Oh the Dickens You Say

“This box is empty. Empty. This—this is what you got me? What is this supposed to be, Jerome? What’s supposed to be under all this wrapping paper?”

“It’s the Ghost of the Christmas Present.”

Reading Minds

He claimed he could read dogs' minds. We asked him to prove it. After calmly holding his hands over the dog's head for about 4 minutes, he began to pant and bark. He clarified that he could read their minds but not translate. That was a completely different gift.

UM Consumer Sentiment Index at Lowest on Record (going back to 1960)

University of Michigan consumer sentiment index at its lowest in more than 6 decades.

Hey UM. You think that's remarkable, ask me about my citizen sentiment right now.

source:https://www.sca.isr.umich.edu/charts.html 

Herod's Violent Crackdown

Matthew 2: 16
Then Herod, when he saw that he had been tricked by the wise men, became furious, and he sent and killed all the male children in Bethlehem and in all that region who were two years old or under, according to the time that he had ascertained from the wise men.

This World, a poem

THIS WORLD

It appears that it was all a misunderstanding.
What was only a trial run was taken seriously.
The rivers will return to their beginnings.
The wind will cease in its turning about.
Trees instead of budding will tend to their roots.
Old men will chase a ball, a glance in the mirror-
They are children again.
The dead will wake up, not comprehending.
Till everything that happened has unhappened.
What a relief! Breathe freely, you who suffered much.

Poem by Nobel Prize winning Polish-American poet Czesław Miłosz.

The 10 Richest Americans are Worth a Combined $2.6 Trillion

The 10 richest Americans are worth a combined $2.6 trillion.

Only 7 of the 190 countries in this world have a GDP larger than $2.6 trillion.

This as of 18 December 2025.

Karma of a Different Sort

Karma sutra.
An awkward position you find yourself in as the result of some stupid thing you did in the past.

Are You Closer to Bankruptcy or Billionaire?

I feel as though I'm about as pro wealth creation as anyone I know but ...

Each year, between 500,000 and 1 million Americans file for personal bankruptcy.

In a typical year, perhaps a dozen Americans become billionaires. (There are roughly 1,000 billionaires in the U.S., but the club grows most years.)

Designing policy to encourage wealth creation matters.

But designing policy to reduce the vastly more probable outcome of personal financial crisis matters more.

One overlooked bit of genius of Trump is that through cultural wars, he got millions of Americans to imagine they had more in common with - and were more likely to join - the billionaires than the bankrupt. 

Side Effects May Include ... What Political Parties Are Not Telling Us

One reason I tend to trust pharmaceutical companies more than “natural remedies” is that pharma doesn’t just promise benefits — it also lists side effects. That feels oddly honest. If you’re taking something powerful enough to relieve pain, stress, or cancer, it’s powerful enough to have unintended consequences. Vaccines are more likely than green tea to make you ache or feel sick but also more likely to protect you from nasty disease.

Which made me wonder:
What if political parties were required to do the same thing?

Imagine campaign ads that ended not just with soaring music and hopeful slogans, but with a calm voiceover:
“Side effects may include…”

Not as a gotcha. Not as mockery. Just as an acknowledgment that policies, like medicines, act on complex systems and rarely do only one thing.

What would be listed as side effects of today’s Democratic platforms?
What would be the side effects of Republican ones?

Job Numbers in Trump's Economy

Some job numbers

Nov 2024:
Unemployment rate 4.2%
Number unemployed 7.1 million

Nov 2025:
Unemployment rate 4.6%
Number unemployed 7.8 million

The AVERAGE monthly rate of job creation:

In Donald Trump's
First 3 months in office: 127,000
Most recent 7 months: 17,000

In Joe Biden's 48 months: 336,000

Data source: BLS

Frankly, I Had Higher Expectations for the West Wing Sequel

Who knew the sequel to The West Wing would be called The East Wing and it would involve the literal demolition of the government structure of that name.
No snappy dialogue.
No noble principles.
Just wrecking balls, gold overlays, and the suggestion that there will be great balls thrown, to which none of us common Americans will be invited.

