Books Mon Amour. Losing Power. Social Credit.

We love books at Daily Pnut. In fact, the few earthly belongings Daily Pnut’s publisher possesses are books. We are in the media business (as we’ve mentioned before) to educate and entertain. We enjoy sharing what we learn on Daily Pnut, and we also want to share our books.

Starting this Friday, we will have a Daily Pnut Week in Review quiz. This online quiz will be 10 short questions, and submissions must be made by 12pm EST that Sunday. Without sounding like a high school teacher, everything in the quiz will have been covered in that week’s Daily Pnut. The highest scoring winner will be congratulated in the following Monday’s Daily Pnut (unless they prefer anonymity) and mailed a book of their choosing that day from our book list (we’ll be adding more books to this list in the coming days to weeks). If there are multiple people who have perfect scores (teacher’s pets!), then we’ll use a random generator to pick the winner.

“Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers.” – Charles William Eliot

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.” – Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

War Criminals in Syria: By all appearances, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his allies Russia and Iran are responsible for unleashing another chemical attack over the weekend, this time on the last rebel-held bastion in the Eastern Ghouta region outside Damascus. Sunday morning, President Trump tweeted: “Many dead, including women and children, in mindless CHEMICAL attack in Syria. Area of atrocity is in lockdown and encircled by Syrian Army, making it completely inaccessible to outside world. President Putin, Russia and Iran are responsible for backing Animal Assad. Big price to pay. Open area immediately for medical help and verification. Another humanitarian disaster for no reason whatsoever. SICK!”

Over 500 people, mostly women and children, were brought to makeshift medical centers in Douma, where the attack occurred, with symptoms attributable to chemical exposure. One source reported 70 confirmed deaths. The EU called for an “immediate response by the international community,” and UN Security Council members scheduled an urgent meeting for Monday. Syria and Russia both denied a chemical attack took place. Iran’s Foreign Ministry said reports of a gas attack in Syria were not based on facts and were an “an excuse by the United States and Western countries to take military action against Damascus.” Just days earlierPresident Trump had said US troops would be leaving Syria very soon, but advisers persuaded him to delay any immediate withdrawal for fear it could risk a resurgence by ISIS.

Brazil’s Populist and Popular Former President Sentenced to Prison: Brazilian judge Sérgio Moro became a celebrity when he began aggressively investigating and prosecuting politicians and business leaders accused of corruption. The investigation, known as Operation Car Wash, resulted in former senators, a former finance minister, and the owner of Brazil’s largest construction company being found guilty. The most prominent person caught in Moro’s snare is Luiz Inácio Lula Da Silva, the hugely popular former president of Brazil, who was convicted of corruption and money laundering charges over a kickback scheme that illegally netted him more than $1 million. Lula was sentenced to 12 years in prison and ordered to surrender last week while his appeals process was still underway.

Lula left office at the end of 2010 with an approval rating over 80%. Many Brazilians credit him with the country’s economic growth that lifted millions out of poverty. Last week, Lula was ordered to turn himself in by 4 pm Friday. Instead he holed up in the Metalworkers’ Union headquarters building in his hometown outside Sao Paulo. Crowds of supporters blocked the exit to the union building, chanting “Resist!” or “Don’t turn yourself in.” Lula finally surrendered Saturday after attending a mass commemorating his late wife’s 68th birthday.

– Brazil’s former president isn’t the only one who will be spending time behind bars. Former South Korean president Park Geun-hye has been sentenced to 24 years in prison for abuse of power and corruption. Park was found guilty of having colluded with her long-time friend Choi Soon-sil, in a scandal that exposed webs of bribery and double-dealing between political leaders and the chaebol (sprawling business conglomerates like Samsung and the retail company Lotte). (The Guardian)

– Speaking of bad presidents, the president of the violence-wracked Democratic Republic of Congo, Joseph Kabila, has refused to accept over a billion dollars in aid for his central African nation, claiming no humanitarian crisis exists, and he’s tired of international “meddling” in his country’s politics. Opposition to Kabila’s ongoing rule (he was to have held elections in November 2016) has displaced 4.5 million people and left two million children severely malnourished. The UN declared Congo one of the world’s worst humanitarian emergencies, on par with Syria and Yemen. (NYT)

