Michael Reagan Dies at 80

Michael Reagan had a sad childhood. His adopted parents were Ronald Reagan and Jane Wyman. Even though he was Ronald Reagan's son, he lived at boarding school and when he came home to be with Ronald and Nancy, he did not have a bedroom or bed and simply slept on the couch. Hard to imagine that wouldn't leave a kid feeling a bit disoriented.

Michael Reagan, the eldest son of President Ronald Reagan & a conservative commentator, died 4 January, 2026, at age 80.

When We Began to Wear Clothes for More Than Warmth - Beginning the Move from Living in Nature to Living in Culture

 At a certain point in history, people begin to wear clothing not just for protection from the elements but as a cultural norm. At this point, culture begins to operate as a second skin. Clothing is both literal and symbolic. It is a technology, but it is also a signal—visible evidence that survival has moved beyond mere adaptation to nature and into adaptation to one another.

What clothing marks is the emergence of a new kind of life: not just survival in climate and landscape, but survival in relationship—in reputation, belonging, and shared meaning. Once clothing becomes normal, humans are no longer only animals navigating weather, hunger, and mating. They are social beings navigating expectations, norms, and interpretations.

Clothing, both practically and metaphorically, moves us one step further from a world defined primarily by nature and one step further into a world defined by culture. The body is no longer simply exposed; it is presented. Identity becomes legible. Membership becomes visible.

And the steps that follow extend this trajectory. Homes place a cultural layer between us and the elements. Settlements embed us in social structure. Climate control completes the arc, allowing humans to inhabit environments that would otherwise be unlivable—not by evolving new bodies, but by deepening shared systems of knowledge, cooperation, and design.

Seen this way, human history is not a story of escaping nature so much as interposing culture—adding layers between raw biology and lived experience. Clothing is among the earliest of those layers, a second skin that signals the moment when survival begins to depend less on genes alone and more on what we learn, share, and pass on together.

Politics in a Multicultural America

We went, in the space of a few generations, from one local newspaper and a handful of radio stations to three national television networks; from those shared broadcast rituals to magazines aimed at ever more specific sensibilities; from video stores with finite shelves to the internet’s effectively infinite catalog—memes, movies, lectures, conspiracies, fandoms, ideologies, all jostling for our attention at once.

The good news is obvious. The menu expanded dramatically. Voices once excluded could finally speak. Niche tastes found audiences. Curiosity no longer required permission. If you wanted depth, strangeness, humor, outrage, comfort, or beauty, you could find it—instantly.

But the tradeoff was subtle and only became clear over time. A shared culture does not fragment all at once; it thins, then stretches, then quietly dissolves. When everyone draws from a different information stream, agreement becomes harder—not just about policy, but about meaning. Not only what we should do, but what kind of country we think we live in, what stories count as real, and which events are worth noticing at all.

What felt like liberation at the level of individual choice became disorientation at the level of collective identity.

This is not because Americans suddenly became less reasonable or less patriotic. It is because coherence is an emergent property. It depends on overlap—on common reference points, shared facts, and cultural touchstones that allow disagreement to occur within some mutually intelligible frame. As those overlaps shrink, disagreement stops being a conversation and becomes parallel monologues.

Lewis Carroll anticipated this sensation better than most political theorists ever could. We have wandered, collectively, into a kind of Wonderland—one where nonsense is offered as poetry, where confidence substitutes for meaning, and where everyone seems to be talking, but no one quite appears to be talking to anyone else. Like Alice at the tea party, we sense that a conversation is underway, yet we “can’t quite follow it,” because the rules keep changing and the participants seem to be answering questions no one else asked.






Rabbit holes are, in themselves, a wonderful thing. Curiosity is not the enemy. Exploration is not the problem. The problem arises when a society becomes all rabbit holes and no common ground—when every individual experience is rich, but the collective story grows thin.

