"Trump has acted as a catalyst for the next reboot. His hostile takeover
of the Republican Party was leveraged by a new, more working-class
electoral coalition based on a populist politics of resentment. His
antipathy toward China may lack analysis, but by articulating a sense
that American workers had lost out in the neoliberal era, it gave voice
to authentic grievance. Trump’s chaotic first term made only limited
progress in forcing another reboot, but his second term seems likely to
foreclose on the Biden administration’s interim solution of keeping the
neoliberal system running with a limited New Deal–like
reindustrialization in new sectors such as renewable energy. The
Inflation Reduction Act was a significant reinvention of industrial
policy, something not seen for decades outside a national-security
context, but Trump is abandoning this sort of intervention. Instead, he
has chosen tariffs as his singular tool for reshoring industry."
"During the Vietnam War, Latinos were about 5 percent of the U.S.
population, but they accounted for an estimated 20 percent of the 60,000
American casualties.
In 2015, 12 percent
of active-duty service members identified as Hispanic. By 2023, that
number had increased to 19.5 percent. In the Marine Corps, the
proportion was closer to 28 percent. Latinas are more represented in the
military than in the civilian workforce—21 percent of enlisted women
compared with 18 percent of working women. (One explanation might be the
military’s guaranteed equal pay: In the civilian workforce, Latinas
earn just 65 cents on the dollar compared with white men.)"
How long will it be before those Marines decide they've had enough of ICE thugs beating the crap out of their compatriots.
Re nuclear weapons:
The challenge, as George W. Bush memorably put it, is that a
president wouldn’t even have time to get off the “crapper” before having
to make a launch decision, a decision that could be based on partial,
contradictory, or even false information. Ronald Reagan, when he assumed
the presidency, was said to have been shocked that he would have as
little as six minutes to make a decision to launch.
The
sociobiologist E. O. Wilson described the central problem of humanity
this way: “We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and
godlike technology.” The main challenge of the 80 years since the
Trinity atomic test has been that we do not possess the cognitive,
spiritual, and emotional capabilities necessary to successfully manage
nuclear weapons without the risk of catastrophic failure.
References:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/08/nuclear-command-control-football-iran/683256/
https://www.theatlantic.com/economy/archive/2025/06/reboot-capitalism-operating-system/683308/
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/08/nuclear-proliferation-risks-iran-trump/683250/
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