Fuchsia
One of my favourite plants. Grows like mad in South-West Ireland where one finds some roadside hedgerowss that seem to be largely comprised of it.
Quote of the Day
”The oddity of the hostility of certain thinkers and political leaders to the ‘Deep State’ is that it often favours them in all sorts of weird and largely unintentional ways. They might have trouble building a bureaucracy that is both routinised AND that favours their interests consistently. (In fact, protip hint: that’s why Mussolini and Hitler’s bureaucracies in Italy and Germany were so shambolic: turns out it’s hard to routinise the autocratic whims of impulsive leaders.)”
- Timothy Burke
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Rolling Stones | Ruby Tuesday
Long Read of the Day
Why America Doesn’t Care About Trump’s Graft
Another withering blast from Tina Brown.
What boggles me more is why MAGA adorers, and the American populace in general, seem to care so little about the raging kleptocracy that is business as usual in the Trump circle. The president’s net worth has nearly doubled in the eight months since he returned to the Oval Office. In May, the UAE’s ruling family deposited $2 billion into the crypto fund cofounded by Eric and Donald Trump, Jr. with, among others, the Middle East special envoy Steve Witkoff’s fresh-faced son, Zach and a fourth Musketeer Zak Folkman, who used to run a company called Date Hotter Girls, — and lo!—two weeks later, the White House gave the UAE access to a payload of the world’s most advanced and scarce AI computer chips, despite national security concerns that they might be shared with our biggest adversary, China. A NYT investigation described the transaction as “eviscerating the boundary between private enterprise and government policy in a manner without precedent in modern American history.”
Worth a read. It is truly amazing how much of this naked graft is going on in full view. And people just shrug helplessly, maybe because they are indeed impotent, despite the fact that the US is — as my American friends used to remind me in 2016 when I expressed concerns about the future after Trump’s election — “is a Republic of Laws”. Well, that was then and this is now.
Social media is just TV now – and we can’t stop changing the channel
My latest Observer column…
In 2020, the US Federal Trade Commission launched an antitrust case against Meta (née Facebook), arguing the company had accumulated monopoly power by buying up potential competitors in their infancy. The suit focuses on two acquisitions in particular: Instagram, purchased in 2012 for $1bn when it was merely a photo-sharing app with a handful of employees; and WhatsApp, acquired in 2014 for a staggering $19bn.
The case has had its ups and downs and remains unresolved. Last August, however, Meta filed a document that made a startling claim: that it cannot be regarded as a social media monopoly, because it is not really a social media company.
How come? Meta argues that if “social” means time spent checking in with friends and family, then very little of that now occurs on its platforms. Today, the company reports, only 7% of Instagram time and 17% of Facebook time involves consuming content from friends. The majority of time on both apps is spent watching short-form videos that are “unconnected” – not from friends or followed accounts – but recommended by AI-powered algorithms developed as a direct competitive response to TikTok’s rise.
Meta is clearly deploying these statistics as legal strategy, but they nonetheless capture a profound shift in our media ecology…
My commonplace booklet
Here’s a really uncomfortable thought: In the long view Donald Trump will be seen as the most consequential US president since FDR. Note: This is not an endorsement of the brute, just an opinion. The American Heritage Dictionary defines the term as:
- Following as an effect, result, or conclusion; consequent
- Having important consequences; significant
- Important, influential
- Pompous, self-important
Seems to me that all four apply to Trump. I first got the idea reading the FT columnist Janan Ganesh who was pointing out that there is only one thing that Trump has been consistent about since he emerged into public life — and that is the importance of tariffs.
But it is his effect on trade, an almost uncontested idea once, that stands out. Even in freewheeling Britain, whose state cannot build a high-speed rail line from Birmingham to Manchester, politicians feel obliged to yak on about “industrial strategy”. No individual has changed the global intellectual atmosphere on so large a subject quite so much in my time.
Some Trump-watchers put it about that Barack Obama’s mockery of him at a 2011 press dinner, which Trump attended, hardened his resolve to run. The free trader in me keeps imagining a world in which he’d had toothache that night.
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