On Not Endorsing a Presidential Candidate

Back in September, Jeff Bezos (Mr. Amazon, who also owns the Washington Post), told William Lewis (Post CEO and publisher) not to endorse anyone for president.

Lewis didn’t mention this to the paper’s Opinion editors, but when they sent him their endorsement of Kamala Harris, he killed it.

The Washington Post Guild, which represents journalists and other staff, asked readers to write a letter. So I did.

Dear Mr. Lewis,

I’ve subscribed to the Post for several years, and before that, I read as many of your articles that I could access. Your coverage of US and world news is solid, informative, and important.

I am writing today about Jeff Bezos’s terrible decision to stop the Post from endorsing a candidate for president. 

We are just days away from an election that will have grave consequences if Donald Trump wins. He has made it clear that he intends to weaponize the government against his personal enemies, deport legal and illegal immigrants, end protections for people who are not gender-conforming (many of whom were born that way), make health care more expensive and harder to access, cut abortion and birth control, limit the freedom of the press (ahem!), censor teachers, eliminate support for people who are disabled, increase defense spending, reduce taxes on billionaires while increasing them on lower-income people, and reduce voting rights. And more. For most Americans, life under his agenda would be poor, nasty, brutish, and short, in the words of Thomas Hobbes.

It’s hard to believe, but J. D. Vance is worse. Trump lies, acts on impulse, and rejects science, and is just plain mean, because he is a deeply insecure narcissist. Vance parrots and doubles down on Trump’s spite, malevolence, and vulgarity, knowingly and deliberately, in the pursuit of power. Vance knows he can manipulate Trump to advance his own agenda of making the US a theocracy governed by the ideas of ultra-conservative, patriarchal, white-supremacist Christianity.

Bezos’s interference in the editorial freedom of the people who produce the paper he owns sets a very dangerous precendent. We’ve seen the damage Elon Musk (the only person in the US wealthier than Bezos) has done in politicizing Twitter. Neither man serves in goverment, but their wealth affords them great power in national affairs. This is very worrisome. I hope you will be able to persuade Bezos that this was a terrible decision.

Thank you for your consideration.

The Guild suggests a (less inflammatory) sample letter, but if you’d like to use or adapt any portion of what I wrote, please feel free.

Visualizing Data, or Making it Muddier?

Back in August, the New York Times published a graphic that visualizes the experiences that Harris, Trump, Vance, and Walz would bring to the White House. 

It bothered me, and I’ve been looking at it again and again, changing the font size, the screen orientation and brightness, and trying to see how the candidates’ education, service, and work experience compare. But it seems impossible: even when I zoom down to tiny, swaths of it run off the edges of the screen.

I started wondering if the goal was not to compare the candidates, but to obfuscate the stark differences among them. So finally I took the data and made a new chart. You can see all of it at the same time, and instead of the Times’ beige, grayish pink, and light blue, I used some bolder colors, and linked public service, military service, and elected office with different shades of blue.

Data New York Times | Visualization 1greenblogger

Harris and Walz’s columns are dominated by state and national elected offices; Trump’s forty years as a businessman stand out in sharp contrast. But the real outlier is Vance, who served as a senator for only eighteen months before getting tapped as VP canditate.

Vance’s four-year stint as a Marine combat correspondent is by far his longest work commitment. From 2013 to 2023, he hopscotched across the country for jobs with seven different employers: clerkships, a job in corporate litigation, and posts at a biotech start-up, Mithril Capital, Revolution, and Narya, which he co-founded with funding from Peter Thiel. He also started two non-profit organizations, both of which fizzled, and published a mean-spirited memoir.

Vance’s lack of fitness for the presidency is proven by his inability or unwillingness to hold a job for any length of time, his inexperience in leadership, his caustic insults on those with whom he disagrees, and his proven failure in leading non-profit organizations. 

Is it possible that Trump has chosen a VP candidate even more dangerous than himself? Or is Vance proof of how dangerous Trump is?

***

The Times simplifies Walz’s timeline by placing him at Chadron State College from 1982 to 1989. But he left Nebraska in 1984, studied at the University of Houston, worked a factory job building tanning beds in Jonesboro, and went back to Chadron State in 1987, graduating two years later. I include these details for Walz rather than following the Times’ breakdown. 

