"Because of collapsing fertility elsewhere, Africa will make up an increasing share of the world’s population."

"Africa accounted for less than 10 percent of the world’s population until the early 1970s, but a demographic forecast in The Lancet suggests that by 2100, 54 percent of the world’s babies will be born in sub-Saharan Africa. Include North Africa, and the share is even higher. If that forecast is right (and always be skeptical of long-term demographic forecasts), at some point in the 22nd century a majority of the world’s population will be African.... In an aging and perhaps enfeebled world, Africa will also be a continent of youth — arguably making it comparatively vigorous and more of a hotbed for entrepreneurship and for music and popular culture...."

Writes Nicholas Kristof, in "In an Aging World, a Youthful Africa Steps Up" (NYT).

"We in the news media and chattering class mocked Jimmy Carter as a country bumpkin..."

"... with cartoons depicting him installing an outhouse next to the White House. His public approval dropped to 28 percent, and when Ronald Reagan succeeded him, the Reagans’ interior designer reportedly smirked about the need to 'get the smell of catfish out of the White House.' President Carter, a member of Congress lamented in 1979, 'couldn’t get the Pledge of Allegiance through Congress.' Rolling Stone described Carter as 'the great national sinking feeling.' Ousted after a single term, he wasn’t so much criticized as sneered at. Even Democrats like Bill Clinton treated Carter as an embarrassment who had undermined liberals and paved a path for Reagan. Yet all this speaks to our failure of discernment...."

Writes Nicholas Kristof, in "Jimmy Carter Deserved Our Thanks and Respect, Not Our Sneers" (NYT). That's a free-access link, so you can see Kristof's argument for respecting and thanking President Carter. And let it represent all the many columns that are going up right now, expressing that sentiment. It is a time for eulogy.

Reading "the great national sinking feeling" made me think of Carter's "malaise" speech. I'm surprised it didn't come immediately to mind upon hearing of President Carter's death, but it did not. The cliché got worn out over the course of 45 years. Carter lived so long one grew tired of reacting to the name "Carter" with the one-word outburst: "Malaise!"

Or had your reaction to hearing Carter's name over the years been 2 words long? "Killer rabbit."

I see The Onion went there:

"Mr. Trump had instructed his young sidekick to fight forcefully through those initial attacks, and later said Mr. Vance’s execution exceeded his expectations..."

"... according to three allies who insisted on anonymity to discuss private conversations. In a quintessentially Trumpian display of bravado, the former president has privately praised Mr. Vance by comparing himself to Vince Lombardi, telling people that his eye for political talent was now on par with the Hall of Fame football coach’s ability to find Super Bowl-caliber players. But beyond Mar-a-Lago, early returns on Mr. Vance are less enthusiastic. Polls show that he effectively amplifies Mr. Trump’s political strengths but that he also magnifies his weaknesses. Mr. Vance’s approval rating improved by nearly double digits among the nation’s least educated and poorest voters since joining the Republican ticket — but plunged by even wider margins among college graduates and independent women, according to an NPR/PBS News/Marist poll...."

From "JD Vance’s Combative Style Confounds Democrats but Pleases Trump/Over dozens of events and more than 70 interviews, Mr. Vance’s performances as Donald Trump’s attack dog have endeared him to his boss, even if America broadly is less enthusiastic" (NYT).

For another class politics article in the NYT, try "Here’s Why We Shouldn’t Demean Trump Voters" by Nicholas Kristof. Why? It's "politically foolish." It's also "morally offensive, particularly when well-educated and successful elites are scorning disadvantaged, working-class Americans who have been left behind economically and socially and in many cases are dying young. They deserve empathy, not insults. By all means denounce Trump, but don’t stereotype and belittle the nearly half of Americans who have sided with him...."

AND: Take a look at "'Dangerous and un-American': new recording of JD Vance’s dark vision of women and immigration/Trump’s running mate rants against feminism, immigrants and Ilhan Omar in a newly unearthed podcast from 2021" (The Guardian). We're told — without a link to the audio or a transcript or even the name of the podcast — that there's a 2021 interview in which Vance said that "professional women 'choose a path to misery' when they prioritize careers over having children in a September 2021 podcast interview in which he also claimed men in America were 'suppressed' in their masculinity." I don't trust the Guardian's summary and decontexualization, but it's important to know the line that is being sold to the nondeplorables.

