No, Chuck Todd Is Not A Corporate Shill September 15, 2017September 14, 2017 He’s just misinformed. Click here to get a sense why Medicare For All is not a crazy idea. If it can work throughout Europe, Canada, and the rest of the industrialized world, can’t we — who already pay far more for health care than any of them do — make it work here, too? I.e., if their outcomes — spending just 9% to 12% of GDP on health care — can be as good as ours (and in many respects, they’re better), why can’t we do as well when we spend more than 17%? And by the way? I’m no commie pinko: just as charging $1,899* for a wide seat in the front of the plane helps make cramped plan-ahead $139 seats available for everybody else, I have no problem with the wealthy paying a giant surcharge for single rooms or private nurses or even — when it’s not life-threatening — cutting to the head of the line. For better or worse (depending on your perspective), this is America. *$2,549 if you’re going last minute. (And by the way? Once WheelTug is widely deployed, the $139 folks in 36B will not only land at the same time as the folks in 1B, they’ll deplane just as fast, too, from the rear door.)
Tom Brady’s Brain September 14, 2017September 13, 2017 If you’ve ever read Catcher in the Rye or been intrigued by J.D. Salinger, check out Rebel In The Rye, now playing at an art house near you. If you happen to be in Panama today, check out Jan Vanna’s 11am WheelTug presentation (after the coffee break) at IATA’s Maintenance Cost Conference. The beat goes on.* Here is a major piece exposing the disaster that are Michigan charter schools — of note because Trump chose their billionaire champion, Betsy DeVos, to be our Secretary of Education. Also because it drives home the point that charter schools can be ineffective or even awful. Just like pills. (Cyanide, anyone?) Knowing that something is a pill — or a charter school — tells you very little. But when you find a pill — or a replicable charter school model, like Success Academy — that works spectacularly well, for heaven’s sake grab it. OK. Can We Talk About Tom Brady’s Brain? That was Frank Bruni’s column in the New York Times. Yet as terrific a columnist as Bruni is, he missed Brady’s secret brain sauce — my much-touted (because I own a piece) BrainHQ. Here’s how the Boston Herald covered it: You can now train your brain like Tom Brady. No, this isn’t the plot of a satirical sci-fi flick: TB12 has apparently teamed up with Posit Science to make the G.O.A.T.’s personal regimen of BrainHQ exercises and assessments available to the public. Brady’s reportedly been doing BrainHQ exercises online over the past four years — during which time he’s lead the Pats to two Super Bowl championships. And he claims that the cognitive training has made a difference in how he thinks on the field. “I’m not a brain scientist,” Brady said in a statement, “but I can tell you about my experience after using the exercises — I could feel myself seeing more, seeing things more quickly and accurately, and making better decisions, faster.” . . . [H]ere’s what the real brain scientists are saying: More than 100 published, peer-reviewed studies point out the benefits of TB12 BrainHQ — from improved speed and executive function to better balance and gait. The research has actually revealed that the mental workouts can prompt chemical and structural changes within the brain. Check out the special version of BrainHQ featuring Tom’s regimen at TB12.BrainHQ.com. BrainHQ is also featured in Tom’s The TB12 Method: How to Achieve a Lifetime of Sustained Peak Performance, out next week. There is a connection here: The proven, replicable Success Academy charter-school model — at no additional cost to taxpayers — has the potential to dramatically improve outcomes for millions of our most vulnerable kids, breaking the cycle of poverty, teenage pregnancy, and all the drag that puts on their lives and our nation as a whole. The proven BrainHQ exercises could dramatically reduce the incidence of dementia, with all the drag that puts on families and our nation as a whole. Indeed, as argued here, Medicare should in effect pay folks to do BrainHQ. (Want to live healthy to 100? Parade has some tips that include BrainHQ.) This is big stuff, no? *You laugh: but television was invented in 1926 and by 1946 — 20 years later! — no one had made a dime from it. Yet it did catch on.
