Dear Commons Community,

I have just finished reading Yuval Harari’s current bestseller, Nexus:  A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI.  As the title suggests, this is long (400 plus pages) and slow  book.  Actually as commented in a review published in The New York Times, it is actually two books. 

“Really, what we have is two separate books, neither brief. The first 200 pages are indeed historical in their way. Unfortunately, this is a dizzying, all-in version of history that swerves unsatisfyingly from Assyrian clay tablets to a 19th-century cholera outbreak to an adaptation of the “Ramayana” on Indian TV to the Peasants’ Revolt in medieval England to the Holocaust in Romania, and so on. It doesn’t feel controlled, or even particularly expert — and the effect is a little like a flight where the person sitting next to you is well-read, hyper-caffeinated and determined to tell you his Theory of Everything.

…the second half of the book is where the action is. The meat of “Nexus” is essentially an extended policy brief on A.I.: What are its risks, and what can be done? (We don’t hear much about the potential benefits because, as Harari points out, “the entrepreneurs leading the A.I. revolution already bombard the public with enough rosy predictions about them.”) It has taken too long to get here, but once we arrive Harari offers a useful, well-informed primer.”

I found the second half full of interesting and critical commentary.  See for instance my earlier posting entitled, “Insights from Yuval Harari’s “Nexus” – On Social Media Truth Loses!” His comments about the AI industry, the futility of trying to regulate it, and its inevitable dominance of our lives is sobering and probably true.

I recommend reading Nexus if you are interested in where AI is heading.  Feel free to go straight to Part II on page 191.

Below is the entire New York Times review.

Tony

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The New York Times

Pulling Back the Silicon Curtain

Yuval Noah Harari’s study of human communication may be anything but brief, but if you can make it to the second half, you’ll be both entertained and scared.

Yuval Noah Harari sounds the alarm on our A.I. future. “When the tech giants set their hearts on designing better algorithms, they can usually do it,” he writes. But will they?Credit…Philip Cheung for The New York Times

By Dennis Duncan

Dennis Duncan is the author of “Index, A History of the.”

Published Sept. 10, 2024. Updated Sept. 22, 2024

NEXUS: A Brief History of Information Networks From the Stone Age to AI, by Yuval Noah Harari

In the summer of 2022, a software engineer named Blake Lemoine was fired by Google after an interview with The Washington Post in which he claimed that LaMDA, the chatbot he had been working on, had achieved sentience.

A few months later, in March 2023, an open letter from the Future of Life Institute, signed by hundreds of technology leaders including Steve Wozniak and Elon Musk, called on A.I. labs to pause their research. Artificial intelligence, it claimed, posed “profound risks to society and humanity.”

The following month, Geoffrey Hinton, the “godfather of A.I.,” quit his post at Google, telling this newspaper that he regretted his life’s work. “It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things,” he warned.

Over the last few years we have become accustomed to hare-eyed messengers returning from A.I.’s frontiers with apocalyptic warnings. And yet, real action in the form of hard regulation has been little in evidence. Last year’s executive order on A.I. was, as one commentator put it, “directional and aspirational” — a shrewdly damning piece of faint praise.

Meanwhile, stock prices for the tech sector continue to soar while the industry mutters familiar platitudes: The benefits outweigh the risks; the genie is already out of the bottle; if we don’t do it, our enemies will.

Yuval Noah Harari has no time for these excuses. In 2011, he published “Sapiens,” an elegant and sometimes profound history of our species. It was a phenomenon, selling over 25 million copies worldwide. Harari followed it up by turning his gaze forward with “Homo Deus,” in which he considered our future. At this point, Harari, an academic historian, became saddled with a new professional identity and a new circle of influence: A.I. expert, invited into the rarefied echelons of “scientists, entrepreneurs and world leaders.” “Nexus,” in essence, is Harari’s report from this world.

