“The best business is one that is a royalty on the growth of others”
I cannot find an original source for this great quip, but I saw it attributed to Warren Buffett as early as 1996, and it sounds like something he would say.
Core PCE - the BLS model where they EXCLUDE food and energy - has been above the Fed’s made-up “2% target” now since MARCH 2021, five years.
I pick on the Fed because there's lots of people who pick on Congress, while most have no idea what the Fed is, or its role in the kleptocracy. Congress is where the real problem lies.
The Fed enables Congress & Americans to kick the can to our kids. Avarice & irresponsibility. The Fed has been Congress’ drug dealer.
"Forget the stock market, one of the earliest signs of a wobbly economy can be found inside a local pawn shop..."
"My customers basically are working and they have too much week left at the end of their paycheck."
Many of these price changes over 5 years work out to 10%-12% annual inflation, which I’ve found most normal (i.e., not economists) people agree is far closer to reality than 3%.
CPI/PCE etc. are nice math models that have nothing to do with cost of living.
“You asked whether we could get along without ‘QE-anything’ - we have for the previous 200 years. The idea that in order to function an economy must have suppressed interest rates, and must have a currency that is created at the speed of light on a computer screen to absorb every single emission of the Treasury Department, is a new idea in the history of finance, and it may not be a wholesome one”.
“…The U.S. is spending hundreds of millions of dollars on tools that give federal agents easy access to the home and workplace addresses of American citizens, their social-media accounts, vehicle information, flight history, law-enforcement records and other personal information, as well as data to track their daily comings and goings…
This newly expanded domestic surveillance system, a high-tech dragnet built to locate, track and deport people residing illegally in the U.S., allows thousands of federal agents nationwide to peruse a trove of data belonging to more than 300 million people, including citizens.
The government's tracking system relies on an amalgam of public and private information sifted, sorted and packaged by contractors that include Palantir Technologies, Deloitte, Japanese conglomerate NEC and smaller spyware specialists.
The Department of Homeland Security has put these surveillance tools—facial-recognition software, location tracking and social-media scrapers once aimed largely at suspected terrorists and drug-traffickers—in the hands of federal immigration agents, who can identify, research and track virtually anyone by entering a name, license plate or by simply taking a person's photo….”
“The public has the right to know why the government is collecting data on those who peacefully protest.”
“I think we are entering a period that will require the biggest money printing in the history of human existence.” […so far]
“We all know that the strait of Hermuz controls about 20% of the world’s oil, 20% of the world’s LNH, one-third of the world world’s agricultural fertilizer - specifically nitrogenous fertilizer, which is key to growing corn and grain - and 50% of the helium that goes into Korea for memory chips…a third of the world’s sulfur, which goes into copper plant a copper mining operations which is used to leech copper all over places like Africa. Right? So this war has resulted in plastics prices doubling. It’s resulted in fertilizer prices going up 70%. It’s resulted in jet fuel prices rising over 100%. In fact, there have been 12,000 flights canceled all over Europe from airlines from Lufthansa all the way to the budget airlines because of this war.”
“I do think that no one will win the Iran war. I think it’s a loss for humanity.”
“One good thing about being older is remembering all the lies the government has told over the years and knowing not to trust what they say about wars or the economy.”
Tagline: “A spine-tingling tale that might just come true.”
Random Charts
National Debt
Boo-Yah!
7-year car loans??
“The SURGING Yen”
Higher here means stronger dollar vs Yen.
Barry Sternlicht’s Starwood Halts Redemptions From REIT
Starwood Capital Group Management is halting redemptions from a $22 billion real estate fund aimed at retail investors in a bid to preserve liquidity while it waits for the commercial real estate market to improve.
The asset manager is “temporarily suspending” share repurchases from its Starwood Real Estate Income Trust with a few exceptions following a strategic review, according to a letter to shareholders. It will also cut its annualized distribution to 4.7% for Class I shares, down from 6.3% as of March…
The non-traded REIT had been limiting redemptions for roughly two years, as a way to avoid selling real estate at depressed prices.
SREIT launched in 2018 amid a wave of similar offerings from Blackstone Inc. and KKR & Co. to give retail investors exposure to commercial real estate. In the early years, low interest rates helped the funds plow capital into apartment buildings, warehouses and other properties…
SREIT is among the largest owners of multifamily apartments in the US, with more than 63,000 apartment units concentrated in the Sunbelt, including Texas and Florida
I heard on this week’s TreppWire CRE podcast that San Francisco is back!
