As reported by the CBC this past week:

Canada’s population dropped last year, marking the first time the country has seen an annual net decline in residents since Confederation.

According to the latest quarterly estimate from Statistics Canada, the population of citizens, landed immigrants and non-permanent residents in Canada stood at 41,472,081 on Jan. 1, 2026 — a decrease of 0.2 per cent, or just over 102,000, from Jan. 1, 2025.

StatsCan said that even though the population increased by just over 77,000 people in the first six months of last year, it wasn’t enough to outweigh the decline of almost 180,000 in the second half of 2025.

This preliminary estimate said a reduction in the number of non-permanent residents was the “leading factor in slowing population growth.”

The falling numbers are the result of the policies of the last two Liberal governments to limit the number of permanent and temporary residents. I don’t know whether there will be any long-term effects from this. One immediate effect already being felt is on the housing market and colleges. Foreign students were really pumping up the demand for housing and keeping colleges afloat (as those students pay far more in tuition fees). Just from my own experience, I think it’s also true that new Canadians, temporary or otherwise, were doing a lot of jobs that native Canadians just won’t do. So I think certain industries are also going to be hard hit.

Anyway, it’s an interesting development and seems a meaningful milestone. One I didn’t think I’d ever see. I’m interested if the numbers get adjusted going forward and if the trend continues. For all the talk about getting tough on immigration, I think having people coming here is a net plus. Which means when they don’t come it turns into a net minus.

Last week shares in the Canadian subprime lender goeasy (they don’t capitalize the “g”) crashed 70% and it’s an open question whether the company, which at the start of the week had a market cap of over $5 billion, will survive. For the last several years goeasy has been a champion dividend stock, paying investors big returns. But one of their divisions specializing in loans for autos and “powersports” (ATVs and snowmobiles) recently had to report a much higher than expected amount of charge-offs (loans that were not going to be collected). All dividends have been cancelled. The bloom is off the rose.

Suspicion has now been raised that management knew about the trouble the company was in and was concealing this information from investors. Comparisons have been made to the kind of thing that happened in the mortgage meltdown in 2008, and what is happening with private credit markets now (I should point out that goeasy is not a mortgage lender, nor is it a private credit company, being publicly-traded.) Some class action suits are in preparation, and as of this writing it’s still unclear how this will all play out.

I have some goeasy stock, but not a lot, and at this point I’m assuming it’s a write-off. Easy come, goeasy. Overall I’ve done well as an amateur investor the last thirty years so I’m not jumping out of any windows. You win some, you lose some. Still, the news did make me want to “think in ink” a bit here about what’s going on. What other shoes are waiting to drop?

I think you should always assume the worst in life, as it means you’ll have fewer bad surprises. So where are markets at and where are they heading?

If you listen to voices on the Internet, and there are a lot to listen to, you might have picked up on the increasing note of panic. Does this reflect something real, or is it just that these are the sort of voices that get magnified by the algorithm? I’d be inclined to attribute most of it to clickbait, but there are some prominent voices joining the chorus of doom, with much talk of a “reckoning” that’s on its way. Which leads me to a preliminary observation: if there is some kind of collapse coming it will be, if not the biggest, the most widely predicted in history.

I think there are some real grounds for concern, and I’ll arrange them under four headings. The four horsemen, if you want to pump things up, of the market apocalypse. And just to underline a point in advance: these are all interconnected. Each one affects all the others.

(1) Credit crisis:

In his book MegaThreats the economist Nouriel Roubini uses the concept of debt as a master metaphor for the various faces of the polycrisis the modern world faces, from economics to politics to environmental collapse. He has a point, especially when looking at the big picture. A bill is coming due for the way we’ve been living beyond our means, both as states and as households and individuals. Since 2008 the national debt in the U.S. has gone from $7 trillion to $38 trillion. And it’s set to explode even further, given the massive tax cuts handed out by Trump. The “debt death spiral,” where a government must borrow just to pay interest on the debt, is in sight.

