WHILE HE DODGED VIETNAM, DONALD GETS HIS OWN WALL:

The front page of The New York Times for May 24, 2020 pic.twitter.com/Mp4figjnQe

— The New York Times (@nytimes) May 23, 2020

So mystifying why seniors are fleeing Donald... https://t.co/TWN5RKg5Z2

— brothersjudd (@brothersjudd) May 23, 2020

IGNORE JOE, RUN BARRY:

Former president Barack Obama has dipped his toes into the 2020 presidential campaign recently and is positioned to do more in the coming months as Joe Biden's effort to defeat Donald Trump gathers steam.

Interviews with about a dozen Democratic strategists, party officials and people close to Obama want the popular former president utilizing his powerful online presence and focusing on rallying key Democrat constituencies that are critical to a Biden victory.

Obama is regarded as one of the most popular politicians in American politics and a huge asset within the Democratic party. He left the White House with a near-60% approval rating. His endorsement for any candidate is the political campaign equivalent of an oilman and hitting a gusher.

Obama would be most effective, interviewees said, in highlighting his former vice-president's résumé, rallying key Democratic voting groups like African American women, and pushing voters to register.

NOT TO MENTION EVERYONE PRETENDING TO BE MAD AT JOE:

Nearly half 'reopen America' Twitter accounts are bots: report - Business Insider https://t.co/xXhNjb3fgP

— Ryan Lizza (@RyanLizza) May 23, 2020

DONALD'S ELECTION WAS ENTIRELY A FUNCTION OF HILLARY:

The seeds were planted years ago. Biden has led Trump with seniors in theoretical matchups dating back to 2015. Trump's prospects with seniors have depended to a large degree on the alternative.

The 65+ vote helped put Trump over the top in 2016. Those voters made up more than a fourth of the electorate and went for Trump over Hillary Clinton, 53% to 44%, the Pew Research Center found.

Biden has a +12-point favorability standing among seniors; at the same point in the cycle four years ago, Clinton's favorability with seniors was running a deficit of -13, per Quinnipiac.

A Monmouth University poll out last week shows another strength Biden has over Clinton: He's winning voters who don't like either of the major party nominees by more than 40 percentage points. In 2016, Clinton lost them to Trump by 17 percentage points.

Republicans have won seniors by 5-12 percentage points since the 2000 election, but Trump's margin of victory with them in '16 was roughly half of what Romney earned the cycle before -- and the lowest for any GOP nominee in nearly two decades.

But the coronavirus does look to be hurting Trump with seniors. A recent Morning Consult poll showed Trump dropped 20 percentage points in a month in how seniors view his handling of the crisis.

THE MORE INSIGNIFICANT ONE FEELS ONSELF... (profanity alert):

HOW THE ANGLOSPHERE AVOIDED THE ENLIGHTENMENT:

Hume forged a distinction in his first work, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40), between "true" and "false" philosophy.  The philosophical act of thought has three constituents. First, it is inquiry that seeks an unconditioned grasp of the nature of reality. The philosophical question takes the form: "What ultimately is X?" Second, in answering such questions the philosopher is only guided by his autonomous reason. He cannot begin by assuming the truth of what the poets, priests, or founders of states have said. To do so would be to make philosophy the handmaiden of religion, politics, or tradition. Third, philosophical inquiry, aiming to grasp the ultimate nature of things and guided by autonomous reason, has a title to dominion. As Plato famously said, philosophers should be kings.

Yet Hume discovered that the principles of ultimacy, autonomy, and dominion, though essential to the philosophical act, are incoherent with human nature and cannot constitute an inquiry of any kind.  If consistently pursued, they entail total skepticism and nihilism. Philosophers do not end in total skepticism, but only because they unknowingly smuggle in their favorite beliefs from the prejudices of custom, passing them off as the work of a pure, neutral reason. Hume calls this "false philosophy" because the end of philosophy is self-knowledge, not self-deception.

The "true philosopher" is one who consistently follows the traditional conception of philosophy to the bitter end and experiences the dark night of utter nihilism. In this condition all argument and theory is reduced to silence. Through this existential silence and despair the philosopher can notice for the first time that radiant world of pre-reflectively received common life which he had known all along through participation, but which was willfully ignored by the hubris of philosophical reflection.

