Voices From The Grave: “We Told the Truth. We Obeyed The Law. We Kept The Peace.”.”

Posted on | January 9, 2025 | No Comments

Mike Magee

For those many, many millions of viewers who tuned in to the live coverage of former President Jimmy Carter’s funeral today, they were rewarded with two hours of intriguing video images, and moving words and song, including a recounting of the beginnings of environmental advocacy as Los Angeles burns, and John Lennon’s “Imagine” performed by Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood.

Five former Presidents and four Vice-Presidents were in attendance. And there were notable firsts, like the first greeting and handshake between incoming President Trump and former VP Pence since January 6, 2021.

But perhaps the most striking events of this carefully staged national funeral were the two especially haunting posthumous eulogies delivered by the sons of a former president and vice-president. Presented by Steven Ford, son of former President, Gerald Ford, and Ted Mondale, son of former Vice-President Walter “Fritz” Mondale, they appeared to be directed to America itself, and its’ soon-to-be 47th president.

As the speakers explained, Jimmy Carter, some years back, asked both Ford and Mondale if they would be willing to present eulogies at his funeral. Both agreed, and put pen to paper in anticipation. But as it became evident that Carter might very well outlive them, they each asked their sons, in that event, to read their remarks at his funeral. And today they did.

Both President Ford and Vice-Presidents words (voiced by their sons) deserve a full viewing when time allows. But in the meantime, let me share the closing remarks of each, prescient and timely now, at American democracy’s hour of need.

Steven Ford, son of former President Gerald Ford (7/14/13 – 12/26/06), reciting the president’s written words posthumously:

“…Now is time to say goodbye, our grief comforted with the joy and the thanksgiving of knowing this man, this beloved man, this very special man. He was given the gift of years, and the American people and the people of the world will be forever blessed by his decades of good works. Jimmy Carter’s legacy of peace and compassion will remain unique as it is timeless…As for myself, Jimmy, I’m looking forward to our reunion. We have much to catch up on. Thank you, Mr. President. Welcome home, old friend.”

Ted Mondale, son of former Vice-President Walter “Fritz” Mondale (1/5/28 – 4/19/21) reciting the vice-president’s written words posthumously. He prefaced his reading with this sentence – “My father wrote this in 2019, and clearly he edited it a number of times since then, but here we go.”

“…Two decades ago, President Carter said he believed income inequality was the biggest global issue. More recently, in a 2018 Commencement Address at Liberty University, I think now the largest global issue is the discrimination against women and girls in this world. He concluded that, ‘Until stubborn attitudes that foster discrimination against women change, the world cannot advance, and poverty and poverty and income equality cannot be solved.’ Towards the end of our time in the White House, the President and I were talking about how we might describe what we tried to accomplish in office. We came up with a sentence which remains an important summary of our work. ‘We told the truth. We obeyed the law. And we kept the peace.’ That we did, Mr. President. I will always be proud and grateful to have had the chance to work with you towards noble ends. It was then, and will always be, the most rewarding experience of my public career. Thank you.”

President Jimmy Carter: Challenged the Moral Majority and Defended the Bill of Rights.

Posted on | January 5, 2025 | 2 Comments

Mike Magee

Today was frigid in Washington, D.C. But inside this sacred dwelling on the corner of 16th and 0 Streets NW, marked by soaring 58 foot ceilings supported by gothic arches, smiles and gratitude filled the air at the 6 p.m. prayer service in memory of former President Jimmy Carter.

Carter was an extraordinary devout Christian who once admitted that on some days of his presidency he “might pray up to 25 times.” When he chose to pray more formally those years (1976-1980), First Baptist was where he went – often – in fact over 70 times during his 4 years as President. His love for this community was obvious, once declaring that his and Rosalynn’s choice was among ‘the finest things that ever happened to us, personally.”

When he died last week on December 29, 2024 at age 100, the Washington Post headline highlighted his “brilliant post-presidential career as a champion of health, peace and democracy.” But one would have to search far and wide these days for a major Christian evangelical leader, especially of the Southern Baptist tradition, who is unaware that during the lead up to the 1980 Presidential election Jimmy Carter was widely considered a religious turncoat and “Enemy #1” to the former Conservative Christian cause.

