JFK's Call

 One of the most consequential moments in John F. Kennedy's candidacy for the Presidency was a spur-of-the-moment speech he gave in the early morning hours of October 14, 1960 in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

He was worn out and had intended to go to bed upon arriving, but then he was told that 10,000 students had been waiting patiently for him for hours, so he decided instead to go to the campus of the University of Michigan and deliver what became a life-changing speech for many in my generation. 

He proposed creating a new national service for students, and the young crowd roared its approval. After he was elected, he made good on that proposal by forming the Peace Corps.

I was a naive young man of 22 when I went to Afghanistan as a Peace Corps Volunteer in 1969, having never been out of the country before, let alone halfway around the world.

But by then, thousands of young people just like me were answering Kennedy's call  to serve our country not by going to war but by spreading messages of peace.

We were idealistic and naive, yes, but those of us who were male were also trying to avoid the draft, which would have sent us to Vietnam to fight a war we vehemently disagreed with.

Like millions of others in my generation, I was radicalized in college to the point I considered U.S. foreign policy the imperial arm of an expanding empire. 

Living in Afghanistan proved to be a rude awakening about some of my assumptions. I saw up close how mean and brutal people could be to each other in a poor society, including tribal wars, murders, bribery and cruelty like in the "Lord of the Flies."

I also saw beauty, generosity and tenderness -- the whole range of human behavior was on display every day amid widespread illiteracy and ignorance.

The poorest people on the planet would welcome me into their homes to share the one good meal they would have that entire week. Strangers went out of their way to help me when I got lost. 

When I taught high school in Taloqan, many of my students spouted political beliefs shaped by the five booming radio signals that reached our remote town -- Radio Moscow, Radio Peking, and to a much lesser degree, Radio Kabul, the BBC and the Voice of America.

The brightest kids seemed attracted by socialist and communist ideas similar to the Marxist-Leninist thinking I was familiar with on campuses back home. At first I went along with their ideas about how U.S. imperialism was oppressing people in poor countries, but eventually, like any committed teacher, I began to challenge their assumptions, if only to get them to think.

It was easy to see how Soviet and Chinese propaganda was distorting these young minds, and how their views of America were affected by the worst of Hollywood. The stories they repeated about U.S. barbarism were overblown and simplistic. 

U.S. troops had slaughtered innocents at My Lai, it was true, which was awful, but all armies did that kind of thing. Certainly no country had a monopoly on human rights abuses. Meanwhile, there were also many, many Americans like Peace Corps Volunteers who were opposed to the military and dispensing aid, food, clothes, medicine and education instead of guns and napalm.

But to be truthful, I more or less agreed with my students’ political analysis and wanted no part of the dark sides of U.S. policy, What I did wish to share were the better parts of our culture -- our beliefs in freedom, gender equality, and universal literacy. 

Fewer than ten percent of the Afghans population could read or write. The infant mortality rate was the highest in the world. Women had little access to education, jobs or independent lives.

I knew my students needed a counterweight to what they were hearing on Radio Moscow, but the irony was not lost on me that here I was, an anti-war American, defending my country’s military in some sense as part of my role as a mentor.

Anyway, for Afghans, the problem wasn’t American intervention. The problem was that the Russians were massed right next door. And within a few years of my leaving Afghanistan, the Russians indeed invaded, bombing and strafing the country into submission, or so they thought at the time.

But that ended badly for the Soviets a decade later as they limped back to Moscow in retreat. Once they lost the Afghan war, the entire Soviet empire crumbled as well.

(I first published this three years ago.)

