More Saturday Male Beauty - Pt 2

 

Trump Has Empowered Iranian Extremists While Weakening America

Historians and military war colleges will likely teach the Felon's war of choice against Iran as an example of presidential hubris and lack of proper planning can swamp a presidency and lead it to military solutions that only make everything worse.  With an incompetent president and perhaps even more incompetent Secretary of Defense who has purged experienced top levels of generals and admirals, the military disaster was foreseeable and now prices of everything, particularly gasoline, diesel and aviation fuel have soared.  Meanwhile, the Iranian leadership has become more extreme and militant and rather than preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, the Felon's poorly thought out war of choice has made the desire for a nuclear weapon even stronger among the Iranian leadership.  With the final withdrawal of American troops from Iraq, the specter of increased Iranian influence in Iraq may only increase.  Worse yet, the war has depleted American munitions and shown to the world the limits of American military power.  A piece in the New York Times looks at the Felon's debacle:

In early March, nine days after starting his war with Iran, President Trump held a news conference to crow about his “military success, the likes of which people haven’t seen.” “We’re winning very decisively,” he claimed, and “the result will be lower oil prices.”  Peter Navarro, a White House senior counselor, wrote an essay in March explaining why: “Iran War Will Lower Energy Prices.” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in April announced “a historic and overwhelming victory” that had rendered Iran “combat-ineffective for years to come.”

Instead, Trump’s Iran war should be taught for decades as a model of how not to conduct either war or foreign policy. It’s an example of how hubris can swamp a presidency and lead it to military solutions for difficult global problems — and, in the process, make everything worse.

Now Trump finds himself stuck in the Sartre play “No Exit.” “The unsettling reality is that the conflict is nowhere near over,” Ali Vaez of the International Crisis Group writes in a Foreign Affairs essay titled “The New Forever War.”

Still, the Trumpian myopia persists, with the administration continuing to claim that its pressure on Iran is a smashing success. “The blockade is working; it’s working like nothing we’ve ever seen,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Fox News in September.

Hmm. Diesel prices at a few places in California have hit $9.99 a gallon, the maximum price those pumps can display. The United States has already spent more than $43 billion on the war, by a lowball Pentagon estimate — more than enough to provide free college education for a year to every American family earning less than $125,000 annually. Higher prices caused by the war have cost the typical American family about $1,000, according to the economist Mark Zandi. More broadly, we’ve depleted our arsenal, cost American and Iranian lives, possibly committed war crimes, exposed American vulnerabilities, effectively lost access to some bases and weakened American military credibility as far away as East Asia.

It’s true that the Iranian economy is a catastrophe and that ordinary Iranians — the people we are supposed to be helping — are suffering greatly. The exchange rate is now more than 2.5 million rials to the dollar, one-tenth of the rial’s value in 2021.

Yet Washington doesn’t seem to understand that instead of surrendering, Iran may choose to escalate. “They’ve come to the conclusion that the only way they survive is to shoot their way out,” Vali Nasr, an Iran expert at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, told me. He suggested that Iran could increase attacks on shipping and, especially if it is attacked, strike oil infrastructure around the Gulf.

“Iran did not wage a scorched earth campaign — but it may yet do so if the current situation persists for too long. That is what everyone who actually follows this region and its dynamics is worried about.”

It’s difficult to see a deal being reached, partly because both Trump and Iran have a history of overreaching. It doesn’t help that Trump’s chief negotiators, Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, are real estate investors chosen for their closeness to Trump rather than for, er, their diplomatic savvy.

Iranian leaders also seem cocky. Ahmad Vahidi, the commander in chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, boasted in August that Iran had brought the United States “to its knees.” Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi told “Meet the Press” that Iran was fully prepared for a new round of fighting, “even if it comes to a doomsday war.” . . . Trump’s war may have actually increased the likelihood of Iran’s making a drive toward a nuclear weapon.

Trump’s war began by killing the previous supreme leader, who had issued a fatwa saying that Iran would not develop nuclear weapons. The new supreme leader, his son, does not inherit that fatwa and has not issued his own, so now “there’s a serious conversation in Iran” about pursuing nuclear weapons, Nasr told me.

