![presidential debate cnn 2024 biden trump presidential debate cnn 2024 biden trump](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fda6ff32c-efdf-42b1-95c8-3995f2c8fc65_1000x667.jpeg)
“As someone who had covered Hillary over the years, I remember the bad feeling in the pit of my stomach when I realized she was the anointed successor. All that baggage, disinterring the sleaze, the blue dress, philandering Bill, the oleaginous Arkansas accents, small-time corruption, her benefiting from nepotism, her defensive crouch with the media. Hillary was and is a serious, wonky, process-oriented lawyer, innately suited to the Senate, where she served the people of New York before ditching the chamber to run for president in ‘08. God, she would have made a great Supreme Court Justice. In the alternate universe in my mind, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, entering her ninth decade having battled cancer for decades, decided in 2014 to step down. Obama appointed Hillary to take her seat. With Justice Clinton’s ambitions tucked away with a lifetime sinecure, a more viable Democrat - anyone but Hillary - beat Trump in 2016. In that world, Roe is the law of the land and MAGA just a blip in our collective memory. But this is not how things turned out. For Trump last night, it was like taking candy from a baby. Biden lost his train of thought over and over. Trump lied and lied, while Biden fumbled over his talking points, drifted. And he looked cadaverous. Later it was said he ‘had a cold.’ Wouldn’t that be the first thing you’d say if that was why you couldn’t talk above a whisper? It’s true the bar is lower for Trump. All Trump has to do is sound and look slightly more reasonable than we expect him to. He seems to have figured that out.” (Nina Burleigh)
“Africa is faced with not one, but two existential challenges. There is climate change itself, warming up the continent faster than any other region of the world. And despite emitting the least to global emissions, Africa remains the most vulnerable to the worst of its ravages. Then there is the added challenge of energy poverty and lack of access, and its implications for the survival of Africa’s 1.4 billion people, 580 million of whom have no access to energy. More than 150 million Africans have access to unreliable energy and nearly 1 billion have no access to clean cooking, leading to 600,000 avoidable deaths per year. For Africa, the energy transition is therefore not merely about reaching net zero by a target date, but about securing a decent existence and sustainable livelihoods for the fastest growing population on earth. However, were Africa to grow to middle to high income status on the same carbon intensive pathway that wealthier countries have gone, she will add at least 9.4 gigatons of CO2 emissions annually until 2050,1 making global net zero ambitions impossible to achieve. But this conundrum disguises a real opportunity: An opportunity for Africa to grow to middle income status and beyond while solving humanity’s biggest existential threat, climate change. The opportunity lies in climate positive growth. African countries can decarbonize the world, halt, and eventually undo climate damage—and generate inclusive economic growth, jobs, and livelihoods. With the world’s largest untapped renewable energy potential, youngest and fastest growing workforce, and 30% of the world’s critical minerals, Africa is uniquely positioned to lead on green global manufacturing and supply chains and remove carbon from the air. The abundance and low seasonality of Africa’s renewable energy position it to reliably provide considerably cheaper renewable base load to continuously power industrial production. Providing the same renewable base load from Kenya would cost half as much as from Spain, one of Europe’s best renewable power locations, and 20% less from Nigeria.2 In fact, by aggressively deploying its renewable energy resources, Africa can provide energy to all Africans—600 million of whom currently lack access to energy and 150 million of whom have unreliable access to energy—at a 30% lower cost and with over 90% lower emissions per kWh, compared to the current stated policy.” (Brookings/Yemi Osinbajo)
“I know a certain amount about sports, mainly baseball. Last night the Rangers won the pennant, for example, and I know what the pennant is. The thing my husband finds truly poetic is sports. He’s always trying to talk to me about it and explain. “Watch this play,” he keeps saying, and then explaining it. Without his explanations I don’t think I would appreciate the poetry in sports, though the concept is simple: it’s an arena for heroes and heroics. It’s also an arena for people who are grown men, and sometimes quite old men, who take a child’s game so seriously it’s as if they’re soldiers bound for battle zones in a war to fight for our ideals. My husband approaches sports with a level of dedication normally reserved for the enactment of international peace agreements, and a lot of men are like this. They experience weird levels of well-being at victory and existential despair at defeat. Maybe sports provide for them an alternate route to emotion without actual human interaction, a route to the realm of poetics and sensibility without having to read a poem or have a sensibility.” (Nancy Lehmann/The Paris Review)