It is to this formerly disowned part of experience that he now seeks to return. Yet he also recognizes that it was the philosophic act that brought him to this awareness, so he cannot abandon inquiry into ultimate reality, as the ancient Pyrrhonian skeptics and their postmodern progeny try to do. Rather he reforms it in the light of this painfully acquired new knowledge.

What must be given up is the autonomy principle. Whereas the false philosopher had considered the totality of pre-reflectively received common life to be false unless certified by the philosopher's autonomous reason, the true philosopher now presumes the totality of common life to be true. Inquiry thus takes on a different task. Any belief within the inherited order of common life can be criticized in the light of other more deeply established beliefs. These in turn can be criticized in the same way. And so Hume defines "true philosophy" as "reflections on common life methodized and corrected."

By common life Hume does not mean what Thomas Paine or Thomas Reid meant by "common sense," namely a privileged access to knowledge independent of critical reflection; this would be just another form of "false philosophy." "Common life" refers to the totality of beliefs and practices acquired not by self-conscious reflection, propositions, argument, or theories but through pre-reflective  participation in custom and tradition. We learn to speak English by simply speaking it under the guidance of social authorities. After acquiring sufficient skill, we can abstract and reflect on the rules of syntax, semantics, and grammar that are internal to it and form judgments as to excellence in spoken and written English.  But we do not first learn these rules and then apply them as a condition of speaking the language. Knowledge by participation, custom, tradition, habit, and prejudice is primordial and is presupposed by knowledge gained from reflection.

The error of philosophy, as traditionally conceived--and especially modern philosophy--is to think that abstract rules or ideals gained from reflection are by themselves sufficient to guide conduct and belief.

YOU DIDN'T BUILD THIS:

Remember you are a pilgrim on this road. You are not meant to be a final product, so focus on your verbs more than your nouns: you write, you make, you teach, you serve. This will help you avoid chasing the title and the conversation-piece job, staying true to what you enjoy doing and what you excel at being. Know that once you climb one mountain, there is a higher one above you. Never cease to keep looking out and up, beyond yourself to all the people and places to whom you belong. For belonging is the most beautiful part of the journey, and they lie who tell you that you are your own. If I could rewrite Oh the Places You'll Go, I'd draw that little tyke with a handful of loved ones around him on his way. Chaucer and Dante told truer tales of pilgrimage. I'd also forego many of Theodor Geisel's words in favor of those T.S. Eliot wrote: "We shall not cease from exploration/ and the end of all our exploring/ will be to arrive where we started/ and know the place for the first time."

IT'LL NEVER FLY, ORVILLE:

In 2010, a lithium-ion battery pack with 1 kWh of capacity--enough to power an electric car for three or four miles--cost more than $1,000. By 2019, the figure had fallen to $156, according to data compiled by BloombergNEF. That's a massive drop, and experts expect continued--though perhaps not as rapid--progress in the coming decade. Several forecasters project the average cost of a kilowatt-hour of lithium-ion battery capacity to fall below $100 by the mid-2020s.

That's the result of a virtuous circle where better, cheaper batteries expand the market, which in turn drives investments that produce further improvements in cost and performance. The trend is hugely significant because cheap batteries will be essential to shifting the world economy away from carbon-intensive energy sources like coal and gasoline.

Batteries and electric motors have emerged as the most promising technology for replacing cars powered by internal combustion engines. The high cost of batteries has historically made electric cars much more expensive than conventional cars. But once battery packs get cheap enough--again, experts estimate around $100 per kWh for non-luxury vehicles--electric cars should actually become cheaper than equivalent gas-powered cars. The cost advantage will be even bigger once you factor in the low cost of charging an electric car, so we can expect falling battery costs to accelerate the adoption of electric vehicles.

RETURN TO PIECE WORK:

Though I never would've wished for a pandemic to be the catalyst, I do believe our suddenly new ways of working are here to stay. As leaders adjust to this, here are four future-of-work pillars to which I hope they'll be paying special attention.

Pillar 1: Flexible hours

Since the outbreak of the pandemic, our definition of the word "office" has changed dramatically. It has expanded beyond cubicles and co-working spaces to include kitchen tables, couches, and even bathrooms.

