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| MostlyHuman.com |
After spending 178 days aboard the International Space Station, astronaut Ron Garan returned to Earth carrying something far heavier than space equipment or mission data. He returned with a transformed understanding of humanity itself.
From orbit, Earth doesn’t look like a collection of countries, borders, or competing interests. It appears as a single, radiant blue sphere suspended in darkness. No lines divide continents. No flags mark territory. From 250 miles above the surface, every human conflict suddenly looks small—and every human connection looks unavoidable.
Garan described watching lightning storms crackle across entire continents, auroras ripple like living curtains over the poles, and city lights glow softly against the planet’s night side. What struck him most wasn’t Earth’s power—it was its fragility. The atmosphere protecting all life appeared as a paper-thin blue halo, barely visible, yet responsible for everything that breathes, grows, and survives.
That view triggered what astronauts call the “overview effect”—a profound cognitive shift reported by many who see Earth from space. It’s the sudden realization that humanity shares a single, closed system. No backups. No escape route. No second home.
Garan began questioning humanity’s priorities. On Earth, economic growth is often treated as the ultimate goal. From space, that hierarchy collapses. He argues that the correct order should be planet first, society second, economy last—because without a healthy planet, neither society nor economy can exist.
He often compares Earth to a spacecraft. A ship carrying billions of crew members, all dependent on the same life-support systems. And yet, many behave as passengers rather than caretakers, assuming someone else is responsible for keeping things running.
From orbit, pollution has no nationality. Climate systems ignore borders. Environmental damage in one region ripples across the entire globe. The divisions we defend so fiercely on the ground simply don’t exist from above.
Garan’s message isn’t abstract or idealistic. It’s practical. If humanity continues to treat Earth as an unlimited resource rather than a shared system, the consequences will be universal.
Seeing Earth from space didn’t make him feel small. It made him feel accountable.
Because when you truly understand that we’re all riding the same fragile spacecraft through the universe, the idea of “us versus them” quietly disappears—replaced by a single, unavoidable truth:
There is only us.
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| The above is from the U.S. Navy's official .mil website |
Imagine the CEO of a car company telling his engineers and designers that he wants them to make a new line of automobiles. He knows nothing about cars and has no interest in how they’re produced, but he knows one thing for certain: The line will be named after himself. Everyone claps—because of course they do—but no one really knows what comes next, except that the line needs to look sexy and sporty.
That’s pretty much what the president did today when he announced that a new class of ship named after one Donald J. Trump would be added to the “Golden Fleet,” his name for a renewed U.S. Navy. (You might wonder about the propriety of a sitting president naming naval vessels, among other things, after himself. Pardon the expression, but that ship has sailed.)
Trump’s press conference today was among his more haywire performances, and his slushy delivery and meandering answers will not halt speculation about his cognitive health. When asked for his endgame in the confrontation with Venezuela, for example, he launched into his usual lines about people being sent into the United States from prisons and mental hospitals, as if someone had hit the wrong button and played the wrong recording. He also reiterated that he wanted U.S. ships to be more attractive, noting that he would be involved in the design of the new vessels because “I am a very aesthetic person.”...
I taught military officers for more than two decades at the Naval War College. One thing I learned from conversations with my students was that the Navy really needs to invest more in its officers and sailors, and reduce the tempo of operations that are burning them out. The best ships in the world won’t mean much if their crews are fatigued and poorly trained. As the defense analyst John Ferrari recently wrote, for years, the Navy has been “structurally compromised” because its people are exhausted, its ships are “aging faster than they could be repaired,” and the fleet’s readiness is declining. These are serious problems that require serious work, but Trump has found a way around all of this irritating chatter by sticking his name on a new ship and telling the military to go build it.
At Mar-a-Lago today, Trump reiterated his demand that Greenland must become part of the United States. His plan for a fleet of Trump-branded battleships is only slightly more likely to happen than a victory parade in Nuuk—and neither is in the national interest of the United States.