“Joe Biden could have started writing the final chapter of his political career a year or so ago, when he still controlled the narrative. ‘I’ve capped my long journey in public service by defeating Donald Trump, revivifying our economy and moving the US past the Covid era,’ he might have said. ‘Therefore, I’ve decided not to seek a second term so the next generation of Democrats can succeed me and secure the White House and democracy for the American people.’ Instead, a humiliating and unsettling debate performance on Thursday night is now writing Biden’s final chapter for him. He shuffled onto the debate stage like the old soul that he is, rarely answered questions with more than a whispering rasp, often looked bewildered and failed to land enough memorable blows. Biden was so abysmal that Donald Trump, a convicted felon and sexual predator, effectively mastered the debate’s momentum and left Biden appearing like little more than a punching bag.” (Timothy Obrien/Bloomberg)
“It was worse than disastrous. It was sad, it was humiliating. Biden looked like a hospice patient who got lost on his way to the bathroom. That was probably the biggest thing: He looked and sounded awful. In past debates, Biden maintained eye contact with the camera when Trump spoke; he seemed focused and strong. This time, he rarely made eye contact; he looked down, mouth slack. He gave the impression of a very old man. His voice was weak, his answers garbled and incomprehensible—certainly to anyone who doesn’t spend their life following politics. If he had effective moments, and there might have been a few, they were lost in the overall horror. Trump was Trump. A lying, petulant charlatan. But that won’t make much difference. He didn’t even need to point out how frail Biden seemed—although at one point, he said, ‘I don’t understand what he just said.’ Neither did I, neither did anyone. Trump understood that he didn’t need to ridicule the geezer—indeed, it would have seemed cruel, even for Trump. He just stuck to calling Biden a terrible President; Biden was on the ropes from the first minute, unable to defend himself. Someone should have stopped the fight. The CNN anchors were lapidary and dreadful. They let Trump get away with murder, time after time. He was asked how he would remove the 20 million illegal immigrants he wants to deport. He was asked if he’d deport illegals who had legal spouses, who had been living here for 10, 20 years. He was asked about childcare, about any number of issues—and didn’t answer a single one, but chose instead to hammer Biden’s record repeatedly, making the same points over and over again. Occasionally, the moderators would press, weakly, and ask him…’And what about those 20 million?’ But he stonewalled them—and neither Tapper nor Bash were willing to toss the script and say, ‘We’re going to stick to this question until you answer it: Would you actually deport 20 million people, as you’ve promised?’ But then, I suspect the moderators were shell-shocked as well, rendered speechless by Biden’s performance.” (Joe Klein)
“Hundreds of ancient obelisks and stelas are strewn across fields on the outskirts of Aksum, a city in the highlands of northern Ethiopia’s Tigray region. The largest of these monuments, which lies toppled and broken into sections, was carved with doors and windows to mimic a 13-story building, and once stood around 100 feet high. Weighing more than 570 tons, the Great Stela, as it is known, was hewn from a single block of granite-like rock cut from a quarry two and half miles away. At more than three times the height of the biggest of Easter Island’s moai statues and nearly 20 times heavier than the mightiest of Stonehenge’s sarsens, it is among the largest monolithic sculptures ever created and transported. These monuments, which date to the third and fourth century A.D., once marked the tombs of kings and high-ranking officials. The names of those who erected them, and the individuals buried beneath, have been lost or forgotten over the centuries. They were the rulers of the Kingdom of Aksum, which dominated the Horn of Africa and the Red Sea region for most of the first millennium A.D. Much like the Romans, their contemporaries and occasional allies, Aksum grew from a single city into an expansive empire whose kings controlled a territory comprising parts of modern-day Ethiopia, Eritrea, Sudan, and the southern Arabian Peninsula. The Aksumites’ transcontinental trade routes stretched from Iberia to India, and perhaps even as far as China. They were a highly literate society, fierce warriors, and accomplished engineers and artists, and they issued their own gold coinage. The third-century A.D. Persian prophet Mani referred to Aksum as one of the world’s four great empires, along with the Romans, Persians, and Chinese. ‘At that time, Aksum is mentioned as one of the most powerful civilizations in the world, although people in the modern era may not know that or think of them in that way,’ says Johns Hopkins University archaeologist Michael Harrower. ‘There has not been much archaeological attention given to Africa outside of Egypt.’” (Jason Urbanus/Archaeology)
