The first three chapters of my latest book are on the Amazon webpage. (Click on the ‘Look inside’ link.) The publisher’s webpage is here and you can also buy it from any major retailer. (Note: This will be the new top post for a while. Later posts are below.)
Back in 1972, journalist David Halberstam wrote an excellent book with the title The Best and the Brightest that was a devastating critique of how Kennedy and Johnson stocked their administrations with those they considered considered brilliant people, consisting of highly credentialed people with elite educational backgrounds or who were seen as successful heads of industry. Those people took the US down a devastating path in Vietnam.
The book title refers to Kennedy’s “whiz kids”—leaders of industry and academia brought into his administration—whom Halberstam characterizes as insisting on “brilliant policies that defied common sense” in Vietnam, policies often implemented against the advice of career U.S. Department of State employees.
People who, for whatever reason, pride themselves on being extremely clever can often be blinded by their own sense of being brilliant and make decisions that are reckless and unwise. The beginning of Alexander Pope’s poem An Essay on Criticism succinctly warns about the danger of such shallow brilliance.
A little learning is a dangerous thing ;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring :
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.
Those who have achieved success in some area can succumb to thinking of themselves as being clever at everything. A truly intelligent person knows that their knowledge is both limited in depth and narrow in scope, knows that there are people with greater depth of knowledge in every area, and seeks them out for guidance. No one can accuse Trump of hiring the best and the brightest. He has seemingly chosen people on the basis of how sycophantic they are to him and they are turning out to be best described by the opposite of Halberstam’s title. They are the worst and the dimmest.
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Yesterday there were primary elections in several states and in general progressives did well in winning Democratic races against candidates backed by the Democratic establishment and the Israel lobby.
The closest race was for the Michigan senate where progressive Abdul El-Sayed won a very close race against Haley Stevens, where AIPAC affiliated lobbies spent massively on her behalf, dwarfing his spending.
El-Sayed, 41, is a former public health official who centered his run on the Medicare For All model of universal healthcare, while confronting massive outside spending against him, which became another theme of the race. Stevens, meanwhile, touted her work on the US auto rescue taskforce, where she served as chief of staff.
…Stevens saw the backing of establishment Democrats, including Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, while El-Sayed received endorsements from prominent progressives such as Sanders.
…More than $40m has poured into the race from outside groups supporting Stevens or attacking El-Sayed, including from groups associated with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac), a pro-Israel lobby. Some ads elevated Stevens’ connection to Barack Obama on the auto rescue, which voters have seen as a quasi-endorsement, despite Obama not formally endorsing in the race.
Back in 2014, I had a blog post about a community of migrant workers that are not what you first think of when you use the term. I will not repeat what I said there but it is about elderly people who have reached retirement age without sufficient resources to retire. Following the recession of 207-2009, they used what little money they had to buy a van and convert it into a home and then drive around the country doing low-level temporary jobs such as stocking retailer warehouses and cleaning workplaces and parks and the like. They park in campgrounds that are often provided by the companies who are happy to obtain the services of older people who will accept temporary, minimum-wage jobs under poor conditions without complaining. There is even a name for them: workampers. (Someone who had been a workamper commented on my post.)
The post was based on a long article The end of retirement: When you can’t afford to stop working by Jessica Bruder that appeared in Harper’s magazine , which was later expanded into a 2017 book Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century. In 2020, this was made into a film Nomadland that won three Academy Awards, for best picture, best director and best actor.
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In yesterday’s post, I wrote about how, despite Trump’s bluster and boasts, the US is flailing in its war with Iran, lumbering about like a giant lummox, facing an adversary that is far nimbler than they anticipated, that is able to duck and weave and land counterpunches even as the US is running out of steam with the steady depletion of its offensive and defensive weaponry.
It seems like Iran is adopting the equivalent of the boxing strategy known as ‘rope-a-dope‘, made famous by Muhammad Ali in his fight with George Foreman in 1974. This is the argument made by Jack A. Goldstone, professor of public policy at George Mason University in this article where he compares Ali’s and Iran’s strategies.
Fifty years ago, an aging Muhammad Ali fought a title bout against a younger, stronger, more dangerous and undefeated opponent, George Foreman. Few thought Ali had a chance. Yet he had a strategy that would allow him to knock out Foreman and reclaim the world heavyweight title.
Ali knew that Foreman, a feared heavy puncher, would furiously throw blow after blow. But he also knew that if he could deflect those attacks to absorb less of their force, Foreman would tire himself out, leaving openings for Ali’s sharp jabs and counterpunches. Ali called this his “rope-a-dope” strategy. After leaning against the ropes for seven rounds, seemingly taking Foreman’s fierce blows but mostly avoiding them, Ali sprang into action to stagger and knock out the exhausted Foreman, giving Ali the victory.
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If you follow most mainstream US news reports about the war with Iran, and especially the statements by Trump, Pete Hegseth, and defense department officials, you will hear mainly about how the US is pummeling Iran with its missiles and little about how Iran is responding. The impression given is that Iran has had its offensive and defensive capabilities destroyed, leaving the US able to operate with impunity in the region and is unscathed except for some minor losses.