ADDED: I think this is the podcast — "Moment of Truth" — "The Hillbilly Has a Moment, featuring J.D. Vance." 

"[P]erhaps one-third of today’s young Americans will never marry, with couples living together not replacing marriages."

"More people, [says sociologist Brad Wilcox], are simply detached and on their own. Some women in America have publicly proclaimed that they are distancing themselves from men, abstaining from sex or going 'boy sober.'... One window into gender tensions is a viral meme on TikTok in which women discuss whether they would rather encounter a bear in the woods or a man. Many go with the bear. Young people are not only marrying less and partnering less; they’re also having less sex.... To me, the fundamental problem is the struggle of men to adapt to a world in which brawn matters less than brains, education and emotional intelligence.... I fear that I’m a romantic in a world that is becoming less romantic."

Writes Nicholas Kristof, in "Less Marriage, Less Sex, Less Agreement" (NYT).

Excerpting that quote, I was stunned by the last sentence — where the word "romantic" appears twice — because my post from an hour ago — the one about gendered architecture — features a quote with a distinctive use of that word from an essay called "The Gender of Genius," by Hilde Heynen. I'll re-excerpt from Heynen's essay:

According to Christine Battersby, the way we understand the term genius is rooted in 19th-century Romanticism, which admired originality and creativity in the individual. The Romantic notion of genius referred to men of great intellectual and artistic capacities, who were in touch with their feminine side – for great art requires sensitivity, emotionality and love. The great artist, for the Romantics, was thus a feminine male.... The gradual disappearance of women during the long march towards the top is in part explained by our romantic notion of the architect as artist and genius. As Naomi Stead has noticed, the figure of Ayn Rand’s Howard Roark in The Fountainhead, the ‘arrogant and virile hero architect, casts a long shadow over any discussion of authorship in the discipline’, infusing it with a mystique heralding the creativity of the individual artist-designer

Kristof's usage of "romantic" is so different, but it's an intriguing difference. Kristof is worried that men and women won't enter into romance with each other, and he associates maleness with "brawn" and seems to think men are impaired when it comes to the life of the mind. Heynen is talking about 19th-century Romanticism and an idea that the greatest minds are male.

Would you rather encounter a bear in the woods or 19th-century Romantic genius?

@susankehoe1 This bear likes my company. So he climbs on the deck and sits nearby. I truly believe he likes my company. Please don’t say otherwise🙏 #foryou #bear #love #wildlife #viral #woods #funny #laugh #smile #spirituality #bear #animals #enjoy #hangout #mountains #camp #country ♬ original sound - Susan Kehoe

"A self-described high school dropout living in a camper with a tarp on the roof sings a plaintive cri de coeur about blue collar workers being shafted by the wealthy..."

"... and it is right-wing Republicans who rush to embrace him while Democrats wag their fingers and scold him for insensitivity. Huh?"

Writes Nicholas Kristof — who can't really be surprised, can he? — in "On Their High Horse, Too Many Liberals Disdain Oliver Anthony" (NYT).

Have Democrats retreated so far from their workingman roots that their knee-jerk impulse is to dump on a blue collar guy who highlights “folks in the street, ain’t got nothin’ to eat”?...

Easily, for anyone who's been watching America in this century, the answer is yes. The "workingman"/"blue collar guy" might be a racist, and if anything in that song feels like dog-whistle racism, that brings on the hostility of the left. The lyric "the obese milkin' welfare" closed liberal hearts to the plaint of the working-class white man. They're not "on their high horse" in this. They're sticking with their anti-racist values and keeping their sensitivities tuned. 

Kristof says:

"The American Medical Association put out a 54-page guide on language as a way to address social problems — oops, it suggests instead using the 'equity-focused' term 'social injustice.'"

