Accounts reports that the state recovers only 10% of the money they spend to attract the movie industry.)

Even workforce training has a leak in the bucket. Suppose we do train New Mexicans into real film professionals. Good. Then what? A trained film worker can take those skills anywhere and when work inevitably slows down here, that person will head to Georgia, California, Texas, Oklahoma, or Canada. The state will end up subsidizing productions to train workers who become valuable enough to leave. And if they stay, then taxpayers must keep subsidizing Hollywood to make sure they have work.

That is not an industry. That is Hollywood renting New Mexico’s checkbook.

New Mexico is not merely helping local grips, drivers, caterers, and extras get work—it is also helping pay the checks of people who were never New Mexicans and may never intend to become New Mexicans. Under the film-credit system, the state can subsidize wages for certain nonresident crew, and the larger partner arrangements can reach into payments for nonresident actors, directors, producers, writers, and editors. In plain English, that means a director flies in from Los Angeles, a star arrives with an entourage, specialized crew members come for a few weeks or months, the production wraps, and then they go home — while New Mexico taxpayers help underwrite their paychecks. The state counts that as local economic activity because the work happened here, but much of the paycheck will leave on the same plane as the people who earned it.

Under New Mexico’s film-subsidy program, a movie star can roll into the state in a million-dollar bus, sleep in it, eat in it, shoot her scenes, cash her check, and drive away — while New Mexico taxpayers help underwrite the paycheck. That is the magic of film incentives: even when the glamour leaves town, the bill stays behind.

The underlying question is simple: would the money do more economic good if left in the pockets of New Mexicans?

State government assumes that if it collects money from citizens and redistributes it to a politically favored industry, the resulting activity is proof of wisdom. But maybe the citizens would have spent that money better. Maybe they would have fixed trucks, bought appliances, paid medical bills, expanded small businesses, hired local help, repaired roofs, replaced water heaters, or just bought groceries without wincing. That spending would also create jobs, only without needing a government office to issue a press release about it.

There is an old country test for this sort of thing: if the deal is so good, why does it need my money?

If New Mexico’s scenery, light, culture, climate, and talent pool are enough to make this a natural film center, then Hollywood should come here because it makes sense. If Hollywood comes only because we pay it, then we are not selling New Mexico. We are discounting it—bribing them to come.

That does not mean film production is bad. Let them come. Let them shoot Westerns, crime dramas, science fiction, prestige miniseries, and whatever else requires a lonely road, a suspicious sheriff, or a desert sunrise. Sell them hotel rooms. Rent them warehouses. Feed them green chile. Hire local workers. Charge fair prices. Welcome them warmly.

But stop pretending that writing checks to Hollywood is the same thing as building prosperity.

New Mexico has real needs: water, roads, crime, schools, courts, healthcare, broadband, housing, and a private economy strong enough that young people do not have to leave to make a living. Against that list, subsidizing a wealthy entertainment industry starts to look less like vision and more like vanity.

The film subsidy creates smoke. Sometimes it creates a pretty flame, too. But after the crew leaves, the trailers roll out, the rented furniture is returned, and the last assistant director boards a plane, New Mexico is left with the bill and a politician pointing at the smoke as proof there was a fire.

Cecil B. DeMille supposedly said that young Hollywood actresses were called starlets because the word piglets was already taken. In a similar vein, we call an elected moron in the state house a politician because the word thief was already taken.

New Mexico, An Art Colony Built Around a Gas Station

milliorn@nmsu.edu (Mark Milliorn) — Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 -0600

On and off for the last couple of weeks, I’ve been talking about cities getting dangerously close to plunging into an economic death spiral, primarily New York City because I find the likelihood of a young socialist like Mayor Mamdani fixing the city’s financial problems about as likely as a spavined hearse horse winning the Kentucky Derby.

An economic death spiral is what happens when a town gets to circling the drain like a tired dog before a nap: businesses pull out, workers move off, tax money dries up, the roads go to washboard, the schools start selling raffle tickets for copy paper, and the only folks still optimistic are the chamber of commerce, three realtors, and a man at the diner who insists a new truck stop is going to turn everything around just as soon as somebody fixes the exit ramp. As tax income dries up, the city government inevitably tries to raise revenue by raising taxes, thus lighting the bundle of rags tied to the tail of the last fleeing business.

But, it is not only cities that can enter that downward spiral, but whole states can also do it as well, and my state, New Mexico, would be a classic example—if not for one saving economic factor that is an industry that our state government absolutely hates.

There is an old joke that New Mexico is a poor state with excellent scenery. Like many old jokes, it survives because it is uncomfortably close to true.

If one were brutally honest—and honesty is rarely encouraged in economic development brochures—it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that, if not for the oil and gas industry, New Mexico would be firmly planted in an economic death spiral somewhere between “rust belt cautionary tale” and “forgotten Soviet republic.”

This is not entirely New Mexico’s fault. Geography dealt the state a strange hand: It is large, sparsely populated, dry, mountainous, and far from the great population centers of the country. Unlike Texas, California, or Florida, nobody accidentally passes through New Mexico and decides to move there because the freeway exits looked lively.

What New Mexico does possess is beauty, culture, laboratories, military bases, chile, and an astonishing number of turquoise shops. Unfortunately, none of those things generates the kind of tax revenue required to keep an entire state government fed, paved, pensioned, and air-conditioned.

Enter oil.

Oil in New Mexico is less an industry than a life-support system with pump jacks.

The southeastern part of the state—in the Permian Basin region—produces staggering amounts of wealth compared to the rest of the state economy. One could argue that Hobbs and Carlsbad are effectively subsidizing Santa Fe’s ability to debate bicycle lanes, climate justice, and whether chile should be capitalized in official state documents.

Without petroleum revenue, New Mexico would face a deeply uncomfortable reckoning. State government spending would have to shrink dramatically or taxes would have to rise to levels usually associated with medieval tribute systems.

This creates one of the great political ironies of modern America: New Mexico is culturally and politically suspicious of the very industry preventing its becoming economically indistinguishable from rural West Virginia with better sunsets.

The state’s public rhetoric often treats oil companies the way Victorian families treated embarrassing relatives: tolerated because they pay the bills, but never mentioned in polite company. A recent governor of New Mexico declared that it should be the primary goal of the nation to reduce the dependency on petroleum by 50%. Cut New Mexico petroleum income by 50% and the state will be desperate for a recipe for sand soup.

Meanwhile, every time oil prices rise, state government revenues suddenly bloom like desert wildflowers after a thunderstorm. Budget surpluses appear. Legislative wish lists expand. New programs emerge. Everyone becomes an economic genius for six months.

Then oil prices wobble and panic quietly spreads through Santa Fe like a norovirus outbreak on a cruise ship.

The deeper issue is that New Mexico has never quite solved the puzzle of creating a broad, diversified private-sector economy.

There are islands of success:

Los Alamos,
Sandia,
defense contracting,
tourism,
healthcare,
and, a trickle of retirement migration,

But these sectors do not combine into a roaring engine of population growth and entrepreneurial dynamism. They create pockets of prosperity floating in a much larger sea of government dependency, low labor participation, and economic fragility.

One sees this in the demographics.

Young educated people leave in such large numbers that they may well be the state’s largest export. Many rural communities steadily age, so that entire small towns seem to survive on a mixture of federal transfers, retirees, and determination. Outside of Albuquerque and a few select corridors, economic momentum can feel thin.

And yet, oddly enough, New Mexico narrowly avoids outright collapse.

Why?

Again: oil.

Oil revenue functions like an enormous invisible subsidy that holds together a state economy otherwise struggling to generate sufficient taxable activity on its own.

New Mexico’s state government is not merely “helped” by oil and gas; it is structurally dependent on it. Using the cautious state-budget framing, roughly one-third of recurring general-fund revenue comes from oil and natural gas, while a broader accounting that includes severance taxes, royalties, gross-receipts taxes, corporate taxes, worker income taxes, permanent-fund distributions, and related economic activity can push the oil-and-gas share into the 40%-50% range of general-fund support. The direct money alone is enormous — billions from severance taxes, rents, and royalties — but the real dependency is larger because the industry also supports high-wage jobs, contractors, local purchases, and investment funds that feed the state treasury. In practical terms, New Mexico can talk like an energy-transition state, but its schools, roads, agencies, reserves, and recurring spending are still heavily financed by the petroleum economy.

Imagine a household where one cousin works offshore rigs in the Gulf and sends home checks large enough to support twelve other relatives who spend most of their time discussing sustainable gardening and beadwork. That, in simplified form, is New Mexico’s fiscal structure.

The state’s defenders will object that New Mexico has recently experienced pockets of economic growth. This is true: Intel has reinvested in Rio Rancho and Albuquerque has seen some revitalization, so there are real success stories.

But remove the petroleum sector from the ledger and the picture changes very quickly.

Worker participation remains weak compared to many states and private-sector depth is limited. Many counties remain heavily dependent on government employment. The state consistently struggles to retain college graduates. Crime concerns in Albuquerque continue to hurt perceptions. Educational rankings remain stubbornly poor despite decades of reform efforts and spending increases.

And while businesses are fleeing California and New York for the Southwest, almost none of them come to New Mexico because of our state personal income tax, our generally anti-business climate, and the state’s strong union laws. If we draw a line across the United States, going along the northern boundary of New Mexico stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific, only two states below this line are not right-to-work states: California and New Mexico. These two are also the only states below that line whose industrial bases are declining.

On paper, New Mexico has quite a few advantages: several large state universities, low land cost, and a low cost of living. Even with those resources, economic activity stops at the state border, as can be seen by this satellite photo of the Texas/New Mexico border at night.

The result is a state that often feels suspended between two futures.

One future imagines New Mexico transforming into a southwestern Colorado: affluent, outdoorsy, technologically sophisticated, culturally rich, and attractive to remote workers and retirees.

The other future looks more like a slow demographic fade: stagnant population, shrinking economic dynamism, rising dependency ratios, and a permanent reliance on federal and petroleum revenue to sustain living standards.

At present, oil is keeping the second future at bay, which creates a curious emotional atmosphere in the state.

New Mexico simultaneously behaves like:

a frontier state,
a federal dependency,
an arts colony,
a retirement haven,
and an energy exporter.

These identities do not always coexist gracefully.

The state wants the tax revenue from petroleum without fully embracing the culture that produces it. It wants environmental prestige while depending heavily on extractive industry revenue. It wants Scandinavian-style social programs with an economy that’s closer to rural Arizona plus uranium ghosts.

These contradictions could continue for quite some time. Governments are perfectly capable of living with contradictions, especially when oil is above $70 a barrel.

But long term, New Mexico faces uncomfortable strategic questions:

What happens if the petroleum industry contracts substantially before the state develops a replacement economic engine? What happens if the petroleum availability expands and the industry begins shutting down wells in states where governments tax production the most?

These questions lurk behind almost every optimistic press release about film studios, green energy corridors, aerospace hubs, startup incubators, and artisanal lavender festivals.

Because, despite all the brochures featuring happy hikers and attractive people drinking craft beer beside adobe walls, New Mexico’s modern fiscal reality remains astonishingly simple:

The oil patch is paying the electric bill…

And deep down, almost everyone in Santa Fe knows that and hates it.

The Ghost Ship, the Wrong Submarine, and the USS Stewart That Wouldn’t Stay Sunk

milliorn@nmsu.edu (Mark Milliorn) — Sat, 16 May 2026 00:01:00 -0600

When I lived on Galveston Island, I frequently toured the USS Cavalla (SS-244), a World War II submarine on display at Seawolf Park. This produces one of those small historical misunderstandings that only a tourist attraction can create. Because the submarine is in Seawolf Park, many visitors naturally leave with the impression that they have toured the USS Seawolf. This is impossible, unless the Navy has developed a very aggressive museum-restoration program involving recovery from the bottom of the Pacific, because USS Seawolf (SS-197) was lost in 1944, most likely to friendly fire. The Galveston Naval Museum identifies the submarine on display as the Cavalla, and the destroyer escort beside her as USS Stewart (DE-238).

The friendly-fire part of the Seawolf story is one of those grim little naval footnotes that make history feel less like a marble monument and more like a dimly lit office with too many filing cabinets. The evidence indicates that Seawolf was probably sunk by the destroyer escort USS Richard M. Rowell after failing to respond properly during a tense anti-submarine search. The Navy did not exactly put “We may have sunk our own submarine” on a recruiting poster, but the friendly-fire explanation was part of postwar accounting rather than a secret locked away until the age of the internet. The Naval History and Heritage Command say the evidence suggests friendly fire was the most likely cause.

Still, I was not there primarily to solve the Seawolf confusion. I was there to tour the Cavalla, the submarine that sank the Japanese aircraft carrier Shōkaku, a veteran of the Pearl Harbor attack. That is a pretty good résumé. Most museum ships can say they served their country, the Cavalla can say she helped send one of the Pearl Harbor carriers to the bottom. That gives the tour a certain edge. You are not just ducking through hatches and trying not to bang your head; you are walking through a machine that once changed the balance sheet of the Pacific War.

But I always ended the visit by touring the ship tied up beside her: the USS Stewart (DE-238), an Edsall-class destroyer escort. Destroyer escorts were not glamorous in the way battleships and carriers were glamorous. They did not get much help from Hollywood. They were the practical shoes of naval warfare: sturdy, necessary, and unlikely to be featured in a recruiting poster unless all the battleships were busy. The Galveston Naval Museum says Stewart is one of only two remaining destroyer escorts in the United States, and the only surviving Edsall-class destroyer escort.

Reading up on Stewart, I discovered that there were actually three U.S. Navy ships named USS Stewart, all named for Rear Admiral Charles Stewart, who commanded the USS Constitution during the War of 1812. This is where the story stops being merely interesting and starts behaving like it was written by a screenwriter who had been told, “Make it weirder, but keep the ships real.”

The first USS Stewart (DD-13) was one of the Navy’s earliest destroyers, a Bainbridge-class vessel from the dawn of the destroyer age. She was small, narrow, fast for her time, and armed with the kind of optimism that early destroyers required. In World War I, she escorted convoys off France, and even attacked the German submarine U-108 in 1918. The Naval History and Heritage Command photo caption notes that Stewart’s funnel carried a star signifying that she had sunk or disabled a German submarine, though later evidence showed U-108 survived.

The second USS Stewart (DD-224) had the truly fabulous career, by which I mean a career that included almost every indignity short of being converted into a floating seafood restaurant. She was a Clemson-class “four-stacker,” commissioned in 1920, and by World War II she was already an elderly antique destroyer in the Asiatic Fleet. In peacetime, she had done the usual imperial-era chores: showing the flag, visiting China, rescuing people after the Kanto earthquake, patrolling rivers, and reminding everyone that the United States Navy could appear in your harbor whether or not you had invited it. In 1938, Stewart even helped search for the missing Pan Am Hawaii Clipper, which vanished between Guam and Manila. According to one timeline, Stewart left Manila on July 30 to search for the missing flying boat and was ordered to abandon the search on August 6.

The Hawaii Clipper mystery deserves its own shelf in the library of prewar weirdness. The aircraft disappeared with fifteen people aboard, and no confirmed wreckage was ever found. One rumor held that passenger Wah Sun Choy, also known as Watson Choy, was carrying millions in gold certificates intended for Chiang Kai-shek and the Chinese Nationalists. That led to theories that Japanese agents hijacked or destroyed the plane, something Japan vigorously denies, but we shouldn’t let that get in the way of a good story.

Then came World War II, and Stewart’s life became genuinely strange. In February 1942, during the desperate defense of the Dutch East Indies, Stewart was damaged in battle and made it to Surabaya, Java, for repairs. There, in one of those moments that makes a sailor consider changing careers, she slipped off the blocks in a floating dry-dock and bent her propeller shafts. With Japanese forces closing in, the Americans destroyed the ship with demolition charges, scuttled the dry-dock, and left her for dead. The Navy struck her from the list in March 1942.That should have been the end of it.

It was not the end of it.

After nearly a year underwater, the Japanese raised her, repaired her, and commissioned her as Patrol Boat No. 102. This is where Stewart became the “Ghost Ship of the Pacific.” Allied pilots began reporting the extremely awkward sight of what looked like an old American four-stack destroyer operating deep behind enemy lines.

One can imagine the debriefing. “You saw what?” “An American destroyer.” “Where?” “In Japanese waters.” “Have you been sleeping?” “No.” “Would you like to start?” The Naval History and Heritage Command says multiple Allied pilots reported seeing the ship behind enemy lines after the Japanese commissioned her as Patrol Boat No. 102.

At war’s end, American occupation forces found the battered former Stewart afloat near Japan. In a ceremony that was either touching, bizarre, or both, the U.S. Navy recommissioned her in October 1945 as DD-224. Her crew nicknamed her RAMP-224, borrowing the language used for Recovered Allied Military Personnel, as if the ship herself had been a prisoner of war. This is sentimental, absurd, and somehow exactly right. Ships are just steel until sailors start talking about them; after that, they become characters.

The Navy brought Stewart back to San Francisco, but there was no real future for an old four-stacker that had served both sides, been sunk, raised, captured, recovered, and insulted by every ocean she met. On May 24, 1946, she was used as a target ship and sunk off the California coast. Even then, she did not go quietly. Reports say she absorbed rockets, machine-gun fire, and naval gunfire for more than two hours before finally going down. Some ships are sunk, Stewart had to be persuaded.

For decades, that was the end of the story. Then, in August 2024, undersea searchers found the wreck of USS Stewart (DD-224) in the Cordell Bank National Marine Sanctuary off northern California. She lies in about 3,500 feet of water, largely intact and nearly upright. The National WWII Museum says the discovery was made by a team including Ocean Infinity, the Air/Sea Heritage Foundation, SEARCH, NOAA’s Office of National Marine Sanctuaries, and the Naval History and Heritage Command.

So there she rests: an American destroyer, a Japanese patrol boat, an American destroyer again, and finally a ghost on the seafloor. If one is willing to be mischievous, she may be the closest wreck of a Japanese warship — sort of — to San Francisco. Legally, historically, and emotionally, that statement requires several footnotes and possibly a naval lawyer. But as a punchline, it is irresistible.

The next time someone visits Seawolf Park and says they toured the Seawolf, let them down gently. They toured Cavalla, which sank Shōkaku, and Stewart, whose predecessor had one of the strangest careers in naval history. That is not a disappointment. That is an upgrade. After all, any ship can have a service record. Very few can say they served two navies, died twice, came home, and still managed to become a ghost story.

New York and the Search for the Last Taxpayer

milliorn@nmsu.edu (Mark Milliorn) — Sat, 9 May 2026 00:01:00 -0600

There is an old joke that New York City could tax oxygen if only the air could be properly assessed and invoiced. Given recent political trends, I fully expect a future press conference announcing the “Progressive Atmospheric Equity Contribution Fee,” payable quarterly by anyone breathing south of Yonkers.

This raises a serious question hidden beneath the humor: At what point does New York’s increasingly enthusiastic effort to tax the rich begin to resemble a man trying to drain a sinking boat by drilling new holes in the bottom?

To hear some people tell it, the rich are already fleeing New York in biblical caravans. Hedge fund managers are supposedly racing across the Florida border in armored Bentleys while investment bankers rappel out of Midtown office towers carrying sacks of untaxed capital gains. Somewhere in Palm Beach, according to this narrative, there is now a gated community populated entirely by former Upper East Side residents wearing linen suits and complaining about how hard it is to find decent bagels.

The truth, as always, is less cinematic and more interesting.

There is, in fact, real evidence that wealthy people have been leaving New York City. New York’s own tax data show that millionaire out-migration increased sharply during and after COVID, with relocation rates rising well above historic norms. Some of the ultrarich, especially those earning tens of millions annually, clearly decided that sunshine, lower taxes, and fewer regulations sounded preferable to paying both New York State and New York City income taxes while carefully navigating feces-laden sidewalks on the way to dinner.

And honestly, from a purely mathematical standpoint, one can understand their concern. New York State already imposes one of the highest income tax burdens in the country. Add New York City’s local income tax on top, then pile on property taxes, corporate taxes, sales taxes, mansion taxes, congestion pricing, assorted fees, and Mayor Mamdani’s threat of a pied-à-terre tax, and eventually even a billionaire may begin quietly Googling “residency requirements in Florida.”

Florida, meanwhile, waits offshore like a giant tax-free aircraft carrier.

No state income tax. Warm weather. Palm trees. Private airports. And an endless supply of real estate agents whispering, “Sir, your taxes alone could pay for this waterfront estate.” New York tax officials admit almost 1,700 millionaires moved their tax address out of New York in just 2024. New York hasn’t released the data for 2025 or 2026, but I doubt that many moved back.

Not surprisingly, Miami and Palm Beach have become popular landing zones for finance executives and wealthy retirees. Texas has benefited too. Wealth migration toward lower-tax states is real enough that entire industries now exist to help wealthy individuals establish legal residency elsewhere while keeping one tasteful Gucci loafer still planted in Manhattan.

But before we declare New York a post-apocalyptic wasteland populated only by rats and deranged graduate students, it is worth noting that the “everyone is fleeing” story is also wildly exaggerated. New York is not in the red-light danger zone, but it is in the warning orange zone. The NYC Comptroller says the city is already operating with a structural deficit, meaning spending is already running ahead of recurring revenue, and the budget relies on optimistic revenue projections, reserve drawdowns, unspecified savings, and reduced fiscal flexibility. The state comptroller also warned that the city’s budget reduced contingency reserves, including the general reserve, down to the $100 million statutory minimum.

New York remains one of the most economically powerful cities on earth. It still dominates finance, media, publishing, fashion, advertising, law, and international business. People continue to move there because it offers opportunities unavailable almost anywhere else. The city still attracts massive tourism, investment, and foreign capital. And despite all the horror stories, the overall tax base has not collapsed. Official projections still show growing tax revenue in coming years, although that may be offset by predictions of even faster growing expenditures.

This is because wealthy people are often less mobile than politicians and cable news hosts imagine. Moving is not just a tax decision—it involves business networks, schools, family ties, social status, office locations, cultural institutions, and personal identity. A hedge fund manager may enjoy saving millions on taxes in Miami, but he may also discover that his entire professional ecosystem still functions in Manhattan.