We should take these warnings seriously. One reason professors will teach Trump’s war as an example of military malpractice is that it fits neatly into a larger pattern of counterproductive American policies toward Iran. I deplore the brutality, corruption and economic incompetence of Iran’s rulers — so it’s infuriating that America has repeatedly empowered Iranian extremists.

First, the United States helped topple a democratically elected prime minister in 1953, energizing nationalists and souring Iranians on the West. Then in the 1960s and 70s, the United States gave Iran a nuclear reactor, backed an increasingly autocratic shah and overstepped in ways that helped allow Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to become a national force by denouncing American imperialism.

President George W. Bush’s 2003 Iraq war toppled Saddam Hussein, an enemy of Iran, and empowered Shiite militias that support Iran. In 2018, President Trump announced his withdrawal from the Obama nuclear pact with Iran. The capstone in this “march of folly,” to borrow a phrase from the historian Barbara Tuchman, was Trump’s war on Iran this year, which has bolstered military hard-liners in Tehran and enabled them to project greater power over the Persian Gulf and global oil markets.

That’s what I find particularly worth studying: How is it that for three-quarters of a century, we Americans have so bungled our foreign policy that we have systematically empowered Iranian extremists? They call us the “Great Satan,” but in truth our ineptitude has made us their benefactors.

More Saturday Male Beauty

 

Dinner Parties, Socializing, and American Loneliness

We hear much about the increased loneliness and sense of isolation experienced by everyday Americans and the role it may play in political polarization and the rise of MAGA.  While some on the far right would blame the phenomenon on the decline of organized religion and a loss of "fellowship", as a piece in The Atlantic reviews, the real cause is perhaps due to modern trends that make self-entertainment at home far easier, without the need to included friends and neighbors. One of the starkest declines is in the number of Americans who entertain at home and throw dinner parties. Indeed, the data indicates that the share of Americans who say they host friends or family at their home at least monthly has fallen from 42 percent in 1975 to 12 percent in 2026—a 70 percent collapse in a half century.  In addition, many modern homes have eliminated formal dining rooms which were once a standard feature of most homes. The end result is an increased view of others as "strangers" with declines in a sense of community.  Personally, this is an unknown experience. Growing up, my maternal grandmother held family dinners weekly and my parents would likewise host friends.  Currently the husband and I host two or more dinner parties in our home every month (some fancy and others simple comfort food) and frequently we go to dinner parties hosted by friends and neighbors.  And that's when we are not having dinner with friends at restaurants or the yacht club a block down the street.  Besides perhaps setting the stage for political polarization this plunge in socializing does not bode well for aging Americans where studies have found frequent socializing helps ward of mental decline. I'm not sure what the solution is, but the dinner parties and socialization from years past are one aspect of the "good old days" that perhaps need to be restored.  Here are highlight from the Atlantic:

Mid-century Americans knew how to throw a party, for better or worse. In some of the most famous titles of the 1950s and 1960s—Couples, by John Updike; Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, by Edward Albee; Revolutionary Road, by Richard Yates—the drama (and martini-soaked melodrama) took place in middle-class living rooms. The stories were fictional, but the setting was realistic. Until 1975, half of Americans said they entertained guests at their home every month.

Then something changed. Americans stopped throwing parties. Even more fundamental, they stopped visiting one another. From 1975 to 1998, the share of Americans who gave or attended a monthly dinner party declined by half. The share of Americans saying they never entertained people at home tripled. Although cultural critics often bemoan the decline of organized religion, the dip in church attendance was downright modest compared with the collapse in hosting, according to data gathered by the DDB Needham Life Style Surveys.

In his 2000 book, Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam wrote that if these trends continued, the ancient practice of visiting with friends “might entirely disappear from American life in less than a generation.” Check your calendars. One generation and change later, Putnam’s prediction needs an update.

So what’s the state of hosting in the 21st century? To get an apples-to-apples answer to that question, the polling group Data for Progress replicated the DDB Needham Life Style Surveys cited by Putnam. Unfortunately, the upshot is about as brutal as you’d imagine.

