Michael Lewis, The Fifth Risk

- I’m an avid reader of anything Michael Lewis writes. This shorter than average book is rather narrow in focus but riveting reading.

- Lewis’ style is to isolate particular individuals central to his argument and tell the story from their perspective. They are usually skilled and senior operatives and they are honest, exceptionally clever, highly intelligent and articulate. 

- As usual he skews his targets with pinpoint accuracy, this time at the Trump administration’s utter incompetence during the transition period in particular, then the appointments or lack thereof to management positions subsequently. 

- This book made me squirm. It tracks the corruption of the civil service under Trump. The pig-ignorant, anti-science clowns Trump sent in to manage the massive government departments and agencies that spend tens of billions of taxpayer dollars each year.

- It emphasises how critically important government programs, big and small, are to the community and economy generally, and how this underlying fabric of civil order is so taken for granted. Very few people know about them. They’re under the radar. 

- The ‘seeming commitment to scientific ignorance’ started very quickly to permeate the senior levels of huge government departments like energy, agriculture, commerce. Troves of data collected over decades and ripe for mining were deleted, suppressed or made unavailable for public access. ‘Under each act of data suppression usually lay a narrow commercial motive: a gun lobbyist, a coal company, a poultry company...It was between the people who were in it for the mission, and the people who were in it for the money’.

- Sections of the book seem rather tedious and pointless at first - portraits of NASA’s first female astronaut; the first ‘Chief Data Scientist’ - but these people are academically brilliant and motivated public servants who are brutally sidelined by the Trump administration. The perverse and disgraceful undermining of NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) to favour the private weather forecasting industry, particularly one player just because he’s well-connected and a Republican donor, is just one of many examples.

- It’s a war against knowledge, expertise, science, skills and basic competence. Utterly shameful and stupid beyond belief. But there you go - welcome to Trump's real America.