In other words, it turns out that civilization is annoyingly sticky. But, with each arrival of a new millionaire or business in a Southern state, a small part of that missing social infrastructure is re-established, making it easier for the next hedge fund manager to set up shop.

Still, New York faces a genuine long-term risk, and it is not necessarily the dramatic overnight collapse people imagine. The real danger is something slower and far more bureaucratic: a gradual erosion of the tax base combined with increasingly optimistic government spending.

This is where economics stops being exciting and becomes terrifying.

Suppose Mamdani inevitably announces yet another new “tax the rich” proposal that is anticipated to raise $500 million annually. Headlines celebrate. Advocacy groups cheer. Editorial boards declare that fairness has finally arrived.

Then reality intervenes.

More wealthy residents leave. Others restructure income. Investments are delayed. Real estate transactions slow. Businesses expand elsewhere. Capital gains are realized in different states. Accountants suddenly become the most powerful people in America.

Instead of raising $500 million, the tax brings in $300 million. Unfortunately, by this point the government has already spent the imaginary $500 million three times over and created six new agencies to administer it.

Now there is a budget gap.

The response, naturally, is to propose another tax, and triggering even more capital flight.

This is how cities wander into fiscal quicksand. Not through a dramatic catastrophe, but through an endless cycle of optimistic revenue forecasts colliding with human behavior. This is how Detroit, St. Louis, and Philadelphia triggered rapid economic decline.

The core problem for New York is concentration. A tiny percentage of taxpayers provide an enormous share of tax revenue. Millionaires account for a massive portion of New York’s income tax collections. This means the city’s financial health increasingly depends on the continued willingness of a relatively small number of highly mobile people to remain exactly where they are and continue earning exactly as much money as before.

That is not a stable long-term strategy. It resembles balancing the city budget atop a stack of champagne glasses.

And yet, the political incentives always favor more taxation because the immediate math looks irresistible. If one billionaire pays millions annually in taxes, then taxing him a little more appears painless. Multiply that across thousands of wealthy taxpayers and politicians see visions of balanced budgets dancing in their heads.

The trouble is that economists are forced to deal with the horrifying reality that human beings react to incentives.

Raise cigarette taxes and fewer people smoke. Raise gasoline prices and people drive less. Raise taxes on capital and wealth, and eventually some capital and wealth relocate.

This should not be controversial, but somehow every generation of politicians acts shocked when it happens.

The final irony is that if New York ever truly succeeded in driving out large numbers of wealthy taxpayers, the burden would not vanish into thin air. It would simply shift downward onto the remaining middle class, homeowners, renters, and businesses. By the time officials realized the rich did not produce the projected tax revenue after all, the spending commitments would already exist.

And then a new politician would arise with a fresh PowerPoint presentation explaining why one more tax increase will finally solve everything forever.

At which point the last remaining taxpayer in Manhattan will quietly board a flight to Miami carrying nothing but a laptop, a residency affidavit, and a deep appreciation for palm trees.

The Mystery of the Lost Mysteries

milliorn@nmsu.edu (Mark Milliorn) — Sat, 2 May 2026 00:01:00 -0600

I have always loved mysteries, probably because I worked my way through the entire Hardy Boys series in the second grade. I was hooked early by secret panels, hidden staircases, stolen jewels, mysterious strangers, coded messages, and the absolute certainty that two boys with flashlights could outwit every adult in town.

Eventually, I moved on to Ellery Queen, Agatha Christie, Rex Stout, Lawrence Block, John D. MacDonald, and a host of other great mystery writers. The best of them understood something important: a mystery is not just a crime story. It is a puzzle, a game, a contest between the writer and the reader. The writer lays out the clues, hides the truth in plain sight, and then dares the reader to arrive at the solution first.

Good mystery books are still being written, and it is not hard to find one. If you are looking for your next mystery, I would recommend subscribing to the newsletter from The Mysterious Bookstore, the “World’s Oldest and Greatest Mystery Fiction Specialty Store,” run by Otto Penzler. You can find them here.

What I cannot find, or at least cannot find very often, is a good mystery movie or television mystery. There are plenty of television shows and movies that call themselves mysteries, but most of them are not mysteries at all. They are police procedurals, character dramas, revenge stories, thrillers, or episodes of “watch the star solve the case while everyone else stands around looking suspicious.” They may have a corpse, a detective, a lab report, and a confession, but that does not make them mysteries.

They all seem to fail in the same ways.

First, they frequently are not actually mysteries. In the opening act, we often see who commits the murder. We watch the killer creep into the room, pull the trigger, push the victim off the balcony, or poison the wine. Then the rest of the episode consists of the detective slowly discovering what the audience already knows. That can be suspenseful, but it is not a mystery. It is a waiting game.

There is nothing wrong with that form, exactly. Columbo made an art of it. The pleasure of Columbo was not guessing who did it. The pleasure was watching Peter Falk’s rumpled, shambling, apparently harmless detective worry the murderer to death with “just one more thing.” But Columbo worked because it knew what it was. It was not pretending to be a whodunit. It was a how-will-he-catch-him.

Too many modern television mysteries give us the murderer early and then still expect us to pretend we are solving something. We are not. We are just watching the hero catch up.

Second, in the vast majority of television mysteries, the murderer is the highest-paid guest star. This may be the single greatest weakness of television mystery writing. The casting department destroys the plot before the first commercial break.

If a familiar actor shows up in the first ten minutes, has no obvious reason to be there, and then disappears into the background, you can safely arrest him immediately. Television cannot resist this pattern. The famous guest actor is never just the victim’s lawyer, the dead man’s neighbor, or the slightly rude restaurant owner. He is there because the show paid for him, and, by heaven, they are going to get their money’s worth in the final scene.

This is especially true when the actor is just famous enough to be recognizable, but not famous enough to be above doing one episode of a network crime drama. The moment he appears, the mystery is over. You do not need fingerprints, blood spatter, or motive. You need only ask, “Which guest star has the strongest IMDb page?”

Third, the suspect list is usually too small. A real mystery needs room to breathe. It needs several people who could plausibly have committed the crime, several motives that overlap, and several clues that point in different directions. In a good mystery novel, almost everyone has something to hide, even if only one person is hiding murder.

Television usually gives us three suspects, and one of them is obviously innocent because he cried too much in the interrogation room. One is too obvious, one is too sympathetic, and one is the guest star. That is not a mystery. That is a seating chart.

The problem is partly time. A television episode has perhaps forty-two minutes after commercials. In that time, it has to introduce the crime, interview witnesses, include a lab scene, give the regular characters something to do, provide a red herring, solve the case, and leave time for a final emotional conversation in a dimly lit office. There is not much room for real detection.

Fourth, the structure gives the game away. Television mysteries are often built on a rigid rhythm. The first suspect is wrong. The second suspect is also wrong. The third suspect seems impossible, then suddenly becomes obvious after a late-breaking clue. Someone lies. Someone else says, “I should have told you this earlier.” The detective sees something tiny, stares thoughtfully into the middle distance, and suddenly knows everything.

Once you know the rhythm, you are not solving the crime so much as reading the clock. At minute twelve, the angry spouse did not do it. At minute twenty-four, the business partner did not do it. At minute thirty-five, the sweet old friend says something odd, and there it is. Cue the confession.

The formula is so familiar that it drains the story of tension. We know the first explanation is wrong because it came too early. We know the second explanation is wrong because there are still eighteen minutes left. We know the killer will be revealed at the exact moment the episode needs to start wrapping up.

Fifth, the detective often knows more than the audience. This is a fatal flaw. A fair mystery lets the audience reason alongside the detective. We should see the important clues, even if we do not understand them at first. When the solution is revealed, we should be able to say, “Of course. I should have seen it.”

Too many television mysteries cheat. The detective notices something the camera did not show us clearly. Or a lab result appears at the last minute. Or the hero remembers a detail from an earlier conversation that was not emphasized enough for any sane viewer to retain. Then, in the final scene, the detective explains everything as if the solution had been obvious all along.

That is not mystery writing. That is withholding evidence.

Agatha Christie, at her best, played fair. Rex Stout played fair. Ellery Queen practically invited the reader to stop before the final chapter and solve the case. Television usually does the opposite. It hides the usable clue, then congratulates itself for revealing it.

Sixth, character drama replaces detection. Many television mysteries are less interested in the murder than in the detective’s personal problems. The detective has a divorce, trauma, a drinking problem, a dead partner, a troubled daughter, a dying father, a corrupt boss, or all of the above. The murder becomes a coat rack on which to hang the regular character’s weekly emotional burden.

Again, there is nothing wrong with character drama. We like detectives with personality. Sherlock Holmes had cocaine, a violin, and a tendency to be insufferable. Nero Wolfe had orchids, beer, and an unwillingness to leave the house. Travis McGee had a houseboat and a deeply complicated view of paradise. But the mystery still mattered. The character did not replace the puzzle.

On television, the crime often exists only to illuminate the detective’s feelings. A murdered teenager reminds the detective of her own daughter. A dead soldier reminds the detective of his time in the service. A poisoned husband reminds the detective of his failed marriage. By the end, the killer is almost an afterthought. The real climax is the hero staring out a window, having learned something about grief.

Finally, the solution must be simple enough for one episode. A good mystery needs misdirection, motive, opportunity, timing, character, and surprise. It needs the solution to be unexpected, but inevitable. That is hard to do in a novel. It is much harder to do in forty-two minutes with a B-plot and recurring cast obligations.

So television reduces the mystery to something simple. He lied about where he was. She wanted the inheritance. The brother was jealous. The business partner was stealing. The victim knew a secret. The killer made one mistake, and the detective spotted it.

That may be enough for a crime show, but it is not enough for a real mystery. A real mystery should make the audience lean forward, not merely wait for the reveal. It should give us the pleasure of suspicion, deduction, failure, and sudden recognition. It should make us think we might solve it, then punish us for being overconfident.

Television rarely does that anymore. It gives us crimes, detectives, corpses, and confessions, but not mysteries. The machinery is there. The puzzle is missing.

And that is why, when I want a mystery, I usually go back to books. The corpse may be imaginary, but at least the game is real.

A Nazi Baby Shower

milliorn@nmsu.edu (Mark Milliorn) — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:23:00 -0600

After reading about the history of the painting, I was a little surprised to learn that it was actually rather small, about fifteen inches wide and only 22 inches tall. After reading about the two decades of legal battles concerning ownership, I expected something bigger.

I guess we should start at the beginning. The painting, Madonna and Child, was painted by Edward Cranach the Elder, in 1518. Of that we are certain, since the artist signed the work with his winged-serpent mark, and dated å Mary half-length in a landscape, her reddish-blond hair falling over her shoulders, holding a green velvet cushion on which the naked Christ Child lies.

We do not know who commissioned the painting, or even who its first owners were. X-rays show that the underlying design was traced, suggesting that the work began in Cranach’s workshop rather than as a wholly freehand original composition. It would be too much to say that Cranach “mass-produced” such paintings in the modern sense, but Madonna and Child images were certainly a workshop staple. Even after five centuries, some 189 related paintings survive or are catalogued as works by Cranach, by his workshop, by his son, by his followers, or by later imitators.

Who owned the painting, where it was displayed, how often it changed hands…. none of that is known. Due to the cost of such a painting at the time it was done, we can guess that whoever commissioned it (and all the subsequent owners) were probably the kind of people who had very nice jewelry and lived in castles. The kind of people who might commission a painting for a church or to buy favor from another aristocrat.

Before the City of Cologne got its municipal mitts on Cranach’s Madonna and Child, the painting had already enjoyed the sort of mysterious, well-traveled life that makes provenance researchers reach for coffee, aspirin, and possibly confession. Cranach painted it in 1518, but who ordered it, paid for it, prayed before it, or first showed it off to dinner guests remains unknown. It simply appears out of the mists of art history with Mary, the Christ Child, and a very old habit of not leaving paperwork behind.

The first halfway solid clue is that it may have belonged to Samuel Graf von Festetics, although even that comes with the scholarly equivalent of a raised eyebrow and a question mark. By 1859, it was respectable enough to show up at an Artaria auction in Vienna, where it was sold as lot 124. From there, it entered the collection of the Grand Duke of Saxony/Weimar, which gave it a suitably aristocratic home and probably better manners than it would encounter later.

The Grand Duchy of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach ceased to exist after World War I, and there was a frantic post-monarchy garage sale. Eventually, the picture made its way into the hands of Theodor Fischer, the Swiss art dealer in Lucerne. Fischer, doing what art dealers do, sold it in 1937 to the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum / City of Cologne. At that point, Cologne had acquired a lovely Renaissance Madonna. Unfortunately, Cologne was about to demonstrate that owning a masterpiece and exercising good judgment are two entirely different things.

The city fathers of Cologne didn’t buy the painting for a museum, they bought it to give to Edda Göring, the newly born daughter of Hermann Göring.

Cologne did not suddenly develop an urgent civic need to place a Renaissance Madonna in a bassinet. What Cologne wanted was favor. Hermann Göring was not merely Edda’s proud papa; he was one of the most powerful men in Nazi Germany. Giving his newborn daughter a Cranach was the sort of municipal flattery that says, “Please remember us kindly when contracts, favors, grants, honors, and political survival are being handed around.” Officially, it was a christening gift to little Edda. In reality, it was a gold-framed curtsy to her father.

The city fathers knew that the Nazi leaders liked the paintings of Cranach, a German Renaissance painter. Hitler alone stole 16 by the artist he considered Aryan, and an extra one by the son, Lucas Cranach the Younger.

The problem was that Cologne did not simply have a spare Cranach lying around in the mayor’s desk drawer. The city acquired the painting from Theodor Fischer, the Swiss art dealer in Lucerne, for about 50,000 Reichsmarks. Then came the awkward part: paying a Swiss dealer required foreign currency, and Germany’s currency controls made that difficult. So, Cologne solved the problem in the grand old tradition of public officials spending public treasure for private political advantage.

The city compensated Fischer not simply with cash, but by letting valuable artwork from the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum go out the door. The most famous piece in that exchange was Van Gogh’s Portrait of Armand Roulin (left). In effect, Cologne turned part of its public art collection into the purchase price for a private gift to the Göring family. A Renaissance Madonna went to Edda, a Van Gogh went into the international art market, and Cologne got the warm glow of having pleased a Nazi. As civic transactions go, it was less “public service” than “municipal groveling with museum-quality accessories.”

Hermann thanked the city fathers, on behalf of his daughter, of course, and took the painting to his retreat, Carinhall where it fit right in with the other 1,374 paintings he had “acquired” from some of the best families of Europe. The painting stayed at Carinhall until 1945, when Göring discovered that there are few decorating problems more urgent than the Red Army approaching your country estate. So, he packed up the art collection at Carinhall — paintings, sculptures, tapestries, loot, purchases, gifts, and assorted masterpieces of extremely flexible provenance — and sent much of it south toward Berchtesgaden, where Nazi grandees hoped the Alps might provide both scenery and plausible deniability.

Among the treasures caught up in this grand retreat was Edda’s Madonna and Child.

Göring then had Carinhall blown up, lest the Soviets get the satisfaction of walking through his private museum of acquisitive vanity or playing with his model trains. Unfortunately for him, moving a stolen-and-semi-stolen art collection by train during the collapse of the Third Reich was not a model of orderly logistics. Some works ended up in rail cars, shelters, depots, and local hands. Then the Americans arrived, followed by the Monuments Men, who gathered the collection, sent it to the Munich Central Collecting Point, and began the long job of figuring out which “gift” was really a bribe, which “purchase” was really theft, and which Madonna belonged back in Cologne.

After the war, Edda Göring’s Cranach Madonna and Child entered that peculiar postwar category of objects best described as “artworks with lawyers attached.” The painting had traveled south with Göring’s collection and ended up in Allied custody, not in Edda’s bedroom, drawing room, or hope chest. Cologne, understandably sobered up after its earlier bout of municipal bootlicking, wanted the painting back. Edda, meanwhile, argued that a gift was a gift, even if the gift had been a Renaissance masterpiece handed to a dictator’s baby by officials eager to curry favor.

The legal fight dragged on for years. Edda even won an important round in the 1950s, when a court accepted the argument that Göring had not forced Cologne’s hand so much as Cologne had enthusiastically offered its hand, arm, and public art collection. But the authorities kept pressing. In 1968, the German courts finally ruled for Cologne, holding that the gift was improper, and the Madonna went back where it belonged: the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum. Today, it is in the collection of the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum & Fondation Corboud in Cologne — a Madonna rescued from the world’s worst baby shower.

Göring’s Model Trains

milliorn@nmsu.edu (Mark Milliorn) — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 00:01:00 -0600

In the early 1980’s while my wife made yet another trip to look at a cathedral (seen one, you’ve seen them all) I took a trip to a really great museum/hobby house that featured an incredible model train layout near Paddington Station. The London Toy and Model Museum occupied five floors and visitors were led into a working pithead and coal mine model, with lifts, miners, pit ponies, and Davy lamps. The museum also had large, landscaped working models in which trains whizzed in and out of tunnels and over viaducts.

Sadly, the museum closed in 1999, which only goes to show that I was right, and my wife was wrong—I can still go see Saint Nigel’s Buddhist Bar and Tabernacle or whatever it was, but The Doc has lost her only chance to see a great museum. (There are rumors that most of the layouts were sold to a museum in Tokyo, but don’t tell my wife.)

There was once another great model train layout—perhaps the largest in the world at that time—but none of us are ever going to see any of it because it was owned by a madman who deliberately destroyed it. It belonged to Adolf Hitler’s right-hand man, Hermann Göring.

There is something almost too perfectly awful about Hermann Göring’s having a gigantic model railroad at Carinhall, his forest palace retreat. Of course he did. Of course, the man with the uniforms, the titles, the pets, the loot, the hunting lodge inflated into a palace, and the incurable need to perform magnificence for visitors also wanted a miniature kingdom in which everything ran on time because he said so.

The historical record is clear that he really did have a substantial model railway at Carinhall, that he showed it off to important guests, and that it was part of the estate’s larger function as a theater of ego. The Library of Congress has a 1937 photograph explicitly titled “Hermann Göring and Adolf Hitler watching model trains at Carinhall, Templin, Germany,” and another LOC album for 1938 includes views of Göring’s model railroad. Remaining insurance papers show that Göring insured the layout for $254,000, the equivalent of more than a million dollars today. Carinhall itself was not some cozy private retreat: it was an ostentatious estate where Göring displayed stolen art, his pet bison, and entertained dignitaries.

So why did he build it? We do not, so far as I know, have a neat little memo from Göring saying, “I require a vast train layout because I am a vain overgrown child with a passion for theatrical domination.” But the surrounding evidence makes the motive fairly obvious. Carinhall was a stage set for self-glorification, a place where Göring curated an image of himself as hunter-prince, art connoisseur, host, strongman, tastemaker, and second-or-third-most-important man in the Reich depending on which week you asked. The Jewish Museum Berlin describes Carinhall as his “ostentatious” hunting lodge, where he displayed stolen treasures seized from Jewish owners across Europe. Add to that the photographic evidence that he was showing the trains to Hitler and other guests and the model train layout starts to look less like a simple hobby table and more like one more prop in a power pageant. It let him be emperor not merely of a forest estate, but of a tiny obedient world under glass and rafters. One suspects the attraction was obvious: in the model kingdom, unlike in the Luftwaffe, the scheduling problems were manageable.

As for how large it was, the safest answer is: astonishingly large, though not with the kind of museum-grade precision that lets one draw a blueprint today. The strongest widely repeated figure is that Göring had two train sets at Carinhall totaling about 400 square meters, roughly 4,305 square feet. That is not a toy on a table. That is a hobby expanding until it begins to resemble a municipal planning department. The archival photographs support the existence of multiple substantial installations over time, even if they do not, by themselves, settle every technical detail. The attic images especially suggest a sweeping layout under steep rafters, while later reporting points to more than one major setup.

There is also the deliciously absurd matter of brand and scale. Model-train devotees have argued for years about exactly which parts were Märklin and which were Trix (the two prominent German manufacturers of model trains), because even the dictator’s playroom cannot escape specialist debate. What can be said confidently is that the German Federal Archives catalog a photograph from January 12, 1943, at Carinhall as “Vorführung Trix-Eisenbahn” — a demonstration of a Trix railway — during Göring’s 50th-birthday festivities. That means at least one documented Carinhall installation was definitely Trix-Express.

The train layout was important enough to be part of the performance for invited guests, which tells you a great deal about its role in the ecosystem of Göringian vanity. Even on his birthday, on the very day that the Russian Army launched the counteroffensive at Leningrad, there he was, ushering people over to admire the little trains. Nero fiddled; Göring seems to have preferred careful track alignment.

Was it the largest model railway in the world at the time? That is a tempting line, because it sounds exactly like the sort of thing Göring himself would have wanted repeated. But the evidence I found does not prove a world record. The 400-square-meter figure certainly makes it enormous and arguably one of the largest known private layouts of its era, but I would stop there. It is big enough without historical embroidery. There is no need to gild the lily when the lily already occupies the attic, the basement, and a nontrivial fraction of Brandenburg. The important point is not that it was definitively number one on some global leaderboard of grown men with soldering irons: it is that it matched the scale and psychology of the estate that housed it—conspicuous, curated, expensive, theatrical, and meant to impress.

And then, of course, he destroyed it. Or rather, he destroyed the whole world that contained it. In April 1945, with Soviet forces closing in, Göring ordered Carinhall blown up so it would not fall into Soviet hands. The Reichsmarschall ordered Captain Frankenberg to destroy the estate, thus, petrol and explosives were spread through the interior, and the place was blown up as Soviet troops approached. In one sense the reason was practical: to deny the enemy a trophy, to conceal the scale of the loot, and to prevent capture of the estate as an intact symbol. In another sense, it was grimly fitting, since regimes built on plunder often prefer arson to accountability. If he could not keep the stage set, no one else was to inherit the scenery.

