Author: A.T.

Flying, Crying, And Dying

Everybody dies sooner or later.

So far.

(As Bill Gates long ago explained: “Mortality is just a software problem.”)

But in the meantime?

Three items today: how to live, how to die, how to prevent dementia in between.

Let’s start with that one.

CRYING

A friend of more than half a century is strong of heart and fit — but slipping ever further away, unable to tie his shoes or remember where he is.  He’s lived a terrific life, his name attached to several worthy things he conceived and funded . . . but now?  The toll on his wife and kids is enormous; the sadness it brings his pals, profound.  When his cheerful caregiver told me recently that “he mentions you two or three times a day,” I wanted to cry.  (Man of steel though I am.)

So:

If you’re in your forties or fifties, let alone older — or if you have friends or relatives who are — would you please give Brain HQ a try?  And urge them to?

Based on a lot of peer reviewed research, it would seem that adding BrainHQ to your routine will dramatically lower the risk of your ever suffering my friend’s fate.  (Or, if you’re an aging quarterback, serve to improve your chances of making it to another Superbowl.)

The Wall Street Journal last week offered a demonstration of BrainHQ’s “Double Decision,” one of its 29 exercises.  But the best demonstration is just to give it 5 or 10 minutes a day for a week (say) to try it yourself.  Free.

They’ve added a nice human voice to guide you through.

FLYING

Another friend of long-standing directed the original “Grease” on Broadway years ago (“tell me more, tell more,” I hear you sing . . . or you could read his new book about it all).

Last week he was written up in the New York Times — for flying on the trapeze.

At 79.

DYING

In this podcast, Sam Harris interviews BJ Miller and Shoshana Berger, authors of A Beginner’s Guide to the End: Practical Advice for Living Life and Facing Death.  After listening (at 1.25 speed), I ordered the book.  My current plan is to live forever; but just in case.

 

We Beat Bulgaria!

I would quibble with some of the criteria used in these rankings, but it is a global report card worth pondering.  At root, much of our diminished standing stems from the gaping way that inequality here has widened over the past four decades.

That’s one reason we should be encouraged that the IRS is finally being funded to ensure greater compliance among wealthy individuals and corporations . . . which will provide more revenue to do things like reduce the cost of health care for ordinary Americans. Likewise, the 15% global minimum corporate tax the Biden administration has negotiated.  Likewise, modest student debt relief funded by a slight shift of resources from the plutocracy.  Likewise, the higher minimum wage.

Democrats support all these things; Republicans oppose them — even oppose an end to price gouging of diabetics.  But that’s what makes horse races.  And why my money, and vote, are on the Democrats 45 days from now.

And do you know who’s optimistic?  Michael Moore, here on Bill Maher.  Four minutes that will put wind in your sails.

PENNSYLVANIA 

George Will’s perfect column: Why Mastriano’s candidacy presents a special danger to the nation.  “His motives are frightening because they are pure: He has the scary sincerity of the unhinged whose delusions armor them against evidence.”

SPEAKER TRUMP

I’ve raised this specter before.  Here it is again, in The Hill: House Speaker Trump? It’s Not As Far-Fetched As You Think.

All we need to keep it from happening is to win.

Have you joined your local chapter of the League of Women Voters?  Joined Field Team 6? Joined Vote Forward? Done all you can to fund the organizing effort?

Six more ideas:

NextGen America: Register and engage young voters.

Midterm Madness: Get involved in local and state-wide races.

Swing Left: Attend a Volunteer Orientation.

Sister District: Help win state legislative races.

Power the Polls: Become a poll worker to help elections run smoothly.

Protect the Vote: Serve as a nonpartisan Election Protection volunteer.

Have a great weekend!

 

You’ve Doubtless Heard The News:

Attorney General James Sues Donald Trump for Years of Financial Fraud.

. . . “For too long, powerful, wealthy people in this country have operated as if the rules do not apply to them. Donald Trump stands out as among the most egregious examples of this misconduct,” said Attorney General James. “With the help of his children and senior executives at the Trump Organization, Donald Trump falsely inflated his net worth by billions of dollars to unjustly enrich himself and cheat the system. In fact, the very foundation of his purported net worth is rooted in incredible fraud and illegality. Mr. Trump thought he could get away with the art of the steal, but today, that conduct ends. There are not two sets of laws for people in this country; we must hold former presidents to the same standards as everyday Americans. I will continue to ensure that no one is able to evade the law, because no one is above it.” . . .

Here’s the 222-page complaint.