More specifically, however, what we seem to be entering into now is the tight-money part of the credit cycle. This is partly what happened in 2008 with the financial crisis. A lot of bad debt had to be written off, leaving lenders feeling gun-shy. This is the same signal being sent up by what happened to goeasy. And, on a much larger scale, it seems to be what’s behind the headlines regarding the private credit market, whose full exposure to bad loans we can’t determine as it’s not publicly reported. But for sure some lenders are now going to have to take a haircut or go under (again, as in 2008). This will of course have knock-on effects throughout the rest of the economy. Someone is lending lenders that money, after all.

(2) Economic stagnation:

Unemployment numbers in both Canada and the United States have slipped into the red, with Canada losing a remarkable 84,000 jobs just last month (the U.S. lost 92,000). The only sectors that can still be seen as holding their own are health care and some government work. Last year was also a record year for corporate bankruptcies in the U.S. And even the stock market (“the DOW is at 50,000!”) has been kept afloat by questionable means. As I understand it, take away the investment in building A.I. infrastructure and the U.S. economy shrank this past year.

(3) Incoming inflation shock:

In the tight-money phase of the credit cycle prices usually go down. This is what we see already happening in many housing markets, and it comes with its own set of problems. But that doesn’t mean inflation isn’t a bigger threat, and what Trump has done with his scattershot imposition of tariffs and beginning a war in Iran makes it hard not to see prices on essentials (food, energy) going up. Also, given Trump’s resistance to raising interest rates, it isn’t clear to me what his plan would be to address that situation. This may lead to quite a whipsaw effect, and if consumers choose (or are forced) to cut back on their spending that could lead to a greater slowdown in the economy, more unemployment, and market collapse.

(4) AI bubble:

Is all the investment going into AI the sign of a bubble? The current valuations don’t make sense to many analysts. Still, maybe it isn’t a bubble, at least to the extent that crypto is (though I don’t know if I’d characterize crypto as a bubble so much as call it gambling app, which makes it the perfect investment vehicle for our casino/betting economy). As with crypto, or a casino, there may be winners in AI. But there will be more losers, and they now stand to lose a lot, with (again) major knock-on effects throughout the rest of the economy. We’ve already been getting reports of this in connection with rising energy costs due to how much power AI data centers use and predictions of massive job losses. And that’s just the start.

So these are the four big areas of concern I have moving forward. To be honest, the only reason I’m not more full of doom and gloom is that nobody knows anything. We could ride this long bull market for another ten years. But it’s good to keep the potential downside in mind. You’ll often hear it stated how the market, in the long run, always goes up and that all you have to do is invest in index funds and you’ll be fine. Timing the market never beats time in the market, as the conventional wisdom has it. And this is good advice. But I’d want to register two caveats.

In the first place, when the market goes down it can stay down or be flat for ten years or more. It’s done that twice in my lifetime, in the 1970s and the 2000s. You could easily see the last 125 years as consisting of just two or three big booms. So the wealth elevator may be out of order for a while, and the “long run” might need to be longer than most people will want or be able to manage.

The second point is that while it’s true the history of the market is one of growth, there’s no reason to believe in that as some kind of natural law. The market doesn’t have to go up, even in the long run. Because Canada and the U.S. have never suffered a total collapse of their monetary system, with money becoming worthless and “blood in the streets,” doesn’t mean it’s impossible. Just something to keep in mind.

According to some new survey results, about three million Canadian adults are taking GLP-1 drugs such as Ozempic or Mounjaro, primarily for weight loss. This would correspond to roughly eight per cent of the population. Another six percent (approximately 2 million people) responded that they would like to take a GLP-1 drug but can’t afford it.

I thought this seemed like a really high number, but apparently in the U.S. it’s even higher, with 11 per cent of Americans surveyed saying they take the medication.

I really shouldn’t have been surprised. Roughly two-thirds of Canadians are reported to be overweight or obese (obesity being the medical condition, affecting about one-third of Canadians). And the numbers have been increasing, especially during the COVID shutdown. In the U.S. the stats are even worse, with just over 40% of Americans being obese. That’s a big (and yes, I’ll say it, growing) problem, and it seems as though these drugs do help people lose weight so they may be helping in that regard. But I still have to shake my head at that amount of drug use among such a large segment of the population. I’m also always surprised at the high rates of obesity. We’re all familiar with these numbers now, but the thing is, when I go out for a walk I don’t see a third of the people I meet as being obese. Not even close. Maybe 1 in 10, tops. The only way I’ve ever made sense of this is by figuring that all the really heavy people stay at home, never leaving their house. Or if they have to go anywhere, staying in their cars. Does that explain it?