In the past 30 years, Americans have seen double-digit declines in practically every measure of socializing. They are less likely to play cards; attend a sporting event; go to the bar; volunteer; work on a community project.

When it comes to hosting people at home, the declines are particularly stark. Since 1995, the share of Americans who say they’ve hosted guests or attended a dinner party has declined by about 20 percent, from 88 to 67 percent—and that’s in addition to the declines that Putnam noted a quarter century ago.

Combining the two surveys, we get this astonishing fact: The share of Americans who say they host friends or family at their home at least monthly has fallen from 42 percent in 1975 to 12 percent in 2026—a 70 percent collapse in a half century.

Perhaps, an optimist might think, Americans are hosting fewer dinner parties because they’ve simply moved all of their hangouts to restaurants and bars. Nice idea, but almost certainly wrong. As Putnam wrote in his book, “the practice of entertaining friends has not simply moved outside the home, but seems to be vanishing entirely.” Overall face-to-face socializing has declined significantly in the past few decades, and the restaurant industry has actually noted a sharp increase in people eating alone.

Another plausible theory is that Americans have replaced dinner parties with other forms of healthy socialization. Americans do engage in some activities much more frequently than in 1975, such as going to concerts, traveling, and exercising. All very good.

But the evidence suggests that, despite the increase in running clubs, the surge in exercise time seems to be mostly solo. A lot of people are going to the gym with a podcast to keep them company or rolling out a yoga mat in the basement. Most important, it is impossible to assert that Americans are getting out of the house to socialize in new ways when time spent at home has certifiably exploded since the 2010s.

In short, the great disinvitation is real, and we can’t wish or explain it away by arguing that Americans are just finding new ways to be with friends. Here are four explanations:

First is that people are more harried, especially those in dual-earner households. In the 1970 book The Harried Leisure Class, the Swedish economist Staffan Burenstam Linder wrote that as a society gets richer, leisure time takes on the frantic quality of work, because each hour of downtime practically shouts, Excuse me! You could be making money right now! We multitask and pack various activities into short periods. . . . Taking several hours to coordinate with other busy people to set up a lengthy dinner party is a tougher sell.

That’s a sociological explanation, but the decline of hosting is also about macroeconomic trends. In Bowling Alone, Putnam acknowledged that women have historically been the keepers of the family social calendar, planning the birthday parties and neighborhood potlucks. For any number of reasons, women seem to do better than men at making and keeping adult friendships and making plans with other families. But in the 1950s and 1960s, tens of millions of women traded their unpaid household-management jobs for salaried jobs, and the family social calendar frayed, as men failed to pick up the slack.

The trouble with going all in on this explanation—beyond the fact that it embraces a version of learned helplessness for men—is that leisure time has increased overall since the 1950s. Theoretically, married couples should have even more time to have people over for food and drink. Other facts must be squeezing out socializing.

Another possibility is that intensive parenting leaves less time for hosting. Americans used to have many kids whom they cared for sparsely; now they have fewer children to whom they devote every minute of their life. . . . Thus evenings that adults once spent hosting adults are now spent holding, bathing, driving, tutoring, playing with, and talking to their children.

A third explanation is that friendship networks are shrinking, especially for poor people who aren’t married. If you’re going to throw a dinner party, you probably need a few things first. Say, a dinner table. Chairs. Food and drink. And also: friends. It is rare to host a dinner party for people you’ve never met. But the average number of close friendships is declining with each generation, and the decline is steepest for Americans without a college degree. So it’s not just that married people have fewer dinner parties; poor people, who are less likely to be married, have fewer friends, period.

[T]he two groups most likely to say they never entertained people in their home in the previous year were political independents (44 percent) and people without a college diploma (39 percent). The latter isn’t surprising, given all of the evidence that socializing is declining most rapidly among poorer Americans with less education. Hosting friends, like so much socializing, is in danger of becoming a luxury good.

