Blooming heck!
A truly amazing plant. We come down every morning and it’s done something new.
Quote of the Day
”If it’s sent by ship, it’s cargo. If sent by road, it’s shipment.”
- Dave Allen
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Emily’s Reel | Mark and Maggie O’Connor
Lovely Appalachian tune.
Long Read of the Day
Springtime for Scammers
Readers with long memories will remember Mel Brooks’s lovely film, The Producers, in which Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder come up with a scam involving putting on a sure-fire Broadway musical flop entitled Springtime for Hitler (which, surprisingly, becomes a hit). The headline on this blog post by Paul Krugman immediately brought the movie to mind, because it’s already clear that the Trump regime is opening the floodgates to scamming on an Olympic scale, with crypto at the heart of it. This post is not about cryptocurrencies but about simpler kinds of fraud. It was prompted by the news that Trump has shuttered the federal Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection, which was created to protect Americans from financial predators.
Overall, Project 2025’s attack on the CFPB bears a family resemblance to Elon Musk’s claim that USAID is a “viper’s nest of radical-left Marxists who hate America.” It’s a bit milder, but equally absurd, and is clearly not the real reason for killing the agency.
So what is the real reason? It seems fairly obvious. CFPB was created to protect Americans from financial predation, and has done a very good job of doing so. But now we have government of, by and for financial predators. Trump has famously left behind a trail of bankruptcies and unpaid contractors, and is furiously grifting even now. Musk has faced multiple lawsuits from vendors and former employees over unpaid debts.
There’s lots more to come on this topic. It’s nice to have Krugman on Substack rather than behind the NYT paywall.
Books, etc.
I’m an avid notebook user, partly because I want to keep my handwriting from atrophying, but mainly because it enables me to keep track of fleeting thoughts. So I was a sucker for Roland Allen’s book when it came out. I’m about halfway through it, and enjoying it. Notebooks have a much more interesting history than I had imagined.
Feedback
My puzzlement about the neon inscriptions on the Portico of the Fitzwilliam the other night prompted Kevin Cryan to email:
The poem quoted in neon is – in the unlikely case you did not know – is “Waiting for the Barbarians” (Περιμένοντας τοὺς Bαρβάρους) an 1898 Greek poem (published in 1904) by Constantine P. Cavafy (1863 – 1933). I came across it when I was studying Modern Poetry with the OU, and it has remained one of my favourite “political” poems ever since
Of course I didn’t know. Which is why being an ignorant blogger is such a joy!
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