The Dive, 11/1/24
Your monthly compilation of what's what on global politics, American society, and an assortment of odds and ends
Quote of the Month
"I never forget that I live in a house owned by all the American people and that I have been given their trust... "I always try to remember that reconciling differences cannot satisfy everyone completely. Because I do not expect too much, I am not disappointed. But I know that I must never give up—that I must never let the greater interest of all the people down, merely because that might be for the moment the easiest personal way out. "I believe we have been right in the course we have charted. To abandon our purpose of building a greater, a more stable and a more tolerant America, would be to miss the tide and perhaps to miss the port. I propose to sail ahead. I feel sure that your hopes and your help are with me. For to reach a port, we must sail—sail, not tie at anchor—sail, not drift." - Franklin Delano Roosevelt, April 14, 1938
What I’m Reading:
1. Why Putin’s nuclear threats shouldn’t be taken too seriously
Why you should read it: British strategy scholar Lawrence Freedman argues in the New York Times that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s chronic if vague nuclear threats should not be taken as seriously as many policymakers seem to do at present.
“[Putin’]s problem is that he is unable to describe situations, however belligerent his rhetoric, in which using nuclear weapons would make sense… Why is that? None of the actions above [supplying tanks, fighter jets, and rockets to Ukraine] warranted such drastic escalation. Any kind of nuclear use would raise what is still supposed to be a limited ‘special military operation,’ in Ukraine, to a new, exceptionally dangerous level. Striking NATO countries or other countries with nuclear weapons would risk retaliation in kind against Russia (a point that is not likely to be lost on the populations of Moscow and St. Petersburg). Confining use to so-called tactical nuclear weapons, which have smaller warheads and are designed for battlefield use, against Ukraine’s frontline forces could prompt a direct NATO intervention, if only with conventional forces… Any nuclear use would lead to international outrage, some of which Mr. Putin might feel able to ignore, but less so if it came from otherwise friendly states such as India and China. He could try to limit that outrage by using just enough weapons to show he was prepared to cross the threshold — and could go further. But that could be embarrassing if the weapons turned out to be duds — many have not been tested for some time — or the delivery vehicles were shot down by Ukrainian air defenses.”
“If Mr. Putin really believes, as he claims, that Ukraine can operate precise Western weapons systems only with Western support, then that has already happened: Western precision-guided weapons have already been used against Russian targets on Ukrainian territory, including in the Crimean peninsula. If the problem is hitting targets inside Russia, then Ukraine has been doing that for some time with its homemade systems — and with increasing effectiveness. Ukraine even mounted a conventional invasion of Russia in August, in Kursk, from where it has yet to be ejected… There is very little about the current debate that is new. That is not to dismiss Mr. Putin’s threats as pure hot air and bluff but to recognize that nuclear use, while undoubtedly the most dangerous option, is not the most likely. It is not that he is averse to escalation; he has already escalated — from the full-scale invasion to ordering the annexation of sovereign territory, attacking energy infrastructure and bombarding civilian areas. He has sought to punish the West through energy crunches, campaigns of sabotage and subversion, and by stirring up trouble around the world. President Biden has still not agreed to Ukrainian requests to use Western missiles against targets inside Russia. This is partly because U.S. intelligence believes it would be a poor use of scarce resources, but also because of concerns about these other, nonnuclear forms of escalation.”
Why it matters: “Nor does this mean that there are no circumstances in which Mr. Putin might consider using nuclear weapons. The scenario he has mentioned most is one in which NATO forces are fighting alongside Ukrainian forces, a situation that could quickly put Russian forces on the back foot. That is a scenario in which we can imagine a desperate Mr. Putin being prepared to embark on a wider war. He finds himself caught in the classic paradox of the nuclear age. He does not consider himself irrational, but to make his threats credible, he has to rely on his adversaries’ thinking that he might be a bit crazy.”
2. Reports of globalization’s demise have been greatly exaggerated
Why you should read it: In a policy paper for the Aspen Institute, Council on Foreign Relations international economics expert Brad Setser observes that incessant talk of “deglobalization” obscures the reality that globalization persists—albeit in the unbalanced and unhealthy forms of tax avoidance, unregulated financial flows, and China’s monumental trade surpluses.