The AI Generated Soundtrack of Social Encounters

One of the most pervasive—and least anticipated—uses of AI turned out to be the universal addition of mood music to everyday life.

Not soundtracks chosen by people, but soundtracks generated for them: foreboding strings when you walked into a difficult meeting, a jaunty clarinet when you bumped into a friend at the grocery store, slow contemplative piano when you opened the refrigerator at 2 a.m. to rethink your life.

At first it was magical. A handful of early adopters floated through the world as if starring in a beautifully directed film. But within a year, once the feature went mainstream, any space containing more than six people became a small sonic riot—like twelve orchestras frantically scoring twelve overlapping subplots.

Still, society adapted. Parents quickly realized that the music served as a nearly subliminal social tutor. Children learned, without instruction, what level of decorum was expected simply by the incidental score: reverent hush (string quartet), gentle playfulness (marimba), or “for the love of everything, not here” (solo bassoon).

By the end, mood music did more than dramatize our lives.
It replaced what used to be called manners.

And honestly? It worked astonishingly well—at least until the algorithm started adding ominous strings every time Uncle Arnold approached with political opinions.

Powell Suggests Economy is Steadily Losing Jobs

Jerome Powell yesterday commented on how the Fed is trying to make policy without data. He also said that what little data we do have on job creation seems to be skewed upwards by about 60,000 a month.

So, rather than creating roughly 40,000 jobs a month in the last quarter+, he thinks the economy is more likely losing 20,000 jobs a month. 

The Trump critic: Quite the hat trick Donald has pulled off: higher prices and losing jobs.

The Trump defender: But at least he's building a ballroom so couldn't you try to think about someone other than yourself - American voter - and just be happy for him?

Trump's Threat to A Century of Foreign Policy And Global Alignment

 The Trump administration has just released a national security document that reverses nearly a century of American philosophy and policies. Steven Simon and Jonathan Stevenson write in the The New York Times (full piece here: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/09/opinion/trump-security-strategy-threats.html)

*quote:
Even Republican members of Congress seem to be getting unnerved about U.S. government-ordered strikes in the Caribbean that are an illegal, immoral and distinctly unstrategic use of a superlative professional military. Yet the administration’s 2025 National Security Strategy, released last week and by turns incoherent, ahistorical and specious, casts the strikes as a legitimate exercise of “the Trump corollary to the Monroe Doctrine” and one of any number of “targeted deployments to secure the border and defeat cartels.”

This strategy document focuses the United States’ attention on the Western Hemisphere. It subjects strategically crucial regions and allies to relegation and, in the case of Europe, outright subversion. It denigrates the European Union “and other transnational bodies that undermine political liberty and sovereignty,” while implicitly contemplating Europe’s right-wing nativist parties as instruments for “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory.” Those comments effectively codify JD Vance’s hectoring speech at the Munich Security Conference last February. As the United States systematically eviscerates its constitutional order and international standing, it presumes to tell Europe that it risks “civilizational erasure.”
*end quote

Here is what this means.

For the first time since 1945, a U.S. National Security Strategy appears to cast Europe’s liberal-democratic project as more troubling than Moscow’s authoritarian one. That is not a minor adjustment of priorities; it is a reversal of the FDR-era bet on a world of cooperating democracies. The Trump administration is edging away from a decades-long alliance with the European Union and leaning instead toward an ideological partnership with nationalist regimes, including Putin’s Russia, that reject liberal norms.

It is worth pausing over what “liberal” means here. Liberal as in liberty. A liberal democracy is one in which the majority wins elections, but minorities keep their freedom - their right to practice marginal or no religion, to live in ways the majority may dislike, to pursue careers, cultures, and identities that do not conform. In such a system, a majority vote may be needed to raise or lower taxes, or to fund education and science, but it is not needed to validate particular lifestyles, ethnicities, or beliefs. The point of liberal democracy is precisely that some freedoms are not up for a show of hands.

