David Foster Wallace on luxury cruises

Since moving to Monterey, I have been playing bridge a couple of days a week and the club has some people who love going on cruises and have done so multiple times. Then there are those (like me) who are mystified as to its appeal and would not do so even if the high cost were not a problem.

When I ask the cruisers what the appeal is, they talk of the good food that is constantly available and the variety of entertainment that is offered. But its seems to me that you could eat at good local restaurants and go to good entertainment events where you live at much lower cost and space them out for greater pleasure, rather than cram them all into one week. They also give as an appeal the fact that being on a cruise is like living in a floating hotel that takes you to different locations for sightseeing with you having to unpack only once in your cabin. I can see that constantly packing and unpacking as one goes from hotel to hotel while traveling could become tedious but hardly seems worth being stuck on a boat for a lengthy period where there is the constant risk of seasickness, not to mention epidemics of viruses. Who can forget the horror stories such as the Norovirus and Covid-19 outbreaks on cruise ships from a few years back?

I have been on long ship voyages (three in fact) but that was back in the days when I was a young boy, prior to jet planes, when this was the main mode of transport for long distances from point A to point. B, not for going on a round trip back to the starting point. My trips between Sri Lanka and England were on big ships but they were not luxury liners though they did have things to entertain people so that they did not go bonkers by being constrained for two weeks in a small space. So maybe any desire that I might have had for a long sea voyage has been satiated. Anyway, to each his own, and I figured that if these cruises satisfied the needs of others, that was fine even if I could not fathom their appeal.

But then I came across this essay by David Foster Wallace on luxury cruises that appeared in the January 1996 issue of Harper’s Magazine. Titled Shipping Out, it had two features. It described in acute detail what life on a luxury cruise is like and it also gave me a clue as to what their real appeal might be.
[Read more…]

The danger of breaking the government

There has been a lot to be concerned about the moves by Trump and his cronies with shaking up the government. But perhaps the most disturbing is Elon Musk demanding, and getting access, to the government’s Office of Personnel Management as well as the Treasury’s Bureau of the Fiscal Service. These are not policy-making bodies. They are like the Human Relations and Accounting departments of a business. They hold important and confidential information but work in the background and if things are running smoothly, you don’t even know they exist.

As one of the people who works for the federal government writes:

Those of us within the ranks of the federal workforce looked on in horror at all of this. Those outside the federal government might not understand the gravity of this situation. Think of OPM and the Treasury’s Bureau of the Fiscal Service as the valet sheds of the federal government. They’re not flashy or big, but they hold all the keys. OPM maintains the private information of federal civil servants—bank codes, addresses, insurance information, retirement accounts, employment records. The Treasury’s system processes every payment to everyone from grandmothers waiting for their Social Security check to cancer researchers working to crack the cure. Now there’s a ham-fisted goon in an ill-fitting valet attendant’s coat rummaging in broad daylight through all of the keys—all of that private information, previously given in trust, handled with care, and regulated by law.

[Read more…]

Is Trump staging a retreat from US empire?

Trying to make sense of the whirlwind of activity that has characterized the last two weeks is not easy. Trying to find any sense or pattern in Trump’s actions that are not due to revenge or self-interest or sheer vindictiveness may be an exercise in futility. But Ryan Grim writes that a French writer Arnaud Bertrand has gained a following by arguing that what we are seeing is a retreat by the US from its global hegemonic ambitions to accepting its status as that of a regional power.

Here is how Bertrand puts it:

Hegemony was going to end sooner or later, and now the U.S. is basically choosing to end it on its own terms. It is the post-American world order – brought to you by America itself. Even the tariffs on allies, viewed under this angle, make sense, as it redefines the concept of ‘allies’: they don’t want—or maybe rather can’t afford—vassals anymore, but rather relationships that evolve based on current interests. You can either view it as decline – because it does unquestionably look like the end of the American empire – or as avoiding further decline: controlled withdrawal from imperial commitments in order to focus resources on core national interests rather than being forced into an even messier retreat at a later stage. In any case it is the end of an era.

[Read more…]

Trump wants all of us to have more lead and TCE in our bodies

As I wrote yesterday, one of the main goals of Trump and his cronies is to cut all the rules and regulations that prevent the wealthy and large corporations from making even more money, even if the moves result in actual harm to people. One of the most disturbing examples of this is the announcement today that they are planning to eliminate the rules that sought to reduce the amount of lead and other toxic elements in water supplies.

Republicans in Congress and the Trump administration are attempting to repeal the Biden administration’s groundbreaking rules that require all the country’s lead pipes to be replaced over the next 13 years and lower the limit on lead in water.

Environmentalists expressed alarm about the moves, which, if successful, would in effect prohibit the government from ever requiring lead line replacement in the future, or lowering lead limits.

The Trump administration is also working to kill a recently implemented ban on TCE, a compound that is among the most toxic and common water pollutants, and particularly a risk on military bases.

[Read more…]

We should not ignore the real Trump agenda

Trump has done many things that have generated a lot of headlines, staging raids on immigrants in a blaze of publicity whose purpose seems to be to cause humiliation and please his xenophobic followers. Then we have his widely publicized actions against any program that promotes diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), the pet target of right-wing ideologues who seek to bring back unquestioned acceptance of the dominance of white heterosexual males in all public life. Anything and everything that goes wrong is being blamed on DEI.