I don’t personally take any GLP-1 drugs. I do, however, invest in pharmaceutical companies. I have for years. They’ve always been a pretty safe bet.

The release of the documentary Melania, which is about what the wife of Donald Trump was busy doing during the lead-up to his second inauguration, has been met with a predictable chorus of critical carping. Most if not all of which I’m sure is well deserved. Yes, the film itself was a $40 million bribe that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos was making to the Trump family in order to curry favour. And I’m sure it’s every bit as bad and soul destroying a movie as reviewers have been saying. Here’s Mark Kermode, a reliably level-headed Everyman: “It’s horrible. It’s the most depressing experience I’ve ever had in the cinema and I’ve seen A Serbian Film, I’ve seen Cannibal Holocaust. I’ve never felt this depressed in my life in the cinema.”

That may be a fair take, but Melania is not a unique phenomenon. The way celebrities use their money and power to shape the public presentation of their lives is a subject I’ve been banging on about for years. Most recently I talked about how the tennis player Naomi Osaka was being lionized by the media for her attempt to assert “narrative control” of her public image, and related it to other sports figures like Tom Brady, Michael Jordan, and Venus and Serena Williams who had all been the subject of documentary and autobiographical films they had also been involved in the production of. As I put it then:

Everyone wants that kind of control. But who has that privilege? Only the most powerful. Billionaires. Those with “massive social-media followings.” Celebrities who own their own media companies.

Melania Trump is another figure in the exact same mold, and served as a producer on Melania. As I said over ten years ago in a post on celebrity biographies:

Whatever or whoever the subject, the same rules of the dance apply and the “sausage-making process” does its job. There’s nothing sinister or even wrong with that, but you have to always keep it in mind any time you’re getting access to a source that has a clear interest in spinning a story a particular way. Which is to say, any source. The story you’re hearing is the one they want you to hear. It may be true, but that’s beside the point.

I find the way people try to draft celebrities or billionaires onto different political teams ridiculous. Some rich and powerful people may be slightly better than others, but none of them are the friends or (shudder) “allies” of the common people, and their program when it comes to trying to “control the narrative” of how they are presented in the media is always exactly the same. To call it whitewashing or propaganda or advertising for their personal brand should go without saying. No one should be surprised at what Melania is like, not because of the kind of person Melania Trump is but because they’ve already seen this movie and read this book countless times already. If you’re not seeing or reading something that someone doesn’t want you to see or read then it’s just an ad.

Last week I read a news story about an apparent murder-suicide that had happened in the U.S. Except it wasn’t reported as being a murder-suicide. Instead, the police chief was quoted as referring to it as possibly being “a murder-[expletive].”

I have to admit that when I first read this I did a double take. I couldn’t figure out what the police chief had said. It took a couple of moments for the penny to drop.

Was this an example of the “language police” riding again? Apparently it’s been considered wrong for a while now to say “committed suicide” because “commit” implies or suggests that suicide is a sin or a crime, as this is how it’s been looked on in the past, albeit not recently. And by “not recently” I mean probably not in many people’s memory.

There’s still some stigma attached to suicide, but this has more to do with the act itself than the language. But let’s stick with the word. As the medical director for The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention puts it: “We wouldn’t say commit cancer or a heart attack. It implies something that’s willful and morally reprehensible.”

This sounds fair, though I still don’t think I’d want to ban the use of the expression outright. And thinking about it more deeply, I’m not sure the analogy holds. Cancer and a heart attack aren’t acts. People don’t do a heart attack or cancer. Saying that suicide isn’t a “willful” act is also problematic. Surely in some cases, like medically-assisted suicide in this country, it is profoundly willful. To say otherwise would be to deny personal agency in what is an agonizing decision over how to end one’s life.