That tells us why the train layout vanished too. The trains were not singled out for destruction because Göring suddenly developed a principled objection to excessive toy railroading. They disappeared because they were embedded in the larger destruction of Carinhall itself. Some model houses that may have belonged to the railway later turned up in a Berlin government depot, but no intact working layout is known to survive on public display. So, the vast miniature empire died the same way the larger counterfeit empire was dying around it: by collapse, by denial, by frantic evacuation, and by demolition. The final irony is almost literary. A man obsessed with arranging the world to flatter himself ended by blowing up even the tiny one.

The Carinhall railway was not just a hobby. It was a scale model of Göring’s tastes and delusions: lavish, childish, domineering, meticulously staged, and impossible to separate from the machinery of theft and violence that financed the setting around it. He built it because he liked trains, certainly, but also because he liked the display, the control, and the adoring gaze of guests being shown yet another marvel in the palace of a man who mistook accumulation for grandeur. It was huge and by the late 1930s and early 1940s it was famous enough to be photographed with Hitler and other visitors. He destroyed it, or at least doomed it, for the same reason he destroyed Carinhall: because the real world was closing in, and men who make a religion of possession rarely meet loss with dignity. Sometimes they just blow up the train room.

Alcatraz, You’re Kidding, Right?

milliorn@nmsu.edu (Mark Milliorn) — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 00:01:00 -0600

President Trump has asked Congress for $152 million to start work on restoring Alcatraz as a federal penitentiary. This almost has to be a joke.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about Cuba and had to preface my remarks with an admission that, while I have read and studied Cuba extensively, I’d never traveled there. This week is a little different, as I’ve been to Alcatraz half a dozen times and I have met former inmates, guards, and even the children of guards who grew up on the island. I have a bookshelf full of texts about Alcatraz. In addition, I spent years maintaining aging hotels on Galveston Island which, while not a prison, certainly gave me some experience with aging concrete and plumbing in an ocean environment.

So, let me summarize the conclusion before I present my evidence…. The whole idea of making Alcatraz back into a federal prison is lunacy. It’s never going to work.

Let’s start with a very brief history. Formerly a military fort and prison, The United States Penitentiary Alcatraz opened August 11, 1934, and closed March 21, 1963. This was a small prison, housing on average just 275 of the most hardened and infamous of federal prisoners.

Alcatraz was never a very successful prison primarily because it's being an island a little of a mile off the coast of San Francisco, meant that the harsh climate made operating the prison a financial nightmare. There was not—and still is not—any direct connection to the mainland for water, electricity, or sewage, meaning everything had to be transferred by boat from the mainland. By the time the prison closed, the daily cost of keeping a single incarcerate prisoner on Alcatraz was more than three times higher than anywhere else in the rest of the federal penitentiary system. This was the primary reason the prison was closed, and is the primary reason it should never be reopened.

But, let’s ignore the operating cost. What would it cost to make that aging dinosaur of rust and crumbling concrete ready to reopen? First, let’s connect the utilities.

The National Park Service says water and diesel fuel still have to be ferried out, while garbage and sewage are carried back to shore, and the Bureau of Prisons says the old prison was closed in part because nearly one million gallons of fresh water had to be barged weekly to the island. Using recent Bay-area marine utility projects as rough comparisons, a submarine electric feeder to Alcatraz looks like roughly $5 million to $10 million, and a submarine water line looks more like $15 million to $50 million. Put less delicately, before a single inmate takes a shower, flushes a toilet, or turns on a light, you are probably staring at $25 million to $70 million just to stop running the place like an offshore camp with boats and generators.

Then comes the sewage, which is where the fantasy starts getting expensive in earnest. NPS says sewage is still hauled back to the mainland today, and on-site treatment is merely “under study,” so a genuine prison-scale wastewater solution would mean either an on-island treatment system or another serious marine utility project. Based on the same kind of Bay crossing work and the obvious need for pumps, redundancy, permits, and historic-site constraints, a believable estimate for solving sewage in a permanent way is roughly $20 million to $60 million. Add that to the water and electric work, and the all-in bill for just giving Alcatraz dependable electricity, potable water, and sewage treatment lands in the neighborhood of $45 million to $130 million. That’s just to run utilities—we haven’t yet started work on the actual prison.

If Washington seriously tried to resurrect Alcatraz as a prison, the environmental review alone would likely become its own island institution. Across federal agencies, the median time to complete an environmental impact statement is about 34 months, and even Alcatraz’s much narrower historic-preservation-and-safety program took the National Park Service from a draft EIS in March 2001 to a final EIS in October 2001 and a Record of Decision in 2002. On top of NEPA, Section 106 review would apply because this is a federal project affecting historic property, and because Alcatraz is a National Historic Landmark the agency must try to minimize harm and bring in additional consultation. The cheapest part of this circus would probably be the consultants: GAO says a “typical” EIS has been estimated at roughly $250,000 to $2 million, with DOE’s median EIS contractor cost at $1.4 million. In plain English, before the first prisoner got his commemorative iron cot, Uncle Sam could easily spend a few years and low-single-digit millions just producing the paperwork explaining why this was a terrible idea.

And let’s not forget about asbestos: Alcatraz is not some quaint old ruin sprinkled with a charming dusting of historical fibers. The National Park Service says structures on the island are assumed to contain asbestos and lead-based paint until proven otherwise. The problem is that there does not appear to be a clean public estimate for “remove all asbestos from Alcatraz and call me when it’s done.” There is a similar project already underway at Golden Gate Park, so using those numbers I’ll hazard a semi-educated guesstimate and say it will cost about $7 million to remove the asbestos enough that remodeling and repair can begin.

But wait, there is one more step! The buildings are almost a century old, and they need to be stabilized to prevent collapse from seismic activity. Here, we can use fairly precise numbers, since the National Park Service has just run the numbers to do exactly that. The cost is $63.584 million. Also already scheduled is a project to stabilize the island’s wharf at a cost of $40.2 million.

So now we are ready to start repairing those old cells, the reason we started this whole nonsense. Well, no. The old Alcatraz cells were 5’ by 9’, totaling 45 square feet in total. While there is no set national minimum cell size, numerous court challenges on the space necessary to avoid “cruel and unusual punishment” have forced the Department of Justice to set detention standards for segregation call for at least 70 square feet total, with 35 square feet unencumbered by bunks or plumbing.

Wait, wait: there’s even more! In the federal prison system, prison cells do not all have to be ADA-compliant in the sense that every single cell must meet full accessibility specs; instead, federal prisons must make their institutions accessible as required by the Rehabilitation Act, the Architectural Barriers Act, applicable federal accessibility standards, and Bureau of Prisons policy. The BOP’s disability policy says federal institutions “should be accessible” to that extent, and the…. Well…let’s just say that bringing Alcatraz up to code is going to reflect some significant and expensive design modifications. While the cells don’t have to meet ADA compliance, the facilities for the modern coed guards do have to meet modern standards.

At this point, you should realize that none of the existing cells on Alcatraz meet any of these standards and the entire cell blocks would have to be rebuilt. And there are similar concerns about the kitchens, shower areas, and medical services meeting modern codes. By far the simplest solution would be to bulldoze down the site—ignoring that it is on the National Register for Historic Sites—and build a new prison. While we are somehow turning the small cells into large cells, we should go ahead and add in the HVAC, fire suppression, electronic controls, medical space, kitchens, staff areas, backup power, and marine security. I’ll skip all the back of the envelope figuring and just give you the bottom line. This is going to cost about $1.2 billion.

Which raises the rather obvious question: If you are going to have to build a new prison, why not build it someplace where the cost will be much cheaper?

If the goal is to make Alcatraz hold about 300 inmates again the honest number is not the White House’s $152 million first-year ask, but something more like a total rebuild cost of roughly $1.2 billion. In short, a little over a billion dollars buys you a boutique rock in the bay for 300 prisoners, which is an impressively inefficient way to do corrections.

By contrast, a brand-new 4,000-bed prison in the middle of nowhere Nevada would almost certainly be cheaper per inmate and might well cost about the same in total. One policy estimate based on recent prison construction put a 4,000-bed facility at about $500 million. So, the dark joke here is that for roughly the kind of money it could take to resurrect Alcatraz for 300 people, you could build two ordinary 4,000-bed mainland prisons with roads, utilities, and parking. We would also avoid about two decades of battles in California court followed by endless appeal in the 9th Circus. (But who in their right mind would want to do that???)

Clearly, Alcatraz will never again be a federal penitentiary. But, you should know that officials from both the Department of Justice and the Bureau of Prisons have recently toured the island and are actively planning to proceed.

Couldn’t we just lock them up there now and save a lot of taxpayers money?

Ghost Ship, Meet the Actual Ghost Spreadsheet

milliorn@nmsu.edu (Mark Milliorn) — Sat, 4 Apr 2026 00:01:00 -0600

In Ghost Ship (2002), a salvage crew in the Bering Sea is lured toward a long-lost ocean liner and the movie wastes no time telling you exactly what kind of story it wants to be. Not a story about insurance, maritime liens, beneficial ownership, sanctions databases, or the exact legal meaning of “abandoned.” No, this is a story about a creepy ship, a mysterious past, a plucky salvage crew with bad luck, and the wonderfully cinematic notion that if a haunted liner is floating around in international waters, whoever gets there first can pretty much plant a boot on the deck and say, with professional enthusiasm, “Gentlemen, we have hit the jackpot.” The plot follows that marine salvage crew as it discovers an ocean liner lost since 1962, and the whole thing is wrapped in the sort of damp, rusty, supernatural nonsense that horror movies allegedly do well.

The legal fantasy underneath it is even better. Ghost Ship leans into the old movie rule of salvage, which can be summarized as: “find it, tow it, keep it.” Actual admiralty law, alas, is a killjoy. The popular belief that a salvor becomes the owner is erroneous; ordinarily the owner can reclaim the property by paying salvage money. And under the more limited law of finds, a would-be taker must prove intentional abandonment, possession, and intent to reduce the property to ownership. In other words, real salvage law is less “Yo-ho-ho,” and more “Please hold while counsel reviews the paperwork.”

Which brings us to the Arctic Metagaz, a vessel that sounds like the title of a low-budget streaming thriller but is, in fact, a very real LNG tanker having a very bad year. Unlike Ghost Ship’s glamorous phantom liner, the Arctic Metagaz is a working gas carrier, IMO 9243148, built in 2003, now about 23 years old, roughly 909 feet long, about 43.4 meters wide, and sailing under the Russian flag. In plain English, it is less “ghostly palace of the damned” and more “very large refrigerated industrial problem with geopolitical implications.” Public ship databases also show it currently under numerous heavy sanctions imposed by the U.S., the UK, and the EU, which is generally not the sort of accessory that improves resale value.

The ship’s biography reads like a witness trying very hard not to be recognized in a lineup. The vessel’s former names include Berge Everett, BW Suez Everett, BW GDF Suez Everett, BW Everett, Metagas Everest, Everest Energy, and then, eventually, Arctic Metagaz. Some of those earlier names plainly belong to a normal commercial life before sanctions politics swallowed the plot. Others, especially the recent shuffle among Metagas Everest, Everest Energy, and Arctic Metagaz, have all the breezy innocence of a man wearing a fake mustache and insisting he has never, in fact, heard of the bank that was robbed yesterday.

The ownership and management picture is as murky as you would expect from a ship floating around the Mediterranean with sanctions attached to it. Reuters reported in October 2025, that the registered owner was Lathyrus Shipping and the commercial manager was Ocean Speedstar Solutions, both with registered addresses in Mumbai which appear to be mail drops for paper corporations. Other reporting around the March 2026 casualty identified the vessel’s Russia-based manager as LLC SMP Techmanagement. The best way to describe this without requiring a chart the size of a dining-room table is that the paper trail points to Mumbai paper companies, while operational responsibility appears to run through Russia. Everyone involved looks less like an old-fashioned shipowner in a commodore’s cap and more like a stack of filing cabinets speaking in accents.

This aging vessel is a perfect example of the Russian “shadow fleet”: aging ships with poor maintenance and a horrible record of environmental issues used to circumvent sanctions imposed after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Shadow fleet ships are engaged in illegal operations to circumvent sanctions, evade safety or environmental rules, avoid insurance costs, or engage in other illegal activity.

Then came the part where reality outdid Hollywood for melodrama, while somehow becoming even less cinematic. On March 3, 2026, Reuters reported that the Arctic Metagaz caught fire in the Mediterranean—probably (but unconfirmed) because Ukraine attacked it with a drone—and that its crew was later found safe in a lifeboat within Libya’s search-and-rescue region. There was early confusion, including a Libyan advisory later cited by Reuters as saying the ship had sunk, but later reporting made clear that the vessel was, in fact, still afloat, damaged and drifting unmanned. Even the ship’s obituary had to be retracted. It is hard to look ominous and legendary when the first question is not “What ancient evil lives aboard?” but “Wait, is it sunk, or not sunk?”

By March 18, Reuters reported that the damaged tanker had entered Libyan search-and-rescue waters, and by March 20 Italian officials were warning that the vessel posed an “imminent and serious risk” of ecological disaster, estimating that it still carried 450 metric tons of heavy oil, 250 tons of diesel, and an uncertain amount of LNG, with only two of its tanks thought intact. This is the moment where any lingering fantasy of jaunty freelance salvors racing out in a tug to claim a prize should yield to the sober realization that a drifting LNG tanker is not treasure. It is a very large chemistry exam in bad weather.

Libya, understandably, did not treat the matter as a charming adventure and Libya’s coast guard began towing the vessel away from its shores, while the country’s National Oil Corporation worked with Russian and Maltese authorities to prevent a maritime and environmental mess. Then, because the sea enjoys plot twists of its own, the towing operation failed. Reuters and AP both reported that the ship broke loose in bad weather near the limits of Malta’s search-and-rescue zone on April 2. Libyan authorities warned other vessels to keep at least 10 nautical miles away and to report any sign of leaks or smoke. This is not “open for salvage.” This is “please back away slowly from the giant floating danger can.”

According to the latest reliable reporting, the Arctic Metagaz is best described as still adrift in the central Mediterranean after the failed tow, still somewhere in the unhappy neighborhood of Libyan waters and the edge of Malta’s search-and-rescue zone. So, anyone claiming to know the ship’s exact present location from a cheerful little consumer map is either overselling the map, overselling himself, or both. The honest answer is that the latest hard reporting places it out there, loose again, with official authorities trying to keep a dangerous situation from getting worse.

Now let us return to the movie myth. Is the Arctic Metagaz available to the first rugged opportunist with a towline, a beard, and a dream? Nope. Very much nope. Under ordinary salvage law, the salvor does not get title merely by rescuing a vessel. He gets, at most, a claim to a salvage award or lien, while ownership remains with the owner, unless very specific legal standards for abandonment are met, and it would probably take a decade to establish who really owns the Arctic Metagaz. “No crew aboard” is not the same thing as “free on Craigslist.”

That, really, is why the Arctic Metagaz fascinates. It is Ghost Ship stripped of romance and left under harsh fluorescent light. It has the eerie, drifting hull, the vanished crew, the uncertain cargo, the maritime rumors, the dramatic photographs, and the sense that something lawless is happening just beyond the horizon. But instead of supernatural gold and demonic ferrymen, the real supporting cast consists of sanctions officials, Libyan maritime authorities, insurance questions, Mumbai registration addresses, Russia-linked management, tracking data, and a lingering environmental threat. It is the same human appetite for mystery, only fed through spreadsheets, acronyms, and emergency advisories.

So the final lesson is almost disappointingly adult. Movies taught us, “find it, tow it, keep it.” The Arctic Metagaz teaches a harsher and much less marketable rule: find it, document it, sanction it, argue over it, tow it badly, lose the tow, warn shipping traffic, and call more lawyers. That version will never sell as many tickets, but it has the distinct advantage of being how the world actually works. The ghost ship of the movies offers a cursed treasure. The ghost spreadsheet of the real Mediterranean offers a 23-year-old LNG tanker, a maze of names, and a reminder that the sea may be romantic, but maritime law absolutely is not.

Corrugated Time Capsule

milliorn@nmsu.edu (Mark Milliorn) — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 00:01:00 -0600

Twice a week I travel across the Organ Mountains to White Sands, where I participate on a drinking team with a small bowling problem. It is quite an excursion for a semi-retired historian. The drive passes through a landscape so crowded with history that the miles scarcely have room to breathe. I go past the place where Pat Garrett was murdered, past the high mountain spring where the Union garrison surrendered to Confederate Colonel Baylor, across Saint Anthony Gap, past the lonely stretch where Colonel Albert Jennings Fountain and his little son disappeared in 1896. The murders, despite all the years, remain unsolved, and the boy with him was only five years old. From there I roll down into White Sands Missile Range, where former Nazi rocket scientists, including Werner von Braun, helped build the American military rocket program. At the entrance to the post stand dozens of early rockets, silent, upright reminders that history has a wicked sense of continuity. There is even a mint-condition German V-2 on display, which is well worth the trip all by itself.

Less noticed along the way is a small round-topped building that now houses a mechanic’s shop. I wish I knew more about the building’s history as it appears to be one of the surviving Quonset huts dating from World War II, a humble relic crouching beside a road otherwise crowded with murder, mystery, conquest, and rockets.

The Quonset hut is one of those gloriously unromantic inventions that somehow becomes lovable the more you learn about it. It has nob*’r cathedral spires, no marble columns, no elegant Georgian symmetry, no architect standing on a hill in a black turtleneck whispering about “the dialogue between structure and sky.” A Quonset hut looks like someone took a giant corrugated metal loaf of bread, sliced it in half, and plunked it on the ground. And yet this homely metal igloo did an astonishing amount of work in the twentieth century.

The Quonset hut was born in 1941, right when the United States Navy decided that what it really needed was not beauty, but shelter, speed, and portability. The design was created at Quonset Point, Rhode Island, which is where the hut got its name. The Americans, being sensible people in wartime, did not invent the basic idea out of thin air. They borrowed heavily from the British Nissen hut, which had been developed during the First World War by Major Peter Norman Nissen. The Nissen hut was the earlier ancestor, the British prototype, the plain-spoken parent of the shinier American child. It was cheap, portable, and could be put up quickly by soldiers who were not necessarily master carpenters, which in wartime is a very good thing.

The U.S. Navy looked at the Nissen hut and essentially said, “This will do nicely, but let us tinker with it.” So, the Quonset hut emerged as a more standardized, Americanized, mass-producible descendant. It kept the great virtue of the half-cylinder shape, which was strong, simple, and easy to ship in pieces. But it also included improvements such as insulation, interior lining, and flooring. The result was a building that could be disassembled, packed up, shipped across oceans, and reassembled where it was needed (which was a marvelous trick in a war that sprawled across continents and islands).

And goodness, were they needed! The Quonset hut was the Swiss Army knife of buildings. It could be a barracks, a warehouse, a mess hall, a supply room, an administrative office, a classroom, a repair shop, a chapel, a hospital unit, or whatever else the military suddenly realized it needed by Tuesday. It was not choosy. It had no artistic pretensions. It was the sort of structure that did not ask what sort of building it wanted to be when it grew up. It simply rolled up its corrugated sleeves and said, “Fine. I’m all of them.”

What made the Quonset hut especially lovable to quartermasters was that a building that would stand 20 by 48 feet once assembled could arrive broken down into a remarkably compact kit. One Navy description said its shipping cube was about 450 cubic feet—only about one-third the volume of a 2½-ton cargo truck—while later improvements cut some versions down to roughly 270 to 325 cubic feet when crated. In other words, the Quonset hut was not quite something one tucked under the arm on the way to Guam, but by wartime standards it was wonderfully portable: a sturdy little metal village that could be boxed up, hauled by truck, rail, or ship, and turned back into a building before the paperwork had finished catching up.

During World War II, over 150,000 Quonset huts turned up all over the place. They appeared on isolated Pacific islands, in cold and miserable outposts, on bases, in staging areas, near airfields, and in places where a normal building would have taken too long, would have cost too much, or required too much skilled labor. If soldiers, sailors, medics, clerks, mechanics, or cooks needed a roof over their heads and walls around their supplies, the Quonset hut was ready to serve. They even appeared in connection with the Manhattan Project, which means that one of the most humble-looking structures in wartime America was, in some cases, standing quietly near some of the most consequential work in human history. Not bad for a glorified metal arch.

One of the Quonset hut’s chief glories was speed. A typical 20-foot model could be erected by a crew of around ten men in a single day. That is extraordinarily quick by the standards of ordinary construction, where even putting in a decent backyard shed can sometimes resemble a diplomatic crisis. This was the magic of prefabrication. The parts arrived ready to go. You did not have to quarry stone, season timber, or summon a guild of medieval masons. You needed a site, a crew, a stack of parts, and a willingness to follow directions. The entire construction manual (left) is only 23 pages long and is far easier to read and use than the cryptic hieroglyphics that accompany an Ikea bookshelf.

As for cost, Quonset huts had another great virtue: they were cheap. That was part of their whole reason for existing. The military needed buildings by the thousands, and it needed them without the sort of price tag that would cause taxpayers or quartermasters to swoon onto a fainting couch. Exact wartime per-hut prices are maddeningly hard to pin down in a tidy, universal way, because prices varied by model, use, transport, and contract. But what is clear is that postwar civilian versions were advertised at as little as $1.50 per square foot, which helps explain why they spread across the American landscape after the war. Farmers, small businesses, schools, and practical-minded civilians looked at these sturdy metal half-tubes and thought, “For that price, why not?”

And so, the Quonset hut enjoyed a vigorous second life after the war. Surplus huts were sold off, repurposed, and adapted to civilian use. They became garages, machine shops, workshops, storage sheds, farm buildings, and commercial spaces. Some people even turned them into homes, which required either admirable practicality or a very forgiving attitude toward curved walls. In a country that has always had a soft spot for affordable utility, the Quonset hut fit right in. Even today, there are Quonset huts on every continent, (yes, even at McMurdo Station in Antarctica).

But if the Quonset hut was so cheap, quick, tough, and versatile, why did it not become the default building of the American future? Why are we not all living in steel half-moons, waving cheerfully from our corrugated porches?

