Another Door Opens

“…there’s little political upside in defending the rights of undocumented shoplifters.” — Michelle Goldberg, The New York Times.

If past is prologue, Mr. Trump lacks the acumen to carry out his ambitious agenda. The first problem is management style. In his first term, Mr. Trump was a poor administrator because of his mercurial, polarizing style and a general indifference to facts and the hard work of governance. — Jack Goldsmith, The New York Times

Thus spake one Shawn McCreesh of The New York Times, America’s all-wise, all-knowing font of everlasting rectitude. But to answer his question, why blah blah: Donald Trump is glaring because he means bidness. His bidness is to shift the paradigm on the mendaciously sanctimonious managerial class of the USA, of which The New York Times is the principal mouthpiece. DJT looks stern, does he? All that really tells you is how nervous the Old Gray Lady is. A million or more brains, from sea to shining sea are about to get vacuumed out and redecorated

Readers of The New York Times — in their various C-suites, ivory towers, ateliers, yoga parlors, tasting rooms, bioweapon labs, and other haunts — remain utterly baffled about what is to begin today. No amount of ‘splainin’ seems to suffice. They behold the Golden Golem of Greatness (DJT) doing his dance onstage behind the cop, the Indian chief, and the cowpoke and all they can really see are their own careers going up in smoke (along with vested pensions, reputations, possibly even chattels, marriages, and health).

As I write, long before dawn, “Joe Biden” remains President of the US. You must wonder, as the hours dwindle to noon, what pardon power magic he’s saving for the final minutes of his term, while the whole nation is distracted by the spectacle in the Capitol Rotunda, the moiling dignitaries and celebrities, the solemn arrival of the elect, the snarky palaver of the cable news jockeys, the electric charge of history in the large room. . . .

It is a fact, perhaps missed by some of you, that Rep. James Comer’s House Oversight Committee just last week issued criminal referrals on James Biden (“Joe’s” brother) and First Son Hunter. Wait-a-minute, was not Hunter already pardoned for Gawd-knows how many misdeeds dating back to 2014, and (supposedly) preemptively for any alleged crimes to come ever hereafter? Part B of that may yet have to be adjudicated. A pardon is not intended to be a get-out-of-jail-free card. Anyway, would it be difficult for a federal attorney of average ability to draw a connection between the newly referred crimes of those two and the departing President? Hence, will “Joe Biden” pardon “Joe Biden” at 11:30 this morning?

Not to mention about 1000 other current and former public officials quaking in their Beltway McMansions this frosty morning. This is part and parcel, you understand, of the massive Cleanup in Aisle Four that must happen if the agencies of our federal government can ever be trusted again. For instance, the Department of Justice.

At the end of the workday, Friday, AG Merrick Garland made a triumphal final exit from the building past a throng of cheering and clapping employees, including dozens of federal attorneys who zealously persecuted their fellow citizens under color-of-law for no good reason, or real legal predicate, and ruined many lives and households in the process. Do you suppose they get a free pass on that? And what of the three bears of Lawfare: Norm Eisen, Marc Elias, and Mary McCord, all of them present at the creation of serial affronts against the Constitution (and decency) lo this past decade. Do they just skate? I doubt it, though it might take a while to shine a light on their turpitudes.

Will “Joe Biden” wave his pardon wand over Tony Fauci, Francis Collins, Scott Gottlieb, Deborah Birx, Rochelle Walensky, and dozens of other public health officials who sprung the Covid-19 operation and the deadly vaccinations on the country? Or Ralph Baric, hunkered out of sight in his Carolina lab? You realize, of course, that the orgy of illness and death from that is hardly over. For four years under “JB” the truth has been obfuscated and buried, because none of those characters has really had to answer for anything.