"The A.M.A. objects to referring to 'vulnerable' groups and 'underrepresented minority' and instead advises alternatives such as 'oppressed' and 'historically minoritized.'... I’m all for being inclusive in our language, and I try to avoid language that is stigmatizing. But I worry that this linguistic campaign has gone too far, for three reasons. First, much of this effort seems to me performative rather than substantive. Instead of a spur to action, it seems a substitute for it.... Second, problems are easier to solve when we use clear, incisive language. The A.M.A. style guide’s recommendations for discussing health are instead a wordy model of obfuscation, cant and sloppy analysis. Third, while this new terminology is meant to be inclusive, it bewilders and alienates millions of Americans. It creates an in-group of educated elites fluent in terms like BIPOC and A.A.P.I. and a larger out-group of baffled and offended voters, expanding the gulf between well-educated liberals and the 62 percent majority of Americans who lack a bachelor’s degree — which is why Republicans like Ron DeSantis have seized upon all things woke."

Writes Nicholas Kristof in "Inclusive or Alienating? The Language Wars Go On" (NYT).

Here's the AMA document. It is fascinating. I read a lot of it, and I suspect that absolutely no one will read the whole thing. Talk about things that are not inclusive: it excludes everyone. But that's the reason for long bureaucratic documents — to create an impression that something complicated has been worked through but to make it impossible to check the work. I mean, it's possible, but no one will do it. 

There are a lot of tables and diagrams, and these jump out as more readable than the rest. I spent some time absorbing this diagram:

 

Shouldn't the "deep" part be at the bottom? Are they using a pyramid the way the government used the old "food pyramid" — just to represent the size of the particular groups of things? And what's with the yellow arrow pointing upward? What is this gravity-defying process?

"'I don’t think that most people appreciate that most years, alcohol kills more people than drugs,' Kristof told me, though he clarified that he does not believe this is true of the type of alcohol that he makes."

"He also does not think that profiting off the sale of alcohol and lowering rates of alcohol addiction, two of his stated immediate goals, are in conflict. 'You know, I’ve lost friends to alcoholism, but I haven’t lost any to Pinot Noir alcoholism,' he said. 'I wouldn’t be in favor of barring alcohol in general. I think that wine can be, or cider can be, a social good and can create social capital. Things that bring people together, I think, are good for society. I think alcohol can do that, and I think that’s true of wine and cider. I take your point that some people start with nice Pinot Noirs and then… ,' he trailed off. 'But I think that is much less common, and those who die, the mortality from alcoholism, it’s driven really by working-class Americans, and it’s in kind of bulk hard liquor particularly. I don’t think that good wine and cider add significantly to the problem.'"

That's the most hilariously elitist thing I've read in a long time. Kristof is Nicholas Kristof, the former NYT columnist, who left that job to run for governor in Oregon, but got stopped in his tracks by the state law requirement of 3 years' residency, and he only had 1.

The quote is from "Nicholas Kristof’s Botched Rescue Mission/How the lauded Times columnist lost the race for governor of Oregon before it even began" (NY Magazine).

Why did he think he could run if he didn't meet that very specific requirement? Answer: lawyers! Just as his vineyard doesn't produce the kind of wine that entails the usual problems of alcohol, his 1 year could count as 3, couldn't it? With fancy enough arguments, his 1 could be the Pinot Noir of 3... couldn't it?

You know they say the states are the laboratories of democracy. It's such a shame we didn't get to see the mind of Kristof applied to the laboratory that is Oregon!

"But you all know how much I love Oregon, and how much I’ve been seared by the suffering of old friends there. So I’ve reluctantly concluded that I should try not only to expose problems but also see if I can fix them directly."

Writes Nicholas Kristof, quoted in "Nicholas Kristof Leaves New York Times as He Considers a Political Run/Mr. Kristof, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, is weighing a run for governor of Oregon, the state where he grew up" (NYT). 

Kristof "grew up on a sheep and cherry farm in Yamhill, Ore." That sounds wonderful.

"President Biden has decided that the diplomatic cost of directly penalizing Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, is too high..."

"... according to senior administration officials, despite a detailed American intelligence finding that he directly approved the killing of Jamal Khashoggi, the dissident and Washington Post columnist who was drugged and dismembered in October 2018. The decision by Mr. Biden, who during the 2020 campaign called Saudi Arabia a 'pariah' state with 'no redeeming social value,' came after weeks of debate in which his newly formed national security team advised him that there was no way to formally bar the heir to the Saudi crown from entering the United States, or to weigh criminal charges against him, without breaching the relationship with one of America’s key Arab allies. Officials said a consensus developed inside the White House that the cost of that breach, in Saudi cooperation on counterterrorism and in confronting Iran, was simply too high.... Mr. Biden and his aides have repeatedly said that they intend to take a far tougher line with the Saudis than did President Donald J. Trump, who vetoed legislation passed by both houses of Congress to block weapons sales to Saudi Arabia.... Mr. Trump refused to make [the intelligence findings] public, knowing it would fuel the action for sanctions or criminal action against Prince Mohammed."

