Voter Turnout Seems to Rise in a Divided Country

A divided country tends to vote at higher rates. Earlier this century, voter turnout in U.S. presidential general elections hovered around 55% of eligible voters.

Between 1848 and 1872 — a period that included the Civil War — average turnout was about 75%. Viewed in that light, recent presidential elections are telling: turnout was 67% in 2020 and 65% in 2024, both high by modern standards and reflective of a deeply divided electorate.

As I've said before, I think the slogan that could win the next election is, "Make politics boring again."

The Balancing Act: FDR vs. Dictatorship and the Power of Inclusive Policy (Or, What is Fascism?)

Franklin Roosevelt and Adolf Hitler both came to power in 1933 and died in April 1945—one by stroke, the other by suicide. Their parallel timelines make the contrast in governance stark.

System	Core Alignment	Who Was Excluded
Hitler’s Fascism	Government + Business	Labor, democracy, intellectuals, free press
Stalin’s Communism	Government – Business	Independent labor, markets, press, and thought
FDR’s New Deal Democracy	Government + Business + Labor + Intellectuals + Free Press	None, in principle; dissent tolerated and institutionalized

 

Hitler and Stalin crushed opposition. FDR, facing the Great Depression, could not dictate policy—nor did he wish to. Instead, he built an economy that worked through inclusion: Congress, the courts, corporations, unions, intellectuals, and a free press all played roles. No one was silenced for dissenting ideas.

This made policy slower but more sustainable. It also made it democratic.

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The Great Experiment in Inclusive Governance

The 1930s and 1940s tested three competing economic systems—capitalism, communism, and fascism—under the pressures of depression and war.

Fascism and communism seemed, at first, to demonstrate superior efficiency: Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s USSR mobilized industries rapidly, while democracies looked paralyzed by debate. Yet the cost—repression, censorship, and moral catastrophe—soon revealed that such efficiency was brittle.

FDR’s “third way” wasn’t an “either–or” but an “and”: public investment and private enterprise, labor and management, federal power and local initiative. He depended on cooperation rather than control. Even when Congress or the Supreme Court struck down his ideas—such as his first child-labor bill—he adapted rather than crushed opposition.

To build support, Roosevelt accepted compromises, some tragic. To win southern Democrats’ votes, for instance, he excluded domestic and farm workers—many of them Black—from Social Security. Progress was incomplete, but FDR understood that the measure of reform is better, not perfect. People who sacrifice progress for perfection, he knew, end up with neither.

---

How the Systems Treated Business

The difference among regimes can be seen in their treatment of corporations.

• Stalin: Private enterprise virtually abolished. The economy was state-owned and centrally planned; inefficiency was endemic.
• Hitler: Private firms remained but operated under strict state direction—rearmament priorities, wage controls, and “Aryanization.” Ownership was private; purpose was dictated.
• FDR: Business stayed private but subject to democratic regulation—the SEC, FDIC, and Wagner Act balanced capital with accountability. During WWII, firms accepted temporary direction but returned to normal market decisions afterward.

FDR renegotiated the balance between Adam Smith’s market and Jefferson’s democracy. His genius lay not in speed or purity but in creating institutions that could reconcile competing interests and keep learning.

He embodied that openness personally: FDR held 998 press conferences, about two per week, a record unmatched by any president. His administration invited scrutiny because he understood that criticism was a source of strength, not weakness.

---

Fast but Fragile: Dictatorship’s Illusion of Efficiency

Authoritarian systems look effective because they move fast—but that speed comes from excluding dissent.

• Hitler’s Germany recovered quickly from the Depression but only by crushing labor, silencing intellectuals, and building an economy dependent on conquest. Once war began, the system devoured itself.
• Stalin’s USSR industrialized rapidly but at staggering human and economic cost. Without market feedback or intellectual freedom, stagnation was inevitable.

The apparent efficiency of autocracy was a mirage—impressive bursts of progress followed by collapse or sclerosis. The absence of open debate guaranteed such results.

---

FDR’s Alternative: A Sustainable Flywheel

Roosevelt institutionalized negotiation rather than command.
Key New Deal policies—

• the Wagner Act (1935) protecting unions,
• the Social Security Act (1935) creating a safety net, and
• the Fair Labor Standards Act (1938) setting wages and hours—
  all reflected a belief that balanced participation produces lasting strength.
• Intellectual freedom underpinned innovation—from the Manhattan Project to advances in medicine and computing.
• A free press ensured public accountability.

