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George Washington, the self-made icon

Josh Marshall has an interesting piece in TPM on George Washington. It’s the second of two commentaries on Presidents Day. Presidents Day was originally celebrated as George Washington’s Birthday. When the effort to declare Abraham Lincoln’s birthday a national holiday failed, due to opposition from white Southern politicians, Presidents Day replaced Washington’s birthday. In the earlier commentary, Marshall (who has a PhD in American History from Brown University) argues for a separate Lincoln’s Birthday because the consequences of his presidency far outweigh those of Washington. In the second essay, he elaborates further: “ Washington wasn’t terribly creative. He wrote nothing of note. He didn’t have terribly original ideas. He wasn’t even always that good of a general. But the people around him pretty universally held him in a sort of awe. Almost all the craftier and more notable members of the Revolutionary generation had great confidence in his presence, the fact that he was aroun...
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Why the US failed in Cuba

This article is over 30 years old, but Cuba still has a socialist authoritarian government. After the collapse of the USSR, its primary benefactor. After the death of Fidel Castro and the retirement of Raul Castro. Decades of US boycotts and saber-rattling have failed to elicit regime change. That’s because the US never trusted American capitalism. What we should have done is love bomb Cuba with tourism and trade. Far from propping up Castro, it would have reminded Cubans daily of what they were missing. And by abandoning military threats, we would have dissolved the glue that holds many dictatorships together—the external threat. “Cuban leaders have long experience in administering repression and adjusting to hardship. What they do not know how to deal with is openness and peace . . . the United States should . . .  stop assisting Cuba’s censorship of information: allow A.T.&T.’s telephone link on a commercial basis; permit the sale of fax machines and other communication...
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The history of chaos

“ Henry VIII dissolved monasteries and executed wives because the machinery of monarchy allowed it, and challenging him risked the entire structure. The Romanovs died because saving them threatened coalitions that mattered more than five lives in a basement. Kennedy’s death formalized distance because proximity had become a procedural risk. And Sarajevo exploded not because of two bullets, but because every system that might have absorbed the crisis had already chosen self-preservation over adaptability.   “The assassination in Sarajevo is often described as the moment Europe’s old world collapsed. In truth, it was the moment that world revealed it had already hollowed itself out. The institutions were still standing. The palaces were still full. The procedures were still followed. But the capacity for human judgment, for weighing a life against a system, for choosing courage over continuity, had quietly bled out over decades.   “The shots were loud. The failure that gave them...
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Annals of euphemism

How many euphemisms are there for TACO? “Carve-out.” “Step-backs.” “Exclusions.” “Price relief.” How about “advancing to the rear?” Trump’s tariffs are turning out to be fairy tales told to children. Trump wrote that his tariffs are unleashing “an American economic miracle, and we are quickly building the greatest economy in the history of the world.”   Meanwhile,  manufacturing jobs have fallen by 86,000 over the past year, while broader blue-collar jobs are down 166,000.   To paraphrase Hans Christian Andersen, the clothes have no emperor. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/trumps-potential-steel-aluminum-rollback-would-be-latest-tariff-reversal-amid-broader-affordability-push-185956950.html  
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Trump is our King Canute

King Cnut (Canute) famously ordered the incoming tide to stop. It was an exercise in futility (to be fair, Cnut knew this and staged the event to prove that his royal power was worthless compared to the power of God). Donald Trump is the modern King Cnut, pretending to order away climate change. Trump, however, lacks Cnut’s self-awareness; he seems to think that climate change denialism is his superpower to stand down the laws of physics. “ In 2009 the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency formally declared that greenhouse gas emissions, including from vehicles and industry, endanger public health and welfare. The decision, known as the   endangerment finding , was based on years of evidence, and it has underpinned EPA actions on climate change ever since.   “The Trump administration is now tearing up that finding as it tries to roll back climate regulations on everything from vehicles to industries.   “This is a big deal,” EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said in announcing w...
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Oh Canada

Over the past year, Trump has been undermining the US tourism business. “Inbound travel from all countries to the United States was down 5.4 percent from January through November of 2025,   according to the   US Commerce Department’s National Travel and Tourism Office. But it’s Canadians who have been staying away in the largest numbers. In November 2025 alone, the number of Canadians taking trips to the United States was down nearly 24 percent over the previous year.” But that’s just a temporary setback, right? “But in what has become a recurring problem for US tourism, a few days after Heywood traveled to advocate for US tourism, President Trump quickly extinguished any embers of goodwill. “Trump has demanded that Canada “share authority” and ownership of a new bridge connecting the two countries. The Gordie Howe International Bridge, connecting Ontario to  Michigan , will not open until the Canadian government “treats the United States with the fairness and respect tha...
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Coffee for your brain

I started drinking coffee when I was in high school. Back then, it was either instant coffee or percolator coffee. One Christmas when I was in college, my parents gifted me a coffee grinder and Melitta drip coffee pot and ceramic filter holder. That’s what I’ve used ever since. Turns out, it was a health addiction. “ Moderate daily consumption of caffeinated coffee or tea was tied to reduced dementia risk and better cognitive function over time, a prospective study of health professionals showed.   “Over a median follow-up of 36.8 years, health professionals in the highest quartile of coffee drinking had an 18% lower risk of dementia compared with those in the lowest quartile (HR 0.82, 95% CI 0.76-0.89,  P <0.001), reported Dong Wang, MD, ScD, of Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, and colleagues.   “Top coffee drinkers also showed a reduced prevalence of subjective cognitive decline (prevalence ratio 0.85, 95% CI 0.78-0.93,  P <0.001) and modestly better c...
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