First, it must be said that the subtitle — “A Brief History of Information Networks From the Stone Age to A.I.” — is misleading. Really, what we have is two separate books, neither brief. The first 200 pages are indeed historical in their way. Unfortunately, this is a dizzying, all-in version of history that swerves unsatisfyingly from Assyrian clay tablets to a 19th-century cholera outbreak to an adaptation of the “Ramayana” on Indian TV to the Peasants’ Revolt in medieval England to the Holocaust in Romania, and so on. It doesn’t feel controlled, or even particularly expert — and the effect is a little like a flight where the person sitting next to you is well-read, hyper-caffeinated and determined to tell you his Theory of Everything.

In a nutshell, Harari’s thesis is that the difference between democracies and dictatorships lies in how they handle information. Dictatorships are more concerned with controlling data than with testing its truth value; democracies, by contrast, are transparent information networks in which citizens are able to evaluate and, if necessary, correct bad data.

All of this is sort of obvious-interesting, while also being too vague — too open to objection and counterexample — to constitute a useful theory of information. After a lot of time, we have arrived at a loose proof of what we hopefully felt already: Systems that are self-correcting — because they promote conversation and mutuality — are preferable to those that offer only blind, disenfranchised subservience.

In the end, however, this doesn’t really matter, because the second half of the book is where the action is. The meat of “Nexus” is essentially an extended policy brief on A.I.: What are its risks, and what can be done? (We don’t hear much about the potential benefits because, as Harari points out, “the entrepreneurs leading the A.I. revolution already bombard the public with enough rosy predictions about them.”) It has taken too long to get here, but once we arrive Harari offers a useful, well-informed primer.

The threats A.I. poses are not the ones that filmmakers visualize: Kubrick’s HAL trapping us in the airlock; a fascist RoboCop marching down the sidewalk. They are more insidious, harder to see coming, but potentially existential. They include the catastrophic polarizing of discourse when social media algorithms designed to monopolize our attention feed us extreme, hateful material. Or the outsourcing of human judgment — legal, financial or military decision-making — to an A.I. whose complexity becomes impenetrable to our own understanding.

Echoing Churchill, Harari warns of a “Silicon Curtain” descending between us and the algorithms we have created, shutting us out of our own conversations — how we want to act, or interact, or govern ourselves.

None of these scenarios, however, is a given. Harari points to the problem of email spam, which used to clog up our inboxes and waste millions of hours of productivity every day. And then, suddenly, it didn’t. In 2015, Google was able to claim that its Gmail algorithm had a 99.9 percent success rate in blocking genuine spam. “When the tech giants set their hearts on designing better algorithms,” writes Harari, “they can usually do it.”

Even in its second half, not all of “Nexus” feels original. If you pay attention to the news, you will recognize some of the stories Harari tells. But, at its best, his book summarizes the current state of affairs with a memorable clarity.

Parts of “Nexus” are wise and bold. They remind us that democratic societies still have the facilities to prevent A.I.’s most dangerous excesses, and that it must not be left to tech companies and their billionaire owners to regulate themselves.

That may just sound like common sense, but it is valuable when said by a global intellectual with Harari’s reach. It is only frustrating that he could not have done so more concisely.

Dear Commons Community,

The Georgia Supreme Court yesterday rejected an attempt by national and state Republicans to immediately reinstate recently passed election rules that a judge had ruled were invalid.

Fulton County Superior Court Judge Thomas Cox last week ruled that the State Election Board didn’t have the authority to adopt the new rules, and declared them “illegal, unconstitutional and void.” The Republican National Committee and the Georgia Republican Party had appealed that ruling to Georgia’s highest court. They asked that it be handled in an expedited manner and for the rules to be reinstated while the appeal was pending.

The Supreme Court unanimously declined the request for expedited handling and declined to put Cox’s order on hold. The court’s order says that once the appeal is docketed it will “proceed in the ordinary course,” which means it will likely take months before there’s a ruling.

The three-person Republican majority on the State Election Board, which was praised by former President Donald Trump during a rally in Atlanta in August, voted to adopt multiple rules in August and September over the objections of the board’s lone Democrat and the nonpartisan chair. The controversial new rules met resistance from the start, not least from local election officials who worried about changes so close to the general election. But yesterday’s order may mark the end of the legal fight over election rules in this critical battleground state — at least until after the election.