He also safeguarded intellectual freedom, which later paid dividends in wartime research from radar to the Manhattan Project. Meanwhile, an independent press kept citizens informed and officials accountable.

These policies took time to shape but proved adaptable. By WWII, the U.S. could mobilize like a command economy yet remain democratic and privately driven—a hybrid far more effective than Germany’s rigid model. Protecting rather than purging intellectuals drew global talent—Einstein, Fermi, and others—whose discoveries gave the Allies decisive advantages.

Unlike Hitler, who needed war to sustain his regime, Roosevelt built an economy that could thrive in peace. The institutions of the New Deal—banking reforms, labor protections, social insurance, and research funding—underpinned decades of prosperity. The National Science Foundation, conceived just before FDR’s death, signaled that even knowledge itself had become an economic institution.

---

Enduring Institutions

When Eisenhower, the first Republican president after FDR, took office, he didn’t undo the New Deal. Quite the opposite. In a 1954 letter, he wrote:

“Should any political party attempt to abolish Social Security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. … There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things… Their number is small and they are stupid …”

Just as Lincoln had created an economy in which a ruling party could never again ignore capital, FDR had created an economy in which labor could never again be ignored.

The Price of Gold Rises as Trust in Institutions Wanes

Gold has risen sharply, up 90% in the last year. That alone doesn’t prove much, but it is suggestive.

I don’t particularly like metals as investments, but they have a place. Fiat currency is extraordinarily powerful when paired with strong institutions: a legal system that defines and protects private property, enforces contracts, and adjudicates disputes predictably. In that context, dollars aren’t just paper—they’re claims embedded in a functioning system.

But when faith in that system weakens, metals start to look more appealing. Gold, in particular, functions as an international asset that is far less dependent on any single country’s legal regime or political stability. It doesn’t require trust in courts, central banks, or elected officials—just belief that others will accept it.

I wasn’t prescient enough to anticipate gold’s recent rise, but in retrospect it makes sense. (And if you cynically suggest that this is true of most market changes, I'd have to wince and admit you're right.) When the world’s largest economy is led by an aspiring strongman who has openly mused about subordinating the central bank, weakening institutional checks, and ruling by personal will rather than predictable policy, some investors will move money out of bank accounts, bonds, and equities—and into assets that feel insulated from political discretion.

My crude working theory is this: if Congress and the courts continue to constrain attempts to concentrate power, the dollar will likely hold its value reasonably well. If those guardrails erode, international currencies and gold will continue to gain relative to it.

That said, I don’t claim deep expertise here. The system is complex, the variables numerous, and even if this framing is mostly right, predicting timing and magnitude is extremely difficult. Markets often sniff out risk early—but they also overshoot, reverse, and surprise.

Gold’s rise may not be prophecy. It may simply be a barometer: not of certainty, but of growing doubt about the reliability of governance itself.

NO MORE ICE!

There’s a lot of reporting right now about federal agents and protesters in Minneapolis after recent deadly use-of-force incidents involving ICE and Border Patrol. I get that many people are rightfully outraged by what’s happened — and by the tactics being used in the city. At the same time, I have to wonder whether some of the protesters on those frigid Minneapolis streets aren’t just confusedly protesting the weather. At 40 below, no more ice is a message with at least two levels of urgency.

Soon to Hit 2 Million Views on R World

My darling wife, who knows me as well as anyone, has suggested that I suffer from idearhea.
In related news, it appears that my blog is on track to hit 2 million views within the next 24 hours. Nearly half of that traffic has come in just the last year.

There are more than 3,000 posts—some short, meant to provoke a chuckle; others longer, aiming to provoke thought or float theories about complex events.

One theory is that I’ve written about so many different topics, and the blog is free, so AI systems occasionally wander through looking for material. (I realize this theory rests on the assumption that I’m a useful partner to what may be the emerging superpower - so yes, skepticism is warranted.)

If you visit in the next 24 hours, you might even become the two-millionth reader. No prize, unfortunately - just a front-row seat to my condition.

Ouija Board Stand at a Funeral Home

His first job was at twelve. An early entrepreneur, he set up a Ouija board table outside a funeral home with a simple sign: “Proper goodbyes. Lingering questions.”

Any Hope in the Fact That MAGA Lied About Why They Supported Trump?

Why were MAGA so critical of Joe Biden?
He was too old and prices were too high.