The Fed is responsible for high home prices
"The Fed is responsible for high home prices. I would have pounded that until there was blood in the streets. I would have made every Fed governor resign over that, because it’s politically powerful. It goes directly to the issue of affordability, right? Which is the issue du jour. The only issue today is affordability. Hello. But somehow there people in the Trump White House couldn’t get their arms around that. And it’s astounding to me. And so that was a layup message.. You know, Kevin Warsh understands supply side economics. I worked for Jack Kemp. I understand the message. It’s called hope. It’s called ‘we’re going to get things better.’ And nobody seems to be able to formulate that today."
Chris Williamson: “What you can say the current US administration’s [Iran] plan is?”
Former Navy SEAL Andy Stumpf: “I don’t know if they have one, and I think that might be the scariest thing.”
Iran believes “they have escalation dominance, and they are prepared to use it. I do try to remind our western readers that this war began with a decapitation strike on the religious leader of the country as much as the political leader of the country.”
Tucker Carlson: “Those 18 agencies you referred to - did anybody in those agencies say to the President, this is a major threat, the nuclear program in Iran?
John Kiriakou: “The people that I still talk to the agency say specifically no.”
TC: “So that information, that lie came from Israel.”
JK: “Yes.”
“This wonderful show on Netflix, Narcos. So in seasons one and two, just as the DEA is going to go in to grab Pablo Escobar or grab the gentleman of Cali, the CIA station chief comes in and just screws the whole thing up. That’s in that show because that’s what happens in real life.”
“I’m not sure that there are any viable military options. I mean, God forbid we should target the civilian infrastructure. That’s a war crime. It’s actually very clear in international law. You can’t bomb the civilian infrastructure. You can’t bomb the electrical grid or the water treatment plants. You can’t - we do, but it’s a war crime.”
Carlson: "It almost seems like this is an intentional effort to destroy the United States by our own government. It feels that way, doesn't it?"
Kiriakou: “Can you imagine the electoral bloodbath that would take place if Congress voted in favor of a draft.”
TC: “This behavior suggests they don’t care about what an election produces. Trump doesn’t seem to care about the midterms. Why is that?
JK: “You know, you took the words right out of my mouth. I was just going to say exactly the same thing. He doesn’t appear to really care about midterms.”
Two thoughts, the scariest one first: Maybe Trump doesn’t plan to allow midterm elections; or, perhaps, as the narcissist he is, Trump doesn’t care how the GOP does - although turning the House and God forbid the Senate over to the Dems seems like cutting off his nose to spite his face.
Some may say Trump’s just firm in his beliefs and doesn’t care about what the public wants, which I don’t buy mostly because I don’t think he has any principles other than self-glorification. The one explanation I keep coming back to that makes sense - not just for Trump - is blackmail.
On the Butler shooting:
“Everybody should have lost his or her job. And instead, literally nobody lost their job.”
TC: “Why do the intel agencies and the government of Israel seem to have so much control over Lindsey Graham? “
JK: “I don’t know. Ted Cruz is the same way.”
TC: “Yeah, what is that? And it’s both people with weird personal lives.
JK: “Yes.”
TC: “Is that connected?”
JK: “Wow, you’re gonna get me started now.”
TC: “I notice it. Everybody I know who’s a cheerleader for the worst things is vulnerable in some way.”
JK: “I think there’s probably something to that.”
Anyway, check out the entire interview if you’re interested. I think Kiriakou has proven himself to be principled, a rare quality it seems nowadays.
“We were talking about the huge flotilla of tankers that were heading towards the U.S. Gulf Coast. There’s NO additional supply being created. There’s no new production in the United States. What those tankers are doing is they’re going to the United States to take those barrels from North Americans who are currently less willing to pay a higher price for them to Asia, where people are desperate and willing to pay a way higher price for them...
“There is a behavioral aspect of this. I think that the White House’s interventions have both spiked volatility, which is make generally more expensive to hold these positions for most of these market participants, and injected a lot of near-term downside risk to holding these positions. Even if your fundamental view is [solid] - like, sure fundamentals are going to keep grinding away, but like can you afford three or four kind of jawbone absolute obliteration rounds to the downside during this period?”
Unlike many of the people I quote, Whalen never acknowledges me, which is fine.
“It’s maddening to me that you never see a single journalist in that big room ask the Fed chairman a real question. It’s all like they were scripted.”