The definition of the "workday" has changed, as well; it is no longer limited to a certain subset of hours that all employees share. For parents especially, the workday has become whatever they can fit in, whenever the fewest people are vying for their attention.

Without the boundaries of a physical office space or strict working hours, employees have been forced to set--and communicate--their own availability, based upon their personal schedules and productivity levels. This shift would've eventually occurred with the future of work, as well.

While some leaders might be nervous this flexibility will lead to reduced productivity, I have the opposite fear: that, without a delineation between office and home life, employees may work too much. In one survey of more than 4,500 developers and tech workers, for example, 66% of remote employees reported feeling burnt out. The reason? More than half cited longer work hours.

With that in mind, leaders should fight the urge to micromanage their teams and instead act as advocates for their newly remote employees, encouraging them to set clear boundaries and to protect themselves from work-from-home exhaustion.

Pillar 2: Data-based employee metrics

In a more flexible environment, leaders don't need to stop evaluating employee performance--far from it. They'll simply need to create new metrics of success, as they will no longer be able to judge employee effectiveness (foolishly, it might be argued) based on hours spent in the office.

At Automattic, the tech company that created WordPress, all 1,180 employees are remote. To measure individual success, CEO Matt Mullenweg has said the company focuses on outputs rather than inputs. Instead of assessing an employee's hours or availability, Mullenweg asks: "What do you actually produce?"

To be well-positioned for continued remote work during and after the pandemic, leaders will need to emulate Mullenweg, and develop new, measurable metrics of success for each employee. For a salesperson, perhaps it's the number of phone calls they make. For a human resources professional, perhaps it's the employee turnover rate. Because these metrics are so vertical-specific, leaders shouldn't hesitate to co-create them with their teams.

Then, once the metrics are set, leaders must make their new expectations crystal clear. Line managers and supervisors should schedule meetings with team members to answer questions and eliminate roadblocks. They should also determine a regular cadence for subsequent one-on-ones, as workers generally desire a higher degree of feedback when they are remote.

As anyone will tell you, however, the most important key to managing remote employees is trust. Leaders must simply trust that they hired good people, and that those good people will continue to do the work for which they are being compensated. That trust will allow leaders to foster a successful remote culture both during the pandemic and beyond.

WHY SHOULD HE CARE; HE'S LOST MICHIGAN ALREADY:

Like many disasters, the beginnings of the Michigan dam failures are far removed in time from the actual even, but this event can hardly be described as a mistake. All indications are that this week's historic flooding was caused by years of neglect and mismanagement of a public good that was co-opted for private profit. It doesn't help that the headquarters of Dow Chemical, including a Superfund site with known cancer-causing chemicals, is directly downstream of all this floodwater. 

The owner of the breached dams, Lee Mueller, who heads a company called Boyce Hydro, has been cited numerous times in recent years. State regulators had even revoked one of the company's four dam operating license in 2018 over an inability to handle a major flood. At least two of Boyce Hydro's dams were identified as being "high hazard," meaning that according to the National Dam Safety Program and FEMA, loss of life would likely result if they failed or were incorrectly operated. 

 The potential failure of the Edenville Dam, wrote federal regulators, "would pose a very substantial risk to life and property, and Boyce has repeatedly failed to comply with the orders of the Regional Engineer and other Commission staff or to work with Commission staff to resolve these instances of noncompliance, notwithstanding being given many opportunities to do so." The dam was flagged as unable to handle heavy rainfall as long ago as the 1990s. But Mueller, a Trump supporter who publicly backed the president against impeachment in a Reuters article last year, didn't want to pay to repair them. After years of delay, Boyce Hydro finally agreed to sell the dams to a task force of residents from four neighboring counties who hoped to implement overdue repairs. This is yet another example of the wealthy privatizing their profits and socializing the losses. 

The Army Corps of Engineers says more than half of the nation's 91,458 dams are privately owned, and according to E&E News, a majority of them are more than 50 years old. Jokes about Trump's always-impending and never-arriving "Infrastructure Week" have long gone stale, but it's worth remembering that increased infrastructure spending, like the kind needed to upgrade the nation's aging water infrastructure, was one of Trump's biggest campaign promises. 

