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In her book “March of Folly,” Barbara defined three criteria to distinguish merely mistaken policy from folly: "To qualify as folly for this inquiry, the policy adopted must meet three criteria: it must have been perceived as counter-productive in its own time, not merely by hindsight. … Secondly a feasible alternative course of action must have been available. … third … the policy in question should be that of a group, not an individual leader." The current US war against Iran meets all three criteria. Now we need to implement the first law of holes: when you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is to stop digging.

Be calm when the unthinkable arrives. Modern tyranny is terror management. When the terrorist attack comes, remember that authoritarians exploit such events in order to consolidate power. The sudden disaster that requires the end of checks and balances, the dissolution of opposition parties, the suspension of freedom of expression, the right to a fair trial, and so on, is the oldest trick in the Hitlerian book. Do not fall for it. ~Timothy Snyder  

One of the conspiracy theories about the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic is that the pandemic started from a lab that was engineering a gain-of-function coronavirus. None of the data on the virus genome sequence supports this theory, but lack of evidence rarely extinguishes conspiracy mongering. I haven’t thought seriously about gain-of-function research in a while, but I was just watching a podcast that made me realize that I’ve known about this field for decades. A virologist at Saint Louis University School of Medicine (now deceased) had engineered a human adenovirus that targeted and killed cancer cells. He patented this gain-of-function virus but he was never able to get a company to produce enough to do a clinical trial using his virus. Oncolytic gain-of-function viruses remain subjects of active research world-wide. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oncolytic_adenovirus

“On October 6, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York published an article to its Liberty Street Economics blog that included a chart showing that President Donald Trump’s tariffs directly led to a higher inflation rate and that without those tariffs, consumer goods prices would have declined. Through October 7, most major news organizations had failed even to mention this research yet.”   https://www.mediamatters.org/tariffs-trade/new-york-fed-research-found-if-not-trumps-tariffs-goods-prices-would-have-declined

Today’s U.S. military structures itself around assumptions of short, decisive wars. Munitions stockpiles are limited. Preparation for reconstituting a highly skilled professional force is minimal. Maintenance of reserve weapons and equipment is poor. These policies trade long-term staying power for short-term lethality and presuppose that the United States can end a conflict quickly by destroying the opposing military. But if ending a war is a matter of coercive bargaining, in which enemies can almost always keep fighting, then Washington cannot create short wars by fiat. Prudence dictates reconsidering choices that assume the opposite. ~Stephen Biddle, Sam Winter-Levy and Yuri Zhukov

“A few times I’ve noted that Trump started moving aggressively toward foreign policy and war just as his power and popularity were diminishing at home. That’s when the Greenland fury started, that’s when he went after Venezuela, that’s when, on the sugar high of Venezuela, he launched his catastrophically consequential war on Iran. No one likes unpopularity or flagging power. Trump is unable to handle it. Foreign aggression was a kind of compensating expression of power and dominance, which was possible because an American president’s war power is all but unlimited, a kind of presidential self-soothing. The naming and building campaign kicked off at about the same time and is largely the same thing. It’s an in-spite-of-himself admission that the permanent, almost statutory love he imagined would be his at the outset of the first administration and that he thought he had another shot at in the second will never happen, and he had to start mandating it in construction and name plates tha...