The information economy did not merely give us more facts. It gave us more realities. And while that abundance made personal freedom easier to exercise, it made social agreement far harder to maintain. We gained choice faster than we developed new institutions, norms, or habits capable of helping us choose together.

In that sense, our cultural confusion is not a failure of values so much as a consequence of success: a society suddenly able to generate meaning faster than it can coordinate it. Wonderland is dazzling. It is also exhausting. And sooner or later, every Alice begins to ask not just what else is there to see, but how do we find our way back to something shared?

**********

And the real punchline—the one we keep circling without fully naming—is that we are, and will remain, multicultural.

Whatever version of America we define next cannot be built by wishing that fact away. It has to begin with it. People realizing their potential will pursue happiness along radically different paths and, in the process, become very different people. That is not a failure of cohesion; it is the condition of freedom.

Some Americans will remain squares. Others will always be beatniks. Some will describe themselves as products of culture—of learning, environment, and choice. Others will insist that genes, heritage, and destiny loom larger. These differences are not aberrations to be solved. They are permanent features of a society that places liberty at its center.

Specialization, after all, was never only about the factory floor. Adam Smith gave us the image of one man drawing out the wire and another sharpening it, but specialization has long since escaped the bounds of production. We now specialize in lifestyles, sensibilities, identities, communities, and values. We choose different sources of meaning, beauty, obligation, and belonging. And that divergence is not going away.

What this means is something both humbling and hopeful: we will never be the same as one another—and that shared experience of distinctness may be one of the most universal things about us. To feel uniquely oneself, to sense that no one else quite occupies the same vantage point in the world, is an experience nearly everyone recognizes.

If there is a foundation on which a modern American identity can be rebuilt, it is not sameness but mutual recognition across difference—an acceptance that creativity, productivity, and vitality emerge not from enforced uniformity, but from coordination among people who are unlike one another in meaningful ways.

A country that can hold that idea—one that treats diversity of paths not as a threat but as a resource—has the potential to be endlessly adaptive. Not tidy. Not tranquil. But fascinating, creative, and wildly productive.

Either We Become a Radically Different Country or the Republican Party Becomes Essentially Extinct for a Lifetime

Trump now appears intent on unraveling the U.S. commitment to NATO—reportedly over his desire to seize Greenland by force.

If you still believe “Russia, Russia” was a hoax, you may be clinging to a delusion that recent events are making harder to sustain. What once sounded implausible now fits an emerging pattern.

It is difficult to overstate how dramatic—and dangerous—a break this would be from American policy over the last century. It would amount to a wholesale reversal: from leading a coalition that helped secure a peaceful Europe to adopting the posture of a power willing to invade territory and redraw borders by force.

That is not merely a policy shift; it is a moral realignment. It would mean switching sides—from the defenders of a rules-based order to those who openly violate it.

If the Republican Party cannot or will not stop Trump, it risks suffering the kind of long political exile the Democratic Party endured for roughly sixty years after Lincoln—and that Republicans themselves endured for roughly fifty years after FDR. Parties, like nations, can survive many mistakes. What they rarely survive is abandoning their fundamental role in history.

***********

The fact that Trump is repeatedly threatening to invade and seize Greenland should alarm any serious person. Not because it is theatrical or provocative rhetoric—but because it crosses a line that Americans have not had to contemplate in generations.

Had anyone told me even a few years ago that a U.S. president would openly discuss invading and conquering territory belonging to a NATO ally, I would have dismissed it as absurd. Not “unlikely”—inconceivable. That idea simply did not belong in the realm of American politics as it had existed since World War II.

And yet here we are.

Trump has expressed this intention repeatedly, not as a joke, not as satire, but as an assertion of power. The repetition matters. This is no longer an offhand provocation; it is a declared posture. When a leader with control over the world’s most powerful military speaks this way, disbelief is not a strategy.

This would not represent a minor deviation in foreign policy. It would be a historic rupture—one that signals a shift from a rules-based international order to raw territorial ambition. From a nation that helped build NATO to one that treats alliances as obstacles. From a power that deterred invasions to one that contemplates launching them.