Well, because the Quonset hut, for all its virtues, is not perfect. Its shape is both its strength and its nuisance. The curved roof and walls make it sturdy and simple, but they also make the interior awkward. Straight furniture and curved walls are not natural friends. Cabinets sulk. Shelves become complicated. Ordinary windows and doors require a little fuss. If you want to divide the interior into neat rooms, the hut begins to object. If you want the crisp domestic dignity of a normal house, the Quonset hut replies, “Best I can do is a very competent metal tunnel.”

There are also insulation and condensation issues. Steel is many admirable things, but it is not naturally cuddly. Turn a bare metal shell into a comfortable year-round home, and you must start adding layers, finishes, and systems. By the time you have done all that, some of the original cheap simplicity begins to wander off in a huff. Quonset huts remain excellent for storage, workshops, garages, and broad-span utility spaces, but for ordinary housing or institutional use, more conventional buildings became more attractive.

There was also a psychological factor. After the war, many people were ready for permanence. They had spent enough time around temporary military structures to last a lifetime. A Quonset hut may have been efficient, but it also looked like war, rationing, mud, cold mornings, and government coffee. If given the choice between a curved corrugated hut and a nice brick house with honest vertical walls, many veterans understandably chose the brick house.

Even so, the Quonset hut never quite vanished. Many are still standing. Not in the grand, world-striding numbers of World War II, when roughly 150,000 were built, but in enough places to remind us that practical solutions have staying power. Some remain in military or industrial use. Others survive on farms, in commercial yards, or behind old buildings where they have spent decades quietly sheltering tools, machinery, hay, inventory, and assorted mysteries. They are the architectural equivalent of a dependable old mechanic who never brags, never retires, and always knows where the wrench is.

And that, really, is the charm of the Quonset hut. It was never glamorous. No one gasped in delight at its ornamental moldings. No poet wrote sonnets to its corrugated steel. But it solved real problems, and it solved them very well. It gave armies speed, shelter, flexibility, and thrift. It gave civilians an inexpensive building that could do almost anything. It was the kind of invention that wins wars, supports livelihoods, and gets very little applause because it is too busy being useful.

So let us give the Quonset hut its due. It may resemble half a soup can set on end, but history has been kind to it. In an age that often admires the flashy and forgets the practical, the Quonset hut stands as a reminder that sometimes the ugliest building in the room is also the most hardworking. And if it is not beautiful in the conventional sense, it has earned a more respectable compliment. It is one of the most useful buildings America ever made.

We may not have seen the last of the Quonset hut, however. NASA’s current plans for the Trans-Hab, the structure future astronauts will live in while on Mars, calls for an inflatable Quonset hut-like structure.

When Old Was Younger

milliorn@nmsu.edu (Mark Milliorn) — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:00:00 -0600

When Old Was Younger

The calendar insists that I have reached a certain age. In fact, the calendar and I are now in one of those long, bitter relationships in which one party keeps bringing up unpleasant facts, while the other keeps pretending not to hear them. Officially, I am rather old. Not “eligible for a museum display” old, perhaps, but old enough to remember President Eisenhower, which is no small thing in a country that now treats the 1980s as archaeology.

I still own an IBM Selectric typewriter…Not a keyboard designed to imitate one, mind you, but an actual Selectric—a machine built in that vanished era when office equipment was expected to survive direct artillery fire. I also still own both a DVD player and a VCR, because I am apparently running a branch office for obsolete media. I have clocks that need to be wound, which means that, from time to time, I must perform the same duties as a Victorian butler. My car’s glove compartment still contains maps that are folded the way maps always are (which is to say incorrectly). I keep them because I do not entirely trust a calm British woman inside a dashboard to tell me where I am.

I also still have a landline and it is listed in the phone book. That sentence alone should qualify me for federal historic preservation. Go ahead, look it up and call me! It won’t bother me since, during the great presidential-election hysteria of 2008, I removed the bell from the phone. You can still call it and, on your end, you will hear it ringing away like a respectable citizen’s telephone, but my end there is only blessed silence. Ever since then, life has been so peaceful that I have begun to look upon the mailbox with similar suspicion. A silent telephone was the gateway drug. Neåxt comes a mailbox with no slot, then perhaps a front gate, a moat, and a tasteful sign reading, “NO SOLICITORS, CAMPAIGNERS, OR PEOPLE WITH IMPORTANT NEWS”.

Lately, I have attended a great many funerals and hardly any weddings. That, too, is one of the unmistakable mile markers of age. At a certain point, your social calendar becomes less “save the date” and more “in lieu of flowers.” The musicians who provided the soundtrack of my life are mostly gone, as are many of my favorite authors, actors, commentators, comedians, and larger-than-life public figures. I still remember the names of the seven Mercury astronauts, which used to make me sound informed and patriotic, but now, mostly makes me sound like a museum docent.

All of that is standard old-age equipment—the usual set of rattles and creaks—but lately I have noticed something new, and it is profoundly unsettling. I am increasingly shocked to discover that I have lived longer than a number of famous people who, in my memory, looked absolutely ancient. Their appearance was not just older than I am now in spirit or in bearing, but old in the fully upholstered sense. They bore the face, the posture, the jowls, and the exhausted gaze of people who seemed to have been born old, lived old, and died old. And yet, examining one after another, I discovered that many of them checked out well before reaching the age I now occupy with such mixed emotions.

Perhaps the best example is Franklin Delano Roosevelt. I have read biographies of Roosevelt… and shelves of books on the war years, memoirs, histories, political studies, and enough wartime commentary to qualify as pedantic at parties. I know the photographs. I know the voice. I know the cigarette holder, and the grin, and the cloak of cheerful confidence draped over catastrophe. But somehow, it had never really struck me—in any personal way—that Roosevelt had died before he was even old enough to collect Social Security benefits under the program he helped create. Look at the man in those final photographs: he seems carved out of fatigue, worry, and world history. He looks like the burden of the entire twentieth century has been carried home on his shoulders. Yet he died at only 63!

That realization is becoming one of the rude little surprises of age. The mirror says one thing. History says another. Memory, meanwhile, lies shamelessly.

Most of our presidents look ancient by the time they leave office. The presidency is not a job so much as a public embalming process. It sands a man down in full view of the nation. By modern standards, though, many of those presidents were still surprisingly young. Take a dollar bill out of your pocket and look at George Washington. The Gilbert Stuart portrait that appears there was painted only three years before Washington died and he was just 67. Sixty-seven! In that portrait he looks like a man who was a passenger with Columbus. He does not look 67.

Then there is Lyndon Johnson. In November 1963, when he became president, I thought he was older than God and by the time he left office he looked to me as if the Almighty had been leaning on him. Vietnam, riots, domestic upheaval, the ceaseless grinding gears of power—all of it had left visible marks—yet, he was only 55 when he became president, and he died at 64. Those numbers simply refuse to line up with the images stored in my head. My memory insists on a man who looked weathered, battered, and Biblically ancient. The facts say otherwise.

Actors can be equally disorienting. When Spencer Tracy played Santiago in The Old Man and the Sea, he was only 57. Fifty-seven! Watching that performance and seeing the gauntness, the heaviness, and the air of a man who had seen every hard thing the sea could offer, I would have guessed much older. Consider, too, that Ernest Hemingway, himself, committed suicide at the distressingly young age of 61. Hemingway hated Tracy’s portrayal of his protagonist, reportedly saying Tracy looked more like Gertrude Stein than a fisherman, which is one of those literary insults too specific not to admire. The truly alarming part, from my point of view, is that I am not only older than Tracy and Hemingway were when they died, but older than Gertrude Stein was when she died, too! There are certain comparisons one does not enjoy winning.

War ages men in especially merciless ways. You can see it in the faces of soldiers, of statesmen, and of generals who have spent too long keeping company with Death. Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant are perfect examples. Given what both men witnessed, commanded, and endured—as well as the memories they carried afterward—it is no surprise that their faces show more than years: They show the knowledge. They show the strain. They show the physical toll of having lived through catastrophe on a scale no decent person should ever have to contemplate. And yet both Lee and Grant were only 63 when they died. In the photographs taken near the end of their lives, each looks much older, as though the war had reached forward and stolen extra decades as interest.

That, I suppose, is part of the lesson: People in the past often looked older at younger ages, partly because Life was harder, medicine was cruder, work was more physical, smoking was more common, stress was more visible, and leisure was less available and less therapeutic. There were fewer serums, fewer treadmills, fewer kale evangelists, and fewer dentists making everyone look as if they had been issued the same teeth by the Department of Modernity. They took on adulthood harder and much sooner. They also “dressed older”. Nobody ever looked youthful wearing a frock coat, a stiff collar, and an expression suggesting concern about tariffs!

Still, the shock remains. There is something unnerving about discovering that the “old men” of your memory were, in fact, younger than you are now. It rearranges the furniture in your head. It makes you wonder whether age is not merely counted in years, but accumulated in burdens, in wars, in cigarettes, in grief, in high office, and in the plain wear and tear of living before antibiotics, statins, sunscreen, ergonomic chairs, and the magical modern assumption that 70 is the new 50.

I do not entirely object to being old—there are compensations. Old age allows certain freedom of opinion, a welcome indifference to fashion, and the right to keep maps in the car without explanation. But I must confess that I do object to opening a history book, to studying some exhausted-looking monument of a man and then discovering that he died at an age I now regard as annoyingly youthful.

There ought to be a law against that. Or at least a warning label.

Havana Today

milliorn@nmsu.edu (Mark Milliorn) — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:01:00 -0600

Note. I haven’t been to Cuba. The three main sources for the information here comes from Reuters, The New York Times, and the Miami Herald. Any mistakes are solely mine.

People often ask what living conditions in Havana are like today. The answer is that Havana remains a functioning capital city—one with electricity, water, food markets, buses, taxis, apartment buildings, schools, and all of the normal civic furniture one expects to find in a metropolis. The trick is that many of these things operate on something closer to a suggestion than a guarantee. In modern Havana, daily life tends to be organized less by the clock than by the moment: when the power happens to be on, when the water happens to be flowing, when the bus happens to appear, or when the bread truck happens to arrive.

This is not to say that Havana has descended into some cinematic wasteland where residents barter shotgun shells for canned beans. The city still hums along. People go to work, children go to school, and tourists still sip mojitos while admiring pastel facades and 1950s Chevrolets. But behind that postcard image lies a city where infrastructure is aging, supplies are inconsistent, and the art of improvisation has become the chief civic virtue.

One quick note on tourism. Yes, Cuba is still getting visitor (mostly Canadians and Europeans), proving once again that human optimism can survive almost anything—including airline schedules, food shortages, and municipal plumbing. But the trade is running on four bald tires. Tourist numbers are down roughly 60 percent from the pre-pandemic days and are off about 20 percent from last year alone, which is less a slump than a trapdoor.

Part of the problem is the broader economic collapse, which tends to put a damper on the whole “tropical getaway” pitch. Part of it may also be the result of the Havana sewage system’s coming apart like a Soviet tractor during harvest. The city is dumping some 48,000 cubic meters of raw sewage into the bay every day, with some of that cheerful brew making its way onto the beaches. Add in the fact that over half of Havana is no longer properly connected to the sewer system, and suddenly, the tourism brochure’s promises of sun, surf, and Old World charm begin to sound less like a vacation and more like a gastrointestinal dare.

Let us begin the day.

Morning in Havana starts with a game of utilities roulette. Residents wake up and check the two most important questions of the day: Is the electricity on? Is there water? These are not rhetorical questions because, although city does have electrical and water systems, both operate with a degree of reliability that would make an American utility executive wake up screaming in the night.

If the power stayed on overnight, the refrigerator is still cold and the phone still has a charge. If not, breakfast planning becomes an exercise in improvisation. Electricity outages have become common enough that many households instinctively keep candles, battery lights, and portable chargers ready. Fans stopping in a tropical climate is not a trivial inconvenience.

Closely related to electricity is the equally thrilling question: Is there water? Havana does have a municipal water system with pipes, pumps, and reservoirs. The challenge is that pumping water requires electricity and fuel, both of which have been in short supply. As a result, water sometimes arrives on a schedule best described as “when circumstances permit.” Experienced residents respond by keeping containers, buckets, and tanks ready. When water appears in the pipes, it is greeted the way desert travelers greet an oasis—fill everything you own before it disappears again.

Breakfast in Havana is less about culinary inspiration and more about logistics. Food exists in the city, and markets sell it, but acquiring it often involves patience, creativity, and a willingness to stand in line long enough to form friendships. Bread lines are a common morning sight. Prices have risen sharply, and certain items appear sporadically. The result is that breakfast tends to be whatever combination of bread, fruit, eggs, or coffee happens to be obtainable that week.

Then comes the next great adventure: transportation.

Havana possesses buses, taxis, shared cars, bicycles, and the occasional heroic Soviet-era vehicle that refuses to retire. In theory, these form a transportation network. In practice, fuel shortages have turned movement around the city into something resembling an improvisational sport. Bus routes run but may be crowded or delayed. Taxi rides cost more than they once did. And bicycles—long neglected relics of earlier decades—have returned to fashion not so much as recreation as a necessity.

If a Havana resident once drove to work, he may now ride a bicycle. If he once rode a bus, he may now share a taxi with strangers. And if all else fails, he walks, because Havana is still a city where many destinations are reachable on foot—assuming the sidewalks cooperate.

The workday proceeds under similar conditions. Offices open, shops operate, and the city continues to produce and sell goods. But everything functions with a background awareness that the electricity might vanish, supplies might run out, and transportation might falter.

A shopkeeper may spend part of the day selling merchandise and the rest trying to locate more of it. A mechanic might devote equal time to repairing engines and hunting spare parts. The rhythm of work is therefore less about efficiency and more about adaptability.

Meanwhile, the city’s sanitation system is conducting its own experiment in endurance. Havana still collects garbage, but fuel shortages have reduced the number of operating garbage trucks from over 200 to fewer than 50. When fewer trucks run, trash piles accumulate in corners and along sidewalks. It is not exactly the glamorous Havana of tourist posters.

Speaking of the city, itself, we must address the matter of buildings.

Havana’s architecture is beautiful—faded colonial mansions, art deco apartments, and ornate balconies that look like something from a film set. Unfortunately, beauty does not guarantee structural stability. Much of the housing stock is old and poorly maintained. Cracked plaster, leaking roofs, moldy walls, and sagging staircases are not unusual. The homes of Havana are a metaphor for life in Cuba: beautiful façades hiding decay and corruption.

Every so often, a building collapses. Sometimes it is a partial collapse, sometimes a total one. Due to poor maintenance, the lack of building materials and amateur construction efforts to create new apartments by putting doorways through load bearing walls, building collapses happen often enough that residents view them with grim familiarity. Living in certain older structures requires keeping a skeptical eye on the ceiling during heavy rainstorms.

Housing anxiety is, therefore, a quiet but constant part of life in some neighborhoods. People patch walls, reinforce beams, and hope the next rainy season will be gentle.

Afternoons bring more of the same juggling act. A Havana resident might spend the midday hours running errands—buying food if it appears, repairing a bicycle, or checking whether a store has received new supplies. Lines form quickly whenever scarce goods arrive, and joining a line without quite knowing what is being sold is a time-honored tradition.

The economic landscape has shifted noticeably in recent years. Private businesses and informal markets have become increasingly important sources of food and household goods. Items may be easier to find in these markets, but they often come with higher prices. In short, goods exist—but they sometimes require more money than many households would prefer to spend.

The city’s digital life adds another layer of complexity.

Yes, Havana has cell phone service. People carry smartphones and use them regularly. The entire system runs through the state telecommunications company, which provides voice service, text messaging, and mobile data.

Internet access also exists and is widely used. People message friends, read news, and scroll social media like everyone else in the modern world. The difference lies in cost and speed. Mobile data plans can be expensive relative to average Cuban wages, and connectivity is sometimes slow or disrupted by the same infrastructure problems affecting electricity.

So, Havana residents do have internet—but they tend to use it carefully, stretching their data allowances the way previous generations stretched ration coupons. Users also have to remember that both the internet and cell phones are run by the state and are both monitored and censored.

Television is simpler. The city receives a modest lineup of state-run channels—roughly eight major ones. These include national channels like Cubavisión and Tele Rebelde, educational channels, a news channel, and a local Havana station. It is not exactly the American universe of hundreds of cable channels, but it provides official government news, sports, educational programming, and entertainment.

Then comes evening.

Dinner preparation again depends on the electrical grid. If the lights remain on, families cook normally. If the power disappears, dinner becomes an exercise in candlelight and creative cuisine. Refrigerators warm, fans stop spinning, and people drift outside to balconies and sidewalks to escape the heat.

Oddly enough, blackouts sometimes produce the most social moments of the day. Without televisions or internet, neighbors gather outdoors and talk. Rumors about the electrical grid circulate like weather forecasts. Someone inevitably predicts that power will return “in twenty minutes,” a statement delivered with absolute confidence and very little supporting evidence.

Night in Havana often reveals another contrast. Tourist hotels and certain central districts sometimes run generators during blackouts. Their windows glow while surrounding neighborhoods sit in darkness. Visitors continue drinking cocktails under electric lights while residents a few blocks away wait for the grid to recover.

Finally the electricity returns, at least most days, sometimes late at night. Phones charge, refrigerators hum back to life, and fans resume their gentle rotation.

And tomorrow morning, the cycle begins again: check the lights, check the water, check the market, check the bus schedule.

Havana today is not a city without utilities, food, or transportation. All those things exist. The difference is that they operate intermittently and unpredictably. But, every week, the services seem to decline just a little, forcing people to adapt just a little more, compromise again, with the certain knowledge that circumstances are unlikely to improve.

The result is a culture built on patience, ingenuity, and humor. People repair appliances that would be thrown away elsewhere, ride bicycles through streets lined with vintage cars, and keep spare buckets ready for the next water interruption.

In short, Havana remains very much alive—colorful, chaotic, and stubbornly resilient. The city is neither the tropical paradise sometimes imagined by tourists nor the apocalyptic ruin sometimes portrayed by critics. It is something more complicated: a capital where infrastructure creaks, shortages appear and vanish, and ordinary citizens navigate daily life with a mixture of patience, ingenuity, and dark humor. Somehow.

And tomorrow morning, when the alarm clock doesn’t ring (the electricity never came back on overnight) the whole adventure begins again.

Static, Dynamic, and Other Fairy Tales from New York City

milliorn@nmsu.edu (Mark Milliorn) — Sat, 7 Mar 2026 00:01:00 -0700

Zohran Mamdani’s latest fiscal sales pitch rests on a familiar political miracle: tax the rich, tax big business, tax a few luxury transactions, and the money will appear as obediently as my cat Charlie at dinnertime.

The Mayor says that unless the city and state governments enact his sweeping tax plan called Path One, he will be forced to enact a more draconian Path Two, a 9.5 percent property-tax increase that would hit more than 3 million residential units and over 100,000 commercial buildings. That is less a policy option than a budget memo written with a revolver on the desk.

Now, on a static model, this all looks delightfully tidy. Mamdani’s Path One, as reported March 6, includes about $3.0 billion from a two-point income-tax increase on filers earning over $1 million, about $1.75 billion from narrower corporate and unincorporated business tax changes, about $700 million from trimming the city’s pass-through entity tax credit, about $1.2 billion from new or expanded taxes on pricey real estate, and about $300 million from ending the sales-tax exemption on gold bars and other precious metals. Add the pile together and you get roughly $6.95 billion a year. On paper, that is the sort of number that causes politicians to speak in soft, reverent tones about “shared prosperity,” while taxpayers consider taking up drinking before lunch.

But a dynamic model is what happens when we admit, reluctantly, that taxpayers are not decorative turnips with deep roots. Dynamic analysis asks how policy changes affect economic behavior, employment, income, output, prices, investment, and therefore the actual tax haul. In other words, it does not merely ask, “What is the tax rate?” It asks, “What will people do when you change it?” The Tax Policy Center explains that dynamic analysis accounts for those broader macroeconomic effects, and that those feedback effects can either soften or worsen the budget impact of a proposal. So, the difference between static and dynamic is the difference between counting the fish in the pond and asking whether the fish can swim away.

A great example is the $300 million that Mamdani hopes to raise from the sale of gold. It is hard to imagine an investor who doesn’t already know that gold is available to purchase everywhere. New York City knows this, and says that if you purchase gold someplace else, when you bring it into the city, you will have to pay that tax. Unless they inspect the baggage of everyone entering the metropolis….

Let’s take the millionaire tax next. Static scoring treats the tax base (otherwise known as people) as though it were bolted to the pavement. Dynamic scoring asks whether some of those high earners will rearrange compensation, realize income in different years, move certain activities, change residency, or pay clever people in expensive suits to make taxable income appear less taxable. That matters in New York because the tax base is already unusually top-heavy. The Citizens Budget Commission (CBC) notes that in 2023, filers earning over $1 million paid 37 percent of New York City’s personal income taxes and that New York City residents already face a 14.8% combined top marginal personal income tax rate. CBC also says Mamdani’s proposed two-point increase would push that to 16.8%. When that much of the city’s tax revenue rests on so few shoulders, you do not need a full-blown stampede to shake the budget foundations; a brisk, offended jog will do.

Then come the business taxes, which in campaign rhetoric are always aimed at “the most profitable corporations,” a phrase designed to make the target sound like a dragon sleeping on a mattress of gold. In practice, the latest plan would raise city corporate taxes by 1.8 percentage points for finance firms, 1.77 points for other corporations, and 0.4 points for large, unincorporated businesses, while also cutting back the PTET credit to 75 cents on the dollar. Dynamic analysis here asks whether firms absorb the hit, pass it on in prices, reduce hiring, delay expansion, shift activity elsewhere, or simply get extremely creative with the legal geography of profits. And because the package also leans on taxes tied to luxury property and cash real-estate deals, dynamic scoring would ask the obvious rude question: what happens when fewer people decide to buy the penthouse quite so urgently?

CBC argues that New York’s tax burden is already the nation’s heaviest, that the state’s share of the nation’s millionaires fell from 12.7 percent to 8.7 percent between 2010 and 2022, and that the number of publicly traded company headquarters in New York shrank between 2020 and 2025 while Texas and Florida gained. That does not prove that every additional tax increase causes a U-Haul parade at dawn, but it does suggest that competitiveness is not an imaginary concept invented by hedge-fund lobbyists while they sipped champagne and ate canapés.

