Yesterday I remarked on Joe Biden’s approval rating. Today at Gallup Megan Brenan reports that President Biden ended 2023 with a lower approval rating than when he began it:

WASHINGTON, D.C. — President Joe Biden’s job approval rating is 39%, marking a slight improvement from the 37% low points in October and November but the fifth time his rating is below 40% in 2023.

During the latest poll’s Dec. 1-20 field period, the war between Israel and Hamas continued after a late November pause in fighting, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy visited Biden at the White House to ask for the United States’ help in his country’s war with Russia, and House Republicans unanimously voted to open an impeachment inquiry into Biden.

While rank-and-file Republicans’ ratings of Biden have been firmly entrenched in the single digits since August 2021, independents’ ratings have been more variable. After hitting a record-low 27% in November, approval of Biden is up seven percentage points this month. Approval of Biden among Democrats is currently 78%, down slightly from last month’s 83%.

That’s no actually the punchline which is that President Biden’s approval rating at this point in his presidency is lower than that of any president in post-war period including Jimmy Carter who failed to be re-elected.

As I observed in comments to be re-elected his approval rating’s trend must change and it must change soon.

There are all sorts of retorts to that. His approval rating doesn’t matter; his approval rating relative to Donald Trump’s does (Trump’s approval rating is presently higher than Biden’s). It’s still early. A lot could happen between now and November 2024 (will what happens improve his approval rating or hurt it?). The only poll that matters is the one in November 2024.

My only points are that I’m sure that President Biden’s re-election campaign is looking at the same polls, should be expected to act accordingly, do it soon, and their actions may have unanticipated results.

Tonight I completed playing Baldur’s Gate 3. I started playing shortly after it came out in pre-release in October 2020. The game consists of three acts and only the first act was in the pre-release. The complete release came out in August 2023, I start a playthrough as a monk (a character class unavailable until then). And I’ve just completed.

It is an enormous, complex, beautiful game—probably the closest to playing a tabletop game of Dungeons and Dragons that a video game can be but with all of the advantages of a video game. Art, music, voice actors. The credits are enormous.

The first act is probably the most fully realized followed by the second act followed by the third. During pre-release I played through the first act at least a half dozen times, each time as a member of e different character class. I know from long experience that I am best suited by character to play as a bard, a rogue, or a monk. I also found playing as a sorcerer fun.

Tomorrow if I have the time I plan to play the final battle again (I saved just before the start of the battle), using a different strategy. Then I’ll start a new playthrough. I’m not sure what character class I’ll choose.

If you like role playing games, I highly recommend Baldur’s Gate 3 if you have a device capable of playing it and an Internet connection fast and stable enough to download it.

It’s available for PC, mac, Playstation, and XBox.

Here’s some food for thought:

The source of most these statistics is Zippia.com. College enrollments and on-time graduation rates come from the National Center for Educational Statistics.

The college enrollment and on-time graduation rates don’t really fit together with the job statistics (they’re measuring very different things) but I included them because I think they are illuminating. There aren’t actually many actuaries in the U. S. I only included because for me it represents the “path not taken”. When I graduated from high school I was offered a four year scholarship if I became an actuary. Actuary is a pretty good job but it wasn’t something I was interested in.

You might look at the job statistics and shout “Systemic racism!”. Depending on how you define that I might agree with you. That seems to be a term like “woke” for which the definition changes depending on the individual. Considering the relatively younger age of all of the construction trades jobs (and actuaries) we’re talking about relatively recently not historic racism. The population by race in the United States is 75.5% white, 19.1% Hispanic, 13.6% black, 6.3% Asian. Counting the adult population only doesn’t change that by much.

Need I point out that there are a disproportionately high number of Hispanics in the construction trades and a disproportionately high number of Asians are physicians, accountants, and actuaries? And that the percentage of blacks in all of those jobs is disproportionately low?

