Review: All the Wrong Moves: How Three Catastrophic Decisions Led to the Rise of Trump

All the Wrong Moves: How Three Catastrophic Decisions Led to the Rise of Trump by Anthony Scaramucci
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Looking back on buying into the Trump idea, Scaramucci finds three pivotal trends pre-Trump that made his rise possible:

1. Privileging China. Clinton supports the WTO in giving China special privileges in trade, hurting American workers deeply, quickly, and permanently.

2. Waging War Without Taxes. George W. Bush invades Iraq while simultaneously cutting taxes, thereby shifting the cost of a misguided, multitrillion-dollar effort to alter the entire Middle East to ordinary Americans, while removing any buffer between them and ruination.

3. Bailing Out Wall Street. Obama bails out banks and Wall Street, which were failing largely thanks to Clinton's and Bush's finance policies, while ordinary Americans by the millions lose homes and livelihoods.

At least a couple of times her refers to a historical "Crackup" without explanation:

...a celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the IMF and the World Bank was loudly interrupted by protests. By June 1999, the movement's organizational power had grown. That month, cities around the world took part in the Carnival Against Capital, and in the Eugene, Oregon, event that day, anarchists clashed with police, with temporary success, pushing them out of a park.

Which I take to be the mixture of anarchism and radical environmentalism, punk rock and old-hippiedom opening the door to populism. He uses the term to describe the social upheavals of the late 1960s and early 1970s, a period when the established order began to break down:
• The Fragmenting of Consensus: The sudden shattering of traditional social norms, trust in institutions, and postwar political stability.
• The Countercultural Wave: The explosion of radical anti-establishment politics, hippie communes, anti-war protests, and psychedelic culture that shook America.
• The Political Realignment: Events like the televised clashes between police and anti-war protesters at the 1968 Chicago Democratic National Convention. Andersen identifies these as early milestones of a "crackup" that permanently fractured the American left and gave rise to a fierce conservative cultural backlash.

By linking the 1999 anti-globalization protests back to "the Crackup that began in the '60s," the author is arguing that the Carnival Against Capital, for example, wasn't entirely a modern phenomenon. Instead, its mix of radical anarchy and alternative lifestyle was a direct echo of that original 1960s cultural collapse.

I don't know if I am entirely convinced of this three root cause. I do believe a manifold of historical events gave the U.S. an authoritarian president and subservient other branches of government. I am more behind his prescriptive cures:

1. Stronger rules against monopoly.
2. Taxation overhaul.
3. Tariff correctives.
4. Election funding reform.
5. Fight partisan gerrymandering.
6. Strengthen investigations to be outside of executive branch control

A small nitpick: I loath the Garamond font used here and popularly. I especially don't like that capital "I" and numeral 1 have the same symbol.


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Review: Opera

Opera by Edward Joseph Dent
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Kinda chronological, but more chronological within region. So, Italy first, England and America last... Key composers, format, and technical (effects) development with quirk illustrations and synopses of many of the operas

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Review: Bella Bella

Bella Bella by Harvey Fierstein
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Wonderful one-man show bringing to life Bella Abzug, first NY female senator and a firebrand w/long, impactful political career without compromise.

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Review: Empire Down: A Historical Look at the Largest Civilizations in History and What Caused Them to Fail

Empire Down: A Historical Look at the Largest Civilizations in History and What Caused Them to Fail by Barrett Williams
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Adequate Virtual Voice narration and shallow content make this a hard pass. It reads like eight grader school assignments,. You'd be better off with he Wikipedia articles. No Macedonian or Greek empires. Han and Gupta empires are nice additions, but nothing from Africa without a pharaoh and nothing from indigenous North America. What order is this in? Ottoman chapters after Byzantine with British empire betwixt....