—Tom Nichols PhD, US Naval War College faculty, retired
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| Click here |
What a horrific weekend. My intent had been to engage other worthy stuff. Mass shootings in Providence RI and Bondi Beach, Australia, and the Reiners tragedy muscled everything else aside.
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| Coming January 2026 |
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| The New Yorker |
Having swallowed sports media, will gambling now devour other kinds of news? Last week, CNN announced a deal with Kalshi, a federally regulated online exchange where Americans can wager on current events, from basketball games and congressional elections to whether it will rain tomorrow in New York City. This marked Kalshi’s first partnership with a major news organization and, according to several close observers of the media business and gambling industry, could foreshadow a deluge of similar deals. After all, a decade ago, many outlets refused to even mention sports-betting odds. Then, in a blink, the shilling became inescapable.Gambling has been creeping into political coverage for a while. Prediction markets, as sites like Kalshi are called, use odds that can also be interpreted as probabilities, and, because those odds reflect the distilled wisdom of everyone willing to put skin in the game, they have the allure of a crystal ball. A prediction market associated with the magazine Le Point, for example, has anticipated the results of the past two French Presidential elections more accurately than top polling firms. It’s now routine for American journalists, when assessing the state of a political race, to cite betting odds as a counterpoint to polls. Shortly after unveiling its partnership with Kalshi, however, CNN seemed willing to integrate gambling to a far more jarring degree...The people behind prediction markets can be even more callous, while also offering even more opportunities to bet. (Last month, Mansour, the C.E.O. of Kalshi, said that the “long-term vision” for the company “is to financialize everything and create a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion.”) At a gaming conference in July, Josh Sterling, an attorney for Kalshi, was asked if regulators should enforce more consumer protections. “People are adults,” he answered, “and they’re allowed to spend their money however they want it, and if they lose their shirt, that’s on them.”
Inside America’s preventable sports-gambling debacleIn 2018, the United States Supreme Court opened the floodgates for states to legalize betting on sports. Eager for revenue, almost forty states have done so. The result is the explosive growth of an industry dominated by companies like FanDuel and DraftKings. One out of every five American adults gambled on sports in 2023, amounting to $121 billion, more than they spent on movies and video games combined.
The rise of online sports gambling—the immediacy of betting with your phone, the ability of the companies to target users, the dynamic pricing and offers based on how good or bad of a gambler you are—has produced a public health crisis marked by addiction and far too many people, particularly young men, gambling more than they can afford to lose. Under intense lobbying from the gaming industry, states have created a system built around profit for sportsbooks, not the well-being of players.
In Losing Big, historian Jonathan D. Cohen lays out the astonishing emergence of online sports gambling, from sportsbook executives drafting legislation to an addicted gambler confessing their $300,000 losses. Sports gambling is here to stay, and the stakes could not be higher. Losing Big explains how this brewing crisis came to be, and how it can be addressed before new generations get hooked.
Rapidly spreading far beyond sports.
Stay tuned...
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| Sept 2012 |
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| December 2025 |
UNLV EPS 701 Fall 1994, Argument Analysis Paper (pdf)
A Better Quality Alternative:
Single-Payer National Health System Reform
Gordon D. Schiff, MD, Andrew M. Bindman, MD, Troyen A. Brennan, MD, JD, MPH;
Physicians for a National Health Program Quality of Care Working Group.
JAMA, September 14, 1994—VoL 272, No. 10
Argument synopsis:
Notwithstanding public misgivings about making significant public policy driven changes in the U.S. health care industry, there is extensive and persuasive empirical evidence of costly inadequacies in the system—such as lack of access/coverage, uneven levels of quality of service and outcomes, market-driven rather clinical priorities, waste and duplication, etc.—that can best be corrected by a unified approach to improvement driven by a scientific focus on quality issues (broadly defined) rather than those of short-term cost-control, competition, and piecemeal regulatory strategies and tactics. A single-payer health care system reformed by implementation of the ten principles detailed herein would at once extend medical access to all, reduce costs, improve clinical outcomes of the sick and injured, and elevate the overall health status of the nation, resulting in win-win consequences for providers and citizens alike.
