I love Joe Biden and I cannot lie

Hattip: Colbert 

I happened to hear some blowhard saying that Joe Biden wasn't "great." 

Au contraire. [Historian Jon Meacham agrees.]

This isn't just a post about him dropping out* of the race.

It isn't even about how he stood aside in 2016 for the good of the party, then came out of retirement because he was (rightly) convinced he was the only one who could beat the incumbent pussy-grabber. 

For 2020 alone, he has to go down as one of the greatest Americans ever. No hyperbole.

It isn't just the big items his administration has accomplished, or the less-well-known ones. Or that he is a fundamentally good person.

Even more: people vastly underestimate the role Biden played in the Obama administration. For example, there is no way the ACA passes Congress without Biden's knowledge, connections, and efforts. It was a BFD. Especially for me.

* Long-time readers know I'm not jumping on the "Yay for Joe dropping out!" bandwagon. I've long been a fan. But I do ❤ him even more for what he did last Sunday. A True American Hero.

Brief (Political) PSA

Don't donate to a presidential campaign; your donation won't make a difference. Donate to a close local House race, or your state Senate or House candidate. (State governments are where issues like reproductive rights are decided.)

If you live in a blue or red area, this fund divides contributions up between close House races.

If you want to do something that isn't money, try Vote Forward.

If you know anyone who is indifferent to voting, this bit on JD Vance might change their mind.

Hey idiot!

This post isn't (just) bitching - there is an "action item."  😇 

tl;dr: Try Kindness as the Default.

I am regularly on guard against being one of those cranky old men who say everything was better when I was a kid (or, more accurately, when I was 24-25). And as I document regularly here, things are better, on average (for humans) than ever. Nostalgia is harmful!

But I will say that I do think that the average person in the US is meaner on the internet than in real life. (Again - all this is "on average" - there are people who are cruel assholes in real life.) 

Even people who purportedly want to make things better go about it in a way that is ... let's just say ... not How to Win Friends and Influence People. 

BTW, I have been so very guilty of this.

If you spend time online and are, like nearly everyone, subject to availability bias, you are likely to come away feeling disrespected and unwelcome, even by people who should be allies.

I've often come across:

• If you eat meat, you are an idiot!
• If you don't exercise [to the level I do] you are an idiot!
• If you drink alcohol, you are an idiot!
• If you don't eat [my version of] a whole-foods plant-based diet, you are an idiot!
• If you have a chronic disease, you deserve it, you idiot! (personal example, paragraph under graph).
• If you take "poison" from Big Pharma instead of being vegan, you are an idiot! 
• If you are a conservative, you are literally an idiot!
• If you have a car, you are an idiotic monster!
• If you have a kid, you are a monster!
• If you don't have a kid, you are a fool.
• If you support Biden, you are an idiot!

Etcetera.

Given this, we can each make the world better by acting with kindness. 

Even if kindness wasn't the best way to open people's hearts and minds, it is worth it to avoid creating more anger and hatred. (And it is the only rational response to realizing that no one has free will. We are rational, no?  😉 ) 

I talk about this more in Losing, along with the caveat that making kindness our default can be incredibly hard, if not impossible.  To quote Lyle Lovett:

But what would we be if we don't even try? 
We have to try.

And we get to live in a world with cinnamon rolls!

We interrupt this regularly-scheduled blog....

Aerial photo of a portion of the military aircraft boneyard here in Tucson. Each of those planes is millions of dollars. The B-1s were hundreds of millions of dollars. So this shows many, many billions of tax dollars slowly decaying in the Sonoran Desert. Photo by Holger Eckstein.
Warning: politics below.

This ad for Kamala seems pretty effective to me. 

Or this from the former Chair of the Republican National Committee:

Also, from economist Noah Smith: 

"AI isn't intelligent, it just regurgitates bullshit that it read somewhere" 

bro have you met human beings

(More on AI and humanity next week.)

Misc: Pits, Fargo, etc.

 

If you haven't already watched season 5 of Fargo, I'd suggest you don't. 

OTOH, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is a really excellent show. No other show has done a musical episode that I liked, other than Taxi. And the hair!

Speaking of hair: shave your armpits. I spent decades wasting antiperspirant on hair. DOH!

Don't tell anyone, but summer in Tucson is not like winter up north. Even on days with excessive heat warnings, I can go running early in the morning. (And swim anytime.) I've run when it was 102 here and it was way better than running when it was 82 in humid Maryland. 

In Pittsburgh, we once had three days when the windchill didn't get above 0 degrees F. Sleet, ice, blowing snow - that's not a question of "the right gear." 

