“Recently, the New York Times relayed Tucker Carlson’s view that, ‘The most depressing thing about the United States in 2025 is that we’re led not just by bad people, but by unimpressive, dumb, totally noncreative people.’ This is unarguable — and the Times made no attempt to counter the point. Indeed, this judgement applies doubly to the team of grifters and double-digit IQ Machiavellians who staff upper echelons of the Trump administration. Yet, a fascinating new book by the scholars (and brothers) William and Philip Taubman shows that even smart and impressive peopple can, if they lack vision, character and empathy, lead the country to disaster.” (12/22/25)
“The government shutdown made the November jobs report especially hard to read. There was not just the problem of missing a month of jobs data for the first time in many decades, but also the difficulty in trying to determine how much impact the shutdown had on the data. In principle, the shutdown should have had little direct impact on either the household or the establishment survey. In the household survey, people who had been furloughed should have been back at work during the reference period and therefore answered that they were employed. With the establishment survey, government employees were always on the payroll, so should have been listed as employed. But there are indirect ways in which the shutdown could have affected the data.” (12/22/25)
“President Donald Trump is a singular — and solitary — figure. ‘I alone can fix it,’ he solipstically declared in 2016, before his first presidential run. Now in his second term, he’s been a one-man tsunami, destroying decades-long global alliances, creating chaos in the global economy with his unilateral tariffs, and unleashing bitter partisanship domestically. … We can blame our national habit of venerating iconoclasts, a tendency Trump exploited to leverage himself into office. We like to lionize the man who speaks out — the brave rebel who defies the establishment. … But for every iconoclast, there’s a crank. For every visionary, a conspiracist. For every genius, a madman.” (12/21/25)
“A key reason that Russia went to war in Ukraine was to prevent Ukraine from ever joining NATO; a key reason that Ukraine went to war with Russia was to defend their right to join NATO. On December 14, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky gave up Ukraine’s right to join NATO. He presented the concession as a compromise. But it is not really a compromise. Zelensky may intend the non-compromise to leverage concessions from Russia, but it may not really change anything.” [editor’s note: There was never any chance that Ukraine would join NATO … and Putin knew that. A manufactured excuse is not a real reason – TLK] (12/22/25)
“In Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, the Ghost of Christmas Past doesn’t punish or terrify. Instead, it reminds. The haunting is less mystical than moral, illustrating how history lingers when its lessons go unlearned. The tale remains especially relevant in the White House today, and not just because of the holiday season. Besides, Melania hates Christmas. Every presidential administration wrestles with its own ghosts. President Trump and his Cabinet of Scrooges are shadowed by two figures whose failures stemmed not from circumstance but character: Herbert Hoover and J. Edgar Hoover.” (12/21/25)
“As generative AI is embedded into search engines, email, and word processors, it will mediate ever larger parts of the information ecosystem that people rely on. Governments are discovering that they can pressure companies to censor what may be the most consequential communications technology since the printing press. Recent efforts go well beyond combating clearly illegal content such as child sexual abuse material. From Brussels to New Delhi, Warsaw to Washington, officials are wielding regulations, threats, and public shaming to shape what information, ideas, and perspectives billions of people can access through AI.” (12/22/25)
Source: Responsible Statecraft
by Jennifer Kavanagh
“Under the current plan — or what is publicly known about it — Ukraine would cede the 20 percent of Donetsk that it currently controls to Russia in return for a package of security guarantees including an ‘Article 5-style’ commitment from the United States, a European ‘reassurance force’ inside post-war Ukraine, and peacetime Ukrainian military of 800,000 personnel. Despite optimism from U.S. officials, this proposal is unlikely to be the one that ends the conflict. There is a better path for Ukraine, one that will leave the country more secure and more confident in that security over the long run, without crossing Russian redlines or requiring expansive commitments from the United States: armed un-alignment.” (12/22/25)
“The major artificial intelligence companies’ prime directive to literally bulldoze AI infrastructure into states with minimal regulation has produced citizen-led, bipartisan demands for local and national moratoriums on data center siting. While the Trump administration is doing everything it can to facilitate the only capital spending with a pulse in the economy, these calls for moratoriums are growing, and connecting with local successes in blocking data center construction. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) recently called for a national moratorium on the construction of data centers that are ‘powering this unregulated sprint to develop and deploy AI’. Sanders did credit ‘the transformative power of AI and robotics’ before calling out Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, and Bill Gates with a simple question: ‘Are these multibillionaires staying up nights worrying about what AI and robotics will do to the working families of our country and the world?'” (12/22/25)
Source: Foundation for Economic Education
by Mark Nayler
“El Gordo is the world’s second longest-running lottery, behind the Netherlands’ Staatsloterji, which started in 1726. It was first held on December 18, 1812, in the southwestern city of Cádiz, the home of Spain’s government-in-exile during the Napoleonic Wars. Though it raised much-needed money for cannons and bullets, some thought it morally questionable. Agustín de Argüelles, a member of the national congress, claimed that it ‘would be desirable to adopt more decent means … to sustain public necessities because the lottery, raffles and other games are resources that conspire with immorality and, as a consequence, are incompatible with the virtuous character that should be what distinguishes Spaniards in the future.’ Argüelles’s fears proved unfounded: over two centuries on, El Gordo is surely one of the most wholesome instances of mass-gambling on the planet.” (12/22/25)
“The Constitution of the Roberts Court is not color-blind. It is a Constitution that permits discrimination on the basis of race, but forbids alleviating discrimination on the basis of race. And over the next year, the Court will face more cases that could further erode both the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, pushing America back toward what some on the right believe is the true, Antebellum Constitution.” (12/21/25)