– Christopher Wylie, the former Cambridge Analytica employee who blew the whistle on the firm’s use of Facebook data harvested from millions of users, said the number of people affected is probably upwards of 87 million. Wylie also said the data could be stored in Russia, or elsewhere in the world, since Aleksander Kogan, the Russian data scientist who was managing the data harvesting process, was going back and forth between the UK and Russia. (CNN)

– Speaking of fragile cyber security, some 200,000 router switches in numerous countries, including Iran, India, the US, and parts of Europe, were attacked by hackers who left an image of an American flag and the message: “Don’t mess with our elections.” The attack, which hit internet service providers and cut off web access for subscribers, exposed a vulnerability in routers from Cisco. (The Guardian)

– Speaking of trying to run away from authorities and bad news, this year only about half the number of foreign amateur runners competed in North Korea’s Pyongyang marathon, compared to 2017. The US travel ban and concerns over nuclear war are thought to have limited participation. And German media reported the arrest of six people suspected of plotting a knife attack on participants and spectators during Sunday’s half-marathon in Berlin. (BBC)

Hungary’s Slide Into Autocracy: As polls closed Sunday, Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Hungary’s longest-serving leader since communism fell in 1989, and his Fidesz party were expected to win yet another four year term in office. Under Orban, Fidesz has gone from a liberal party formed in the 1980s to a right-wing populist party opposed to immigration. Fidesz and its coalition partner (the much smaller Christian Democratic People’s Party) have held a two-thirds supermajority in parliament for the past eight years, allowing it to change the constitution without a referendum. Orban’s government has passed many laws that tighten regulations on the media, central bank, constitutional court, and nongovernmental organizations, causing EU leaders to warn the country’s democracy is being undermined.

Orban’s opposition to immigration, particularly for Muslims, has made him a role model for nationalistic leaders from Italy to Poland. Should he win another two-thirds supermajority, he could introduce a new class of politically-connected oligarchs, tighten his grip on institutions such as the courts, and strengthen resistance to countries like France and Germany that are seeking to deepen EU integration. Should he secure only a simple parliamentary majority, it could signal his political dominance has reached its apex.

– This weekend we watched a fascinating video of Steve Jobs giving a lecture to a MIT class where he discusses the pros and cons of consulting. Speaking of excellent online videos, subscribe to our sister publication – a free (of course) video newsletter. (YouTube)

– Speaking of very rich people, the “richest 1% [are] on target to own two-thirds of all wealth by 2030.” (The Guardian)

– Speaking of inequality, “nearly one million American households received eviction judgments in 2016.” And, “Middle-Class Families Increasingly Look to Community Colleges: With college prices in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, more middle-class families are looking for ways to spend less for quality education.” (NYT)

– Speaking of inequality causing bad credit, what about bad social credit? “Life Inside China’s Social Credit Laboratory: The party’s massive experiment in ranking and monitoring Chinese citizens has already started.” (Foreign Policy)

– Social credit isn’t limited just to China – the other extremely populous nation in the world is also proving that 2018 is the new 1984. “Seeking to build an identification system of unprecedented scope, India is scanning the fingerprints, eyes and faces of its 1.3 billion residents and connecting the data to everything from welfare benefits to mobile phones.” (NYT)

– Speaking of the dangers of bad social credit, this reality already exists and is becoming more pervasive. Just consider Yelp, Glassdoor, and Uber/Lyft driver ratings: “Uber asks riders to give their drivers a rating of one to five stars at the end of each trip. But very few people make use of this full scale. That’s because it’s common knowledge among Uber’s users that drivers need to maintain a certain minimum rating to work, and that leaving anything less than five stars could jeopardize their status.” (Quartz)

– Speaking of low social standing, President Trump’s Chief of Staff John Kelly probably doesn’t like where he stands right now: “No one knows how many days remain for Kelly, but when he leaves — either by the president’s hand or because of his own mounting frustration — he is almost certain to limp away damaged.” (Washington Post)

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