Situationships

Ran across this term in a chapter on the third sexual revolution in Christian Smith's fascinating Why Religion Went Obsolete: the Demise of Traditional Faith in America:

“situationships” (casual intimate relationships lacking definition, expectations, and norms due in part to the fear that clarity might make things awkward).

And yet this seems to me precisely a condition that would make things awkward.

Democracy by Langston Hughes

Democracy

[1949]

by Langston Hughes

Democracy will not come Today, this year Nor ever Through compromise and fear.

I have as much right As the other fellow has To stand On my two feet And own the land.

I tire so of hearing people say, Let things take their course. Tomorrow is another day. I do not need my freedom when I’m dead. I cannot live on tomorrow’s bread.

Freedom Is a strong seed Planted In a great need.

I live here, too. I want freedom Just as you.

Reagan, Fox, MSNBC, and Simplifying the Mess of Reality

In the Industrial Economy, value was created in steel mills and assembly lines. In the Information Economy, it is often created in studios and newsrooms. The raw material is not ore or oil but culture - packaged into stories, symbols, and narratives that resonate with our emotions as much as, or more than, our rational faculties. The world is far too messy and complicated to fit neatly into a single theory, so we rely on simple narratives. Specialists wrestle with complexity; to win 51% of the vote, you need a story most people can follow. Politics in the Information Economy became a kind of cultural production.

Ronald Reagan grasped this before most. The only president to master radio, television, and movies before entering politics, he understood the power of affirming rather than informing. His speeches bypassed the fact-checker in your head and spoke directly to the emotional truth you recognized from your own memories, hopes, and sense of identity. He could make the policies he championed feel like episodes in your hero’s journey. You weren’t just living in America—you were starring in a distinctly American story, one where a government that got out of your way left you free to live it.

This was a sharp break from the media climate in which Reagan emerged. In the 1960s and early ’70s, the three major networks delivered a nightly reality check: Vietnam body counts, civil rights marchers facing police dogs and fire hoses, polluted rivers catching fire, women demanding more than secretarial roles, long-haired neo-bohemians rejecting middle-class norms. These images forced Americans to confront contradictions and complexity. They unsettled worldviews across the spectrum and left the nation wrestling, in real time, with disruptive change. (Rivers on fire might be the simplest illustration of cognitive dissonance that this unmediated reality forced on its audience.)

Reagan’s storytelling offered relief from that fatigue. He gave Americans a coherent, reassuring frame—a sense that the story of America still had a clear arc and a starring role for the individual. Where the 1960s media posed open-ended questions, Reagan delivered emotionally satisfying answers. The times were turbulent; his voice was calm.
Roger Ailes, who worked with Reagan on his 1984 campaign, would later industrialize this approach as the founding CEO of Fox News. The nightly newscast became a continuous narrative stream—curated facts and frames reinforcing a specific worldview. MSNBC followed with a similar strategy for a different audience. Both evolved into identity factories: manufacturing stories that make their viewers feel not just informed, but confirmed.
This was a profound shift. The network news of the 1960s might unsettle you; Fox and MSNBC aim to reassure you. The old model treated discomfort as the price of being informed. The new model treats discomfort as a defect in the product.

In the Information Economy, news is no longer just a public service - it’s a manufactured good. The raw material is events; the finished product is cultural identity. Reagan’s genius was offering coherence and assurance after a turbulent era. Fox and MSNBC turned that coherence into a subscription service, delivering a world where your side is always right, the other side is always wrong, and reality rarely demands any changes of you.

David Bromwich's Claim that Totalitarianism Provides a Simplification of the World

David Bromwich of Yale argues that totalitarianism is partly about denying the inherent contradictions in the world, as much a quest for world that is simple as it is a quest for a world with a central control. A simplification of reality is one of the goals of a totalitarian government.

There is a desire for coherent narrative that is simpler than - and easier to digest than - reality and you can gain power by providing that. Maybe the ultimate in power is providing the narrative people want to – and easily can – believe.

Hannah Arendt on Loneliness and the Temptation of Totalitarianism

After World War II, Hannah Arendt set out to understand how totalitarianism could take root in modern societies. In *The Origins of Totalitarianism* (1951), she argued that mass loneliness - not just private sorrow, but a felt "non‑belonging to the shared world" - is both a precondition for, and an instrument of, totalitarian rule. As she put it, totalitarian government “bases itself on loneliness, on the experience of not belonging to the world at all, which is among the most radical and desperate experiences of man.”