“The FBI, Department of Homeland Security, and the National Counterterrorism Center are all surveilling and reporting on domestic protests, specifically the student demonstrations about the Israel-Hamas war and abortion-related protests at the Supreme Court, a top intelligence official admitted this week in testimony before Congress. The intelligence community has been under significant pressure from Congress to monitor the pro-Palestinian protests, as I’ve previously reported. The FBI and NCTC have also taken it upon themselves to more closely scrutinize domestic protests in other areas, all on the pretext that they are looking for foreign influence. Homeland Security’s intelligence agency has on multiple occasions tasked their intelligence collectors with gathering information on various protests, Ken Wainstein, the Department's Under Secretary for Intelligence and Analysis said in testimony before a House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Tuesday. Wainstein claimed that foreign governments (and other actors) were actively exploiting American protests to sow discord in the U.S. His remarks have not been previously reported.” (Ken Klipperstein)
“After their stunning success in forcing the government to shelve $2.7 billion in tax hikes, young Kenyan activists are setting their sights higher, taking aim at ingrained corruption and misgovernance. Protesters say the finance bill that President William Ruto abandoned on Wednesday was only a symptom of the problems plaguing a country where many young people have few job prospects despite strong economic growth. The movement has little precedent in its mass mobilisation of Kenyans across ethnic and regional divisions while rejecting any kind of political leadership. Protests in Kenya have historically been led by elites, often ending in power-sharing deals that yielded few tangible benefits for demonstrators. Protesters now face the challenge of maintaining unity and momentum while pursuing broader, less immediate goals. They will also have to decide how to respond to Ruto's offer of dialogue, made on Wednesday but without specifics. Writer and activist Nanjala Nyabola said most of those involved in the recent protests were motivated by legitimate, strong grievances against the government. ‘Until those grievances are addressed, it's unlikely that they're going to be willing to make concessions.’ How the diffuse and leaderless movement, which largely organised via social media, pursues its objectives remains an open question - and a source of internal debate.” (Aaron Ross and Giulia Paravicini/Reuters)
“Soon after we meet Ruth Puttermesser (the name, (Cynthia) Ozick tells us, is meant to evoke the German for ‘butter knife’), she resigns from a white-shoe law firm, where her gender and Jewishness furnish a deadpan view of the blueblood leadership’s politely veiled prejudices (‘They were benevolent because benevolence was theirs to dispense,’ Ozick writes), and takes a new role at the New York City Department of Receipts and Disbursements, in the bowels of a Kafkaesque sendup of city government. Puttermesser is insatiably, stubbornly intellectual: a woman, from her school years, “looking to solve something, she did not know what.” The character’s vision of Heaven evokes Borges’s Library of Babel, a space for infinite reading where she yearns to study ‘Roman law, the more arcane varieties of higher mathematics, the nuclear composition of the stars, what happened to the Monophysites, Chinese history, Russian, and Icelandic.’ (The actual heaven she ultimately enters is, in keeping with the book’s acid sensibility, less idyllic.) Puttermesser, and the book, serve as a eulogy for a lost strain of deep knowledge and thoughtful discourse. Ozick’s lament for the waning space afforded to big, thorough thinkers feels surprisingly timely in the era of TikTok. Nobody particularly wants Puttermesser’s naked intellectualism, nor her knowledge of the world and her roots in it: not her married lover, who walks out on her after she chooses Plato over sex, and not her dysfunctional colleagues in city government.” (Ronan Farrow/TNY)