Here’s what I think:

• I think that young black Americans can pursue and succeed in any job that’s important enough to them and for which they will do what’s necessary.
• I think that expectations (their own; their teachers’ their parent’; others’) tend to channel young black Americans towards certain jobs. That’s why, for example, a disproportionate percent of black college students major in public administration.
• The table above illustrates a point I have been making. Our immigration system along with stereotypical expectations (see above) is stacked against black Americans.
• The system by which we train physicians, too, is stacked against black Americans. It might have made sense in 1910. It doesn’t make the same amount of sense now.

As an aside, note the low percentage of on-time college graduation rates among young black Americans attending college. IMO that’s explains the politics of the Biden Administration’s fixation on forgiving college loans.

You might want to take a look at Vox’s predictions for 2024, by Bryan Walsh, Dylan Matthews, Sigal Samuel, Kenny Torrella, Marina Bolotnikova, and Izzie Ramirez. All told they make 24. Here are the first eight:

• Donald Trump will return to the White House (55 percent)
• Republicans will recapture the Senate (85 percent)
• Democrats will recapture the House (55 percent)
• Inflation will come in under 3 points (65 percent)
• 2023 US car crash deaths will again exceed 40,000 (60 percent
• Netanyahu will be unseated as Israeli prime minister (75 percent)
• The world will be hotter in 2024 than it was in 2023 (80 percent)
• Narendra Modi will remain as prime minister of India after the country’s 2024 elections (85 percent)

It might be more interesting to consider the first three predictions together. On face value they’re telling us it’s more likely that a Republican wave will be more likely than a Democratic one and no wave at all is more likely than a wave for either.

It also might be interesting to consider which of their predictions is the most likely to be wrong. I suspect it’s their prediction about Netanyahu.

Here’s what I want for Christmas and the New Year:

• I want Congress to pass the bill funding aid for Ukraine and Israel, increasing staffing at the border, and changing our policy on asylum and for the president to sign it and enforce it.
• I want the U. S. Supreme Court to define clearly and unambiguously what is and is not an insurrection, whether Trump can be disqualified from seeking re-election under the terms of the 14th Amendment, and who has the authority to make the determination.
• I want Russia to stop making war on Ukraine.
• I want Hamas to surrender.
• I want Israel to stop funding settlements on the West Bank.
• I want Congress to raise the debt ceiling and enact a budget.
• I want Hollywood to make a movie I genuinely want to go to the theater to see.
• I want neither Joe Biden nor Donald Trump to seek re-election.
• I want the city to correct what their contractors screwed up in our alley.
• I want the bozos at work to start taking my advice, start doing their own jobs, and stop trying to do mine.

Nothing big or ostentatious. I’m under no illusions. I don’t think I’ll get any of those things.

2023 was a bad year for Hollywood. Consider the top grossing pictures (per Box Office Mojo):

Production costs are estimates and from miscellaneous sources.

A number of things are apparent from these results. First, Greta Gerwig, who wrote and directed Barbie, has cemented her position as a powerful force in Hollywood. Congratulations to her. Barbie, despite many predictions of its failure, is one of the highest grossing pictures ever and, well, money talks.

Second, the overall box office grosses for 2023 remain 20% lower than the pre-pandemic grosses in 2019. They may never recover.

Third, we may have seen the end of the blockbuster superhero movie. For GOTG3 to make money it needed to gross $625M by most estimates and it did. But it was the only superhero picture to do so in a year filled with releases of superhero pictures. The rest all lost money.

Third, it was a very, very bad year for Disney. Nearly all of its 2023 releases, particularly its live action releases, lost money. Additionally, its other business units, especially its streaming unit, all lost money. Clearly, they’re doing something wrong. I presume that its CEO Bob Iger will blame it on the other guy but it’s hard to see how he could survive another year like 2023.

Even with its gargantuan budget Avatar 2 made money. Not a lot when you add the promotion budget to the production budget but it made money. Will there be another sequel?

#10 and #11 on the list must send shivers up the spines of Hollywood execs. Neither was a Hollywood movie. Sound of Freedom was crowd-sourced. The Taylor Swift movie was financed, produced, and promoted by her and her people. Add one more picture: Godzilla Minus 1. Released on December 1, the $25 million movie has already grossed three times its production cost. That highlights a critical problem: making Hollywood movies is too damned expensive.