Who did they then vote for?
A guy who broke Biden's record as oldest president on inauguration day and whose tariffs would raise prices.

Do you think that Trump supporters are just embarrassed to admit why they so love Trump? And is there hope in the fact that they might just be embarrassed about why they really like the guy?

The Difference Between Conservatives and Fascists

 

Remembering Anne Frank

I took this picture of the statute of Anne Frank in Amsterdam years ago. It's a reminder to everyone about the consequences of committing to the cruelty of the idea that any child can be "illegal."

Illegal children. Can you imagine being so stupid that you could say something like that and not even feel embarrassed or ashamed?

AE as Segue to AI

While less aspirational visionaries race to perfect artificial intelligence, I’ll be in the garage tinkering with artificial emotions.
And for the record, I genuinely care how you feel about this.

Trump Shares a Peace of His Mind

Trump announced a new Board of Peace.
Which is, admittedly, indistinguishable from saying he’s bored of peace.

Creating a Global Trading System with Multiple Alliances

Canada’s Prime Minister, Mark Carney, gave a quietly brilliant speech the other day about building new alliances. Soon after, Ursula von der Leyen announced that the European Union is on the brink of a historic agreement with India, linking two of the world’s largest economies.
One of the most encouraging responses to Trump’s nationalist nonsense is that the rest of the world is not freezing—it’s reorganizing. New alliances are emerging that don’t depend on unanimity among all advanced economies. Instead, they resemble independent suspension: parallel paths for cooperation that keep moving even when one wheel hits a pothole. The result is a global economy that is less fragile and less hostage to the domestic politics of any single nation.
Trump and his toxic isolationist policies will eventually dissolve. But they may also prove catalytic—accelerating the emergence of a new world order that is, paradoxically, healthier.
It’s easy to imagine that the EU, India, China, the United States, or the Association of Southeast Asian Nations will each, at different moments, retreat from global trade under nationalist pressure. If the global economy depends on a single consensus, those retreats are destabilizing. But if it rests on overlapping agreements—multiple alliances that don’t all hinge on everyone’s approval—the system becomes far more resilient.

Nationalist, anti-trade sentiment will ebb and flow. A more modular, redundant system of trade relationships won’t eliminate that tendency—but it will blunt its impact, preserving growth, cooperation, and prosperity over the long run.

Greenland! Iceland! Not Sure What It Is or Where But We Must Have It!

 

This week Trump first said that the US had to have Greenland and that he would use force to take it. Then later he conceded that as much as he had to have Greenland, he would not use force to take it. And before we had worked his way out of the paragraph regarding Greenland, he was calling it Iceland. Meanwhile, NATO troops had moved into Greenland to defend against an American attack.

Trump clearly feels more allegiance with Putin than, say, Mark Rutte, the head of NATO and previous Prime Minister of the Netherlands. Trump would rather partner with despots and go to war with democracies. 

Americans Mostly Uneasy About Trump's Presidency (but also frustrated, unsafe, exhausted ...)

The pursuit of happiness seems to have taken us down a rabbit hole.





So, America, how do you feel about Trump's presidency?
Mixed. I have mixed feelings.

Market Manipulation and Puzzling Political Orientation

Trump says he'll invade Greenland. Markets fall nearly 2%.

Trump says he won't invade Greenland. Markets rise nearly 2%.
Market manipulation is incredibly lucrative for folks who know what is coming.

Related, after a generation or two of civics classes being taught by high school football coaches and home schooling parents, there must be millions of Americans surprised to learn that - in spite of what they've been taught - they are actually fascists and not conservatives.

Trump's Odd Hatred for the Great City of Minneapolis

I've worked with a number of product development teams in Minneapolis and got to spend quite a bit of time there. (Among other things, they have a vibrant medical device industry there.) The simplest way I can think to sum up what a delightfully unexpected place and people it is? The same city gave us Garrison Keillor and Prince.

If a community can nurture and make a home for people so talented and so different, you know that it has a great blend of practical, whimsical, and nurturing, a sense of humor about itself and a sense of respect for others and who they can become.

And the world's oldest toddler has sent troops to that city to disrupt and kill and has sent arrest warrants for Minnesota's governor and Minneapolis's mayor.

I guess a few people who hate Garrison Keillor and or Prince might consider themselves real Americans but that seems odd. What is really American? Lauding the communities that manage to nurture people capable of contributing to the rich culture that makes it so hard to say, exactly, just what America is.