WISE TO THE FACT:

Well then, if Past Master is impossible to introduce, R. A. Lafferty is somewhat less so; let us start there. Lafferty's was a remarkably unremarkable life. Vacations and military service aside, he spent almost all his days in Tulsa, Oklahoma, working more or less the same job at the same store counter, selling parts to electrical engineers and contractors. He never married, never had kids, never earned a college degree. During the Second World War, he saw action in the South Pacific, but apart from a few oblique references in obscure stories, he left no record of those years. Every day he went to mass, took a walk round his neighborhood, and settled in to read, watch TV, or work a little bit on his foremost hobby, the learning of languages. And then he also wrote some of the wildest, funniest, most outlandish stories ever seen in science fiction, fantasy, or whatever other genre category you're brave enough to place him in. (Far better writers than I have thrown up their hands at this task: Theodore Sturgeon once imagined that future literary historians would simply label his works "lafferties.")

Though Lafferty is best known today--when he is known at all--as an author of science fiction, this was as much historical accident as purposeful career choice. When he picked up writing as a hobby in the late 1950s, ostensibly as a way to fill the hours while "cutting down on drinking and fooling around," he experimented with a variety of genres then popular on newsstands: hard-boiled detective fiction, men's own adventures, slice-of-life domestic tales. Though he placed a handful with small-circulation literary magazines--starting with "The Wagons" in the New Mexico Quarterly--they sold poorly enough that he shelved most of them to concentrate on the one area in which he had more consistent success: science fiction. Perhaps if that field hadn't been on the verge of its own stylistic revolution--the "New Wave," as it was called largely in retrospect, borrowing not just the name but also the attitude, the techniques, and a host of preoccupations from French cinema--then Lafferty would have struck out there as well. But he met science fiction at a time when it was desperate for new voices and new directions, and his style--equal parts carnival barker, bar-stool raconteur, and apocalyptic prophet--was met with an eager embrace.

By the time he began publishing in SF, he was already in his mid-forties, unusual in a field where many writers cut their teeth in their teens. His tales, by turns philosophical and playful, humorous and horrific, often all within the same piece, sold steadily: he featured in many of the best outlets in science fiction, including Frederik Pohl's (and later Ejler Jakobsson's) Galaxy, Robert Silverberg's New Dimensions, Terry Carr's Universe, Damon Knight's Orbit, and of course Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions. At one time or another he counted among his admirers Ursula K. Le Guin, Samuel Delany, Roger Zelazny, Judith Merril, and Gene Wolfe. Lafferty's stories won him, in addition to an audience, the 1973 Hugo Award for Best Short Story; many of his best were collected in the volumes Nine Hundred Grandmothers, Strange Doings, Does Anybody Else Have Something Further to Add?, and others that may be found in this book's biographical note (they will, however, be much tougher to find on the shelves of your local bookstore). A rather easier-to-find volume, the thick Best of compilation published in early 2019 by Gollancz, offers twenty selections handpicked by authors who love them; the complete stories are being gathered for collectors by Centipede Press with an eye toward wider distribution down the line. While far from common commodities, Lafferty's stories do still circulate, likely more today than over the past few decades. To read any of them is to at least consider the possibility that he did become, as he once asserted, "the best short story writer in the world" (in Patti Perret, The Faces of Science Fiction, 1978).

The novels are a rather different matter. Although several of them were also nominated for genre awards, they have always appealed to an even more niche audience, a niche within a niche. If the stories break many of the "rules" of writing--and they do, departing sharply at times from conventions of characterization, pacing, and plot--then they do so at a manageable length. The novels tend to sprawl, binding together episodes less through elegant plot mechanics than via other logics that are not always immediately evident. But though the novels ask much more of a reader, the rewards are consequently greater: a series of windows opened on one of the most idiosyncratic imaginations American fiction has ever seen.