A bit of history:

In 1976, the year that President Ford went up against this Baptist peanut farmer from Georgia, Pat Robertson and his new Christian Broadcasting Network, supported by state-of-the-art direct-mail solicitations, was all in on mixing religion, politics, and entertainment.

That November, 55 percent of Baptists voted for Jimmy Carter, a gain of 22 percent on the previous Democratic presidential nominee. Carter prevailed, and the triumvirate that included Robertson, fellow televangelist, Jerry Falwell, and Heritage Foundation CEO Paul Weyrich, rushed to the White House, expecting to be met with gratitude and open arms.

But Carter made no effort to pack his cabinet with evangelicals, and Billy Graham never even got the call to come pray in the Oval Office. Moreover, while Carter didn’t like abortion, he refused to support a constitutional amendment to override Roe v. Wade, and he didn’t think homosexuals threatened the moral fabric of America. He also got along with Catholics.

For those and other reasons, four years later the now highly organized “Moral Majority” leaders listened intently to then candidate Ronald Reagan in the summer of 1980 address the Christian Coalition’s annual policy meeting and say, “I know you can’t endorse me, but I want you to know that I endorse you and what you are doing.”

The Moral Majority got “their man” (a divorced, completely secular product of Hollywood and corporate America) into the White House. Whereas 61 percent of conservative Christians had voted in the 1972 presidential election, 66 percent voted in both 1976 and 1980, and they voted overwhelmingly Republican. That was enough for Jerry Falwell to confidently claim that the Moral Majority had elected Jimmy Carter and, when Carter had displeased them, replaced him with Ronald Reagan.

But another three years would pass before the real tidal wave of evangelicals in politics would hit, and the seismic force that created the wave was the financial survival of Christian nonprofit schools that promoted racial purity.

In 1983, the Supreme Court ruled that Bob Jones University, often called “the buckle on the Bible Belt,” could not receive federal funds so long as it continued to discriminate on the basis of race. The university’s namesake and founder had been an early-20th-century evangelist with such Bible-pounding zeal that he was said to have at least once shattered a pulpit…Twenty years on, he bequeathed to Bob Jones Jr., his son, the Greenville, South Carolina school, which, until 1971, would continue to exclude black students.

When at last it relented under federal pressure, it still required that black students be married to attend the school. After 1975, it opened the door to single blacks as well, but still prohibited interracial marriage and dating. This relative “enlightenment” was still not enough for the IRS, which on January 19, 1976, rescinded the university’s tax-exempt status for failure to comply with federal civil rights regulations.

In the hands of the Heritage Foundation’s Paul Weyrich, this dispute over taxes and compliance with laws banning racial and gender discrimination became not only a David-versus-Goliath battle, but a direct attack on Christian teachings.

The Supreme Court ruled against Bob Jones and its racial policies on May 24, 1983. By then, lily-white “Christian academies” had proliferated throughout the former Confederacy, all of which now felt threatened. Their health curricula were already infused with bans on contraceptive information and abstinence-only values education. The merger of health and education conservative priorities gave Weyrich confidence that he now had an explosive and powerful force that could rile the Southern electorate and ensure Reagan’s (and Republicans for years to come) future success.

That was then, and this is now, you say. Well, not so much. Take for example the life of Sarah Weddington. She was Texan through and through, part of a group of notable women achievers of the time, sometimes referred to as the “Great Austin Matriarchy”which included Barbara Jordan, Sissy Farenthold, Ann Richards, Molly Ivins, and Liz Carpenter.

Weddington served as Carter’s special assistant from 1968 to 1981. The daughter of a Methodist minister, she died nearly 3 years to the day of Carter’s passing on December 26, 2021. Her obituary noted her expert legal service to the President, but focused heavily on the fact that she was one of two lawyers who argued and won Roe v. Wade before the Supreme Court in 1970.