So much in it about his taking the Fifth, and fascinating specific examples.  E.g.:

. . . For example, they received a series of bank-ordered appraisals for the commercial property at 40 Wall Street that calculated a value for the property at $200 million as of August 1, 2010 and $220 million as of November 1, 2012. Yet in the 2011 Statement, they listed 40 Wall Street with a value $524 million . . .

For example, Mr. Trump’s own triplex apartment in Trump Tower was valued as being 30,000 square feet when it was 10,996 square feet. As a result, in 2015 the apartment was valued at $327 million in total, or $29,738 per square foot. That price was absurd given the fact that at that point only one apartment in New York City had ever sold for even $100 million, at a price per square foot of less than $10,000.  And that sale was in a newly built, ultra-tall tower. In 30 year-old Trump Tower, the record sale as of 2015 was a mere $16.5 million at a price of less than $4,500 per square foot . . .

Hundreds of pages of this.

A bully, an adulterer, a narcissist, a criminal, a liar, a cult leader, a con artist, a grifter, a Putin-admirer, a sore loser, an insurrection inciter, a Proud Boys ally, a sociopath, a megalomaniac, a guy who kept a book of Hitler’s speeches by his bedside, a xenophobe, a racist, a demagogue, and a national disgrace all walk into a bar together.  Oh, wait — I forgot he doesn’t drink.

 

Raise Your Hand If You Believe In The Rule Of Law

A BRIEF

A private citizen just can’t take Top Secret stuff from the White House, put it in his drawer, lie about it, and refuse to give it back.

Can he?

“If the attorney General sincerely believes in the rule of law,” argues Jennifer Rubin, “Trump is in deep trouble.”

She cites a brief filed by former Republican officials:

The district court’s analysis, which gave greater weight to the reputation of a former president than to the reputation of any other citizen, and greater weight to that personal reputation than to national security concerns, is fundamentally inconsistent with the basic tenets of U.S. law. . . . Under the court’s reasoning, its analysis would be different if the plaintiff were not the former president but a school teacher, police officer, or veteran who had taken classified information from a U.S. government facility and stored it in their home.

“In short,” she concludes, “the court cannot come up with a rule simply for Trump. That is what the rule of law is meant to prevent.”

A BOOK

From NPR’s review of The Divider (Trump in the White House 2017-2021):

. . . As a sumptuous feast of astonishing tales, it may hold wonderments indeed for those first contemplating the enormity of the Trump phenomenon. For them, this could be like a child’s first encounter with Harry Potter or an adolescent’s first taste of Tolkien.

But even a reader steeped in years of Trump coverage and well-versed in the precedent literature may be surprised at how compelling this narrative proves to be. The more one reads, the more one wishes to read.

The authors begin with Trump’s first day in the Oval Office, Jan. 20, 2017, the day of the inaugural address that became known as the “American carnage” speech. Upon first entering the Oval, Trump is reported to have been pre-occupied with the quality of the light available for picture taking.

This leads to a discussion of Trump’s careerlong obsession with appearances in general and his own in particular, asking aides: “‘How’s the look.”

The new president, we are told, “wanted to project himself as the hero America had been waiting for, a strong man for troubled times… Were these merely the weird quirks of a vain septuagenarian? Or the menacing affectations of an aspiring dictator?”

A BONUS

Dogs.

Woof!  Woof!

Their eyesight may be only 20/50, but they hear four times as well as we do and their sense of smell is from a thousand to ten thousand times better.

 

Your Marching Orders

RE-BOOST

I did, Saturday.

There’s Terrific News About the New Covid Boosters, but Few Are Hearing It

WALK

Six miles, Saturday.  (And I’m from New York.  I don’t amble. I don’t stroll. I walk.  Listening, Saturday, at 1,4 speed, to the audio equivalent of “page-turning” Empire of Pain.)

People Who Do This One Thing Every Day Have Half the Dementia Risk That the Rest of Us Do

Meanwhile, people who do 5 minutes of BrainHQ every day, or 15 minutes a week, may never have to worry about this at all.  Do we owe it to those who would be our caregivers to spare them this crushing future?

HELP!

Even Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post is beginning to see how dangerous Trump is.

And all those who vote with him, whether to block impeachment or to block investigation or to block voting rights — we can’t let them regain control of Congress.  Combined with their ill-gained control of the Supreme Court, it could well doom our democracy.  Seriously.  For real.  No joke.

Have you joined your local chapter of the League of Women Voters?
Joined Field Team 6?
Joined Vote Forward?

How about these?

NextGen America: Register and engage young voters.
Midterm Madness: Get involved in local and state-wide races.
Swing Left: Attend a Volunteer Orientation.
Sister District: Help win state legislative races.
Power the Polls: Become a poll worker to help elections run smoothly.
Protect the Vote: Serve as a nonpartisan Election Protection volunteer.

