Author: A.T.

Lighten Up!

Here’s most of what we need to know about those magic pills — and the tens of millions who struggle with obesity.  In most cases, it’s not their fault.

An enlightening read.

(Meanwhile, investors expect airline profits to rise as passenger weight declines . . . but knee-and-hip replacement profits to decline.  Not to mention snack food profits. As a nation in five years, we may weigh three or four billion pounds less.)

Two A.I.’s In Conversation

Watch!

The world is going to be so different so soon.

Dare we hope AI’s multiplying power will be harnessed to produce widely shared happiness, avoiding the pitfalls?

That strikes me as something of a longshot.

As President Clinton said so frequently (paraphrasing from memory) — “Isn’t it amazing?  We’ve landed on the moon. We’ve split the atom.  We’re mapping the human genome.  We’ve solved all these incredibly complex problems . . . and yet the one problem we can’t seem to solve is the oldest problem of all:  just learning to live with each other.”

But what other shot do we have available?

And what social systems will work best in tomorrow’s world?

Autocracy?  Monarchy?  Democracy?  Communism?  Unfettered capitalism?  Well-regulated capitalism?  Socialism?  Democratic socialism?  Darwinism?  Tyranny?  Anarchy?

How about primogeniture, where all wealth passes to the first-born male?

(In this X-rated clip early in “The Gentlemen,” streaming on Netflix, Freddy — the eldest son — reacts to the reading of his father’s will.  After 600 years of primogeniture, the family’s 15,000-acre English estate is going to his younger brother.)

Should wealth that is the product of thousands of years’ work, struggle, suffering, and genius be concentrated among just a lucky few while billions struggle to make ends meet?

Which is not a bad segue to Joseph Stiglitz’s opinion, published Monday:  Time is up for neoliberals: Democracy requires a new, progressive capitalism.

Maybe in a few years we can just ask A.I. all these questions — and feel comfortable relying on her answers.  Or just watch her head explode.

 

Empowering The Sensible Center; No One But Trump

TEN MINUTES . . .

I’ve written about this before:

Ultimately, the solution to our country’s toxic polarization is a combination of open primaries, ranked choice voting, and easy voting-by-mail.  Candidates will no longer be able to win their party’s nomination by appealing to the most ardent on the right or left.  Instead, they’ll have to appeal, also, to the broad, often-more-sensible center. Over time, compromise and comity could once again become the norm.

Andrew Yang’s just-released 10-minute TED talk does a really good job of making the case.

It worked in Alaska — with more states on the way.

Watch!

MEANWHILE . . .

Many believe that the New York “business records” charges now playing out in in court would not have been brought against anyone but Trump.

And that’s probably true.

But there’s a reason.

It’s that mischaracterizing a hush-money payment as a legal expense to spare embarrassment — or even to cheat on taxes — is not something of great consequence . . . whereas doing it to become President of the Unted States and change the course of history is — and something no one but Trump has ever done.

Yes, it would have been better if Al Capone had been tried for murder instead of tax evasion.

So, too, if Trump could be timely tried for lying to the FBI about documents he claimed not to have had and then worked to conceal.

Better still, if he could be timely tried for attempting to overturn an American election.

He seems clearly guilty of both.

But given that he appointed judges (one in Florida, three to the Supreme Court) seemingly intent on dragging those cases out long enough for him to shut them down once reelected, we have to take what we can get — if we get anything at all.  (It’s not easy to get all 12 jurors to agree; and not enough if only 11 do.)

 

The Case For Hope

I hand the microphone to Nick Kristof (one of my heroes):

More than three-quarters of Americans say the United States is headed in the wrong direction. . . . Instead of a City on a Hill, we feel like a nation in despair — maybe even a planet in despair.

Yet that’s not how I feel at all.

. . . I emerge from years on the front lines awed by material and moral progress, for we have the good fortune to be part of what is probably the greatest improvement in life expectancy, nutrition and health that has ever unfolded in one lifetime.

Worth reading in full.

Have a great weekend.

Oh, wait!

What Trump Promised Oil CEOs As He Asked Them To Steer $1 Billion To His Campaign

The headline says it all.

If only we had the video tape.  What an ad that would make.

RNGE

A sharp-eyed reader asked why I had sold my entire holding of 333,333 shares, as per this filing Wednesday.

