In fast-moving current events as I write on March 1, 2026, the United States (executive branch, which is unconstrained in this moment by the other supposedly co-equal branches or public opinion) has launched an unprovoked military attack on Iran, in crystal clear violation of the UN Charter and domestic law. Theoretically, there are mechanisms both international (International Criminal Court) and domestic (impeachment – which can apply to cabinet members, agency heads, and federal judges in addition to the President and Vice President; and court martial which applies to military officers who follow illegal orders) that could eventually hold the criminals involved accountable for their crimes. Lots of people have lots to say and we will see how this unfolds. I am just documenting that I am present at this particularly sad moment in history.
Most frightening and/or depressing story: I hadn’t heard of mirror life, technology we apparently have right now which can destroy all life on Earth. This new, shocking, theoretically existential threat narrowly edged out the usual stream of depressingclimate disaster news, the existential threat known to be currently unfolding, but which I suppose I am somewhat desensitized to.
Most hopeful story: Falling consumer prices in China might represent a new industrialrevolution analogous to the age of railroads and electricity in the west in the late 1800s, rather than a textbook financial recession which seems to be the (propaganda-tainted?) conventional wisdom. I put this in the win column because if it is true, I am hopeful we will see it spread peacefully to the rest of the world rather than representing a threat.
Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: Ray Kurzweil predicts broad consensus that Artificial General Intelligence has arrived by 2029 (defined as AI equal to the leading experts in all fields), “longevity escape velocity” in 2032 (which would reverse the US slipping in recent decades), universal basic income in the U.S. sometime in the 2030s, and the Singularity in 2045 (defined as 1000X human intelligence – always pronounced TIMES according to me), but most importantly and the only thing that truly matters, robots doing my dishes in a couple years.
Well, I seemed to be in a political mood in January. I try to stay on the policy side of the line, but that is hard when bad politics makes good policy impossible. Inspired by a Nate Silver post, I took a look back at what I see as key moments in the last 25 years of U.S. history, and there were just so many that were on a knife edge and ended up going the wrong way, in my view. Maybe there are other universes where things went better, but remember my scientific theory that once they make a Spiderman movie about a scientific theory, it is almost certainly wrong. I find it depressing how we got here, but there is no sense crying over it. We need to learn from the past yes, but then face up to the present moment and start picking up the pieces from where we are.
Most frightening and/or depressing story: Evidence is crystal clear that sabotaging R&D spending is a very effective way to sabotage economic growth and progress. Attaboy to the fools, assholes and traitors currently in nominal charge of the U.S. government. Meanwhile, if a more rational administration ever takes hold, research on learning curves might provide some clues on where to concentrate our efforts for the greatest gains.
Most hopeful story: New York City congestion pricing was a hard-won U.S. transportation policy win in 2025. This is just good, economically sound urban policy that would be apolitical in a more rational world.
Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: I reviewed book reviews from 2025, one of which was Ezra Klein’s Abundance (not the 2012 book Abundance by Peter Diamandis, which while I am not a huge fan I continue to be puzzled how Ezra Klein could either not be aware of that book or intentionally choose to name his book the same thing.) I still find it hard to summarize that book in a sound bite, which would need to be done if it were ever going to serve as the basis for a political campaign. But here is an attempt: (1) Continuously review and streamline federal regulations, (2) increase public and private investments in critical technology and infrastructure, including recommitting to clean energy, and (3) address market failures in housing, health care, and education. #3 is a doozy of course, but the un-sexy answer just has to be understand and implement the latest evidence-backed policies. I would think ramp up housing supply, Medicare for All, and free (tax-funded) college or trade school for all. And um, if we want a chance for any domestic agenda to succeed, we also need serious plans to manage international risks including war, ecosystem collapse, famine, and massive refugee flows that may be coming. Now, I just want to acknowledge that there is a rosy future scenario where AI magically solves all these problems. The way that could work is that technological progress and economic growth suddenly pick up so drastically that we are awash in cash and resources to the point that even the wildly suboptimal operations of our dysfunctional political system are adequate to solve the problems. I don’t think it is safe to put all our eggs in that basket! We better assume that we will need to continue doing the hard work of allocating scarce resources to manage difficult problems for the foreseeable future.