All those take time and effort.

This one takes under two minutes — but some sacrifice.

 

Book Club

But first, a little WheelTug press. It inches forward.

And now, a wildly varied list of books for your consideration:

Allen Carr’s Easy Way To Stop Smoking.

Josh:  “Just lost a beloved aunt to lung cancer—makes me more grateful than ever to you for giving me Allen Carr’s book and setting me on the path to being the non-smoker I am today.”

Giuliani: The Rise And Tragic Fall of America’s Mayor.

I am reading this with my actual eyes, and they grow wider with every page.  So much I didn’t know (like his cutting school and jumping a police line to shake JFK’s hand; his father’s violent criminal past).

Andrew Kirtzman’s previous Giuliani biography 22 years ago was good, too . . . but now?  Oh, my.

The Desperate Hours: One Hospital’s Fight to Save a City on the Pandemic’s Front Lines.

An Amazon “Editor’s Pick” — so don’t just take my word for it.

I have a friend who complained about the nightly 7pm pot banging to cheer hospital workers. That and his gym closure were what really bugged him about Covid.  He was probably right about the gym closure (and certainly right schools remained closed too long) . . . but boy does Marie Brenner’s reporting ever make me want to lean out the window and bang some pots of my own.

(And do you know what the head of the non-profit New York Presbyterian Hospital system earns?  Oh. My. God.)

Nudge.

I didn’t read it in 2008 (“since its original publication more than a decade ago . . . the book has given rise to more than 200 ‘nudge units’ in governments around the world and . . . [helped] us make better decisions for ourselves, our families, and our society”) . . . but I sure mean to read it now.

“The authors have rewritten the book from cover to cover, making use of their experiences in and out of government over the past dozen years as well as an explosion of new research .. . . It offers a wealth of new insights on a wide variety of issues that we face in our daily lives — health, personal finance, retirement savings, credit card debt, home mortgages, medical care, organ donation, climate change, and ‘sludge’ (paperwork and other nuisances we don’t want and that keep us from getting what we do want) — all while honoring one of the cardinal rules of nudging: make it fun!”

Three of my favorite “listens” this summer were autobiographies.

Bryan Cranston’s A Life In Parts. (From Malcolm in the Middle’s ridiculous dad to Breaking Bad’s Walter White.)

Billy Crystal’s Still Foolin’ ‘Em.  (Have fun storming the castle.)

Moss Hart’s Act One.  (A book I’ve been meaning to read since 1959, when my parents first brought it home.)  Kind of, for theater, what Shoe Dog is for business.

Finally . . . as recommended by Head Butler:

And There Was Light: The Autobiography of Jacques Lusseyran, Blind Hero of the French Resistance.

. . . For Jacques, early childhood was heaven. He ran. He played. God was “just there.” As he says, “Behind my parents there was someone, and my father and mother were simply the people responsible for passing along the gift.”

At 7, he had an accident in school. The shaft of his glasses stabbed his right eye and tore away the tissue. The left eye had sympathetic damage. The happy-go-lucky Paris schoolboy woke up, his eyes bandaged.

He was totally blind.

And he was completely happy.

Despair, he realized, was simply a matter of “looking the wrong way.” . . .

The world was still beautiful — indeed, more beautiful. Waves were “arranged in steps.” Voices could be caresses. Metaphor was everywhere: “Before I was ten years old, I knew with absolute certainty that everything in the world was a sign of something else.” So blindness was an obstacle, but it was also like a drug — it made other senses intoxicatingly intense.

. . .

High school. Academics. Friends. Girls. Happy days. His mother learned Braille. His father took him every week to the symphony.

“The world of violins and flutes, of horns and cellos…obeyed laws which were so beautiful and so clear that all music seemed to speak of God. My body was not listening, it was praying. My spirit no longer had bonds…I wept with gratitude every time the orchestra began to sing. . . . Intelligence, courage, frankness, the conditions of happiness and love, all these were in Handel, in Schubert, fully stated, as readable as the sun high in the sky at noon.”

But we know what was coming: the Nazi occupation. Jacques was a patriot. At 17, he decided to organize his friends into a resistance unit. Wisely, they appointed him head of recruiting — his hearing made him a great judge of character. Later he and his friends started an underground newspaper; it would become France-Soir, the most important daily newspaper in Paris. [To buy the paperback from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]

His luck ran out in 1943, when a man who Jacques had grudgingly admitted to their group betrayed them all. After spending 180 days in a cell in France, he was transferred to Buchenwald. Two thousand other Frenchmen were sent with him. Fifteen months later, when the Nazis were defeated, only thirty of them were still alive.