Overall Evaluation:
The following alternative courses of action are generally advanced in the health care debate:No one can dispute that the health care industry can be improved. Any system an be improved. Problems such as lack of access, arbitrary and often wildly excessive pricing, inexplicable variations in clinical practice and outcomes are well-documented and cry out for solution. That tends to rule out option 1. The question is one of extent: has the case been made that the health care industry requires comprehensive national reform?
- Status quo: the system works fine, and normal incremental quality improvements at the provider level will suffice. Get a job.
- Insurance reform: prohibit exclusion and enforce community rating to reduce the insurance premium stratification characteristic of the present system.
- Expand existing public payer programs such as Medicare to cover the working poor and otherwise uninsurable.
- Capitated managed competition, with "employer mandates" to provide choices in beneficiary alliances for pooled coverage bry*g power, administered though the workplace.
- Tax inducement programs such as the "Medi-save" approach in which workers use pre-tax dollars to purchase catastrophic coverage and pay for routine health expenses themselves.
- The public single-payer system based more or less on the Canadian model.
In sum, the authors' argument has many strengths, particularly in their exhaustively documented enumeration of the shortcomings of our present health care system—to the extent to which it can be characterized as a "system." There is, however, a plausible alternative to a public national single payer system that would meet many of the goals sought by these advocates, and it is not a theoretical one. Utah's IHC (Intermountain Health Care) organization is a private, vertically-integrated health care corporation serving Utah and western Wyoming residents. It is a large for-profit network of hospitals, clinics, physicians, and related operations such as home health services. IHC is essentially a managed-care system with subscribers who pay set fees and minimal co-payments. Unlike other HMO-type operations in the state that typically experience subscriber turnover rates of approximately 15% per year, IHC’s turnover rate is less than 0.5% (that's 0.005), at competitive prices. They accomplish this by an organization-wide, enthusiastic, almost religious commitment to the very CQI principles outlined above. IHC quality improvement programs are directed byDr. Brent James, a surgeon and nationally respected leader in health care CQI education. Having myself undergone their health care CQI training course over the period of the past six months as a part of my work, I can attest that IHC, while not yet perfect, effectively applies nearly all of the recommendations cited in this article, albeit on a smaller scale (and that may indeed be a significant virtue). They are in essence a microcosmic single-payer system, but one successful in the private sector, driven not by publicly imposed mandates, but by their own thorough knowledge of and dedication to CQL IT is difficult to see at this point whether the asserted advantages of a national public system would add net value beyond the type of operation that IHC represents.
To be fair, IHC operating in a fairly prosperous, culturally homogeneous region enjoying a great deal of social and political unity. Here in Nevada, by contrast, though we share a common border and similar population size and geography with Utah, the social milieu could not be more different. IHC might not encounter the same level of success in other regions, and their successes do not impact those who cannot obtain coverage-and a central issue of this article has been about the significant negative impact of such a deficit. The IHC example does, however, stand in stark relief to both the inadequate business-as-usual attitude, and the proposition advanced above that a national single-payer system is the best path to effective health care reform. other examples exist around the nation also; one that comes to mind is Northwest Hospital in Seattle whose presentation at the Annual Quality Congress of the American Society for Quality Control this year revealed yet another organization deriving significant cost savings and quality improvement from diligent application of CQI methods.
Rule Number One of CQI is "listen to the customer," and thus far the customers are prohibitively wary of the idea of creating a huge new national program, a political reality that is unlikely to shift anytime soon. The argument presented by Schiff et al takes into account an enormous amount of evidence and theory generated from within health care and the wider quality sciences, but serious questions remain unresolved with respect to the needs and concerns of health care consumers, whose overwhelming support would be needed to implement a single-payer health care system.