Both weird and unsurprising that Trump finds Minneapolis so offensive.

Stock Market Day After Trump's Announcement That He's Going to War Over Greenland

Markets were down sharply today.
NASDAQ - 2.4%
S&P 500 - 2.1%
Dow - 1.8%

Weird that an American president can't even announce that he's going to war against NATO without investors getting all nervous.

The Toronto Stock Exchange was down about half that, by the way.

Trump Daily Amps Up the Fascist Meter - Serving Subpoenas to Minnesota Governor, Attorney General and Minneapolis Mayor

Trump is casually planning going to war with NATO - putting the US in the same camp as Russia - and is arresting state governors, mayors and attorney generals. And some of you supporters of his still think you're conservatives, not fascists. You need to read some history.

From Reuter's ... BREAKING: Subpoenas were served at the offices of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, Attorney General Keith Ellison and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, a DOJ official said as protests and an immigration enforcement crackdown continue in the state.

Time to Invoke the 25th Amendment

The 25th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution clarifies presidential succession and disability, establishing procedures for when the President dies, resigns, or is removed, allowing the Vice President to become President (Section 1). It also provides a process for filling a vacant Vice Presidency (Section 2) and mechanisms for temporarily transferring presidential powers (Section 3) or permanently removing a disabled President with Congress's help (Section 4). Ratified in 1967 after President Kennedy's assassination, it addresses succession gaps and presidential inability, ensuring continuity of government.

Donald Trump 2026 - Like King Lear But With Nuclear Weapons

Another way to phrase Donald Trump's note to Norway's Prime Minister?
"Since you would not give me the Nobel Peace Prize I will be going to war with you."


This is surreal. The stuff of a deranged mind. Republicans who continue to support Trump (yes, this includes ordinary Americans and not just elected officials) are colluding with this descent into madness. It is like King Lear - a descent into madness - but with nuclear weapons.


Here is Donald's note from 19 January 2026:

“Dear Jonas: Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America. Denmark cannot protect that land from Russia or China, and why do they have a “right of ownership” anyway? There are no written documents, it’s only that a boat landed there hundreds of years ago, but we had boats landing there, also. I have done more for NATO than any other person since its founding, and now, NATO should do something for the United States. The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland. Thank you! President DJT”

The 100 Year Gap Between the Civil War and Civil Rights - an Argument About How Culture, Entrepreneurship and Institutions Are Connected

Jeremy Bentham wrote that “natural rights” are “nonsense upon stilts.” He was not criticizing rights as aspirations but instead rights without institutions. Bentham’s core claim was brutally pragmatic: You can declare a right all you want, but unless there is organized power to define it, adjudicate it, and enforce it, it doesn’t actually exist.

In other words:
Rights are not self-executing.
Rights without enforcement are moral sentiments, not social facts.
What makes a right real is not the declaration but the machinery behind it.

The United States ended slavery in 1865, but it was not until the 1960s that it built - and enforced - the institutions required for equal citizenship. Progress stalled not for lack of moral clarity, but because power was ceded to those determined to preserve the old order. It was a century between winning the Civil War and winning the fight for civil rights.

Declaring a right is an act of imagination; enforcing it is an act of institution-building. Without the second, the first is just rhetoric. Put differently, rights are not wishes; they are policies backed by power.

Culture defines what we believe should be a right.
Institutions determine whether that belief becomes reliable reality.
Entrepreneurship is the work of building the scaffolding that makes that reality durable.

Each line answers a different question:
Culture answers: What do we owe one another, what norms should we share?
Institutions answer: Can we count on this tomorrow?
Entrepreneurship answers: Who builds the systems that make it so?

Nothing is redundant. Nothing can be skipped.

Many contemporary arguments collapse everything into culture:
“Change hearts”
“Win the narrative”
“Shift norms”

Others collapse everything into policy:
“Pass a law”
“Enforce a rule”
“Fix the system”

But both are incomplete alone.

Culture without institutions is aspiration.
Institutions without culture are brittle and might be ignored.
Entrepreneurship is the missing middle that translates between them.

Rights begin as cultural commitments—and only endure when someone builds the institutions to carry them forward.

