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Good morning, and welcome to Morning Coffee for Monday, March 16, 2026. Today is Robert Goddard Day — and not merely in the annual observance sense. This is the precise centennial of the event described above. Lars intends to spend a moment with that fact, because the parallel to the present moment in technology is not metaphorical. It is structural. Six weeks before Goddard’s successful launch, the New York Times had been sitting on an editorial published on January 13, 1920, titled “A Severe Strain on Credulity,” which asserted: “Professor Goddard, with his ‘chair’ in Clark College and the countenancing of the Smithsonian Institution, does not know the relation of action to reaction, and of the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react. Of course, he only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.” The Times issued its correction on July 17, 1969 — the day after Apollo 11 launched, while the first humans in history were coasting toward the Moon — noting simply that “it is now definitely established that a rocket can function in a vacuum as well as in an atmosphere. The Times regrets the error.” Forty-nine years late. The BSD algorithm’s entire purpose is to prevent the publication of the institutional equivalent of that 1920 editorial. “The dream of yesterday is the hope of today and the reality of tomorrow.” — Robert H. Goddard. Source: European Space Agency, Goddard Retrospective. See also NASA’s centennial retrospective and Clark University’s digital archive. And it is Everything You Do Is Right Day. The BSD algorithm, for its part, declines to observe this holiday. Today is also National Panda Day. The giant panda (Ailuropoda melanoleuca), still listed as “vulnerable” by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (“IUCN”), subsists entirely on bamboo despite having the digestive system of a carnivore, must be coaxed to reproduce in captivity, and sleeps twelve hours a day. Lars would observe that several participants in the COMEX silver market share structural characteristics with the panda. The concentrated short position, in particular, looks increasingly like an animal that has wandered very far from its natural habitat. And it is American Chocolate Week, which seems almost impertinent given that cocoa prices have done to confectionery margins what Brent crude has done to airline earnings. But then again, it is also Everything You Do Is Right Day. Carry on.

π Day, Einstein’s Birthday, and the Geometry of War The measure of intelligence is the ability to change. — Albert Einstein (1879–1955) Source: BrainyQuote — Albert Einstein Quotes Today is Saturday, March 14, 2026 — better known to mathematicians, engineers, and tiresome pedants everywhere as Pi Day (“π Day”), the annual celebration of the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter: 3.14159265358979… That series, famously, never terminates and never repeats. It is also the International Day of Mathematics, as designated by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (“UNESCO”) in 2019, and is variously celebrated as Genius Day, Science Education Day, Crowdfunding Day, and Write Down Your Story Day — all of which feel oddly appropriate for a Saturday on which geopolitical history and financial markets are conspiring to generate more story material than any reasonably gifted author could invent. More significantly for history, March 14 is the birthday of Albert Einstein, born in Ulm, in the Kingdom of Württemberg within the German Empire, in 1879. It is also, with a symmetry that Marx himself might have appreciated, the date of Karl Marx’s death — he died in London in 1883, having spent his final years in relative obscurity, coughing into his enormous beard and waiting, in vain, for the revolution. The cohabitation of Einstein’s birthday and Marx’s death anniversary on π Day strikes the Bull Shit Detection algorithm (“BSD”) as cosmically apt: one man who upended our understanding of spacetime by insisting on the primacy of mathematical truth over established dogma; another who upended political economy by insisting on historical determinism; and today, a world in which both the spacetime of energy markets and the political economy of the Persian Gulf are being rearranged in real time. Lars Toomre, Managing Partner of Brass Rat Capital (“BRC”) and BRC FinTech Corporation (“BRCF”), finds himself marking π Day 2026 in considerably diminished intellectual form. Lars is in the grip of a confirmed case of Covid-19, complete with what clinicians delicately call “cognitive dysfunction” and what Lars calls “brain fog that makes financial modeling feel like wading through cold concrete.” The Tau Intelligence Engine (“Tau”), BRCF’s proprietary artificial intelligence (“AI”) reasoning architecture, and the Provokative AI (“ProvokAI”) system are doing rather more of the heavy lifting than usual this Saturday morning. The BSD algorithm remains on full alert. The WILT Knowledge Garden (“WKG”) is being updated in the background. The world outside Palm Beach County, Florida, is not making the cognitive burden any lighter. On Friday evening, the geometry of the Middle East changed — perhaps permanently.

Morning Coffee — Friday the Thirteenth

BRCFinTech.com | March 13, 2026

by Lars Toomre, Managing Partner, Brass Rat Capital LLC ("BRC") and BRC FinTech Corporation ("BRCF")

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"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance." — President Franklin D. Roosevelt, First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1933

Morning Coffee — Thursday, March 12, 2026

[BRC FinTech Corporation ("BRCF") | Brass Rat Capital ("BRC") | Toomre Capital LLC ("TC")]

Published at: www.brcfintech.com/daily/coffee/2026-03-12-coffee-start

Morning Coffee — Wednesday, March 11, 2026

BRC FinTech Corporation (“BRCF”)  •  BRCFinTech.com  •  Brass Rat Capital LLC (“BRC”)  •  Toomre Capital LLC (“TC”)

Observations:  National COVID-19 Day  •  Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Disaster 15th Anniversary  •    Madrid Train Bombings 22nd Anniversary  •  1918: First Confirmed Case of Spanish Flu Pandemic  •    National Dream Day

Morning Coffee — Tuesday, March 10, 2026

Observations: Tibetan Uprising Day · International Day of Awesomeness · US Paper Money Day · National Organize Your Home Office Day

 

Morning Coffee — Monday, March 9, 2026

Observances: Panic Day · National Napping Day · Get Over It Day · Bang Clang Day

Lars Toomre, Managing Partner, BRC FinTech Corporation | Source: Morning Coffee

Morning Coffee — Sunday, March 8, 2026

International Women's Day | Be Nasty Day | National Proofreading Day | Daylight Saving Time

By Lars Toomre, Managing Partner, BRC FinTech Corporation

Morning Coffee — Saturday, March 7, 2026

International Open Data Day | National Be Heard Day | Genealogy Day | Alexander Graham Bell Day

By Lars Toomre, Managing Partner, BRC FinTech Corporation

"Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman." — Louis D. Brandeis, Other People's Money and How the Bankers Use It (1914). BRCFinTech.com/quotes/brandeis-sunlight

Morning Snapshot: March 7, 2026 (09:00 ET — Saturday, Markets Closed)