The rules that Cox declared invalid included three that have gotten a lot of attention. One would require three poll workers to count ballots — not votes — by hand once polls close. The other two had to do with the process to certify county election results.

Democrats and some voting rights groups had raised concerns that the rules could be used by allies of Trump to slow or deny certification or election results, or to cast doubt on results if the former president loses the presidential election to Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris.

While some prominent Republicans in Georgia, including Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, have criticized the flurry of last-minute rules the State Election Board introduced, the state and national Republican parties have been supportive. They have said the rules promote transparency and accountability in the state’s elections.

Cox’s ruling came in a lawsuit filed by Eternal Vigilance Action, an organization founded and led by former state Rep. Scot Turner, a Republican. The suit argued that the State Election Board overstepped its authority in adopting the seven rules. In addition to invalidating the rules, he ordered the State Election Board to immediately inform all state and local election officials that the rules are void and not to be followed.

Reached by phone Tuesday, Turner said he was glad for the election workers, who will not have to be trained on new election rules with just two weeks to go before Election Day. Many county election officials had expressed concern over the tight timeline for implementing the rules, saying they risked causing confusion for poll workers and undermining public confidence in the election results.

“I hate fighting my friends,” Turner said. “It’s unfortunate that the Republican Party has apparently lost their affection for defending constitutional principles like separation of powers. But I’m undeterred and we will continue to fight.”Georgia Republican Party Chairman Josh McKoon called objections to the new rules “unimaginably stupid and damaging to public confidence in what is expected to be a closely contested election.”

“It is supremely disappointing to observe yet another failure of our judicial system to expeditiously resolve critical questions about our elections process,” he wrote in a statement.

The CEO of Fair Fight, an organization founded by former Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, called Tuesday’s order “a huge win for Georgia voters and the rule of law.”

“These rules are part of a larger election denier plot to undermine confidence in our elections, but once again, the courts have affirmed that the rule of law will prevail,” Lauren Groh-Wargo said in a statement. “This is a critical victory in the ongoing fight to protect independent elections.”

Good decision and a win for fair elections!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times reported yesterday that Bill Gates has donated  $50 million to help elect Vice President Kamala Harris.

The donation was made privately to a nonprofit group called Future Forward, which is supporting Harris’ Democratic bid for president and was not meant to be made public, people familiar with Gates’ support told the Times. The mammoth figure would be a shift for the Microsoft co-founder, who has generally avoided throwing his financial might behind candidates on either side.

“I support candidates who demonstrate a clear commitment to improving health care, reducing poverty and fighting climate change in the U.S. and around the world,” he told The New York Times in a statement. “I have a long history of working with leaders across the political spectrum, but this election is different, with unprecedented significance for Americans and the most vulnerable people around the world.”

Gates has not formally endorsed Harris, but the Times added that he has told friends he is concerned about what could happen in a second Donald Trump presidency.

Future Forward is the largest super PAC in America and has raised more than $700 million, much of it through its nonprofit “dark money” arm that does not disclose its donors. Other major benefactors include former New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg, who has given millions of dollars to the group.

Gates’ ex-wife, Melinda French Gates, has also given large donations to groups supporting Harris’ bid and described her own shift from the political sidelines in an interview with the Times earlier this month.

“Now I do get to make whatever decision I want to make about endorsing or not endorsing on my own,” she said, referring to her 2021 divorce from Gates and her decision to step down from her family foundation.

Tony

Shohei Ohtani and Aaron Judge

Dear Commons Community,

It’s hard to envision a more star-studded and magnetic World Series matchup than this one — both a throwback to when baseball reigned supreme in the U.S. while also showcasing the greatest talents in the game.

The New York Yankees and Los Angeles Dodgers represent the two largest markets in Major League Baseball. They entered the season with the second-largest payroll in the sport (Yankees) and the fifth largest (Dodgers). They will now meet for a twelfth time in the World Series, the most by any two teams.   As reported by NBC News.