But the news story went further, choosing to see the word suicide as an “expletive.” This is where things got interesting for me. Let’s take a couple of dictionary definitions of “expletive”:

Merriam-Webster:

a syllable, word, or phrase inserted to fill a vacancy (as in a sentence or a metrical line) without adding to the sense

an exclamatory word or phrase, especially one that is obscene or profane

Wikipedia:

An expletive is a word or phrase inserted into a sentence that is not needed to express the basic meaning of the sentence. It is regarded as semantically null or a placeholder. Expletives are not insignificant or meaningless in all senses; they may be used to give emphasis or tone, to contribute to the meter in verse, or to indicate tense.

The primary definition comes from the Latin expletivus, meaning to fill out or take up space. The secondary meaning defines it as a word considered to be offensive, a profanity or curse.

Now I’ll be honest and say I didn’t even know the primary meaning of expletive as a placeholder. For people my age I think the word expletive first came into public consciousness with the release of the expurgated transcripts of the Oval Office tapes of Richard Nixon, which made famous the phrase “expletive deleted.” My father had a political cartoon of Nixon swearing his oath of office with one hand on the Bible and the oath itself peppered with “expletive deleteds.” I’ll never forget it.

So what has happened is that the word “suicide” has been redefined as an expletive, something offensive to be deleted from reported speech. Not just “committing suicide,” but the suicide itself. Unfortunately, what this has resulted in, at least online, is an awkward grasping for euphemisms or circumlocutions to fill the gap. Most of these have been, frankly, ridiculous. Self-deletion? Or, even worse, “unalive”?

In 2024 Seattle’s Museum of Pop Culture actually got in trouble for rewriting a Nirvana exhibit to say that Kurt Cobain had “un-alived himself” rather than “died by suicide.” There was a public backlash to that and it had to be corrected, but the fuss underlined what has become a digital-age phenomenon. The thing is, digital media platforms, most prominently YouTube, can and do demonetize content that runs afoul of speech codes. Which is why, watching some videos or listening to podcasts, you’ll hear certain words blanked out or else substituted for something less likely to trigger the algorithm.

This has become so prevalent that the resulting language even has its own name: algospeak. This refers to the code words that are used to evade automated or human moderation. “Unalive” is one such example.

Algospeak has its critics. Some people in the suicide prevention community, for example, see it as potentially confusing individuals who may be looking for help and who can’t decode the new slang. But it’s interesting to see the forces at work that push language to evolve.

Are we better off today than when I was a kid? In public and high school kids in my generation listened to songs like Ozzy Osbourne’s “Suicide Solution” and Queen’s “Don’t Try Suicide.” I can still remember in grade 7 or 8 hearing the latter come on at a dance:

Don’t try suicide, nobody’s worth it
Don’t try suicide, nobody cares
Don’t try suicide, you’re just gonna hate it
Don’t try suicide, nobody gives a damn

A teacher who was standing nearby turned to one of his fellow teachers and laughingly remarked: “Nobody gives a damn? That’s not being very positive.” And that’s as far as things went back in the day. Were we made stronger by listening to such lyrics? Or damaged by them? Osbourne was actually sued after someone listening to “Suicide Solution” killed himself but the claim failed at trial. On the broader question of the role language plays in such cases, the jury’s still out.

There were 3,866 investment fraud victims reported in 2024, who collectively suffered a financial loss of $310.6 million, according to the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre (CAFC). These numbers include all types of investment fraud, not just online scams.

So far in 2025, Maude Blanchette, chair of the Canadian Securities Administrators (CSA) Investment Fraud Task Force, estimated that there have already been about 3,000 cases reported. The official tally will be released by the CAFC in 2026.

Blanchette said the number of reported cases has levelled off since 2022, but added that scams tend to be severely underreported to begin with. According to the CAFC, just five to 10 per cent of fraud incidents are reported.

“It’s very scary because it means that it is only the tip of the iceberg,” Blanchette said.

I found this news report upsetting for a number of reasons. Assuming only 10 per cent of fraud incidents are being reported, the total annual losses would be over $3 billion. And perhaps double that if 10 per cent is too high. That’s a lot of money, and victims, for one country without a large population.

The thing is, as much as we can shake our heads at the foolishness of people who fall for some of the more obvious scams, I think we are all vulnerable. I even got scammed by one online retailer about fifteen years ago, but it was only for $10 so I didn’t feel too bad. And while most frauds are pretty transparent, I’ve known a couple of people who were fooled by operations that were really quite sophisticated. And with AI these scams are apparently getting even better. The bottom line is: even if you think you’re much too smart to fall for an online fraud, you probably aren’t. You just haven’t been caught yet.

