Infrastructure note: I’ve updated all the pages under the “Nonfiction Books” tab in the menu above. I set up those pages a year ago, in December 2024, and updated a few of them in May 2025, and now have updated all them this month. The link on the main tab in the menu takes you to those books recently blogged (not necessarily recently read). There are, of course, other books recently read that I haven’t yet blogged about and so are not captured in these pages.
My plan is to finish updating these pages in the next few weeks, extending alas into the new year (I thought I might finish by this month), and then turning my attention to the SF Reviews tab, and building it up similarly. Because that’s where I’m going: to consider SF novels and stories in light of the modern understanding of the world. And documenting them all, as a start.
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And I did my annual trip to the shopping centers and malls for Christmas. (Walnut Creek, Emeryville, 4th Street in Berkeley; not all today.) My conclusion: it’s easier to buy stuff online. Once in a while shopping in a physical store provides some inspiration, but that didn’t really happen today. And the things I was actively looking for, I could not find. I came home and ordered more stuff online.
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Another Trump performance with his TV speech last night, then the shock and bewilderment: how has America comes to this?
Salon, Heather Digby Parton, 18 Dec 2025: Trump’s primetime speech was a master class in gaslighting, subtitled “The president’s false claims about economic conditions are the latest indication that he’s in serious trouble”
For an administration leading an all-out assault on vaccines, Wednesday night’s primetime address by Donald Trump from the Diplomatic Reception Room of the White House was all about inoculation. After weeks of losing control of the political narrative — of refusing to release economic data, of alternately embracing and rejecting the term “affordability” — the president attempted to project dominance going into the 2026 midterms and tout what he deemed the successes of the Trump economy. …
Trump rattled off a number of demonstrably false claims, including that “inflation is stopped” and prices are falling, while laying the blame for everything bad at the feet of Democrats and, you guessed it, former president Joe Biden.
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The Atlantic, Tom Nichols, 17 Dec 2025: This Is What Presidential Panic Looks Like subtitled “Donald Trump delivered a fear-drenched rant live from the White House.”
The president of the United States just barged into America’s living rooms like an angry, confused grandfather to tell us all that we are ungrateful whelps.
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We could take apart Trump’s fake facts, as checkers and pundits will do in the next few days. But perhaps more important than false statements—which for Trump are par for the course—was his demeanor. Americans saw a president drenched in panic as he tried to bully an entire nation into admitting he’s doing a great job. For 20 minutes, he vented his hurt feelings without a molecule of empathy or awareness. Economic concerns? Shut up, you fools, the economy is doing fine. (And if it isn’t, it’s not his fault—it’s Joe Biden’s.) Foreign-policy jitters? Zip it, you wimps, America is strong and respected.
In effect, Trump took to the airwaves, pointed his finger, and said: Quiet, piggy.
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JMG, 18 Dec 2025: Lying Liar Screams Lies In National Address
Compilation of comments at NBC News, CNN (fact checks), and Washington Post.
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Worth noting:
JMG, 18 Dec 2025: Lutnick Defends Trump’s Batshit Math On Drug Prices
HOWARD LUTNICK: “Now, what he’s saying is you bring it, if a drug was $100 and you bring the drug down to $13, right?. If you’re looking at it from $13, it’s down seven times.”
If you raise a price by 10%, then lower that price by 10%, you’re not back to the same place. Same idea. Simpletons think you should be. They’re wrong.
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Other headlines, from today. From the reality-based community.
Here’s a telling photo from Robert Reich’s post.
- Vox, Zack Beauchamp: The revealing pointlessness of Trump’s primetime speech, subtitled “The president is a desperate man.”
- JMG: Politico: Trump Lied About “Warrior Bonus” For Troops. The money was already appropriated; Trump just renamed it and took credit.
- Slate, Jill Filipovic: Conservatives Somehow Found a Way to Make This Week’s Tragedies All About Them, subtitled “Facts, as some conservatives like to say, don’t care about your feelings. But MAGA supporters are a deeply feeling bunch.”
- The Bulwark, Jonathan V. Last: Trump’s Bad Economy Is Even Worse Than It Looks, subtitled “Winter is coming.”
- Paul Krugman: Why Trump’s Viciousness Matters, subtitled “He wants to destroy our values, not just our democracy”
- Robert Reich: The real threat in Trump’s madness, subtitled “I hate to say this, but it must be faced”
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Not completely unrelated.
That’s quite an impressive structure. Where is it exactly? Right here, in the foothills below Boulder, CO. But this is an aside.
Slate, Marianne Lavelle, 18 Dec 2025: The U.S. Has a Great Warning System for Deadly Weather. Trump Wants to Destroy It., subtitled “The National Center for Atmospheric Research helps power weather and wildfire forecasts across the country. Now it’s being targeted in a presidential feud.”
So, despite Russell Vought’s accusation that this center spreads “climate alarmism” — a heads-in-the-sand move to deny anything that would disrupt the Trump and MAGA agenda, which is to prioritize short-term big business interests at the expense of long-term survival — the motive here seems to be something much more petty.
One of the world’s leading climate, weather, and wildfire science research institutions is being targeted for elimination in what many of those affected see as President Donald Trump’s political vendetta against Colorado Gov. Jared Polis.
… Trump’s beef with Polis stems from the jailing of a former county election official in Colorado, Tina Peters, who was convicted of giving Trump allies unauthorized access to a voting machine in the aftermath of the 2020 election. An anonymous White House official told the Washington Post: “The Colorado governor obviously isn’t willing to work with the president.”
Trump does not care about, in fact has no idea about, how science facilities like this help to anticipate future catastrophes.
NCAR, founded in 1960 and administered by the National Science Foundation, provides state-of-the-art data and technology resources for 129 North American university partners. Partners rely on NCAR supercomputers, heavily instrumented aircraft, and Earth-systems modeling. NCAR developed the Dropsonde, the equipment that hurricane-hunter aircraft use to measure temperature, pressure, and humidity of tropical storms. The center does real-time operational forecasting for the military, for example, at the antiballistic missile systems site at Fort Greely, Alaska, and has done the computer modeling that has helped improve forecasting of wildfire behavior.
Once again, it’s easy to understand Trump and his minions as seditionists, or even Russian operatives, bent on doing everything they can do to tear down the achievements of America over two and half centuries.
Or: it’s a regression to the mean. To base human nature, which is at the core of every one of us. In the big picture, the achievements of the scientific revolution, the Enlightenment, may have elevated humanity to perceive greater truths beyond those of parochial religions, but perhaps they cannot last. The legacy of tribalism and intuitive superstitions never goes away.