Decades ago, the key players were luminaries like Mickey Mantle, Joe DiMaggio, Roy Campanella and Jackie Robinson.

Legends of the game, for sure, and now that star power has returned in 2024.

Shohei Ohtani — who just rewrote the history books with baseball’s first season of 50 home runs and 50 stolen bases — certainly appears to have a flair for the dramatic, crushing a three-run homer in his postseason debut.

Ohtani, the marquee name in the sport, was part of the Dodgers’ $1 billion offseason overhaul that saw them pad a star-studded roster with two pitching aces — fellow Japanese countryman Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Tyler Glasnow, acquired from the Tampa Bay Rays.

On the Yankees side, general manager and senior vice president Brian Cashman made a major offseason splash of his own — acquiring 25-year-old phenom Juan Soto, whom many consider the most complete hitter in baseball, adding to a lineup that already features American League home run king Aaron Judge and the fearsome Giancarlo Stanton.

Soto not only delivered with a career season of 41 home runs and 109 runs batted in, but he also just unleashed one of the most epic at bats you will see in postseason play — daring Cleveland Guardians pitcher Hunter Gaddis to throw him a fastball in extra innings Saturday, only to belt it over the centerfield fence and send the Yankees past upstart Cleveland and into their first World Series since 2009.

Judge and Ohtani, meanwhile, are both making their first appearance in the Fall Classic, a fact that might seem hard to fathom given their already robust resumes. Judge and Ohtani are both MVP winners and are the favorites to win it again this season. Judge flirted with the Triple Crown by batting .322 with 58 home runs and 144 RBIs. Ohtani nearly matched those numbers, with a .310 average, 54 home runs and 130 RBIs.

“This is sweeter — it’s even sweeter,” Judge said on Fox Sports about reaching the World Series and whether the reality matched expectations.

“This group we have is something special,” he said. “You know, all the work they put in the offseason, the ups and downs during the regular season, there’s no better group. … That’s what you grind all season for — moments like this.”

Dodgers manager Dave Roberts echoed those sentiments after his team ousted the magical New York Mets to reach their fourth World Series in the last seven years, though with only one ring to show for it, in the Covid-shortened 2020 season.

“I’ve never believed in a group of guys more than I believe in these guys,” Roberts said, ahead of the impending clash of the titans. “Most importantly, they believe in each other.”

The playoffs this season have been a hit with fans as TV viewership is at its highest levels in years.

The last time the two teams faced off in the World Series was in 1981 (the Dodgers won), and Tyler Kepner, the longtime baseball writer now with The Athletic, reflected on the rarity of what we’re seeing.

“There was a 40- or 41-year span, from 1941 to 1981, where we saw that matchup [in the World Series] 11 times … but in the last 41 years, we haven’t had one.”

And with Judge and Ohtani headlining the two juggernauts, another feat is now happening that’s taken more than four decades, too.

“To have two Hall of Fame-type players in MVP seasons making their World Series debuts against each other, that’s only happened once,” Kepner said. “That was George Brett and Mike Schmidt in 1980 — so it is kind of a perfect storm of fun stuff that would happen if it’s Yankees and Dodgers.”

Let the games begin!

Tony

A miner walks in a shaft of the CSM coal mine in Stonava, Czech Republic, Monday, Oct. 14, 2024. (AP Photo/Petr David Josek). Click on to enlarge.

Dear Commons Community,

This photo appeared in The Associated Press. Below is the text that accompanied it.

What an image!

Tony

—————————————–

AP photographer Petr David Josek started working with The Associated Press in 2002 and became a full-time staffer in 2011, when he got the Prague bureau job.

Since then, he has covered the Iraq War, eight Olympics and four World Cups among numerous sports and news assignments.

Here’s what he had to say about this extraordinary photo.

Why this photo?

When walking through the dark shafts of the mine in northeastern Czech Republic you come across quite a few miners, but this guy’s unique physique obviously struck me. I figured it would be nice to get some portraits of the man.

Luckily, he walked past me more than once, so I had few chances to shoot a couple of frames as he was doing his work.

