A C. T U. A L. L Y

I was listening to The David Frum Show podcast yesterday.   Frum is a senior editor at The Atlantic and, according to his website, has been active in Republican politics since the first Reagan campaign of 1980 .   He holds a BA and MA in history from Yale and a law degree from Harvard, where he served as President of the Federalist Society.   He also served as George W. Bush’s speechwriter and chairman of the board of a UK center-right think tank.   I try to seek out points of view different from my own and was particularly intrigued by the topic of Frum's podcast, Why America Isn’t Rome (And Why That Matters).   His guest was Dame Mary Beard, who is Great Britain’s leading classicist and expert on the history of Rome and the ancient world. You can listen to or read a complete transcript of the podcast here . But what I want to write about here is not the decline of ancient Rome, but humor and how it can defang the most terrifying beast.   Before introd...

A few weeks ago, Nvidia and AMD met with President Trump to discuss Chinese export licenses for the sale of certain advanced microchips.   As late as last April, the sale of those chips to China had been judged a national security risk, but when there’s a “deal” to be made, such pesky concerns have to take a back seat to the unmatched deal-making skills of the President, who is a master of extortion.   As reported in the Washington Post :   [Trump] said he had had a conversation with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang [below], whom he called “a great guy,” about allowing the chip’s export. “I said, if I’m going to do that, I want you to pay us as a country something because I’m giving you a release.” And just like that, Nvidia and AMD agreed to pay the government 15% of the Chinese sales revenue from those chips.   Never mind that this revenue-sharing amounts to an export tax, which the U.S. Constitution flatly forbids , and never mind that this is yet another legally quest...