We Didn’t Start the Fire
When history turns into every damn thing at once
I was working nights in a welding shop in 1989 when Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire” came out. When you’re running a MIG welder with headphones on, you listen to a lot of music, and that song was everywhere. Birth control, Ho Chi Minh, Richard Nixon back again—this relentless catalog of events that made you feel like history was happening faster than anyone could process.
The song wasn’t really about those events. It was about the feeling of living through them. That sense that time itself was compressing, that the gap between “one damn thing after another” and “every damn thing at once” was collapsing.
Thirty-six years later, I’m not welding anymore. I’m an HVAC analyst watching pressure gauges in a windowless bunker. But I know that feeling again.
Let me remind you about the first three weeks of December 2025.
December 5: The White House released a National Security Strategy describing European allies as facing “civilizational erasure” and calling for “cultivating resistance” within NATO countries. Former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt said the document uses “language that one otherwise only finds coming out of some bizarre minds of the Kremlin.”
December 10: Danish Intelligence released its annual threat assessment. For the first time in history, it names the United States as a potential security concern, warning that Washington “uses economic power, including threats of high tariffs, to enforce its will, and no longer rules out the use of military force, even against allies.” A NATO ally put that in writing.
December 10: The US Coast Guard seized an oil tanker off Venezuela. This follows 22 airstrikes since September that have killed at least 87 people on boats the administration calls “drug vessels”—including follow-up strikes on survivors clinging to wreckage. The largest US military buildup in Latin America since the Cold War is now in place. The President has declared Venezuelan airspace “closed in its entirety”—language typically reserved for acts of war.
December 12: House Democrats released 19 photos from Jeffrey Epstein’s estate showing Trump, Clinton, and other powerful figures. The December 19 deadline for full DOJ file release approaches.
December 15: Ukraine-Germany-US peace talks in Berlin concluded with complete silence from all three delegations. No leaks. No spin. When everyone stays quiet, something happened.
December 15: Ukrainian underwater drones disabled a Russian submarine in Novorossiysk harbor—the first successful attack of its kind in history. A $500 million submarine, taken out by a drone costing under $250,000. Cost ratio: 2,000 to 1.
Meanwhile: 44 House members—nearly 10% of Congress—have announced they won’t seek reelection, the highest rate at this point in any cycle in over a decade. Republican retirements outpace Democrats nearly 2-to-1. One senior GOP lawmaker told Punchbowl: “This entire White House team has treated ALL members like garbage.”
Three weeks. That’s three weeks.
That’s not a news cycle. That’s a phase change.
The prediction markets give Trump 90%+ odds of finishing his term. But prediction markets price what people believe will happen based on historical patterns. They’re terrible at pricing novel scenarios—systematic abandonment by your own party, allies restructuring negotiations without you, a 78-year-old man under enormous stress who doesn’t do the health maintenance.
I’m not predicting specific dates. I’m just reading the gauges. And right now, every pressure indicator I’m watching says the same thing: functional people are done waiting. They’re routing around the problem. Building new structures. Finding ways forward.
Danish intelligence analysts naming us as a threat—and publishing it anyway. Exhausted legislators saying “I don’t have to do this anymore.” Ukrainian engineers building garage-workshop weapons that punch 2,000 times above their weight. European allies rearranging the seating chart so they can’t be isolated.
Not dramatic. Not revolutionary. Just functional.
Whether it’s a Christmas Miracle, a January Surprise, or the ICE finally melting in the spring—the timeline is compressing. The retirements are accelerating. The allies are adapting.
You don’t have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.
And that might be the most hopeful thing of all.
Beò an Reàbhlaid 🐸
So many moving parts. And so little information to the public. Where are the Walter Cronkite’s of our time.