Walz’s data is a little tricky: his years in the National Guard overlap with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in education, doctoral coursework, and his full-time job as a teacher ( and Gay-Straight Alliance advisor and football coach). I slightly compressed his years teaching and studying to incorporate his military service without lengthening his overall career. 

Some Metacognition

I started keeping a log of activity and fatigue levels several days ago, and it got me thinking.

The idea was to see if any patterns emerge so maybe I can organize my life a little bettter. Turns out the answer is always the same: stuff happens. Before Long Covid, I’d roll with that Stuff and just keep moving, but now, Stuff Happens means something else doesn’t happen, and probably I still end up so exhausted I’m shaking. Pacing, ha ha.

Well, anyway, I ended up with some insights into how my brain works, and how it … doesn’t.

from “On Fire,” K. C. Greene

For my whole ADHD life, my brain has been like a ping pong ball catapult capable (look! alliteration!) of firing hundreds of rounds a minute. I was pretty good at catching some of the good ideas and making notes about things to think about later while swatting away or dodging everything else.

Turns out cognitive processing speed is much slower in people with Long Covid than in those who never got infected, or did, but recovered. The idea that slowed processing underlies everything wrong with my brain seems completely plausible.

Because I can’t multi-task any more.

Coming up with words — and spelling them! — while operationalizing syntactic rules of a language to form coherent sentences, working simultaneously bottom-up, top-down, front-to-back and back-to front, requires heavy-duty multi-tasking. 

Writing, same deal. It’s just a little less stressful because no one is watching while I struggle. Instead, I spend, well, sometimes hours, googling words and phrases to try to find the word I want. (“Plausible,” for instance.) Sequencing ideas and making sentences coherent, with brevity and maybe even wit, feels like hauling boulders.

Putting leftovers in a bowl and then in the microwave, food I’m not eating back in the fridge, and empty containers in the dishwasher? Multi-tasking. Before Covid Me wouldn’t even have remembered thinking about it; Long Covid Me gets wires crossed. (BCM? LCM? Hmmm.)

“On fire,” continued

The ballista keeps on launching. (“The Money Keeps Rolling In” from Evita ping-pongs to mind; nah, it doesn’t scan.) A news headline pisses me off (that’s its job now?), there’s a fawn in the neighbors’ yard, my mom sends a text (or five), a social media post gets me thinking, one of the dogs wants attention. Occasionally, the actual phone actually rings. So many decisions, so many ping-pongs to forget.

I try to write everything down. Seriously, everything. Yesterday Catherine noticed on her way out the door that the garbage truck hadn’t come yet and asked me to bring the can to the curb. I didn’t write it down, or do it immediately, and I didn’t think about it again until I heard the truck pulling away. Damn.

Last night, I made a note: “calendar the things.” This morning: What things? Uh-oh.

Alternatively, my mind latches onto some idea and won’t let go and … well, it’s interesting, and it’s important, but I need to spend my energy on other things, but I start looking things up and writing things down and looking up words and suddenly it’s two hours later and I have a headache and look, that almost-full cup of coffee is stone cold and I forgot to eat breakfast again. 

Sometimes forgetting seems like the less disruptive dysfunction.

Cooking is harder than laundry, also because thinking, slow thinking. I keep wondering why the physical demands of doing the laundry don’t take more out of me and why cooking hits me so hard, harder than it seems standing with peripheral neuropathy should be.

Slowed cognitive processing. I might follow a recipe or make it up as I go along; either way, I’m chopping and stirring, measuring carefully or eyeballing, trying not to forget anything, and still batting away ping-pong balls.

My big accomplishment the other day: I soaked a cup and a half of brown rice, drained it, measured water, started the stove, brought the pot to a boil, turned it down, cooked the rice until the water was gone, left it for a few more minutes, and then stirred it. Ye gods. If I ever *thought* about cooking rice before, it was 45 years ago. Now: so many steps. So many timers (an unexpected bonus of Apple watch). 

If I forget I’m doing laundry, maybe stuff gets a little wrinkled. I did laundry last weekend and there are still sheets and pillowcases in the living room. I’ll get to them, eventually.

If I forget I’m cooking? Things burn.

“On fire” concludes

JD Vance’s Words are Weapons

I listened, repeatedly, to JD’s convo about “the postmenopausal female,” so you don’t have to.