Trump’s administration is attempting to roll that back: to turn cultural conformity, religious orthodoxy, and ethnic hierarchy into political goals rather than private choices. For a nation that once helped design and defend the liberal order, it is hard to overstate how dangerous and disorienting that turn is.

The Tiny Portion of Crypto Assets Used for Payments

Crypto. It is not really an investment (no profits or returns) or a currency, but people still pretend like it is both.

This, from David Frum in The Atlantic

"Most cryptocurrency owners don’t use it to buy things or pay people. A 2023 survey by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation found that among the small minority of U.S. households that own crypto assets, only 3.3 percent use them to send or receive payments; about 2 percent use them to purchase goods in the real economy."

A Christmas Poem (or something like it)

Christmas is the holiday we take most seriously.
The birth of the baby Jesus.
This point at which he was still innocent of knowledge,
So much still to be revealed - about himself, the world.

He taught us that the price for life is death.
No one gets out alive.
To live like you have something to save
When you know you'll eventually lose everything?
That might just be wrong,
He suggested.
Watch how it is done.

But before all that,
Before the thousand questions and The very few answers,
He was the baby Jesus,
Innocent of our calloused sin.

And that is the Jesus we celebrate
With our own children,
Wondering what gifts to give them.
Whether they will remember or value any of it.
Wondering what of our own lives will be resurrected for the next generation.
And the next.
What gifts will they be?
What gifts are we?

Labor Market Like a Deer in the Headlights Waiting for More Predictable Economic Policy

The Trump administration has sharply curtailed federal data collection and reporting, leaving us to rely on less accurate and less consistent sources to judge the economy. What those sources suggest so far is that two things have happened in Trump’s first year: hiring has slowed, and separations (layoffs, firings, quits) have also slowed. That’s good news for people who might otherwise have lost their jobs, but bad news for people hoping to find one.

When I began driving, my mother gave me simple advice: drive in a way that makes it easy for other drivers to predict what you’ll do. I later realized how wise that was. When the drivers around you can anticipate your moves, they can adjust smoothly—and you can adjust to them. Collisions avoided. (At least for the first half-century of my driving. All bets are off in my dotage.)

Which brings me back to the labor market.

Trump’s tariffs are currently being challenged in court, and betting markets put the odds of them surviving at roughly one in four. In other words, we have tariffs—for now—but there’s a decent chance they disappear soon.

Tariffs are no small thing. Yet businesses largely aren’t raising prices to offset them (why alienate customers over a cost that may vanish?). Nor are many firms hiring or firing aggressively to adapt—because the tariffs themselves may be temporary.

The result is a kind of economic hesitation. Businesses aren’t moving forward confidently under “business as usual.” They’re also not retooling their operations for a genuinely new normal. Instead, they’re waiting.

One often-overlooked role of government is predictability. Regulations that affect decisions involving millions or billions of dollars can’t reasonably change every six months, and then change again six months later. Firms don’t invest, hire, or expand in an environment where the rules of the road are unknowable.

Start driving as if there’s a bee loose in the car, and traffic grinds down. Accidents become more likely. Something similar happens when economic policy becomes unpredictable: businesses slow rather than move confidently into the future.

In theory, we may know within weeks whether the courts uphold Trump’s tariffs and, by extension, whether they affirm that Congress still has a central role in economic policy, rather than allowing presidents to levy taxes unilaterally. Until then, a key element of the economy is unpredictable. Companies hesitate. Hiring stalls. And workers, like the rest of us, remain in limbo.

For Profit Media is At Odds With A Healthy Democracy

A slowly improving society is an economic threat to an attention-based media. Panic pays; progress does not. In an information economy, demand steadily shifts toward drama, conflict, and daily news designed to seize and hold our attention. People will pay to watch a zero-sum game played on the grass; nobody pays to watch grass grow.

The politics of theater does more than elevate drama over boring progress. It has a way of putting us in the seats, watching events unfold, rather than giving us meaningful roles to play. It turns citizens into spectators - passive and angry at the same time - a particularly corrosive combination for a healthy society. 

A democracy cannot thrive when its citizens are treated primarily as an audience.