But shhhhh - let everyone think it is so bad here!

The joy of learning (not really beach reading)

Much more interesting than politics. Even joyful!

Crash Course: The Universe (podcast with author John Green, The Anthropocene Reviewed, one of my favorite podcasts)

Existential Physics (really good book) 

Our home galaxy. Picture by a pal on their iPhone! 
Used w/o permission. Don't tell them!

Thanks, Effective Altruism Man!

Click for larger.   :-)

Just Spain Pictures

The world's largest wooden structure

Toledo Spain is nicer than Toledo Ohio. (Bench Plaza Espana, Sevilla.)

Sevilla Alcazar, which we got to visit with thousands of our closest friends.  
(But the pictures came out nice.)

Swifties!

We really liked Cordoba - much more than Sevilla.
The Mezquita (above and below) was a huge mosque. After the Xtians took it back, they built a cathedral in the middle of it. Very cool! (And not overrun with tourists.)

Noah Smith: Lifting humanity out of poverty is Job #1.

Mezquita in Córdoba, Spain
(Not related to post)

Somewhat related to "There are enough people," Noah Smith explains "The elemental foe." (A portion relevant because a friend's life was quite possibly just saved by antibiotics.) Excerpts:

I remember a particular scene out of a book that terrified me when I was seven years old. During an argument, some minor character talks about having been to Calcutta and having witnessed the desperate poverty there. He describes seeing beggars on the street, starving, covered in sores. That mental image stuck in my mind for weeks. Even as a child, having never myself known absolute poverty, I had an elemental terror of it. [I wonder if this book is A Fine Balance, a book that horrified me. -ed]

look at animal existence in the wild places of the world — a constant desperate struggle for survival, where populations are kept in equilibrium only by starvation and predation. That is the natural state of most life. Then look at how humans lived for the vast majority of our history — indigent subsistence farmers forever skating on the rim of famine. That is the natural state of preindustrial humanity.

When we spin fantasies of our collective past, we write about kings and princesses, because they’re the only ones who lived lives we could even remotely relate to today. Even then, the comparison is only approximate — the mightiest emperor of yesteryear had plenty to eat, but lacked antibiotics, vaccines, flush toilets, or air conditioning.

...

In the developed societies almost all of us manage to stay a few steps out of reach of that monster for our entire lives, and this fact is the wonder of the world. The artifice we have built to keep it at bay — vast farms blanketing whole continents and tended by fantastic machines, sprawling landscapes of ersatz caves to keep us sheltered from the elements, endless roads and rails, an empire of warehouses and supermarkets and pharmacies and just-in-time logistics — is the only meaningful thing that has ever been built within the orbit of our sun in billions of years.

It is industrial modernity — our single weapon against the elemental foe. It took centuries of blood and sweat to build, centuries of sacrifice by our sturdiest workers, our most brilliant inventors, and our most visionary leaders. And it is fantastically complex, far beyond the ability of even the most brilliant individual to understand in full; only collectively, at the level of society, do we shore up its fragile walls and keep it from collapse every day.

When smug intellectuals sneer at “economic growth” or “GDP”, they are denouncing the very walls of the fortress that has allowed them to live more than an animal existence. Safe within its sheltering bastions, they are free to indulge in the extravagance of pretending that the foe isn’t lurking right outside. They revel in the luxury of their material security by staging mock revolutions over differences in social status and relative wealth among the elite. With their bellies full of industrially grown sugars, they wander through pleasant fantasies of an imagined past — pastel-colored worlds filled with noble savages, happy indolent peasants, and glossy 1950s advertisements. Sometimes they imagine they could move to one of those fantasy worlds.

As shallow as all that sounds, it’s precisely to allow the luxury of shallowness that humanity struggled so long and hard. Yet we can never afford for luxury to become complacency, because the foe has not been defeated.

...

As you read these words, there are still billions of humans living outside the sheltering walls of industrial modernity — still grappling hand to hand with the foe. Less than half of humanity lives on more than $10 a day. Almost two billion live on less than $3.65. Two billion lack access to safely managed drinking water. Every day, 190 million people go hungry in India alone.

No redistribution of resources from Europe and America to India and Africa will fix this. The wealth of the world is not a fixed lump of treasure to be plundered; that is simply another daydream. Our true wealth is not gold and paintings lying in vaults in rich men’s mansions; it is the system of industrial production and logistics that is built and rebuilt and maintained every day by billions of human hands. Foreign aid is helpful, but it cannot substitute for economic development. Industrial modernity must be built out where it does not already exist.