“The now-standard tale of deglobalization certainly contains a kernel of truth. Policies meant to accelerate economic integration across borders no longer command a clear political majority… But as a description of the current global economy, this paper argues that that narrative is incomplete at best and in many ways simply inaccurate. As significant as the political forces pushing for a less integrated world are, there are also strong forces pushing for further integration—even when further integration isn’t necessarily healthy… persistence of globalization may mask ongoing distortions in global trade, which impede the efficient direct flow of Chinese-assembled consumer goods—and Chinese components for US production—into the US market… more generally, we should make no across-the-board assumption that higher levels of globalization necessarily reflect more perfect markets and/or the elimination of arbitrary restrictions on cross-border flows. Rather, certain forms of integration stem from distorted incentives, and thus a fall in measured integration can be a sign of a healthier and more balanced global economy.”
“Any discussion of globalization ultimately leads to China… The recent surge in China’s exports and in its trade surplus stems primarily from China’s sharp domestic slowdown and its still-unresolved property market crisis. China’s internal demand growth has faltered, and it has instead relied again on exports and global demand to support its growth. This form of globalization is unhealthy to be sure, as it stems from unresolved imbalances inside China’s economy, but it is nonetheless globalization… China’s immense strength in global manufacturing has many sources, not least the fact that countries that import commodities generally do need to export other goods to cover their import bill. China also provides extensive government support to favored sectors in both the old and the new economies. Those subsidies have tilted the playing field to China’s advantage in several specific cases… A final point: the global economy cannot truly fracture along geopolitical lines into a ‘democratic’ bloc (led by the United States) and an autocratic bloc (led economically by China) so long as the autocratic world collectively runs an enormous surplus that only balances with a large deficit across the democratic bloc. This persistent imbalance, of course, also implies a net flow of capital from the autocracies to the democracies, even if that flow is now well-disguised… The negative externalities from China’s low level of consumption have been recognized for the last twenty years but still haven’t given rise to significant policy shifts. The negative global spillovers from China’s unresolved internal imbalances are once again increasing. A China that needs to export to make up for internal demand shortfalls will intrinsically create sectoral-supply dependencies even in the absence of sector-specific government intervention at a time when concerns about over-reliance on Chinese supply are real. Creativity is needed, including increased coordination across the G7. European policymakers share American concerns about Chinese sectoral overcapacity but haven’t been as forceful in linking overcapacity to oversaving.”
Why it matters: “China’s weakness is creating pressure globally for further but ultimately unhealthy globalization. The auto industry is a powerful example. China has gone from being a modest net importer of autos to being the world’s largest vehicle exporter—with a substantial lead over Germany and Japan—in just three years. Unbalanced interdependence with an economy as large as China’s will inherently create new forms of supply chain dependence; it also risks undermining investment in leading-edge sectors that are hoped-for sources of future growth and productivity. Common policy approaches among allies are the best response to these pressures, even if they are difficult to introduce in practice. Reform of the US corporate tax code is of course also not easy, but it offers a clear strategy to address concerns that the actual economic outcomes from the era of unfettered globalization generated outsized gains for the few while leaving many behind.”
3. Why Beijing wants another Trump presidency
Why you should read it: In the New York Times, former National Security Council official Rush Doshi makes the case that China’s ruling Communist Party would welcome a second Trump presidency that they believe would accelerate America’s decline.