Any science fiction that ceases to speak to the present moment, no matter the year of its publication, is already on the way to becoming the province of genre hounds and antiquarians. Past Master is unavoidably a product and reflection of its times: a response to what Lafferty perceives--likely in the wake of LBJ's Great Society initiatives--as renewed support in society and popular culture for the idea of Utopia; this he considered as bad as dystopia, if it were possible even to tell the two apart. Lafferty's Thomas More is wise to this fact, which is why his Utopia can only be construed as searing satire: an image of a world pleasant enough on its surface, but hellish to endure even if (perhaps especially if) one is a member of the privileged class with the full rights of citizenship, rather than one of the numerous slaves or nearby foreigners whose lives the Utopians "improve" by force.

THE rIGHT IS THE lEFT:

I think it should not surprise anybody familiar with the economic analysis of politics that our own states--in the "free" countries--also use national security to increase their own power, albeit not as uncontrollably as the Chinese government does. Think about the Trump administration imposing tariffs on steel and aluminum imported from allied countries in the name of national security and threatening to do the same on automobile imports from Europe.

A few days ago, on May 19, the same administration did something similar, even if it is not as immediately obvious how it harms Americans (while it clearly hurts poor people who are legitimately looking for asylum in America), and even if national security took a public-health face. The Wall Street Journal explains ("Trump Administration Extends Order Blocking Migrants at Border," May 19, 2020):

The Trump administration extended a public-health order allowing it to reject migrants crossing U.S. borders without giving them access to the asylum system until the government determines the new coronavirus no longer poses a danger to the public.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published the indefinite extension on Tuesday. The order was introduced in March for a duration of 30 days and extended in April for another 30 days.

The public-health order allows the government to turn back any migrants it encounters crossing the border--including unaccompanied children and anyone asking for humanitarian protection--without taking them into custody or allowing them to file asylum claims.

What's nice of Mr. Trump is that, with his limited understanding of the world, he often reveals his ulterior motives as a badge of honor--in this case, that the extension of the public-health order has little to do public health. The Wall Street Journal quotes him:

Every week, our border agents encounter thousands of unscreened, unvetted and unauthorized entries from dozens of countries. And we've had this problem for decades. With the national emergencies and all of the other things that we've declared, we can actually do something about it.

This looks pretty close to what Rahm Emmanuel (pardon me but I am tempted to write, borrowing from Mr. Trump's invectives, the radical left, do-nothing Democrat Rahm Emmanuel, or the Democrat Savage Rahm Emmanuel) said in 2012:

You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. What I mean by this is, it's an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.

Both President Donald Trump and Chairman Xi Jinping invoke nationalism to excite their respective political bases and reinforce their power.

GLASS CEILING:

AR: It feels as though there was an argument at some point in late January, early February, in which the phrase "herd immunity" was on the table. Is that right?

JF: Herd immunity is not a scientific strategy that has merit. Patrick Vallance is the chair of Sage--I know he's been quoted in the newsreel about how he talked about herd immunity. I am not aware... and I certainly never would have argued for a concept of herd immunity, which would mean naturally letting what is a very nasty virus pass through a population and accepting that there would be a very high amount of illness and people dying, in order to protect the rest of the population. To me, that's an unacceptable way to think about public health. I'm not aware that that concept was ever discussed at Sage in my presence.

AR: Is this virus something that you think as a species we're just going to have to live with for years?

JF: Yeah, what we've witnessed over the last three or four months is the emergence of a true, brand new novel human infection, which is now endemic in the human population, and it's not going to disappear. This will now be part of the infectious cycle that humanity has to live with.

And [potentially] we're... going to have to completely change the way we live, with some degree of physical distancing forever. But that's a plaster over a problem, because as soon as you lift those restrictions, things will bounce back. And I can't think of any biological or social reason why we won't face rebounds and second waves of this infection. So the only exit from this is the production of interventions that totally reduce the risk of that. And ultimately, that means diagnostics and treatment and vaccines.

I think that a vaccine has a very good chance of working, but there's a glass shortage in the world at the moment, there isn't enough glass to put a vaccine into glass vials. There's a syringe shortage, so if we had to inject the vaccine, we wouldn't have enough syringes in the world. And then finally, you've got a horrible geopolitical structure at the moment, which means you're in grave danger of going into something akin to vaccine nationalism, where each country will have to look after itself in national stupidity, really, without thinking of the need to take a global perspective.