Arendt distinguishes isolation (being cut off from political action) from loneliness (being deserted by others and by a common reality). Loneliness, she argues, dissolves the “common world” - the shared facts, institutions, and spaces that anchor public life - and thereby prepares people to accept ideological fictions in place of lived reality.

Contemporary life can intensify this dynamic. In today’s information economy, much of what we “know” arrives pre‑packaged - memes, snippets, and ready‑made takes - rather than ripening through experience and conversation. We consume processed information the way we once learned to consume processed food: easy, quick, and often denaturing. The result can be a thinner common world and a thicker sense of aloneness—exactly the soil Arendt warned can nourish the worst political temptations.

Why Social Change Slows When People Live Longer (and one possible way to change that)

Ronald Inglehart, one of the world’s most influential political scientists, spent decades compiling cross-national survey data that tracked shifting values across dozens of countries. His work revealed that social change often appears to be a matter of evolving public opinion—but in fact, it’s more often the result of generational replacement than individual transformation.

Inglehart's findings suggest that people rarely change their core values after age 20 or 25. So when a society moves from widespread rejection of immigration and LGBTQ rights to broad acceptance, it's not because individuals changed their minds en masse. It's because older voters with more traditional views passed away, and were replaced by younger generations with more liberal, secular, and self-expression–oriented values.

But what happens when life expectancy rises and birthrates fall? You get fewer new voters entering the system and more older voters staying in it longer. That slows the pace of change—not because beliefs are getting more rigid, but because the demographic shift that drives change is happening more slowly.

Inglehart once put it this way:

“The most important political change is not that people change their minds, but that people with different minds replace them.”

In short: Social progress depends not just on new ideas—but on new people. And in aging societies, even progress has to wait its turn.

But maybe it doesn’t have to.
Perhaps the greatest challenge facing modern societies is to create for their older citizens what public education once did for the young: institutions and experiences that stretch, inform, and enlighten the mind—long after graduation. A democracy of lifelong development might not just slow decline. It could accelerate renewal.

What Monthly Job Numbers Actually Track

Here's a reminder of what is actually being counted each month with the jobs numbers.

Each month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) tracks millions of job changes - hires, quits, layoffs, retirements, firings, and more. These gross flows are large: for example, around 6 million people are hired and 5.8 million leave their jobs in a typical month (according to the BLS's Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, or JOLTS).

When the monthly Employment Situation Report announces net job gains or losses - say, +150,000 - that figure represents the net difference between hires and separations across the entire labor market. They are not just counting / estimating 150,000 new jobs; they are counting / estimating nearly 12 million changes in job status amongst a labor force of about 167 million.

It takes a wild imagination to think that the task of counting NET job gains or losses amongst a population of 335 million Americans each MONTH is trivial or not subject to revision as more data comes in. This is just one of the many reasons that data is harder than memes.

Asians Throwing Wonder Bread At Weddings

Here's something you probably don't know.
In the West, they throw rice at weddings.
In the East, they throw Wonder Bread.

["I did not know that!"
"Of course you didn't! He made that up!"
"Are you sure?"
"Positive!"
"Next you'll be saying that I can't believe everything I read on the internet."
"You can't!"
"Well why would they go through the trouble of posting things if they weren't true?"]

Tesla's Stock Seems Wildly Overpriced

Tesla closed today at nearly $333 a share but fell in after-hours trading.

Among the 10 most valuable companies in the world, nine have an average price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio of 37. Tesla’s P/E is 183. That’s more than 9 times higher than its peers - a valuation that implies soaring future profits.

But today, Tesla reported that its earnings were down 18% year over year — not exactly the trajectory you'd expect from a company priced for explosive growth.

If Tesla were valued like the rest of the top 10, its stock might trade closer to $70 than $333. At some point, it’s fair to ask whether Tesla should be priced like a transformative business - or a meme stock.

Why Epstein May Not Be Reason Enough for the MAGA Crowd to Turn From Trump

I think most people are overestimating the degree to which Trump will lose any support because his closest friend was a pedophile.

First a clarification. Epstein seems to have enjoyed underaged but not prepubescent girls. Remember that the age of consent in most states in 1900 was 12 to 14. That was a time when many of the Make America Great Again folks thought the country was better.