The 5 Jobs Robots Will Take First — And Last September 13, 2017September 12, 2017 From Shelly Palmer a few months ago: First. (Journalists? Really?) Last. (He forgot to include bed-makers and masseurs, hair stylists and a whole lot of others — ichthyologists spring to mind.) But however one might dispute the specifics of his lists, the larger point is that we face rapid change that could make life amazing for 8 billion people — the sun powering all manner of machines that relieve us of most traditional work, leaving us more time to love and learn and laugh. But that would require agreed-upon means to share the benefits of all this great technology, while also retaining incentives for excellence and hard work. (Here’s an idea: how about the incentive being a bit more about applause and self-esteem, a little less about money?). Universal Basic Income is an idea that deserves ever more consideration. The alternative is a massive unemployment, demoralization, strife, and even-greater inequality. Or not? The Wall Street Journal recently offered, “Workers: Fear Not the Robot Apocalypse,” contending that “Automation commonly creates more, and better-paying, jobs than it destroys.” But I’m not so sure. Technological progress may now be accelerating-faster than we can find new things to need or want (at least new things that require human labor to provide). There’s lots of jobs only humans can fill — caring nurses, cheerful servers, stand-up comics. But once we’ve switched to sun-powered self-driving vehicles there will be no truck, bus, cab or limo drivers; no meter maids, toll takers, gas-station or parking-lot attendants. And that’s just transportation. Just as agriculture — that once employed 60% of us — now requires fewer than 2% to meet our needs, the hundreds of animators who used to be required to make a film are largely replaced by a couple. How many accountants will we need? How many diagnosticians? With our basic needs someday so easily satisfied, powered by free energy from the sun, Universal Basic Income (and universal health care) may be required to underpin the happy, healthy society of tomorrow
He Was Just 17 September 12, 2017 And is still just 17. And has just published We Rise: The Earth Guardians Guide to Building a Movement that Restores the Planet . . . that begins when he was fifteen, addressing the United Nations General Assembly on climate change. Have I got your attention? You may have seen him this past Sunday on Bill Maher. He is Xiuhtezcatl (“shoe-tez-caht”) Martinez. If you don’t become one of his Earth Guardians yourself, perhaps suggest it to your kids or grandkids? While you, dear reader, do your part by eating less meat and dairy. You can do it, argues Arti Patel. Here’s a guide to meat and dairy substitutes. The father of a young man I know is fine with his son marrying a vegetarian — and fine that the vegetarian he’s marrying is a guy — but draws the line at his own consumption: he insists on meat at every meal. I very much hope he is not a reader of this page, because it turns out his son and future son-in-law have been serving him fake meat. They just lie to him, and he can’t tell the difference. Not all fake meat is that good, but it’s time we all gave it another try. Which alone will not halt climate change. But it will help.
Troll Farms and Gay Muslims September 11, 2017September 10, 2017 So it turns out a lot of us were duped. Read about Russian troll farms — Russians posing as Americans. The former KGB — headed ultimately by a man who murders journalists and political opponents (but with whom our president has a special relationship) — invested in a massive operation to beat Clinton. They came within just 3 million votes of pulling that off, enough to give Putin what he wanted. There was a time when that would have bothered most Americans. But that was before we all got great health care at a tiny fraction of the cost. In small part: . . . The Russian information attack on the election did not stop with the hacking and leaking of Democratic emails or the fire hose of stories, true, false and in between, that battered Mrs. Clinton on Russian outlets like RT and Sputnik. Far less splashy, and far more difficult to trace, was Russia’s experimentation on Facebook and Twitter, the American companies that essentially invented the tools of social media and, in this case, did not stop them from being turned into engines of deception and propaganda. . . . On Wednesday, Facebook officials disclosed that they had shut down several hundred accounts that they believe were created by a Russian company linked to the Kremlin and used to buy $100,000 in ads pushing divisive issues during and after the American election campaign. On Twitter, as on Facebook, Russian fingerprints are on hundreds or thousands of fake accounts that regularly posted anti-Clinton messages. Many were automated Twitter accounts, called bots, that sometimes fired off identical messages seconds apart — and in the exact alphabetical order of their made-up names, according to the FireEye researchers. . . . I’ve previously plugged Parvez Sharma’s A Sinner In Mecca: A Gay Muslim’s Hajj of Defiance. Now comes the first substantive review. To 100 million LGBT Muslims, or to the rest of us who hope to see Islam modernize, it’s a book worth reading.
BOREF September 8, 2017 As hurricanes threaten many of our friends and neighbors, it seems silly, or perhaps even heartless, to write about anything else. But as several of you asked why BOREF dropped from $5 to $2 yesterday, I thought I should respond. The drop was on a volume of 1600 shares. Presumably, some trusting soul — or perhaps the executor of an estate that held the shares — placed an order to sell those shares “at the market” and his broker, or some other dealer, paid $2. Scandalous. Had the seller placed a limit of $5, that’s the price he or she would have received. And that remains the price at which shares are currently offered. Nothing has changed. Have a great weekend . . . as we all hope for the best for those in peril.