I have not.  These were shares bought direct from the company which the company is now in the process of registering with the S.E.C. so that they can be freely sold someday.  I have no intention of selling them any time soon.  Also, the form should have reflected the substantially larger number of shares I had previously bought on the open market.  I’m not selling those, either.

As noted in the past, this is a speculation, to be undertaken only with money you can truly afford to lose!

 

Good News:

BATTERIES
Storage Prices Coming Way Down — making wind and solar all the more economical.

BEES
Honeybees Invaded My House and No One Would Help — good news, because it turns out honeybees are not on the brink of extinction.

BIDEN
Georgia ex-Lt. Governor, lifelong Republican: “I’m voting for a decent person I disagree with on policies over a criminal defendant who has no moral compass” (30 seconds).

BONUS
Biden v. Trump on Health Care (30 seconds).

 

Opening Our Eyes To Hindsight

The rule of law — and democracy — are mortal.

We’ve already begun losing the rule of law.

Democracy is already faltering.

Rachel Maddow grabs us to make sure we’re paying attention.

“Democracy is losing the propaganda war,” writes Anne Applebaum in The Atlantic:

Autocrats in China, Russia, and elsewhere are now making common cause with MAGA Republicans to discredit liberalism and freedom around the world.

And boy are they succeeding.  Not reading her piece — or watching Maddow — won’t make these huge threats any less real.

All we need do for democracy to triumph is win big in November.

Help?  Volunteer?

Unlike the Germans and Italians who freely elected wannabe dictators (who then soon were) nearly a century ago, we have the benefit of hindsight.  We can see what happened.

[If Monday’s short post — Part II of “Should Joe Debate?” — arrived garbled, as it seems to have for some of you, please try again.  It’s been fixed.]

 

They’re Mad As Hell

Everyone agrees our Southern border is in crisis.

Only Trump stands in the way of fixing it.

Rosa DeLauro is mad as hell (60 seconds).

Everyone knows Trump is guilty of trying to overturn a free and fair election . . . and of stealing government documents he lied to the FBI about not having.

Thanks to Merrick Garland, those cases may never come to trial.

Bill Maher is mad as hell (7 cathartic minutes).

And then there’s Gaza.

So much reason to be mad — and cry.

If only Hamas had accepted Gaza’s 2005 victory — Israel’s unconditional retreat — and built a prosperous society instead of an underground war machine (60 seconds).

Hamas hiding among and below innocent women and children, intentionally causing tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians to die, is beyond horrible — but not genocide.*

Because yesterday was Holocaust Remembrance Day, it’s worth remembering that the Brits basically carved out a Jewish state after two-thirds of Europe’s Jews were purposely exterminated.  That’s genocide.

 

*About 2 million Palestinians live in Gaza, 2 million in Israel (as citizens, 10 of them in the Knesset), and 2 million-plus in the West bank.  Because Hamas has used Gazans as human shields, one-third of one percent of the Palestinian civilians in the region have died.  Again: beyond horrible.  But not genocide.

 

Should Joe Debate? II

In response to my thoughts last week:

Ed Costello: “Why not refuse to debate unless Trump admits he lost the 2020 election?”

→ So simple.  And brilliant.

If he “agrees” — and then, once the debate starts, says something Trumpian like, “I only said that so I could get Joe on stage and get the truth out to the people” — the moderators should be prepared with endless questions on just this one topic (“why did your own head of election security, Chris Krebs, call it ‘the most secure election in history?’ after all, you told us repeatedly that you appoint only ‘the best people’ — did you appoint an incompetent to this important job?” . . . “why did all 62 judges, many of them your own appointees, in all 62 cases you brought alleging election fraud, throw you out of court?” . . . “you have called former vice president Dick Cheney a ‘great guy,’ yet in light of the way you have conducted yourself since you lost the election, he says that ‘in our nation’s 247-year history, there has never been an individual who is greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump’ — can you explain why?” . . . and on and on) until his head explodes.

Kathleen M:  “Debates would need to be done without an audience with questions being asked by League of Woman Voters or a suitable other group of regular citizens in order for me to even consider Joe Biden standing on the same stage with the current defendant.”

→ That, too.  And as proposed in the piece I linked to last week, the moderator would have to have a mute button to prevent either candidate from interrupting the other.