The most disturbing part of Vance’s exchange with Eric Weinstein, in my mind: neither man displays any interest in what the two women — Usha Vance, Esq., and her mother, Dr. Lakshmi Chilukuri (whom I am naming in part because neither is named in the clip) — wanted or needed. 

The child is also unnamed: Vance calls Ewen, his oldest son, “this baby” and “our son.”

Weinstein says that providing free child care is “the whole purpose of a postmenopausal female.” 

Unlike “woman,” which refers specifically to a human, “female” is also used for animals. Long-horned beetles, t-rexes, dolphins, gorillas, and more. Referring to people of color, and especially women of color, in animal terms has a long history. I’m not surprised — Vance has made, and endorsed, plenty of racist statements — but I’m still dismayed.

Vance clearly says “yes” after the host finishes saying the words. His response comes almost on top of the word “female,” but in plenty of time after “post-menopausal,” which Weinstein fumbles, and which can only refer to a woman, and before Weinstein finishes the sentence with “in theory.” 

Weinstein goes on to say that free child care is “a weird unadvertised feature of marrying an Indian woman.” Vance starts to speak, pauses to interject “yeah,” and continues.

Weinstein uses singular “they” to refer to Provost Chilukuri. Hang on — the ossified right thinks using “they” in place of “she” or, preferably, “he” opens the door to gay and trans rights, which they find pornographic. Ooops.

Vance’s idea that prioritizing earning power over everything else is “hyper-liberalized” and “a consequence of fundamental liberalism” that has “abandon[ed] … Aristotelian virtue politics for a hyper market-oriented way of thinking” is almost risible in its foundational wrong-ness. This describes, quite precisely, the Republican Party line since Reagan. 

The speed and vocal register of Vance’s speech suggest gravitas, especially in contrast to Trump’s jumpy, meandering tirades. But listening over and over again made me see just how repetitive and imprecise Vance’s speech really is. He uses big words and learned phrases to gesture casually at concepts, rather than carefully staking claims and providing evidence to develop arguments. Vance’s words are projectiles, designed — deployed — to destroy, not to build.

Giants, King Arthur, Olympic Athletes, and Misogynoir

In the (fictional!) History of the Kings of Britain (1136), Geoffrey of Monmouth invents Arthurian legend, drawing on (and vastly embellishing) an earlier collection of Biblical, Greek, and Norse lore and legend combined with geographical and historical information. 

According to Geoffrey, giants from Africa settled the British Isles and built Stonehenge. Later migrants, humans descended from the Greek Aeneas, slaughtered the giants, pitching their leader, Gogmagog, off a cliff to his death.

In naming the giant leader Gogmagog, Geoffrey draws on a long series of narratives about villains. In the Hebrew Bible, Gog is the leader of the armies of Magog, who threaten the Israelites but are vanquished by God (Ezekiel 38, 39). In the Book of Revelation, Gog and Magog become nations that join Satan in attacking the saints, but are consumed by fire from God (Rev. 20.8-9). 

In the Middle Ages, Africa and Asia were sometimes distinguished, and sometimes collapsed into one, but always described in ways that emphasize difference. Medieval maps typically locate Gog and Magog in Asia; the Hereford World Map (1300) names them twice, and identifies them with both “barbarous and filthy” Turks and “the cruellest people among the Scythians.” 

Geoffrey’s identification of Gogmagog as African rather than Asian connects with numerous texts and images that imagine monsters in Africa: the Hereford World Map places Gog and Magog in Asia, and identifies them explicitly in negative terms, it also contains several drawings and descriptions in Africa of monsters and human-animal hybrids.

So when Geoffrey says that Gogmagog is a giant from Africa, he associates him with a long trail of negative, and even Satanic, associations.

Fox Nation has just devoted an entire episode to resurrecting Geoffrey’s fantastic claim. An article promoting the episode says Geoffrey’s makes the first written reference to Stonehenge when he calls it “chorea gigantum” — a circle, or dance, of giants. But Henry of Huntingdon scooped Geoffrey in his Historia Anglorum (1129). Henry writes that no one can figure out how or why the huge stones of  “Stanenges” were set upright.

The demographic that follows Fox is also the one that made recent attacks on female Olympic athletes of color as “trans” go viral. White misogynists have a problem with capable women, and they have a huge problem with capable women of color. It’s why Serena Williams endured years of racist attacks; she was called monstrous and depicted as an animal or a man.