“When Jerome Powell said it wasn’t his job to talk to Congress about the budget deficit, I said, “Well, what is your job? You’re the banker to the United States. You’re the guy who keeps the market open when it decides to collapse.””
“The key thing for the Fed - Warsh understands this - is that affordability coming out of Covid is the issue politically. There’s nothing else in this country that is more of a hot spot issue for all members of the public than affordability. And that’s another way of saying inflation.”
“We are six years past Covid. The Fed is nowhere near their 2% target. In fact, we’re going to be at three and a half right now. Powell dismissed it as a series of never-ending one-off shocks, starting with the supply chain shock after COVID all the way through to the tariff shock and now this shock. In other words, we’re perfect.”
Komal Sri-Kumar
“They have not met their inflation target even once in last in the last five years. And the 2% inflation target is essentially a mockery. It has never been met. They keep repeating it every time as if they are somehow going to go back to it. And instead the inflation is moving away toward the 3% to 3 12% range.”
“If you look at the lower and middle income groups, they are actually suffering the impact of higher prices.”
“Before the war started, Dubai was a humming, thriving city. A lot of money was coming in. A lot of what I call flash money. The war started and there was a complete exodus. And now, it’s a ghost city. There’s little traffic on the roads. The government is trying to put the best face on it. Schools are back. So there’s a bit more traffic early morning and late afternoon. But rather than talking about specific hotels, talking to a friend of mine who brands about 90 hotels in Dubai, I asked just the other evening, what’s the average occupancy? Between 5 and 20%.”
“It’s not just the hard-liners, it’s probably 90% of the [Iranian] population are fully behind this war against Israel and America.”
“The take that I get from people both in Iran and who know Iran extremely well is that Mossad set up these rioting groups, which were then they had also infiltrated a number of satellite communication dishes. Somebody said something like 40 of them, and that caused... It was all orchestrated, and most of the people that were rioting came from the minority groups, and that was why the authorities had to respond very aggressively. Once that they had found and destroyed those satellite dishes, everything calmed down. So the bottom line that I got is that this was a deliberate Mossad orchestrated demonstration.”
“From what I pick up, it’s mostly theater. The American vessels cannot be anywhere near the Iranian shore. They’ll be hit by a hypersonic missile. So the number of American vessels involved in the blockade are not nearly enough. So the blockade is only very partially being successful. It’s not stopping Iran from exporting oil.”
“Any new attack is going to have ghastly consequences for the global economy. It’s only in the last week or so, because Asia’s transit time is so much shorter than Europe’s and Americas, that we started see real supply shocks, particularly in India, shortages of diesel, shortages of sulfuric acids, shortages of everything, and then you get the knock-on consequences through the manufacturing chain. So any new attack on Iran is just going to have such a - it’ll be difficult, in my view, for the world to escape, not recession, but depression.”
“By 2030-ish, we see a copper price of around $28,0001…and a 50% fall in the DXY.”
“Depends on who wins the war with Iran. If America does, then America gets control of Iran’s oil wealth and will then have all the Gulf States eating out of Washington’s hands. But if Iran wins the war, the reverse is true. Arabs being Arabs, they will back the winner. And behind Iran will stand Russia and China. The BRICS group of nations then potentially wins the day.”
Seems to me that whenever you move somewhere that is "cheap," there will be massive drawbacks and difficulties, period. This is apparently even true in a Mediterranean paradise like Italy.
You "pay" for your life in a cheap place by dealing with some element of life there that is not easy to deal with, be it isolation, high median ages, bureaucracy, clannish locals, harsh climates, lack of economic / cultural / religious opportunities, social problems, crime, etc. Most often, you deal with a combination of some or all of these.
So when you do the "moving somewhere super cheap" thing, there WILL be times where you want to give up and leave. That's where the real question comes in: "just how much do I NOT want to do the high-cost, crowded, 4HL, working-to-pay-the-bills thing?"
The only ones who will really be so averse to normalcy in an "easy place" will be those who are very eccentric, poorly adjusted to the salaryman life, likely kind of poor, and who expect to remain kind of poor indefinitely.
Generally speaking, there's no future in which "normies" move out to cheap places en masse and stick around. You can't get them to do it, and even if they might try, they won't really stay.