HEADLINES:

• The Obamas have endorsed Harris, capping a week where Democrats embraced her (NPR)

• Harris Narrows Gap Against Trump, Times/Siena Poll Finds (NYT)

• Why a GOP pollster is watching Harris’s impact in the Midwest (WP)

• The 2024 Map Just Got a Major Shakeup (Politico)

• How Kamala Harris could win (or lose) the Electoral College (Vox)

• Where Harris stands against Trump in the battleground states that will decide the election (The Hill)

• Harris embarks on sprint to find Democratic running mate (WP)

• Chinese and Russian bombers patrolling off Alaska raise concerns about growing military cooperation (AP)

• French rail lines disrupted by ‘coordinated sabotage’ ahead of Paris Olympics opening ceremony (CNN)

• California’s largest wildfire of year grows as thousands ordered to evacuate (Guardian)

• Typhoon Gaemi lashed towns on China's coastal Fujian province with heavy rains and strong winds as the storm began its widely watched trek into the populous interior. Earlier this week, Gaemi turned streets in the Philippines into rivers (Reuters)

• How Soon Might the Atlantic Ocean Break? Two Sibling Scientists Found an Answer—and Shook the World (Wired)

• Nasa rover discovery hints at ancient microbial life on Mars (Guardian)

• The AI race’s biggest shift yet (Verge)

• AI is approaching an open-source inflection point (Financial Times)

• How our genome is like a generative AI model (Technology Review)

• Woman Has Friend On Standby To Drive Car Through Bar Window In Case Date Going Badly (The Onion)

Note to File

In the moments following the assassination attempt on Donald Trump, something bothered me about what I’d seen on TV. It was the way Trump reached up to his ear after being hit — it seemed like the way a person might swat away a mosquito rather than responding to being hit by a bullet.

I decided not to publish it at that time, because I didn’t want to seem disrespectful at what clearly had been a traumatic experience for him and the country at large.

Besides, it was only an impression.

Since then, Trump has told his version of what happened a number of times and the incident has entered the annals of political mythology, where it will probably live far into the future. In his telling, a bullet “pierced” his ear.

The problem for FBI investigators, historians and journalists is that we have to deal in facts, not useful fictions and in this case, the truth may be slightly more complex than the story-teller’s version.

According to the FBI director, there is doubt that Trump was actually hit by a bullet. More likely, he’s suggested, it was something smaller, perhaps shrapnel. And whatever hit him didn’t pierce his ear, it just grazed him. All of which might explain my first impressions of his reaction.

In the end, this is a minor distinction, of course. Trump was shot at, that’s what matters, and he avoided serious injury, which is a good thing.

And he lived to tell his own story, which is a very good thing for his campaign. But for me there’s a lesson here too: Pay attention to your first impressions! 

A Warning

 With a nation divided and at loggerheads, Joe Biden stepped aside from the presidential race last night with grace and dignity but with a warning. Here are some highlights from his speech:

“I’ve made it clear that I believe America is at an inflection point. On those rare moments in history, when the decisions we make now determine our fate of our nation and the world for decades to come, America is going to have to choose between moving forward or backward, between hope and hate, between unity and division.”

“When Ben Franklin was asked, as he emerged from the (constitutional) convention…whether the founders have given America a monarchy or a republic, Franklin’s response was: ‘A republic, if you can keep it.’ A republic, if you can keep it. Whether we keep our republic is now in your hands.”

With three-and-a-half months left before the election, the rhetoric on both sides is not going to get more conciliatory or less heated. Democrats and Republicans are locked in what feels like a political death spiral, with each side predicting disaster should the other prevail.

But it’s worth remembering at this juncture that we’ve been through this kind of thing before — many times. Yet it feels in the moment that the stakes are unprecedented. And maybe they are.

Because we only have a republic if we can keep it.

HEADLINES:

• Full Transcript of Biden’s Speech on Ending His Run for Re-election (NYT)

• Dozens of congressional staffers walk out ahead of Netanyahu address (The Hill)

• Takeaways from FBI testimony: Trump shooter searched details of JFK assassination and flew drone near rally site (CNN)

• This Is Exactly What the Trump Team Feared (Atlantic)

• Historic flood of cash pours into Harris campaign and allied groups (WP)

• What Initial Polling Data Show About the Trump-Harris Matchup (Bloomberg)

• JD Vance Is the Least Liked VP Nominee in Decades, According to Polls (Newsweek)