I think of this thing as not so much a prediction but an indicator of what political and business leaders are thinking and talking to each other about. The results seem to be very sensitive to whether people are asked about a 1-, 2-, or 10-year horizon. So I don’t know that the rankings make a lot of difference. Rather, it makes sense to look at a “top 10” or so. Chillingly, more than half of poll respondents seem to think there is an “elevated” to “looming” risk of “GLOBAL CATASTROPHE” within the next 2-10 years. Within 2 years, they are most worried about “geoeconomic confrontation” while within 10 years they identify environmental disaster as the top 3 worries – “extreme weather events”, “biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse”, and “critical change to earth systems”. “State-based armed conflict” (would it be simpler to just call this WAR?) is also up there somewhere near the top. “Inequality” doesn’t rank as high, but the analysts identify it as the risk that is most “interconnected” with the others.
How pathetic for our species and civilization that our leaders believe environmental disaster is looming a decade out, and yet they are starting wars with one another on our behalf in the present, when they know damn well they need to be cooperating to head off the environmental disaster that is going to affect all of us, the winners and losers of today’s useless wars alike. People don’t want war, so how are we putting people in leadership positions over us who are failing us so utterly?
Now is the time on the show when I summarize my monthly wrap-up posts and try to draw some conclusions.
2025 Post Roundup
Most frightening and/or depressing story of each month:
JANUARY: Longreads #1 stories of 2024 – this is a lookback but I posted it in January and it has a ton of interesting stuff. Interesting, frightening, and depressing. The story on Israel’s dispatching of air strikes based on statistical analysis is the single most disturbing article I read last year. Everyone should read this article and decide for yourselves where you stand. Another one is called “When the Arctic Melts”. Even as the shadow of fossil fuel propaganda once again overspreads the land, I am afraid the globe could be approaching an irreversible tipping point into runaway warming and sea level rise. Let’s hope the world can afford another four-year round of U.S. backsliding and then pick up the pieces, but I am not sure.
FEBRUARY: Donald Shoup died in February. He was a pioneer in parking economics, which doesn’t sound all that sexy, but his clear explanations really helped me see the light of what walkable, livable, healthy and low environmental impact cities can potentially be. What they can’t be is low-density and automobile-oriented. I put this in the depressing category both because I am sad at his passing, and because I do not see these trends going in the right direction.
MARCH: The U.S. might be headed forrecession. Recessions happen, but this would be the first one where the U.S. government obviously and counter to all competentadvice throws a monkey wrench in a perfectly healthy economy, that I know of anyway. Lest we think GDP growth is only a statistic that does not affect real people, the U.S. poverty rate among children was 5% in 2021 and rose to over 13% in 2023, when the economy was doing relatively well as measured by GDP growth and employment, but Congress forced the end of Biden’s tax credits for parents. So pop quiz: force a completely unnecessary recession by choice and will more or less children suffer? Shame shame shame on the Trump administration and Congress you stupid assholes.
APRIL: Maybe an irreversible methane tipping point is happening. This could be the scariest thing out there short of nuclear war.
MAY: The India-Pakistan conflict seems to have died down a bit (or did the media outlets I pay attention to just lose interest?). But both the potential nuclear conflict and the long-term loss of glacial ice billions of people depend on are terrifying.
JULY: In case we still don’t have enough feedback loops to worry about, loss of Antarctic ice could also trigger volcanoes under Antarctica.