Humble and self-effacing as a law professor at the University of Texas, she told her students in 1998, “A lot of people together won Roe v. Wade. We give it to you proudly it can be passed down to other generations.” But by 2017, she foretold the future, stating in an interview, “If Gorsuch’s nomination is approved, will abortion be illegal the next day? No. One new judge won’t necessarily make much difference. But two or three might.”

As Jimmy Carter is laid to rest, beside Rosalynn, how should we remember him? First Baptist senior pastor, Julie Pennington-Russell would certainly say, as a man of deep personal faith, and committed to “acts of service” and “the power of kindness.” Others might note his courage in standing up to Robertson, Falwell, and Weyrich in defense of the Constitution and especially the first clause in the Bill of Rights stating: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.”

Both Sarah Weddington and Jimmy Carter believed in an afterlife, and looked forward to reuniting with their heroes. For Sarah, Texas Gov, Ann Richards was a lifelong colleague and friend. In 2012, she said, “My gravesite is about 50 feet away from hers. Hopefully, when I call the Texas State Cemetery home, we will have great late-night conversations, remembering our battles of the past and celebrating the victories that live after us.”

Jimmy Carter now can rest in peace at his wife’s side. On her death at age 96 on November 19, 2023, he gave us all a glimpse of how he managed to rise above the hatred of Christian Conservatives by focusing on his gratitude for a life with Rosalynn. As he said of her: “Rosalynn was my equal partner in everything I ever accomplished. She gave me wise guidance and encouragement when I needed it. As long as Rosalynn was in the world, I always knew somebody loved and supported me.”

Category: Uncategorized
Tags: Bob Jones > Christian Coalition > Jerry Falwell > jimmy carter > Moral Majority > Pat Robertson > Paul Weyrich > Ronald Reagan > Rosalynn Carter > sarah weddington > Separation of Church and state

Glory Be To 2025

Posted on | January 1, 2025 | 2 Comments

Mike Magee

More than once in the lead up to the launch of 2025 I have heard friends and colleagues express a range of sentiments that circled around the general notion that “This is too much to take.”

But throughout history, and into the current period, there are more than a few examples of human courage and resilience, and even a hopefulness that defies logic and reason.

One can hope, for example, that the long war between the Ukraine and Russia will be drawn to an end in 2025. President Zelensky’s address to the Parliament of the European Union in 2022 from a war bunker, did not mince words.

“I don’t read from paper, the paper phase is over, we’re dealing with lives. Without you, Ukraine will be alone. We’ve proven our strength. We’re the same as you. Prove that you’ll not let us go. Then life will win over death. This is the price of freedom. We are fighting just for our land. And for our freedom, despite the fact that all of the cities of our country are now blocked…We are fighting for our rights, for our freedom, for our lives and now we are fighting for our survival, Every square today, no matter what it’s called, is going to be called Freedom Square, in every city of our country. No one is going to break us. We are strong. We are Ukrainians.”

In those words, Ukraine’s president was mirroring the emotions of other leaders facing an impossible foe in uncertain times. Poets, politicians, and religious leaders have tread this path before. Rome’s 1^st century CE intellectual, Seneca, stated with confidence that “Injustice never rules forever.” Was he really sure of that?

In his Inaugural Address on January 20, 1961, President John F. Kennedy, expanded on this theme. “Now the trumpet summons us again – not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need; not as a call to battle, though embattled we are; but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out, ‘rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation’, a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease and war itself.”

St. Augustine understood well the interlocking nature of human justice when he wrote, “Charity is no substitute for justice withheld.” And the Talmud cautions that timing is of the essence with this passage, “Three things are good in little measure and evil in large: yeast, salt and hesitation.”

As Shakespeare reminded, one person, large or small, can make a difference. “How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed in a naughty world,” he wrote. Goodness in the human world requires as much light as possible from every corner of society. Reality is real, as the Irish repeated often enough till the words “All sins cast long shadows” became a proverb.

Back in 2022, Zelensky closed his remarks to the European Parliament with this appeal, “Do prove that you will not let us go. Do prove that you indeed are Europeans. And then life will win over death and light will win over darkness. Glory be to Ukraine.”