From "Biden Won’t Penalize Saudi Crown Prince Over Khashoggi’s Killing, Fearing Relations Breach/The decision will disappoint the human rights community and members of his own party who complained during the Trump administration that the U.S. was failing to hold Mohammed bin Salman accountable" (NYT).

AND: From "President Biden Lets a Saudi Murderer Walk/The crown prince killed my friend Jamal Khashoggi, and we do next to nothing" by Nicholas Kristof (NYT):

Perhaps I’m biased because I knew Jamal. Some may think: It’s too bad about the murder, but other leaders have killed people, too. True, but M.B.S. poisons everything he touches. He kidnapped Lebanon’s prime minister. He oversaw a feud with Qatar. He caused the world’s worst humanitarian catastrophe in Yemen. He imprisoned women’s rights activists. He has tarnished his country’s reputation far more effectively than Iran ever could. 

So, Mr. Biden, it’s not a human rights “gesture” to sanction M.B.S. Jamal was a practical man who didn’t believe in mushy gestures — but he did dream of a more democratic Arab world that would benefit Arabs and Americans alike. And by letting a murderer walk, you betray that vision.

"It's maddening to watch the liberals who insisted for months that we should 'follow the science' reject the overwhelming scientific evidence that schools can reopen safely."

"Conservatives have argued for years that liberals don't actually care about science and only pretend to when it's convenient for the advancement of their political agenda. It appears that they had a point." 

A commenter named Jadon writes, at "School Closures Have Failed America’s Children As many as three million children have gotten no education for nearly a year" by Nicholas Kristof (NYT).

"In Russia, the dissident Aleksei Navalny uses withering sarcasm in his efforts to bring democracy to Russia."

"Navalny, now recovering in Germany from what apparently was an attempt by Russian officials to murder him with Novichok nerve gas, responded to Russian suggestions that he had poisoned himself: 'I boiled Novichok in the kitchen, quietly took a sip of it in the plane and fell into a coma,' he wrote on Instagram. 'Ending up in an Omsk morgue where the cause of death would be listed as "lived long enough" was the ultimate goal of my cunning plan. But Putin outplayed me.'... 'The grins of the people are the nightmares of the dictators,' wrote Liu Xiaobo, the Chinese dissident who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010 while in prison."

From "To Beat Trump, Mock Him/The lesson from pro-democracy fighters abroad: Humor deflates authoritarian rulers" by Nicholas Kristof (NYT).

"While President Trump has insisted that schools physically reopen, the private school his son Barron is attending is sticking with remote learning. Yes, that feels like a double standard...."

No, it doesn't. It's the same position an ordinary parent is in. You might want the schools to reopen, but you're stuck with they're deciding to do (or what local government is requiring them to do).

The quoted line is the beginning of "'Remote Learning' Is Often an Oxymoron/We need to try harder to get kids back in school" by Nicholas Kristof (NYT).

Now, I do see why Barron is dragged into this. He's a privileged kid and — like other privileged kids, including the offspring of Democratic politicians — he has a nice computer and internet access and a supportive environment and good food. It's the less affluent children who suffer the most with the schools closed.

So... Kristof agrees with Trump! But he still must complain about Trump: "I fear that Trump’s hyperbolic embrace of reopening schools has led Democrats to be instinctively wary." Note the implication that Democrats aren't really very good at looking at the science and deferring to the experts. They're "instinctively wary" — that is, they have an emotional reaction to Trump that keeps them from thinking straight.

"I’ve been on the front lines of the protests here, searching for the 'radical-left anarchists' who President Trump says are on Portland streets each evening."