How I made this photo

I shot this picture on 24mm 1.4 lens at 1000/sec. Going to the mine is somehow specific. It’s a very dusty and dark environment, so I figured less equipment is better for that. I took two cameras that I covered with foil for protection from the dust and two fixed lenses, 24 mm and 85 mm. I was equipped with a flashlight that you use to navigate through the mine – it also helped for the pictures, as you can light up your subject.

Why it works

I had several pictures of this man, but I think in this one, the combination of his strong posture, his facial expression and the dirt on his body reflects the best, just how hard this job really is.

Also, the fact that his eyes aren’t seen makes it a bit more mysterious.

Ryan Walters

Dear Commons Community,

Opponents of an Oklahoma law for schools to teach the Bible are suing the state’s superintendent of public instruction, calling the mandate unlawful and asking the state’s highest court to halt the purchase of materials intended to be taught this academic year.  As reported by Education Week.

The lawsuit—brought on behalf of more than 30 community members which include parents, teachers, and religious leaders—was filed with Oklahoma’s state Supreme Court Oct. 17. It argues that the mandate should be ruled invalid, and that political firebrand Ryan Walters, a Republican who serves as the state’s elected superintendent of public instruction, is illegally appropriating funds for the $3 million purchase of approximately 55,000 Bibles.

The complaint states the directive violates the Oklahoma’s constitution by using state funds to purchase religious materials as the mandate “represents a governmental preference for one religion over another.”

Legal experts say this is a case other states will likely be watching, as it comes at a time when conservative state officials are testing the church-state divide. For instance, Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry, a Republican, recently signed a bill requiring all public schools to display a copy of the Ten Commandments in every classroom. That law is also being challenged in court.

Walters, who announced the Bible mandate in June and issued subsequent teaching guidance a month later, has garnered national attention for his handling of LGBTQ+ student rights and position on teaching about race and racism. He’s been active in former President Donald Trump’s 2024 reelection effort and has said he supports dismantling the U.S. Department of Education. His name has been surfaced as a possibility for education secretary in a Trump administration.

Walters recently drew scrutiny from his own party, with a number of state GOP lawmakers calling for an investigation into his stewardship of the department’s budget, spending priorities, and transparency.

In a statement, Walters said Oklahoma would not be “bullied by out-of-state, radical leftists who hate the principles our nation was founded upon.”

“It is not possible for our students to understand American history and culture without understanding the Biblical principles from which they came, so I am proud to bring back the Bible to every classroom in Oklahoma,” he said. “I will never back down to the woke mob, no matter what tactic they use to try to intimidate Oklahomans.”

The lawsuit argues Bible mandate violates the separation of church and state

The 32 plaintiffs—which include 14 public school parents, four public school teachers, and three faith leaders—argue that Walters is pushing his religious beliefs, violating the separation of church and state.

In the complaint, parents—both those who are Christians, and those who are not—argue that he is overstepping, and that the mandate interferes with the upbringing of their children. One longtime educator believes “the Bible contains confusing concepts, many of which are not age-appropriate for elementary- and middle school students,” according to the complaint. One religious leader’s “conscience is violated by a sacred Christian religious text being used for what he considers to be political grandstanding,” the filing states.

The complaint alleges that the $3 million to purchase the Bibles also is illegally reallocated from education department staff salaries. It also alleges that the specifications limit acceptable Bibles. Earlier this month, the state officials amended the original request to broaden eligible Bibles after backlash that the original request favored an edition endorsed by Trump.

The complaint alleges that school districts have the authority to select academic materials, and that Walters and the state’s education department do not.

Lawyers representing the community members said the mandate is an erosion of church-state separation, and a political stunt. The plaintiffs are represented by Americans United for Separation of Church and State, the American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Oklahoma Foundation, the Freedom From Religion Foundation, and Oklahoma Appleseed Center for Law & Justice.

Rachel Laser, president and CEO of Americans United, one of the firms representing the plaintiffs, said in a statement that Walters was “abusing the power of his office” through the mandate.