But at the end of the day, it comes down to this, do you believe in the fundamental goodness of human nature? Walt Whitman did. He wrote, “I am as bad as the worst, but, thank God, I am as good as the best.”

Category: Uncategorized
Tags: 2025 > european parlaiment > glory > goodness > Human nature > Ukraine > Zelensky

A Message From Elizabeth II This Christmas Day

Posted on | December 23, 2024 | Comments Off on A Message From Elizabeth II This Christmas Day

As the New Year approaches, Hcom offers this piece for your quiet consideration and contemplation.

Mike Magee

Hanukkah, the Jewish communities 8-day Festival of Lights begins this Wednesday on December 25, 2024. This is a rather rare calendar coincidence, one that will not repeat again until 2052. Those who witnessed the conspicuous Trump and Musk-induced infighting last week over shutting down our government will have to agree that “enlightenment” couldn’t come soon enough.

Bad behavior is especially glaring at this time of year. Our holiday music is incredibly optimistic. Think of the phrases ingrained in our minds and hearts since childhood: “All is calm, all is bright,” “Good tidings we bring,” “Making spirits bright,” “Oh hear the angels voices,” “Sleep in heavenly peace,” “Have yourself a merry little Christmas,” “Comfort and joy,” “Do you hear what I hear?” “The stars are brightly shining,” “Let your heart be light.”

And that is why David French’s headline this week was so shocking, timed as it was. The headline asked, “Why are so many Christians so cruel?” French and his wife and three children have experienced the cruelty first hand since he openly expressed his opposition to Donald Trump during the 2016 Presidential campaign. That resulted in threats to his entire family by white supremacists who especially targeted his adopted Ethiopian daughter. Ultimately, he was “cancelled” by his own denomination, the small, Calvinist “Presbyterian Church of America.”

The entire article is worth a read and careful consideration. But to cut to the chase, French suggests the core problem is religious certainty. As he states it, the “answer often begins with a particularly seductive temptation, one common to people of all faiths: that the faithful, those who possess eternal truth, are entitled to rule. Under this construct, might makes right, and right deserves might.”

Of course, the notion that “might makes right” has been a recurring theme over human history. Notably, European empire building (and Royalty in lock step) aided by organized religions have unleashed centuries of death and suffering which arguably continue into the very present. Marshaling fear and worry, and targeting vulnerable “others,” often accelerated by new technology-induced societal turmoil, arrived long before the emergence of Trump and Musk. It is as old as human history.

Consider King George VI, Queen Elizabeth’s father. His nickname, “Bertie,” derived from his given name, Albert Frederick Arthur George. The name was not a casual choice. He was born on December 14, 1895, which by poor luck happened to be the 34th anniversary of the death of Queen Victoria’s husband, Albert (“Bertie’s great-grandfather). As you might imagine, this was not the aging Queen’s happiest day of the year, and bonding with her new grandson was not a foregone conclusion, in fact the new parents were informed that the Queen was “rather distressed.”

The suggested solution was to name the child after Victoria’s dead husband. It worked exceedingly well. A few days later the Queen wrote, “I am all impatience to see the new one, born on such a sad day but rather more dear to me, especially as he will be called by that dear name which is a byword for all that is great and good.”

Through a series of improbable happenings (including the abdication of his older brother, Edward, who served only from January to December 1936, so as to be free to marry commoner Wallis Simpson) Albert became King George VI on December 11, 1936.

Aside from his skill at collecting stamps (over 250,000 in 325 volumes during his lifetime), and overcoming a crippling speech impediment, he is best remembered for managing a short, inspiring Christmas message aired worldwide by a new technology – radio – in 1936. His lasting legacy however was having helped create Queen Elizabeth, his daughter and successor to the throne on his death from cancer of the lung on February 6, 1952.

