Back from the brink - John Quiggin's Blogstack
Trump finally facing some resistance, but will it be enough ?| johnquigginblog.substack.com
A few weeks ago, I drew up a flowchart to estimate the probability that Trump would establish a dictatorship in the US, which looked, at the time, like an even money bet.| Crooked Timber
One big driver of this was the Disney Renaissance. This is well known — there are books about it — but the TLDR is that, for reasons beyond the scope of this blog post, Disney suddenly went from making mediocre animated films that nobody much cared about and that didn’t make much money (Bedknobs and Broomsticks, The Fox And The Hound, The Black Cauldron, The Great Mouse Detective, Oliver And Company) to making animated films that were good to excellent, hugely successful, and in some ...| Crooked Timber
Trump finally facing some resistance, but will it be enough ?| johnquigginblog.substack.com
Thanks to James Wimberley for prompting me to write this, and alerting me to the data on China's emissions| johnquigginblog.substack.com
1| Crooked Timber
Update The Trump regime has been stopped, or at least stalled, on all three fronts discussed below. In particular, the Hegseth-Noem report on the Insurrection Act seems to have been quietly buried. That doesn’t mean US democracy is safe by any means, but at least it has some chance of survival. More on this at my Substack| Crooked Timber
But anyway: all the metals in the universe (other than a tiny wisp of lithium, never mind that) were created by dying stars. In the earliest days of the Universe, before there were any stars, there were no elements heavier than helium — no metals.| Crooked Timber
{ 1 comment }| Crooked Timber
Thanks to James Wimberley for prompting me to write this, and alerting me to the data on China’s emissions| Crooked Timber
This is the second post in a series of posts on Russell Vought’s programmatic (2022) essay “Renewing American Purpose: Statesmanship in a post-Constitutional moment,” The American Mind. (The first was here yesterday.) Yesterday, I focused on Vought’s diagnosis of the failures of Trump 1, and I explored some of the intellectual roots of the framework he proposes to take up in — as one may surmise from what is unfolding already — in Trump 2.| digressionsimpressions.substack.com
After they leave office or government service, high ranking, former government officials usually do not present a vision of how things might well be improved in their former abodes.| digressionsimpressions.substack.com
With collapsing stock markets, retirement portfolios, and consumer confidence, there is an all-too-human tendency to focus on the economic effects of tariffs by their critics: they are a tax on consumption, they will raise inflation, reduce efficiency, and reduce take-home income, etc. This is familiar.| Crooked Timber
Good composition for color–zooming in shows great detail.| Crooked Timber
Relatively quickly after the start of President Trump’s second administration, critics accused it of generating a constitutional crisis (see here in the NYT).| digressionsimpressions.substack.com