“Beijing seeks to displace the United States from its global leadership position and is a formidable challenger. It is America’s first geopolitical rival to surpass 70 percent of U.S. G.D.P., exceed American industrial capacity and pull ahead in multiple technology sectors, such as electric vehicles, hypersonic weapons and nuclear energy technology. Absent corrective action, the United States risks falling behind China technologically, growing dependent on it economically and perhaps even suffering defeat by China’s military in the Taiwan Strait or the South China Sea. How the next U.S. president navigates the remaining years of this decisive decade will have far-reaching consequences for America and the rest of the world… [Chinese leaders] saw [Trump’s] term as an accelerant of what they believe to be American decline, and not without reason. Mr. Trump focused on U.S. commodity exports instead of long-term manufacturing strength. He alienated allies and partners, mishandled the pandemic response and repeatedly showed disregard for democratic norms. On China policy, he routinely put personal gain over America’s interests and undermined important steps his staff members took to compete with Beijing. As a result, Mr. Trump was widely mocked by Chinese citizens, who nicknamed him ‘Chuan Jianguo’ (‘Build-the-Nation Trump’ — the ‘nation’ being China). His administration led President Xi Jinping of China to declare that the world was undergoing ‘great changes unseen in a century’ as America fell from pre-eminence… As president, he squandered any leverage he gained from raising tariffs on China by accepting a bad trade deal that he hoped would help his re-election prospects. The deal allowed Beijing to keep its unfair practices and sell Americans manufactured goods if China promised to buy American commodities. More bad deals like that in a second term could cost millions of U.S. jobs, displace America in high-tech industry and accelerate decline by turning the United States into a commodity supplier dependent on Chinese manufactured goods.”
“Mr. Trump’s ideas on Taiwan are a blueprint for calamity. For decades, Washington has deterred China from invading Taiwan with a bipartisan policy of strategic ambiguity about whether the United States would defend the island. Mr. Trump threatens to weaken that deterrence. He said recently that Taiwan should pay the United States to defend the island, which is democratically ruled, while cavalierly casting doubt on America’s ability to do just that…Telegraphing a lack of U.S. resolve could one day embolden China to seize the island, which could spark a conflict that devastates the global economy. And Beijing has already taken notice: It is increasingly well known in Western diplomatic and scholarly circles that Chinese officials and think tank experts are quietly asking whether Mr. Trump might acquiesce to Chinese military action against Taiwan if he is re-elected.”
Why it matters: “China is America’s most formidable geopolitical rival in a century, and thanks to Mr. Trump’s term in office, leaders in Beijing are acutely aware of what he is about and how to manipulate him. They believe China is rising and America is declining. Electing Mr. Trump next month risks proving them right.”
4. How America’s economic recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic beat the rest of the world
Why you should read it: Brookings Institution economics experts Robin Brooks and Ben Harris detail the ways America’s economy outperformed its peers and competitors in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic—thanks in no small part due to decisions made to avoid permanent economic damage through fiscal stimulus.
“The COVID-19 pandemic-era recession was unlike any other in U.S. history. Beginning in February 2020, the recession quickly reached depths not experienced in roughly a century before abating just as fast—lasting just two months according to the National Bureau of Economic Research. A combination of unprecedented fiscal support, rapid deployment of vaccines, and structural economic resilience all helped jumpstart the swift and enduring U.S. recovery, with the economic expansion now entering its fourth year… The prior recovery was marred by economic scarring that emerged from insufficient fiscal support for households and businesses. Following the Great Recession, consumption was very slow to return to its precrisis level, causing a large output gap to emerge, which held down inflation but also limited demand for labor. With employment depressed, millions of discouraged workers exited the labor force and many more would struggle to return to prerecession earnings levels. As a result, consumption and residential investment remained depressed and the output gap between potential and actual GDP persisted… In the wake of the pandemic, many of the United States’ competitors repeated its mistake in the prior recovery. As the global economy remained disrupted by COVID-19 in 2021 and beyond, many foreign governments opted for premature fiscal consolidation in which the policy response was too muted and insufficient to help return their respective economies to prerecession form. By contrast, policymakers in the U.S. opted for more generous countercyclical support—including massive relief bills passed under both Democratic and Republican administrations that would provide assistance past even the omicron and delta waves of COVID-19. As a result, there is now no meaningful slack in the U.S., unlike in Europe where activity is once again falling behind its prepandemic trend. Perhaps most important, U.S. labor force participation has risen to record highs across major population groups, especially among prime-age women. Elevated inflation in 2021 and 2022 abated quickly and in recent years was driven more by supply constraints in the housing market than by fundamental imbalances in supply and demand. The steady fall in non-shelter year-over-year inflation, which now stands at just 1.1%, underscores that supply disruptions—not overheating—were by far the main driver of high inflation right after the pandemic. All told, the post-COVID recovery reaffirms the difficult choices made by policymakers and ultimately vindicates U.S. policy choices.”
