We've had a lot of them. I'm not sure how you could make it to 40 without enduring a particularly foul one.
I do think a lot of the 19th century presidents get a pass simply because they were nearly universally awful. Like, how do you rank Cleveland against Johnson or Tyler or Buchanan when it's just a race to the bottom?
Nixon was an absolute monster as a human being, but he was at least reasonably competent and politically savvy. Trump's much more in line with that earlier era of presidents - the most popular klansman or charismatic stooge of industry, but with no redeeming virtues as an actual bureaucrat.
I will say that this reads like a real Bush Era classico sychophant. You really get the sense his tongue is up in there. It's cringe, but it's not phoned in.
As often as not they were chasing Americans' empty promises (and occasionally achieving the impossible as a result).
The hydrogen bomb, the probe into Venus, the Mirr Space Station... all launched in response to American campaigns.
But the USSR of the 60s/70s was a wildly different place from post collapse Nationalist Russia. They scraped much of their R&D infrastructure for parts under Yeltsin.
Russia's got more of a space program than the US at this point. And they've continued to build and modernize their nuclear infrastructure, with the youngest plant coming online as recently as 2020 and seven in the pipe.
They're two industries the country has keep in relative working order while the rest of the economy was scrapped for parts back in the '90s/'00s.
Insane to think they are in a position to colonize the moon when they're quagmired in Ukraine and slaughtering hundreds of thousands of young men to keep at it. But they have the kit to try in a way no other county - except maybe China or India - could hope to.
I think the issue is with how many hoops you want to jump through in order to fix BMWs, specifically.
If I'm running an auto-repair shop and I already need specialty kits and tools for more common vehicles, why am I going to invest in one for a far more niche brand? And if the number of non-dealership repair centers for BMWs dry up, the pool of people skilled in repair go with it.
It's a death spiral for the brand as a whole, in pursuit of marginal increase in dealership based repairs.
A Veblen good is a type of luxury good for which the demand increases as the price increases, in apparent contradiction of the law of demand, resulting in an upward-sloping demand curve.
Even setting aside Epstein, this abuse is fully rampant in the upper eschalons of American society.
And Brooks was going out with these guys, he was meeting their second and third and forth wives. He was writing long winded articles about Eastern Europe and the scandals of human trafficking, with the spin being a need for more US intervention to restore law and order in post-Soviet States.
Epstein was probably careful about who he let into the inner circle.
Nothing in the info dumps we've received suggests Jeff was particularly discrete. He bragged about who he knew and slept with. Ghislaine bragged on his behalf. It was a selling point.
He had a plane christened The Lolita Express. Nothing about this screams subtlety
Round here we gotta cure fer callin anodder man feadderless, hehehe...