The political wrinkle is more intriguing to me. I sometimes hear from people who tie everything back to politics that political polarization might lead to social fragmentation. But I wonder if the opposite is just as plausible. Maybe people who are less embedded in strong social networks are less likely to attach themselves to groups of all kinds, including political parties. In this way, America’s long-term detachment from groups and institutions is leading to a kind of pox-on-all-parties mentality that cashes out in an increase in independents.

The average time that Americans spent at home increased by almost two hours a day from 2003 to 2022. Cocooned within personalized entertainment fortresses, more Americans have shrunk the great buffet of all possible leisure activities to the small plate of screened media.

Everybody might prefer, in the abstract, a world of dinner parties, neighborhood friendships, and spontaneous gatherings. But on any given Wednesday at 7:45 p.m., looking at a screen is easier than hosting a party. This is not so much an individual failure as a coordination failure. Modernity has shifted leisure from activities that require coordination with other people toward activities that can be consumed without the permission or participation of others. . . . . We keep creating opportunities for downtime that eliminate the need for other people to be present. Not all progress is progress.

Saturday Morning Male Beauty

 

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The Felon Is Repeating a Biden Mistake On The Economy

If one believes the narrative that the Felon was re-elected because voters believed he would improve the economy - rather than because he was greenlighting open racism, hate and bigotry - more than a Democrat president. In reality, through his tariffs, multiple trade wars, the ballooning of the federal debt, and the Felon's war of choice in Iran, the Felon took what was actually a fairly good economy and drove it into the ditch. Inflation is higher, mortgage rates are higher, gas prices have soared, and consumer prices has risen across the board. The Felon's response? He says "affordability" is a hoax, claims that America's economy is in a new "golden age" - perhaps if one is a billionaire or a member of the Felon's family - and he continues policies that will push energy prices, especially electricity, still higher.  Perhaps equally bad, while millions of Americans are struggling financially, the Felon has posted over the top images of the recent state dinner that are so out of touch that they'd embarrass Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette.  Indeed, it's little surprise that a recent poll showed the Felon's approval on his handling of the economy is down to 17%.  A column in the New York Times looks at the mistakes being made by the Felon and his regime:

When I served in President Joe Biden’s White House, we had good economic news to report: robust job creation, rising wages, low unemployment and a manufacturing jobs revival. Yes, inflation spiked early in his term, but by the time he left office, it had come down considerably.

Mr. Biden wanted his team to highlight his domestic agenda. His policies were working, and he wanted the country to understand what he was doing and why. But the polling was clear: Our economic message didn’t land.

Senior White House advisers, myself included, would meet for hours, day after day, trying to get a handle on the mismatch between the strength of the data and the flagging public confidence. . . . We pored over the numbers, worked through different messaging options and kept looking for a way to break through.

But Americans weren’t feeling it. Too many people were struggling with the prices of groceries, rent, child care and gas. Their lived experience did not match the encouraging economic news, and that disconnect shaped the entire public conversation.  We believed that if we laid out the evidence clearly enough, people would see what we saw. They didn’t, and we didn’t adjust to meet them where they were.

The truth is, we had a stale message and outdated models for delivering it. It cost Mr. Biden and, eventually, Vice President Kamala Harris dearly. President Trump is now making a mistake even more damaging.

The economic indicator that hurt Mr. Biden the most, inflation, is higher today than it was when Mr. Trump returned to office. The bond market has been roiled. The Federal Reserve just raised interest rates. Mr. Trump’s trade wars and his war with Iran are hurting the overall economic picture. All of which helps explain his sinking poll numbers.

Mr. Trump’s refrain that we’re the “hottest country anywhere in the world” is a no-sale, both because the facts really aren’t on his side and because he’s barely acknowledging Americans’ legitimate economic worries. By and large, people aren’t buying his assertions that “affordability” is a “fake word” or his insistence that higher gas prices are “a very inexpensive price to pay” for his war aims. . . . When leaders neglect lived experience, the message collapses.

Why? To start, facts and figures alone no longer carry the weight they once did. There was a time when people would absorb accurate information presented clearly through official channels, like the White House press briefing. They might disagree on what it meant, they might challenge certain points, but it wasn’t automatically treated as spin.