“Investment in the U.S. has been a notable point of optimism relative to other G10 economies. Buoyed by the investment incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act (and to a lesser extent) the CHIPS and Science Act, coupled with broader optimism over the U.S. economy, the U.S. experienced a relative boom in investment compared to its competitors… Today, U.S. investment is 14% above its pre-COVID level, while investment in the eurozone has fallen by 7% over the same period… The absolute rise in investment in the U.S. is especially notable when controlling for the business cycle. As noted in analysis by the U.S. Treasury Department, change in investment typically falls (as a share of GDP) in the period following a peak in the business cycle—typically falling by about 1 percentage point between six and 12 quarters from the peak. However, in the current recovery, aggregate investment has remained roughly constant—leading to an additional $430 billion in investment relative to historical norms.”
Why it matters: “In broad terms, policymakers faced two options during the pandemic with respect to fiscal stimulus. One route was to invoke aggressive fiscal stimulus to avoid persistent economic scarring and sluggish growth but accept elevated inflation in the face of highly atypical supply chain pressures. The second option was to offer more muted fiscal support, and to allow for the emergence of output gaps and slow growth in consumption, which might help offset extra inflation. The U.S. chose the former, while most of the rest of the G10 opted for the latter. As a result, the U.S. has seen substantially more economic growth and more investment, but with slightly higher price levels in the initial years of the recovery.”
5. Why the woes of Boeing and Intel constitute a “national emergency”
Why you should read it: Wall Street Journal columnist Greg Ip surveys the woes facing aerospace giant Boeing and chipmaking behemoth Intel as they struggle to cope with self-inflicted setbacks that threaten their existence
“Today, both [Intel and Boeing] are on the ropes. Intel has suspended its dividend, slashed jobs and capital spending, and is a takeover target. Boeing has been hobbled by investigations into crashes and a midair mishap, production delays and a strike. A breakup or bankruptcy are no longer unthinkable… Intel and Boeing were once the gold standard in manufacturing groundbreaking products to demanding specifications with consistently high quality. Not any longer.”
“The loss of either company would have industrywide repercussions. Each supports a multilayered ecosystem of designers, workers, managers and suppliers. Once that ecosystem moves offshore, it is almost impossible to bring back… So, much as national leaders would like to ignore these companies’ woes, they can’t. National security dictates the U.S. maintain some know-how in making aircraft and semiconductors.”
Why it matters: “Both political parties have bought into the idea that manufacturing is special and thus deserving of public support. That raises the question: which manufacturing, and what kind of support?”
6. How Bidenomics has already started to reshape the American economy
Why you should read it: New Yorker columnist Nicholas Lemann details how President Biden’s substantial investments in infrastructure and industrial policy have begun to change the American economy for the better—even if no one’s noticed.
“There is as close to a unifying theory as one can find in a sweeping set of government policies. Almost all the discussion of ‘Bidenomics’—by focussing on short-term fluctuations of national metrics such as growth, the inflation rate, and unemployment, with the aim of determining the health of the economy—misses the point. Real Bidenomics upends a set of economic assumptions that have prevailed in both parties for most of the past half century. Biden is the first President in decades to treat government as the designer and ongoing referee of markets, rather than as the corrector of markets’ dislocations and excesses after the fact. He doesn’t speak of free trade and globalization as economic ideals. His approach to combatting climate change involves no carbon taxes or credits—another major departure, not just from his predecessors but also from the policies of many other countries. His Administration has been far more aggressive than previous ones in taking antitrust actions against big companies… Bidenomics has overturned a number of unwritten rules that you previously had to follow if you wanted to be taken seriously as a policymaker: economic regulation is usually a bad idea; governments should balance their budgets, except during recessions and depressions; subsidizing specific industries never works; unions are a mixed blessing, because they don’t always promote economic efficiency; government should not try to help specific regions of the country or sectors of the economy.”