• Secret Service encourages Trump campaign to stop outdoor rallies (WP)

• CrowdStrike Explains What Went Wrong Days After Global Tech Outage (WSJ)

• Climate change is ending the Sun Belt boom (Yahoo)

• Russia’s huge stockpiles of Soviet-era weapons are dwindling (Economist)

• UN blasts ‘shamefully’ high hunger levels (Financial Times)

• Baseball Grapples With a New Problem: Parity (WSJ)

• Sharks test positive for cocaine in Brazil’s drug-polluted waters (WP)

• The AI boyfriend business is booming (Axios)

• How AI Companions Are Redefining Human Relationships In The Digital Age (Forbes)

• AI arms race escalates: OpenAI offers free GPT-4o Mini fine-tuning to counter Meta’s Llama 3.1 release (VentureBeat)

• J.D. Vance Vows To Fight For Forgotten Communities In Silicon Valley (The Onion)

No Drama Kamala

 Now the question has become: “Who do you like — Kamala Harris or Donald Trump?” 

We all know it’s not necessarily the issues that determine who wins elections. Most of us need to find our comfort level with a presidential .candidate in order to vote for them.

And we definitely need to like them more than their opponent. 

That’s why one of the biggest tasks for their campaigns is image-making. Of course, for the Republicans, everybody already has a set image of Donald Trump, so there’s not much to be done about that.

Democrats, by contrast, have an opportunity to introduce us to Kamala Harris and they are essentially starting with a blank slate.

And although she comes from here, most of us in San Francisco probably don’t feel like we know her very well either. 

Her rise in local and state progressive politics has paralleled that of Gavin Newsom, but as politicians the two could hardly be more dissimilar. Almost everybody around here has their Gavin Newsom story but precious few people have Kamala Harris stories.

Most of us first became aware of Harris in 2003 when she was an assistant district attorney in San Francisco running for D.A. That same year Newsom was running for mayor.

They both won and the next time around they were both re-elected. Harris then was elected as California’s attorney general (2010), then as its senator (2017), before being selected for the V-P position by Joe Biden (2020).

During all of these years of her rise politically, Harris remained something of an enigma, virtually untouched by the press. She was scandal-free and largely uncontroversial.

Newsom, by contrast, was always in the public eye, as mayor, then lieutenant governor, and finally governor of California. He was often at the center of dramatic events — being the first public official to approve same-sex marriages, negotiating strike-ending deals or getting into trouble with scandals including a messy sexual affair. He also faced down a major recall effort as governor. 

Harris studiously avoided the limelight, even as vice-president. Compared to Newsom, she has always been (my term) No Drama Kamala.

Like many others, I’ve had any number of personal interactions with Newsom over the years, all memorable and positive, but no interactions at all with Harris. He was always accessible; she seemed aloof. 

Given all this, it’s not surprising that many San Franciscans expected Newsom to run for president some day and we still do. Fewer thought that of Harris — until 2020.

So while Newsom was stealing the limelight over the past two decades, Harris was quietly preparing in her own way for the moment that has finally arrived. 

Now she is at center stage it’s time we got to know her.

HEADLINES:

• Harris makes presidential campaign debut in swing state of Wisconsin (Reuters)

• Trump’s New Rival May Bring Out His Harshest Instincts (NYT)

• Trump’s age and health under renewed scrutiny (WP)

• What are Kamala Harris’s chances against Donald Trump? (Financial Times)

• Harris gets a dream start, but the task ahead is monumental (CNN)

• Historians say Biden’s withdrawal shows American democracy is working (WP)

• Project 2025’s Plan to Eliminate Public Schools Has Already Started (Time)

• World recorded hottest day on July 21, monitor says (Guardian)

• Secret Service Director Resigns Amid Anger Over Trump Shooting (WSJ)

• U.S., Israel and UAE held a secret meeting on Gaza war "day after" plan (Axios)

• Palestinian factions including rivals Hamas and Fatah agreed to form an interim national unity government during negotiations in China. (Reuters)

• Google makes abrupt U-turn by dropping plan to remove ad-tracking cookies on Chrome browser (AP)

• Open Source AI Is the Path Forward (Meta)

• Target Employees Hate Its New AI Chatbot (Forbes)

• Large language models don’t behave like people, even though we may expect them to (MIT)

• A.I. Can Write Poetry, but It Struggles With Math (NYT)

• Democrats Panic After Kamala Harris Ages 40 Years In Single Night (The Onion)

Trump Card

As both parties adjust to the new contours of this year’s election landscape, it’s worth remembering how we got here in terms of the issues at play.