AUGUST: A gigantic incoming object could be the alien ship that will put us out of our misery. Okay, probably not. The interesting and scary thing is that as our ability to look at the nearby universe improves, we are seeing more surprising stuff. But how are we supposed to think about let alone do anything about a very low probability existential threat like this one? We are not even responding to the “somewhat likely” (nuclear war, pandemics) and “likely happening right now” (a climate tipping point leading to future collapse) existential threats in front of us. I suggested that the tipping point will be called in retrospect, and 2025 might be a nice round number for the history books.
SEPTEMBER: We are most likely on a path to the AMOC tipping point. I distinguished between the tipping point, which is when collapse becomes inevitable, and the actual collapse itself. These are separated in time, which means the tipping point may only be called in retrospect when it is too late to prevent the collapse. This is why being “on the path to the tipping point” is important, because we can still do something.
OCTOBER: The evidence for an increasing worldwide collapse in insect diversity and abundance continues to mount. What’s that you say, you don’t actually like bugs? Well, they are the base of the food chain (after plants) and generally indicators of biodiversity and healthy ecosystems more broadly. That’s right, the proverbial “canary in the coal mine” may have actually been a cockroach. There was also news this month that another “planetary boundary” has been breached. The biodiversity one that would cover insect collapse was already breached a long time ago, and this new one has to do with ocean acidification. Only two more to go for a perfect score of 9/9!
NOVEMBER: Wait, I actually had trouble coming up with a frightening or depressing story this month! It’s not because I was in a particularly good mood. Okay, I’ll go with all the terrible things identified in Project Censored’s yearly roundup of terrible things. These include PFAS, melting ice sheets, police violence, and the generally sorry state of the Native American community.
JANUARY: I noted that congestion pricing in New York City could provide a glimmer of hope that transportation in the United States could begin to implement 21st century international best practices. (Yes, I am aware the century is a quarter over already – one more indicator of the U.S. slipping towards the bottom of the world’s more advanced nations.) Unfortunately, as I write this on February 13 we see the President himself actively interfering in this state and local matter. “States’ rights” for thee, not for me (i.e. only when it’s convenient to some disingenuous argument).
FEBRUARY: The fool in the White House and the devils whispering in his ear can weaken enforcement of the Civil Rights Act, but they can’t actually make laws go away. They can try to ignore them, and then we will see how effective our court system and third party legal action can be at activating the checks and balances we are supposed to have. The other potential players are congress and widespread public action, and these do not seem to be active at the moment.
APRIL: 3-30-300 is a nice, simple idea. “you can see 3 trees from your window, your neighborhood has 30% tree canopy cover, and you are within 300 m of a half-hectare park.” Sure, you have to figure out some details and make some sustained effort over time to implement simple ideas. Still, not rocket science. Combined with the “15 minute city”, this is a pretty good urban planning philosophy that should be communicable.
MAY: I came up with four keys to my personal happiness in the moment: sleep, coffee, exercise, and down time. What, no family, community, career accomplishment, or making a lasting difference in the world you ask? No, those are about reflecting on life satisfaction, not being in the moment. No “fun”? Well, my idea of fun may be different than your idea of fun. I wish you joy and happiness as you pursue your idea of fun, only try to have some empathy and don’t force your own idea of fun on others. So there.
JUNE: This is the best I can do – Biden wasn’t able to take political credit for his infrastructure and energy transition accomplishments because his accomplishment was getting money appropriated for them, whereas implementation of these will be painfully hard and painfully slow. (Yes, I believe based on evidence and logic that investments in infrastructure and energy production that do not destroy the biosphere are good ideas.) But at least part of this agenda will be implemented over time, and Trump is spending substantial energy of his own only partially rolling back these programs.
SEPTEMBER: Spain has been so successful at rolling out solar power that the price of solar power has “collapsed”. I’ve been beating a drum lately that economic incentives have tipped in favor of renewable energy worldwide and this fact is being largely hidden from us in the US by propaganda.
OCTOBER: The seems to be some mixed evidence, tainted with industry and government propaganda in my opinion, but overall there are some hopeful signs that the global transition to renewable energy is real. It may be too slow and too late to avoid consequences, but it may also avoid the worst possible consequences.