"I thought I’d found one: a man who for weeks leapt into the fray and has been shot four times with impact munitions yet keeps coming back. I figured he must be a crazed anarchist. But no, he turned out to be Dr. Bryan Wolf, a radiologist who wears his white doctor’s jacket and carries a sign with a red cross and the words 'humanitarian aid.' He pleads with federal forces not to shoot or gas protesters.... Maybe the rioting anarchists were in front of the crowd, where there are discussions about Black Lives Matter? I found musicians and activists and technicians, who were projecting a huge sign on the wall of a nearby building — 'Fed Goons Out of PDX' — that seemed a bit geeky for anarchists.... Sure there are anarchists and antifa activists in the Portland protests, just as there are radiologists and electricians, lawyers and mechanics. Report on the ground here and any single narrative feels too simplistic. The protesters aren’t all peaceful, nor are they primarily violent. They’re a complicated weave, differing by time of day....  [W]hile there’s violence from both sides, what I’ve seen firsthand is that the most violent behavior overwhelmingly comes from the federal agents, and indeed the most serious injuries have been suffered by protesters."

Writes Nicholas Kristof in "Help Me Find Trump’s ‘Anarchists’ in Portland/The president has his politically driven narrative. And then there’s reality" (NYT).

Where will we be in one year?

"The Best-Case Outcome for the Coronavirus, and the Worst" by Nicholas Kristof (NYT) begins with a presentation of 2 alternative scenarios, set one year in the future.

The worst:

More than two million Americans have died from the new coronavirus, almost all mourned without funerals. Countless others have died because hospitals are too overwhelmed to deal adequately with heart attacks, asthma and diabetic crises. The economy has cratered into a depression, for fiscal and monetary policy are ineffective when people fear going out, businesses are closed and tens of millions of people are unemployed. A vaccine still seems far off, immunity among those who have recovered proves fleeting and the coronavirus has joined the seasonal flu as a recurring peril.

And the best:

Life largely returned to normal by the late summer of 2020, and the economy has rebounded strongly. The United States used a sharp, short shock in the spring of 2020 to break the cycle of transmission; warm weather then reduced new infections and provided a summer respite for the Northern Hemisphere. By the second wave in the fall, mutations had attenuated the coronavirus, many people were immune and drugs were shown effective in treating it and even in reducing infection. Thousands of Americans died, mostly octogenarians and nonagenarians and some with respiratory conditions, but by February 2021, vaccinations were introduced worldwide and the virus was conquered. 

"It’s true that Iran’s foreign minister, Javad Zarif, said that Iran’s response had 'concluded,' but Zarif is a moderate often outmaneuvered by hard-liners."

"I know this partly because back in 2004, after Zarif approved a visa for me, I was detained in Iran by security forces looking for information that could embarrass Zarif and get him fired. My best guess is that Iran will strike back hard in a way that leaves it some plausible deniability. Perhaps it’ll be a truck bomb at a diplomatic mission or Trump property, or perhaps rocket attacks on a military site by a proxy, or a cyberattack on an oil refinery or the power grid, or perhaps mines that damage oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz. Iran has options, and let’s not celebrate prematurely."

Writes Nicholas Kristof in "Trump Has a Bizarre Idea of Winning/Let’s tally up the results of his efforts with Iran" (NYT).

That made me read Zarif's Wikipedia page. I see that he sojourned in the United States, beginning when he was 17, at a college-prep school in San Francisco. He stayed in San Francisco to get a BA and an MA at San Francisco State. Then he got a Ph.D. at the University of Denver (thesis: "Self-Defense in International Law and Policy").

ADDED: The Wikipedia page has this picture of John Kerry representing our interests in a discussion with Zarif in 2015:



Where did that take places? At the Castle of the Asparagus!

The feet-out-in-a-lounge-chair position is unfortunate. Kerry had broken his leg in May of 2015. Here's how that calamity was reported in The Guardian at the time:

Secretary of State John Kerry broke his leg in bike crash near Scionzier in France on Sunday, apparently after hitting a curb. He then scrapped the rest of a four-nation trip that included an international conference on combating the Islamic State group....

Kerry’s cycling rides have become a regular occurrence on his trips. He often takes his bike with him on the plane and was riding that bicycle on Sunday.... During discussions in late March and early April between world powers and Iran, he took several bike trips during breaks. Those talks were in Lausanne, Switzerland, and led to a framework agreement....