The Difference Between a Conservative and A Fascist

There is a difference between a liberal and a communist and a difference between a conservative and a fascist. If you voted for Mitt Romney in 2012, you're probably a conservative. If you voted for Donald Trump in 2024, you're probably a fascist.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

A Tentative Theory About 20th Century Germany and the US and the Impact of Conscious Social Change on Entrepreneurship

Germany went through multiple, unmistakably distinct phases in the 20th century—imperial, Nazi, occupied, divided East/West, and reunified liberal democracy. The United States changed profoundly too, but in a way that more often felt continuous: less externally imposed, less punctuated by regime replacement, and easier to narrate as organic evolution.
I think we could argue that Germany is more aware that it is constructed, that things could be very different, and that the US is more forgetful of its past. In Germany norms changed abruptly. In the US, they seemed to evolve more organically. In the U.S., many ruptures were narrated as fulfillment (continuity with founding ideals), which keeps “constructedness” less visible.

I'll offer the tentative theory that the US makes it easier for entrepreneurial imagination to flourish but in Germany entrepreneurial efforts might be safer. Put differently, entrepreneurial imagination flourishes more easily in societies that “forget” (where norms feel flexible), but it flourishes more safely and scalably in societies that “know they’re constructed” (where people can redesign rules deliberately). Strong institutions can increase safety and scalability while still reducing the rate of deviation or entrepreneurship. 

Entrepreneurial imagination needs two permissions. First, the cultural permission to deviate—to try something strange without being socially exiled. That’s why looser cultures often produce more startups and experimentation. But imagination also needs a second permission: the institutional permission to scale—rules that make trust, contracts, and cooperation reliable. Without that, entrepreneurship may be abundant but not especially productive. The sweet spot is a society loose enough to try and self-aware enough to redesign the rules so the good experiments can compound.

The practical implication is that entrepreneurial societies need to build institutional literacy: the ability to change rules deliberately without breaking the hidden load-bearing norms. Looseness produces ideas; constructedness produces guardrails. Progress needs both—permission to deviate, and the capacity to institutionalize what works.

Trust and Innovation - The Value of CEO Trust

Research using CEO turnovers and a trust proxy based on culturally inherited “generalized trust” finds that more trusting CEOs foster more exploratory R&D—showing up as ~6% more patents and higher patent quality—consistent with employees feeling safer taking risks.
Raising CEO trust by ~11 percentage points (for example: Greek-American → English-American average trust difference) corresponds to about a 6.3% increase in patents filed, roughly ~1 additional patent per year for the average firm, estimated at ~$3M in additional value. [ source: https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/.../trust... ]

Photo from yesterday as we drove out of the neighborhood. Spectacular sky.

Harper's Reports - 92 Percent of Investment Driven by Data Centers & How Credit Card Debt is Increasing Divorce Rates

From Harper's Magazine

Estimated percentage of U.S. GDP growth in the first half of 2025 that was driven by investment in data centers : 92

    [January 2026 • Source: Jason Furman, Harvard Kennedy School (Cambridge, Mass.)]

Percentage of American couples who got divorced in 2023 who said that credit-card debt was partly to blame : 29

Of those who got divorced in 2025 : 42

    [January 2026 • Source: Debt.com (Fort Lauderdale, Fla.)]

Source:
https://harpers.org/harpers-index/?issue_month=01&issue_year=2026

Institutions As Enablers of Excellence

The aim is not to institutionalize people, making them dependent, but to build enabling institutions: scaffolds that expand human ability by making cooperation reliable and enabling. At their best, institutions are conspiracies to make ordinary people more capable of making a difference in their world, giving people more agency and all that comes with that – from learning to belonging to confidence that one’s effort matters.

W. Edwards Deming put the point more plainly. One of his most radical management principles was that people have a right to take pride in their work. Not pride in themselves alone, but pride in what they helped create. When institutions work, they allow people to say, “Look what I played a part in making possible.” When they fail, they turn effort into frustration—work into motion without meaning.

"Mixed" Reviews on Trump Coming Into His First Anniversary

Well sure, federal troops have invaded American cities to find brown people, Trump is threatening to go to war with NATO for Greenland and to arrest the Fed Chair in order to coerce that institution to set in motion lower rates that would "stimulate" the economy to the point of rampant inflation and the Trump family has made deals with Saudi Arabia and other despotic regimes to increase family wealth by more than $6 billion and Trump has time for all this but no time to release the Epstein files that would reveal details of his close friendship with a pedophile ... and ... and ...

But you sure don't hear about those 6 trans kids playing high school sports anymore. And nobody is eating the dogs and eating the cats now. So, you know, reviews are mixed coming into the first anniversary of Trump's inauguration.