The folks at Fox do nothing by accident. Moya Bailey, a Northwestern University professor, coined the word misogynoir to reference the “unique anti-Black racist misogyny that Black women experience.”  

Highlighting the idea that Stonehenge was built by African giants led by a guy whose name is synonymous with evil makes perfect sense in the context of Fox’s ongoing programming. Network hosts and the people they platform make ad hominem attacks on black women politicians, and misrepresent and lie about their record, rather than addressing policy and substance. Fox articles refer repeatedly and uncritically to a discredited Russian test claiming Imani Khalif is not a woman.

It all connects back to very, very old narratives about monstrosity. 

Post Exertional Symptom Exacerbation: Don’t Blame the Sick Person

Man, did I need this today. 

Often post-exertional symptom exacerbation (PESE) is not triggered by overactivity. Showering, getting dressed, walking, loud noises, busy environments, or multi-tasking is not overactivity. Saying post-exertional symptom exacerbation is like a Boom-and-Bust cycle is patient blaming and unhelpful.

One of my hardest Long Covid symptoms is fatigue. It’s not like doing a long bike ride or a hike, a triathlon or a road race, or even pulling out all the stops to write an article or a syllabus, and then needing to rest up. 

It’s more like I do a little too much of basic normal activity and then I feel like I’ve been walloped by a giant wave. All I can do is wait out the days — usually four — until I revert to post-covid “normal.”

Yes, absolutely, I have been blaming myself for PESE, more commonly called post-exertional malaise, even if no one else does. The word “malaise” lingers in my head like a bad earworm. It makes me feel like a helpless, fainting stereotype of romance fiction. 

When I was diagnosed with Long Covid, I was referred to a physical therapist, who was very friendly and encouraging, but like most people, didn’t have much experience with Long Covid. She assigned balance and strength exercises, and to avoid over-exertion, told me to track my heart rate carefully: stop immediately if it went over 130, and rest after every set until it went below 90.

My balance improved and I stopped needing the rolling walker. But the brain fog — lousy short-term memory, struggling for words, toiling to come up with whole sentences, difficulty reading academic books and articles, and very wonky vision — was fierce.

The individual exercises didn’t feel hard, especially with so much rest between them. But the thing I didn’t understand about PESE is that it doesn’t emerge until many hours after exertion. Cognitive fatigue hits me immediately and hard, but the fatigue from exercise doesn’t appear until the next day.

Only months later did I stumble across an article about the problems with Graded Exercise Therapy.

Exercise was making me worse.

It finally dawned on me to stop.

The brain fog started to lift. Slowly. Too slowly. More cognitive energy turned out to mean crashing even faster, having to be even more careful. Academic writing, serious reading, a conversation about something I used to teach every year — 45 minutes in, and I’m stuttering, struggling for sentences, freezing up.

After some sedentary weeks, I started back on exercise at one minute. Yeah. ONE MINUTE. I’ve worked back, most days, to a ten-minute walk with the dog (she sniffs many things and makes sure I take lots of breaks) and ten minutes of yoga, mostly seated and prone poses. 

The RECOVER research protocol for the Long Covid fatigue sub-group calls for a baseline of 10 minutes or less, depending on ability, of aerobic activity. It also warns, strongly, that people in the trial should stop exercising if they get PESE. 

Reading that gave me a lightning-bolt shock of relief. 

I’m better at sitting down when I start getting light-headed, or stopping when I’m trying to write an email (or a blog post) and I start to feel the clamp around my head, or not exercising at all if I feel worn out. It’s a work in progress. 

It was so helpful to see the written words that say I’m not pushing myself too hard, but — 

the basic activities of everyday life are too hard for me.

Deep breath.

I have not been able to recover from Long Covid through sheer force of will. 

It’s okay.

Long Covid: All the Doctors

In a survey of patients’ experience with Long Covid that I completed recently, one question was, describe your experience with medical professionals. 

By the way, without Catherine I’d have neither health insurance nor income, so I wouldn’t be seeing any doctors. Plus I’d be lost without her help making appointments, remembering details, and explaining things to doctors, not to mention grocery shopping and cooking and so much more.

By far the majority of the many medical professionals I’ve seen since I got Covid listened well, were thoughtful and kind, and knew enough about Long Covid (or learned) to understand what I’m going through.