NOVEMBER: RENEWABLE ENERGY IS NOW CHEAPER THAN FOSSIL FUELS, AND ANYBODY WHO CLAIMS OTHERWISE IS EITHER MISINFORMED OR LYING. Note I said “misinformed”, because I try to be nice and “ignorant” is not a nice word. But they are synonyms. Despite the propaganda coming from the U.S. fossil fuel industry, government, and press, the renewable energy transition is happening and the fossil fuel stranded assets problem (for that industry) is real. Speaking of propaganda, Noam Chomsky is 96, still writing, and surer than ever that people don’t want war and only acquiesce to it because of the propaganda machine.
DECEMBER: From Our World in Data, carbon dioxide emissions in the US and most developed countries peaked around 2006 and have been falling. Global internal combustion engine vehicles peaked around 2018, while electric vehicle sales are rising. Renewable electricity generation is growing exponentially as costs of existing technology fall, and there are some promising advances in materials science that could improve wind turbines and batteries. There is hope for fusion power, although it still seems to be the proverbial two decades away.
Most interesting story of each month, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both:
FEBRUARY: I continued to follow the emergence of AI agents in February. Outside the bananas state of U.S. and global geopolitics, this is one of the biggest things going on, or at least a big change playing out quickly. Even a “singularity watch” item – I’m going to give a 5% chance this is the start of the singularity. Hopefully not the Terminator version. But has anyone noticed we now have Starlink and Stargate – these even sound like Skynet. We already had Operation Warp Speed of course. What puzzles me is that conservatives usually don’t like science fiction because they lack imagination. So either somebody is a science fiction fan, or more likely they have these words in the backs of their minds from indirect exposure to science fiction, and now they think they thought of them.
MARCH: Prospera is a weird quasi-autonomous city-state nominally inside Honduras run by crypto-currency weirdos.
APRIL: I made what I would consider a “common sense” trade policy proposal. “I generally support…free trade. But if we are going to trade freely, we need a safety net for people who are hurt. We could do this with generous unemployment benefits and retraining programs. We could help people relocate to places with jobs. We could provide much better communication and transportation infrastructure allowing them to commute regionally to places with jobs. We could educate their children so they are prepared for the jobs of tomorrow. We could institute a value added tax on our productive, growing economy and use it to provide services or cash to workers. We could invest even more in research and development to make our economy even more productive and growing. We could invest in neighboring countries to help them be more productive and growing, import cheap stuff from them, and reduce some of the migration pressure on our borders.”
MAY: The U.S. approach to R&D is a partnership between government (through both grants and procurement power), universities, and the private sector (historically, including regulated monopolies like Bell Labs). Other countries including China have copied this model somewhat successfully, and our own government taking a monkey wrench to our own system that has worked so well seems like a really stupid idea. First we need to stop the damage and then let’s hope it can be repaired.
JUNE: A Minimal Quality of Life index has been developed which is intended to better capture the cost of living real working families and parents are experiencing.
JULY: Policies to increase housing supply in the most economically dynamic cities can theoretically accelerate economic growth, since housing supply is not expanding fast enough and is therefore holding economic growth back. A lot of discussion has been focused around zoning, which is a local matter. But I offered some additional suggestions: investment in better transportation and communication infrastructure to reduce the friction of working across distances between homes and offices, effectively enlarging housing markets. And serious investments in construction productivity, which has been flat in the U.S. for decades. Ideas include more factory-based modular components. The U.S. has tried and failed at this before, but of course China is now leading the way. AI should also be pretty good at construction scheduling and logistics. The U.S. is somewhat successfully partnering with Korean ship-building expertise, at least on a small scale.
AUGUST: Designer babies are here, and the trend towards the rich and powerful accelerating their own evolution (and a few governments making this available to the masses) can only accelerate.