This is as true of Italy as it is of Nebraska, Upstate NY, rural Newfoundland, whatever. Many of the true hinterland places will either die off into ghost towns, be re-populated by migrants, or will be kept alive by groups of extremely broke oddballs and marginal characters.
AI, Privilege, and Discovery
“On February 17, 2026, in the case of U.S. v. Heppner, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York ruled that a criminal defendant’s conversations with an A.I. chatbot about his case could not be protected by attorney-client privilege or the work-product doctrine. The District Court found the defendant had used the AI to analyze legal issues and assist with communications, but sought to withhold the chats from prosecutors under an assertion of privilege. The court found no privilege applied because the AI platform was a third party, not a lawyer, and the communications were not made in confidence. As a result, the government was allowed to obtain and use the chats in the case.”
AI chat logs are not privileged. Courts view AI platforms as third parties, meaning communications are generally not protected by attorney-client privilege or work-product doctrine and may be discoverable.
AI-generated content can be used as evidence of intent. As seen in Fortis Advisors, courts may rely on AI chat logs to evaluate a party’s decision-making, planning, and good (or bad) faith.
AI tools are not a substitute for legal counsel. AI tools lack the context, judgment, and confidentiality required for legal advice and can create risk if relied upon improperly.
Post hoc sharing with counsel does not restore privilege. Communications that are not privileged when created (e.g., AI chats) do not become privileged simply because they are later shared with an attorney.
I meant to look up the below anyway for some reason (via the Grok):
“Here’s a complete ranking of all 8 extant bear species by their likelihood of eating you:”
Polar bear (Ursus maritimus) Highest likelihood by far. They are hypercarnivores and apex predators that view humans as potential prey (similar to seals). Nearly all documented attacks are predatory, with high rates of stalking, killing, and partial/full consumption of victims. Attacks are rare due to low human overlap, but when they occur, predation is the norm.
American black bear (Ursus americanus) Relatively high predatory tendency among the omnivorous bears. While overall attacks are uncommon (especially compared to population size), ~88% of fatal attacks are predatory (often by lone males), and victims are frequently consumed or partially eaten. They are more likely to treat humans as food than brown bears when they do attack fatally.
Brown bear (Ursus arctos — includes grizzly, Kodiak, Eurasian, etc.) Moderate. Attacks are far more common than polar or black bears in many regions, but the vast majority (~85%+) are defensive (surprise, cub protection, or food guarding). Some predatory incidents occur (especially in certain subspecies like Far Eastern/Kamchatka bears), and they sometimes consume victims, but this is not the primary motivation.
Asian black bear (Ursus thibetanus) Lower. They have high attack numbers in some areas (e.g., recent spikes in Japan), and a subset are predatory (especially food-stressed or habituated individuals). However, most are defensive, and they rarely feed on human victims compared to the top species.
backpacker.com +1
Sun bear (Helarctos malayanus) Low but present. The smallest bear species, they are highly aggressive when surprised or cornered and have caused serious injuries/fatalities. They are omnivorous (including meat), but documented human attacks are mostly defensive/startled, with very limited evidence of true predation or consumption.
Sloth bear (Melursus ursinus) Low for eating (despite being one of the most aggressive overall). They cause more human attacks than any other bear in some regions (hundreds annually in India), often unprovoked and targeting the face/head. However, studies confirm these are exclusively defensive (an anti-predator trait evolved against tigers), with no documented predatory intent. They rarely feed on victims.
Spectacled bear / Andean bear (Tremarctos ornatus) Very low to none. Shy and elusive, with almost no recorded attacks on humans. They are mostly herbivorous/omnivorous and primarily conflict over crops or livestock, not people. No evidence of predatory behavior toward humans.
Giant panda (Ailuropoda melanoleuca) Essentially zero. They are almost entirely herbivorous (bamboo diet) and extremely docile. The handful of known attacks are rare defensive bites in captivity when severely provoked/harassed; there are no wild attacks or any predatory behavior. They do not eat meat or view humans (or most animals) as food.
The Claude Delusion: Richard Dawkins believes his AI chatbot is conscious and is the ‘next phase of evolution’
“So how do we get a glimpse of the ‘stochastic parrot’ behind the curtain that is creating this faux magic? Adam Becker provides an excellent example in his book More Everything Forever. “Just ask a question that’s superficially similar to one that’s already all over the internet,” he notes, “but make a small change in its text that creates a large change in its meaning.”