Ten months after assuming the throne, but prior to her formal coronation on June 2, 1953, the 27-year old Queen Elizabeth II delivered her first Christmas message on December 25, 1952. It too was heard around the world thanks to radio. In that address, she began by paying tribute to her “beloved father.” But she finished that morning by humbly acknowledging her youthful inexperience and insecurity personally requesting that on the date of her formal coronation, “You will be keeping it as a holiday, but I want to ask you all, whatever your religion may be, to pray for me that day.”

Five years later, she delivered her 1957 Christmas Message for the first time using another new technology, television. expressing the hope that day that it would be a “more personal and direct” connect to her people. Direct she was, acknowledging that Christmas morning that, “It is inevitable that I should seem a rather remote figure for many of you.”

Ten years later, on Christmas Day, 1967, she had clearly grown into a world leader, speaking to an increasingly troubled world of “have’s” and “have-not’s” (this time on color television) with these words, “No matter what scientific progress we make, the message will count for nothing unless we can achieve real peace and encourage genuine goodwill between people and the nations of the world.”

A quarter century later, on November 24,1992, Queen Elizabeth II, in an uncharacteristic moment of despair, labeled 1992 “Annus Horribilis,” referencing worldwide turmoil, a fire that had destroyed a portion of Windsor Castle, and the divorces of three of her children.

Encouraging “public scrutiny” of the government and the Monarchy, she said aloud, “criticism is good,” and uttered these words that now, thirty two years later, seem to be directed to our incoming President.

“There can be no doubt, of course, that criticism is good for people and institutions that are part of public life. No institution – City, Monarchy, whatever – should expect to be free from the scrutiny of those who give it their loyalty and support, not to mention those who don’t. But we are all part of the same fabric of our national society and that scrutiny, by one part of another, can be just as effective if it is made with a touch of gentleness, good humour and understanding.”

Twenty-eight years later, in the midst of the pandemic, and with her lifelong companion, Phillip, now 99, failing, she reminded those who had lost love ones, “You are not alone,” and thanked caregivers worldwide for “joyous moments of hope and unity despite social distancing”. But in the end, as she said, “We need life to go on.”

In her 2021 Christmas Message she deflected concern for herself on the prior year’s loss of her husband, saying, “But life, of course, consists of final partings as well as first meetings; and as much as I and my family miss him, I know he would want us to enjoy Christmas.”

In what would be her final message, before passing on September 8, 2022, the aging Queen, now 96, chose to focus on the promise of children and rebirth. She said, “I am sure someone somewhere today will remark that Christmas is a time for children. It’s an engaging truth, but only half the story. Perhaps it’s truer to say that Christmas can speak to the child within us all. Adults, when weighed down with worries, sometimes fail to see the joy in simple things, where children do not.”

Her final words that day, resonate this Christmas Day in America, “As the carol says, ‘The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight’”.

Category: Uncategorized
Tags: Bertie > Charles VI > Christian Cruelty > Christmas Message > David French > Elizabeth II > Musk > PCA > trump > UIK

Your Comments Matter – Reporter Resources for CODE BLUE.

Posted on | December 18, 2024 | Comments Off on Your Comments Matter – Reporter Resources for CODE BLUE.

Thanks to Mary Ellen, a veteran health care professional for the comment above. She is absolutely right. CODE BLUE: Inside America’s Medical Industrial Complex, was written intentionally to share with policy makers how our health care arrived at this moment in history, and suggest ways to improve it. For reporters interested in following this lead, find resources HERE.

Category: Uncategorized
Tags: Code Blue > health care reform

A Clash of Values Playing Out In Full View.

Posted on | December 17, 2024 | 2 Comments

Mike Magee

As the new year, 2025, fast approaches, it’s wise to pause, and gather our thoughts as a nation. Few would argue that we’ve been through a lot over the past decade. And quite naturally, we humans are prone to blame individuals rather than circumstances (some of which have been beyond our control) for creating an environment that feels as if it is unraveling before our eyes.

How should we describe our condition – dynamic, tense, complex? Is peace, contentment, and security achievable in this still young nation? Have accelerationist technocrats, armed with bitcoins and Martian fantasy, short-circuited our moment in time that had been preserved for recovery from a deadly pandemic that eliminated a million of our fellow citizens seemingly overnight?