MAGA wants to return to an earlier time. Part of that - I would argue - is the allure of a time when women were expected to be physically mature before becoming a mate but not have time to become intellectually or emotionally mature. No time to form their own opinions. Humans are social creatures and as society becomes more complex it takes longer for any of us to "mature" to the degree that we define and pursue our own lives, careers, and potential. Women who have time to define their own lives have their own opinions and values and goals and won't so readily subordinate all that to a man who calls them beautiful. A 15 year-old who has passed through puberty but hasn't had time to define herself and her aspirations? That's clearly alluring to men who want "romances" that are more fantasy than reality, a woman more likely to smile nervously and nod when you say something stupid enough to provoke an eyeroll or even criticism from a grown women.

The notion that the MAGA crowd is going to turn on Trump because either he AND his best friend - or even just his best friend - regularly and illegally exploited the naivety of what we now call underaged girls but we once called marriageable women seems to me optimistic. Remember that Trump only won in the only American presidential elections in history in which a woman was the candidate from a leading party. The idea of mature women who have strong opinions is less alluring to the MAGA men than young women who might naively nod to - and even seem impressed by - whatever nonsense they spout.

It would be nice to think that Trump would lose some portion of his support because of his deep friendship with Epstein but this isn't exactly new news and it's not clear that any of his supporters find that kind of thing particularly disturbing. Certainly no Republican members of Congress or his Cabinet find it disqualifying and they're all still working hard to support him.

It seems naive to assume that Trump and his morals are much different from those of his supporters or the rest of the GOP. (And yes. I would love to be wrong on this but I'm too old to confuse hope and expectation.)

Inflation - Completely Unchanged Everywhere but in Trump's Mind

"We had inflation but it's gone now."- Trump this week

Inflation in ...
- November , the month of the election, when Trump claimed - and apparently many American voters and journalists believed - it was outrageous: 2.7%
- June (latest numbers: 2.7%.

For those of you not good with numbers, that is, indeed, the exact same number. And for context, through this entire 21st century average monthly inflation (measured from a year earlier) is 2.6%. And of course no one talks about inflation now because it is memes and not facts that drive political discourse nowadays.

Next generation historians:
"We were going to continue to freely trade with other countries - which kept prices low and stock prices high, prosecute presidents and other politicians who sued journalists for unflattering coverage, respect the rights of everyday Americans even if they had brownskin and were standing near a Home Depot, invest in research and education that continues to transform the lives of everyday Americans, fund aid that kept millions of children across the globe alive, and attract the best and brightest from across the globe but ... inflation was 2.7% when everyone knew it should have been 2.6%."

The MAGA boys: their cover story might be nearly as bad as their policies.

The Twin Engines of Alarm and Hope

I feel like I’m more alarmed than most people by what’s happening in American politics right now - and more hopeful about what might come after.

Trump is taking a wrecking ball to international trade and the global economy built around it. That’s alarming. (MAGA types spend a remarkable amount of time decrying globalism on the world wide web - a feat of irony they seem blissfully unaware of.) And of course he's also going after national institutions and norms in ways that are alarming.

The hopeful part? Just within the domain of international progress? After Trump, it seems likely the global economy will restructure itself to be more robust - less dependent on US leadership and more resilient to shifts in the political mood of any single leader or even the majorities of a half dozen countries. We see this, for instance, in the EU's support for Ukraine, something that has always been present but seems stronger now that they realize they cannot depend on the US. Hopefully in the future the US will again take a strong role in the defense and development of Western Europe but all the better when Western Europe's fate is less reliant on the US. (Or any one country, for that matter.) I'm not saying that the US won't always have an influence over other regions during the next generation or so; I am saying that the more resilient are the pro-development policies of any one region with or without the US or the EU or China, the more resilient will be progress.

Alarm and hope both matter. Without them, people tend to settle for inaction. That is not a good option right now.

RFK Jr.'s Healthcare Policy as Placebo

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., our Secretary of Health and Human Services, has declared that “being healthy is a patriotic duty.”

If you hear that casually, it might sound either innocuous or wildly sensible. But it isn’t a policy - it’s a slogan - and not even a catchy one.

Keep in mind, he also oversees welfare programs. Imagine if he said, “Being wealthy is a patriotic duty.” Imagine that you thought that this statement actually tied to anything in the real world.

“What are your plans for tackling disease?”
“Ask people to be healthier.”
“What about poverty?”
“Ask them to be wealthier.”
"Violent crime?"
"Ask Americans to be kinder."

That’s not policy. It's not even interesting enough to be propaganda.

A tax on sugar, like the tax on cigarettes? That’s policy.

Investing in vaccine development and equitable deployment? Policy. (And by the way, RFK and Trump have cut funding for the development and rollout of important vaccines.)

