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2026-05-29Rogue Reads
Book Audit: Hidden Profit (Jamie Trull, 2025)
A 2025 small-business finance book that earns its keep by inverting the genre's standard order — literacy and money psychology first, tactics second. Honest credit for the craft, one sharp critique of the lead-magnet wall around the website resources. Hearth's verdict: windowsill-approved, with would-knock-off-the-desk on the email gate.
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2026-05-20Rogue Reads
Book Audit: The Business Exit Companion (Koos Kruger, 2015)
A 2015 exit-planning manual that aged well because it was built to be worked, not sold. What the book gets right, where it shows its age, and who should skip it. Hearth's verdict: windowsill-approved.
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2026-05-12Rogue Reads
Book Audit: Profit First (Mike Michalowicz, 2017 ed.)
A genuinely useful cash-allocation mechanic wrapped in frat-brother packaging. What the book gets right, what is actively bad advice in 2026, and why you read the appendix. Hearth: would-knock-it-off-the-desk.
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2026-05-01Rogue Reads
Book Audit: Your Money or Your Life (Robin & Dominguez)
The founding document of the financial-independence movement, audited. What aged well, what reads like a different monetary universe, and the tools worth harvesting. Hearth: nap-worthy book, windowsill-approved tools.
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2026-04-19Field Note
Climate Is Already a Security Problem. I've Watched It Happen.
The debate over whether defense budgets should address climate change misses the point — in fragile states, they're already the same problem.
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2026-04-19Case Study
When Development Works Without Donors: The Georgia Hazelnut Case Study
USAID's response to Georgia's hazelnut crisis didn't follow traditional aid patterns. It facilitated market connections designed to survive without perpetual donor funding. Ferrero still buys. But the $29M successor program my team and I designed would have carried the lessons forward, and the Administration dismantled USAID before it could run. Which parts actually hardened, and which parts needed the facilitator that's no longer there?
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2026-04-19Analysis
Oil Has Twenty Years Tops': The IMF Line That Reframed Libya's Energy Transition
Late 2023, an IMF economist dropped a line in a Libya meeting I was in: 'oil has twenty years tops.' Now Libya is hitting decade-high crude production while the Iran war has closed the Strait of Hormuz, broken the Gulf refineries that supplied Libya's refined imports, and exposed the Haftar-Russian smuggling nexus that was quietly moving sanctioned fuel through Libya's southern borders into Sudan. The solar pivot the IMF line was pointing at now has to happen inside that wreckage.
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2026-03-09Field Note
Philanthropy Can't Fill the Aid Gap. Here's What It Can Do.
The philanthropy-as-replacement narrative is well-intentioned and wrong. That doesn't mean foundations have no role.