OCTOBER: The seems to be some mixed evidence, tainted with industry and government propaganda in my opinion, but overall there are some hopeful signs that the global transition to renewable energy is real. It may be too slow and too late to avoid consequences, but it may also avoid the worst possible consequences.
NOVEMBER: The Tyranny of Small Decisions posits that many small but well-intentioned decisions made at inappropriately low levels within an organization can cause it to stray from its mission.
DECEMBER: BBC lists 25 most important scientific ideas of the 21st century. Highlights include various genetic technologies (stem cells that don’t come from babies, mRNA vaccines, tissue engineering for human organ transplants), attribution analysis, and of course large language models. Science magazine echoes some of these adds gene editing, new antibiotics, and progress on heat-resistant rice strains as 2025 breakthroughs.
Brilliant(?) Synthesis
The world is slowly bending the curve on emissions and energy. One theme that emerges is the clear arrival of economically viable renewable energy technology. All the international treaty-making and policy hand-wringing might have accelerated us toward this point, but it is now technology and markets that are finally in the driver’s seat. I was surprised to learn that peak emissions have already occurred in the U.S. and other developed countries. Emissions are still high and growing in developing and middle income countries including China and India. This makes sense – for all we hear about China being so advanced, their levels of income, consumption, and pollution at the individual level are still catching up to western countries. This is both good for them and terrifying for the world because China and India (add Indonesia, Brazil, others here if you want to) have such vast populations that their impact is going to dwarf anything the rest of the world does going forward. They are going through the same transition that the US, UK, Germany, Japan, or whatever western countries you want to name went through, just later in history, on a vaster scale, and when our planet’s ability to absorb the impact is mostly used up. So this is how China can simultaneously be the world leader on clean technology and the world’s largest creator of world-destroying pollution. Now, we want Africa to eventually develop and lift another 1.5 (headed to 3!) billion people out of poverty, but clearly we have to find lower-impact ways to develop if our civilization is going to survive.
But we could end up calling 2025 as the tipping point to disaster in retrospect. Getting over that technology and cost-effectiveness hump is nice, but it may still be too little too late to avoid disaster. An important concept I discovered/reminded myself about in 2025 is that a tipping point is not the point where a system changes drastically, but the point where that change becomes inevitable. As such, we may call the tipping point only in retrospect. The gradual increases in heat and sea level – overlaid with extreme events like heat waves, floods, fires, and storms – may have put us on a path towards unavoidable destruction of our food supply and our urban areas. That’s my elevator pitch for how climate change is hitting home – climate change is coming for our food and it’s coming for our houses. Add to the trends and extreme events the possibility that we have crossed a threshold leading to runaway methane releases and major shifts in ocean circulation patterns. We may look back and determine that the 2020s were when these outcomes became inevitable due to our failure to act quickly enough or on a broad enough scale. And if we decide the 2020s or mid-2020s are when this outcome became inevitable, why not pick 2025 as a nice round number when the climate shit hit the fan?
Earth’s ecosystems are past the tipping point. Yesterday’s environmentalism has sort of evolved to focus almost fully on climate change, but intertwined with the climate crisis is the destruction and destabilization of Earth’s ecosystems, from the oceans to tropical forests. It is hard to make that elevator pitch that draws a straight line from ecosystem and biodiversity collapse to human wellbeing. A reliable food supply is certainly part of it, and yet our industrial food system is somewhat decoupled from natural ecosystems. To me this is a moral failing of our species and civilization, and it is just deeply sad. While there still might be a theoretical possibility to head off the worst possible damage to our climate, the damage to our ecosystems cannot be reversed at this point. Of course, this does not mean we should give up. We can always take action to make the outcome less bad than it could have been. We have a moral responsibility to do so, but I do not see much public or political energy directed at this issue. And maybe it makes sense to focus on the relatively simple to understand issue and relatively straightforward solutions (which is not to say easy!) to greenhouse gas emissions. Getting emissions under control is certainly necessary to protect ecosystems though not sufficient.