What also bothers me is the inability, or unwillingness, of law enforcement to do much of anything about the problem (I won’t even mention the platforms who are basically accomplices in all this). It’s just too much work for authorities, or too difficult. I knew a lawyer who worked in the field twenty years ago and back then he told me that the police wouldn’t even investigate a complaint that was under $75,000.

I think we should take this kind of thing a lot more seriously, and while there may be jurisdictional issues I don’t see why it should be so hard to crack down on these people. As it is, they all know they can get away with it so it’s a problem that keeps getting worse. And as the numbers indicate, it’s a big problem now.

For those who don’t know, poutine is a French-Canadian dish consisting of french fries covered in cheese curds and gravy. This past weekend the World Poutine Eating Championship was held in Toronto, an event sanctioned by Major League Eating (yeah, I’d never heard of it either) and sponsored by Smoke’s Poutine at their annual Smoke-a-Palooza festival.

Two years ago the contest was won by a guy who ate 20.4 pounds of poutine in 10 minutes. That number was crushed the next year though by competitive-eating legend Joey Chestnut, who swallowed 28 pounds of the stuff in the same time. This year Mr. Chestnut won again but only ate 26.5 pounds. Maybe he pulled up seeing how far ahead he was.

Needless to say, I couldn’t imagine eating 28 (or 26, or 20) pounds of anything in ten minutes. I will say that Mr. Chestnut is very good at what he does, and he trains hard for these events (yes, training is involved). This is a guy who can (and has) eaten 76 hot dogs in twelve minutes. But this kind of thing, in addition to looking gross, isn’t healthy. Most deaths from these stunts occur due to choking, but even assuming you get everything down it seems to me like you’re ravaging your body. I think you could get clogged arteries just from watching this amount of poutine being consumed.

Still . . . 28 pounds. Disgusting, sure. But you have to be impressed, just a little.

According to a 2024 report by the charity Kindred², which was based on a poll of 1,000 primary school staff in the UK, problems are increasing with school-readiness among the cohort of students entering Reception (which is what they call the first year of primary school, for kids around the age of 4 or 5).

Nearly half (46%) of pupils are unable to sit still, 38% struggle to play or share with others, more than a third (37%) cannot dress themselves, 29% cannot eat or drink independently and more than a quarter (28%) are using books incorrectly, swiping or tapping as though they were using a tablet, according to the survey.

The numbers give some indication of how much extra work teachers are having to do, and they are surprising. I’m not sure what it even means that a kid age 4-5 can’t eat or drink “independently.” But it’s that last statistic that got me. Over a quarter of these kids don’t even know what a book is? That’s scary. Apparently it’s also where the biggest gap in the survey showed up between what parents’ expectations were and the reality of where most kids were at, as over half of all parents thought children should be able to use books correctly upon entering the program. This gives some indication of how under the radar the problem is.

Over at the New Yorker the columnist David D. Fitzpatrick has just done a much-discussed forensic accounting (“How much is Trump pocketing off the Presidency?”) calculating the amount of money Donald Trump has made out of being president. The total he comes to, and this is presented as a conservative estimate, is $3.4 billion. Already.

Many payments now flowing to Trump, his wife, and his children and their spouses would be unimaginable without his Presidencies: a two-billion-dollar investment from a fund controlled by the Saudi crown prince; a luxury jet from the Emir of Qatar; profits from at least five different ventures peddling crypto; fees from an exclusive club stocked with Cabinet officials and named Executive Branch. Fred Wertheimer, the dean of ethics-reform advocates, told me that, “when it comes to using his public office to amass personal profits, Trump is a unicorn—no one else even comes close.” Yet the public has largely shrugged. In a recent article for the Times, Peter Baker, a White House correspondent, wrote that the Trumps “have done more to monetize the presidency than anyone who has ever occupied the White House.” But Baker noted that the brazenness of the Trump family’s “moneymaking schemes” appears to have made such transactions seem almost normal.

When thinking about numbers like this I think it’s helpful to remember just how much a billion dollars is. A million seconds is approximately 11.5 days, while a billion seconds is about 31.7 years. The scale of Trump’s corruption isn’t just unparalleled, it’s nearly unimaginable.