I spent almost every weekday in October of 2023 in a courtroom in Lower Manhattan, listening to experts, lawyers, and first-hand witnesses recount the collapse of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange and prove Sam Bankman-Fried’s responsibility for it to a jury.But while this book recounts Bankman-Fried’s crimes in detail, it is ultimately focused on his ideas. Bankman-Fried, for a time known affectionately as “SBF,” was deeply tied to concepts and movements with names like Effective Altruism, determinism, utilitarianism, extinction risk, Rationalism, and longtermism.These buzzwords have been developed into increasingly formal systems by professional philosophers and ethicists at elite universities, and further amplified through a network of institutions well-funded by technology billionaires. But they stand for much deeper, much older structures of thought: a historical teleology that I here call “techno-utopianism.”The superficial optimism of Effective Altruism was fundamental to the public fascination with Bankman-Fried that helped fuel his lightning-fast ascent. But its deeper biases — to which he was perhaps uniquely vulnerable — also helped Bankman-Fried rationalize his crimes, and its superficial logics created the blind spots that led to his downfall.This book is not a work of journalism, but of forensic philosophy. It asks how techno-utopian ideas, so loudly declaring their intent to do good, instead led to one of the largest financial frauds in American history — and whether their broader sway in twenty-first-century politics and society may lead to similar results, on a much larger scale.
Morris, David. Stealing The Future: Sam Bankman-Fried, Elite Fraud, and the Cult of Techno-Utopia (pp. 8-9). (Function). Kindle Edition.
I am a law professor at Stanford, where I have taught for close to forty years. Before that, I was a practicing lawyer in New York and clerked on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. I am also Sam Bankman-Fried’s mother. Because of my professional life, I have witnessed the events of the past three years through two very different sets of eyes. Someday I may write about what it has been like to live through this experience as a parent. Today I write as a lawyer, about the government’s legal case against Sam and the other FTX defendants. I would have much preferred to leave this task to others. But the spectacle that has surrounded the FTX case since day one has not been conducive to serious, independent thought or attention to facts. It has also imposed a very high cost on anyone who publicly expressed doubts about whether justice has been done in this case. I hope this will change in time, and others will come forward to supplement or amend what I have written here. Most of what I say below is documented in the trial transcript and public records posted on the official court docket. I have provided cites for those who would like to follow up on their own…
In courts, counsels and judges know such up-front agreement as "stipulation."
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… Perhaps it just isn’t true that book reading in particular and literacy in general are essential for intelligence. Maybe there is more to intelligence than is dreamed of in this literacy-venerating philosophy. Perhaps, that is to say, all these ostensibly stupid kids responsible for dragging down average US intelligence aren’t so dumb as suggested. Just possibly, in not reading Moby Dick and Shakespeare, but instead making TikTok videos and crafting Instagram stories, they are manifesting intelligence, only not of the kind measured by IQ tests.The humor, man. Thought I was gonna break a rib laughing.
True, this is an unexpected, perhaps even stupid, thought to encounter in a book. Book writers generally come to praise literacy rather than bury it – if only out of self-interest. This book, then, might not only be a history of stupidity but also be an addition to it. But, really, I am only elaborating here a thought we encountered earlier in the book, namely that the psychologist Edwin G. Boring was more sage than he realized in suggesting the limitations of IQ tests. His remark is worth repeating: ‘Intelligence as a measurable capacity must at the start be defined as the capacity to do well in an intelligence test. Intelligence is what the tests test.’ If IQ tests measure cognitive skills predicated on literacy, then any form of intelligence we may care to imagine that is not predicated on literacy will be ruled out, perhaps even considered to be a kind of stupidity. Just possibly, though, a post-literate, non-literate America might be more intelligent than a literate one. Equally, the cognitive skills for which IQ tests test may not be the only ones that the intelligent have and the stupid – poor deluded boobs – lack.