ALSO: (From August 2015) "We have a deal that is so incompetent, so bad. Think of the deal. We make a deal, our chief negotiator goes into a bicycle race at 73 years old, he falls he breaks his leg. That was the good part of our deal. That was the only thing that happened.... I swear to you I will never ever ride a bicycle, at least in a race...."

"In the long arc of human history, 2019 has been the best year ever."

"The bad things that you fret about are true. But it’s also true that since modern humans emerged about 200,000 years ago, 2019 was probably the year in which children were least likely to die, adults were least likely to be illiterate and people were least likely to suffer excruciating and disfiguring diseases. Every single day in recent years, another 325,000 people got their first access to electricity. Each day, more than 200,000 got piped water for the first time. And some 650,000 went online for the first time, every single day. Perhaps the greatest calamity for anyone is to lose a child. That used to be common: Historically, almost half of all humans died in childhood. As recently as 1950, 27 percent of all children still died by age 15. Now that figure has dropped to about 4 percent."

From "This Has Been the Best Year Ever/For humanity over all, life just keeps getting better" by Nicholas Kristof (in the NYT).

I trust he's right about all facts he's setting out, and great! Of course. But let me carp about "The bad things that you fret about are true." He doesn't know what I — and the other "you"s who read him — fret about. I was just fretting the other day about the possibility that our consciousness is an illusion that coalesces anew each time we wake up after a night's sleep.

"Folks, we need a center-right political party in this country. Yet today’s Republican Party isn’t the steadying force of the past..."

"... but is rather a blood-and-soil movement that stands for nothing larger than one bombastic hothead."

Writes Nicholas Kristof in "The G.O.P. Is Now a Personality Cult/The party no longer stands for much of anything" (NYT), which I'm quoting as an example of the kind of thing I am seeing but not reading anymore. I made an exception for this one — after passing over many similar but slightly less tantalizing headlines — and I cherry-picked one line — mainly because I want to talk about how unreadably predictable this sort of material has become, but I do have one thing to say: If we need a center-right political party in this country, how about if the Democrats be that party?

At least be the center-center party. The whole center is gapingly open for anyone sensible and normal to step into it. I'm suspicious of one-sided demands for one party to forgo the thrills of extremism, to just calm down and be dull.

"It sure looks as if President Trump was hoodwinked in Singapore."

"Trump made a huge concession — the suspension of military exercises with South Korea. That’s on top of the broader concession of the summit meeting itself, security guarantees he gave North Korea and the legitimacy that the summit provides his counterpart, Kim Jong-un. Within North Korea, the 'very special bond' that Trump claimed to have formed with Kim will be portrayed this way: Kim forced the American president, through his nuclear and missile tests, to accept North Korea as a nuclear equal, to provide security guarantees to North Korea, and to cancel war games with South Korea that the North has protested for decades. In exchange for these concessions, Trump seems to have won astonishingly little...."

Writes Nicholas Kristof in the New ?ork Times.

Looks... seems.... I'm not s?re what to make of that. Who is the observer — Kristof? Kim? And does Tr?mp want to be perceived as having gotten the better of the deal? If the idea is shaping the mind of Kim, how do ?o? do it and how wo?ld it look and seem when ?o? have done it?

And wh? is Altho?se writing like that this morning? Is it some enigmatic commentar? on the s?mmit or the commentar? on the s?mmit or is she s?ffering from a m?sterio?s ke?board problem this morning? The latter!!! An? ideas? Help me, techie readers!

UPDATE: I solved the problem for $99 — a new keyboard. The old keyboard lasted a long time and, like the keyboard before it, went bad with the failure of one or 2 keys. I'm not disappointed at the failure, really. I use my keyboards for hours a day, day after day, and they last for years. How many hours. I think they go bad after, perhaps, 5,000 hours. That's good enough.

"The flesh of your mother sticks between my teeth."

That's an example of an insult from cannibalism days on Easter Island, brought to us by NYT columnist Nicholas Kristof, who flew all the way to Easter Island to be there to recount the history of Easter Island, which anyone can read without actually going there. Big statues of heads, long-ago deforestation wrecking its capacity to support the people who were advanced enough to make those big-head statues... you know the story. It's not news. Indeed, Kristof serves up readymade quotes from Jared Diamond pop-science book "Collapse' (2005). He does offer 2 sentences of on-the-scene reportage:

Easter Islanders themselves aren’t thrilled about being reduced to a metaphor. They rightly feel great pride in their earlier history and see the collapse as more complex and uncertain.