“Not on our watch,” she said. “We’re proud to defend the religious freedom of all Oklahomans, from Christians to the nonreligious.”

Broadly, religion in schools has been litigated since the mid-20th century, said Whittney Barth, executive director for the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University. Courts have found devotional reading of the Bible and the offering of the Lord’s Prayer to be unconstitutional, as is religious instruction in classrooms.

The Bible has historically been taught as literature, and has been seen to have academic merit as a historical document, she said. The American Academy of Religion has guidance on teaching the Bible.

“What’s interesting about this case is the integration of the Bible into the curriculum in ways that, I think, many people would say have both devotional aspects as well as potentially academic aspects,” Barth said. “I do think this raises those kinds of concerns.”

Teaching the Bible is religious instruction. Even if this case should ever reach the conservative U.S. Supreme Court, the Oklahoma law will be overturned.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Liberty finally have a WNBA championship after beating the Minnesota Lynx 67-62 in overtime of a decisive Game 5 last night.

Jonquel Jones scored 17 points to lead New York, which was one of the original franchises in the league. The Liberty made the WNBA Finals five times before, losing each one, including last season. This time they wouldn’t be denied, although it took an extra five minutes.

The win gave the city of New York its first basketball title since 1973 when the Knicks won the NBA championship.

With stars Breanna Stewart and Sabrina Ionescu struggling on offense, other players stepped up. Leonie Fiebich started off OT with a 3-pointer, and then Nyara Sabally had a steal for a layup to make it 65-60 and bring the sellout crowd to a frenzied state.

Minnesota didn’t score in OT until Kayla McBride hit two free throws with 1:51 left. The Lynx missed all six of their field goal attempts in overtime. After Ionescu missed a shot with 21 seconds left, her 18th miss on 19 shot attempts, the Lynx had one last chance, but Bridget Carleton missed a 3-pointer with 16 seconds left.

Stewart, who missed a free throw with 0.8 seconds left in Game 1, hit two free throws with 10.1 seconds left to seal the victory.

As the final seconds ticked off the clock the players hugged and streamers fell from the rafters

Napheesa Collier scored 22 points to lead Minnesota before fouling out with 13 seconds left in OT.

Congratulations Liberty!

Tony

(OSV News/Gregory A. Shemitz)

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times columnist, Maureen Dowd,  came out swinging at New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan for allowing Trump to showcase at the AL Smith Dinner last week. Here is an excerpt.

“The cardinal should go to confession.

Timothy Dolan let a white-tie charity dinner in New York showcase that most uncharitable of men, Donald Trump.

At the annual Al Smith dinner, Dolan suffused the impious Trump in the pious glow of Catholic charities. Dolan looked on with a doting expression as Trump made his usual degrading, scatological comments about his foils, this time cloaked as humor.

“We have someone in the White House who can barely talk, barely put together two coherent sentences, who seems to have mental faculties of a child,” Trump told the New York fat cats. “It’s a person who has nothing going, no intelligence whatsoever. But enough about Kamala Harris.”

Trump also offered this beauty: “I used to think the Democrats were crazy for saying that men have periods. But then I met Tim Walz.” When Trump joked about keeping Doug Emhoff away from nannies, even he admitted it was “too tough.”

As he did in 2016 when he crudely attacked Hillary Clinton as she sat on the dais, Trump added a rancid cloud to what used to be a good-tempered bipartisan roast.

Dolan could have stood up and told Trump “Enough!” We have been longing for that voice of authority who could deliver the Joseph Welch line — “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?” — to our modern Joe McCarthy. It is the church’s job, after all, to teach right from wrong.

Instead of telling Trump he was over the line, Dolan enabled him in his blasphemous effort to cast his campaign as a quasi-religious crusade and himself as a saintly martyr saved by God. The conservative cardinal didn’t care about soiling the legacy of the great Democratic patriot Al Smith.

As a Catholic, I have had little confidence in the leadership of Cardinal Dolan.  He seems to relish in closing churches in poor neighborhoods. I agree with Dowd, his fawning and laughing at Trump was close to sacrilegious!”