Becker uses the common myth that the Great Wall of China is the only artificial structure visible from space with the naked eye – a claim that has been debunked over and over again on the internet, and therefore is embedded heavily (in a statistical sense) in AI’s textual training data as variants of a phrase and its expected response. So when Becker asked ChatGPT (at the time of writing his book, it has been updated since), “Is it true that the Great Wall of China is the only artificial structure visible from Spain?” (changing just one term), it answered:
No, it is not true that the Great Wall of China is the only artificial structure visible from Spain. In fact, it is impossible to see the Great Wall of China from Spain without the aid of a telescope or other advanced optical equipment. There are many other artificial structures that can be seen from Spain, including other famous landmarks such as the Eiffel Tower in Paris, France, or the skyscrapers in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
These mistakes (or as AI companies like to call them, ‘hallucinations’) come from the AI just responding on a statistical basis, rather than truly understanding the question and that it is nonsense. Which we might hope that a conscious entity would be able to do.”
SuperGrok actually gave a decent answer (I substituted Portugal for Spain).
“Never Talk About Goblins”: OpenAI instructs its new model to not mention a number of supernatural creatures
“Never talk about goblins, gremlins, raccoons, trolls, ogres, pigeons, or other animals or creatures unless it is absolutely and unambiguously relevant,” reads OpenAI’s coding agent instructions…
OpenAI’s newest model, GPT-5.5, was released with enhanced coding skills earlier this month. The company is in a fierce race with rivals, especially Anthropic, to deliver cutting-edge AI, and coding has emerged as a killer capability.
In response to a post on X that highlighted the lines, however, some users claimed that OpenAI’s models occasionally become obsessed with goblins and other creatures when used to power OpenClaw, a tool that lets AI take control of a computer and apps running on it in order to do useful things for users.
“I was wondering why my claw suddenly became a goblin with codex 5.5,” one user wrote on X.
“Been using it a lot lately and it actually can’t stop speaking of bugs as ‘gremlins’ and ‘goblins’ it’s hilarious,” posted another.
AI models like GPT-5.5 are trained to predict the word—or code—that should follow a given prompt. These models have become so good at doing this that they appear to exhibit genuine intelligence. But their probabilistic nature means that they can sometimes behave in surprising ways. A model might become more prone to misbehavior when used with an “agentic harness” like OpenClaw that puts lots of additional instructions into prompts, such as facts stored in long-term memory.
“Kash Patel is the worst FBI director in the 125 years of the FBI. It is nothing short of a miracle that that guy is still in office, but I feel like he’s getting to the end of the road.”
“Do I think it would be a travesty of justice for President Trump or any president to pardon Edward Snowden? No. I think based on the pardons that Trump has given out, this one would be a no-brainer.”
Q: “What were his credentials to get this role in the first place?”
A: “He wrote a children’s book about President Trump being king, and he wrote a non-fiction book about all the people that should be prosecuted being against President Trump.”
Jeffrey Epstein’s Connections to New York City’s Most Infamous Nightclub, "The Box"
“I’ve traveled around the world, and I’ve been to a lot of degenerate places, and rarely have I seen the level of degeneracy like I’ve seen at the Box.” - Moby
“In September 2006 while mounting a legal defense, Epstein and Maxwell had email correspondence about updating a list of about 50 “peeps”. Andre Balazs finds himself on this list, amongst names such as Jean Luc Brunel, Prince Andrew & Sarah Ferguson, Jes Staley, Glenn & Eva Dubin, Donald Trump, Les Wexner, Leon Black, Faith Kates, and other associates with the most damning connections to Epstein. In the email correspondence Epstein tells Maxwell who to add and remove from the list. He notably requests for Trump’s name to be removed from the list as their relationship had soured by this point. The term “peeps” shows up over 150 times throughout the Epstein files as contemporary slang for the word “people.” The term “peeps” is repeatedly preceded by possessive adjectives like “my,” “our,” or “your,” to signify professional and/or personal allegiance. As Epstein was finally having his crimes catch up with him as he navigated the justice system in 2006, this curated list was not just of people but of Epstein’s people.”
"Apollo Global Management and chief executive Marc Rowan are facing a securities class action that claims the firm spent years denying business ties to Jeffrey Epstein that allegedly ran much deeper than disclosed."
Apollo co-founder Leon Black and a close friend.
We should not be celebrating Michael Jackson
Over 12 years from 1993 to 2005, I investigated and chronicled accusations of Jackson’s serial pedophilia, acute drug addiction and bizarre behaviors in five major articles for Vanity Fair.