IMO the role of “wokeness” is much exaggerated and only tells part of the story. Corporate Hollywood movies are designed by committees and look it. They’re derivative and repetitive with hardly a creative bone in their collective body and people are bored with them.

We have yet to see what the long-term effects of the writers’ and SAG-AFTRA strikes will be. If they’ve done permanent damage to the studios, that in turn will be devastating to the economy of Los Angeles and that of California more generally.

James Joyner comments on a piece at the BBC:

Honestly, while I concede that Gardner’s focus is on the “international politics stage,” the main setbacks for the West have come from democratic backsliding in so many countries. The Trump phenomenon in the United States is of course the most prominent but we’ve seen growing support for far-right, anti-democratic parties across much of Western Europe. That’s a far greater danger to Western values and influence than any of those listed in the article.

I commend the post to your attention as well as a comment there by Michael Reynolds which might be summarized as “we’re doing just fine”. I think he’s overstating the damages suffered by Russia and understating how disastrous the war has been for Ukraine but otherwise I’m in material agreement with him.

But consider the original piece from the point-of-view of the ethnic nation-states of Europe! The immigration they have received over the last decade from the Middle East and Africa has been nothing short of catastrophic for them. France has based its society on the notion of “Frenchness” for well over a century and that is being challenged. Many of their new immigrants don’t consider themselves to be French and don’t care to be French. In Germany the unemployment rate for immigrants is at least 20% higher than for the native-born while in Sweden it’s twice as high.

Nearly all of those fleeing the unrest in the Sahel are going to Europe and that shows few signs of abating. That will be a challenge for the foreseeable future.

Note, too, that despite the war in Ukraine and whatever threat posed to them by Russia defense spending in most European countries is about what it was as a percentage of GDP in 2000. Either they don’t think that Russia poses a threat to them or they’re clinging to the idea that we’ll defend them. Increasing their military spending threatens the government benefits to which they’ve become accustomed. No wonder uncertainty not to mention instability in the United States is concerning to them.

Gabriel Elefteriu offers his predictions for 2024 at Brussels Signal>:

1. Ukraine: the key to surviving the 2024 campaign is political stability in Kyiv. Overall, the situation at the front will get worse before it gets better.
2. The Middle East powder keg: no complete detonation, but chaos will spread including on our streets.
3. Taiwan: China will continue its preparations for war but will not strike.

concluding that the outlook while bleaik is not preordained:

Western power is at a low ebb in historical terms as regards the military balance. Our adversaries have the initiative – and even the upper hand – in a number of domains, regions or subsets of global affairs. The three global flashpoints in Ukraine, the Middle East and Taiwan act as fractures in the US-backed system of global security, fractures that Russia, Iran and China are trying to widen and deepen.

The fact that the West is proving increasingly more incompetent at strategy and global action hardly bears repeating. It is enough to consider the fact that approaching the third year of its invasion of Ukraine, Russia is on the offensive and its economy is growing – whether this is temporary or not, time will tell – while those of leading Western nations are teetering on the brink of recession, with some, like Germany, de-industrialising.

That actually sounds optimistic to me.

I recommend reading David Ignatius’s quiz in his last Washington Post column of 2023. His questions are:

• On Dec. 31, 2024, the status of the war in Ukraine will be
• Russian President Vladimir Putin will close 2024 as
• Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s biggest surprise in 2024 will be
• The Gaza War will end with
• The CIA’s biggest surprise in 2024 will be
• North Korea’s Kim Jong Un will stun the world in 2024 by
• The most significant technology development of 2024 will be
• The biggest economic story of 2024 will be
• The most destabilizing and potentially dangerous military trend of 2024 will be
• The news-business shocker of the year will be

It’s a multiple choice test.. I gather that at least some of his choices are satirical.

In general my answers are all “None of the above”, mostly because I think that several of the choices are likely to occur. For example, here’s his question about North Korea:

AFAICT only the alternative of the hypersonic cruise missile is possible and it’s very unlikely.

And here’s the economic question:

I think the first, second, fifth, and sixth are all possible but that the biggest economic story of 2024 will be something that isn’t even in his list.

At any rate you may find his list amusing or frustrating. Or both.