If Mamdani’s Path One tax plan were passed, New York City’s business taxes would be 8.73% higher than New Jersey’s, 14.73% higher than Florida’s, and 19.48% higher than the business tax in Texas. To put that in dollars and (common) sense, if Mamdani is successful in raising business taxes, J. P. Morgan can save $14 billion by moving to Fort Worth. And that’s each and every year.

So what would a plain-English dynamic model look like? Something like this: the static total is about $6.95 billion, because that is what you get when you assume the tax base salutes smartly and remains where it is told. But public documents I found list those revenue claims as straightforward amounts; they do not provide a published macroeconomic feedback score. So, the next step is necessarily an illustration rather than revealed scripture from City Hall.

Suppose the behavioral and economic effects of the tax increase shave 10 percent off the static forecast. That leaves a shortfall of about $740 million. Suppose the haircut is a more noticeable 17 percent. Then you are at about $1.25 billion. Suppose the reaction is fairly strong and knocks off 29 percent. Then the haul falls to about $2 billion. Same taxes, same press conference, same righteous language, but very different money.

Painfully, New York Mayor Mamdani is learning that proposing lavish new government programs is the easy part; prying the money loose to fund them is where the parade runs into the brick wall. Remember the promised government grocery stores? While they are still in the planning stage, the mayor’s latest proposals are more than $10 million a year more expensive.

All of this reminds me of an old joke. A politician dies and arrives at the Pearly Gates. St. Peter tells him that, by special arrangement, he may spend one day in Heaven and one day in Hell before deciding where he wants to spend eternity.

First, he visits Heaven. It is lovely enough: soft music, puffy clouds, pleasant people in flowing robes, and an endless supply of calm conversation. Nice, certainly, though a bit quiet for his taste.

The next day, he is taken down to Hell. To his astonishment, it is magnificent. The sun is shining, the fairways are perfect, and all his old political friends are there, laughing, slapping him on the back, and calling him by his first name. They spend the morning playing golf, the afternoon drinking excellent whiskey, and the evening at a splendid banquet with steak, lobster, champagne, and a cabaret floor show. The devil himself is charming, witty, and a magnificent host.

The following day, the politician is returned to Heaven and asked for his choice. "Well," he says, "Heaven is pleasant, of course. But Hell is clearly more suited to my temperament. I choose Hell."

So down he goes.

This time, when the doors open, he finds not green fairways and fine liquor, but a blasted wasteland of smoke, fire, filth, shrieking, and misery. His friends are nowhere to be seen. Demons are whipping the damned, the air stinks of sulfur, and the banquet appears to have been replaced by something boiling in a dented bucket.

The politician stares at the devil in outrage. "What happened? Yesterday this place was a country club. Today it looks like Newark during a sanitation strike."

The devil smiles. "Yesterday," he says, "we were campaigning. Today, you voted."

Galveston, Cannons, and a Boat Wearing a Bale Suit

milliorn@nmsu.edu (Mark Milliorn) — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 00:01:00 -0700

Galveston has always been a place where commerce, weather, and human judgment wrestle in public, and none of them likes to lose. Even in the Civil War, Galveston could not simply be “captured” like a polite chess piece. It had to be negotiated with, argued over, accidentally surrendered, loudly reclaimed, and then remembered—sometimes in brick, sometimes in splinters, and sometimes in the soggy afterlife of a sandbar.

When people talk about “the Battle of Galveston,” they usually mean the New Year’s Day brawl of January 1, 1863. But Galveston got two bites at that apple, because there was an earlier, oddly diplomatic showdown in October 1862, that set the stage for the main event. If you like your history with a dash of irony, consider it a two-act play: Act I consists of a naval squadron arriving with an ultimatum and a timetable, and Act II involves two of the weirdest warships of the Civil War.

Then, hovering behind it all—because Galveston never misses an opportunity to turn chaos into valuable real estate—is the Hendley Building, that still stands on the Strand, like a witness who refuses to be cross-examined without a docent present.

Act I (October 1862): The Battle That Began with a “Surrender,” and Ended with Everyone Leaving. On October 4, 1862, Union forces, under Commander William B. Renshaw, sailed into Galveston Harbor to demand surrender of what was (inconveniently for everyone involved) the most important port in Texas. The Confederate commander in the district, Paul O. Hébert, had already judged Galveston essentially indefensible and had removed much of the heavy artillery from the island—one of those decisions that makes perfect sense right up until your enemy arrives and asks politely—though heavily armed—for your keys. The Fort Point garrison did fire on the Union ships, and the Union replied by dismounting Confederate cannon with return fire.

Now, in a more orderly universe, this is where the city either falls or it does not. But Galveston is always different. Colonel Joseph J. Cook arranged a four-day truce, which he used to quietly evacuate his men to the mainland, which was technically a violation of the truce, but there wasn’t a referee, so he got away with it. The Union ships held the harbor, but the onshore occupation force was thin, delayed, and not exactly brimming with “we own this place now” energy.

Meanwhile, the Stars and Stripes briefly went up over the city, then came down again, because Renshaw had the awkward problem of possessing a navy but not possessing a town-sized garrison. In other words, Galveston was “captured” in the same way you “capture” a cat: you declare success, and the cat continues doing whatever it wants. Eventually, enough Union troops arrived to occupy the city.

Intermission: The Confederacy Invents “Armor,” Texas style. After October, the Confederacy did what it often did best: it improvised. When Major General John Bankhead Magruder took over the district, he began organizing a recapture. The land side would be a push across the railroad bridge with infantry, cavalry, and guns. The water side would be—how shall we put this—less traditional.

For the naval attack, Magruder placed artillery and dismounted cavalry aboard two river steamers, CS Bayou City and CS Neptune, under Captain Leon Smith. These were not purpose-built warships, but the naval equivalent of repurposing a delivery van into an armored personnel carrier because it was available, and because nobody nearby was operating an iron mill. This was going to be an example of good ol’ boys improvising.

Enter the cottonclad: a wooden steamer with 500 lb. bales of cotton used as protective layering, because iron plating was scarce, expensive, and generally not sitting around in coastal Texas waiting to be stapled onto a boat. Cotton bales could absorb a surprising amount of punishment—right up until they caught fire, at which point your “armor” became an enthusiastic bonfire with strong opinions. Still, it was an emergency and when all you have is a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail.

Meet the star of our show: the CS Bayou City, a Commercial Steamer with Military Aspirations. Bayou City began life as a 165-foot side-wheel steamer, built for commercial use at Jeffersonville, Indiana, in 1859. She was chartered in 1861 for service in the Texas Marine Department, operated as a freighter in the Galveston area, until taken over by the Confederate Army in October 1862—because nothing says “wartime efficiency” like reassigning a working boat from freight to combat and hoping the paperwork catches up later.

Act II (January 1, 1863): New Year’s Day Celebration, complete with Boarding Parties. The January battle is sometimes called the “Second Battle of Galveston,” because historians enjoy numbering things almost as much as generals enjoy naming them after themselves. What matters is that it was a combined operation: a land attack against the Union-held waterfront and a naval strike against the Union squadron in the bay. The Union had multiple ships mounting heavy artillery; the Confederacy’s floating punchline consisted of surprise, two improvised cottonclads, and a great deal of confidence.

At dawn, the cottonclads moved in. Neptune took a beating and was badly damaged; Bayou City pushed through and closed with Harriet Lane. Accounts emphasize the chaotic intimacy of the fighting—ramming, locking ships together, and then boarding, because once you have a river steamer wrapped in cotton, the obvious next step is to treat it as a medieval siege tower with a paddle wheel.

The land forces quickly moved into the center of Galveston, taking over the Hendley Building as an artillery position. Sharpshooters manned the windows while light artillery was positioned on the roof, quickly engaging the gunboat USS Owasco in the harbor. You can still spot cannonball or shell damage on the building’s 20th Street-facing side.

Meanwhile, the Union flagship Westfield managed to get grounded on a sandbar, which is the maritime equivalent of tripping over your own shoelaces during a duel. With capture looming, Renshaw ordered the Westfield blown up to prevent her falling into Confederate hands. Unfortunately, this task was done so speedily, that Renshaw perished along with his ship. Since the two largest Union ships were lost, the rest of the fleet decided to retreat.

When news of the loss of the Westfield reached Washington, Assistant Secretary of the Navy Gustavus V. Fox called it “the most melancholy affair ever recorded in the history of our gallant navy.” That is a remarkably dramatic sentence for a bureaucracy, and you can practically hear the desk drawers being slammed in Washington. When US Naval ships perform well, the name of the ship is recycled on later ships. Not surprisingly, the Navy never named another ship “Whitfield”.

Why the Cottonclads Worked (This Time). The trick was not that cottonclads were “better” ships. They were not. The trick was that they were good enough, at the right moment, in the right water, with the right blend of surprise, sandbars, and audacity.

Galveston Bay is not a featureless arena; it is a place with channels, shoals, and the sort of geography that punishes anyone who assumes the map is merely decorative. The Confederates exploited the fact that close action—boarding range—neutralizes some of the Union advantage in heavier guns. Cotton bales helped keep a charging steamer intact long enough to arrive at the part of the battle where muskets, pistols, and boarding parties could matter.

And then, of course, there is morale. Cottonclads look ridiculous right up until they are next to you, at speed, with angry armed men leaping onto your deck. Military history is full of bad ideas that work once, largely because the other side did not expect anyone to try them.

There is something perfectly Galvestonian about Bayou City: a commercial steamer repurposed into a warship by literally strapping prosperity to the sides and charging into a superior fleet. It is industrial improvisation, regional economics, and pure nerve, all stitched together with the confidence that, if you cannot outgun the other fellow, you can at least get close enough that the argument becomes a wrestling match.

The two Galveston battles also make a tidy paired lesson. October 1862 shows how a port can be “taken” in theory while remaining contested in practice. January 1863 shows how a desperate, improvised strike—cotton bales and all—can flip the board when timing, terrain, and surprise cooperate.

And the next time you are on the Strand, near the Hendley Building, look at the brick and imagine the view toward the bay: the smoke, the confusion, the sandbar humiliations, and, sliding into history on paddle wheels, a cottonclad steamer doing its best impression of an ironclad. History likes ironclads, but Galveston should be remembered for the cottonclad that made the Union Navy learn, the hard way, that geography, grit, and bales can all be weapons.

Three Centuries of Royal Scandals

milliorn@nmsu.edu (Mark Milliorn) — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 00:00:00 -0700

Andrew, the royal reprobate formerly known as Prince, is the first senior member of the royal family to be arrested since Oliver Cromwell caused Charles I to get an extremely low haircut. After the all-but-deadly-dull reign, at least morally, of the last two English monarchs, it is easy to forget that sexual scandals and assorted peccadillos are associated with almost every branch of the noble family tree.

Let’s review: The current royal family started about 300 years ago when Parliament ignored 50-odd closer (although Catholic) relatives of Queen Anne and imported a distant (but Protestant) German-speaking George I. (technically, it was 312 years ago, but 300 is close enough for conversational warfare.)

George I (r. 1714–1727): “I came for the crown; I stayed for the mistress”

George I arrived from Hanover with two main hobbies: being king and not being married in any meaningful emotional sense. His wife, Sophia Dorothea, became the star of one of the era’s grimmest “relationship outcomes”: separation, scandal, and long confinement.

George’s marriage to Sophia Dorothea of Celle was a dynastic arrangement that curdled into open hostility. By the early 1690s, the story goes, she’d fallen into a dangerous romance with Philip Christoph von Königsmarck, and the pair began plotting the one thing a court hates more than infidelity: escape. Then, in early July 1694—after a late meeting in Hanover—Königsmarck vanished as neatly as a secret dropped into a river. (Sources bicker over the exact date, but they agree on the result: Königsmarck was professionally disappeared.)

What followed was less romance novel and more administrative cruelty. George pushed through a divorce that assigned Sophia Dorothea all the blame, stripped her of status, barred her from remarrying, and—most viciously—cut her off from her children. She was sent into lifelong confinement at Ahlden House, effectively a “respectable” prison, where she remained until her death decades later.

If you’re keeping score, this reign sets the tone: the monarchy is now British, but the marital peace is… multinational.

George II (r. 1727–1760): “The mistress is a job, and it comes with a pension”

George II and Queen Caroline were, by royal standards, a functional partnership: she supplied the brains, the charm, and (when he wandered off to Hanover) the competent adult supervision as regent, while he supplied the temper, the uniforms, and the firm conviction that fidelity was a charming folk custom practiced by lesser people.

And yes, he kept mistresses—because in that court, a mistress wasn’t always “a scandal” so much as a semi-official office, complete with access, allies, and enemies. One of his earlier favorites, Henrietta Howard, even served in Caroline’s household, which is the sort of arrangement that makes you suspect the Georgian court ran on powdered wigs, port, and spite.

His most famous late-career “department head” was Amalie von Wallmoden, Countess of Yarmouth—a Hanoverian import who didn’t just get the king, but got a life peerage in 1740, neatly converting adultery into a title you could print on calling cards. In a world where access was currency, that made her a gravitational body: politicians orbited, rivals hissed, and pamphleteers sharpened their quills with the usual insinuation that patronage, policy, and pillow talk all lived in the same suite of rooms. Rumor even assigned her an illegitimate son by the king—exactly the kind of story that doesn’t need to be proven to be useful, profitable, and repeatable.

Think of it as an early form of government: the Crown, the Cabinet, and the Side Piece.

George III (r. 1760–1820): “A domestic man trapped in a family business”

George III is the palate cleanser in this menu. He was known for being comparatively devoted to Queen Charlotte, producing an impressive number of legitimate children, and generally giving the nation fewer bedroom bulletins than it had come to expect.

His greatest “scandal,” if you must call it that, was the painful fact that the King frequently talked to trees and was barking mad. At one point, he believed that he was George Washington leading an army against himself. In short: less randy, more tragic, and arguably the last time Britain said, “Ah, finally, a normal one.”

George IV (r. 1820–1830): “The Regency: now with extra Regency”

If George III was the calm, George IV was the compensatory storm. As Prince Regent, he specialized in overpriced luxury, drama, and romantic chaos.

George IV (a.k.a. “Prinny” when the knives were out) managed to turn the monarchy into a traveling show of appetite, debt, and romantic arson. Before he was even king, he secretly married Maria Fitzherbert—an officially unacceptable match—then watched his allies publicly swat down the rumor when it became inconvenient while begging Parliament to cover his exorbitant debts. From there he lurched into the spectacularly unhappy marriage to Caroline of Brunswick and when he wanted out, he effectively tried to weaponize Parliament of the United Kingdom into a divorce court, sparking a public circus of accusation and counteraccusation so lurid it came with paperwork.

Meanwhile, the popular press and caricaturists treated him like a walking moral lesson. Cartoonists didn’t just draw him as bloated—they helpfully surrounded him with the sort of “medical” clutter that screamed venereal panic (the Georgian-era visual equivalent of yelling “pox!” in a crowded theatre). And the “madness” angle wasn’t just a cheap jibe: he became Prince Regent because George III was incapacitated by severe mental illness. By the end, the punchline turned grimly physical—corsets, dropsy, gout, and enormous doses of laudanum and opium to blunt the pain—less “divine right” than “medicated decline.” This is the era that convinces people the monarchy is a soap opera with better furniture.

William IV (r. 1830–1837): “Ten kids, one actress, and then—surprise—respectability”

Before he became king, William IV lived for years with the actor Dorothea Jordan and had ten children with her. Ten! If you’ve ever wondered how royals manage “spares,” William took a… generous interpretation of the concept.

Then he became king and, like a man who suddenly realized the portrait painter had arrived, he pivoted into legitimacy and public duty. Not exactly a scandal machine during his short reign—but the prequel season was a doozy.

Victoria (r. 1837–1901): “Make it moral, make it domestic, make it an empire”

Victoria is the monarch most associated with respectability—partly because she and Albert made a persuasive brand out of family life. If the Georgians felt like a champagne spill, Victoria felt like a starched tablecloth.

That said, the Victorian era did have its murmurs: intense grief, intense attachments (Hello, John Brown), and a public image so carefully stage-managed that it practically invented modern monarchy PR. If Victoria had a scandal, it was the quiet kind: feelings that were not filed in triplicate.

Edward VII (r. 1901–1910): “When your coronation follows your social calendar”

Edward VII spent most of his long apprenticeship as Prince of Wales treating the throne like a distant inheritance and London society like an all-you-can-eat buffet with a dress code. His “Marlborough House set” ran on racing, cards, weekend house parties, and adultery so routine a schedule might as well have been printed on the invitations.

In September 1890, Bertie turned up at a country-house party at Tranby Croft and did what he loved best: played baccarat, a game that was, inconveniently, technically illegal, especially when played for stakes by the glitterati. When a guest, Sir William Gordon-Cumming, was accused of cheating, the solution was pure high-society logic: don’t investigate too hard—stage a hush deal. Gordon-Cumming was pressured into signing a written pledge that he’d never play cards again, and the Prince of Wales obligingly signed, too, as if the heir to the throne were endorsing a royal non-disclosure agreement on a tapestry-covered card table.

Naturally, this secrecy popped like a champagne cork. Gordon-Cumming sued, and in 1891, the heir to the throne was hauled into court as a witness—an event that generated exactly the kind of “fashionable matinée” atmosphere that screams useless monarchy. Gordon-Cumming lost, his life was effectively socially and professionally detonated, and Bertie walked away with a fresh layer of public disgust, because nothing says “future national figurehead” like getting caught in the blast radius of a rigged secrecy pact.

This was not a man who dabbled. He acquired official mistresses with the kind of regularity with which other people acquired umbrellas. Lillie Langtry became his first publicly acknowledged mistress in the late 1870s, and society treated this as news, not a shock. Daisy Greville, Countess of Warwick, later became his “official” mistress (and she was eventually replaced by Alice Keppel), as though the position came with a job description, and a handover memo.

And when the gossip columns needed a courtroom sequel, they got one: in 1870, the Prince of Wales was dragged into the Mordaunt divorce scandal, subpoenaed to testify, and forced to deny—on the record—that anything “improper” had happened. The court applauded, which is a very Victorian way of saying, “We absolutely came for the mess.”

Queen Victoria, meanwhile, regarded Bertie’s appetites as a personal affront to both morality and monarchy. The distress caused by his affairs hit the family hard, and Victoria’s grief after Albert’s death curdled into lasting bitterness toward her heir. She wrote, memorably, that much as she pitied him, she could not look at him “without a shudder”—which is about as close as you get to a royal parenting review in one line.

George V (r. 1910–1936): “The serious one, starring in a family of chaos”

George V is often remembered as dutiful, conventional, and sturdily monogamous—the monarchy’s answer to, “Can we please just run the country without a subplot?”

Unfortunately, the universe heard this and responded by giving him children and relatives with… plot. Which leads us to—

Edward VIII (r. 1936): “Speedrun monarchy”

Edward VIII reigned less than a year but managed to deliver one of the biggest royal crises of the modern era: abdication to marry Wallis Simpson, a twice-divorced American, in a time when that collided spectacularly with monarchy, church, and politics. Even after his abdication, Edward managed to create new scandals, at one time plotting with Hitler to serve as puppet king in a postwar England.

This wasn’t “randy” so much as “romantic defiance with constitutional consequences.” Still, if you’re grading royal scandals on impact, this one is a platinum medal.

George VI (r. 1936–1952): “Stability, courage, and no time for nonsense”

George VI is the emergency replacement monarch who turned out to be exactly what Britain needed during WWII: steady, hardworking, and personally respectable, with a marriage that projected partnership rather than chaos.

If you’re hunting for scandal, this reign will disappoint you. Its drama was national, not tabloid: war, duty, health, and the weight of a job he never wanted. The juiciest thing about George VI is that he makes people feel bad for ever enjoying the gossip in the first place. (Well, there is that story about smoking three packs of cigarettes a day resulting in having a lung removed in an operation at home…)

åElizabeth II (r. 1952–2022): “The longest reign, the largest scrapbook”

Elizabeth II’s personal life, by royal standards, was famously restrained—yet her reign became a museum of modern scandal simply because it lasted so long, and because the press got louder, faster, and more hungry.

Her “royal scandal” chapter is not so much “the Queen did what?!” but more of a series of her family’s private lives showing up on the evening news:

family marriages cracking under public pressure,
the media turning private misery into public sport,
and the monarchy learning that cameras don’t blink, and tabloids don’t forgive.

If earlier monarchs had scandals as events, Elizabeth II had scandal as weather—rolling in, blowing through, and occasionally taking the roof off the gazebo.

Charles III (r. 2022– ): “The sequel nobody expected to be this complicated”

Charles III arrived on the throne with a backstory already widely known: a long, messy, very public romantic history that played out over decades, and a modern monarchy trying to look timeless while living in real time.

If you want “randy,” this reign’s reputation is mostly inherited from Charles’s years as Prince of Wales—proof that in royal life, your prequel can dominate your present. As king, the challenge is less romance than management: family narratives, rebuilding public trust, and the small task of being a symbol in an age that distrusts symbols.

Which brings us back to Prince Andrew, who proves that selecting leaders by birth order has never once produced a slow-motion fiasco. If your family business is literally hereditary symbolism, it’s only a matter of time before one member treats the whole operation like a private club with unlimited guest passes and no bouncer. Andrew’s modern masterpiece was the attempt to talk his way out of trouble on television—an interview that didn’t so much “clear the air” as replace it with a thick, lingering fog of disbelief—followed by the palace doing what it does best: removing uniforms, patronages, and public duties in the calm, administrative tone usually reserved for reassigning a problematic office printer.

And then the plot did what royal plots always do: it escalated. Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor was arrested. If the Georgians gave us mistresses with titles and the Edwardians gave us baccarat in the drawing room, the 21st century gives us the inevitable endpoint of a system that foolishly breeds for primogeniture instead of judgment: not scandal as naughty gossip, but scandal as paperwork, police statements, and the monarchy discovering—again—that “born to it” is not the same thing as “good at it.”