Today, anyone can be a content creator, producing videos, podcasts and memes with subjective, sometimes bogus interpretations of the news. Many Americans now get their news only from outlets that confirm their political leanings. Social media algorithms clearly favor outrage and certainty, not accuracy.

In that environment, official charts and summaries rarely break through. . . . And once a narrative rooted in daily life takes hold, it is almost impossible to dislodge.

We learned that lesson with the economy and again with the debate around Mr. Biden’s age. Looking back, we misread the public mood, thinking the age conversation would fade. At best, my responses from the podium about Mr. Biden’s age failed to put out the fire; at worst, they fueled it.

The Trump White House should realize that over the next two years, there will be only more, not less, scrutiny when the president appears to drift off during meetings, is cagey about the results of his medical exams or goes on one of his erratic, late-night social media screeds. His communications team should know by now that the prices at the pump and the self-checkout line are undefeated.

When people don’t believe what their government says, institutions lose legitimacy. Conspiracy theories flourish. Urgently needed legislation stalls. Elections are lost.

A decade ago, his bluster, so unlike traditional politicians, grabbed ears and eyeballs. Now even many of his fans can see that he’s frequently just seeking attention. Look at just about any poll and you get the sense that voters increasingly don’t trust him.

That tension, the ability to dominate the conversation while struggling to earn trust, defines this moment. . . . Once people believe their government is not speaking to their reality, it becomes incredibly difficult to earn that trust back. I felt that tension every day in the White House briefing room. I see it happening again now. 

Friday Morning Male Beauty

 

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The Felon And GOP Are Flailing

The mid-term elections are a month away and both the Felon and Republican candidates are flailing as the Felon's Iran war drags on and high gas prices and consumer prices have caused much of the public to conclude that the Felon - and by extension Republican candidates - could care less about voters' concerns.  Other than horrific imagery of small children alone in immigration courts and continued violence by ICE thugs against both U.S. citizens and anyone with brown skin, the only Felon/GOP accomplishment - if one can call it that - is the passage of the falsely named "big beautiful bill  that gave huge tax breaks to the ultra-wealthy while screwing literally millions of citizens, including children. Throw in the Felon's vanity projects and threats to demolish the Kennedy Center and other landmarks and it ;eaves little to campaign on. Indeed, Republican candidates - like Jen Kiggans - have resorted to bald faced lies and continue to run ads that the local media have demonstrated to be untrue.  The record of the Felon and the GOP offers little to convince voters to give them more time to further plunder and weaken the country. The oligarchs and billionaire class may be thrilled with the tax cuts and deregulation that threatens clean air and clean water, but everyone else there is little to be thrilled about. A piece in The Atlantic looks at the situation:

The White House’s South Lawn was prepared just so: A full honor guard, complete with American and Chinese flags, stood at attention. The new White House helipad, made of four-inch-thick black-and-white California granite, seemed to gleam. President Trump appeared pleased—but something was missing. Where were the TV cameras?

For a president who needs media attention like he needs oxygen, this was an unacceptable development ahead of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s welcome ceremony last week. Trump whirled around to his aides and demanded they fix it, and a staffer raced to the briefing room to ask ABC News whether it would film the arrival, two people familiar with the exchange told me on the condition of anonymity, given the private nature of the conversations. But the answer was no: The networks were boycotting participation in the TV-pool rotation in solidarity with CNN, which Trump had banned from the White House, along with two other media outlets, days before. No major U.S. television network recorded Trump’s over-the-top greeting for Xi, and the news channels refused to display images taken by the White House or any other outlet, American or Chinese. Trump did not get to show off his extravaganza. And he had only himself to blame.

At the risk of understatement, Trump has never been one to think all that many moves ahead. But his impulsive decision to ban media outlets spawned unintended consequences that derailed his own plans. Again. That’s been a real theme for much of this year: Many of Trump’s actions—quite a few impetuous and ill-considered—have only hurt him and his fellow Republicans ahead of November’s midterm elections. He was elected two years ago to drive down prices, but his tariffs have done the opposite, and a recent reignited trade war with Canada has hurt Republican candidates whose state shares a border with our neighbor to the north. His war of choice in Iran continues to sputter along, leaving gas prices elevated as Trump threatens annihilation one day and offers negotiation the next. . . . . And he’s obsessed with vanity projects . . .