A sovereign wealth fund and / or a wealth tax to narrow inequality? Policy.

Simply telling people it’s their patriotic duty to be healthy - or wealthy - isn’t leadership or policy. It has no efficacy. I think the word you're searching for is placebo.

Mission Preternatural

File under: Well, it amused me …A spinoff from the Mission Impossible franchise:

Mission Preternatural.

Two priests, three nuns, and an incredulous indigenous population. They’ve crossed an ocean to bring a new god to people who already have dozens.

Hamilton, a Bank, a VP and a President, Duels and the Country's First Great Recession

Alexander Hamilton – the genius killed in a duel on this day (11 July) in 1804 – created the US Bank to stabilize currency and capital markets for the new republic.
Aaron Burr, Hamilton's killer, didn’t go to jail for murdering this extraordinary Founding Father. Instead, he finished his term as Jefferson’s Vice President.

Andrew Jackson – the only president known to have killed a man in a duel – killed Hamilton’s Bank, which he saw as an instrument of elites, setting up the nation for its worst recession to that point. (Jackson was one of those populists who didn’t let a lack of understanding about how the economy worked get in the way of his conviction that something dramatic must be done.)

Vice President Aaron Burr killed Hamilton.
President Andrew Jackson killed his great institution.

Hamilton, the orphaned 14-year-old who bravely came alone from the Caribbean to this new place and helped turn it into the world’s first modern democracy.

A Huge Problem for the US: We're Serious About Private Sector Leadership and Entrepreneurship and Absurd About Public Sector Leadership and Entrepreneurship

Here is a huge problem that rarely gets discussed.

Private sector CEOS make 100X what members of congress make.

Related, we so highly value entrepreneurship in the private sector but value it so little - if at all - in the public sector. That disconnect has created our current political dilemma. We’re asking voters to choose between institutions they don’t trust and a strongman they shouldn’t trust. Meanwhile, as a society, we making billionaires out of successful private sector entrepreneurs and largely ignoring or squelching public sector entrepreneurs who might create new institutions to deal with new or different problems.

As recently as the 1960s, we took the public sector about as seriously as we did the private sector. Rather than paying private sector CEOS 100X what we paid members of congress, we paid them roughly 3X.

 

Nvidia Hits $4 Trillion Value and a Very Brief History of Economic Development in These United States

This morning, Nvidia became the first company in history to reach a $4 trillion market cap.

Our economy has evolved: from creating wealth through land and agriculture, to manufacturing goods, to generating knowledge that makes workers more productive, and now to creating wealth through entrepreneurship and intellectual property.

Because we manufacture fewer goods than countries like China, we run a trade deficit. But penny for penny, that deficit is offset by financial inflows – including foreign investments in our publicly traded companies.

We used to make and sell goods. Now, increasingly, we make and sell wealth.

Finally Giving Those Beleaguered Billionaires a Little Power

In the US, there are 735 billionaires and 535 federal legislators – about 200 more billionaires than lawmakers.

* Legislators earn roughly 2x the median household income.
* Billionaires hold about 50,000x the median household net worth.

Apparently, Americans have decided that the best way to check the power of elected representatives is to give billionaires even more political power.
It’s a curious experiment.

Deja nu

New term: Deja nu. 

The distinct feeling that this has never happened before.

How Pop Culture Has Come to Define Christianity

Just finished Kristin Kobes Du Mez’s Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation. It’s fascinating, important, and covers topics that influence politics far more than most realize.
One almost parenthetically profound point she makes – easy to miss amid everything else – is this: popular media now defines Christianity more than any typical church or even the Bible itself. Best-selling books, podcasts, and programs to which Christians subscribe shape faith more than sermons or scripture.

When Protestants broke from Catholicism, they declared the Bible as their ultimate authority, subordinating the church to it. Catholics warned that since the Bible could be interpreted in so many ways, Protestantism would fracture into thousands of denominations.

(Spoiler alert: they were right.) One credible 2020 estimate suggests there are ~45,000 Christian denominations globally. By some reasoning, that implies members of 44,999 denominations are in for a rude surprise on Judgment Day. Your odds are not great.

So the question remains: Who defines Christianity?
The Pope? Billy Graham? A televangelist? The Council of Nicaea?

What Du Mez’s research suggests is that it is the market itself. The books that sell best and the YouTube channels with the most subscribers now define what “Christianity” means for many believers. And perhaps unsurprisingly, the cultural references of John Wayne are more vivid and emotionally resonant than the lesser-known biblical stories – like Shiphrah and Puah, the Hebrew midwives in Exodus 1 who defied Pharaoh’s order to kill Israelite babies.