...

It is our highest task to push that foe ever backward, to build out the fortress of industrial modernity, to reclaim the Earth for the safety and comfort of beings that think and feel.

PS re: Taste & Chicken & "Do No Harm"

Follow-up to yesterday:

Lewis Bollard of Open Philanthropy recently noted that plant-based chicken nuggets beat animal-based ones in a taste test (Column C; the top bar is the plant-based option). The plant-based tenders were very close.

But as I mentioned in yesterday's post, people don't seem to even try plant-based chicken when it is right in front of them and free. 

Combine that with the fact that One Step's "Please don't eat chickens" has as much impact on red meat consumption as chicken. 

Considering all this, I believe more strongly than ever that we should only ever discuss the horrors of chickens being factory-farmed. Everything else drives a net move from red meat to chicken.

Taste, Price, Convenience, Chicken

Tim Story: In This Small Spot 

#TeamChicken (look closely)

As I've written ad nauseam, most everything we* do as advocates increases the number of animals being factory-farmed. 

Watching the relentless increase for the past decades ...

...made supply-side advocacy more attractive. It was 2006 when I first started arguing that we should just give people what they want but plant-based. Make it easy for people to make a better choice - match the taste, price, and convenience of animal meat - and people will stop making "bad" choices. 

And in the past decade or so, more people and companies have adopted this view. (Impossible Foods founded in 2011; Beyond Meat in 2009, going public in 2019.)

Yet in terms of animals suffering, there is zero evidence of any impact of this work, either.

In the past few months, I spent many hours on different occasions in an airport lounge in Los Angeles. The food was free (can't beat the price). Plant-based was right next to the animal chicken (perfect convenience).  

Yet watching the buffet, not a single person even tried the plant-based chicken.

This is just an anecdote, of course, although it is supported by the statistics. More, from the Wall Street Journal Food Forum:

The McDonald's president was asked when we'll see more plant-based options at McDonald's. He responded by saying that no one wanted the McPlant, their customers don't want plant proteins from McDonald's, the consumer wants more chicken, and they now sell more chicken than beef at McDonald's.

I don't say this to be a downer. But if we want to have any chance of actually reducing suffering, I do think we need to start by being honest.  

And we need to explicitly give people reasons specifically not eat chicken.

* In the United States. However, as documented at the end of 2022, even meat reduction in Germany led to more animals being factory-farmed. The very latest data indicates this might be turning around. Even with the most optimistic projections, it will be a while before the number of animals killed per capita returns to where it was ten years ago.  

Weekend Q&A with Matthew Yglesias (warning: politics)

From here

Is your main worry about a second Trump term his personality? Near as I can tell, MY seems to have come around to some more traditional GOP ideas: a stricter immigration system with deportations fully on the table, a more stringent justice system generally, and a quicker approach to the break with the entitlement state that is going to happen anyhow?

I have significant concerns about Trump’s personality, but setting that all aside, I think that Donald Trump’s stated policy ideas are terrible, as evidenced by the fact that Tim G is not even stating them correctly.

1. I am glad that the Biden administration is moving to crack down on asylum abuses, but I support an increase in legal immigration, while Trump wants to cut legal immigration.
2. I support deficit reduction (almost certainly including entitlement reform), while Trump supports a massive increase in the budget deficit.
3. I care a lot about the interests of poor Americans, while Trump wants to raise their taxes.
4. To me, the intersection between points (2) and (3) is really hideously evil — it’s one thing to promote some economic sacrifice of poor people’s interests in pursuit of fiscal prudence, but to raise taxes on poor people while snatching away poor people’s social safety net while also increasing the budget deficit is so cartoonish that I’ve never met a Trump supporter who can articulate why it’s a good idea.

Broadly speaking, I would say that rather than having “come around to some more traditional GOP ideas,” I’ve just stuck with what I think of as traditional Democratic Party ideas. If my ideal point is roughly the Obama 2012 platform, then I think Biden 2024 is a bit to the left of that, while Trump 2024 is way to the right.

That said, I do also think that there is a rich guy demographic that likes the idea of making the poor suffer for their personal financial benefit and which is therefore unimpressed by this case for Biden. Those people, I think, are making an error by neglecting the downside risk to their interests of electing someone who might succeed in turning the whole federal government into a shakedown/extortion racket and gut the rule of law that’s been the foundation of American prosperity. Even there, though, I wouldn’t call this a question of Trump’s “personality.” In his stated political views, he frequently expresses admiration for various foreign thugs and strongmen. I think he has a considered zero-sum worldview in which he wants to be the top dog, and I think that’s bad.