And we have his withdrawal of the US from the WHO and suspension of all aid programs that serve the needs of people in need. He probably would like to also withdraw from the UN (even though that body has often served to provide cover for US aggression around the world and shield it from the atrocities committed) but he may not want to risk them moving the headquarters from the US.

It is my belief that all these moves, extremely harmful as they are to so many people, are largely being used to generate a lot of controversy in order to cover the things that he really wants to do, though there is no question that Trump and his followers enjoy causing suffering to those whom he sees as not sufficiently loyal and subservient to him.
[Read more…]

Unbelievable cruelty being inflicted across the globe

This article from ProPublica describes the chaos that has fallen upon all the aid groups that were providing life-saving humanitarian services to people around the world as a result of the Trump administration’s executive orders to stop everything at once.

On Friday morning, the staffers at a half dozen U.S.-funded medical facilities in Sudan who care for severely malnourished children had a choice to make: Defy President Donald Trump’s order to immediately stop their operations or let up to 100 babies and toddlers die.

They chose the children.

In spite of the order, they will keep their facilities open for as long as they can, according to three people with direct knowledge of the situation. The people requested anonymity for fear that the administration might target their group for reprisals. Trump’s order also meant they would stop receiving new, previously approved funds to cover salaries, IV bags and other supplies. They said it’s a matter of days, not weeks, before they run out.

American-funded aid organizations around the globe, charged with providing lifesaving care for the most desperate and vulnerable populations imaginable, have for days been forced to completely halt their operations, turn away patients and lay off staff following a series of sudden stop-work demands from the Trump administration. Despite an announcement earlier this week ostensibly allowing lifesaving operations to continue, those earlier orders have not been rescinded.
[Read more…]

What happened to Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi?

I used to read and support both of them (I used to send money to Greenwald back at the beginning when he was a mere blogger) but as many observers have noted, they seem to have taken a turn to the right and I no longer seek them out. Will Solomon writes that a new book Owned by Eoin Higgins asserts that their shift is part of a larger program by tech billionaires like Mark Andreesen, Peter Thiel, and Elon Musk to buy the loudest voices on the left and right. (The article is behind a paywall so I’ll give just brief excerpts.)

Higgins has done a sort of service for those of us who have watched Greenwald and Taibbi in disbelief, as they’ve contorted themselves into more and more ridiculous positions in obvious deference to wealth and power—particularly wealth and power in the tech sector—and aligned themselves with an ascendant right. Both have repeatedly justified the transformation (a transformation that, to varying degrees, they also deny, instead blaming shifts in liberal culture) under the guise of rejecting corporate censorship and hegemonic liberalism, surfing the same wave of anti–cancel culture hysteria that has degraded public conversation more generally and simplified potentially meaningful debates around power and the consolidation of media into a more easily digestible pill of “liberal elites are muffling conservative voices.” And, of course, both men have gotten very rich doing it.
[Read more…]

Is social media more like cigarettes or junk food?

I do not use TikTok. I have also stopped using Twitter/X. I closed my Facebook account a long time ago, much to the chagrin of some friends who use it to advertise events and get-togethers that they think I would be interested in. When asked by them why I limit myself this way, I tell them that I dislike the ethics of Facebook and its parent company Meta and that I am not at all worried about the phenomenon of FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out). If I miss an event because it was only announced on Facebook, it does not bother me. I know what things I value and find ways to learn about them.

I do use the internet a great deal but when it comes to communicating with other people, email and text messages are about it. Even there, I avoid group chats and emails because they often degenerate into squabbles that I think are petty and have no interest in.
[Read more…]

Trump is nuts: Example #453

Today Trump said on his social media platform the following:

The military entered California and turned on the water to the state? We didn’t have any water before? Is there some spigot that can be used to turn water on and off to California? Where is this spigot and where is the pipe that. carries the water? And who is in charge of it that they had to be ordered by the military to turn it on? What the hell is Trump talking about?

As Kevin Drum writes:

This is beyond weird. It’s hallucinatory. And even if it were somehow true that the Army TURNED ON THE WATER, California doesn’t get any water from the Pacific Northwest or beyond. We get it from our very own Sierra Nevadas.

Is Trump really and truly losing it? Or does he figure he can just say anything he wants for the rubes? Or what?

[Read more…]

New DeepSeek AI chatbot challenges other chatbots and US monopolies

A new AI chatbot called DeepSeek created by Chinese investors has been released and sent shock waves through the US AI industry because it seems to be able to do all that the other chatbots can do (and perhaps more) for much lower cost and with less sophisticated chips.

Investors punished global tech stocks on Monday after the emergence of a Chinese chatbot competitor to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, DeepSeek, raised doubts about the sustainability of the US artificial intelligence boom.

The tech-heavy Nasdaq index in New York opened lower after investors digested the implications of the latest AI model developed by the startup DeepSeek.

Nvidia, the most valuable listed company in the US and a leading maker of the computer chips that power AI models, lost more than $400bn (£321bn) in stock market value in early trading as its shares declined 13.6%, while Microsoft shed $130bn and Google’s parent, Alphabet, declined by $80bn.

Nvidia’s fall – which wiped about $465bn off its value, was the biggest in US stock market history, according to Bloomberg.
[Read more…]