Who do we turn to for answers, now that we’ve largely lost faith and trust in our politicians, our religious leaders, and our journalists? And how exactly do you create a healthy nation? Certainly not by taking doctors and nurses offline for miscarriages, and placing local bureaucrats in exam rooms. Are they prepared to deal with life and death decisions? Are they trained to process human fear and worry? Do they know how to instill hopefulness in parents who are literally “scared to death” because their child has just been diagnosed with cancer? It certainly must require more than a baseball cap with MAHA on it to heal this nation.

Historians suggest this will take time. As Stanford Professor of Law, Lawrence M. Friedman, wrote in A History of American Law, “One hundred and sixty-nine years went by between Jamestown and the Declaration of Independence. The same length of time separates 1776 and the end of World War II.”

During those very early years that preceded the formal declaration and formation of the United States as a nation, our various, then British colonies, fluidly and independent of each other, did their best first to survive, and then to organize into shared communities with codified laws and regulations. It was “a study of social development unfolding over time” impacted by emotions, politics and real-time economics. At the core of the struggle (as we saw with the pandemic, and now the vaccine controversy) was a clash between the rights of the individual and those of the collective community.

This clash of values has been playing out in full view over the past five years of the Covid pandemic. In 2023, Washington Post columnist, Dr. Leana Wen, asked, “Whose rights are paramount? The individual who must give up freedoms, or those around them who want to lower infection risk?”

This battle between “individual liberty and communal good” is ancient and current at the same time, and still a source of conflict wherever and whenever humans attempt some version of “nation building.” In our current case, it has been further complicated by purposeful misinformation and misdirection on an industrial scale. In a world of “alternative facts,” who and what do you trust?

Through the past five years, public trust in doctors and nurses have managed to remain high. Literally, they have been “a bridge over troubled waters.” That is why it has been such a glaringly obvious public policy blunder to forcefully separate them from the women they care for in half of the states of this nation. By compromising the health of our women, we have compromised the health of our democracy.

It is useful to recall that we humans on these shores have come a long way. From the beginning on the shores of Virginia in 1607, these early wild settlements were essentially lawless – that is without laws. They also were wildly different in their dates of entry and their range of issues. Consider that more than 100 years separated the beginnings of the Massachusetts Bay colony and the colony of Georgia. And as historian Lawrence Friedman noted, “The legal needs of a small settlement run by clergyman clinging precariously to the coast of an unknown continent were fundamentally different from the needs of a bustling commercial state.”

And yet, here we are together, doing our best to push back against a manmade culture war, ignited in Florida, and designed to halt our human progress, as we pursue policies that will not only widen the gap between rich and poor, but also reward billionaire technocrats with unimaginable deregulation that will almost certainly place our citizens health and safety at risk.

In many ways, the struggle to act in a civil and wise manner, that mines common values, and finds a balance between individual freedom and wise collective rules and regulations, remains our hill to climb.

Not surprisingly, RFK Jr. finds himself under a microscope. His past pronouncements, replete with his own “alternative facts,” struggles with addiction, celebrity seeking, and mixing of good and bad ideas have placed him in a well-deserved hot seat. If trust is what we need, he may not be the best choice for MAHA.

As a fact starter, check out The History of American Law. It “presents the achievements and failures of the American legal system in the context of America’s commercial and working world, family practices, and attitudes toward property, government, crime, and justice.” Medicine lives and breaths at these very same interfaces.

How should we describe our condition – dynamic, tense, complex? Historians might say yes to all of the above, but also proclaim that the timing for progress is perfect. We should advantage this fluid opportunity, and make the most of it. Public Health policy, debating it and formulating it, can help us manage our differences, and make wise choices for our still young nation. This is because Public Health exists at the intersection of Law and Medicine.

Category: Uncategorized
Tags: A History of American Law > accelerationism > alternative facts > bitcoin > Lawrence M. Friedman > MAHA > mars exploration > miscarriages > RFK Jr. > technocrats > trust

Not My Final Column.