“I was nothing but skin and bones, but I had recovered. The fact was I was so happy, that now Buchenwald seemed to me a place which if not welcome, was at least possible. If they didn’t give me any bread to eat, I would feed on hope… It was the truth. I still had 11 months ahead of me in the camp. But today I have not a single evil memory of those 333 days of extreme wretchedness. I was carried by a hand. I was covered by a wing. One doesn’t call such living emotions by their names. I hardly needed to look out for myself…I was free now to help the others; not always, not much, but in my own way I could help. I could try to show other people how to go about holding on to life. I could turn toward them the flow of light and joy which had grown so abundant in me.”

“Joy doesn’t not come from outside, for whatever happens to us, it is within,” he concludes. “Light does not come to us from without. Light is in us, even if we have no eyes.” . . .

Talk about the happy gene!

Have a great weekend.

 

Robert Reich’s Question

In The Guardian:

I have a serious question for people who have power in America, and who continue to deny the outcome of the 2020 election and enable Trump’s big lie: what are you saying to yourself in private? How are you justifying yourself in your own mind?

I don’t mean to be snide or snarky. I’m genuinely curious.

If you hold public office and deny the outcome of the 2020 election, are you telling yourself that despite the overwhelming evidence that Biden won and the lack of evidence of fraud, you still genuinely doubt the outcome?

But you must know that 60 federal courts have found no basis in Trump’s claim, nor have any so-called state “audits” and even Trump’s own attorney general found the claim baseless.

Or are you telling yourself that it will soon be over – that Trump will fade, that the big lie will disappear, that your party and America will soon move on?

But you must know you’re wrong. The big lie is growing. It has metastasized into a cancer that’s dividing the nation and devouring our democracy.

Or are you telling yourself that you have no real choice but to support the lie if you want to keep or obtain political power?

Even if true, is power so intoxicating to you – so important as an end in itself – that you’ll do anything for it?

Where will you draw the line? If Trump is reelected and imposes martial law? If he or another Republican president forbids public criticism of his administration? If he calls for violence against those who oppose him?

And what do you tell yourself about the measures your party is taking based on the big lie: suppression of votes, takeovers of election machinery, assertions that state legislatures can overturn voter preferences in the certification process, rejection of the January 6 committee’s findings?

You have sworn an oath to uphold the constitution. How do you defend yourself in your own mind?

I’m asking you, Kevin McCarthy. And you, Lindsey Graham, and Marco Rubio, and Rick Scott and Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz and Ron Johnson. And others.

And I’m asking those of you with significant power in the Republican party who have remained silent in the face of all this – such as you, Mitch McConnell, and you, Mitt Romney: how do you justify your silence?

And I ask those of you now running for office who are denying the 2020 election results and pushing other aspects of Republican authoritarianism – such as you, JD Vance, and Blake Masters, Mehmet Oz, Herschel Walker, Doug Mastriano, and Kari Lake: what are you telling yourself in private? How are you excusing yourself? Why are you even running?

And I ask the billionaires and CEOs who are bankrolling these people: how do you rationalize spending millions, even tens of millions, helping them get or remain elected?

I’m asking you, Peter Thiel, and you, Stephen Schwarzman, and Ken Griffin and Steve Wynn and Mike Lindell and Patrick Byrne and others: is this really the way you want to spend your fortune? Is this your legacy to the nation?

And I ask all the people making money off this rot – the TV hosts and producers and media moguls who are raking it in while poisoning the minds of America with bald-faced lies – what are you telling yourself in private?

I’m asking you, Rupert Murdoch, and you, Tucker Carlson, and you, Sean Hannity, and you, Laura Ingraham: how are you defending yourself to yourself?

I don’t expect you to answer me. This is a question for you to answer to yourself, alone and in private.

But before you do, may I have a confidential word?

Whether you’re a politician supporting the big lie, a billionaire backer of it, or a broadcaster who’s pushing it, it is not too late for you to get off the road you are on.

Yet if you continue to promote or enable this lie, you are undermining our democracy. The crisis you have helped create is worsening. You bear part of the responsibility for what comes next.

When the history of this trying time is written, future generations of Americans will judge your actions and your silences harshly.

They will recall your cowardice and your self-justifications. They will remember your lust for power and your moral blindness. They will recollect your unwitting ignorance or your witting failure to come to democracy’s defense in this perilous time.

Generations to come will sit in judgment about what you have wrought. And if the democratic experiment called America continues to unravel because of what you did or failed to do, you will live in infamy.

Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com.

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