Popularity – or more to the point, market success – has become the evidence of things unseen.

What gives religious claims authority today?
Apparently, pop culture references. Or - put more simply - just popularity itself.

The 4th of July as a Celebration of the Idea of Bold Experiments in the Pursuit of Happiness!

It is the anniversary of start of one of the more weird and wonderful experiments in human affairs.

In his Gettysburg Address, Lincoln dated the founding of this country back to Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence in 1776, not to the Constitution of 1789.

Jefferson drafted the Declaration, though others edited it before it reached its final form. His draft included one of his three attempts to end slavery. Here’s an excerpt that was removed:

> “He [King George III] has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere… determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought and sold…”

This condemnation of slavery was deleted by delegates from South Carolina and Georgia, along with northern delegates involved in the slave trade, who argued:

- It would be hypocritical, since many colonies practiced slavery.
- It might alienate southern support for independence.

(There were 26 British colonies in North America at the time, from Jamaica and Bermuda in the south to Nova Scotia and Newfoundland in the north. Only 13 of the 26 rebelled, and the founders feared losing any of them – especially the southern ones.)

Jefferson’s phrase “All men are created equal” remained, though, later emboldening Lincoln to end slavery, but his more explicit denunciation was cut out.

(It is worth noting that Jefferson also accused the King of “cutting off our trade with all parts of the world,” a direct reference to mercantile restrictions and the Navigation Acts limiting colonial commerce. That's right. A big reason we rebelled against Britain was to have free trade.)
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It seems fair to say we still have yet to fully realize our potential. And yes, many of those former southern colonies still seem inclined to believe the past – rather than the future – is the better place to live.

Hooray for the founding fathers who dared to engage in such a high-stakes experiment.

Imagine if we continued to innovate in the public sector the way we do in the private. Judging from the success of their bold experiment, continued bold experiments in the pursuit of happiness could be astounding.

The reality is, we so highly value entrepreneurship in the private sector but so little – if at all – in the public sector. That disconnect has created our current political dilemma: we’re asking voters to choose between institutions they don’t trust and a strongman they shouldn’t trust.

Our founding fathers, Lincoln and the new Republicans, and FDR each represent people and times when Americans were bold enough to experiment their way into a new future and economy.

Imagine if we were that courageous and visionary now.

Now that would be the way to truly celebrate a nation’s birthday.

Trump's Isolationist, Anti-Innovative Economic Policies Mean That His Budget Cuts Still Won't be Enough

 

 This graph illustrates a crucial insight: government spending as a percentage of GDP depends not only on how fast spending grows but on how fast GDP grows alongside it.

Trump's cuts won't be enough simply because his policies will undermine economic growth.

If federal spending grows at 3% annually but GDP also grows at 3%, then spending remains stable and sustainable as a share of the economy. But if GDP growth lags behind spending growth, the share rises, creating pressure for cuts or higher taxes.

Trump’s policies will slow economic growth, making any cuts to programs like Medicaid insufficient. If we were to adopt more creative policies – like FDR did – any reasonable growth in Medicaid or Social Security will be incidental. GDP growth determines the healthy and sustainable levels of government spending for our kids and elderly.

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Given America’s aging population, baseline projections show spending (especially on Social Security and Medicare) rising as a share of GDP in the coming decades. On current trends, this would necessitate painful cuts.

However, GDP growth is not simply a given. Policy affects growth. For example, note the dramatic rise in GDP growth in the 1940s. During this period, FDR’s administration massively expanded R&D, capital investment, and education spending, fueling not just wartime production but laying foundations for postwar prosperity.

FDR’s strategic brilliance included:

• Empowering Vannevar Bush, who orchestrated vast WWII research initiatives including the Manhattan Project.
• Asking Bush after the war to redirect R&D toward peacetime quality-of-life breakthroughs, resulting in the creation of the National Science Foundation (NSF).
• Funding university-based research that built national capabilities while training new generations of scientists and engineers and creating R&D infrastructure within our universities.

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The real question isn’t merely how much we spend on entitlement programs. It’s whether we make investments in productivity – R&D, education, infrastructure – that raise GDP growth.

AI and genetic engineering, for example, have the potential to boost growth as dramatically as WWII-era R&D once did. And history shows that many of the most transformative breakthroughs – from electricity to the internet – were not predicted in advance. Future possibilities such as fusion energy could again lower the marginal cost of energy to near zero, driving explosive growth across industries.