There hasn't been a year where GDP has grown more than the deficit since 2007! 17 years, 3 presidents and no end in sight. You're recommendation in the past was to use deficit spending to boost the economy. This was done under Trump and now Biden. What is your recommendation now on how we move past the point of needing stimulus to generate positive economic growth?

This isn’t true. The deficit shrank as a share of GDP in 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2021, and 2022. It’s true that I advocated deficit spending to boost the economy when unemployment was high and inflation and interest rates were low. Now the situation is reversed, and we need deficit reduction, as I’ve been saying repeatedly. In terms of plausible political mechanisms, a bipartisan fiscal commission is probably the best path forward, though I wrote my personal favorite ideas here.

I will just repeat, though, that not only did the deficit grow faster than the economy during every year of Donald Trump’s presidency, he is running on proposals that would cause the deficit to explode. Biden’s deficit reduction proposals are not entirely aligned with my preferences, but his budget submissions do reduce the deficit. 

Weekend Travel Tips from Dynomight

Mezquita in Cordoba, Spain

Also in Cordoba, same day

 

View from the porch at our Cordoba Airbnb

Obvious travel advice, excerpts:

1. Who you go with matters more than where you go.
   
   
2. Cultures vary in lots of arbitrary ways—how loud to talk, how (or if) to wait in line [edit: in Spain, they don't give a darn about lines, boarding groups, entrance time, etc.], how close to stand to other people, how to [eat]... It’s good to be aware of these both as a producer of behavior (not offending others) and a consumer of behavior (not being offended when you’re not “supposed” to be).
   
   
3. You can wash clothes in the sink. I think basically everyone does this but doesn’t talk about it? [We had laundry in or near our lodging on our last trip, allowing us to live out of carry-ons for weeks.]
   
   
4. When looking at reviews, consider (1) sorting by new, (2) looking at the pictures (I told you this would obvious), (3) possibly—umm—possibly taking the ethnicity of reviewers into account, and (4) if one reviewer is really swaying you, checking out their history to calibrate for how effusive they tend to be.
   Despite being only 0.3% of the world’s population, Australians seem to make up 10% of overseas visitors everywhere on the planet. [This was definitely true of our latest trip, OMG!]
   
   
5. If you like isolated beaches or hikes, get up early. [+1!] In touristy places there are often nature things (hikes, beaches, views) that make it into guidebooks and become insanely crowded while there are almost equivalent things nearby that are nearly empty.
   
   
6. The human, after drinking liquids, must pee. So if you’re about to go somewhere where peeing is impossible, maybe don’t drink a lot of liquids. [Oh boy do I have a story about that from Spain....]
   
   
7. Time seems to speed up as you get older. And you wonder—is it biological, or is it because life had more novelty when you were a child? Travel partly answers this question—with more novelty, time slows way down again. [This was my seventh European trip, and the time dilation was the most intense of all. After two days, it felt like we had been gone for weeks; after a week, it felt like over a month. We both experienced this and commented on it regularly on the trip.]
   
   
8. My favorite part of travel is the perspective it gives on “regular” life.
   
   
9. Don’t confuse scarcity with value. A really good afternoon in the park (a really good one) is maybe about as good as it gets. [Sometimes!]

In Case You Missed It

Andrew Tobias on the campaign.

This isn't about Biden

Two words for you: 

Access Hollywood

How is anything that happens in 90 minutes in June remotely comparable to "Grab 'em by the ..." on a constant loop in October?

Then, for all of us to see, Tangerine Palpatine incited an attempted coup, a rebellion against the United States government. An insurrectionist mob that killed cops.

None of this is about Biden, his voice, his energy, his age. [More specifics from Andrew Tobias.]

This is 100% about us. 

Decency loses because too many on the left care more about being self-righteous than winning and actually making the world better. We spend our limited time and resources whining about things we can't influence instead of working to change what we can.

The other side does the opposite. 

I would bet that more people know about Biden's debate performance than know that Mr. "Grab 'em by the..." was found to have raped E. Jean Carroll. 

This is because so many people who supposedly oppose Republican policies will go out of their way to amplify anything against Democrats. 

The other side does the opposite.

Don't curse the ground. Get back up. Move ahead. Your personal opinion and posts and emails about what Biden should do are irrelevant... 

...except in so far as they take time and resources away from knocking doors, stuffing envelopes, putting up campaign signs, and sharing positive stories.