While we are focused on emerging artificial intelligence technology, biotechnology has matured all around us. We are hearing that artificial intelligence may be a bubble waiting to pop in the near term, a promising boost to productivity that will raise all boats in the medium term, and either a ticket to utopia or an existential threat in the (somewhat?) long(er?) term. But while so much attention is focused on this emerging technology, biotechnology has sort of matured and arrived fully all around us. We can now edit the genes of embryonic and adult humans, grow genetically engineered human body parts in pigs and then implant them back in humans, and genetically engineer vaccines. In agriculture, genetic technology has some promise to overcome the downward pressure on our food supply caused by global heating and extreme weather. The fact that all this technology is available doesn’t mean it will automatically applied morally or that it will be accessible evenly across countries and demographic groups, of course. Biotechnology is improving many of our lives and has potential to improve all human lives, but reaching that potential and managing the risks is going to vary depending on where you are and who you are.
It’s crystal clear the United States is in decline. The child poverty metric (13% in 2023) alone is damning. The state of Native Americans. Entrenched resistance to rational energy, transportation, housing, trade, and immigration policies with solid evidence of success in leading countries elsewhere in the world. Active, intentional weakening of Civil Rights Act enforcement. Corruption and propaganda (as I write this on January 4, it appears the US has invaded a sovereign UN nation-state to make it safe for US-headquartered multinational oil companies, who bankroll our elections). Intentionally destroying our research and development system which got us to the level of prosperity we enjoy today. The ineffectiveness of our legislative branch. We’re lucky at the moment that the stock market and incomes of top earners are allowing our economy to keep bumping along. If there is a financial panic or some external shock, I can envision the country going into a tailspin the current clowns and amateurs in charge will not be able to competently manage. Let’s hope we are lucky enough to bumble through the next three years without a major crisis, and then able to get better leadership in place. Chillingly, I probably said something like this in January 2018, and we only made it to the two year mark.
Whither war and peace? The stories that have come out about Israel using algorithms to target suspected Hamas associates and their families are chilling to me. As the use of big data and artificial intelligence becomes more and more widespread in all aspects of our economy and lives, this is one cautionary tale of how it can be used by governments in immoral ways. I see the technology as neutral, but we clearly need safeguards on how it is applied in the worlds of surveillance, social control, and outright war. We also had several examples of direct military confrontations between nuclear-armed nation-states in 2025 – India and Pakistan, Israel and Iran, the U.S. and Iran; and by proxy the U.S. and western Europe vs. Russia. This is clearly very risky for the future of the whole world. I would also note that in all these cases except the Russia one, the supposed liberal democracy appears to be the more aggressive party. (The U.S. has also illegally invaded Venezuela as I write this.) So the parliamentary and presidential democratic systems we have in place are not acting as safeguards against cross-border aggression like we might have hoped they would. Luckily none of these conflicts seemed to come close to a nuclear exchange in 2025, but we can’t continue to rely on luck. We need renewed respect for sovereignty as a bedrock principle. We need to reverse the recent expansion of nuclear arsenals, and we need new talks and treaties on arms control and non-proliferation. And we need to get serious about the risks of biological and AI-powered cyberwarfare.
Construction Physics has done a deep dive on US pedestrian fatality numbers. I really appreciate data-based articles like this. I think the answer to the question in their headline, “Why are so many pedestrians killed by cars in the US?”, is that our street and road designs are about 50 years out of date compared to best practice elsewhere in the world, and auto-oil-highway industry propaganda hides this fact from us and encourages us to blame the victims. They don’t really talk much about this in the article. But the article focuses on a slightly different question, which is why have fatalities increased significantly over the last 15 years or so? They look at the evidence for the “SUV hypothesis”, increases in drinking and drug use among both drivers and pedestrians, and distracted driving due to cell phones. The evidence seems to support the SUV hypothesis best, and this makes sense to me.
