They seem an unlikely, almost motley, crew of emissaries.

For the Bahamas, there is Herschel Walker, a former NFL star whose fledgling Senate campaign was undone by a string of personal embarrassments but who now is named to be the next US ambassador to the small island nation.

To the plum diplomatic posting of Paris goes Charles Kushner, father of Donald Trump’s son-in-law, and a man the president-elect once pardoned for a felony conviction that the former Republican New Jersey governor Chris Christie, an ex-federal prosecutor, called “one of the most loathsome, disgusting crimes” he ever prosecuted.

And to Greece, once a preserve of seasoned career diplomats, goes Kimberly Guilfoyle, until recently the romantic partner of Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr, and a woman known more for her rumbustious media profile than her diplomatic acumen.

The trio are among a flurry of ambassadorial nominees rolled out by Trump in recent weeks as he rushes to fill his administration at breakneck speed with envoys who will project his “America First” ideology abroad.

Their lack of credentials has prompted one experienced foreign policy analyst to label them a “diplomatic clown car” – and a deliberate affront to the countries hosting them.

Since last month’s election triumph, the president-elect has nominated ambassadors at a rate not recalled in recent memory – including five in a single day this week.

Some appear conspicuously unschooled in the diplomatic arts; others have business links which experts say risk conflicts of interest.

Unlike most countries, which fill ambassadors’ roles from the ranks of professional diplomats, it is customary for US presidents to reward allies and financial backers with ambassadorial jobs – with prize postings like London and Paris almost always going to friends of the man in the oval office.

But Trump has broken new ground with the sheer volume of ambassadorial nominations – and his lack of consideration of their professional suitability.

“It’s not unusual to see a lot of political appointee ambassadors named early in a presidency,” said Dennis Jett, an international relations professor at Pennsylvania State University and author of a book on the history of US ambassadors.

“But I don’t recall any president-elect announcing bunches of ambassadorships like this guy’s doing. They don’t usually dip down into the ambassadorial ranks until they actually are sitting in the White House.

“The other remarkable thing is how stunningly unqualified everyone is. I don’t see anyone there who I think, ‘Now there’s a highly qualified person.’”

theguardian.com/us-news/2024/d…

A farmer with a wolf, a goat, and a cabbage must cross a river by boat. The boat can carry only the farmer and a single item. If left unattended together, the wolf would eat the goat, or the goat would eat the cabbage. How can they cross the river without anything being eaten?

You probably know this puzzle. There are two efficient solutions, related by a symmetry that switches the wolf and the cabbage.

But what you might *not* know is that this puzzle goes back to a book written around 800 AD, attributed to his advisor Alcuin! Charlemagne brought Alcuin from York to help him set up the educational system of his empire. But Alcuin had a great fondness for logic. Nobody is sure if he wrote this book - but it's fascinating.

It has 53 logic puzzles. It's called "Propositiones ad Acuendos Juvenes", or "Problems to Sharpen the Young". If the wolf, goat and cabbage problem is too easy for you, you might like this one:

"Three men, each with a sister, must cross a boat which can carry only two people, so that a woman whose brother is not present is never left in the company of another man."

There are also trick puzzles, like this:

"A man has 300 pigs. He ordered all of them slaughtered in 3 days, but with an odd number killed each day. What number were to be killed each day?"

Wikipedia says this was given to punish unruly students - presumably students who didn't know that the sum of three odd numbers was odd.

It's fascinating to think that while Franks were fighting Saxons and Lombards, some students in more peaceful parts of the empire were solving these puzzles!

(1/n)