Why are these books worth so much?

I have written before of my puzzlement at the huge advances paid by publishers for books by politicians and celebrities because I could not see how these books could possibly be interesting enough to recoup in sales what the publishers seemed to expect. At least when it comes to politicians, there is a ready-made market of their own political parties and partisan groups that may buy these books in bulk as gifts to be given out to loyalists. And when it comes to celebrities in the arts and sports worlds, there does seem to be a fascination with what they are ‘really’ like, an appeal that completely eludes me.
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Another exciting episode of ‘Adventures With Ordinary People’ by David Brooks

In a recent column, David Brooks of the New York Times describes the structural barriers that have been created that separate the rich from the rest of us and prevent the poor from making progress. He starts out reasonably enough.

Upper-middle-class parents have the means to spend two to three times more time with their preschool children than less affluent parents. Since 1996, education expenditures among the affluent have increased by almost 300 percent, while education spending among every other group is basically flat.
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The most important is residential zoning restrictions. Well-educated people tend to live in places like Portland, New York and San Francisco that have housing and construction rules that keep the poor and less educated away from places with good schools and good job opportunities.

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Sam Harris digs himself deeper

Ben Norton writes that Sam Harris, the self-styled ‘centrist liberal’, moves further and further into the warm embrace of the xenophobes.

In language eerily reminiscent of the rhetoric of the fascist far right, New Atheist pundit Sam Harris has called for reducing the number of Muslims in society, warning on the January episode of his popular podcast, “You can’t have too many Muslims in your culture if you want it to remain enlightened.”
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How far can this go?

I have not been writing that much about the administration of Donald Trump with its daily diet of outrageous and contradictory things that he and members of his administration say on the record (usually via Twitter), and the news reports based on leaks from anonymous sources within the administration about all the dubious activities that he and his family members and others have been engaged in. It seems to be better to wait for actual facts to emerge rather than try to follow the twists and turns of rumors and speculations.
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The case of the kidnapped and missing student

Perhaps because of my memories of being a new graduate student in the US, my attention was drawn to the strange and sad case of a Chinese student Yingying Zhang, who came to the US for graduate studies in April and disappeared soon after on June 9. What is puzzling is that footage from street security cameras show her waiting at a bus stop and then getting into a car that stopped for her. The car’s owner has since been identified as being until recently a promising physics graduate student and he has been taken into custody.
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People who write in library books

As part of the research for my book, I have borrowed a huge number of books from my university library. Many of them are decades old, sometimes going back over a century, and some are quite rare. I am sincerely grateful that my library is stocked with them and that the library staff is so helpful and thus make my life easier. So I get infuriated when I find that people have scribbled all over some books, such as underlining sections and inserting comments and exclamations and other editorializing in the margins. Some have done it in pencil that can in principle be erased, though the extent of scribbles can be daunting. Others have done it in ink.
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The destruction of Libya

Marcus Ranum looks at the chaos that the US has unleashed in Libya as a result of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton’s ‘liberal interventionist’ strategy. This is an old strategy that involves asserting US military power to overthrow leaders whom the US no longer finds useful for its purposes but dressed up in the guise of trying to save the people from a despot. But once the leader is overthrown, the US walks away and the media treats the resulting situation as if it were the working out of local factors and not as a consequence of US actions.

The net result is that people who at one point lived in a modern functioning society suddenly find themselves in utter misery and despair. We now see Libya as the source of many refuges fleeing the devastation with some of them seeking revenge through groups like ISIS at those who did this to them, and the country itself the source of weaponry throughout the region.

Getting angry over driving trifles

This video below shows what can happen when two drivers both try to enter a Taco Bell drive-through line at the same time and then each refuses to yield to the other, ending up blocking the line for everyone and the police having to be called in. The video was taken by a driver who was stuck behind as the people in the two contesting cars demanded that the other back down, and the videographer could not believe that this standoff was over Taco Bell food.

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