Most frightening and/or depressing story: A gigantic incoming object could be the alien ship that will put us out of our misery. Okay, probably not. The interesting and scary thing is that as our ability to look at the nearby universe improves, we are seeing more surprising stuff. But how are we supposed to think about let alone do anything about a very low probability existential threat like this one? We are not even responding to the “somewhat likely” (nuclear war, pandemics) and “likely happening right now” (a climate tipping point leading to future collapse) existential threats in front of us. I suggested that the tipping point will be called in retrospect, and 2025 might be a nice round number for the history books.
Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: Designer babies are here, and the trend towards the rich and powerful accelerating their own evolution (and a few governments making this available to the masses) can only accelerate.
Rutgers has some facts and figures on defensive gun use in the United States. It is worth noting that “use” includes simply showing or telling someone you find threatening that you have a gun.
People who have experienced gun violence or know someone who has experienced gun violence, including suicides, are more likely to own guns.
8.3% of people who own guns have used them at some point. 4.7% showed the gun to someone, 3.8% told someone they had a gun (and they really did), 1.1% said they fired but not at a person, and 1.2% said they fired at a person.
The article doesn’t really come out and say it, but the gist is really that people who own guns are at greater risk of being harmed by guns than people who do not. This is counterintuitive and very few people are swayed by evidence these days, of course. The policy prescription: “Of primary importance will be efforts to shift the narrative around firearms to deemphasize DGU as a common outcome. In doing so, policy efforts can be decoupled from efforts to prioritize safety through a lens of self-defense and instead center on efforts to reduce the risk of injury and death associated with firearm access.”
I am writing this on Halloween, October 31, 2024. You may be reading this after the 2024 U.S. election, in which case you know what happened and I don’t!
Parts of this op-ed in Project Syndicate by a political science professor surprised me.
Others grew alienated during the grueling experience of the Trump presidency. For some Republicans (and independents), the last straw was his loyalty to himself over his party and country when it came to endorsing candidates and dealing with foreign allies and adversaries. For others, it was his pandering to evangelicals, his embrace of isolationism, and his indulgence of racist white nationalists. For still others, it was his attempt to steal the 2020 election, culminating in the uniquely shameful attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. Most Democrats and many independents, of course, have resisted Trump from the start.
Thus, the reason Trump isn’t running away with the 2024 election is Trump himself. It is difficult to escape the conclusion that the Republicans would be the favorites in a normal year with a normal candidate. But 2024 is not a normal year, because Trump is not a normal candidate.
The American electorate’s decision is being influenced both by the quotidian concerns that usually structure election outcomes and by one outsize personality. Never has the latter been such a key consideration. Hundreds of thousands of voters – perhaps millions – are putting aside their party loyalty, policy priorities, and complaints about current conditions to stand against a candidate they consider unfit for the presidency and unworthy of election. We will soon know whether politics as usual or unusual politics will carry the day.
I am surprised by the idea that a “more normal” Republican would be running away with the election. I think it is more likely that an “average Republican” would be hard to distinguish from Kamala Harris who, other than a mildly interesting personal history consisting of being a mixed-race childless cat lady, is a very “average Democrat”.
The Democrats delivered Social Security almost a century ago and Medicare more than half a century ago. These programs are hugely beneficial to voters. However, they have been around for so long that voters take them for granted and do not connect them to the Democratic Party. Since enactment of these programs, Democrats have made many promises to middle class voters and almost entirely failed to deliver on them. (Obamacare might be the biggest success from this period – it was certainly the absolute most that was politically possible at that moment, and much better than nothing, but also much less than fully satisfying. My family would have to pay about $2500 a month out of pocket for coverage, just for the privilege of then paying more when we go to the doctor. This is not affordable or acceptable to the people who need the program most, which are middle income people in the gap between corporate employer-provided coverage and piss-poor quality but free Medicaid for low income people.) So from the Democrats we get positive messages coupled with utter failure to deliver. The Republicans promise nothing and deliver nothing to the middle class. The Democrats’ failure to deliver allows Republicans to focus entirely on negative messaging around things like taxes and immigration, which connects the middle class with people and policies to blame for our misery. The connections are logically and empirically almost entirely false, but the misery is very real. So the election ends up being a referendum against a bland average administration people connect with that misery. My guess would be Trump’s personality turns people on and off in about equal measure, so I suspect substituting a bland average Republican for him (see 2020 Joe Biden) would still result in a near-tossup election.