So one can be excused for being surprised that Iran has not unconditionally sued for peace or outright surrendered. Further puzzling, given Trump’s claim that the US is in control of the Strait of Hormuz, is the report yesterday of Iran hitting tankers that were trying to break the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz under a US aerial escort.
Iran has said it struck two tankers trying to pass through the strait of Hormuz under the escort of the US military as Donald Trump gathered his cabinet to discuss the stalling war and rising prices as midterm elections in the US loom.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said on Friday that the “non-compliant oil tankers … were struck and brought to a halt, while four other oil tankers quickly changed course and returned to their previous positions”. The military body said the ships had tried to pass through the strait via an “undeclared route” and under US aerial escort.
Iran and the US have said ships should pass through the strait via two competing routes, with Iran bombing ships that take the southern route, close to the coast of Oman, and the US bombing ships that violate its blockade of Iranian ships and ports.
…Trump has tried to open the strait of Hormuz by force, but increasingly intense US strikes on Iran have yielded few results.
Trump’s justice department admits that the reason that the Lincoln pool paint was peeling was because it was a botched rushed job and they have dropped the charges against David Hearn, the person they accused of vandalizing it. They released this news late Friday night, since that is when they think no one is paying attention and thus the time to release embarrassing information.
The Justice Department admitted Friday that President Donald Trump’s $14 million renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool was “hasty and botched,” and it is dropping the criminal case against former Olympian David Hearn that accused him of vandalizing the pool, according to a new court filing from DC US Attorney Jeanine Pirro.
The admissions are an embarrassing reversal for Pirro — and for Trump, who has insisted publicly for weeks that vandals were solely responsible for the severely damaged pool lining, chronic algae blooms and green-hued water at the iconic landmark.
Three other people have been swept up in the administration’s push to blame the pool’s problems on alleged vandals — each pleading not guilty to lesser, misdemeanor charges. Federal prosecutors dropped the charges against at least one of those people as well Friday, according to DC court records.
Most people have an abysmal level of knowledge of world geography, unable to place even major countries on a map of the world. I recall when I first came to the US as a graduate student, friendly people would ask me where I was from. When I said Sri Lanka, I would often get blank looks. That was not a surprise since Sri Lanka is a small country that is not a global player, and it had changed its name from Ceylon only four years earlier. So when people followed up by asking me where it was located, I would say that it was a small island off the southern coast of India and that was usually sufficient for them to place it. But I recall once a woman responding, “Oh, so you’re from South America!”
Jon Stewart has joked that wars are America’s way of learning geography since it is only when the US starts a war with some country that people learn about that region of the world. So it was no surprise to learn that at a global conference on AIDS held in Brazil last week, a presentation by US officials that had a map of Africa had every single country mislabeled.
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For the longest time the Ford Edsel, launched in 1957, held the record as the biggest flop automotive history, the measure used being the target sales compared to actual sales.. (Via
Ford launched the Edsel in 1957 with projections of 200,000 units in its first year. It sold less than one-third of that target, and its vertical grille (mocked as resembling a toilet seat) became shorthand for corporate failure that has endured nearly seven decades.
But superachiever Elon Musk has beaten that record with his Cybertruck, launched in November 2023.
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The loony right has been obsessed with the belief that the Covid-19 virus did not jump from animals to humans but was because of a Chinese lab leak, and that scientists especially Anthony Fauci who spent 38 years at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and was a key figure in the fight to prevent the virus from harming more people than it did, was part of the cover-up.
Senator Rand Paul has been relentlessly pushing this notion and targeting Fauci and called him up before a special hearing. But Fauci refused to answer his questions and called him unhinged.
The hearing was centered around an assertion Paul has promoted for years: that the Covid pandemic began in 2020 as a “leak” from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, even as virologists see a natural jump from animals to humans as more likely.
This belief underpinned Paul’s argument for bringing Fauci before the committee. If the pandemic was indeed started by a “lab leak”, Fauci “could be responsible for this entire pandemic” because the National Institutes of Health (NIH) provided the institute with a sub-grant, he later told reporters.
His only witness was Fauci, who served as a key adviser to Trump and Joe Biden during the pandemic, and has become a political punching bag on the right.
This annual event, where Washington-based journalists meet, eat, drink, and schmooze with the people they cover, with other celebrities thrown in, is a disgusting example of the incestuous world of politics, shattering the illusion that these reporters are hard-hitting seekers of the truth even if their work antagonizes politicians. This year Trump was the main speaker and to say that he bombed is putting it mildly. Even his ardent supporters found it hard to find anything good in his rambling tirade of venomous insults.
Jon Stewart, in a funny skewering of Trump’s dreadful speech says that the event should be put in the dustbin. As a stand-up comedian, Stewart knows how to tell jokes and he brutally dissects Trump’s ineptness at telling even the simplest ones.