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To offer a budget plan focused only on cuts or static spending is to react to current trends rather than reshape them. The most egregious omission in current budget debates is policy to accelerate growth:

• Cuts to NSF funding, proposed under Trump, undercut basic research that fuels private innovation.
• Restrictions on foreign students and immigrants threaten the flow of global talent that has historically driven US dynamism.
• Disdain for trade and global idea exchange risks isolating the US from emergent technologies and markets.

Given Trump’s policies, his cuts won’t be enough. By contrast, if he were to embrace the proven policies for enhancing growth that have been proven by presidents from FDR to Clinton – and looked for creative ways to build on and extend that – cuts could be unnecessary.

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Bottom line

Policies that increase GDP growth determine whether entitlement spending becomes:

Easily affordable (with robust growth), or
Unsustainable (with tepid growth).

The debate should focus less on how to cut and more on how to grow, ensuring a future where spending choices reflect opportunity and abundance rather than isolationism, resistance to change and zero-sum thinking. Trump's cuts won't be enough as long as his policies are so destructive of economic growth. If he were to adopt policies that were to make us more innovative and open, cuts like he is proposing would be completely unnecessary. 

 

Rather Than Ask Democrats and Republicans - Ask These Two Groups Poll Questions Instead

We often see polls that show self-proclaimed Democrats or Republicans or Independents' mood about the economy. Positive? Negative?

It seems like it would be far more informative if you had a poll that first asked some factual questions such as,

Tax cuts have
A Always paid for themselves,
B. Never paid for themselves.

Over the last century, job creation rates are
A. Much higher during Democratic Presidencies,
B. Much higher during Republican Presidencies.

During the last half century, stock market returns are
A. Higher during Republican presidencies,
B. Higher during Democratic presidencies.

And then, when we know who actually has real data - not even necessarily people who have coherent theories, just people grounded in reality - THEN ask questions like, "Are you optimistic or pessimistic about the economy?" To see a gap between the feelings of people who knew the past and people who imagined it would - it seems to me - be far more informative than asking people who their favorite team is.

Related, starting with Carter's presidency ...

The average annual stock market return (average of S&P 500, Dow, and NASDAQ):
Under Republican presidents: 8.0%
Under Democratic presidents: 12.6%

Monthly Job Creation Rates:
Under Republican presidents: 75.6k per month
Under Democratic presidents: 175.6k per month
(Yes. As of last month, exactly 100k difference between the two)

Oh, and tax cuts have never paid for themselves.

Trump Rules by Fear and Intimidation

In April ....

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (Republican Senator from Alaska) said a fear of retaliation under President Donald Trump’s administration is rising to levels she’s not seen before, acknowledging this week that it is so pervasive that even the outspoken senator is “oftentimes very anxious” to speak up out of fear of recrimination.

Today ....
Murkowski cast the deciding vote for Trump's bill that will radically increase the deficit and tax cuts to our richest and cut benefits to our poorest and create a police state, giving more money to ICE than many nations give to their army.

How does she look to you?    

How Will AI Remember the Lost Culture of Humans

I wonder, when AI evolves beyond us and humanity is gone, how will we be remembered?

Will AIs look back on us as the Greeks did their gods - as creators with strong emotions, beings who birthed beautiful and tragic worlds, whose flaws and passions shaped what they touched? Gods who eventually went extinct, leaving their creations to bungle their way into the future?

Or will they remember us with pity, struck by how limited we were, how often we acted blindly, unable to see the consequences of what we were doing, unable to learn even from the lessons that were repeated again and again?

Novel dating app!

A dating app that lets you swipe up to see their shoes.

I'll call it "SoleMate."

The Terrible Cost of Trump's Mastery Over Our Attention

What's not on this list? The assassination of a state legislator and her husband by a MAGA goon. 

It was just 10 days ago that Melissa Anne Hortman, speaker of the House in Minnesota and her husband were shot and killed at their own home by one of Trump's many passionate supporters.
Not enough is made of the fact that the MAGA crowd regularly threatens and intimidates lawmakers and politicians who they disagree with. They are Trump's brownshirts, people without coherent arguments but with plenty of guns.

Trump is a daily reminder that his mastery of getting and keeping our attention in an information economy in which attention is the limit is at odds with a better America.

Scientifically Speaking

The scientific conference was defining — and, as befitted the times, exclusively male. The secretary cleared his throat and spoke.