Don’t get me wrong. My fingers are crossed for Kamala Harris and a Democratic majority in Congress. Another Democratic administration will not deliver for the middle class, but it is much more likely to inch us in the right direction on climate change and manage risk created by the various international crises. These are existential risks, and re-electing Trump just fans the flames of some very, very bad possibilities that could bring down our nation or even our global civilization. To deliver for the middle class, we would need to modernize our constitution, end the control of government policy by wealthy and powerful corporations and billionaires, and get rid of the current insurmountable barriers for candidates outside of the two dominant parties.
The accelerating arms race in hypersonic missiles and anti-hypersonic defensive technology was unleashed upon the world following the US unilateral decision in 2002 under George W. Bush to withdraw from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty between the Soviet Union and US.
The ensuing weapons competition has pushed aside risk-mitigation measures, such as expanding the New START nuclear arms reduction treaty, negotiating new multilateral arms control agreements, undertaking transparency and confidence-building measures, and puts in jeopardy a cornerstone of world peace, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty…
Unlike the USA’s most recent Nuclear Posture Review which asserted its right to a ‘first nuclear strike’ in “extreme circumstances”, China has a ‘no first strike’ nuclear weapon policy.
An objective outside observer, let’s say an alien since how could any resident of Earth be objective on this, might conclude that China is the more rational, less paranoid, and less belligerent party here. Does the leadership of China actually think there is a case where the leadership of the U.S. would launch a first strike? Hopefully not, but a little strategic empathy would seem like a good idea for the U.S. here – other countries are legitimately afraid of the United States. We have invaded sovereign states, interfered with elections, and broken treaties repeatedly, so we should be able to step into someone else’s shoes for a moment and begin to understand why they might not trust us and might fear us. Reducing fear and building trust could be some pretty good concepts to build a risk-reducing foreign policy around.
Obviously, there were plenty of goings-on in the U.S. presidential election campaign in August. I’ve talked about that elsewhere, and everybody else is talking about it, so I’ll give it a rest here.
Most hopeful story: Drugs targeting “GLP-1 receptors” (one brand name is Ozempic) were developed to treat diabetes and obesity, but they may be effective against stroke, heart disease, kidney disease, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, alcoholism, and drug addiction. They may even be miracle anti-aging drugs. But really, it seems like the simple story is that most of us in the modern world are just eating too much and moving our bodies too little, and these drugs might let us get some of the benefits of healthier lifestyles without actually making the effort. Making the effort, or making the effort while turbo-charging the benefits with drugs, might be the better option. Nonetheless, saving lives is saving lives.
Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: I did some musing about electricvehicles in August. The hype bubble seems to have burst a bit, as they did not explode onto the international commercial scene as some were hoping/predicting. This is partly because public infrastructure has not kept pace with the private sector due to sheer inertia, but I always detect a whiff of the evil oil/car industry propaganda and political capture behind the scenes. Nonetheless, just as I see happening with computer-driven vehicles, the technology and market will continue to develop after the hype bubble bursts. In a way, this almost starts the clock (5-10-20 years?) for when we can expect the actual commercial transition to occur. It will happen gradually, and one day we will just shrug, accept it, assume we knew it was coming all along, and eventually forget it was any other way. And since I seem to have transportation on the brain, here is a bonus link to my article on high speed trains.
