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The simple fact is that for all the other evils of Trumpism they simply don’t understand the basis of American power, military or economic. That’s the basis of the absurdity of the last decade in which the US is somehow the defiant rebel against the system it created for its own prosperity and security and which has secured both for going on a century. Listen to their thinking and you see it clearly:   We’re the big power. We’re in charge. But we don’t act like we’re in charge. We let ourselves get pushed around. Now we’re going to be in charge.   They simply don’t understand that to the extent we are “in charge” the underlying basis of the agreement that puts us in charge. It’s the comparatively easy terms of American global power. They really do imagine that US allies are something like colonies or finlandized client states that we’ve just let get over their skis.   ~Josh Marshall

This is what happens when you put someone with the emotional maturity of a middle school boy in charge of the world’s largest economy and the world’s most powerful military. “What is striking about this picture, setting aside all these nitty-gritty details, is how much it mirrors Trump’s Iran debacle, another war not so much of choice but of whim. Both illustrate the difference between theoretical and de facto power. On paper, the U.S. could convincingly defeat Iran militarily. It could invade the country, dismantle its military and government, eliminate the threats to the Strait of Hormuz. But that would require vast sums of blood and treasure, in addition to huge domestic economic pain, something the U.S. simply has no appetite for. That lack of appetite became clear soon after the war started and it’s shaped everything since. There’s zero domestic support for that in the U.S. And the U.S. has no pressing strategic interest to do that, certainly not at the cost it would require. Mean...

For Canada, the choice came down to either severe but temporary economic instability or binding itself to a pseudo-democratic fiscal basketcase of a nation, whose only apparent foreign policy objective has become domination for the gratification of its president’s slapdash vanity. ~Stephen Marche

Chomsky ... wrote that the old motto about 'speaking truth to power' is overrated. Power, as he points out, quite probably knows the truth already and is mainly interested in suppressing or limiting or distorting it. We would therefore do better to try to instruct the powerless.   ~Christopher Hitchens  

Historically, the party in power loses seats in the midterm. The smart money seems to be on that happening again in 2026. Since GOP margins in both houses are slim, so only a few seats can make the difference in control. As of today, Nate Silver has strong odds for Democrats taking the House, but the Senate is close to a toss-up. It’s still a couple months out, but Trump seems to be doing everything in his power to help the Democrats.   The Democrats seem to be doing a lot of navel-gazing about the strength of the Democratic Socialists. But less remarked on it Trump fatigue on the right. Sarah Longwell at The Bulwark has been reporting on focus groups in, for instance, Georgia, where Trump voters are expressing enthusiasm for John Ossoff. Voters are looking for candidates who understand their concerns with grocery and gas prices and who will fight data centers. Come November, I don’t expect a lot of Trump voters to vote blue, but if they just decide to stay home rather than vote fo...

  Spotted this headline for an article in The Atlantic: ‘Find Your Passion’ Is Awful Advice A major new study questions the common wisdom about how we should choose our career. The article is paywalled, so I can’t read it. But the headline provoked me to think about my career. I don’t recall being told to find my passion. The closest I can come is my dad’s advice to ask myself what I think about in my spare time. Or my postdoc mentor, who said that a scientist thinks about science in the shower. Those guides fall a bit short of manifesting “passion” as I understand the word. But my 47-year post college-career in science is consistent with a certain enthusiasm for science. It’s easier to get up in the morning and go to work when you are looking forward to your job. There’s a useful distinction to be made between work and toil. Work, while sometimes difficult and challenging, provides opportunities for personal growth and rewards beyond the paycheck. Toil, in contrast, is effort with...