Dowd’s entire column is below.

Tony

————————————————

The New York Times

Trump’s Charity Toward None

Maureen Dowd

October 20, 2024

The cardinal should go to confession.

Timothy Dolan let a white-tie charity dinner in New York showcase that most uncharitable of men, Donald Trump.

At the annual Al Smith dinner, Dolan suffused the impious Trump in the pious glow of Catholic charities. Dolan looked on with a doting expression as Trump made his usual degrading, scatological comments about his foils, this time cloaked as humor.

“We have someone in the White House who can barely talk, barely put together two coherent sentences, who seems to have mental faculties of a child,” Trump told the New York fat cats. “It’s a person who has nothing going, no intelligence whatsoever. But enough about Kamala Harris.”

Trump also offered this beauty: “I used to think the Democrats were crazy for saying that men have periods. But then I met Tim Walz.” When Trump joked about keeping Doug Emhoff away from nannies, even he admitted it was “too tough.”

As he did in 2016 when he crudely attacked Hillary Clinton as she sat on the dais, Trump added a rancid cloud to what used to be a good-tempered bipartisan roast.

Dolan could have stood up and told Trump “Enough!” We have been longing for that voice of authority who could deliver the Joseph Welch line — “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?” — to our modern Joe McCarthy. It is the church’s job, after all, to teach right from wrong.

Instead of telling Trump he was over the line, Dolan enabled him in his blasphemous effort to cast his campaign as a quasi-religious crusade and himself as a saintly martyr saved by God. The conservative cardinal didn’t care about soiling the legacy of the great Democratic patriot Al Smith.

Like Trump, Smith, the “Happy Warrior,” was a native New Yorker — half Irish and half Italian. His track was the reverse of Trump’s, starting in politics and ending in skyscrapers. Smith was born into an Irish community nestled under the Brooklyn Bridge and left school at 14, after his father died, to help his family by working at the Fulton Fish Market. When his political career ended, he became the president of the corporation that built the Empire State Building. From his office in the sky, he could see the street he grew up on.

The gregarious four-term governor of New York believed deeply in lifting up the less fortunate, and in America’s founding principles. Emotionally devastated after helping investigate the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire that killed scores of women and girls in 1911, he crusaded to create laws for safer working conditions.

Anti-Catholic bigotry destroyed his presidential bid in 1928, and he hated bigotry of all kinds. He early on decried lynching, racial violence, the Ku Klux Klan and Naziism. He would have detested Trump, a bigot cynically stoking racial fears and bloodthirsty impulses to get elected.

Unlike Trump, Smith was a man of faith. He died with a prayer on his lips, next to his parish priest. He had no patience for bickering and was praised in his obits as “warmhearted” and “honest as the noonday sun.”

Despite Trump’s contention this past week that he has a “good heart” and his father had a “big, big heart,” both Trumps’ hearts were cold. Young Donald helped his dad, Fred, refuse Black tenants.

Trump is proudly amoral. He disdains the Christian values I was taught by nuns and priests. His only values are self-interest and self-gratification. He has replaced a code of ethics with the Narcissus pool.

Certainly, Dolan is happy with Trump’s abortion crackdown. But can’t he see that Trump is corroding our country’s moral core? Trying to steal an election violates the Eighth Commandment. And Trump has broken the commandments about cheating and lying and coveting.

As Anne Applebaum points out in The Atlantic, Trump uses the language of Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini to rouse hate and violence. This, while sacrilegiously calling Jan. 6 a “day of love.” He compares the jailed rioting thugs to the Japanese interned in World War II. It’s not a big leap to saying migrants are “poisoning the blood of our country” and calling his political opponents “vermin,” given his belief — inherited from his father with the “big heart” — in superior genes and blood lines.

This past week, he called Democrats “evil,” “dangerous” and the “enemy from within,” limning them as a bigger threat than Russia and China, a threat that he said might require him to sic the military on his opponents. He denounced the national treasure Nancy Pelosi — who is a devout Catholic — and her husband — who was attacked with a hammer by a far-right conspiracy theorist — as “sick” and “evil.”