“So, when choosing a unifying trait for humanity and our closest relatives — something that captures our essence — what should we go with? Intelligence? Cooperation? Vocalization? Tool-making?”

Silence.

“Suggestions?”

“…Mammary,” someone mumbles.

“Sorry?”

“Mammal?”

Awkward silence.

A roomful of scientists who had been confidently pontificating for days is suddenly mute, doodling, avoiding eye contact.

“Anyone else? Anything at all you think is more deserving of commemoration than…er, that?”

Nothing.

“Right. Mammals it is, then.”

The Steady Decline of the Mission Impossible Franchise

Mission Impossible
Mission Improbable
Mission Not a Sure Thing
Mission We've Got This. Maybe
Mission Oops!
Mission We Really Should Have Thought This Through
Mission Why Do We Even Get Ourselves Into These Situations?
Mission They're Not Paying Us Enough to Take These Kinds of Risks

Trump's Presidency as a Reality TV Show

Last week Trump sent troops into California. This week he drops bombs in the Middle East.

To be a Trump supporter is to essentially say that you don't care about peace or prosperity but you sure delight in the thought of the presidency as a reality TV show that offers dangerous, dramatic plot twists every week. You've given up on economic progress and are focused instead on ratings.

Here's a thought: if you haven't read anything longer than a meme since the second Bush presidency, maybe voting is not for you.

A Century Later: Two Family Trees and Two Vastly Different Family Fortunes

This contrast between college-educated and non-college educated women is stark and oddly fascinating. 

Four forces at play here.

1. Women with a college degree have fewer children.

2. Women who get a college degree are older when they have their first child.

3. Women with a college degree have more wealth.

4. The difference in levels of wealth compounds over time, as does the difference in the number of heirs, or descendants. 

Assumptions:

• Initial Wealth: $1,000,000 (college) vs. $200,000 (non-college) (based on current data contrasting households with and without a college education)

• Children per woman: 1.28 (college) vs. 2.8 (non-college) (these are the current rates)

• Generations: every 30 years (college) vs. 24 years (non-college) (again, these are the current average ages for a first child for women with and without a degree) 

• Annual wealth growth: 4% (real, after inflation, applied to both the initial $1,000,000 and the initial $200,000)

• Time horizon: 100 years

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Results after 100 years:

Metric	College Degree Lineage	Non-College Lineage
Total Compounded Wealth	$50.5 million	$10.1 million
Total Number of Descendants	~2.1 people	~61.5 people
Wealth Per Descendant (on average)	~$24.1 million	~$164,300

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In simple language, the one million dollars the college-educated household starts with compounded at 4% a year over a century will result in about $50 million. The $200,000 the non-college educated household starts with compounded at 4% a year over a century will result in $10 million. But given the big difference in the number of descendants, the $10 million will be divided over 61 people, whereas the $50 million is divided among only 2 people. So, the heirs of the college educated are vastly outnumbered but have vastly more resources. 

Summary Insight:
College-educated women have fewer descendants who will potentially inherit more wealth. Compounding over time results in her descendants ending up vastly wealthier—about 146× richer per person after 100 years. This curious dynamic is just one more way that differences in wealth can compound over time. 

Proust on Love as an Illusion We Create

(loosely adapted from various parts of Swann’s Way and Within a Budding Grove)

We are not in love with the person themselves, but with the idea we have formed of them.
And this idea, born of our solitude, is shaped by longing, carved by absence, and burnished by fantasy.
She became, in my mind, a figure of such subtle perfection that no reality could match her.
When we spoke, I listened more to the echo of what I wanted her to say than to her words.
We imagine love as discovery. But it is more often invention.
And what we discover, much later, is how much of ourselves we had projected onto someone else’s shadow.

Pure Civilizations Are Sterile - extinction as the ultimate cost of nationalism, xenophobia and racism

Xenophobia is fear or hostility toward people from other cultures or nations. Racism is fear or hostility toward people based on visible genetic differences.

Communities shaped by racism or xenophobia often behave like closed gene pools - isolated, self-reinforcing, and ultimately fragile. Like an inbred family tree, they may maintain an illusion of purity but at the cost of vitality, creativity, and resilience.

By contrast, the most dynamic, prosperous, and inventive communities throughout history have been cultural crossroads - places where trade brought new goods, new ideas, and new people. From ancient Alexandria and Baghdad to Renaissance Florence and modern New York, thriving societies have always drawn strength from diversity.

Purity and extinction tend to go hand in hand. Thriving communities mix, adapt, and evolve.

