The FBI arrested a DC council member yesterday for taking bribes. The same council member who made the news in 2018 for saying that “the Rothschilds controled the climate”. Here is a good heuristic: if someone sees corruption, manipulation and conspiracies everywhere, odds are that they are themselves corrupt, manipulative and conspiratorial. Pure projection.
Janan Ganesh published another banger of a column this week, Beware the professional ghetto. He quotes Taleb, and rightfully so, and puts out this fascinating bit of trivia:
Tim Walz is the first person on either the top or bottom half of a Democratic presidential ticket since 1980 who did not attend law school. That is 20 individuals across 10 elections over 40 years who pursued a JD or LLB. Not one of the four Republican presidents over the period had a legal background.
Fachidiocracy, anyone?
For the second time this week, my man at the Financial Times knocks it out of the park:
To read well is to ignore the now. This is true of no other art form, because no other art form is so time-intensive.
Pair with Taleb’s advice on writing.
Janan Ganesh, telling it like it is:
The hardest thing to convey about modern politics to intelligent readers, who tend to assume that ideas drive events, is the tribal shallowness of it. People take a certain position because the opposing side doesn’t.
He is writing about foreign policy, but applies just as well to masks, vaccine mandates, approach to tech, etc. which gets us to the package of sometimes incompatible beliefs you can expect to get from either side.
If you are an American, the country’s best decade was whenever you were a teenager, says The Washington Post. Compare and contrast to Serbia, whose best decade is more dependent on your politics and can be anything from the 1340s to the 1960s. My teenage years were, of course, not so glorious.
Breaking my “no politics until November” promise to self in order to quote today’s Stratechery update:
[The] Democrats gave up the enviable position of being the default choice for people who didn’t want to think about politics at all.
And this is exactly what has been bothering me since 2016. I spent my whole childhood and young adulthood in a country (Serbia) where you had no choice but to think about politics, and a big part of coming to the US was not having to think about it too hard. Alas, instead of the Balkans becoming westernized the West has been balkanized.
A few links to start off your morning with:
I disagree with Gruber. While the current calls against social media echo the comic-book/rap-music/video-game scares, there is hard(ish) data on their detrimental effects in some children and adolescents. Certainly enough to justify more scrutiny.
On the day Boeing’s incompetence was headline news our family of five boarded a 787 to Amsterdam that was delayed by 90 minutes for repairs. Good thing I don’t read the news, or it would’ve made for an anxious trip. #newsnoise
The Washington Post is having a crisis of identity — it recently laid off most of its local columnists but apparently still wants to focus on local news:
Sir William and co. are floating an idea called “Local+,” a new offering for readers who want to pay extra for premium local content, sources tell me.
At the same time, their coverage of 12 best ice cream shops in Washington starts with one in Alexandria, Virgina. So, the “+” in “Local+” may not mean what I think it should mean.