A new Reuters/Ipsos poll is out. I wonder if Donald Trump has gotten tired of so much winning yet?

We all know Donald Trump lies a lot. But this is pathological:

Speaking to members of the military during his surprise trip overseas this week, President Trump spoke about the raises they received. “You haven’t gotten one in more than 10 years — more than 10 years,” he said Wednesday. “And we got you a big one. I got you a big one. I got you a big one.”

He continued: “They said: ‘You know, we could make it smaller. We could make it 3 percent. We could make it 2 percent. We could make it 4 percent.’ I said: ‘No. Make it 10 percent. Make it more than 10 percent.’ ”

It’s one thing to say this at, say, a press conference or something. But Trump repeated this nonsense to the actual troops it applies to. If there’s anyone in the world who knows he’s lying, it’s these guys. They know they haven’t gotten a 10 percent raise, but they have to stand at attention anyway and listen to their commander-in-chief BS them about it.

For the record, the 2017 pay increase (for 2018) was 2.4 percent. The 2018 increase (for 2019) was 2.6 percent. Adjusted for inflation, they’re both pretty close to zero.

Here’s a cute little chipmunk at the top of Snow Summit. I saw him dive into a burrow when I got close, so I sat down, focused the camera, and waited for him to come out. Sure enough, he got bored quickly and emerged to pose for a few pictures.

Are we due for a recession? One barometer is to simply look at how much we’re all chattering about the possibility of a recession. This is normally calculated using media mentions of the word recession, but that’s old school—and I don’t know where to get that data anyway. So instead, here are two other measures of how much we’re all talking about the economy:

The orange line is an index based on the average daily number of uses of the word recession in the Wall Street Journal. The blue line is the Google Trends chart for recession as a percentage of the Google Trends chart for expansion. It crossed the 50 percent mark two weeks ago.

As you can see, there’s been a slight upward trend in both indexes all year, followed by a huge uptick in December. The Journal index increased by 50 percent in December compared to its average over the previous 11 months, while the Google Trends index soared by 150 percent.

Why is this? Is it because we all get bored during the holiday season and invent things to chatter about? Is it because the stock market has been doing so poorly? Is it because Donald Trump has been whining about the Fed so much? Or is it because we really are getting close to a downturn? Wait and see!

I wasn’t around for yesterday’s discussion, but it must have been pretty exciting.

Yesterday’s discussion of the Liaoning Underwear Index left out one remarkable fact. Nearly three-quarters of men there wear XL and bigger. Not a single one, apparently, deigns to go for S. pic.twitter.com/1FUH2qJl7V

— Simon Rabinovitch (@S_Rabinovitch) December 27, 2018

Cultura via ZUMA

Peter Stone and Greg Gordon of McClatchy’s DC bureau have fresh evidence that Michael Cohen was in Prague after all:

A mobile phone traced to President Donald Trump’s former lawyer and “fixer” Michael Cohen briefly sent signals ricocheting off cell towers in the Prague area in late summer 2016, at the height of the presidential campaign, leaving an electronic record to support claims that Cohen met secretly there with Russian officials, four people with knowledge of the matter say.

During the same period of late August or early September, electronic eavesdropping by an Eastern European intelligence agency picked up a conversation among Russians, one of whom remarked that Cohen was in Prague, two people familiar with the incident said.

There are two things that are interesting about this. First, if it’s true, it’s a huge shot-in-the-arm for the credibility of the entire Steele dossier, where this allegation originated. Second, it means that special counsel Robert Mueller knows about all this and decided to keep it closely held instead of using it in the charge sheet against Cohen.

But why would Mueller want to keep it secret? Well, the alleged purpose of Cohen’s trip to Prague was to visit with Russian intelligence folks in order to come up with a plan for making cash payments to the hackers who were working with Team Trump to take down Hillary Clinton. Even for Mitch McConnell, I assume this would be considered an impeachable offense, and it’s the kind of thing you’d really want to nail down solidly before you make it public. What’s more, I assume—again, if this is true—that Cohen turned over names and dates and Mueller might want some time to see if he can interview any of the people Cohen talked with. Who knows? Maybe one of them will take a flight that makes a refueling stop in Canada someday.

Headlines I never expected to see, part 176 in an ongoing series:

Amazing. The “blob,” as Obama folks called the foreign policy establishment toward the end of their tenure, is even stupider and more obstinate than I ever would have guessed. Do they all secretly get together and watch Fox News every afternoon, or what?

Get. Out. I don’t care if Trump is an idiot or not. If he’s offering the chance to get the hell out of Syria and Afghanistan, tell him he’s a genius and take the deal. Anyone who doesn’t sign on to this loses the privilege of mocking Glenn Greenwald for the rest of their lives.

I would just like to say that if a quarter of a point in interest rates either way has even the slightest effect on the economy, then we’re in big trouble. L’affaire Fed is much ado about nothing. It will have nothing more than the most marginal impact on the real-world economy.

It’s remarkable that this whole thing is getting the attention it has. In the short-term, the medium-term, and the long-term, the question of whether policy rates right now are at 2 percent or 2.25 percent makes absolutely no difference.

Today is “name that plant” day. When I was up at the arboretum a couple of weeks ago, I came across a section that was filled with two different plants. They were pretty similar, but one was red and the other was green and yellow. The red one was labeled but the other one wasn’t. So what is this thing?

Here is the latest meme sweeping the Chinese-speaking world:

This is a mashup of the Chinese characters for dirt, poor, and ugly, and it’s the new rage among China’s millennials:

Pronounced “qiou,” the new character can’t be produced on a keyboard. But its image, which appeared early this month on Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter, has been viewed tens of millions of times.

….The three components mean poor, ugly and dirt…Put them together and — according to one highly shared post — you get an adjective with three possible definitions: 1. so poor you’re eating dirt ; 2. not only ugly, but also so poor you eat dirt; 3. poor, ugly and dirt-tacky. Young netizens who feel left behind in China’s new economy have claimed the character as an ironically proud expression of loser-hood.

Many Weibo users spread the same joke about qiou: It should be a synonym for wo — or “me.” Fans of the new character aren’t in dire poverty. After all, they have access to the internet and time to play on social media. But they live on the wrong side of China’s widening income gap, a place where finding a job, buying a house and getting married can feel impossible.

Surely we can Americanize this bit of ironic whining and make it into a text-emoji, like the famous shrug: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯  Let’s get on this, internet.