If you think Biden said "We ended cancer as we know it," I think you're not very good at understanding slurred speech.

Biden: "I said I'd cure cancer they looked at me like, why cancer? Because we can. We ended cancer as we know it." pic.twitter.com/RI5JqxyG3A

— Greg Price (@greg_price11) July 25, 2023

I believe he said "We could end cancer as we know it" [or "We can end cancer as we know it"]. There's slurring, but if you take it in context, he'd just said he would cure cancer because we can. There's sloppiness over who'd be doing this cancer curing, but everyone knows he can't personally cure cancer. He was just planning to oversee and encourage the work of others who were supposed to cure cancer (and who'd be trying to cure cancer whether Biden was providing incentives or not), but his reason for curing cancer is stated (simplistically) as something that we do because "we can." I think the slurred sentence is something of a repetition of that idea. He said we would cure cancer because "We could end cancer...."

The best argument for sticking to the other transcription — "We ended cancer" — is that he tacked on the words "as we know it." Those are weasel words. Any improvement in the treatment of cancer changes the experience of cancer and thus "ends" what we have "known" as cancer.

In any case, the President should enunciate, and Biden is awful at enunciation. This is very far from convincing me that the President is suffering from dementia. By the way, did you notice that we've ended dementia as we know it?

"Sexuality shouldn't be categorized as a high-stakes decision..."

"... like, say, a will or a major financial decision where you really need the capacity to consent to things... We're saying that sexuality is different and the way to establish consent should be different."

Intelligent adults, contemplating why they play a mindless video game.

Lori Culwell sees the game "Angry Birds" as her "meditation tool" and thinks she's "picked up some sage wisdom from those self-sacrificing birds and their mortal pig enemies. Call it an Angry Birds satori, perhaps."

[T]he birds put my mind into a deeply Zen-like and hypnotic state, not unlike "flow" as described by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Maybe the people at Rovio have given us a game that is part meditation, part allegory for life. Maybe Freud would point out that my finding Zen in a game based on pig destruction signals latent anger issues.

("Flow" by Mihaly Csikszentmihaly is one of my very favorite books, as I've noted before.)

And here's William Ian Miller in "Losing It"  — a book I first talked about here — talking about solitaire:

Everything distracts me... I interrupted the writing of this paragraph to play a game of solitaire, and then when I lost I allowed myself to play until I won, and then one more in case I won two in a row, and then I kept on until I won two in a row. Says the ancient rabbinical Pirkei Avot: The Ethics of the Fathers, written some eighteen hundred years ago: “If a man is walking by the way and is studying and then interrupts his study and exclaims: ‘How beautiful is this tree? How beautiful is this plowed furrow?’ Scripture considers that it is to be regarded as if he has forfeited his life (or as if he bears guilt for his soul).” If the beauties of nature cannot justify distraction, what of solitaire? My offense is (as if) capital; if only I could remember which circle of hell awaits me. My will—an element of my name, no less—never strong to begin with, has become weaker. The “I am” that remains in Will -iam is thus a ghost of its former self. If William James is right, and I find that he usually is, then I am in trouble: “The essential achievement of the will, in short, when it is most ‘voluntary,’ is to attend to a difficult object and hold it fast before the mind" (italics in original).

Do you use video games in a way that makes you want to explain it — like Culwell — in terms of meditation and wisdom or — like Miller — to read it as a signpost that you are walking downhill toward the grave?

Pat Summitt on her dementia: "It's not going to keep me from coaching. If anything it's going to inspire me more."

And her son, asked to comment, says: "It's hard to fight an invisible opponent, and now... we know what we're up against."

Have you thought about how you would respond if you got a diagnosis of dementia? Now that you've heard from Pat Summitt, will you think about it differently?