For decades, the Republican Party has settled into the role of retrenchment and reaction against inevitabilities, opposing both the growing diversity of the population and the globalization of the economy.

These changes are relentless and can’t be stopped, but they can be mischaracterized and demonized to instill fear in the people who feel they’ve been left behind.

So it’s no surprise to hear Trump’s heated rhetoric against “illegal” immigration or “vermin” and “the worst economy” or “killer inflation.”

The third great GOP complaint — urban crime — is an old bugaboo hauled out by virtually every Republican candidate for higher office since Herbert Hoover, regardless of whether the actual crime rate happens to be rising or falling. 

It’s falling at present, and tt has nothing to do with national politics.

Meanwhile, complaining that too many immigrants are coming to the U.S. is about as creative a campaign idea as complaining that water flows downhill, i.e., the immigrants will always go where the jobs are. Policies set at the federal level have precious little to do with it.

But what a demagogue can do is exploit the issue by instilling fear of outsiders — this is the easy, cheap option favored by Trump. He also sprinkles in anger at a few random crimes caused by immigrants, even though those are incredibly rare incidents that have little to do with border policy or the crime rate.

As for inflation, the prices of food and other necessities have indeed gone up in response to various factors related to rapid economic growth. The Bureau of Labor Statistics says the main causes of recent inflation are “volatility of energy prices, backlogs of work orders for goods and service caused by supply chain issues due to COVID-19, and price changes in the auto-related industries.”

Federal government spending is always a factor with inflation, and so a legitimate topic for debate, but both parties love to spend taxpayer money so there’s little substantive difference between their approaches to governing.

Rather than acknowledge these realities, politicians prefer to simplify complex issues and blame their opponents for things beyond either party’s control. They do so because blaming each other is an effective political strategy.

So in order to compete with Trump, Harris and the Democrats may need to develop effective counter-attacks on their three main issues — immigration, inflation and crime — while exploiting their potential advantage in at least two other areas.

The biggest is abortion/reproductive rights. Harris has been a strong advocate, which should help her with the all-important sliver of voters who may decide the election — suburban women in the swing states.

Particularly on abortion, the GOP is vulnerable, and Trump knows it. By stacking the Supreme Court with extremists, he caused the reversal of Roe v. Wade. Most Americans do not agree with that decision or the state bans that have followed it.

The other issue where Harris may have the upper hand is somewhat more nebulous but critically important and that is Trump’s authoritarian aspirations. In the end this represents her strongest card in the high-stakes poker match just now getting underway because most Americans don’t want a dictator.

We must collectively hope that she plays her cards right and can therefore beat back Trump’s attempt to subvert our democratic way of life. In this, the stakes couldn’t be higher.

HEADLINES:

• Harris seeks to rally Democrats after Biden drops out of race (CNN)

• Harris' campaign says it raised more than $100 million after launch (CBS)

• Majority of pledged Democratic delegates endorse Harris after massive fundraising day (CNBC)

• Historic move sets Democrats and the country on an uncertain path (WP)

• Secret Service director grilled over Trump assassination attempt (Axios)

• Joe Biden’s Departure Sends Trump Into a Conspiracy-Theory Meltdown (New York)

• Trump wrote on Truth Social minutes after Biden dropped out that Biden was "not fit to run for president." Trump continued ranting and pushing conspiracy theories late into the night. [HuffPost]

• The rich world revolts against sky-high immigration (Economist)