Trump's Terrible Tariffs and Job Creation Rates

Since Trump announced his tariffs, average monthly job creation has been about 12,000 jobs.

Over the rest of this century - including the Great Recession and COVID - the average monthly job creation rate has been about 94,000 jobs.

Put differently: at the tariff-era pace, it would take two full presidential terms to create as many jobs as the U.S. economy typically creates in a single average year.

We're dangerously close to stall speed.

Tariffs weren’t a bold economic strategy. They were a brake.

I've Replaced my Keyboard with an Ouija Board

My keyboard died and I've temporarily replaced it with an Ouija board. It makes "typing" really slow but the good news is that I'm hearing from people I haven't heard from in a long time.

2025 Job Creation Less Than 4Q of 2024

In 2024, the economy created more than 2 million jobs. In all of 2025 it created fewer jobs than were created in just the fourth quarter of 2024.
Jobs created
2024 2.012 million
2025 .584 million

If You Were Conscripted into Public-Sector Entrepreneurship Where Would You Focus

If you were conscripted for 12–18 months into public-sector entrepreneurship to help to create, improve, or eliminate our public sector institutions and policies, where would you choose to focus?

Imagine a world where public sector solutions are not always a product of long debates through congress and the oval office but can also emerge out of citizen initiatives, piloted in small areas and then abandoned, revised or scaled up depending on outcomes. As a draftee, you would work with other Americans to create these pop-up institutions that could be relegated to history or emerge as a new pillar of democracy.

• ☐ Primary focus
• ☆ Secondary interest
• ______ Fill-in-the-blank

Possible Public-Sector Entrepreneurship Domains

1. Education & Lifelong Learning
(schools, credentials, re-training, access, outcomes)

2. Workforce & Economic Mobility
(job transitions, entrepreneurship, precarity, local opportunity)

3. Health & Mental Health
(access, prevention, public health, addiction, aging)

4. Housing & Community Development
(affordability, zoning, homelessness, mixed-income communities)

5. Public Safety & Justice
(crime prevention, policing, courts, incarceration alternatives)

6. Climate, Energy & Resilience
(adaptation, infrastructure, water, wildfire, heat)

7. Transportation & Urban Systems
(mobility, congestion, public transit, walkability)

8. Technology, Data & Digital Government
(service delivery, trust, privacy, civic tech)

9. Democracy, Trust & Civic Participation
(elections, institutions, public engagement, misinformation)

10. Immigration & Integration
(newcomer support, labor matching, civic belonging)

11. Research, Science & Long-Term Capability
(R&D, national capacity, moonshots, readiness)

12. International Cooperation & Security
(diplomacy, alliances, global public goods)

13. Arts, Culture & Public Space
(public art, cultural districts, libraries/museums, creative economy, place-making)

14. Public Media, Broadcasting & Civic Information
(PBS/local news partnerships, civic explainers, media literacy, emergency communications, community dialogue)

15. Fill in the Blank

____________________________

You are not fixing everything. You are choosing one place to make something meaningfully better. Democracy should not be something that happens to you. It should be something you help to make happen.

Excerpt from Pope Leo's State of the World address

"Although the context in which we live today is different from that of the fifth century, some similarities remain highly relevant. We are now, as then, in an era of widespread migratory movements; as then, we are living at a time of a profound readjustment of geopolitical balances and cultural paradigms; as then, we are, in Pope Francis’s well-known expression, not in an era of change but in a change of era.

"In our time, the weakness of multilateralism is a particular cause for concern at the international level. A diplomacy that promotes dialogue and seeks consensus among all parties is being replaced by a diplomacy based on force, by either individuals or groups of allies. War is back in vogue and a zeal for war is spreading. The principle established after the Second World War, which prohibited nations from using force to violate the borders of others, has been completely undermined. Peace is no longer sought as a gift and a desirable good in itself, or in the pursuit of “the establishment of the ordered universe willed by God, with a more perfect form of justice among men and women.” [4] Instead, peace is sought through weapons as a condition for asserting one’s own dominion. This gravely threatens the rule of law, which is the foundation of all peaceful civil coexistence."
...

"The purpose of multilateralism, then, is to provide a place where people can meet and talk, modeled on the ancient Roman Forum or the medieval square.

- Pope Leo XIV First State of the World Address

2025 Was the Slowest Rate of Job Creation Since the Great Recession (And - of course - the Year of COVID)

2025 was the slowest rate of job creation (outside of COVID) since the Great Recession.

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."]