I interviewed hundreds of people, both defenders and detractors, covered two trials, and combed through myriad legal documents in an effort to make the public aware of how Michael Jackson really conducted his life behind closed doors, behind the funhouse facade of Neverland.
I found credible evidence that he committed crimes against children—crimes I believe he got away with. He was never criminally convicted, he and his estate have paid $43.5 million in settlements to the families of children who accused him of abuse. And now, in a movie that is supposedly an examination of his life, it isn’t even a footnote.
But this is what I know: His tactics to silence were violent and cruel; his ego and sense of entitlement so inflated that he demanded humanitarian awards be presented to him before personal appearances, frequently invoking his devotion to emulating Christ-like purity.
Outside at Neverland were the zoo and Ferris wheel. Inside were cameras and listening devices throughout the house; anyone approaching his locked bedroom would be detected and announced by loud ding-dong sounds before reaching the bedroom door.
The tide turned for a while after the two-part documentary “Leaving Neverland” was released on HBO in 2019 and two little boys I first knew about in 1993, but who said they had previously lied to protect their idol, came forward as grown men, fathers themselves, to tell of their seductions.
One, Wade Robson, said his molestation began at age 7. But “Leaving Neverland” was abruptly pulled off HBO after Jackson’s estate sued using a creative legal argument. And now the estate’s sanctioned box office success story, “Michael,” an absurd, sanitized musical biopic, has audiences dancing in the aisles during the concert numbers. This at a time when R. Kelly and Sean Combs are behind bars in jail for their sex abuse, and when Jeffrey Epstein’s victims are part of our daily conversation.
Jackson’s victims are no less real.
Is this cognitive dissonance frustrating? Yes, especially because Michael Jackson never hid the fact he liked to sleep with little boys.
When I was first assigned the story, the mega superstar, then age 34, had slept more than 30 nights in a row in the same bed with 13-year-old eighth-grader Jordie Chandler at Chandler’s house that he shared with his mother and younger sister in Santa Monica Canyon.
When a criminal investigation began and then a civil suit was filed, I read documents in which Jordie described encounters with Jackson in explicit sickening detail… a pattern Jackson was accused of repeating over and over with other young boys before discarding them around age 13 or 14 when puberty set in.
A cunning groomer, Michael’s practice was to seize on largely dysfunctional star-struck families and ply them with expensive payoff gifts. James Safechuck’s parents got a house; Robson’s mother, a noncitizen, got a fancy car and a permanent U.S. resident visa.
Over the years, Jackson and the estate have paid out millions to settle various claims, with some lawsuits still pending without ever admitting wrongdoing.
Pardon Lobbying
“If you’re a wildly rich guy who’s looking for a pardon, giving a contribution is probably the single best way to elevate your brand”
“It’s part of his carrot-and-stick approach—you’re his enemy, he’s going to prosecute you. You’re Jim Comey, you’re Tish James, he’s going to investigate your mortgage application. He’s going to do everything he can to bring you down. Whereas, if you’re a January 6th person, you support his family’s crypto business, you do anything to support him, he will give you a pardon. We’ve never seen anything like this before in history.”
“In the event of an imminent nuclear apocalypse, we suspect that many people who have access to private jets will immediately take to the skies and escape city centers. This site tracks this indicator in realtime. The current emergency level is reported on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being an indicator of a likely imminent apocalypse…
This site watches a fixed cohort of business jets and asks a simple question: is the number currently airborne unusual for this time? It is not tracking all aircraft. The tracked set is built from FAA registry data with a practical business-jet filter, and each aircraft is matched by its ICAO hex identifier.”
Whole Lotta “Ring Around the Rosie”:
I looked all this stuff up after a brief discussion with a two-year old:
learnt from other children,
“The first known published versions are from the 1880s, although an American forerunner2 is reported from 1790.”3
“The words of this little ring-song seem to be becoming standardized, though this was not so fifty years ago when Lady Gomme4 was collecting {ante 1898). Of the twelve versions she gathered only one was similar to the above. Although ‘Ring-a-ring o’ roses’ is now one of the most popular nursery games—the song which instantly rises from the lips of small children whenever they join hands in a circle—the words were not known to Halliwell, and have not been found in children’s literature before 1881. Newell, however, says that
Ring a ring a rosie,
A bottle full of posie,
All the girls in our town,
Ring for little Josie
was current to the familiar tune in New Bedford, Massachusetts, about 1790. The *A-tishoo’ is notably absent here, as it is also in other versions he gives, in which the players squat or stoop rather than fall down:
Round the ring of roses,
Pots full of posies,
The one who stoops last
Shall tell whom she loves best.