My GP has been an absolute rock through all of this. She’s reading research, listening carefully to me, helping me get to appropriate specialists, and helping me understand some of the possible treatments. After covid, my asthma was no longer controlled by the medication I was taking. It was ameliorated, but I still had fairly substantial difficulty breathing, pretty much all the time. She suggested a different medication.

The insurance company: No. 

The occupational therapist listened when I said my eyes were messed up. She ran a bunch of physical tests, documented the kinds of problems I was experiencing, had me do exercises, and recommended a neuro optometrist. 

The neuro-optometrist prescribed fancy eyeglasses and assigned more and different eye exercises. He tells me my eye muscles are very strong now. Problem is, my brain still can’t correctly join the input from my two eyes. 

The neurologist tested for peripheral neuropathy and balance problems, and prescribed duloxetine. My balance is okay if I’m not too tired, and the neuropathy isn’t gone, but it’s not as bad. better. She reads articles I bring her. She listens carefully when I talk about anecdotal evidence from social media about low-dose naltrexone, nicotine patches, and a raft of other supplements, and tells me what she thinks.

Pulmonologist #1 said my lungs would get better soon, and recommended smell training. Many months later, I thought to look up smell training, and found that there was no evidence it helped with general brain recovery. I asked why she suggested smell training. She said to improve my sense of taste and smell. I told her my sense of smell wasn’t great, but no worse than before covid. “Oh.”

Pulmonologist #2, whom I saw many months later because #1 was out that day, listened to me when I said I still had difficulty breathing despite using a rescue inhaler several times a day, and changed my medication. Insurance company agreed, because specialist. It made a big difference.

Cardiologist said I just needed to get up off the couch and get some exercise. 

The psychiatric nurse practitioner reads research on what medications have given some people relief from cognitive symptoms of long covid. She recommends medications, talks me through alternatives, and works with me on trying to optimize dosage. They’ve knocked some of the sludge out of my brain. I have to be careful though, because thinking faster also tires me out faster.

The talk therapist helped me to find my way back to some level of hope and self-acceptance despite losing my job, my avocation, my energy, my mental acuity … all of this.

The physical therapist gave me exercises for balance and strength. She had me track heart rate, stop after every set, wait for it to go below 90. I had been in excellent condition prior to covid and my muscles were still strong, so the individual exercises seemed easy. My balance got better, except when I’m tired. But eventually, I realized that spending that much time on them, even though the individual activities felt easy, was actually contributing to fatigue. 

Everything I do is tiring. 

Eating, showering, getting dressed, fixing the simplest of meals. Organizing, remembering, and taking medications. Unloading the dishwasher is a heck of a lot of movement. Plus eye exercises smell training, and stretching before bed so I don’t wake up in pain. Plus I was trying to play the piano every day because that’s also supposed to be good for the brain. 

I finally realized it was just all too much.

I stopped smell training, after asking the doctor about it. I stopped worrying about doing the eye exercises all the time. I stopped all of the exercises except short walks and yoga, subscribed to Kindle Unlimited Limited, and spent more time reading mystery novels. I stopped worrying about doing all the exercises all the time and prioritized resting. With time, this is helping me feel very gradually less fatigued, at least some of the time. Sometimes I add some standing yoga poses.

Priority #1 is rest.

How much longer will it be like this? Who knows. I’m at maybe 35% of pre-covid normal. The stats on recovery aren’t great, after a year and a half, but I do keep getting very slightly better, and I keep hoping for a research breakthrough.

Long-term disability insurance company: We are ignoring everything your doctors said. You do not qualify for disability insurance.

The dogs are not medical professionals, but it’s hard to express how much better my life is with them in it. 

“Burn Down Washington”

Republican vice-presidential nominee J. D. Vance wrote the foreword for a new book by Kevin Roberts, Dawn’s Early Light, scheduled for release in September.

Roberts is president of the Heritage Foundation, the organization behind Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership, which lays out a vision for a Trump presidency (he’s named more than 300 times) that would eliminate abortion and gay rights and dismantle the Department of Education, just for starters. It also calls for banning pornography, which it equates with any mention of trans gender identity.

Vance says the Heritage Foundation is “the most influential engine of ideas for Republicans from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump.” He calls for “an offensive conservatism” and quotes Roberts’ call for action: “When the twilight descends and you hear the wolves, you’ve got to circle the wagons and load the muskets.” He’s so enamored of the passage that he repeats it: “We are now all realizing that it is time to circle the wagons and load the muskets.”