“The irony of Bidenomics is the vast gulf between its scale—measured in money and in the number of projects that it has set in motion—and its political impact, which is essentially zero, even though a major part of its rationale is political. It has become a standard talking point of the engineers of Bidenomics that it will take at least five years, maybe ten, possibly even longer, for the public to understand its effects. ‘That’s the way it was with the New Deal,’ Steve Ricchetti, one of Biden’s closest and longest-serving aides, said. ‘It wasn’t just three or four years of new programs. It was leveraged for twenty or thirty years into the future.’ But the short-term politics worked out a lot better for Franklin Roosevelt; he carried all but two states in his first reëlection campaign. There is little evidence that the Democrats will be similarly rewarded in 2024. Only late in the race, when she was spending much of her time in the Midwest, did Kamala Harris begin speaking regularly about Biden’s major economic initiatives. It’s unclear how committed to them she will be if she becomes President. Trump has promised to repeal many of them. Still, President Biden can rest assured that many signs are being put up. They just don’t say ‘Joe Did It.’ They say ‘Investing in America.’”
Why it matters: “Where we are now, near the conclusion of the 2024 campaign, is profoundly strange. People love to complain that politics organizes itself around perception, not reality. Here’s the reality: one party, the G.O.P., ditched its establishment, embraced a form of economic nationalism and populism, and surprised everybody by winning a Presidential election. This wasn’t just a freak event; versions of the same thing happened around the world. In the United States, the Trump Administration, once it was in power, mostly pursued not what it ran on but an old-fashioned Republican program of tax cuts and deregulation. Meanwhile, the Democrats began competing for the voters Trump had attracted, and, after this helped lead to a victory in 2020, they enacted an ambitious program aimed at the economic lives of working- and middle-class Americans. And still, outside a limited cadre of activists and policymakers, none of this is the dominant narrative of American politics. Another complaint that people make about politicians is that they are all talk, no action. With Biden, on these issues, it has been almost the opposite: lots of action, very little talk. As Harris’s campaign wore on, she began speaking more about economic issues, especially during her visits to Midwestern states, but her language has been quite different from that of other Biden officials. If Biden’s actual economic policies were the main topic of the campaign, perhaps the outcome of the election would determine their future. Their absence from the election makes their fate more of a mystery.”
7. What the restart of Three Mile Island says about the future of nuclear power
Why you should read it: The Breakthrough Institute’s Ted Nordhaus and Alex Trembath contend that the recently announced restart of the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant symbolizes dramatic shifts in the domestic energy market over the past several years.
“By the time that Exelon Energy prematurely shuttered [Three Mile Island’s] Unit 1 in 2019, the nuclear sector in the United States had reached a nadir. Not only had the United States stopped building new reactors but it had begun to close existing plants as well. The power sector was awash in cheap natural gas, electricity demand was not growing quickly, and neither liberalized electricity markets nor policy-makers valued nuclear’s attributes as a firm and reliable source of low carbon electricity. Nuclear energy’s problems were further exacerbated by environmental groups campaigning to shut down plants like Indian Point in New York, Diablo Canyon in California, and Three Mile Island despite their professed concern about climate change… Natural gas is still cheap. But electricity prices have soared across much of the country. Electricity demand is once again growing robustly, as AI driven data center growth is already outstripping the generation capacity that grid planners anticipated just a few years ago. Local resistance to wind, solar, and transmission, along with the hesitance of grid planners to allow more variable generation resources onto electricity systems without sufficient firm resources to back them up, has slowed growth of wind generation over the last few years, though solar is still growing apace. And a welcome shift of approach from tech and other firms at the leading edge of corporate commitments to clean energy, from simply procuring enough renewable energy credits in bulk to claim that they are offsetting their carbon dioxide emissions to matching their demand on an hour to hour basis with clean electricity generation, has tilted the corporate procurement landscape toward nuclear energy.”
