Are you curious about how Truth Social stock is doing? Sure you are.
DJT got a little bounce when the Republican convention started, but that wore off quickly and the stock has tanked completely ever since Kamala Harris entered the race. It's down 40% from its pre-convention price.
Mind you, it's still selling for about 500% more than it's worth, but it's obviously fragile because investors¹ are having doubts about whether Trump can win in November. It's probably a better weathervane for Trump's reelection odds than actual polls.
¹That is, MAGA fans and other suckers who Trump has conned into buying the stock and holding onto it.
The pre-pandemic growth trend is strong because it was a rebound from the 2006-09 housing bust. But post-pandemic growth is even stronger. Adjusted for both inflation and population growth, residential construction is 20% higher than in 2002 and 28% higher than just before the pandemic.
Everybody is promising to build more houses, and that's a good idea. But the free market is already doing a decent job of responding to demand. A little nudge is probably all it needs.
I was diddling around this evening and accidentally typed books into FRED. I discovered two interesting things. First, there's been zero book inflation over the past quarter century:
In fact, books today cost a little less than they did in 1998. At the same time, consumption of books has gone up considerably:
We buy twice as many books as we did four decades ago. And this is only physical books. Add in e-books and the total would be even higher.
Now, this doesn't automatically mean we're reading more. It just means we're buying more. Still, it probably means we're also reading more. I guess I'm surprised by that.
For something a little less surprising, compare this to newspaper revenue over just the past 15 years:
Newspapers are a dying breed. But you already knew that.
I headed out to the desert on Saturday with the promise of good, cloud-free skies. Ha. As I drove east, I could see huge black thunderheads covering half the Mojave Desert, so I stopped to check things out. The normal weather report said everything was clear. Uh huh. Then I looked at a Doppler radar map, and it showed a few scattered clouds and nothing more.
So I forged on, hoping the clouds would break. They didn't. There was no point in setting up the telescope, so instead I took out my regular camera and diddled around for a while with the Milky Way and the clouds. By the time I was done, I could see lots of stars, so I set up the telescope after all.
And it was great! A couple of weeks ago I adjusted the backlash on my mount, and it turned out I didn't really have any. I made a slight adjustment, but figured it wouldn't make much difference.
But it did. For the first time in forever, I did a successful calibration, and even with a longish exposure time (five minutes) the guiding was good and the stars were excellently round. Because of one thing and another I only got about three hours of imaging time, which is too bad, but things turned out OK anyway.
This is the Bubble Nebula, NGC 7635, and it's pretty easy to see why it's called that. Unfortunately, my camera didn't resolve the lovely blue color of the bubble itself, but that's a normal problem. I may try this again to see if I can do better.
As always, there's a lot you can say about the Israeli hostages held by Hamas. But one of the things you can say is this: After holding them prisoner for 11 months, Hamas decided last week to murder six of them in cold blood rather than take the chance they might be rescued.
Condemn Israel all you want. But either condemn Hamas too for this monstrous act or else forfeit your claim to be a decent human being.
Regular readers know that I've long been annoyed by the relentless use of the word chaotic to describe the Afghanistan withdrawal. Of course it was chaotic. It's like saying the D-Day landings were chaotic. There's no way anyone conducts an airlift of 100,000 people in a neat and orderly way from a city that's just been overthrown by the Taliban.
In any case, since it's back in the news it's worth reviewing how the Afghanistan withdrawal played out:
In early 2020 Donald Trump negotiated with the Taliban for a withdrawal date of May 1, 2021, and the release of 5,000 Taliban prisoners held by the Afghan government.
Over the next year Trump pushed hard to reduce US troop levels. By the end of his term he had reduced the US presence to 2,500 troops.
When Joe Biden took office, he moved the withdrawal date out to September 11. Trump criticized the change. "We can and should get out earlier," he said.
In July Biden changed the withdrawal date to August 31. At this point, the Taliban was fighting but hadn't yet taken over a single province. The broad assumption was that when the US withdrawal eventually took place the Afghan government would still control the country. The US, naturally, was committed to protecting the government through the withdrawal.
That changed suddenly because the Afghan army collapsed faster than anyone expected. On August 15 the Taliban took over Kabul and the president of Afghanistan fled the country. With only two weeks to go, this made a large-scale evacuation imperative.
The withdrawal started chaotically, but within a few hours the Army restored order. Meanwhile, despite the Trump administration's longtime policy of delaying visa requests, which left a huge backlog of unprocessed applications, the State Department worked heroically to process visas for Afghans who wanted to leave the country.
In two weeks, the Army evacuated about 90% of Americans in Afghanistan and nearly 100,000 Afghan nationals. By any kind of historical standard, this was a superb performance under the most difficult circumstances imaginable.
The entire operation had only one serious failure: the death of 13 American service members (and 170 Afghans) to an al-Qaeda suicide bomber at Abbey Gate. Multiple investigations by the Pentagon concluded that there wasn't really anything that could have stopped it.
Everyone processes grief differently, and I can't bring myself to reproach the families that blame Biden for the deaths of their children. But the fact remains that Biden wasn't at fault; the Army wasn't at fault; and deaths in the line of duty are a natural occurrence in war.
The withdrawal wasn't handled perfectly, but there weren't any huge mistakes. Nor was it really possible not to withdraw given the situation Biden inherited: the Taliban's takeover was inevitable as soon as Trump signed the withdrawal agreement with them. It might well have been inevitable even without that. After 20 years it was as clear as it could be that there was simply no more the US could do, and Biden showed a lot of political courage in facing up to that.
In the end, despite everything, the evacuation and airlift were considerable successes—and it's remarkable that the only serious casualties came from a single al-Qaeda suicide bomber. The blame for that rests squarely on al-Qaeda and no one else.
For chrissake. Will anyone ever have the guts to tell Trump that BleachBit is just an ordinary piece of open source disk management software that was used by Platte River Networks, Hillary's email hosting company?
I know it doesn't matter anymore. But how is it possible for Trump to be ignorant of this for eight years?
DJT got a little bounce when the Republican convention started, but that wore off quickly and the stock has tanked completely ever since Kamala Harris entered the race. It's down 40% from its pre-convention price.