I have not gotten my hands on an advance copy of Roberts’ book, so I can only tell you what’s in the promotional materials. And that is an interesting story. A weird story, even. The subtitle of the book, as announced by HarperCollins, is “Taking Back Washington to Save America.”

But when Vance first took to X to laud the “incredible” book’s “bold new vision,” it was subtitled “Burning Down Washington to Save America.

Two days later, Vance deleted that, and posted a new tweet: same text, new title, no match in the cover photo.

Apparently whoever updated HarperCollins’ web page for the book forgot to change the title and description associated with the audiobook. Over at Amazon, the title given for the hardcover and the ebook has “taking,” while the CD version use “burning.” Amazon’s audiobook also gives the title as “burning,” but the description of the book is yet another different version.

Amazon’s description for the hardcover and ebook mirror HarperCollins’ copy for the book. Amazon’s audiobook description has the same sentence structures and paragraph breaks, with some word changes. Both versions claim that “a corrupt and incompetent elite” is brainwashing the nation, and call Roberts’ book “ambitious and provocative.” Then they diverge.

In HarperCollins’ current book description, Roberts’ book “blazes a promising path” for conservative change. On Amazon’s audiobook page, the book “blazes a warpath.” The FBI, Ivy League universities, the Gates Foundation, and the New York Times are “too corrrupt to save.” HarperCollins: “All these need to be dissolved.” Amazon: “Conservatives need to burn down these institutions.”

The copy on the Amazon page for the CD version of the book — and, as of this writing, on HarperCollins’ website for the audiobook — is yet more extreme. I took the screenshot at 11:15 pm on July 30 and am reproducing it as there is no knowing when HarperCollins might change the website.

In this version, Democrats and Republicans alike belong to a “Uniparty” aligned with “globalist elites” that promote centralized government and “endless wars.” (Real Americans, on the other hand, “prioritize winning wars worth fighting.” Which wars are which?) The list of institutions to be “destroyed” includes the Boy Scouts, the Fairfax County School System, and the World Economic Forum.

By “globalist elites,” right-wing conspiracy theorists mean the secret worldwide Jewish cabal that, in their fevered imaginations, controls multinational corporations and international finance. Some of them think the entire cabal consists of George Soros. Some dream up space lasers. The fantasy of malicious and powerful Jews is hundreds of years old. It was peddled by the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Henry Ford, and Adolf Hitler. White nationalists just keep breathing new life into it.

But where do these different descriptions of the book originate? The publishers of both of my books asked for marketing descriptions of various lengths when preparing the contract. What I wrote for the first book, and my co-author and I, for the second, later appeared on the publishers’ websites and on Amazon.

It is quite likely that the title and language that still linger on HarperCollins’ digital audio page and on Amazon’s page for the audio CD represent Roberts’ original vision for the book, but when Trump tapped Vance as his VP, somebody at HarperCollins got nervous.

In an excerpt from Roberts’ book published online by the Institute on Public and Religious life under the title “Burning down Washington,” Roberts writes that patriarchy is “the natural form of familial relations.”   In the “Foreword” to the Project 2025 Mandate, he calls government “unnatural” (4) and urges the next president to delete references in all federal documents to “gender, gender equality, gender equity … abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights” (5).

I think what he is attempting here is to claim that contraception and gender equality restrict his free exercise of religion. But his slash-and-burn method denies other people freedom of religion and freedom of speech. In labeling patriarchy as “natural,” he tries to delegitimize any other perspective. It’s kind of impressive, rhetorically, but still ugly.

These are the ideas that vice-presidential candidate J. D. Vance lauds in his introduction to Roberts’ book, for which he was “thrilled” to write the Foreword, and which he says is “an essential weapon” in the battle that he wants to provoke. Censorship. A sweeping denial of basic civil rights to gay and trans people. Loading his gun to fight. Burning universities, newspapers, charitable foundations, federal offices, and the boy scouts. The boy scouts?

I used to think Trump was the country’s most dangerous politician. I have begun to think that Vance might be more dangerous. 

 

Biden’s Cognitive State: Stable

I decided I should run numbers for Biden, as I did yesterday for Trump. As in analyzing Trump’s language, I used a speech from the 1980s as a baseline before looking at more recent speeches.