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Review: Sinatra and the Jack Pack: The Extraordinary Friendship between Frank Sinatra and John F. Kennedy?Why They Bonded and What Went Wrong

Sinatra and the Jack Pack: The Extraordinary Friendship between Frank Sinatra and John F. Kennedy?Why They Bonded and What Went Wrong by Michael Sheridan
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The book goes deep on the Sinatra-Kennedy connection and uncovers a lot of Sinatra-Mob connections. But still, Sirhan Sirhan was the RFK shooter and the Kennedy patriarch is not proven to have been into rumrunning. Some may disagree.

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Review: All the Wrong Moves: How Three Catastrophic Decisions Led to the Rise of Trump

All the Wrong Moves: How Three Catastrophic Decisions Led to the Rise of Trump by Anthony Scaramucci
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

1. Privileging China. Clinton supports the WTO in giving China special privileges in trade, hurting American workers deeply, quickly, and permanently.

2. Waging War Without Taxes. George W. Bush invades Iraq while simultaneously cutting taxes, thereby shifting the cost of a misguided, multitrillion-dollar effort to alter the entire Middle East to ordinary Americans, while removing any buffer between them and ruination.

3. Bailing Out Wall Street. Obama bails out banks and Wall Street, which were failing largely thanks to Clinton's and Bush's finance policies, while ordinary Americans by the millions lose homes and livelihoods.

Crackup?

...a celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the IMF and the World Bank was loudly interrupted by protests. By June 1999, the movement's organizational power had grown. That month, cities around the world took part in the Carnival Against Capital, and in the Eugene, Oregon, event that day, anarchists clashed with police, with temporary success, pushing them out of a park.

This mixture of anarchism and radical environmentalism, punk rock and old-hippiedom, gave the movement a countercultural revolutionary feeling-hearkening back to the Crackup that began in the '60s. It could also look, at the time, more European than American.

To outsiders, anyway. Definitely to me. As I've said, at the time I didn't get it. The protesters seemed kooky to me-and economically uninformed. But the historical fact is that, in the US, something new was happening.

Andersen uses the term to describe the social upheavals of the late 1960s and early 1970s, a period when the established order began to break down. The reference specifically captures:
• The Fragmenting of Consensus: The sudden shattering of traditional social norms, trust in institutions, and postwar political stability.
• The Countercultural Wave: The explosion of radical anti-establishment politics, hippie communes, anti-war protests, and psychedelic culture that shook America.
• The Political Realignment: Events like the televised clashes between police and anti-war protesters at the 1968 Chicago Democratic National Convention. Andersen identifies these as early milestones of a "crackup" that permanently fractured the American left and gave rise to a fierce conservative cultural backlash.
By linking the 1999 anti-globalization protests back to "the Crackup that began in the '60s," the author is arguing that the Carnival Against Capital wasn't entirely a modern phenomenon. Instead, its mix of radical anarchy and alternative lifestyle was a direct echo of that original 1960s cultural collapse.

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Review: The Stowaway: A Young Man's Extraordinary Adventure to Antarctica

The Stowaway: A Young Man's Extraordinary Adventure to Antarctica by Laurie Gwen Shapiro
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Pretty interesting life from an era when explorers like Byrd were rockstars and stowaways were a thing. The subject himself did the stowaway thing three (or four?) times to reach Byrd and was a subset of something like eight such cases just for Byrd's ventures.

Billy succeeded and became legit and played a real role:

Billy helped construct: Little America's administrative headquarters and the mess hall, which was not large enough for the men to eat in all at once. There would be shifts. It wasn't long before the shacks were covered with snow, with only the stovepipes peeking out. Long tunnels hollowed out of ice were lined with food and instruments and kennels, and connected the two implausibly located buildings built two hundred yards apart. Once completed, it would be unnecessary to go outside. The men chosen to winter over would live like moles under the snow in houses built from highly insulating ceiba tree pods that had traveled from America.

Even back then, they had to deal with flat earthers:

Imagine the laughter in the New York Times editorial room the very next day when they decided to publish an angry letter from multimillionaire Wilbur Glenn Voliva, an evangelist priest and radio broadcaster, and a forceful proponent of the flat-earth theory. Voliva-based in Zion, Illinois...

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