In this context, it is amusing, to put it mildly, that the World Population Review, which published the data on declining average American IQ tests in 2024 on its website, added this caveat. ‘To be completely fair and transparent, the intelligence quotient is not the most accurate way of determining someone’s intelligence. After all, it is nearly impossible to fully calculate someone’s intellect because it is not a variable that is numerically represented. Instead, IQ scores are a way of trying to put a number on someone’s intelligence.’ If you’re reading this in New Mexico thinking how terrible it is you live in the US’s most stupid state, even though you’ve been doing all you can to skew that data by translating Proust into Sanskrit and inventing spaceships that go faster than the speed of light, take succour: even the people publishing the research don’t really believe that intelligence – whatever it is – is measured very well by intelligence tests.
Professor Dombrowski’s worries about the reasons for the fall in American average intelligence have led to a growth industry in indicting purportedly rising stupidity. That growth industry’s business model requires that Voltaire and Schopenhauer were wrong: stupidity is not so much an ineradicable feature of humanity as something living, growing. The American writer Lance Morrow declared in the Wall Street Journal in 2021:We live in a golden age of stupidity. It is everywhere. President Biden’s conduct of the withdrawal from Afghanistan will be remembered as a defining stupidity of our time – one of many. The refusal of tens of millions of people to be vaccinated against the novel coronavirus will be analysed as a textbook case of stupidity en masse. Stupid is as stupid does, or, in the case of vaccination, as it doesn’t do. Stupidity and irresponsibility are evil twins. The slow-motion zombies’ assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6 was a fittingly stupid finale to the Trump years, which offered duelling stupidities: Buy one, get one free. The political parties became locked in a four-year drama of hysteria and mutually demeaning abuse. Every buffoonery of the president and his people was answered by an idiocy from the other side, which in its own style was just as sinister and just as clownish.Morrow was wrong about one thing: the Capitol riots weren’t the finale to the Trump years. In January 2025, Trump was sworn in at the Capitol, where his followers had rioted four years earlier, inaugurating another four years of idiocy – or so the president’s detractors might suggest.
Morrow’s account is a common journalistic trope: in the Daily Telegraph Janet Daley lamented ‘the Age of Stupid’, citing both Trump and Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn, while David Rothkopf wrote for the Washington Post under the headline ‘America’s golden age of stupidity’ about the first Trump administration, offering a clear definition: stupidity is ‘the wilful disregard of knowledge – regardless of motive’. Such stupidity is an ‘unwinnable proposition . . . because those who battle facts are at war with reality’. Stupidity thus constitutes a distinct form of failure; separate from, but likely aiding and abetting, political, ethical, and other shortcomings. Stupidity also amounts to a useful tool in electoral success: those who disconnect from the truth are not constrained by it.
All these articles suggesting that we have reached Peak Stupid have one thing in common: they are themselves stupid. Who knows if this is a golden, silver, or even bronze age of stupidity? We are, as a species, surely too dim to know what the future holds. It is quite possible that as we crest one summit we see a beguiling prospect ahead of us, half shrouded in the mists of fatuity. The peak of stupidity remains ahead. And so we continue on what we think is our ascent, higher and higher, too stupid to realize that we’re really going down not up, that in truth we are progressing deeper and deeper into the unplumbed depths of witlessness.
In his ‘The Discovery of the North Pole’, Karl Kraus satirized the idea of the human mind becoming enlightened and eradicating stupidity by means of superior technology and willpower. The discovery of the North Pole, he wrote, was ‘inevitable. . . . It is an idea graspable by all brains, especially those no longer capable of grasping anything. The North Pole had to be discovered some day, because for centuries the human mind had penetrated the night and the fog in a hopeless struggle with the murderous elemental forces of stupidity.’ We think that the Enlightenment involves progress only because we are too stupid to consider another possibility, that it does the opposite. As Kraus puts it: ‘When people were travelling in mail coaches, the world got along better than it does now that salesmen fly through the air. What good is speed if the brain has oozed out on the way?’