In the absence of complete medical reports, the quality of their speech provides perhaps the best proxy for evaluating both men’s cognitive state. In transcripts of their speeches, sentence complexity drops with age for both. Trump averaged 20 words per sentence in a 1980 interview; Biden averaged 18.7 words per sentence in a presidental campaign speech in 1987. Biden’s baseline grade level is 12.9, Trump’s 10.5.

Jumping ahead several decades, both men’s speeech demonstrates decreased complexity, as measured by sentence length, vocabulary, and other metrics.

But unlike Trump’s, Biden’s speech patterns have remained stable in recent years.

In three randomly chosen speeches from the past five years, Biden’s data are comparable. Average sentence lengths of speeches from 2019, 2021, and 2024 are 13, 16.6, and 14.2, while grade-level calculations come in at 9.5, 9.2, and 9.6.

Right-wing Republicans have asserted since before his presidency that Biden is mentally unfit for the office. In 2021, Lauren Bobert tweeted that cognitive decline made him a security risk. Moderate Republicans, however, found him sharp, well prepared, and cogent in discussions of policy and legislation.

The contrast is clear: unlike Biden’s, the complexity of Trump’s speech continues to drop.

Trump’s confident pugnacity has not changed.

But his speeches, and the thought processes they reveal, indicate that he is increasingly unable to grapple with complicated ideas and delicate negotiations. Even in comparison to 2017, the idea of Trump representing the United States in interactions with global heads of state is … unsettling.

Democrats have focused, appropriately, on Trump’s policy proposals and his extremist rhetoric, rather than descending to personal attacks. 

But the evidence of dwindling cognitive capacity and agility afforded by Trump’s speeches is hard to ignore. Americans across the political spectrum should worry, a lot, about his ability to govern.

Trump’s Cognitive Decline is Obvious

Words. Words are what I know how to do things with. So I decided to do some things with words. And I have to tell you, I was really surprised and dismayed by what I learned.

Claims are flying that Presiden Biden is incompetent, not fit to finish his term, much less serve for another four years. But what of former president Trump? He’s been called a danger to democracy, unfit to rule — but on account of his character, but not his cognitive state.

I got curious. I pulled an interview Trump gave in 1980 as a baseline, and I compared that with two speeches and an interview from the past decade: 

• October, 1980, interview with Rona Barrett
• October, 2017, speech at the Heritage Foundation
• April, 2023 interview with Time Magazine
• July, 2024 speech at the Republican National Convention

Speech analysis provides a good window into cognition. More sophisticated speakers use a wide vocabulary and complex sentence structures that reflect depth, breadth, and subtlety in thought. Cognitive decline is accompanied by a decrease in these metrics, pointing to shrinking capacity for attention to complicated issues. Like, for example, international politics.

For the purpose of this analysis, I used online text analysis tools that count the number of words in each sentence, as well as the number of unique words in each passage. As a proxy for word complexity, they calculate the average number letters and syllables per word, and compare words used against a list known to most fourth graders in a study done in 1984.

They crunch the numbers using several different formulas, whose results are usually expressed as a number corresponding to a grade level. If the text is assigned a 10, it means the average tenth grader will understand it easily.

I pasted excerpts from each of Trump’s speeches and interviews into two different online text analysis tools (in case programming details produced different results; they didn’t), and I averaged the results produced by four formulas.

In the 1980 interview, Trump spoke at a grade level of 10.5, averaging 20 words per sentence. In the 2017 speech, this went down to grade 9, and 12.5 words per sentence. Sentence length in the 2023 interview was comparable at 12.9, but the grade level slipped again, to 7.4.

In his convention speech this month, Trump averaged 9.4 words per sentence at a grade level of 5.9.

For context and comparison, in a 2023 speech at Fisk University, Vice President Harris averaged 23.5 words per sentence and spoke at a grade level of 11.3. In his comments on the RNC shooting, President Biden used 14 words per sentence on average, at a grade level of 10.8.

Given the evidence of Trump’s speech over the years, he is clearly unfit to serve another term as president, not only on grounds of the threat he and his associates pose to democracy, but also because of the decline in his cognitive abilities.

Carbon Dioxide: Too Many New Records

We humans are pushing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere five times faster than we were in the 1960s. We’ve reached not only a new record of 427 parts per million but also a new record in the amount of increase in one year.