• The remarkable contrast between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump (WP)

• The Puzzle of How Large-Scale Order Emerges in Complex Systems (Wired)

• Conspiracy theories swirl about geo-engineering, but could it help save the planet? (BBC)

• China’s Long Blueprint for Economy Falls Short on Details, Raising Concerns (WSJ)

• Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visits Washington this week, under pressure to end the Gaza war both from Israelis who want hostages brought home and from a US administration focusing increasingly on the election (Reuters)

• Americans tend to retire later than people in other countries. The U.S. statutory retirement age is 66 or 67, depending on your birth year. That’s higher than the age in all but nine countries — worldwide, the median is 61. (WP)

• Autonomous Assistants: The Next Step of the GenAI Revolution to Empower Employees and Serve Customers (ATT)

• Tesla to have humanoid robots for internal use next year, Musk says (Investing)

• Artificial intelligence isn’t a good argument for basic income (Vox)

• As new tech threatens jobs, Silicon Valley promotes no-strings cash aid (NPR)

• The Push to Develop Generative A.I. Without All the Lawsuits (NYT)

• Walter Shapiro, stalwart political correspondent, dies at 77 (WP)

• Kamala Harris Turns Down Democratic Nomination To Work On Alaskan Fishing Vessel (The Onion)

The Felon Meets The Prosecutor

In the end, Joe Biden did what he had to do. He ended his bid for a second term by bowing out and endorsing Vice-President Kamala Harris to replace him as the Democratic Party nominee.

Following Biden’s announcement, party leaders — including almost all the potential alternative candidates — got behind Harris. So it’s going to be her.

This means that a campaign that had been staggering since Biden’s disastrous debate performance several weeks ago is rapidly pivoting from supporting the oldest man ever to run for president to one for potentially the first woman to hold that office.

It’s way too soon to predict how this will change the dynamics of the race and I’m not going to be so rash as to do so. But the polls over the coming days and weeks may be telling a different story than the one we’ve grown accustomed to. 

This in an election year already unlike any other in memory.

***

I was saddened to learn Sunday night that an old friend from Michigan Daily days, Walter Shapiro, has died. Walter was a brilliant political journalist who would have had a lot to say about the coming election. Now we won’t benefit from his insights. His passing is yet another reminder how much every voice matters.  

Weekend Reads

 (Summer cherry tomatoes)

HEADLINES:

• Biden continues to resist Democratic calls to end re-election campaign (Guardian)

• Biden family grapples with pressure on their patriarch to step aside (WP)

• Secluded in Rehoboth, Biden Stews at Allies’ Pressure to Drop Out of the Race (NYT)

• Biden vows to fight on (Reuters)

• Harris speaks at fundraiser on Cape Cod amid more calls for Biden to drop out (WP)

• Trump Assassination Attempt Exposes the Mortal Core of America’s Politics (WSJ)

• Secret Service Says It Denied Earlier Trump Requests for More Federal Resources (NYT)

• Lack of motive in Trump attack frustrates public, but fits a pattern (WP)

• Trump mocks Democrats, insults Pelosi, in first campaign rally since assassination attempt (Reuters)

• Israel strikes Yemen in response to Houthi drone attack on Tel Aviv (Axios)

• How Russia’s espionage case against Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich unfolded (AP)

• Bus by Bus, Texas’ Governor Changed Migration Across the U.S. (NYT)

• The Animals Behaving in ‘Humanlike’ Ways (Atlantic)

• Chaos and Confusion: Tech Outage Causes Disruptions Worldwide (NYT)

• This Nvidia Forecast All but Confirms That the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Bubble Will Burst Sooner Rather Than Later (Motley Fool)

• AI method radically speeds predictions of materials’ thermal properties (MIT)

• AI & robotics briefing: What is AI, really? (Nature)

• A short history of AI, and what it is (and isn’t) (Technology Review)

• The AI Revolution Is Meeting Reality (The Wrap)

• MLB Reminds White Sox That Games Televised (The Onion)