Of course, Kraus’s perspective risks the opposite error: not so much faith in the unalloyed good of progress as the equally stupid idea that life was ever better than it is now or that progress necessarily means its opposite. Kraus’s sense was that the evolution of stupidity is unstoppable. Technological change, quite possibly, stupefies rather than liberates us. Maybe, instead, the truth is more subtle: it both liberates and stupefies us. The worst-case scenario is that it liberates, stupefies, and then replaces us. That, at least, is one of the more benign outcomes when the forces of human stupidity do final battle with the tooled-up bots of artificial intelligence. So how should we greet this prospect?
In another essay, ‘In Praise of a Topsy-Turvy Life-Style’, Kraus wrote about the benefits of sleeping in. He even quoted King Lear: ‘Take vantage, heavy eyes, not to behold this shameful lodging.’ In the age of stupidity, he seems to suggest, it’s best to shut one’s eyes to the parade of witlessness. The shameful lodging is the incessant gush of information, a gush that has only multiplied since Kraus’s death in 1936, when it was largely confined to the morning and evening newspapers. He wrote:Anyone who has observed for a time how disgracefully these events debase themselves before curiosity, how cravenly the course of the world adapts itself to the increased need for information, and how in the end time and space become forms of perception of the journalistic subject, turns over in bed and goes on sleeping. . . . Hence I sleep in broad daylight. And when I wake up I spread the whole paper shame of mankind before me so I might know what I have missed, and this makes me happy.Maybe Kraus’s smug daily lie-in is a sort of wisdom: in the face of the world’s stupidity, as brought home to us every morning (or now, in our internet-enabled case, every moment), better to roll over and go back to sleep. But that is what stupidity wants. Indeed, a lifestyle of willed unconsciousness is a manifestation of stupidity. In the face of growing stupidity, keeping oneself from the fray and deluding oneself thereby that one is less stupid and more morally perfect than the witless parade of lesser mortals is not just the height of folly but also deeply stupid. If the triumph of evil only requires that good men do nothing, then the triumph of stupidity requires only that good people close their eyes and roll over.
None of this should suggest that stupidity does not, on occasion, have a valuable social function, nor that we should try to eradicate it from human life. Consider the case of Sunny Balwani, the chief operations officer of Theranos, the Silicon Valley company that promised to offer fast, cheap blood tests from a single drop of blood but was later exposed as a fraudulent business. As reported in John Carreyrou’s book about the Theranos scandal, Bad Blood, Balwani, God bless him, was often out of his depth during engineering discussions. ‘To hide it, he had a habit of repeating technical terms he heard others using,’ wrote Carreyrou. During one meeting, Balwani latched onto the term ‘end effector’. which signifies the claws at the end of a robotic arm. Balwani, though, misheard: he didn’t hear ‘end effector’, he heard ‘endofactor’. For the rest of the meeting, he kept referring to endofactors, while his colleagues exchanged ironic glances with each other. At the next meeting with Balwani two weeks later, some colleagues brought a PowerPoint presentation titled ‘Endofactors Update’.
Balwani didn’t realize he had been pranked by his colleagues, who went on to make up other purportedly technical terms that he, in his ignorance, picked up on and used in meetings. Nor, perhaps, did he realize why they were laughing when he left the room.
Balwani was unwittingly demonstrating the Dunning–Kruger effect, which posits that people overestimate their intelligence and make fools of themselves as a result. He was demonstrating something else: how another person’s stupidity can bring people together. Stupidity, that’s to say, was a scar for Balwani, but a joy for everybody else in the room. There’s a lesson in this story: in difficult times, we need stupidity, arguably more than intelligence, to cheer us up.
Quite possibly, I have become Sunny Balwani’s soulmate. As I’ve written this book, indeed, I’ve often wondered if I am displaying the Dunning–Kruger effect, trying to show off my intelligence while really demonstrating my stupidity. After all, what could be more stupid than writing a history of stupidity? My only consolation is that, like Balwani, I may have entertained you with my witlessness. If so, you’re welcome.
If not, then, given you’ve got to the last sentence of this book, who really is more stupid – you or me?
Jeffries, Stuart. A Short History of Stupidity (pp. 282-287). (Function). Kindle Edition.