And yet he fully intends to step on that pride and offer up Easter Island as "A Parable of Self-Destruction." Why go there if you only want the metaphor/parable version of the place anyway? I'm asking a question that encapsulates the message of "How to Talk About Places You've Never Been: On the Importance of Armchair Travel," by Pierre Bayard.

But Kristof did go there:

I came to Easter Island while leading a tour for The New York Times Company, and those of us in the group were staggered by the statues — but also by the reminder of the risks when a people damages the environment that sustains it.

That brings us to climate change, to the chemical processes we are now triggering whose outcomes we can’t fully predict. The consequences may be a transformed planet with rising waters and hotter weather, dying coral reefs and more acidic oceans. We fear for the ocean food chain and worry about feedback loops that will irreversibly accelerate this process, yet still we act like Easter Islanders hacking down their trees....

How on earth — a place we've all been — did Nicholas Kristof think he could get away with that sanctimony?! DO NOT LECTURE US! Let your example come first, and then you can talk. You flew to Easter Island — you led a tour, enticing others to fly to Easter Island — so obviously, you think nothing of your carbon footprint or the carbon footprint of all those other people who jetted out there with you. When your actions are so radically different from your words, I don't believe your words. The depredations of global warming may be coming, but I don't believe that you believe it.

Yes, I know I have alternatives. It's possible that Kristof is an idiot, incapable of noticing or understanding the radical disconnect between his words and his actions. And it's possible that Kristof is a raging elitist, who thinks that he and his close associates needn't stoop to the hard work of self-limitation that he feels fully empowered to impose on others and who thinks that all the people whose opinion matters will share this despicable elitism.

IN THE COMMENTS: JPS said...

"so obviously, you think nothing of your carbon footprint....When your actions are so radically different from your words, I don't believe your words."

It's like this:

Trump, Bjorn Lomberg or other AGW semi-skeptics: "Why should we limit our use of energy? It won't make the slightest bit of difference as long as India, China and everyone else go on burning all the fossil fuels they want!

Concerned AGW believer: "This is the problem! You are the reason we're not making any progress toward averting this obvious disaster!"
______

AGW semi-skeptic: "Wow, look at you, lecturing us all about our carbon footprints while you jet all over the world."

Concerned AGW believer: "Look, come on. If I cut out everything I do, it wouldn't make any difference as long as you're all free to go on burning fossil fuels like it doesn't matter."

"The Manafort Indictment: Not Much There, and a Boon for Trump."

Says Andrew C. McCarthy at The National Review.

Do not be fooled by the “Conspiracy against the United States” heading on Count One (page 23 of the indictment). This case has nothing to do with what Democrats and the media call “the attack on our democracy” (i.e., the Kremlin’s meddling in the 2016 election, supposedly in “collusion” with the Trump campaign). Essentially, Manafort and his associate, Richard W. Gates, are charged with (a) conspiring to conceal from the U.S. government about $75 million they made as unregistered foreign agents for Ukraine, years before the 2016 election (mainly, from 2006 through 2014), and (b) a money-laundering conspiracy....

The so-called conspiracy against the United States mainly involves Manafort’s and Gates’s alleged failure to file Treasury Department forms required by the Bank Secrecy Act....

ADDED: Meanwhile, at the NYT, you've got headlines like "Will Manafort Sing?" That's in terrible taste. So disrespectful to the prosecutor that we've been instructed to respect.

If Manafort pursues his self-interest, my bet is that he’ll sing. That then can become a cascade: He testifies against others, who in turn are pressured to testify against still others. And all this makes it more difficult to protect the man at the center if indeed he has violated the law.

That's Nicholas Kristof, sounding as though he's drooling over the keyboard... until he hit that big "if."

What "cascade" can there be if it's about Manafort financial dealings long before he had anything to do with Trump? Things need to be connected for there to be a cascade.

Why is the NYT feeding its readers this kind of wild speculation? Why not get back to the newly released JFK papers? People love conspiracy theories.