So Donald Trump has been elected president once again. I have had a feeling for a while that this would happen, but was hoping it would not be the case. It turns out the sense of doom felt by Democrats was justified. Mr. Trump will take the presidency having most likely secured the popular vote for the first time for him, as well as the first time for a Republican in 20 years.

I don’t care what they say about the Celtics being boring to watch. They play excellent basketball and are so much fun. Derek White is a beast out there.

For a few years now the country has been dealing with skyrocketing housing prices that were driven by a variety of factors. A large factor is that the supply of housing never actually caught back up after the Great Recession. Combined with increased demand during and after the pandemic, along with interest rates that were sent up because of inflation, pushed housing costs beyond what many are able to afford.

The current state of the race is fascinating. 1. We have a strong economy, even though many don't feel that way. 2. Unemployment is near historical lows. 3. Inflation is back down to roughly where the Fed target is. Also, short of a severe recession or depression, prices are not going back to where they were before the recent inflation spike. 4. Gas prices have remained far below the pace of inflation.

There is a thought exercise I have when thinking about liberalism in the classical sense. Imagine that you live in the U.S. 50 years from now, but there was an infusion of Indian immigrants and there is now a large majority Hindu population. Meanwhile the evangelical Christian numbers have shrunk to make up a small minority of the population. Now, imagine that Hindus make up a majority of the Republican party in this future and the conservatives have passed a bill that would make it illegal to farm cattle and eat beef of any sort.

I’ve attempted to write about this before. My junior year of high school, I lost the innocent certainty in my faith I had had since childhood. At first I thought that loss of certainty was a loss of faith, but I now see that it wasn’t that. Or at least not quite so. Doubt became a constant companion of mine. I spent the next ten years trying to assuage that doubt by throwing myself headlong into the evangelical Christian practice of apologetics.

The world currently seems to be in a state of decoupling, and has been for the past several years. Free trade is seen as a deal for suckers and nationalisms of various sorts and degrees on the rise. I see this inevitably leading to a rise in conflict, which is already occurring. This is not just because we are going from a unipolar world dominated by the United States to a multipolar world with various regional powers.

This is a short piece following on one that Nate Silver wrote in his substack on the growing split between liberals and leftists. His article is anchored to the Israeli-Hamas conflict that grew out of the attacks of October 7. He focuses on the leftists who support the Palestinians versus the liberals who largely support Israel. Nate uses the example to model the spectrum slightly differently as a triangle with MAGA conservatives in one corner, social justice leftists in the other corner, and liberals in the bottom corner.