The invariable sneezing and falling down in modem English versions has given would-be origin finders the opportunity to say that the rhyme dates back to the days of the Great Plague. A rosy rash, they allege, was a symptom of the plague, posies of herbs were carried as protection, sneezing was a final fatal symptom, and ‘all fall down’ was exactly what happened. It would be more delightful to recall the old belief that gifted children had the power to laugh roses (Grimm’s Deutsche Mythologie).
The foreign and nineteenth-century versions seem to show that the fall was originally a curtsy or other gracious bending movement of a dramatic singing-game, and the present writers have on several occasions gathered from oral tradition a sequel rhyme for the players to rise on their feet again.
The cows are in the meadow
Lying fast asleep,
A-tishoo! A-tishoo!
We all get up again.
Lines similar to these last are also known to the Irish Celts.”
‘Ring a Ring o’ Roses’, the nursery game in which players join hands in a circle, dance round while they sing, and aim not to be last to reach the ground when ‘all tall down’, is today almost a synonym for childhood: the first of the singing games an infant is likely to learn; the only one he or she plays with older members of the family; and the inevitable choice of illustrators when they wish to depict the supposed joyfulness of being young. The game is therefore scorned as soon as a child becomes independent and goes to school; although seven- and eight-year-olds, when asked about the ring games they know, tend to think first of ‘Rin-ga, Rin-ga Roses’ (so pronounced in the Midlands), and the game becomes good sport at the shallow end of the swimming pool on a chill day when the bathers are reluctant to get wet.
However, in satisfaction of the adult requirement that anything seemingly innocent should have a hidden meaning of exceptional unpleasantness, the game has been tainted by a legend that the song is a relic of the Great Plague of 1665; that the ring of roses was the purpuric sore that betokened the plague, that the posies were the herbs carried as protection against infection, that sneezing (‘a-tishoo, a-tishoo’) was the final fatal symptom of the disease, and that ‘all fall down’ was precisely what happened. This story has obtained such circulation in recent years it can itself be said to be epidemic. Thus the mass-circulation Radio Times, 7 June 1973, gave it a double-page headline, to advertise a documentary programme on the plague-village of Eyam (although a 1909 guide book to Eyam does not mention the rhyme); lecturers at medical schools have repeated it as fact both in Britain and America (men of science are notoriously incautious when pronouncing on material in disciplines other than their own); and we ourselves have had to listen so often to this interpretation we are reluctant to go out of the house. Those infected with the belief seem unperturbed that no reference to ‘Ring a Ring o’ Roses’ appears in Pepys’s careful record of hearsay during the long months of the Plague; or that Defoe’s brilliant evocation in A Journal of the Plague Year does not indicate that either sneezing or redness of spots was on men’s minds at the time; or that two recent studies, Philip Ziegler’s The Black Death (1969) and Professor J. F. D. Shrewsbury ’s History of the Bubonic Plague in the British Isles (1970), give no support to the theory, unless, that is, Thomas Vincent’s observation in God’s Terrible Voice in the City, 1666, is thought relevant, that roses were then neglected, since ‘People dare not offer them to their noses, lest with their sweet savour that which is infectious should be attracted’.
The legend linking the plague with the game-song seems in fact to be comparatively new. It was not given by Alice Gomme in 1898, who would certainly have mentioned it had she known it; and has not been found in the work of any commentator before the Second World War, although—under the protection of The Golden Bough—the mythologists were not wanting in fancifulness (e.g., ‘The falling down is a fragment of prostration that was practised when the shadows swept over the cornfield, and the corn spirit was passing by’). Probably the story grew out of the long-alleged connection between sneezing and the plague. A writer in The Monthly Packet, January 1875, commented: ‘It is strange how many educated English people will persist in dating the national “God bless you!” from the time of the Great Plague; though we have clear proof to the contrary in The Golden Legend, which was printed by Caxton in 1483, which particularly mentions that the goodly practice of saying “God help you!” or “Chryste help!” endured at that time.’