The Surrender of Fort Fillmore

milliorn@nmsu.edu (Mark Milliorn) — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 00:01:00 -0700

Perhaps the first thing you should know about this little-known Civil War episode is that the geography is the villain of the story—or, at least, a co-conspirator. People love to imagine Civil War battles as neat little arrows on a tidy map. Down here in the Mesilla Valley, the map itself has been wandering around like a drunken steer. The mountains behave; the river does not.

And then there’s the border. When Fort Fillmore’s drama unfolds in July 1861, the “southern New Mexico” you know today is still the new wing of the house—added via the Gadsden Purchase in 1853–1854, which means the international boundary everyone takes for granted had been settled, locally, for only about seven years. That short timeline helps explain why some old maps look a bit… aspirational.

In 1848, the little community that became Mesilla was established west of the Rio Grande (and along El Camino Real). But the Rio Grande is famous for behaving like a living thing—shifting, braiding, cutting new channels during big floods, and (at times) flipping what people think of as the “east bank” and “west bank.” One technical summary of the 1860s flooding notes the river cut a new course that left Mesilla on the river’s east bank, and other local histories point out yet another course change later that helped produce the river’s present-day position.

That’s why old descriptions can sound like they’re contradicting one another when they’re actually describing different decades of a restless river.

Now, about Fort Fillmore, itself: if you’re picturing towering stockade walls and a gate you could drive a stagecoach through—nope. Fort Fillmore was a typical southern New Mexico “fort”: a cluster of adobe buildings, arranged around a central space, with one side open toward the Rio Grande. A visitor in the 1850s even described it as “large and pleasant,” with comfortable adobe quarters.

Fort Fillmore was established in 1851, across the Rio Grande from La Mesilla to protect travel and traffic through a corridor that connected settlements, trails, and commerce, and that also drew Apache raids and other violence common to the era.

So, keep that mental image in mind: Fort Fillmore was not a compact stone castle, but crude adobe structures in open desert country that was surrounded by nothing but tumbleweeds—hardly an ideal place to absorb a determined attack, especially from mounted men who could choose their angles of attack. This was a fort that you could demolish with a good garden hose much less a howitzer.

This may sound like the punchline to a bad joke, but it’s mostly a story about risk management.

Fort Fillmore was not built near the river, but on sand hills above it—a choice that made sense if you feared floods and wanted slightly higher, drier ground. The problem is that a river that shifts can turn “near” into “not near” with alarming speed. One widely repeated summary notes that after the Rio Grande changed course, the fort ended up being about a mile from the river and had to be supplied by water wagons, which, in turn, made it harder to defend in a crisis.

In other words: it wasn’t built where there was no water so much as it was built where water was close enough—until it wasn’t.

When the Civil War begins, the U.S. Army in the far Southwest is thinly spread, and everything is held together with small detachments, long supply lines, and optimism. In July 1861, Confederate forces from Texas under Lt. Col. John R. Baylor move into the Mesilla area. Baylor’s men are mounted, aggressive, and comfortable in desert campaigning.

At Fort Fillmore, the Union commander is Major Isaac Lynde, with several companies of infantry regulars and attached elements—enough to look respectable on paper, but not enough to feel secure when you’re staring at mounted opponents, on a jittery frontier, and insecure in the knowledge that your supply lines have been cut and that the rest of the nation’s attention is a thousand miles away.

Lynde marches out toward Mesilla, where Baylor’s men are positioned. The confrontation becomes what you might call a “confidence test,” and Lynde does not pass it, despite having more soldiers than the Confederate force. After a short fight kills three union soldiers, Lynde falls back to Fort Fillmore. This small battle is known as the First Battle of Mesilla. (There was a second battle about a year later, but it was so small that no one is sure exactly when it happened.)

This is the hinge point: once he returns to the post, Lynde has a decision. He can try to defend his mud fort or abandon it and try to save his command by moving north towards another Union fort. It was not much of a choice, so Lynde orders the soldiers to prepare to abandon the fort.

Now here’s where the story gets a little hazy. As part of the preparation to leave, Lynde orders that all of the fort’s stores that couldn’t be evacuated are to be destroyed. Whether the fort had a large stock of medicinal brandy or the Sutler’s store was oversupplied with whiskey is a mystery. What is known is that many of the soldiers decide that the best way to destroy the liquor is to run it through their systems. Many of the soldiers choose to fill their canteens with whiskey.

Perhaps they were worried about snake bite? As W. C. Fields said, “Always carry a flagon of whiskey in case of snake bite. Always carry a snake in case of thirst.”

Lynde wants an orderly retreat, leaving the Mesilla area and heading east into the Organ Mountains and the only source of reliable water nearby—the springs in the San Augustin Pass, about 20 miles distant. From there, they could move north towards Fort Union.

That was the plan. In practice, it turns into a slow-motion collapse. Men fall out, heat punishes them, the column straggles, and the mounted Confederates enjoy the luxury of mounted pursuit while the infantry fights the desert as much as any enemy. Southern New Mexico in July is as hot as a pawn shop pistol. The heat is stifling even in the shade and there ain’t no shade. In the middle of a New Mexico summer, I’ve seen trees chase dogs in hope of relief.

Baylor splits his forces, sending half through a narrow mountain pass that now bears his name. While his men are mounted, Lynde’s troops are on foot, struggling in the heat and are beginning to suffer from the effects of their canteens.

By the time Baylor closes in near the San Augustin Pass/San Augustin Springs area, Lynde’s command is demoralized and scattered enough that the surrender becomes, in Lynde’s mind, the least-bad way to avoid slaughter. He surrenders without a climactic last stand.

Baylor plays this well. He pressures, pursues, and presents Lynde with the sense that resistance will only mean pointless casualties. Lynde yields. Baylor has captured a Union force in spectacular fashion, and the Confederacy suddenly has a foothold in the region strong enough for Baylor to proclaim a Confederate “Arizona” government soon after, with Mesilla as its capital.

Lynde’s surrender detonates his career. He is disgraced, and the Army moves harshly against him. A War Department order drops him from the rolls “for cowardice,” effective the date of the surrender.

Baylor rides his victory into power. His proclamation and early Confederate control in the region make him briefly prominent. But Baylor’s story also curdles. He is removed from authority later after issuing an infamous order calling for the extermination of the Apache people—an act so extreme that even Confederate leadership moved against him.

Today, Fort Fillmore is not only forgotten, but it has almost completely vanished. Where the fort once stood is a large pecan orchard where the grounds have been expertly leveled to conserve the precious irrigation water. All that is left is the fort cemetery, located about half a mile southeast.

We need some way to commemorate this battle. Since commemorative runs and walks are the national hobby now, let’s do what any responsible civilization would do: every July, we should stage an annual Fort Fillmore Whiskey Run.

Participants will begin with the traditional gesture—all water bottles will be confiscated and replaced with a pint of whiskey—then participants will set off to recreate Lynde’s finest hour: twenty miles of ambitious decision-making through the desert and march up into the Organ Mountains. Finishers will be rewarded with access to the springs, which is a lovely touch of historical authenticity, except for the small complication that the springs inconveniently dried up around 1950. Still, details, details. History is built on them and is then immediately trampled by them.

A Look Back at the Bush Plan

milliorn@nmsu.edu (Mark Milliorn) — Sat, 7 Feb 2026 00:00:00 -0700

Every few years, someone drags Social Security out onto the national stage, shines a harsh spotlight on it, and announces—usually with the calm confidence of a man explaining compound interest to a golden retriever—that what the program really needs is a makeover involving Wall Street.

In the mid-2000s, President Bush floated the idea of “personal accounts,” and the discussion quickly collapsed into a familiar shouting match:

Republicans heard, “You can own your retirement!”
Democrats heard, “They’re going to turn Grandma’s check into a day-trading app!”

The partisan rhetoric doomed the proposed plan before it had any chance to be seriously studied or modeled. In the last two decades there has been no serious discussion about changing the Social Security system even though we all know it has serious problems.

It is roughly 17 years since the Bush Plan would have been in effect, so let’s do something unfashionable: let’s assume everyone remains calm, lower the volume, and walk through what the proposal actually meant, what it would have meant financially, and what it might mean for the average retiree today if the diverted money had been invested in a plain-vanilla S&P 500 index fund.

This is a blog, not a dissertation, so I’m going to keep the math honest, but not joyless. So, what was the plan?

The popular memory is that Bush wanted to “privatize half” of Social Security. The most concrete version of the plan that got widely modeled wasn’t “half.” It was more like: “You may divert a small slice.”

In the most widely analyzed design, the personal account would be funded by diverting up to 4% of the payroll tax, subject to a dollar cap that started at around $1,000 a year and rose over time. In other words, it was a limited diversion and not a full-blown transfer of the whole program into your Fidelity login.

That detail matters, because it means the personal account was never going to grow into a yacht for the “average” worker… More like a modest financial dinghy—possibly a very nice dinghy—depending on the ocean.

This is an important detail: Your Social Security check goes down if you opt in. That’s the part that gets lost in the political bumper-sticker version. If you divert payroll taxes into a personal account, your traditional Social Security benefit gets reduced. Not because the government is being mean, but because you didn’t pay those taxes into the system, so you don’t get paid as if you did.

The personal account in our model is that all the funds diverted go into an S&P Index Fund that grows or declines with the stock market. At your retirement, your personal account pays you something too, and your total retirement income becomes:

(Smaller Social Security check) + (Personal account payment) = Total

So, yes, your Social Security check would be smaller. The question is whether the personal account would make up the difference, and then some.

Now, the big hypothetical: What if the personal account was invested in an S&P 500 index fund?

The scenario we’re using

We’re looking at a new retiree in 2026 (turning 65 and retiring around now) who earned an average income each year.
They opted into the personal account in 2009 and contributed the maximum allowed each year under the capped design.
The money was invested in a low-cost S&P 500 index fund, with a small annual fee assumption (think “boring and responsible,” not “crypto enthusiast at 2:00 a.m.”).

What happens to the monthly Social Security check?

Under this scenario, the offset would reduce the retiree’s monthly Social Security check by about:

$276 to $284 per month (in today’s dollars)

So, if someone says, “Privatization would raise your Social Security check,” the polite reply is: No. It lowers the check, and then adds a second check.

What does the personal account pay per month?

Under the same scenario, the personal account would generate about:

$530 to $593 per month (in today’s dollars)

This is where the stock market does its dramatic entrance, wearing sequins.

Net result: total monthly retirement income. Put the two together:

Social Security check goes down: –$276 to –$284
Personal account adds income: +$530 to +$593
Net change: +$255 to +$309 per month

So, in this specific “average new retiree in 2026” scenario, the retiree’s total monthly income would likely be higher than under current law—by a few hundred dollars a month. And remember, this is what would happen if we diverted only a small portion of the funds into the private sector.

That’s real money. It’s not a second home in Aspen, but it’s also not “nothing.”

But wait: does that mean the plan “solves” Social Security? No, and this is where the policy conversation gets slippery. The trust fund problem doesn’t vanish; it shape-shifts.

Social Security’s financing challenge is largely a question of cash flow: payroll taxes come in, benefits go out, and demographics are doing what demographics always do—namely, refusing to ask permission as they run roughshod over your plans.

If you divert payroll taxes into personal accounts, the trust funds receive less money up front. But retirees still need to be paid their benefits during the transition. That creates transition costs. In normal-person terms, it means:

The government either:

borrows,
raises other taxes,
cuts benefits,
or it does some mixture of all three,

to keep sending checks while part of the payroll tax stream is being rerouted. The original Bush plan was to divert funds from the general fund into Social Security to match what was being diverted. If this wasn’t done, the Social Security trust fund would be in worse financial shape than it currently is. If Congress fails to divert funds, the trust fund, already in terrible financial shape, gets worse.

Could the long-term picture improve if the offset is structured a certain way, participation is limited, benefit growth is changed, or additional financing is added? Yes. But personal accounts by themselves are not a magic wand that makes arithmetic stop being arithmetic.

The inheritance question: What could the average retiree leave to heirs?

Here’s where personal accounts do something traditional Social Security generally does not: they can create a pile of money with your name on it. Under the present system, if a retiree dies after receiving benefits for only one month, his family receives a one-time death benefit of $255. The rest of the money the retiree paid into the system vanishes.

Under the same scenario, the personal account at retirement would be about:

$95,000 to $106,000 (in today’s dollars)

Since this money is in a private account, the total funds would be available to the retiree’s family upon the death of the retiree if the retiree opted to only receive the interest off the fund and not spend the principle.

In other words, personal accounts introduce a new freedom: you can choose a higher monthly income now, or a larger bequest later. Social Security, as designed, is much more “lifetime insurance” than “inheritable asset.”

So, was the Bush plan a good idea?

The honest blog answer is: it depends on what you’re optimizing for, and how lucky you get.

Potential upside:

A strong market period could boost total retirement income for average retirees.
Personal accounts can create inheritable wealth, especially for people who die earlier, or who don’t spend down the account.
People like owning things with their name on them. This is not a trivial political fact.

Potential downside:

Market risk becomes retirement risk. If the market does badly during your contribution years, or right before retirement, your “private” portion shrinks, but the offset doesn’t sympathetically shrink at the same pace.
The transition financing is real, and it can increase federal borrowing pressures in the years it matters most politically (which is to say, all years ending in a number).

The takeaway, in plain English. If an average new retiree in 2026 had been allowed to divert the maximum under the capped design, and that money had tracked an S&P 500 index fund through the 2009–2025 market run, then:

Their Social Security check would likely be about $280/month smaller,
Their personal account would likely add about $560/month,
Their total monthly income would likely be about $255–$309/month higher, and
They might have something like $95,000 to $106,000 in “surplus” account value that could be preserved for heirs, if they didn’t spend it.

That’s the sunny version, because the stock market in that period was, frankly, in a good mood. The darker version is the one nobody can calculate cleanly ahead of time: what happens when the market is not in a good mood, but you are still trying to pay rent.

And that, right there, is why this debate never dies: it’s a tug-of-war between the appeal of ownership, the comfort of insurance, and the unavoidable fact that the future is going to do whatever it wants, regardless of our spreadsheets.

With Foot Firmly in Mouth

milliorn@nmsu.edu (Mark Milliorn) — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 00:01:00 -0700

There is more than one kind of history.

One is the kind where armies march, treaties are signed, and professors write books with subtitles like A Reconsideration of the Strategic Context. Another kind is where someone opens their mouth, a word wobbles slightly to the left, and the whole world decides that a head of state has just confessed to being a pastry.

Let’s begin with the most famous baked good in the history of diplomacy, .a story every reader has heard whether they wanted to or not.

In 1963, President John F. Kennedy stood in West Berlin and delivered one of the great Cold War soundbites: “Ich bin ein Berliner.” The line was meant as solidarity: I am a Berliner, i.e., I am one of you, i.e., your cause is my cause.

Then, somewhere along the way, English speakers turned it into: “I am a jelly donut.”

This is one of those stories that refuses to die because it is perfectly shaped to satisfy a certain human need: the need to see the mighty humbled by a small linguistic banana peel. Presidents, after all, should not be permitted to stride through history like marble statues. We prefer them with a bit of powdered sugar on the lapel and their foot, if not in their mouth, at least in a bucket.

The problem is that this joke is largely an urban legend. In Berlin, the pastry you and I might call a “Berliner” is commonly called something else, and, more importantly, Kennedy’s phrasing is defensible in context. In other words, it worked as intended for the people listening, which is the whole point of communication, and also the whole reason this story is annoying.

But the legend persists because it highlights something true: language is treacherous, even when it’s not technically wrong. The ear wants what the ear wants, and the public loves a translation that produces an accidental confession of being a donut.

And once you realize that, you start noticing how often world events hang on the fragile thread of words.

Now and then, the translation isn’t a charming myth. Sometimes it is real, and sometimes it is magnificent in its wrongness.

In 1977, President Jimmy Carter visited Poland, and his remarks were translated into Polish in a way that turned perfectly normal diplomatic sentiments into something… spicier. Accounts vary in the exact phrasing, but the gist is that the President meant to say that he liked the Poles, but the translation said that he had a more intimate yearning for the Polish people that no president should ever express in public, at least not without a slow jazz soundtrack and a licensing agreement. Perhaps the verbal slip would not have been so funny if Carter hadn’t just the year before during an interview with Playboy Magazine hadn’t admitted that he had “lust in his heart.”

This is not merely funny: in-on it is instructive. Translation is not a word-for-word substitution game. It is real-time cognitive gymnastics performed in front of an audience, with the added delight that the audience will only notice you exist when you fail.

Interpreters are like football referees: if you’re talking about them, something has gone wrong. And this brings us to the first great law of international communication: The more important the moment, the more it depends on the least glamorous person in the room. Which is a comforting thought—unless, of course, you are the least glamorous person in the room.

If Carter’s Polish mishap was the diplomatic equivalent of slipping on a banana peel, Nikita Khrushchev’s most famous line was more like slipping on a banana peel while enthusiastically waving a lit road flare.

In 1956, less than a year after the Soviet Union had crushed the Hungarian Revolution—at a moment when the Cold War was running particularly hot—Khrushchev managed to assure the West that history itself would be doing the burying.

“We will bury you” landed in Western ears like a threat engraved on a missile. It sounded very much as if the Soviets were advancing with a gun in one hand and a shovel in the other and saw no reason to be subtle about either.

But Russian idiom does not always map neatly onto English panic. Many have argued that a more accurate sense was something closer to: we will outlast you, or we will live to see you buried, or history will bury your system. It’s still not exactly a Hallmark card, but it’s a different species of menace—more ideological boasting than literal burial arrangements.

Here’s the point: idioms are loaded weapons. In your own language, they’re harmless because everyone knows the safety is on. In another language, they can go off in the translator’s hands and put a hole through the wall.

So, if you’re ever tempted to spice up a diplomatic message with a colorful figure of speech, remember: what’s clever in one tongue can become nuclear in another.

Some translation stories are funny, some are scary, and some are both, depending on how much you enjoy contemplating the fragility of civilization.

In late July 1945, the Allied Powers issued the Potsdam Declaration, citing the generous terms for Japan to surrender and end World War II. In Japan, many of the top leaders, including Emperor Hirohito, were inclined to accept the terms subject to a few clarifications, but the response included the work mokusatsu, 黙殺; lit. "killing with silence".

While exactly what the Japanese meant will be argued forever, it is possible that Japan meant to imply “acceptance without comment.” There is no doubt however how that the United States interpreted it as “rejection by ignoring.” The mokusatsu episode is often incorrectly retold as though Japan insulted the United States and the United States responded with atomic weapons.

The United States did not decide to use the atomic bomb because of the Japanese response, instead they saw no reason to stop the already in motion plan to use the nuclear weapons. By late July 1945, the machinery of war was no longer waiting to be offended—it was waiting for a surrender.

Still, it is a sobering reminder that ambiguity is not neutral. When you are speaking to someone armed, nervous, and already halfway convinced you mean the worst, an ambiguous word is a match tossed near gasoline.

In everyday life, ambiguity is charming. It makes poetry possible. In geopolitics, ambiguity can become a Rorschach test that the other side fills in with their nightmares.

At this point you may be thinking: why does the jelly donut story outlive the truth? Why does “we will bury you” echo louder than the nuance? Why do we cherish linguistic bloopers?

Because these stories serve three human cravings:

1.They make the powerful relatable. A president who can accidentally call himself a pastry becomes, briefly, the kind of person who also once walked into the wrong restroom.

2.They offer the comfort of comedy. History is terrifying. We like our terror with a punchline, preferably one involving baked goods.

3.They warn us without preaching. “Be careful with language” is boring advice. “A mistranslation can make you a donut in front of the world” is advice you’ll remember.

And there’s another reason, too: these stories highlight the old truth that language is not a transparent window. It’s a stained-glass mosaic of culture, habit, and assumption. You can see through it, but the colors distort everything.

If you take anything from these tales, let it be gratitude for the people who stand between leaders and international chaos.

A skilled interpreter is not “fluent.” They are a professional mind-reader who processes meaning, tone, and intent, while also anticipating how a phrase will land in the other culture. They are constantly choosing between “literal” and “faithful,” knowing that those are often enemies.

Sometimes the faithful translation sounds less dramatic than the literal one, and the press will punish you for it. Sometimes the literal translation is accurate in words but disastrous in meaning, and history will punish you for that, too.

In other words, it’s a job where the only way to win is to disappear.

Which brings us, at last, to the king who could not disappear if he tried, because he was, allegedly, a rabbit.

In 1806, Napoleon installed his brother Louis as King of Holland. Louis, apparently attempting to be charming, tried to address the Dutch in their own language. The Dutch word for king is koning. The word for rabbit is konijn. Those words are close enough that, in the mouth of a nervous foreign monarch, one can hop into the place of the other.

Thus the famous anecdote: instead of saying something like “I am your king,” Louis effectively announced: “I am your rabbit.”

Whether he said it exactly that way, or whether the story grew in the retelling, is part of its charm. These lines often do grow, because people love them and repeat them, and repetition turns a wink into a brass plaque.

But the underlying truth is timeless: learning a language is an act of humility, and humility is not a natural posture for emperors, kings, and presidents. When they attempt it anyway, the universe occasionally rewards the effort with a joke that lasts two centuries.

And honestly? Of all the things a ruler might accidentally confess to being, a rabbit is not the worst.

Free Trade

milliorn@nmsu.edu (Mark Milliorn) — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 00:01:00 -0700

Trade is in the news again, with just today, several politicians—including our president—saying that the US needs tariffs to restrict trade. It is relatively easy to conclude that trade is evil, but nothing could be further from the truth.

In a perfect world, every country would embrace free trade, resulting in a happier and more prosperous world. And in a perfect world, I would be out putting on my private 36-hole golf course—not writing this blog. Since the world isn’t perfect and several nations are imposing strict tariffs on imported American goods, our president may be correct: perhaps we do need to adjust our tariffs, if only to encourage other countries to return to a policy of free trade.

We need to teach college students the principles of free trade for the same reason universities make students take freshman orientation: because a shocking number of intelligent people can still be trusted to do something spectacularly counterproductive if no one explains the basics to them. It is only through ignorance that someone would voluntarily accept the collective warmth of huddled masses.