So, today another door opens. The To-Do list for Mr. Trump and his aides-de-camp is dauntingly long, the corrections needed are monumental. You might have even noticed that such corrections are badly needed all over the other countries of Western Civ, and strangely many are already following suit. The WEF-inflected governments of France, Germany, and the UK are already a’wobble, and Justin Trudeau threw in the towel two weeks ago. An Arctic blast could not be more fitting for what will move through the DC Swamp at high noon today. That is, if Mr. Trump manages to survive the hours until his swearing-in. Godspeed Number 47! And everybody else: put your tray tables up! A patch of turbulence ahead!

Update: I posted the above blog ten minutes before “Joe Biden” issued his raft of pardons for Fauci, the J6 Committee members, and others. We will have to stand by to see whether a “preemptive” pardon is a legitimate legal instrument. My guess is that it is not.

Further update: About fifteen minutes till noon today, “Joe Biden” preemptively pardoned the rest of his family, brothers Jim and Frank, a sister, various wives and husbands. What crimes did he have in mind, you must wonder. Money laundering? That would be my guess. Note: “JB” apparently did not pardon himself. Bribery and treason are still on the table then.

~~James Howard Kunstler

“…there’s little political upside in defending the rights of undocumented shoplifters.” — Michelle Goldberg, The New York Times.

For 30 years, Japan was the land where interest rates went to die.

The Bank of Japan used yield-curve control to keep long-term rates sedated. Traders joked that shorting Japanese bonds was the “widow-maker trade.”

Not anymore.

On November 20, 2025, everything changed. Quietly, but decisively.

The Bank of Japan finally pulled the plug on decades of easy money. Negative rates were removed. Yield-curve control was abandoned. The policy rate was lifted to a 17-year high.

Suddenly, global markets had to reprice something they had ignored for years.

What happens when the world’s largest creditor nation stops exporting cheap capital and starts pulling it back home?

The answer came fast. Bond yields in Europe and the United States began climbing. The Japanese yen strengthened sharply. Wall Street faltered.

The rate cut narrative is calcifying into gospel: the Fed must cut to save the consumer.

Bankrate reports that 59% of Americans cannot cover a $1,000 emergency without debt or selling something. And yet stocks are roaring, liquidity junkies are celebrating, and the top 10% now account for half of all consumer spending.

Here’s the plot twist: before 2020, consumer confidence faithfully tracked equity markets. After 2020, that relationship broke. As one analyst put it, “The poor don’t hate stocks going up. They just don’t feel it anymore.”

So when the Fed cuts rates in one of the hottest stock markets in history, who exactly benefits? Not the 59%. Not the middle. Certainly not anyone renting and watching shelter inflation devour their paycheck.

Only the late-stage dot-com fever dreams did better in recent memory — back when analysts were valuing companies by the number of mammals breathing inside the office.

For the moment, stocks appear unsinkable, unslappable, and perhaps uninsurable. But this is what generational technology shifts do: they take a kernel of genuine innovation and inflate a decade of growth into a 36-month highlight reel. We’ve seen this movie. It premiered in 1999 and closed with adults crying into their PalmPilots.

And just as the internet continued reshaping the world long after Pets.com curled up and died, AI will keep marching on whether or not today’s multiples survive a stiff breeze. The technology is real. The valuations, however, will eventually need to stop hyperventilating and sit down with a glass of water.

Wheelbarrows are not chickens. A chicken is a biological production unit. A wheelbarrow is a capital good. A wheelbarrow doesn’t produce work. But it CAN be a productivity multiplier.

And that’s how we have to think of all those GPUs the hyperscalers are spending money on. If their thesis is right, trillion in AI and data center spending now, will translate into a massive burst in productivity and new technologies in the next two decades. That is the only justification for the current valuations/multiples at which these stocks trade now.

The American poet William Carlos Williams wrote, “So much depends, upon a red wheelbarrow, glazed with rainwater, beside the white chickens.”

Today the wheelbarrow is Nvidia Green. And so much of the stock market depends on that wheelbarrow being a big enough productivity multiplier to offset $340 trillion in debt.