Scripps Institute of Oceanography

The current concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is twice what it was prior to industrialization in the 19th century, and higher than it’s been in several million years — when sea levels were 78 feet higher than today. 

Also: a quarter of the carbon dioxide we’ve emitted in the past 175 years has been absorbed by the oceans, which are becoming more and more acidic as a result. Bye-bye, coral reefs. 

The amount of CO2 the oceans can absorb has slowed since the start of industrialization — so more of our excess CO2 is going into the atmosphere.

Meanwhile, we’ve pushed atmospheric methane to a level approaching three times what it was before the Industrial Revolution, mostly because the amount of livestock we’re farming. Rice paddies, landfills, and fossil fuel extraction also contribute.

Methane heats the air a lot faster than carbon dioxide does. It degrades in about a decade into water and — yikes! carbon dioxide. 

CO2, unfortunately, is niiiiice and stable. It hangs around for hundreds of years. If we could somehow end all emissions by 2100, it would take thousands of years for CO2 to drop to its pre-industrial level.

Y’all, I’m nervous. Every day, I choose hope that we can manage as a human family to reduce consumption, transition to renewable fuels, and make peace. But despair over the world we are leaving the coming generations is never far from my mind. 

What if NJ Transit Actually Served New Jersey?

New Jersey Transit mostly exists to get people from the hinterlands to and from Newark and New York; you can also go to Trenton, Philadelphia, and Atlantic City.

The European Union, population density 109 per km2, supports a rail network that goes even to the tiniest towns, via high-speed rail and a gazillion local lines.

New Jersey, with 488 people per km2,  has more than four times the population density of Europe, but only the tiniest fraction of the rail network. It turns out I’m not the only person who imagines a more robust rail system.

Reddit: creolefish

Here’s the thing, though: this is still a commuter system with NYC/Newark and Philadelphia as the hubs. 

New Jersey is already among the states with the lowest number of cars per capita, at 674 cars per thousand residents. The European Union, despite all those trains, averages 567 cars per person — not so different from New Jersey. But we drive almost twice as far every year than they do — 14,263 miles per year, on average, compared to Europeans’ 12,000 km, or 7440 miles, per year.

(Montana, on the other hand, has almost two cars for every person in the state. Including children. How do they find the time to drive them all?) 

Connecting all of New Jersey without having to transfer in Newark or Secaucus would take only two more rail lines, each starting at the Hudson River in the north, and running west, south, and finally east to the Atlantic Ocean.

The inner ring would go from Stevens to Stockton, with stops at Montclair State, Seton Hall, Monmouth, Georgian Court, and the community colleges in Essex, Union, Middlesex, Monmouth, and Ocean counties. 

The outer ring would run from Fairleigh Dickinson to Atlantic City, by way of the community colleges in the north, east, and south of the state, with a stop at Cape May.

It would transform the state.

• The availability of public transit would increase access to college. Low-income students can study at community colleges around the state for free, but the effective tax is that they need cars to get to class. Driving cheaper, older cars means less reliable transport on top of more repair bills, plus car insurance and gas.
• Reducing by even a quarter the average amount New Jersey residents drive every year would cut tailpipe emissions by more than 3 million metric tons: New Jersey has 2.5 million cars whose owners drive them, on average, 12,263 miles every year, emitting, on average 5 metric tons of carbon dioxide each, or collectively 12.5 million metric tons of CO2.
• Lower-income residents rely on an outrageously slow bus network to get to work and run errands; replacing these bus lines with trains would speed their trips dramatically (and get yet more vehicles off the roads).
• If half the people who went to the shore on a summer weekend could easily ride the train, they’d get to spend more time swimming, flirting, and eating ice cream, and less time stuck in traffic and hunting for parking. With only half the traffic on the roads, the drivers would get there faster, too.
• If teenagers could take a quick train ride to meet up with friends in the next town, we could worry a whole lot less about them driving under the influence.
• Roads with fewer cars are safer for pedestrians and cyclists. And making biking safer would reduce driving even more: almost 40 percent of the time someone gets in the car, they drive three miles or less. A leisurely three-mile bike ride to go to work or run an errand takes fifteen minutes — barely enough to break a sweat. And spending 30 minutes a day on a bike instead of driving and parking makes people healthier and happier.

Less road rage. More time for exercise. Lower emissions. More leisure time. Can we afford NOT to upgrade the system?