“For a long time, many climate and renewable energy advocates dismissed concerns about how electricity systems would deal with very high penetrations of variable renewable energy without natural gas, arguing that it wasn’t an immediate issue. Fossil fuels still accounted for most generation, and policy-makers and grid managers could cross that bridge once most fossil fuel generation had been eliminated from the system. But booming electricity demand and the unique requirements of the new AI data centers for enormous amounts of always-on clean electricity have brought that question to the fore…Were it possible to meet that demand by simply penning a deal for some new solar and wind generation and energy storage, Microsoft [the company that made the deal to restart Three Mile Island] surely would have done so. But the basic economics of the massive data centers that AI requires and the variable nature of renewable energy generation are a terrible match. Data centers may be energy hogs compared to many other electricity customers. But energy, even very expensive energy, is a relatively small part of the cost of AI data centers. They require huge capital outlays for the massive computing power they need. The firms that build and operate these centers need to utilize them all the time to make money. Demand-side management of their electricity use is not an option.”
Why it matters: “It’s been clear for a while now, from those very same models that look at how low carbon electrical systems might work, that if you can get somewhere between 25 and 50% of your electricity in a decarbonized electricity system from nuclear, particularly next generation nuclear with significantly greater ability to ramp its output up and down, both the cost and complexity of the system are far lower. You don’t need to massively overbuild wind and solar. You don’t need a vast capacity of batteries to store energy for days or even weeks. Your high-voltage transmission requirements are much lower, since nuclear can be sited in smaller geographies closer to load. And you don’t need a big natural gas infrastructure that mostly sits idle… But it does require building significant new nuclear capacity. When Biden Administration officials say that the US needs 200GW of new nuclear by 2050 to meet its climate goals, they are talking about roughly doubling nuclear energy’s share of US electricity generation, from 20% to 40%. Wind and solar energy, under this scenario for a decarbonized US power sector, still produce the majority of electricity. But that still requires building another 200 large reactors over the next three decades or somewhere in the neighborhood of 500-3500 small reactors... You can operate the system with a lot more wind, solar, batteries, and natural gas. Or you can operate it with a lot more wind, solar, batteries, and nuclear. Choose the former and what you will likely end up with is costly electricity that can’t be fully decarbonized. Choosing the latter offers many advantages, climate and land use chief among them, but also more robust grid reliability and resilience.”
8. Why one expert on historical fascism changed his mind about Trump
Why you should read it: New York Times Magazine contributor Elizabeth Zerofsky profiles Robert O. Paxton, a leading scholar of fascism, and why January 6 made him decide that Trump is, in fact, a fascist.
“After Trump took office, a torrent of articles, papers and books either embraced the fascism analogy as useful and necessary, or criticized it as misleading and unhelpful. The polemic was so unrelenting, especially on social media, that it came to be known among historians as the Fascism Debate. Paxton had, by this point, been retired for more than a decade from Columbia University, where he was a professor of history for more than 30 years… Jan. 6 proved to be a turning point. For an American historian of 20th-century Europe, it was hard not to see in the insurrection echoes of Mussolini’s Blackshirts, who marched on Rome in 1922 and took over the capital, or of the violent riot at the French Parliament in 1934 by veterans and far-right groups who sought to disrupt the swearing in of a new left-wing government. But the analogies were less important than what Paxton regarded as a transformation of Trumpism itself. ‘The turn to violence was so explicit and so overt and so intentional, that you had to change what you said about it,’ Paxton told me. ‘It just seemed to me that a new language was necessary, because a new thing was happening.’”
“This summer I asked Paxton if, nearly four years later, he stood by his pronouncement. Cautious but forthright, he told me that he doesn’t believe using the word is politically helpful in any way, but he confirmed the diagnosis. ‘It’s bubbling up from below in very worrisome ways, and that’s very much like the original fascisms,’ Paxton said. ‘It’s the real thing. It really is…’ He told me that what he saw on Jan. 6 has continued to affect him; it has been hard ‘to accept the other side as fellow citizens with legitimate grievances.’ That is not to say, he clarified, that there aren’t legitimate grievances to be had, but that the politics of addressing them has changed. He believes that Trumpism has become something that is ‘not Trump’s doing, in a curious way,’ Paxton said. ‘I mean it is, because of his rallies. But he hasn’t sent organizers out to create these things; they just germinated, as far as I can tell.’”
