A few years ago, I bought Harden’s book King of Spies. Not spectacular, but worthwhile, and gave a few fascinating insights into Korea from 1945 to 1950.

The Mossad might be more important.

6. Tremendous corruption. More and more corrupt people in governments, corporations, and other institutions. This is worldwide. Things like the Panama papers and so on show how bad this is. The saying about Washington DC from 20 years ago: “corruption isn’t some conspiracy; corruption is the culture.“. When there are problems, you have incompetent crooks in charge who don’t care about the public interest at all.

A book from the 1980s mentioned that it is easier to make a computer they can do 1 million calculations per second then it is to make a robot that could empty ashtrays. Believe it or not, even simple tasks like emptying ashtrays uses a decent amount of judgment that is difficult to program.

This is very distorted Many schools don’t offer a foreign language until eighth grade or later.

Edit: what I meant was you are automatically going to wind up with a very small number. Not many schools teach foreign languages under eighth grade. And when they said total number of students, did they start counting in kindergarten? You are automatically going to wind up with a very low number. What if 100% of students starting in 10th grade get intensive language training? Or maybe only their senior year? I really think what would be more realistic is how many students graduate speaking a languages that they learned in school.

I don’t have one. But if I did, it would either be funny or have some insight, unlike what you posted.

Glad I didn’t click. But maybe the question is . . . A god awful small affair, to the girl with the mousy hair

It is very unfortunate, but there is a huge amount of misinformation about the Bay of pigs. This began even before the invasion. To some extent, is the nature of compartmentalization of these operations, and the deception that entails, and then part of it is the result of deliberate lying. Most of the stories are very incomplete or completely wrong.

The Taylor Comission’s report on the Bay of Pigs was not fully released until the year 2000. Among other things that came out, it states how the Soviet union knew the exact date and most likely the location in advance. Sources showed that the Soviets got this knowledge on April 9, even before the Cuban exiles themselves have been briefed. I’m not sure how, but the info came from the CIA itself. Wiretap? Cryptography? A spy? I don’t know that the report says how, but that was what Maxwell Taylor’s commission reported.

Like so many things, when more information comes out, it completely changes the entire narrative. The fact that the Soviets knew in advance means that everything written before the year 2000, much of which already was pretty sketchy, is incomplete.

This happens. All the old books stay on the shelves, and the people who wrote those books or got their PhD on this usually aren’t in a rush to correct things.