Free trade is simply the scandalous idea that consenting adults should be allowed to swap what they have for what they want, without a parade of gatekeepers, forms, committees, and a policy memo citing “stakeholders.” It turns “this is useless to me” into “this might be perfect for you,” and it turns “you have what I want” into “let’s negotiate,” instead of “let’s regulate each other into mutual disappointment.”

Voluntary exchange scales beautifully, bureaucratic micromanagement does not, and the fastest way to make everyone worse off is to appoint the most self-righteous person in the seminar as the Director of Fairness and let them decide who deserves the snacks.

If you teach school, there’s a simple, low-effort way to show students why free trade keeps getting invited back into the conversation, even after everyone swears they’re done with it. It takes about ten minutes, requires no permission slips, and will cost you roughly thirty dollars, which is also known as “two-thirds of a teacher’s weekly budget for joy.”

Step one: go to the nearest dollar store and buy thirty random items. Candy, a puzzle book, a wine glass, a bag of potato chips, and a tiny flashlight that will stop working the moment it feels unappreciated. The details do not matter. (In fact, the more chaotic the assortment, the better.) You want a table that looks like a garage sale held during a mild panic.

Hand out the items so that every student gets one. Tell them they may inspect their items, but not open them, consume them, or break them. (In other words, you are running the most realistic economy imaginable.) They may, however, show them off to classmates, which will immediately create envy, disappointment, and the first great moral lesson of the day.

Now have everyone hold up one to five fingers to show how satisfied they are, with one meaning “this is basically trash” and five meaning “this fulfills my wildest dreams and I would like to name it.” Mentally add up the scores. In most classrooms, the total will land somewhere around 40 to 50, because fate has distributed the wine glass to the kid who wants gummy worms, and the gummy worms to the kid who wanted literally anything else.

Round two: announce they may trade, but only with the student sitting next to them. Give it a minute. Then have them rate their happiness again. The total will usually climb into the 60–80 range. It turns out that when you loosen restrictions a little, people can undo a little of the universe’s bad decision-making.

Round three: remove the training wheels. Tell them they may make their final trade with any willing student in the room. Two minutes of frantic swapping later, do the finger-rating one more time. Typically, the total jumps to 100+, and the classroom briefly resembles a commodities exchange, minus the suits and with more arguing over sour candy.

Then you deliver the punchline: no new items entered the room. Nobody manufactured anything. Nobody discovered a gold mine behind the whiteboard. And yet, the class’s total “wealth”—measured as “how much people value what they have”—went up. Why? Because trade helps stuff move from the people who don’t want it to the people who do. And the fewer the restrictions, the easier that happens.

In other words: trade creates wealth—not by making more things, but by getting the same things into better hands.

Trade does more than shuffle stuff around until everyone is happier with what they’re holding. It also does something quietly civilizing: it teaches respect for private property.

Start with the classroom experiment. Thirty random dollar-store items get scattered among thirty students, and the universe instantly proves it has a sense of humor. Somebody gets a puzzle book and wants candy. Somebody gets candy and wants anything that would not melt in their backpack. At first, the room is full of low-grade disappointment, plus that one student who is absurdly thrilled to receive a tiny panda plush, because the world is unfair in both directions.

Now, here’s the key point: the moment you announce that trading is allowed, the entire tone changes. Students stop talking like pirates and start talking like shopkeepers. They ask, “What do you want for that?” instead of, “Hand it over.” They begin to persuade. They bargain. They look for mutual advantage. They also discover very quickly that the whole game collapses if people don’t treat possession as legitimate.

Because trade only works if your item is actually yours.

In the first round, students are told they can examine the item, show it off, and complain loudly about it, but they cannot open it, eat it, or break it. That restriction is not there to ruin anyone’s fun. It is there because private property is not just the right to hold something; it is the responsibility not to destroy what you might later exchange. A candy bar is a tradable asset until you bite it… After that, it is just evidence.

Then come the trades. Watch what students do when they want something. They don’t snatch it, they negotiate for it. They offer something in return, and—this part is crucial—they accept “no” as a valid answer. Not always happily, but they accept it. They start to understand that consent is not a decorative extra—it is the foundation.

Private property sounds lofty until you realize it’s the only barrier between “exchange” and “chaos.” If anyone can take what they like, there is no reason to offer a better deal, no reason to keep promises, and no reason to plan. Everyone’s effort goes into guarding, hiding, and grabbing. In other words, the classroom turns from an economy into a feeding frenzy.

Trade is a practical lesson in boundaries because it teaches that ownership matters, not because the object is sacred, but because respecting ownership is what makes cooperation possible. When people can say, “This is mine,” and have it mean something, they can also say, “Let’s make a deal,” and have that mean something, too.

While trade creates wealth, it also creates something harder to measure and—arguably—:more important: the habit of respecting other people’s rights, because it turns out that a peaceful “swap” is a lot more profitable than a messy “take.”

Respect for private property is not just a domestic virtue: scaled up, it is one of the quiet foundations of peace among nations.

When a country treats property rights as legitimate—contracts honored, assets not arbitrarily seized, rules applied predictably—it becomes a safer place for foreigners to buy, sell, invest, and cooperate. That, in turn, predictability lowers the temptation to use political pressure, covert coercion, or military force to “secure” resources that could be obtained through normal commerce. In plain terms: if you can reliably purchase what you need, you are less likely to try to take it.

Property rights also strengthen diplomacy because they make agreements credible. Treaties, trade deals, and cross-border projects are all just contracts with flags on them. If a government has a reputation for confiscation, default, or expropriation, other states treat promises as temporary and hedge accordingly—often by building exclusionary alliances, by stockpiling weapons, and by preparing for confrontation.

Finally, respect for property supports trade, and trade creates mutual stakes. When businesses, workers, and consumers in two countries find mutual benefit from ongoing exchange, leaders pay a higher political price for conflict that disrupts it.

Nations that can trust boundaries—territorial and economic—find fewer reasons to test them violently and find a whole lot of good reasons to respect them.

The Problem With Affordable Housing

milliorn@nmsu.edu (Mark Milliorn) — Sat, 17 Jan 2026 00:01:00 -0700

Perhaps it is a sign of my age, but it increasingly seems to me like it’s always campaign season. The Republicans, having won the coin toss back in 2024, have elected to defend in 2026 while the Democrats will go on offense. While it is still months away, the Democrats’ apparent strategy for the next election is to defund ICE (since defunding the police worked so well in 2024) and to blame Trump for a bad economy.

The economy is actually pretty good, but accuracy doesn’t matter in election rhetoric and facts never matter as much as the appearance of things, so Trump is trying to make it look like he is working to make things “more affordable.” One of the common complaints is that housing is more expensive, particularly entry level homes for first-time buyers, so the President is adopting an oft-heard solution: forbid large investment entities from buying homes to derive income from rental property.

Every housing debate eventually arrives at the same emotionally satisfying villain: a financial institution, who’s wearing a dark suit and has a darker soul, (and—if we are being honest—sporting a monocle it does not need). (Most Americans learned their basic economics from playing Monopoly, which is a substantial improvement since our parents learned theirs from watching Frank Capra movies.)

The theory goes like this: “Big money” is buying homes, turning them into rentals, and therefore driving prices into the stratosphere. So, if we just ban financial institutions (or hedge funds, or private equity, or “people who use spreadsheets”) from purchasing houses, the market will calm down, prices will fall, and a grateful public will frolic through affordable subdivisions like it is 1997 again.

It is a great story with clear heroes, transparent villains, and the kind of moral clarity you only get from a plot that skips the boring parts like math, incentives, and supply and demand. The problem is that this solution—while political catnip—mostly aims at reducing demand, when the durable, boring, unglamorous lever that actually lowers prices is usually increasing supply.

Let’s unpack that, with only mild sarcasm and minimal property damage. First, the housing market is not a morality play. Housing prices are largely a function of something that economists use to ruin parties: supply and demand.

When demand rises (more people, higher incomes, low interest rates, migration, smaller household sizes), prices go up.
When supply cannot respond (zoning, permitting delays, labor shortages, infrastructure limits, neighborhood resistance, financing constraints), prices go up more.

Notice something critical: the “can respond” part is doing a lot of work there. If a city or region has strong demand and a system that makes new housing painfully slow, expensive, or legally impossible to build, prices climb whether the buyer is a schoolteacher, a dentist, or a corporation headquartered in Delaware with a logo that looks like a spreadsheet cell.

So, yes, investors can matter at the margin, especially in certain neighborhoods, during certain periods, or in certain housing types. But the bigger, long-run story in most high-cost markets (think every city in California) is that we are not building enough homes, relative to the number of people who want to live in those places.

You can chase villains all day. If the market is short a large number of units, it will behave like a market short a large number of units: it will bid up the existing ones. And it doesn’t matter who is doing the bidding

What happens if you ban financial institutions? Let’s say government passes a law tomorrow: “No financial institutions may buy single-family homes.” The crowd cheers, a bald eagle sheds a tear, and—for two minutes—Bernie Sanders smiles. Then the market reacts, because markets are like that.

Demand doesn’t vanish; it just reroutes. If a certain pool of buyers is blocked, the demand will shift into:

Smaller investors (LLCs, “mom-and-pop” landlords, partnerships, family offices),
Buyer proxies (entities structured to skirt definitions),
Out-of-state individuals, or
Owner-occupants who were already competing.

You have not eliminated the underlying demand for housing as an asset. You have mainly changed who is allowed to participate, and how they will structure their participation. If the fundamental problem is “too many people chasing too few homes,” rearranging the list of permitted chasers is not a structural fix.

Some policies reduce rental supply (and raise rents). If investors buy homes and rent them out, and you clamp down hard, you can end up with fewer rental options—particularly in places where single-family rentals are a meaningful part of the rental stock. Result: renters compete harder for fewer rentals. Rents rise. Then what happens?

Renters with resources decide to buy.
That pushes demand back into the ownership market.
Prices do not obediently collapse: they reallocate pain.

A policy that makes you feel like you punished the right people can still land the bill on the wrong people.

You will probably make new housing harder to build. Here is the unromantic truth: a lot of housing gets built because someone can finance it, aggregate it, manage it, and operate it at scale. Some institutional money goes into:

Build-to-rent communities,
Large multifamily housing, and
Infill projects that require patient capital and tolerance for bureaucratic misery (building within a city where infrastructure already exists, on a vacant lot, for example).

If you write broad laws that scare away capital—or make compliance a legal minefield—you can reduce construction activity. And reducing construction is an odd strategy for lowering prices in a shortage.

This is the key point: Supply is the pressure valve. Break the valve, and you do not get lower pressure. You get a louder bang.

Demand suppression is the “diet soda” of housing policy. Demand-reduction policies feel satisfying because they look like action, and they create the impression that prices are high because of a particular group’s behavior. Every politician loves a quick solution that fits on a bumper sticker and is a little too complicated for the voter to realize that it doesn’t actually work.

But the demand side is an economic hydra:

You cut off one head (institutions), and another head pops up (smaller investors).
You restrict another head (investors overall), and demand returns through household formation, migration, interest rates, and income changes.

In high-demand places, demand is not a tap you can casually turn off—it is a fire hose.

Even if you could suppress demand meaningfully, you run into another awkward truth: people need places to live. Housing demand is not purely optional consumption. You can defer buying, but you cannot defer shelter forever. Which is why, over time, the more reliable approach is to make it easier to build enough homes so that competition among buyers and renters cools down naturally.

Supply is the boring answer that actually works. If you want prices to fall—or at least stop sprinting away from wages—you generally need more of the thing that is expensive. In housing, that means more units, of more types, in more places, at more price points.

No politician is ever going to admit that in a campaign speech. It’s not glamorous and there is no single, obvious villain to defeat. You boost supply by lowering barriers—those obstacles that are usually in place because of another misguided government policy.

If you really want to solve the problem of housing, somewhere in the following list are the actions you need to implement.

Legalize more housing where people want to live. A lot of cities reserve vast areas for only one housing type: detached single-family. That is a policy choice, not a law of nature. Allowing more “missing middle” housing—duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes, courtyard apartments—can add supply without needing to build skyscrapers.

Speed up permitting and stop making lengthy construction time overly expensive. Delays are not just annoying, they are a heavy construction cost, and costs show up in prices. If it takes two years to get approvals, only certain projects pencil out, and only certain developers can survive the wait. Streamlining approvals is not a giveaway to developers—it is a way to reduce the waste, risk, and financing costs that are ultimately baked into what buyers and renters pay.

Reduce parking mandates and other silent cost adders. Mandating excessive amounts of parking can function like a tax on housing (especially in infill areas, where land is expensive). If you require every unit to bring its own slab of asphalt, do not be shocked when the unit costs more.

Build infrastructure that unlocks buildable land. Housing capacity is often constrained by water, sewer, roads, schools, and transit. If you want more homes, you need the pipes and public services to support them.

Encourage accessory dwelling units (ADUs). These are usually a second smaller home on the same lot, sometimes called a mother-in-law’s house or a casita. ADUs are not a silver bullet, but they are a real bullet, and those are rare in policy. They can add incremental supply in established neighborhoods, and they can create gentler options for multigenerational living.

“But investors are buying everything!” Investors are easy to blame because they are visible, and because “BlackRock” sounds more ominous and easier to blame than “the zoning board meeting that ran until 11:00 p.m.” But even if investor activity is inflating prices at the margins, the reason it can do so is usually that supply is tight enough that extra competition moves prices quickly.

In a well-supplied market, investors do not have magical price powers. If they overpay, they lose money. If rents cannot support the purchase price, the model breaks, and they stop buying. Tight supply is the condition that turns marginal buyers into major price movers.

So, if you fix supply, you do not have to win a wrestling match against every possible category of buyer. You just let the market do what markets do when there is enough product: create competition that lowers the price.

If you want a campaign slogan that actually lines up with the economics of the problem, try this: “Build more homes, faster.”

It is not as emotionally satisfying as “ban the villains,” but it has the advantage of being aimed at the lever that actually changes the outcome. Banning financial institutions is, at best, a narrow tool that might modestly affect specific neighborhoods under specific conditions, and, at worst, a policy that shifts demand around, raises rents, or discourages construction.

Meanwhile, increasing supply is the grown-up move: slow, procedural, unsexy, and far more likely to work. The housing market does not care how righteous you feel. It cares how many units exist. And until we build enough of them, the monocle-wearing villain is going to keep showing up in the script—because we wrote the shortage into the plot ourselves.

Let's Talk Carrots

milliorn@nmsu.edu (Mark Milliorn) — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 00:01:00 -0700

There is a great story from World War II that tells how the British were able to shoot down German aircraft because of a secret weapon: carrots.

When the Nazis began heavily bombing London in September 1940, the British ordered a blackout at night and began fighting back by sending up fighters to intercept the Nazi bombers before they could reach the English Channel. “Cat’s Eyes” Cunningham was the first British pilot to shoot down an enemy bomber at night, going on to rack up twenty confirmed kills, all but one of which were downed in the dark. Naturally, the public wanted to know how.

The Ministry of Information eagerly responded that the reason the RAF pilots were so successful was from the Vitamin A they received from eating carrots. Almost immediately, the Ministry of Food began using carrots to promote victory gardens to supplement the meager amount of rationed food available. A bespectacled Dr. Carrot told children it was their patriotic duty to weed those gardens.

During the war years, when sugar was rationed to eight ounces per adult per week, folks got creative, and they got creative fast. Carrot pudding, carrot cake, carrot marmalade, and even carrot flan leaned on plain old root-vegetable sweetness to do the job the sugar bowl couldn’t. And if that still didn’t scratch the itch, you could always pour yourself a glass of carrolade—a juice made from rutabagas and carrots and proof that when dessert is a morale issue, people will find a way (even if it involves drinking something that sounds like it ought to be used to clean a basement drain).

For the record, carrots won’t turn you into a human lighthouse. The whole “eat carrots and you’ll see in the dark” thing was less Grandma’s folk wisdom and more wartime storytelling: carrots do contain beta-carotene, which your body can use to make vitamin A, and vitamin A is important for normal vision, especially if you’re deficient. But if you’re already eating like a reasonably functional mammal, adding extra carotene doesn’t bolt on night-vision goggles—it just gives you a respectable carrot crunch and, in super-sufficient quantities, it will bless you with the sort of orange complexion that makes people ask if you’re over doing the spray-on tan.

There is no doubt that carrots are good for you, but Cat’s Eyes Johnson didn’t rely on vegetables to shoot down those planes: his interceptor had a new secret weapon—radar. In 1940, the British began putting Airborne Interception (AI) radar into night fighters. The early radar gave the crews a crude “blip” for a target’s range and rough direction; controllers on the ground would then “talk the fighter in”, using Ground Controlled Interception (GCI) until he was within two or three miles, at which point the onboard radar would guide the pilot close enough to finally see the bomber in the dark and make the attack. These early radar sets were primitive, fussy, and absolutely game-changing for night defense during the Blitz.

The carefully crafted stories about carrots’ benefits unquestionably fooled British civilians, and the idea that carrots were good for the eyes absolutely became one of those bits of nonsense that everyone knows is true. But it certainly did not fool the Germans, who were already experimenting with their own radar sets. After all, the Germans could certainly see those massive radar antennas that were erected along the Cliffs of Dover. Apocryphal stories of the Germans suddenly feeding their pilots more carrots should be filed in the same open-top cylindrical filing cabinet where we keep Bigfoot sightings and UFO reports.

For me, the most interesting part of the story is asking why the Ministry of Information thought fooling its own citizens was necessary in the first place. All the Allies and all the Axis countries knew the truth, so why couldn’t the citizens be trusted with the truth?

There’s yet another carrot story, and it’s a whole lot more fun than wartime marmalade. If you’ve ever wondered how Bugs Bunny wound up leaning on a carrot like it was a cigarette, and tossing out “What’s up, Doc?” like he’s got an appointment with your optometrist, the trail runs straight through a 1934 movie called, It Happened One Night.

That film was a cultural crowbar. It didn’t just entertain—it rearranged furniture. It helped define the screwball-comedy genre, it shocked the Academy by sweeping the five major Oscars, and it generated more “everybody knows” trivia than a barroom on movie night.

The most famous example is Clark Gable undressing and revealing he’s not wearing an undershirt: a moment that’s been credited—sometimes a little too confidently—with sending undershirt sales into a nosedive. The basic story is widely repeated, but the dramatic “75% drop” figure is closer to legend than to something you can audit with receipts, which is, honestly, the most Hollywood thing imaginable.

Then there’s the bus trip. The movie put Gable and Claudette Colbert on a Greyhound and later writers have credited the film with giving intercity bus travel a real bump in popularity: romance, comedy, and the open road, all for the price of a ticket and a seatmate who sings? That’s certainly remotely possible but it’s also patently unprovable.

Now, here’s where the carrots hop back onto the stage. A fast-talking character named Oscar Shapely keeps calling Gable’s character “Doc,” Gable mentions an imaginary tough guy named “Bugs Dooley” to rattle him, and there’s a scene where Gable munches a carrot while talking rapidly—a bit of business that Warner Bros. animators later admitted was the inspiration for Bugs Bunny.

But, just to keep the record straight: the line “What’s up, Doc?” itself wasn’t cribbed from Capra’s script. It was written for Bugs in 1940 (A Wild Hare), and Tex Avery, the director, later said it was just a common Texas-style greeting—“doc” meaning something like “pal” or “dude.” So, yes, Bugs borrowed the carrot-chewing swagger from Clark Gable, but the catchphrase came right out of Texas, not from a Hollywood soundstage.

Now, here’s the punchline to this whole Bugs Bunny business: a cartoon rabbit leaning on a carrot like it’s a cigar is basically where half the English-speaking world learned “rabbit nutrition”—and it’s about as reliable as learning automotive repair from Wile E. Coyote. Real rabbits don’t naturally live on sugary root vegetables and carrots are best treated like dessert—small, occasional, and not the main event. A steady diet of carrots will actually kill a rabbit. If you want to feed a rabbit something “carrot-ish” on the regular, the top green part is the better bet: carrot tops are a leafy green that fits the “salad” side of a rabbit diet, while the orange part belongs in the once-in-a-blue moon treat category.

Any good dietitian will tell you that you are safer taking dietary advice from Popeye than from Bugs.

Okay, that’s enough! Next week I’ll explain how the S.S. Minnow was a Wheeler Express Cruiser with a top cruising speed of only 12 knots, so Gilligan and the rest of the castaways were never more than 41 miles from Oahu. Geez, it’s like you can’t believe Hollywood at all

Is That Inflation?

milliorn@nmsu.edu (Mark Milliorn) — Sat, 3 Jan 2026 00:01:00 -0700

Growing up, I learned that “prices went up” is one of those phrases people use the way they use “The dog ate my homework.” That’s a catch-all excuse that explains everything and therefore explains nothing. It’s a little like saying, “History happened.”

But if you listen to the public conversation long enough, you’ll notice that we jam at least three different ideas into that one phrase:

A plain old price increase (the thing you buy got more expensive),
A relative price change (the thing you buy got more expensive compared with other things), and
Systemic inflation (damn near everything went up).

And because we treat these as interchangeable, we end up arguing past each other like two professors who are debating whether Plato would have liked TikTok. (He would not. He’d have published a dialogue about it and then banned it.)

So, let’s untangle this, and do it with enough humor to keep your blood pressure below “breaking news.”

“Prices Went Up”: The Great American Catch-All. When someone says, “Prices are up,” they might mean one price is up. Like eggs. Or gasoline. Or the kind of coffee beans that now require a co-signer. That’s a price increase—often caused by something specific: drought, war, shipping snarls, avian flu, or a mysterious shortage of whatever it is my grandson collects.

A price increase is usually local to a product, or a small set of products, and it often has an identifiable, concrete cause. The price rose because something got scarcer, or demand surged, or a regulator woke up feeling ambitious, or some jackass in California discovered that if you ate a half-ton of it within a single week it caused cancer. In other words: a price increase is a micro story. It’s just about that thing.

This is different from inflation, which is the macro story. Inflation is when the overall purchasing power of money declines, and a broad swath of prices rise—goods, services, and finally and a little later, wages.

So, the first key distinction is:

Price increase: “This thing costs more.”
Inflation: “Money buys less across the economy, and it keeps doing that for a while.”