Trying to “tone down” that reality risks confusing sobriety with denial. There are moments—rare, but real—when calm language no longer clarifies the danger. Telling people not to worry because the idea sounds outrageous is like reassuring shoppers while someone is actively firing a weapon: the implausibility of the situation is precisely what makes it so dangerous.

The tragedy is that Americans are being asked to adjust, psychologically and morally, to something they were never meant to normalize. Threatening conquest is not part of our political tradition. It is the language of regimes we once defined ourselves against.

Disbelief was once the appropriate response. Now attention is.

A Vote Against Democracy Should Mean The End of Your Right to Vote

Tomorrow is the 5th anniversary of Trump's attempt to violently overthrow democracy.

We need a constitutional amendment that simply suggests that anyone who supports the overthrow of democracy no longer gets to vote. A vote against democracy - by voting for someone who tried to violently overthrow it - should be a vote against your own voting.

Monogamous Penguins

Penguins are supposedly monogamous but given they all look alike, no one - including the penguins - is actually sure of this.

History Compresses Vast Sprawls of Time, Lives, Events and Trends

The past feels simpler because we encounter it through maps, not terrain. History is what chaos looks like after it’s been cleaned up—after blind alleys, detours, and parallel parades have been edited out.

The 1900s took billions of people a full century to live—a collective experience amounting to something like a trillion human years. We condense all of that into a book that takes six hours to read or a documentary that runs for an hour.

It’s the difference between a thousand acres of dry-land wheat and a single slice of bread.

Cooperation Helps One Compete

 "Having norms that increase cooperation can favor success in competition with other groups that lack these norms."

Henrich, Joseph. The Secret of Our Success (p. 167). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition. 

Cooperation helps in competition. Hard to say whether that is wonderfully paradoxical or prosaically obvious. In any case, a truth worth repeating. 

A Cultural Contrast Between Canada and the US As Seen in Its Supreme Court

Reading Joseph Henrich's brilliant The Secret of Our Success - a book about culture and its importance in shaping societies and individuals - I came across this contrast between Canada and the US that articulated so much of what I've seen and experienced as a cultural difference between the US and Canada.

Henrich writes that the Great Sanhedrin - the Jewish Court that dates back millennia - had a custom of hearing arguments from its board of judges that started with the youngest, least experienced and concluded with the most senior and experienced judge. This process works in the opposite direction of natural dynamics that typically - say in a university or corporate department - start with the most senior person, then include a few people at the next level and then - often - never create room for opinions from the most junior people at all.

Henrich writes,

"Similarly, though the Supreme Court of Canada uses the same speaking protocol as the Great Sanhedrin, the U.S. Supreme Court goes the opposite way, beginning with the Chief Justice and proceeding down from there.

Henrich, Joseph. The Secret of Our Success (p. 138). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.

The Secret to Becoming a Billionaire

Do you know why Warren Buffet is a billionaire?

He didn't retire until he was 95.

[File under, "life lessons kids don't want to hear."]

Happy new year!

Shake off the ick before 2026!

Happy new year!

Change in Value Through 2025 - the Highs (Silver) and Lows (Trump Media & Tech Stock)

Changes from the start to finish of 2025. (I know. This information would have been so much more valuable 365 days ago.)

The Directional Difference Between Socialists and Capitalists

Socialists and capitalists largely agreed that society and the economy are inseparable.

Where they differed was in what to change first.

Socialists focused on reshaping social relations—class, gender, power—believing that fairer economic outcomes would follow.
Capitalists focused on reshaping economic incentives—markets, capital, innovation—believing that social progress would emerge as a consequence.

Put more simply, socialists tried to make social change that would also impact the economy whereas capitalists tried to make economic change that would also impact society.

In practice, every successful era combined both: economic change required social legitimacy, and social change required economic capacity.

I Didn't Say She Was Emotional

I didn’t say she was emotional. I simply said she got choked up each morning reading her horoscope, imagining all the wonderful, if vague, promise it held.

