The difficulty many of us face in understanding Tom Bombadil arises from the fact that he is part of nature and we all too often think of ourselves as separate from nature. We cannot grasp mastery apart from domination. We cannot grasp a steward who does not rule. We are thus far more like Denethor and Saruman than any of us would care to admit. It’s also why neither of them understands Gandalf. Everything but us is a part of Faerie of its very nature, as Tolkien says in _On Fairy-stories_.1 We are not naturally enchanted. Not now, and perhaps we never were. Yet, if we were, our disenchantment dates from the moment we began to regard ourselves as ruling stewards, as viceregents rather than vicegerents. We are like Sauron unable to imagine that “we should wish to cast him down and have _no one_ in his place,” let alone that “we should try to destroy the Ring itself….” (_TT_ 3.v.497). So, of course we can’t understand Tom Bombadil. ___________________________________ 1 Given Tolkien’s description in _On Fairy-stories_(see below), I have no doubt that he would say that _we_ are disenchanted, not _the world_. It would take long thought to work out the dynamics of this point of view in opposition to the standard view that the world is disenchanted. “Faerie contains many things besides elves and fays, and besides dwarfs, witches, trolls, giants, or dragons: it holds the seas, the sun, the moon, the sky; and the earth, and all things that are in it: tree and bird, water and stone, wine and bread, and ourselves, mortal men, when we are enchanted."

When I was around 11 I heard for the first time about Fermat’s Last Theorem. I was immediately captivated by the problem statement, as well as by the accompanying story, and made a fairly ser…

###### What did Trump expect his policies to do to male employment? If he had really wanted to boost male employment, he needed to pick very different policies. What we got was a gendered theory of growth, executed by a moron and staffed by the corrupt, failing exactly on its own terms: The opportunities for sectors that predominantly employ men in blue-collarish jobs to grow in this economy are threefold: Share 1. computer and power infrastructure (that is, data centers), 2. green-tech infrastructure, 3. robustness- and security-driven reshoring in which the North American continental division of labor can be a good substitute for the global division of labor. Give a gift subscription Well, Trump has done the best he can to kill (3): by making sure that nobody is willing to trust that Trump will not disrupt Canadians and Mexicans in the value chain, he has nuked any desire to reshore predominantly male blue-collarish jobs, save for those engaged in immediate publicity-performative Trumpish favor-currying. And Trump has also done the best he can to kill (2). That leaves (1), the construction of data centers, as a source of growth in predominantly-male blue-collarish job industries. And that by itself has proven not enough to get male employment to do more than tread water. Reshoring dies when no one trusts you not to blow up the supply chain next Tuesday. Green-tech dies when you set out to kill it. That leaves data centers boosting maleish employment by themselves—and they can’t. Why did Trump think these policies, the destructive DOGE of Elon Musk, the tariffs, and so on, would boost blue-collarish male employment in the United States? Because he is a moron. Why did nobody on his staff point out that, if he really did want to talk about expanding male blue-collarish employment in a year or two, he needed different policies? Because they are all corrupt. If they were not corrupt, would they be working for Trump? No. A quirky and interesting chart from the superb Mike Konczal: ###### Chart: Mike KonczalSource: CES, all jobs Get the data Download image Created with Datawrapper And he comments: > **Mike Konczal** : Why Are Women Over 100% of Jobs Gained Under Trump’s Second Term? <https://newsletter.mikekonczal.com/p/why-are-women-over-100-of-jobs-gained>: ‘In December 2024, there were 79,332,000 men employed in the Current Employment Statistics survey. In August 2026, there were 79,326,000, a decline of 6,000. That’s a [net of] 759,000 overall jobs…. Job growth was essentially flat in 2025, with health care hiring canceling out the losses in federal employment after DOGE, in trade and transportation and manufacturing after the tariffs, and in professional and business services. Since Trump took office, private education and health services added 1,029,000 jobs against an economy-wide gain of 759,000, so one sector that is 77 percent female more than accounts for all net job growth since Trump took office…. Even with last month’s surprise 162,000 jobs, 158,000 of them went to women. This is a very new trend…. > > This is overwhelmingly, on the order of 84 percent or more, about industries that employ more women growing faster. There will be a conservative spin that this is all about girlbosses, or discrimination against men, or subsidies for working women. There’s no empirical evidence for that. They [the Trumpists] are simply failing at what they have set out to do…. Men are still waiting on a manufacturing and blue-collar revival that the data, basic economics, and common sense all say won’t show up with their [the Trumpists’] approach… Subscribe now Leave a comment ##### _**If reading this gets you Value Above Replacement, then become a free subscriber to this newsletter. And forward it! And if your VAR from this newsletter is in the three digits or more each year, please become a paid subscriber! I am trying to make you readers—and myself—smarter. Please tell me if I succeed, or how I fail…**_ * * * ###### **##** the-feminization-of-employment-growth-during-trump-ii-chart-of-the-day ##macro-outlook ##neofascism ##chaos-monkey-governance ##chart-of-the-day #the-feminization-of-employment-growth-during-trump-ii #mike-konczal #blue-collarish-male-employment #health-care-jobs #data-center-building-jobs #reshoring-jobs #green-tech-jobs

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Why were 70s predictions of the future so obsessed with jumpsuits, onesies and unitard-like uniforms?