If you want a quick gut-check: if only a few items are spiking, you’re likely looking at price increases and relative price changes. If everything is creeping up, and it won’t stop creeping, you might be dealing with systemic inflation.

Relative Prices: The Ratio That Ruins Your Dinner Plans. Now let’s talk about relative price changes, which are the economic equivalent of your neighbor buying a new pickup: the problem isn’t the truck; it’s what it does to the neighborhood pecking order.

A relative price is the price of one thing compared to other things. Economists love ratios because ratios don’t care about your feelings. So, when we say “beef got expensive,” what we often mean in practice is: beef got expensive relative to chicken. Suddenly chicken starts looking more attractive, and beef starts looking like something you buy only on anniversaries, funerals, and when your brother-in-law is trying to impress someone.

Relative price changes are important because they change behavior. People substitute:

· Chicken for beef,

· Store-brand for name-brand,

· “Maybe we don’t need a new bigger iPad” for “fine, I’ll just keep squinting.”

This is not “inflation” in the big, systemic sense. It’s the economy doing what it does: rearranging who buys what, and at what price. The prices of goods relative to other goods are constantly changing. It might be disconcerting, but it is normal.

Episodic Price Increases: The Price Spike With a Plot Twist. Now we add a wrinkle: episodic price increases. “Episodic” isn’t about whether something is expensive compared to other things. It’s about the shape over time. An episodic price increase looks like this:

· A spike,

· A surge,

· A brief moment of panic,

· Then a leveling off, and sometimes a partial retreat.

Think gasoline after a refinery outage. Think eggs during an avian flu wave. Think airfare around the holidays when airlines decide to test the outer limits of human patience.

So: Episodic price increase is a description of timing (“it jumped in a burst”). Relative price change is a description of comparison (“it rose compared to other prices”). These can overlap, but they don’t have to. You can have an episodic spike that changes relative prices, or you can have a broader inflation flare where lots of prices rise together, leaving relative prices mostly unchanged.

Inflation: When the Whole Price Level Decides to Get Ideas. Now we get to the big evil one: systemic inflation. Inflation isn’t just “prices are higher.” It’s persistent, broad-based increases in the general price level. A classic feature of systemic inflation is that it tends to show up across many categories:

· Goods,

· Services,

· Housing costs,

· And anything else that makes you ask, “Is that what I used to pay?”

Inflation often involves feedback loops: Businesses raise prices because costs are rising and they expect others to raise prices, and then, workers ask for higher wages because the cost of living is up, and next, higher wages push up costs for labor-intensive services, till finally, prices rise again restarting the entire cycle.

That’s not a single product’s story…that’s a whole economy’s story. And here’s the part people forget: inflation is a rate, not a level. If prices jump once and then stabilize, you can end up with high prices, but with low inflation (it’s expensive, but it’s not getting more expensive every few weeks).

This is why you can hear someone say, “Inflation is down!” and hear someone else shout, “Then why is everything still so expensive?!” and both can be right. The first person is talking about the rate of price increase. The second is staring at the new, higher level of prices like it personally insulted their retirement plan.

Tariffs: The Political Version of “Hold My Beer”. Now to the big question: If prices increase because of tariffs, is that not inflation? The most honest answer is, “usually not”, at least not by definition—but a tariff can contribute, depending on how it plays out. A tariff is a policy that raises the cost of imported goods (and sometimes key inputs), which often raises the prices of:

· The tariffed imported items,

· Domestic substitutes because producers can now charge more,

· And downstream products that use those imports as inputs.

That’s first and foremost a relative price change: the tariffed goods become more expensive relative to other goods. It can also be a one-time increase in the overall price level if it hits a meaningful chunk of the consumer basket. But here’s the key: a one-time increase in the price level is not automatically a self-sustaining inflation process. Whether it becomes “systemic inflation” depends on breadth, persistence, and reinforcement.

Tariffs look more like “a price shock” when:

· The tariff is narrow (a few products)

· People can substitute away easily

· Firms absorb some of the cost by lowering margins

· The central bank doesn’t “accommodate” it by letting overall demand run hot

· Wages and broad pricing expectations don’t spiral

That scenario gives you: “These things got pricier.” Annoying. Very real. But not necessarily systemic inflation.

Tariffs can feed inflation when: They’re broad and large, they hit key inputs across industries, they raise costs for lots of businesses at once, businesses start raising prices more generally “because everybody is,” and workers bargain for higher wages to keep up. At that point, tariffs can become part of a broader inflation story, not because tariffs are “inflation,” but because they can act like a cost shock that spreads and gets reinforced.

So, the best way to say it is: Tariffs are not “inflation” by definition. They are a policy-driven cost shock and a relative-price change. But they can show up in inflation measures, and in some conditions, they can contribute to inflation persistence.

Perhaps an example would help. If America imported all the widgets needed for manufacturing and every industry used them, a tariff on widgets would be inflationary. But, if manufacturers could substitute American made flanges for imported widgets, or it spurs domestic production of widgets at a competitive price, this is not inflationary as the cost of production is only temporarily increased.

This is all very confusing, so let’s put that into A Field Guide for Normal People.

If you want to decide what you’re looking at in real life, try this:

Is it broad? If only a few categories are jumping, it’s likely price increases and relative price changes. If lots of categories are rising, especially services, inflation is more likely.

Is it persistent? If it spikes and then settles, think episodic. If it keeps rolling month after month, think systemic.

Are wages chasing it? Broad inflation often involves wages rising too (even if they lag). A narrow price shock often doesn’t.

Can you substitute away? If you can dodge the pain by switching products, it’s often a relative-price story. If everything you switch to is also climbing, you’re in inflation territory.

Conclusion: Words Matter, Because Wallets Matter. So, yes, “prices went up” is true in the same way “water is wet” is true. But if we want to be precise (and occasionally sane), we should ask:

· Is this a price increase in a particular market?

· Is it a relative price change changing what people buy?

· Is it an episodic spike tied to a specific shock?

· Or is it systemic inflation, where the general price level rises broadly and persistently?

And if the culprit is tariffs, we can say that tariffs typically create relative price changes and often a one-time bump in some prices, and sometimes in the overall price level. Whether that becomes systemic inflation depends on whether it spreads, sticks, and gets reinforced by expectations, wage dynamics, and overall demand.

In other words, tariffs are not automatically inflationary—they’re more like the economic equivalent of tossing a wrench into the machine and then acting surprised when the machine makes a new noise.

Which, come to think of it, describes a lot of public policy.

The Wellerman

milliorn@nmsu.edu (Mark Milliorn) — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 00:01:00 -0700

If you spend more than fifteen minutes browsing the internet, you are likely to find a video of large, bearded baritones thumping a table while singing an old sea shanty, “The Wellerman.” It’s a catchy tune, but some of the historical references are obscure. Obscure historical terms are my métier.

The lyrics of “Wellerman” first lumbered into writing not in some brine-soaked 1830s logbook, but in the late twentieth century, when New Zealand folk collector Neil Colquhoun wrote down a version he heard from Frank R. Woods of Wairoa—a man who obligingly remembered the song but neglected to remember who wrote it. This is why the song lives in that legal limbo beloved of folk music, where everything is “traditional,” nobody gets a royalty check, and copyright lawyers begin to sweat. It might preserve scraps of an older whaling song, or it might be a comparatively modern composition with antique manners; the evidence is as thin as boarding house soup, the paper trail begins suspiciously late, and by the time anyone thought to ask, the author was either dead, fictional, or had wandered off with the sugar, tea, and rum. As a result, Wellerman remains uncopyrighted in spirit (if not always in performance), floating serenely between the nineteenth century and TikTok, owned by everyone and no one at all.

It is not at all clear whether my quoting one version of the lyrics here is a copyright violation. With that in mind, let me make it abundantly clear that I am NOT the author of any version of the song (most particularly the one I quote here). If pressed, I’m not even sure if I am the author of this blog.

“Soon May the Wellerman Come” (usually just shortened to “Wellerman”) is a New Zealand folk song about the shore-whaling world of the early 1800s. In modern pop culture it’s usually called a sea shanty, but it’s better described as a sea song/ballad (something you sing about maritime life, rather than a strict work-song timed to hauling). In the age of sail, hauling was rarely a one-person job. Dozens of sailors would pull together on the same line and timing mattered—everyone had to lean back and pull at the same moment.

That’s where work songs came in. A strict hauling song (a true sea shanty) has a strong, regular beat or call-and-response pattern so the crew knows exactly when to pull. The shantyman sings a line, the crew answers, and everyone hauls on the beat. If the timing was off, the work slowed—or someone got hurt.

So, let’s take the song a verse at a time.

There once was a ship that put to sea
The name of the ship was the Billy of Tea
The winds blew up, her bow dipped down
O blow, my bully boys, blow (Huh!)

In New Zealand, the whaling season generally began in late autumn to early winter—around May or June—and ran through spring, or roughly October. It is therefore the 1830s, and a whaling ship with the highly improbable name “Billy o’ Tea” has put to sea in foul winter weather, crewed by what the song cheerfully calls bully boys—that is, sturdy, high-spirited sailors, with bully meaning “fine” or “excellent,” not men inclined to steal lunch money. A billy, for those unfamiliar with antipodean slang, is a metal pot used to boil water for tea, which means the vessel’s name translates more or less to “the Teapot.” If we take the shanty at its word, this is almost certainly a nickname rather than a christened name, as there is no historical evidence for a whaling ship formally registered under anything quite that ridiculous.

After every verse comes the chorus, but I’ll just show it this one time:

Soon may the Wellerman come
To bring us sugar and tea and rum
One day, when the tonguin' is done
We'll take our leave and go

The chorus shifts the scene from danger to anticipation, as the crew looks shoreward rather than seaward and pins its hopes on the arrival of the Wellerman, the supply agent associated with the Weller brothers’ New Zealand whaling network, sort of an ocean-going grocery store that sold supplies to the whaling ships. “Soon may the Wellerman come” is less a prediction than a prayer: the men are stuck in the grim, oily business of “tonguing”—the nasty job of cutting blubber into strips for rendering—and morale depends on the promise that, once the gory work is finished, relief will arrive. The refrain is not a hauling song but a waiting song, sung by men whose work cannot be hurried, only endured, and who know that supplies, not heroics, will decide how tolerable the season becomes.

The promised comforts—sugar, tea, and rum—were not luxuries in the modern sense but psychological necessities in an isolated, freezing, and monotonous world. Sugar turned bitter tea drinkable, tea itself provided warmth and routine, and rum (usually diluted with water into grog) offered both calories and the temporary forgetfulness of drunken stupor. These items were small, lightweight, and easily traded, making them ideal shipborne currency, and their mention in the chorus is telling: the crew does not dream of gold or glory, only of sweetened tea, a warm buzz, and a brief return to civilization before the next whale appears offshore.

She'd not been two weeks from shore
When down on her, a right whale bore
The captain called all hands and swore
He'd take that whale in tow (Huh!)

The second verse brings the song abruptly back to business. Barely “two weeks from shore,” the lookout spots a right whale, the very species whalers most wanted, and the captain immediately commits to the chase. The verse compresses into a few lines what was, in reality, a carefully choreographed plan of attack: boats lowered, gear readied, orders shouted, and every man was suddenly alert. There is nothing romantic here—this is a calculated decision driven by economics. A right whale meant oil, baleen, wages, and justification for the risks already taken by sailing out in winter seas.

Baleen—often misleadingly called whalebone—was the plastic of the nineteenth century, a tough, flexible form of keratin that grew in comb-like plates from the upper jaws of baleen whales such as the right whale. Light, resilient, and springy, it could be cut, shaped, and bent, making it indispensable for corset stays, hoop skirts, umbrella ribs, buggy whips, and countless everyday goods in an age before synthetics. By the mid-1800s, high-quality baleen could fetch several dollars per pound—a substantial sum at the time—and on a single large whale the baleen alone might exceed the value of the oil rendered from its blubber. That economic reality explains why a cry of “right whale!” instantly transformed a cold, miserable season into a moment of grim opportunity: the whale was not just meat and oil, but a floating cargo of the era’s most versatile industrial material.

The choice of a right whale is historically correct. Right whales were slow-moving, migrated close to shore during the New Zealand winter, and—crucially—tended to float when killed, making them “right” from a whaler’s brutally practical point of view. For shore-based stations and near-coastal ships, they were ideal prey: large enough to be worth the effort, predictable enough to plan around, and valuable enough to sustain an entire season. The verse’s casual tone masks a grim reality—once the whale is sighted, the season’s waiting ends, and the real danger begins. (If this distresses you, it might be comforting to know that no nation currently hunts right whales, they are protected by several international treaties.)

Before the boat had hit the water
The whale's tail came up and caught her
All hands to the side, harpooned and fought her
When she dived down low (Huh!)

This verse cheerfully dispenses with suspense and dives straight into catastrophe: the boats are dropped, the men pull hard, and almost immediately the whale reminds everyone who is in charge by bringing its tail down like an airborne barn door. In song logic, this happens in about three seconds, which neatly skips the screaming, rowing, and horror that usually preceded such moments. Historically, this is perfectly plausible—whales did smash boats, flip them, stove them in, and occasionally scatter sailors like loose cutlery—but the verse presents it with the impending horror of a twister approaching a trailer park. One moment the crew is confident, the next they are airborne, wet, and reconsidering their career choices. It’s a harsh reminder that in whaling narratives, the whale always gets to land the first punch.

No line was cut, no whale was freed
The Captain's mind was not of greed
But he belonged to the whaleman's creed
She took that ship in tow (Huh!)

The following verse is where the song leaves history and dives into heroic nonsense: despite danger, exhaustion, and every sensible instinct screaming otherwise, no line is cut and the captain absolutely refuses to quit. In real whaling, cutting the line was a standard survival technique, not an act of cowardice—better to lose a whale than a boat, a crew, or one’s internal organs—but folk songs are written by survivors, not by safety officers. Here the captain becomes a symbol of stubborn resolve, the sort of man who would rather be dragged to the ends of the earth than admit defeat, while the crew loyally clings on and hopes the line holds. It’s less a documentary moment than a moral lesson delivered at sea: true grit is measured not by good judgment, but by how long you can ignore it before something expensive breaks.

For forty days, or even more
The line went slack, then tight once more
All boats were lost, there were only four
But still that whale did go (Huh!)

The next verse totally abandons history altogether and plunges into the realm of epic exaggeration, announcing that the struggle lasted “forty days or even more,” which is roughly thirty-nine days longer than any whale, crew, rope, or ship could reasonably tolerate. Real hunts took hours, sometimes a very bad day, but never a biblical testing period complete with slack lines, taut lines, and the gradual disappearance of boats. This is folk-song timekeeping at its finest, where endurance replaces chronology and suffering is measured in round numbers. By the end of the verse the ship is somehow still afloat, most of its boats are gone, and everyone involved has achieved legendary status simply by not drowning—proof that when sailors tell stories, duration expands in direct proportion to discomfort and distance from the nearest bottle of rum.

As far as I've heard, the fight's still on
The line's not cut and the whale's not gone
The Wellerman makes his regular call
To encourage the Captain, crew, and all (Huh!)

The final verse cheerfully waves goodbye to time, logic, and maritime accounting, insisting that the fight is somehow still going on while the Wellerman continues to show up on schedule like a dependable delivery service in the middle of an ongoing disaster. At this point the whale has become less an animal than a plot device, eternally towing the ship while supplies arrive as if nothing unusual were happening. Historically, this is nonsense, but narratively, it’s perfect. The verse turns the whole affair into folklore, where the real struggle is no longer with the whale but with boredom, hunger, and the faint hope that someone will eventually bring tea, sugar, and rum before the song itself finally runs out of breath.

By this point, you are probably comparing Wellerman to Moby-Dick—and it is hard not to. The song is set in the whaling world of the 1830s, while Melville published his novel in 1851. Was the song written first? Probably not, though the evidence is thin enough that no one can prove it either way. The one certainty is this: listening to Wellerman requires far less of your life than reading Moby-Dick.

Coffee Cans, Pickup Trucks, and the Slow March of Shrinkflation

milliorn@nmsu.edu (Mark Milliorn) — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 00:01:00 -0700

When I was growing up in Texas, every family had a pickup truck. Long before I ever had a driver’s license, I knew how to handle “three on the tree,” and I knew that the lug nuts on the driver’s side of Dodge pickups had reverse threads. I also knew that the glove compartment held a flashlight, and I knew that under the seat you could find a lug wrench, a bumper jack, and—wedged into the seat springs—a coffee can containing a roll of toilet paper.

To be completely honest, that can also contained a handful of napkins and a couple of books of matches. Every truck had that coffee can. When my wife and I bought an old ’63 Ford pickup back in 1973, it came with such a can already under the seat. Hell, the automakers should have made it standard equipment.

So, when my boys—What’s-His-Name and The-Other-One—recently each bought themselves a new pickup, I thought I would send them the essential equipment needed for any proper truck. Not jumper cables. Not a tire gauge. That coffee can. The rest they can figure out for themselves.

It turns out I can’t. They don’t make that coffee can anymore!

If we go back to the late 1800s, coffee was sold in whatever quantity you wanted. The clerk would pull the beans from a wooden barrel, scooping out a pound, and pouring them into a sack. Some stores roasted and ground the beans for you, or you could take them home and roast them yourself (usually badly).

In 1890, John Arbuckle began selling pre-roasted coffee—Arbuckle’s Ariosa—in paper bags. It didn’t take long for competitors to follow suit and begin roasting coffee commercially. There was, however, a problem: Once roasted, coffee beans immediately begin to lose flavor when exposed to air.

Hills Bros. solved that problem around 1900 by selling coffee in vacuum-sealed one-pound steel cans. This innovation is widely credited as the beginning of modern coffee packaging and paved the way for the standard one pound can that dominated American grocery shelves for most of the 20th century. (If you are wondering, Arbuckle—once the largest coffee company in the world—continued selling coffee in paper bags and was eventually eclipsed by competitors. History is cruel that way.)

And that’s how things stayed for roughly seventy years. You bought coffee in one-, two-, or three-pound cans, opened them with a key, and when the coffee was gone, the can went to work holding nails, loose change, toy soldiers, marbles, or a roll of toilet paper destined for truck duty. It is no exaggeration to say there may have been people who drank coffee primarily to acquire that steel can.

Once opened, of course, the freshness of the coffee began an immediate and irreversible decline. There was no factory-supplied reseal. People improvised with wax paper, folded cardboard, saucers, rubber bands, or simply left the can open and hoped for the best. Freshness was… aspirational.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, coffee companies began including free snap-on plastic lids to reseal the cans—an idea most prominently associated with Maxwell House and quickly copied by Folgers and everyone else. Even now, I would wager that one of those plastic lids is lurking in your kitchen junk drawer.

Then came the inflationary 1970s, when the price of everything rose sharply. By the end of the decade, the price of coffee had increased by roughly 40 percent, and the bean counters at the coffee companies began to worry. Would consumers balk at higher prices? Would sticker shock kill sales?

The answer was no. Coffee is what economists call an inelastic good. If you are dependent on caffeine, you will buy your morning cup of coffee even if it requires selling your children to pharmaceutical companies for product testing. Cigarettes, coffee, insulin, and water are all inelastic goods—the quantity demanded doesn’t change much when prices rise. Consumers might change brands, but they don’t quit.

So… Instead of raising prices too visibly, coffee companies made the one pound can just a little smaller. Sixteen ounces quietly became fourteen and a half. Keep the can looking familiar, make it slightly thinner, and hope no one notices.

This kind of thievery—I mean marketing—is called, “shrinkflation”. Candy bars, cereal boxes, laundry detergent, toilet paper rolls, potato chips—you name it—we got less of it for the same price. Almost overnight, the half-gallon tub of ice cream was replaced by the 1.5-quart tub. This is also when advertisers discovered phrases like “convenient size” and “portion control.” (The latter roughly translates to, “we want credit for your self-restraint.”)

The truly ironic part is that coffee wasn’t actually getting more expensive in real terms. While inflation raised prices, it also raised wages. Measured in hours worked, coffee became cheaper. In 1970, a minimum-wage worker needed about 28 minutes of labor to buy a pound of coffee. In 1980, it took only about 20 minutes. Shrinkflation was deployed to fight the perception of higher prices, not the reality.

Shrinkflation didn’t stop, of course. By the mid-1980s, the can had shrunk again, to about 13 ounces, accompanied by cheerful announcements about “packaging efficiency” and “improved roasting.” While roasting technology has improved over the last half-century, those improvements are about consistency and cost control, not about taste.

By the early 1990s, rising steel prices doomed the classic can altogether. In its place came the 11.5-ounce plastic “Aromaseal” container. To disguise the smaller size, the plastic was molded with deep finger dents—because who doesn’t remember how impossible it was to pick up a one-pound metal coffee can?

Within a decade, coffee began appearing in “canisters,” meaning cardboard tubes marketed as environmentally friendly. They are not. The interior of those canisters is lined with a metallicized aluminum-polymer barrier bonded with industrial adhesive. They are no more recyclable than the plastic containers they replaced.

Nor is the latest incarnation any better. Coffee is now commonly sold in 10-ounce foil bags. It took 130 years, but we’ve come full circle: we’re back to buying coffee in bags, just like John Arbuckle sold. The difference is that Arbuckle’s bags were paper, while modern “foil bags” are laminated composites—plastic films, metallicized aluminum layers, inner plastic sealants, inks, and adhesives that are chemically bonded

together. After a century in a landfill, all they’ll get is dirty.

I have a modest proposal. Let’s go back to the steel one-pound coffee can. When I eventually tire of using it to store nuts and bolts, I can recycle it—because nothing is more recyclable than steel. Yes, it will cost more than a 10-ounce bag of coffee. I don’t mind.

And you don’t even have to give me a plastic lid. I still have one.

So when my boys ask why their brand-new pickups don’t have that coffee can under the seat, I’m tempted to tell them it’s because modern trucks are more “efficient.” Lighter. Streamlined. Optimized. All the words we use when something useful quietly disappears. They’ve got heated seats, backup cameras, and dashboards that look like flight simulators, but they don’t have a place for a roll of toilet paper and a book of matches. Progress, I suppose.