The echoes of McCarthyism reverberated when Trump was asked at a town hall whether he really believed the debunked story that Haitian immigrants were eating neighbors’ cats and dogs. “I was just saying what has been reported,” an unrepentant Trump replied. “All I do is report.”

The pols on the dais looked like a Last Supper for this unnerving election. Hopefully, it’s not a Last Supper for the Republic.

Dear Commons Community,

I am in the middle of reading Yuval Harari’s current bestseller, Nexus:  A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI.  As the title suggest, this is no small, short topic.  If you have read any of his earlier books such as Sapiens:  A Brief History of Humankind, you know that a Harari book is long and slow.  I need to keep my iPhone near me when I read his work so I can look up terms and phrases.  And at over 400 pages, Nexus… is not a quick weekend read.

I read one chapter yesterday that I feel compelled to share.  In Chapter Eight, entitled, Fallible:  The Network is Often Wrong, Harari takes aim at underlying reasons why social media has come to dominate not always for the good much of what we see on the Internet. He starts by relating several examples of how the Stalinist regime controlled and manipulated information in Russia. Harari quotes and refers to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, during the discussion and moves to today’s social media companies such as Facebook and YouTube.  In between, Harari also incorporates background on Napolean Bonaparte and Carl von Clausewitz, a 19^th Century Prussian general and military theorist. Here are several quotes from this chapter reflecting on 21^st Century social media.

In discussing YouTube, he mentions that the company in studying how to boost its viewership (from 100 million hours per day to 1 billion per day) used AI algorithms that concluded that “outrage drives engagement”.  And when “users dialed down outrage and stuck to the truth, the algorithms tended to ignore them.”  

Harari also references Facebook’s whistleblower Frances Haugen who stated:

“We have evidence that our core product mechanics, such as vitality, recommendations, and optimizing for engagement, are a significant part of why hate speech, divisive political speech, and misinformation flourish on our (Facebook’s) platform”.

Harari concludes:  “As we have seen again and again throughout history in a completely free information fight, truth tends to lose.”

In reading this chapter, I kept thinking about our current presidential election.

God help us!

Tony

Juan Soto and Giancarlo Stanton- ALCS Heroes

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Yankees will be going to their record-breaking 41^st World Series after defeating the Cleveland Guardians 5-2 in extra innings last night. 

Juan Soto provided his biggest blast in pinstripes, a 10th-inning home run that lifted the Yankees passed the Guardians.

Winning an epic seven-pitch battle against Guardians reliever Hunter Gaddis with two outs and two on in Game 5 of the American League Championship Series, Soto drove a 1-2 pitch high and deep to center field. And the ball kept carrying, and carrying – all the way to the Fall Classic.

It landed in the bullpens beyond the fence in right center field, a three-run home run that delivered a 5-2 victory and a 4-1 ALCS conquest of Cleveland.

New York will open World Series Game 1 on Friday, either at Los Angeles against the Dodgers or home to the New York Mets. Either way, ace Gerrit Cole will be aligned for the start.

Thanks to a one-out error on shortstop Brayan Rocchio, who muffed an easy force play at second in the top of the 10th, Soto got a shot to hit just as the game’s leverage was teetering back toward Cleveland.

He floated the ball 402 feet into the outfield, capping a series in which the Yankees’ superstar sluggers – capping a series in which the Yankees’ superstar sluggers – Soto, Aaron Judge and Giancarlo Stanton – came up huge.

“It’s the best feeling you can ever have. That’s what you play for,” said Soto, who won a World Series title in 2019 with the Washington Nationals.

“Now, we are the best team in the American League.”

Stanton had tied Saturday’s game with a two-run, sixth-inning home run. Meanwhile, the Yankees’ bullpen once again came up nearly perfect, pitching 5 ⅓ shutout innings, capped by Luke Weaver’s two-inning effort, the second frame shutting down the Guardians after Soto’s blast.

Last night,  the Yankees demonstrated why they are called the “The Bronx Bombers”.  Congratulations to the entire team!

Tony