All posts by Steve Stern

I’m Shocked, But Not Surprised

Japan

Mr. Trump now leads Mr. Biden 49 percent to 43 percent among likely voters nationally, a three-point swing toward the Republican from just a week earlier, before the debate. Nate Cohen in the New York Times.

Democrats have had the tendency to think, ‘Well, we owe it to the person. They’ve been good to the party, they’ve fought for the right causes over the years. Therefore, it’s kind of up to them to decide when to step aside.” Eric Schickler, co-director of the Institute of Governmental Studies at UC Berkeley.

Michele and I didn’t see The Great Debate Disaster – we were driving to her family cabin in what is now known as Olympic Valley – although we did listen to the debate on the car radio. Well, we listened to parts of the debate anyway. After Biden or Trump would say something, I would turn the radio off, saying, “I can’t listen to this.” Thirty seconds later, in a FOMO frenzy of thinking Biden had to improve, we would turn it back on, listen for ten or fifteen minutes, and then repeat the cycle. It was painful.

I thought Maybe Biden did better on TV, where people could see how much better and more Presidential he looked. However, by every account I’ve read, Biden looked even worse on TV. Part of the problem is that Biden is not a very good campaigner. According to President Biden’s campaign team, part of the problem was that Biden had jet lag from going to Normandy to celebrate D-Day, and part of it was that he had a cold. It’s safe to say that whoever made the deal with former president Trump’s campaign team wasn’t thinking it out. And Biden surely signed off on the debate date which doesn’t speak very well for him.

Actually, President Biden running for a second term does not speak well for him. I say that even though I believe that President Biden had a great first term with a long list of accomplishments like the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law – which, somehow, was a bill that everybody wanted but nobody could get passed – $280B to bring very high tech chip manufacturing back to the United States, and he got the Respect for Marriage Act through Congress which codified marriage equality for same-sex and interracial couples. For me, most importantly, he actually acknowledged that Climate Change was real and started doing something about it with the infrastructure law and the Build Back Better Act. However, all these bills were passed in the first half of Biden’s term, while the second two years were much less impressive.  

I think Biden should withdraw from running for president because he is too old to effectively run for office or effectively run the office – as far as that goes, and he is getting worse. I also believe he is unlikely to stop running. That’s too bad for everyone concerned: President Biden, the Democrats, and, especially, the people of the United States.

Now that I’ve said that, I want to reference a couple of similar situations that suggest I’m wrong. Running for his second term, President Ronald Reagan lost the first debate to former Vice-president Walter Mondale and went on to win the second debate and the presidency. President Johnson had a great first term – a great 1.5 terms? – and then withdrew from running after a poor showing in the New Hampshire primary. Vice-president Hubert Humphrey won the nomination at the 1968 Convention in Chicago and went on to lose the election.

I do want to point out that six years after leaving office, Ronald Reagan made public that he had Alzheimer’s Disease. What he did not say was that he probably had the beginnings of Alzheimer’s during his second term in office, and it probably contributed to his second term being non-productive. I also want to point out that the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago was chaotic, and Johnson would have surely lost if he had run.

Lewis Hamilton Is Leaving Mercedes For Ferrari

Japan

Lewis Hamilton is an anomaly in Formula One. for several reasons other than his being the best driver and Formula One’s only Black driver.  Automobile Racing is expensive, which is why, even today, it is a rich man’s sport. But Hamilton was an exception…sort of. While he was born and grew up in a working-class family, early in his career, while racing an old Go Cart and winning against much more expensive Go Carts, Hamilton was seen by Ron Dennis, the very rich CEO of McLaren Racing. That led to Dennis signing Hamilton on to the McLaren Young Driver Program in 1997, backing Hamilton through Formula 3 and then Formula 2. He started racing for the McLaren Formula One Team in 2007.

Under Ron Dennis, McLaren had become, behind Ferrari, the second most successful Formula One Team. Dennis ran a very tight ship, and Hamilton was expected to conform. But the world was changing, and McLaren wasn’t. It was on the way down. Still, Hamilton won his first Championship and McLaren’s last, in 2008, becoming the youngest Formula One World Champion. In late 2012, Lewis Hamilton left McLaren and joined the Mercedes Team, leaving the very cloistered environment of McLaren for a team in which they only cared how he drove.

Hamilton blossomed. Between 2013 and 2020, he won six World Driver Championships for Mercedes. He also started wearing his hair in dreadlocks, and he covered his body in tattoos. In his spare time, he took up skydiving, snowboarding, and surfing. See below for gratuitous skydiving and snowboarding videos.

However, aside from driving a very fast Formula 1 car very fast, Lewis Hamilton’s biggest love seems to be clothing, especially streetwear. If what they wear to the racetrack is any indicator, Formula One drivers are pretty conservative dressers. Except for Lewis (of course).

Almost every year, Lewis attends the super-expensive Met Gala, which is a fundraiser for the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute. This year, the tickets were $70,000 a pop, and the theme was “The Garden of Time.” Inspired by a J.G. Ballard short story of the same title. Lewis wore an outfit inspired by the story of John Ystumllyn, a freed slave who became Wales’ first black gardener. Inside the coat was a poem by Alex Wharton, a black poet in England, about Ystumllyn entitled The Gardener.