Why it matters: “Paxton has not weighed in on the issue since the Newsweek column, spending much of his time immersed in his life’s second passion, bird-watching. At his home in the Hudson Valley, I read back to him one of his earlier definitions of fascism, which he described as a ‘mass, anti-liberal, anti-communist movement, radical in its willingness to employ force . . . distinct not only from enemies on the left but also from rivals on the right.’ I asked him if he thought it described Trumpism. ‘It does,’ he said. Nonetheless, he remains committed to his yes-no paradigm of accuracy and usefulness… ‘I think it’s going to be very dicey,” he said. “If Trump wins, it’s going to be awful. If he loses, it’s going to be awful too.‘“
9. How Trump debases America
Why you should read it: Bulwark columnist Mona Charen shows how Donald Trump has made America a meaner, more tawdry place during his decade in politics and public life.
“Natural disasters are moments of unity. They remind us of our frailty in the face of nature. They are matters of life and death. We don’t ask, before sending aid, whether you live in a red state or a blue state… But not now. In the hours after Helene devastated the South, Republican nominee Donald Trump circulated rumors to the effect that the Biden–Harris administration and the ‘Democrat governor of North Carolina’ were ‘going out of their way to not help people in Republican areas.’ As it happens, Asheville, one of the most devastated parts of North Carolina, is quite blue, but whatever. Trump’s lips were moving, therefore he was lying. This is what he does: sow suspicion, engender resentment and hatred.”
“When there are no actual causes for fear and loathing, he and Igor JD Vance freely invent things to strike fear in the hearts of their followers. Crime has been declining for three straight years after a spike during the pandemic (when Trump was president). But in the Trump-invented pseudo-reality, crime is ‘so out of control . . . you can’t walk across the street to get a loaf of bread. You get shot. You get mugged. You get raped, you get whatever it may be…’ This is the brutish, false incitement that Trump never tires of injecting into American life. And though it has become commonplace, it is not yet the dominant culture. Trump’s false stories about Haitian immigrants in Ohio threw Springfield into chaos. Bomb threats closed schools and universities. The owner of McGregor Metal has had to draw his shades at night, buy a gun, and vary his family’s movements due to death threats following his defense of his Haitian employees.”
Why it matters: “Some people inclined to vote for Trump reason that he was president before and things seemed to be okay. The economy was good (until COVID). There were no new wars. But there were new wars—between Americans. Trump’s relentless lies and incitement have transformed this county into a less rational and less generous nation. That alone should be reason enough to vote for his opponent. One election is not going to repair the damage to our national character. But another term of Trump could be enough to tip the scales for a long time to come.”
Odds and Ends
How astronauts could turn asteroids and other space rocks into food on future missions…
How a motley crew of pro-Ukraine shitposters managed to raise millions of dollars to support Ukrainian troops on the frontlines…
How GM overtook Ford on electric vehicles—and now looks set to become the first established automaker to break even on them…
How X-rays could help deflect asteroids, at least according to one study at Sandia National Laboratories…
NASA generates an economic return three times the size of its own budget…
What I’m Listening To
“Misery,” by grunge-era band Soul Asylum’s 1995 record Let Your Dim Light Shine.
“Howl,” an energetic spooky season-themed track from Florence + the Machine’s 2009 album Lungs.
DJ Tiësto’s turn-of-the-millennium remix of Delerium’s “Silence,” featuring Sarah McLachlan on vocals.
What I’m Streaming
The fifth and final season Star Trek: Lower Decks, the hilarious animated misadventures of lower-ranking officers aboard one of Starfleet’s least important starships—and a love letter to the 1990s era shows like Star Trek: The Next Generation.
Seinfeld, the quintessential 1990s show about nothing has been in heavy rotation. Favorite episodes include “The Junior Mint,” “The Hamptons,” “The Chicken Roaster,” “The Yada Yada,” and “The Summer of George.”
Extremely loosely based on life of Italy’s first female lawyer, the murder mystery/period piece series The Law According to Lidia Poët sees the title character (played by the beguiling Matilda De Angelis) investigate murders and solve mysteries in late nineteenth century Turin.
Image of the Month