Who knew this level of profiteering was going to happen? Everyone! Including yours truly, in my immediate post-election post in November 2024:

The main thing I feel confident predicting though is that we are going to see kleptocracy run mad. The looting of the American state is about to begin, on a scale (to borrow a favourite Trumpism) never before seen in the history of the world. Back during his first term Sarah Kendzior characterized the Republican plan for America as being to “strip it for its parts,” and Trump presided over an administration more corrupt and indeed criminal than any the U.S. had ever experienced. Well, expect that to ramp up bigly. The copper wires are going to be ripped from the walls, the plumbing fixtures torn out, and the lead taken from the roofs. Switching metaphors, the cookie jar is going to be wide open and sitting out on the table for at least the next two years.

As the corruption has mounted, here are some other voices (all emphases in bold added). Just to anticipate a couple of complaints in advance:

These are all liberal media sources. If you define liberal as any voice speaking out against Trump, yes they are. But the facts are out in the open.

It’s just the same as what Democrats did (and do) when they’re in power. Not like this! To be sure, corruption is very much part of modern politics. But nothing has been done on the scale of what Trump is doing.

So without further ado:

From “Trump’s Corruption” by Jonathan Rauch (The Atlantic, February 24 2025):

Patrimonialism [the form of government Rauch identifies Trumpism with] is corrupt by definition, because its reason for being is to exploit the state for gain—political, personal, and financial. At every turn, it is at war with the rules and institutions that impede rigging, robbing, and gutting the state. We know what to expect from Trump’s second term. As Larry Diamond of Stanford University’s Hoover Institution said in a recent podcast, “I think we are going to see an absolutely staggering orgy of corruption and crony capitalism in the next four years unlike anything we’ve seen since the late 19th century, the Gilded Age.” (Francis Fukuyama, also of Stanford, replied: “It’s going to be a lot worse than the Gilded Age.”)

They weren’t wrong. “In the first three weeks of his administration,” reported the Associated Press, “President Donald Trump has moved with brazen haste to dismantle the federal government’s public integrity guardrails that he frequently tested during his first term but now seems intent on removing entirely.” The pace was eye-watering. Over the course of just a couple of days in February, for example, the Trump administration:

gutted enforcement of statutes against foreign influence, thus, according to the former White House counsel Bob Bauer, reducing “the legal risks faced by companies like the Trump Organization that interact with government officials to advance favorable conditions for business interests shared with foreign governments, and foreign-connected partners and counterparties”;

suspended enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, further reducing, wrote Bauer, “legal risks and issues posed for the Trump Organization’s engagements with government officials both at home and abroad”;

fired, without cause, the head of the government’s ethics office, a supposedly independent agency overseeing anti-corruption rules and financial disclosures for the executive branch;

fired, also without cause, the inspector general of USAID after the official reported that outlay freezes and staff cuts had left oversight “largely nonoperational.”

By that point, Trump had already eviscerated conflict-of-interest rules, creating, according to Bauer, “ample space for foreign governments, such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, to work directly with the Trump Organization or an affiliate within the framework of existing agreements in ways highly beneficial to its business interests.” He had fired inspectors general in 19 agencies, without cause and probably illegally. One could go on—and Trump will.

From “The Trump Presidency’s World-Historical Heist” by David Frum (The Atlantic, May 28 2025):

Nothing like this has ever been attempted or even imagined in the history of the American presidency. Throw away the history books, discard people, comparisons to scandals of the past. There is no analogy with any previous action by any past president. The brazenness of the self-enrichment resembles nothing seen in any earlier White House. This is American corruption on the scale of a post-Soviet republic or a post-colonial African dictatorship.

The Trump story . . . is almost too big to see, too upsetting to confront. If we faced it, we’d have to do something – something proportional to the scandal of the most flagrant self-enrichment by a politician that this country, or any other, has seen in modern times.

From “Follow the money: Trump’s corruption hits shocking heights” by Juan Williams (The Hill, June 2 2025):

Right now, it is hard to miss what looks like a deluge of pocket-lining as private money swirls around this president. And let’s not mention the free airplane he is ready to accept from a foreign power.