Mercedes encouraged and played off of Lewis’es interests and activities. When Black Lives Matter became a rallying cry, Mercedes changed the color of their racecars from traditional silver to black. Still, Lewis Hamilton is now going to Ferrari, and Ferrari is very different.

Ferrari has been racing since 1950 and is the most successful and famous Formula One team ever. At Ferrari, everything is about Ferrari, and everybody, especially the drivers, is expected to conform. To me, that seems like a mismatch, so it will be interesting to see what happens.

Wow!!!

Americana, Current Affairs, Politics

Will Trump go to jail? Can he be president? What’s next after guilty verdict? Washington Post

That Former President Donald Trump has been convicted of 34 felonies is shocking. At least, I was shocked, although not exactly surprised. I shouldn’t have been shocked either, everybody I talked to thought he was guilty (although the people I talked to represented an extremely biased sample). I also shouldn’t have been shocked because, like almost everything Trump is involved in, his defense was incompetent. They fought everything, starting with “Trump didn’t have sex with Stormy Daniels” when he clearly did rather than concentrating on one or two weak parts of the prosecution.

Quilty of all 34 felonies shouldn’t be surprising because they are linked so that if he is guilty of one, he was logically guilty of them all: the Invoice from Michael Cohen, marked as a record of the Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust (felony #1) was entered into the Detail General Ledger for the Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust, bearing voucher number 842457 (felony #2), and then paid by Check and check stub, Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust Account, bearing check number 000138 which is felony #4, and so on. Still, “Guilty” 34 times is shocking.

Shocking!

A Couple of Political Thoughts

Americana, Current Affairs, Politics

“All these people have their public whatever and their Twitter world, but they don’t have any following. They’re four people, and that’s how many votes they got.” In an interview with The New York Times circa 2020, Speaker Nancy Pelosi referring to the Squad.

After five years in Congress, she [AOC] has emerged as a tested navigator of its byzantine systems, wielding her celebrity to further her political aims in a way few others have. Three terms in, one gets the sense that we’re witnessing a skilled tactician exiting her political adolescence and coming into her own as a veteran operator out to reform America’s most dysfunctional political body. The Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez You Don’t Know by Gaby Del Valle in The New York Times

It has now been about a week and a half since my heart valve operation, and everything seems brighter. I feel younger, not young for sure, but younger. The weather has been great – at least most of the time – with clear blue skies and temperatures in the low 70s. I’m not supposed to drive yet – I have no idea why – and my hospital release papers tell me not to walk on steep hills or lift more than 5 pounds. I have had zero pain. Zero. This whole operation has been astounding.

Near the end of last year, I got COVID. Earlier in the Spring, I ended up in the hospital with the flu, and now I am sort of tethered to the house. My last seven months have faded into a grey blur in which nothing seems to have happened. In the meanwhile, the world outside our door has continued to chug along. Well, most of the world, anyway, the US presidential race seems to be stuck in a Groundhog Day loop (just like me).

While there are safe for Biden blue states and safe for Trump red states, Trump seems to be leading Biden, more or less permanently, in the so-called swing states. As to why Trump is leading Biden, there are all kinds of theories, from the poles being wrong to the Democrats being clueless about what the average person thinks. All the theories are slightly true, but I also think that Joe Biden has never been a particularly good campaigner. That’s too bad because Biden has been a much better-than-average President and the best president so far on Climate Change.

The brightest spot in this year’s political landscape – for me, at least – is that so far, every Squad member has won their primary despite AIPAC – the American Israel Public Affairs Committee – claiming they are antiSemites and spending heavily to eliminate them from the public discussion. The Squad is not anti-Semitic, of course, but they are anti-Israeli policy, and AIPAC is a lobbying organization designed to promote the Israeli government and its policies, so there is a built-in conflict. Not only is that conflict with the Israeli government but with President Biden, who has, until recently, wholeheartedly backed whatever Netanyahu did.

Still, that hasn’t stopped President Biden from allying with the Squad when he is trying to minimize Climate Change. A couple of weeks ago, he announced the formation of an American Climate Corps and invited AOC to join him in the announcement. She did and even wore Biden’s trademark aviator glasses. I read about the announcement on Instagram and still haven’t seen anything about it in the New York Times since September of last year.

Lastly, maybe that is part of the problem; the mainstream media is too busy covering the 2024 Presidential election as a political horse race rather than talking about what the candidates want to do. No matter what the media reports, I am feeling much better and will soon be able to drive and even lift more than five pounds.

Wow, This Turned Out Better Than I Expected

Japan

Transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR) is a minimally invasive procedure that replaces a diseased or malfunctioning aortic valve with a man-made valve. The procedure is performed under X-ray guidance and uses smaller incisions than open-heart valve surgery. Both the previous definition of TAVR and the following definition of Gemini are from Gemini, a multimodal model from Google DeepMind, is capable of understanding virtually any input, combining different types of information, and generating almost any output.

When I woke up in the recovery room after my heart valve operation, I felt great. Shockingly great. For the first time in months, I could breathe. It’s been 48 hours, and I can breathe even better now.