The numbers are bad: Trump’s approval rating dropped to 37 percent in a new Wall Street Journal poll this week, marking the lowest rating in that poll since 1990 for an incumbent president heading into a midterm election. He’s even lower in other polls. . . . More and more Republicans are starting to worry about a blue wave, one that seems certain to secure the House for Democrats but could very well, in an outcome unthinkable even a few months ago, yield a Democratic Senate as well. With barely a month until Election Day, and with early voting already under way in a number of states, Trump and his party are flailing.

He’s traveled domestically far less this term, distancing himself from the concerns of his voters. But with October and the stretch run of the midterm campaigns now here, Trump seems set to gas up Air Force One.

Trump will begin with visits to two GOP strongholds (Oklahoma today, Alabama tomorrow) before then journeying on Saturday to Ohio, a state he won three times but where polls show Republican incumbent Senator Jon Husted trailing his Democratic opponent, former Senator Sherrod Brown. Ohio is not the only reliably red state that now seems to have a Senate seat up for grabs: Iowa, Texas, Alaska, Kansas, and maybe even Nebraska . . . .

Matthew Bartlett, a GOP strategist who worked in the first Trump administration but quit after the January 6 Capitol riot, told me that the president hasn’t given Republicans anything to run on, saying they have “no results to point to, no agenda to promise either.” And he said that many in the party feel that the bottom is dropping out and a wipeout could be coming.

[T]here has been some debate in GOP circles as to whether or not a Trump visit would actually help in some battlegrounds; several Republicans in tight races are weighing whether to request a presidential visit, party strategists have told me. Two candidates, Susan Collins of Maine and John Sununu of New Hampshire, have already said no, and others have refused to commit.

The White House downplayed any internal GOP concerns. . . . Yet there have been signs of Republicans distancing themselves from Trump on more issues, including immigration enforcement and ending the war in Iran. But that unpopular conflict may shadow the party for the foreseeable future: Many diplomats from the Middle East who attended the United Nations General Assembly last week privately feel that the war will, in stops and starts, likely continue well into next year and potentially throughout the rest of Trump’s term, threatening to drag down Republicans’ political fortunes for multiple elections.

Trump has lurched from one distraction to another—Renaming Lake Ontario! Offering $5,000 to every adult citizen if Republicans win in November!—but he has yet to shift the electorate’s dim view of his presidency. He’s still pushing claims of election fraud, even though few Republican candidates have joined in. He even authorized the Department of Homeland Security to use taxpayer money to pay for what is, in essence, a Trump campaign ad despite prohibitions on using federal funds for propaganda.

That moment with China’s leader underscored what is arguably Trump’s biggest problem: He has lost touch with what Americans actually care about. The Xi summit was a cornucopia of warning signs for worried Republicans.

The entire decadent spectacle seemed out of step with a country deep in an affordability crisis. The black-tie guest list was dotted with billionaires and tech titans as Trump feted the leader of the Chinese Communist Party, even though he continues to assail Democrats for allegedly being communists. . . . It all felt like a gift to Democrats, who pounced on the videos to paint those in the president’s orbit as dilettantes looking to enrich only themselves.

Susan Del Percio, a longtime Republican strategist, told me that even Trump supporters who are concerned about the economy feel that the president no longer cares about them. “Voters are angry because they are hurting, and through his actions, Trump is telling them that he doesn’t give a damn,” she said.

This week featured another event that likely will not land well with Americans who are struggling financially. Trump presided over a “Golden Age” event that featured business leaders and billionaires—and no talk of affordability challenges. Once more, Trump defended AI and even boasted that it would power a new government-services website. He then joked about where it stood among his accomplishments, saying, “If it is the biggest thing I’ve ever done, I’ve done a shitty job as president.” You can bet Democrats will grab that one too.