The association of the plague with ‘Ring a Ring 0’ Roses’ looks even more improbable when the history of the game itself is examined. Alice Gomme’s failure to devolve it from Stuart times is commendable, seeing that, when she was writing, the game had not been on record in England for more than twenty years, and versions continued to vary considerably.”
“The origin of the Ring a-ring a-roses rhyme has fascinated people for many years, but it is not easy to pin down the first recorded text in Britain. In 1875 James Fowler, of Wakefield, Yorkshire, contributed to Notes & Queries a number of local games which he had noted the year before. These texts also exist in a manuscript compiled by his daughter Wilelmine (born 1867), alongside one or two additional games, including two versions of Ring a ring a-roses. Wilelmine contributed these Yorkshire games to Alice Gomme for her Traditional Games volumes published in 1894. It is not clear whether Ring o’ roses was collected by James in 1874, which would make them the earliest by about seven years, or by Wilelmine a few years later. According to the manuscript:
(Children dance in a circle and sing):
Ring a ring o’ roses
A pocket full of posies
One for he and one for me
And one for little Moses Husher! Husher! Cuckoo!
(At the words ‘Husher! Husher!’ the hands are raised up and down, and at ‘Cuckoo’, all the children sit suddenly on the ground. Another form of the words is):
Ring a ring o’ roses
A pocket full o’ posies
Upstairs and downstairs
In my lady’s chamber
Husher! Husher! Cuckoo!
Whether this was the first sighting or not, it is clear that the game was already quite widely known in Britain by the i88os as it was included in Kate Greenaway’s Mother Goose (1881), Charlotte Burne’s Shropshire Folk-Lore (1883) and other publications of the decade, and although the first two lines remained remarkably stable, the rest of the text varied considerably from version to version, which suggests that it had been around for some time.
The evidence from America is stronger, but still tantalizing. William Newell, in his Games and Songs of American Children (1883), writes of the rhyme as ‘universally familiar in America’, and prints several variants. One, he claims, is from Massachusetts about 1790:
Ring a ring a rosie
A bottle full of posie
All the girls in our town
Ring for little Josie.
However, he does not indicate his source for this information or how reliable it is. Another version he gives is:
Round the ring of roses
Pots full of posies
The one who stoops last
She’ll tell them who she loves best.
This is in line with some of the early British versions, where the children stoop, bow or curtsey rather than drop down, and suggests the idea that the rhyme was originally part of a sweetheart-choosing game.
Many commentators have noted how close our rhyme is to versions found on the Continent, notably in Germany, Switzerland, Italy and France, and indeed some of these texts are so close to ours that direct translation, in one direction or the other, is a real possibility, though more research is needed here. In general, the Continental rhymes are concerned with roses as symbols of love and courtship, and some imply a rose bush in the centre of the circle.”
How YouTube Took Over the American Classroom
AMY WARREN’S “mom siren” went off when her seventh-grader in Wichita, Kan., seemed to know too much about Fortnite, a battling-and-shooting videogame he is barred from playing.
When Warren signed into his school Google account, she was aghast: Her son Ben had accessed more than 13,000 YouTube videos during school hours from December 2024 through February 2025, according to viewing data she provided the Journal.
His feed was rife with inappropriate content. Videos glorifying gun culture, asking about silencers on Nerf guns, “head shots” where children realistically portray being killed, a video with sexually explicit jokes about neighbors sleeping together.
YouTube had served up “shorts”—video after video that it algorithmically determined that he might like.
“It made me cry,” Warren said. “All of a sudden it’s this kind of gun slop, by no fault of his own.”
…schools’ overreliance on the Google-owned platform for educational content has created a gateway for students to get sucked into an infinite scroll of videos on school-issued devices.
YouTube during snack time, dismissal and indoor recess. YouTube to teach drawing to first-graders. YouTube to read a book to class. YouTube under the covers at night, watching hamster videos on school-issued Chromebooks. A survey touted by YouTube executives shows that 94% of teachers have used YouTube in their roles.
Granular data provided by parents highlight the scale: A second-grader in New York watched more than 700 videos in two months during school hours, including one featuring pole dancing. A tenth-grader in Oregon scrolled through more than 200 between 9 and 11:40 a.m. on March 6.
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Looking forward to reading your next post on historic renditions of “There once was a woman from Nantucket :)
Huh. Of all the versions of Ring around the Rosie presented... My version growing up was "Ashes, Ashes we all fall down".
Don't like to think why there would be ashes, but if it had to do with the plague, it's not hard to guess.