House In Order - 5523
It's like the start of this newsletter was a week ago ... or yesterday?
Happy Friday to all who celebrate. Let’s jump in …
The Daily Rabbit Hole: What was happening 1000 years ago this year.
“Citation needed” - Wikipedia
500 years ago to roughly the day was the Ningbo Incident, a brawl between two rival clans in Japan1. This story starts with someone tricking another someone in a trade port into going first in line, and ends with an entire village becoming spies to clear their debts. You can actually draw a nearly straight line to that wild outcome. It features kidnapping, hostages, a swift end to trading in the area (hence the debts that were accrued), and about a hundred other things that make you realize that sometimes the real world is just better than any fictionalized version we could craft.
The takeaway: clans, houses, organizations, etc. work when they are in order. Go out of order (either in line, or through murdering rivals leading to retaliation), and things don’t go according to plan.
The ‘Wait, What?’ Vortex: Son of Sam
The government is having a really tough time figuring this one out.
It’s almost as if the founding fathers couldn’t see the Internet and digital media rights coming when they wrote the constitution so now the US government keeps overruling or caveating the law making it impossible to understand.
It Came From Within
Nearly all historical casino heists have been inside jobs. The Chicago Tribune lays out 10 of the most famous ones here, and nearly all involved someone who worked for the House. If you dig a little further into the perpetrators, no one bears even the closest resemblance to George Clooney, Brad Pitt or Julia Roberts either but that is neither here nor there. The point is, how many times do we have to see that institutions rot and die from the inside before we believe it. From the smallest to the largest organizations, it is the exception not the rule, when an outside influence brings it down.
Maybe this weekend you should spend some time getting your house in order. No, not your family - I’m not implying that your third grade daughter is plotting the liquidation of your 401k and absconding to Belize - I mean your own headspace.
Reset, recharge, get some things in order and we’ll be back next week.
I love that we live in a time when we can look back 500 years to practically the day. The Internet Is Vast.