The Really Big Picture September 7, 2017September 6, 2017 This New York Times op-ed by Lawrence Krauss is magnificent (if you ask me). . . . Even in our own solar system, we expected the moons of Jupiter and Saturn were merely dead lumps of rock or frozen snowballs, whereas we now understand that several have warm oceans underneath a coating of ice — ideal potential breeding grounds for what may be independent forms of life. . . . It’s such a miracle that we’ve climbed out of the trees and come to this point where — in just the last 100 years, barely an instant in geological time — we’ve figured it all out (well, a crazy lot of it); can fly through the air while eating dinner and watching a movie (some birds can’t even fly) . . . even detect warm oceans beneath the surface of distant moons. At the rate things are going, we have just a few decades — if that — to solve the ultimate mystery: how to live with each other. Sustainably, without rendering our tiny planet uninhabitable — or otherwise going extinct. There are so many ways this could go wrong. But what a privilege (and responsibility) to be around to help make it go right. Read the op-ed?
Seeing It From Their Point Of View September 6, 2017September 4, 2017 By Myriam Miedzian: Never Again: Learning From The Trump Tragedy. . . . How could so many working class and middle-class people be so stupid as to support this ignorant megalomaniac con artist billionaire demagogue whose deepest commitment was to huge tax cuts for the very rich including himself? . . . . . . the majority of Trump supporter are not stupid and not part of anti-Semitic and racist Nazi groups. Racism, opposition to abortion, clinging to traditional gender roles, play a part for some, but primarily they are enraged about what they experience as being pushed to the end of the line in terms of jobs and educational opportunities, being attacked by self-righteous left-wingers for being selfish, stupid, and racist . . . Worth reading in full. As is Clive Crook: Why People Still Support Trump. “It’s not all about bigotry and ignorance,” he argues. He’s right. Yet, as you’ll see, he sets up a straw man when he says, “There are two main theories of Trump’s support. One is that a large minority of Americans — 40 percent, give or take — are racist idiots. This theory is at least tacitly endorsed by the Democratic Party and the mainstream liberal media.” I don’t know anyone in the Democratic Party or mainstream media who believes 40 percent of Americans — i.e., everyone who voted for Trump — is a racist idiot. Clearly there are some. You saw racists marching with tiki torches. And if there are idiots who vote, it would not be surprising if they were quicker than non-idiots to believe Trump would get them “great health care at a tiny fraction of the cost.” But to the extent Trump voters perceive the Party and mainstream media to view them this way — as the right wants them to, and as posts like Clive Crook’s tell them we do — it takes a toll. Perception is reality. Unless and until proven otherwise, we should assume that any individual Trump supporter is a core a smart, good person — the bill-of-goods they bought notwithstanding.
A Level-Headed Call For Impeachment September 1, 2017August 31, 2017 If you’ve not seen the seven-minute Ben Wittes “impeachment” clip, watch it now. Far from shrill, its power derives from its thoughtfulness. If you don’t know just how evil Trump’s “great public servant” Sheriff Arpaio is — I didn’t — read it here. (“The word ‘racist’ isn’t enough. The word ‘abusive’ isn’t enough. Joe Arpaio’s actions over the course of his time in office were monstrous.”)* Oh, and look — that pardon might conceivably not stand, after all. Arpaio. Putin. Bannon. Sater (stabbed a guy in the face and neck with a broken margarita glass). Erdogan. Tough guys Trump likes. Carl Icahn. Last summer, I told you my Carl Icahn story, a tale of hard-heartedness, ego, and suicide. But to Trump, Icahn — like Roy Cohn — has been a role model. Elect him, Trump said, and he’d drain the swamp. No Goldman Sachs guys to protect the carried-interest loophole that he promised to repeal (oops — guess what) . . . no, he would appoint amazing deal makers like Carl Icahn. According to this piece in the New Yorker that you may have heard about — “Carl Icahn’s Failed Raid On Washington” — it didn’t work out so well. Icahn is worth more than the Trump family and all the members of the Cabinet combined—and, with no constraint on his license to counsel the President on regulations that might help his businesses, he was poised to become much richer. Robert Weissman, who runs the watchdog group Public Citizen, told me, “This kind of self-enrichment and influence over decision-making by an individual mogul who is simultaneously inside and outside the Administration is unprecedented. In terms of corruption, there’s nothing like it. Maybe ever.” In conversations with me, financiers who have worked with Icahn described his appointment as a kind of corporate raid on Washington. One said, “It’s the cheapest takeover Carl’s ever done.” Have a great long weekend!