“A British financier will pay millions to anyone who finds a way for humans to communicate with animals as part of a new generation of AI prizes that represent a fresh incentive to push technology forward. Jeremy Coller, who made his money developing a way for a private equity fund’s backers to sell interests or assets to another investor, is offering $10 million to whoever can pass a kind of modified, interspecies Turing Test. The now archaic test examines whether machines can successfully imitate humans and trick them into believing that they’re chatting with another person. The goal of the Coller Dolittle Challenge, instead, is to test whether humans can mimic animals and trick them into talking with humans. AI algorithms have helped analyze bat calls and whale songs, leading scientists to believe that communication with other species may be possible. Yossi Yovel, a professor at Tel Aviv University’s Sagol School of Neuroscience, who is chairing the competition, said it’ll be very difficult to show whether a human has successfully communicated with an animal, and that he’s still trying to finalize the competition’s rules. ‘We want to decipher their communication system and we want to communicate with them using their communication system,’ he told Semafor. ‘So training a dog to sit using human language does not count. If you can do it using barking, then that might be something else.’ The Coller Dolittle Challenge is one of a new set of efforts to drive developments in AI that are too weird for big companies, and too wild for academia.” (Katyanna Quach/semafor)
“While Israel continues its military siege of Gaza, the United States is trying to exploit the situation with the goal of strengthening U.S. power in the Middle East. Rather than seeking a long-term solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict, the United States is prioritizing its longstanding goal of normalizing relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia. With such a deal, which would require calm in Gaza to bring Saudi Arabia on board, the United States would further marginalize the Palestinians while more tightly integrating Israel into its regional network of alliances and partnerships.’I think we’re at a point where the necessary agreements between the United States and Saudi Arabia are very well within reach,’ Secretary of State Antony Blinken told Congress last month. For decades, the United States has dominated the Middle East. A key to U.S. power has been the U.S.-led network of alliances and partnerships that includes Israel and the Arab states. It enables the United States to station tens of thousands of soldiers across the Middle East and quickly surge additional forces into the area.’It’s a vast strategic advantage,’ Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin explained in 2021, referring to the U.S.-led network. ‘It is unmatched. It is unparalleled. And it is unrivaled.’” (Edward Hunt/Responsible Statecraft)
“It is a murder mystery that gripped Belgium for decades and now, with the closure of the file on Friday, it may remain a cold case forever. A gang went on a murderous rampage between 1982 and 1985, killing 28 people including children in a series of supermarket robberies, becoming known as the ‘Crazy Killers of Brabant’. Outlandish theories have been offered to explain who was behind what local media called Belgium’s biggest criminal mystery of the last century. One thesis that was seriously considered was that it was an attempt to destabilise the Belgian state by current or former law enforcement officers close to the far right. Yet the case was never cracked. No one has ever been convicted despite multiple overlapping investigations, countless fingerprint and DNA searches, dozens of exhumations and even arrests leading to charges. On Friday, prosecutors finally gathered together the families of victims – still living without answers many years on – to let them know the case was being closed for good. ‘All possible investigative actions have been carried out,’ Ann Fransen, the head of the Belgian federal prosecutor’s office, which took over the case’s various strands six years ago, told reporters in Brussels. ‘Unfortunately, we have not been able to bring the truth to the surface,’ she said. ‘This means the case is now buried and it makes me very sad,’ said Irena Palsterman, whose father was one of eight victims of a supermarket attack on 9 November 1985.” (The Guardian)
“The serial extortion spree is almost certainly the worst of its kind ever to be prosecuted in the US, says Jameson Lopp, the cofounder and chief security officer of Casa, a cryptocurrency-focused physical security firm, who has tracked physical attacks designed to steal cryptocurrency going back as far as 2014. ‘As far as I'm aware, this is the first case where it was confirmed that the same group of people went around and basically carried out home invasions on a variety of different victims,’ Lopp says. Lopp notes, nonetheless, that this kind of crime spree is more than a one-off. He has learned of other similar attempts at physical theft of cryptocurrency in just the past month that have escaped public reporting—he says the victims in those cases asked him not to share details—and suggests that in-person crypto extortion may be on the rise as thieves realize the attraction of crypto as a highly valuable and instantly transportable target for theft. ‘Crypto, as this highly liquid bearer asset, completely changes the incentives of doing something like a home invasion,’ Lopp says, ‘or even kidnapping and extortion and ransom.’” (Andy Greenberg and Matt Giles/WIRED)