AI's Great - Largely Unspoken - Potential for Intellectual Matchmaking

A frontier we rarely capture is the value hidden in the interactions between fields. We train specialists to go deep, but many discoveries occur where domains overlap—where, say, material science meets biology, or optics meets chemistry, and the emergent behavior is the real prize.

The bottleneck is not intelligence; it’s coordination: finding the right counterpart in another field and then constructing a shared language to work together. 

AI has the potential to lower both costs. It might surface non-obvious connections across literatures, suggest plausible joint hypotheses, and translate between vocabularies—essentially matching complementary experts who would never have met or even realize that their great theories and expertise could meet and have a baby that would yield something dramatically different. 

But the final step is institutional: we’ll need incentives and structures that reward the collaboration AI makes possible. To translate these possibilities into value means creating institutions that fund these efforts and create the supporting infrastructure of teammates, equipment, project management, and experts who might be called in for portions of this project. And, of course, visionary marketing to create the support needed to translate this possibility into reality. 

Fortune Cookies as a Gateway

I'm beginning to suspect that fortune cookies reveal little about the future ... but by now they've got me hooked on the Chinese food and it's too late to stop.

Two Amendments That Shifted Policy from A Focus on Just Capital to Capital and Labor

The 16th Amendment (1913) gave the federal government the capacity to raise modern revenues through an income tax; the 19th Amendment (1920) giving women the right to vote changed who politicians had to persuade about how that revenue should be used. 

There is strong evidence that women’s enfranchisement shifted policy priorities, increasing public spending on public health and education, strengthening child-labor restrictions, establishing minimum wages for women, and expanding aid for mothers and children. Granting women the right to vote did more than improve representation for women themselves; it amplified the political voice of those advocating for children and long-term human development.

In the late nineteenth century, public investment focused primarily on land and capital. By the early twentieth century, the government began to invest more deliberately in labor—in people—many of them children.

Mencken's Rebuttal to Thorstein Veblen's Claim of Conspicuous Consumption

Thorstein Veblen famously defined conspicuous consumption as people buying, wearing, driving, and enjoying certain products and services less for their intrinsic value than for the status they signaled. H.L. Mencken, rebutting Veblen's claims that people bought pricier goods because of the status they conferred, wrote, in Prejudices, First Series (1919):

Do I enjoy a decent bath because I know that John Smith cannot afford one - or because I delight in being clean?
Do I admire Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony because it is incomprehensible to Congressmen and Methodists - or because I genuinely love music?
Do I prefer terrapin à la Maryland to fried liver because plow-hands must put up with the liver - or because the terrapin is intrinsically a more charming dose?
Do I prefer kissing a pretty girl to kissing a charwoman, because even a janitor may kiss a charwoman - or because the pretty girl looks better, smells better, and kisses better?

It might be that the pricier goods communicate social status. It might also be that they're pricier simply because they're more pleasing. 

If You Can't Decide on a Genre For Tonight's Entertainment ... might we suggest sports?

If you watch sports, you don’t know what genre you’re getting.

It might be a feel-good story—your team dominating, the hero delivering, everything clicking just right.
It might be a thriller, decided at the buzzer.
Or it might be a tragedy: your team never quite strings together three good plays, the opponent keeps stumbling into success, and your favorite players look painfully mortal.

Not sure whether you’re in the mood for heartbreak, suspense, triumph, or some uneasy blend of all three?

If you can’t decide, might we suggest… sports? It's a way to turn your mood for the rest of the evening over to chance.

Proposing Cat Stevens Updates One of His Classics to "Oh Very Old!"

Time for Cat Stevens to release an update to his classic "Oh Very Young." Titled, "Oh Very Old," it'll be a meditation on inheritance and end of life distribution of gifts and charity donations.

Very little change needed for the opening lines, simply changing the word young to old.

"Oh very old, what will you leave us this time?
You're only dancin' on this earth for a short while."