The money grab is so breathtaking that it has left Trump’s critics muttering expletives while the normally reliably loud critics of government corruption, especially congressional Republicans, appear in stunned silence.

Even as Trump’s administration seeks to regulate crypto more loosely, his jaunt into crypto — his $TRUMP and $MELANIA meme coins, plus his stake in World Liberty Financial — has reportedly increased his family’s wealth by billions in the last six months and now accounts for almost 40 percent of his net worth.

New York Times reporter Peter Baker posted on X last week, “Trump and his family have monetized the White House more than any other occupant, normalizing activities that once would have provoked heavy blowback and official investigations.”

Presidential scandals of the past seem quaint by comparison — Hillary Clinton’s cattle futures, Eisenhower’s chief of staff resigning over a coat, Nixon stepping down over a “third-rate burglary.”

The magnitude of Trump’s self-serving actions to enrich himself exceeds anything in our history. Nixon sought distance from wrongdoing, telling Americans that he was “not a crook.” He wanted to be clear that he did not personally gain money from any abuse of power that took place in his administration.

Trump makes no effort to proclaim his innocence as he pursues wealth while in public office. And while Nixon held power during a time of relative economic calm for the middle class, Trump is acting against a backdrop of economic anxiety for most Americans.

From “This is the looting of America: Trump and Co’s extraordinary conflicts of interest in his second term” by Ed Pilkington (The Guardian, June 16 2025):

Trump and his team of billionaires have led the US on a dizzying journey into the moral twilight that has left public sector watchdogs struggling to keep up. Which is precisely the intention, said Kathleen Clark, a government ethics lawyer and law professor at Washington University in Saint Louis. . . .

“People talk about ‘guardrails’ and ‘norms’ and ‘conflict of interest’, which is all very relevant,” she said. “But this is theft and destruction. This is the looting of America.”

Trump returned to the White House partly on his promise to working-class Americans that he would “drain the swamp”, liberating Washington from the bloodsucking of special interests. Yet a review by the Campaign Legal Center found that Trump nominated at least 21 former lobbyists to top positions in his new administration, many of whom are now regulating the very industries on whose behalf they recently advocated.

Eight of them, the Campaign Legal Center concluded, would have been banned or restricted in their roles under all previous modern presidencies, including Trump’s own first administration.

Final thoughts: the one thing that surprised Fitzpatrick the most in his investigations is the frantic pace at which Trump and his family are exploiting the office of the presidency to line their pockets. So keep in mind we’re only 8 months in and the number is going to keep going up, perhaps at an even accelerated pace. Also: the guardrails against corruption have been entirely torn down and with all the bodies meant to keep an eye out for such behaviour and even call it to account either disbanded or staffed with figures whose only loyalty is to Trump, it’s now become a free-for-all. In terms of high-level graft and corruption the U.S. is effectively a lawless state, already experiencing a level of profiteering, in terms of the dollar amounts involved, unparalleled by any modern government, with the possible exception of what happened after the breakdown of the Soviet Union and the rise of the Putin-era oligarchs. America’s oligarchs took notes on that, and are on board for the same ride. I mean, they already got a $3 trillion dollar-plus tax cut (conservatively estimated) in the Big Beautiful Bill. That’s trillion. Or, to use my earlier analogy, 31, 689 years. The mind boggles.

And now they have crypto to play with too.

So my next totally predictable prediction: the looting of America is going to get worse.

Not all of the words I feature here are ones I come across when reading. This one struck me when I was at the gym, watching the Weather Channel. Which is actually one of the more interesting shows on cable these days.

A virga (plural virgae), also known as a “dry storm,” is a streak or shaft of rain that evaporates before it hits the ground. As I read up a bit about virgae I found it necessary to understand the concept of a “precipitation shaft”: a highly localized precipitation event. It’s not a whole front of rain then but a sort of column, which ties into the Latin root of virga: a rod, staff, sprig, or twig.

This is not a word I can imagine myself using, ever. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a virga, so I’d have to employ the word as a metaphor. Looking it up online, however, I did come across this amazing picture of a virga in the sunset over the Russian city of Saratov. That in itself seemed worth a post. (You can click on the pic to make it bigger.)

Words, words, words