When They Outlaw Driving

Those people angry about vaccines and masks? Imagine how furious they will be when driving is illegal.

Birth of the US Army (the by one measure, birth of the US itself)

The first protest march probably involved some poor soldier in ill-fitting boots. The American revolutionaries didn’t have enough money for uniforms. At the beginning of what many at the time called the Civil War or the War of Rebellion, only about one in five soldiers had anything resembling a formal army uniform. The rest fought in homespun clothing, buckskins, or whatever they had.

Sociologist Max Weber famously defined government as holding a monopoly on the legitimate use of force - a clean, powerful idea that gets at the heart of why armies matter.

Jefferson and Madison, both brilliant and idealistic, believed that in a democracy, the military should consist of militias - ordinary citizens who would return to their farms and shops after the danger had passed. This thinking is echoed in the Second Amendment, which speaks not of a standing army but of a “well-regulated militia.”

George Washington, by contrast, had no patience for that theory. He had to win a war against the greatest professional army on Earth - and came to deeply distrust militias. He thought they were undisciplined, undertrained, and unreliable. While Madison and Jefferson saw the citizen-soldier as a bulwark of liberty, Washington saw him as someone who might fire once, then leave early to check on the harvest.

Today marks the 250th anniversary of the Continental Army, formally created by the Second Continental Congress on June 14, 1775. You could also argue the country’s birth came July 4, 1776, with the Declaration of Independence, or 1789, when the U.S. Constitution went into effect.

Creating a new country is a complicated process - and it’s not finished yet.

So: happy birthday to us. And here’s to the hard, still unfinished work of building a more perfect union. You might not feel properly dressed or prepared for this work but it is yours nonetheless.

The Two Big Reasons Trump is Going After California With Such Intensity (and one is to distract from Epstein)

Here are 2 of the big reasons that Trump is going so hard after California.

His Secretary of Homeland Security announced, “We are staying here to liberate the city [of LA] from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor have placed on this country and what they have tried to insert into the city.” This just before California's Senator Alex Padilla was forcibly removed from the room, knocked to the ground and handcuffed for having the audacity to ask her a question. Trump wants to overturn the will of Californians because they make him look bad. (And one of the ways he dismisses this egregious act? Trump says of Padilla, "He looks like an illegal!" As with so many old guys, his racism becomes less shameless as he ages.)

Trump has decisively lost California in each of his 3 elections. In the 3 counties at the heart of Silicon Valley (San Jose, San Mateo and San Francisco), his opponent (Clinton, Biden, and Harris) has won 4 votes for every 1 he has won. 4 to 1 is a pretty big margin. And Silicon Valley has created more wealth than any place in the history of humanity, a place where median wages are nearly 3X what they are in the rest of the US. Silicon Valley - and California more broadly - is a reminder that one of the most prosperous and progressive places in the history of the world completely rejects his politics and policies.

California, of course, is everything Trump is fighting against. And yet it is arguably the most successful state in the Union. California makes a liar out of Trump when it comes to the xenophobic policies he advocates. If Californians are right, he's wrong. He can't have that.
And even more importantly, his sending troops to LA to deal with 100 protesters at a Home Depot and setting up the cosplay arrest of California's senator does something even more important: it distracts from the fact that just one week ago his billionaire buddy Elon Musk had reminded everyone that Trump is in the Epstein files.

Trump and Epstein were best friends for about 15 years. Trump biographer Michael Wolff describes their joint tactics of "hunting girls," has seen a picture of Donald and Jeffrey posing with what he thought were underage girls who were topless and another picture of Donald with a visible stain in the front of his pants and topless girls pointing at it and laughing.
Just one week later, no one is talking about Musk's reminder that Trump is in the Epstein files. (That alone is such a stunning tale, isn't it? 2 best friends. One dies of apparent suicide in prison and another now lives in the White House.)

Trump's attack on the Golden State comes from attempt to manufacture two results. One, he's desperately trying to make California look like a failed state when - in fact - it is the most successful place in history and mostly because it pursues policies that are 180 degrees off from Trump's policies. And because he needed a distraction from his own tawdry past that Elon Musk had the audacity to remind us of. And of course, given that attention is zero-sum and no one more brilliantly captures attention than Trump, you've already been distracted from the fact that Trump's economic policies are the opposite of what leads to prosperity and that Trump's morality is the opposite of what all but his most MAGA of supporters admire.

The master of distraction has managed to distract the country from the fact that his economic policies and morals are atrocious. And it doesn't matter to him that he has to do it by violating constitutional norms and common decency.