Posted on | December 11, 2024 | 6 Comments

Mike Magee

As my wife often reminds me, “Comparisons are toxic.” And, in general, I agree and try to respect this cardinal rule. But these are extraordinary times. So grant me this exception.

On December 9, 2024, in my early morning survey of the news, two articles demanded my attention. The first was an editorial in the New York Times with the self-explanatory title, “My Last Column: Finding Hope in an Age of Resentment” by Paul Krugman. The second was an article published that morning in Nature titled “Quantum error correction below the surface code threshold” authored by “Google Quantum AI and Collaborators,” a blanket label for a team of 300+ engineers led by Founder and Leader, Hartmut Neven. More on him in a moment.

As a loyal reader of Krugman, I read his “last column” carefully – twice. Over 25 years I’ve admired this specialist’s (global economics) willingness and interest to wander often into generalist, cross-sector, liberal arts territory. No match for his Nobel winning intellect or pure-bred education at MIT, Yale and Princeton, I do share a history of common geography (upstate New York in our early years, and the New York metropolitan area later on); an upbringing in religious households (Jewish and Catholic); and more than two uninterrupted decades of weekly published columns.

Though I have not always agreed with his take on every issue, I count myself as an admirer. The issues that have interested him, both pro and con, over the years, are more often than not the same issues that have troubled or encouraged me. So I was not surprised that he chose, in his “last column,” to reflect on the recent election, and the current levels of anger, violence and resentment in our society. And while I agree with the findings in his examination of the body politic, we arrived at a different diagnosis.

Krugman writes, “What strikes me, looking back, is how optimistic many people, both here and in much of the Western world, were back then (25 years ago) and the extent to which that optimism has been replaced by anger and resentment. . . some of the angriest, most resentful people in America right now . . . are billionaires who don’t feel sufficiently admired.”

As for the diagnosis, in response to the question he himself raises (“Why did this optimism curdle?”), he answers, “As I see it, we’ve had a collapse of trust in elites.” And the treatment for this disease? “if we stand up to the kakistocracy — rule by the worst — that’s emerging as we speak, we may eventually find our way back to a better world.”

Now that sent me back to Hartmut Nevin and the Nature article for a reality check. Were American oligarchs and technocrats, with wild wealth and even wilder ideas, the cause of every day people jumping aboard the Trump cult train?

Hartmut is 9 years younger than Paul. He is a German trained PhD physicist who came to the University of Southern California as an entrepreneurial research professor in computer science in 1998. His several start-ups which were focused on “face recognition technology and real-time facial feature analysis for avatar animation” helped make him famous and rich when they were purchased by Google in 2006. But his fantastical dream was to create a “quantum chip” that would outperform anything that currently existed.

Six years later, he launched the Quantum Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and by 2016, he had come up with an experiment (still ongoing) to prove “quantum supremacy.” Starting his own chip fabrication factory in Santa Barbara, his dream became concrete. He took a world view in 2020, stating: “It’s not one company versus another, but rather, humankind versus nature — or humankind with nature.”

Nevin believes he is in the right place at the right time. The AI Arms Race is full on and relies on ever increasing data consumption to support generative self-learning. That demands enormous consuming power. In his words, “Both (quantum computing and AI) will prove to be the most transformational technologies of our time, but advanced AI will significantly benefit from access to quantum computing. This is why I named our lab Quantum AI.”

Quantum computing is measured in “qubits” (which are the size of a single atom) versus the binary digit measure of standard computers, called the “bit.” As the New York Times explained, “Quantum bits, or ‘qubits,’ behave very differently from normal bits. A single object can behave like two separate objects at the same time when it is either extremely small or extremely cold.” The test, using exotic metals cooled to 460 degrees below zero, reported out on October 9th, declared that Nevin’s quantum chip “performed a computation in under 5 minutes that would take one of today’s fastest supercomputers 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (10 septillion) years to compute.”

But that’s not the amazing part. In past experiments, the device was error prone, and the more qubits, the less reliable the computations. But now, for the first time, this group was able to demonstrate the more qubits in play, the more accurate the outcome. As Nevin explained, “This historic accomplishment is known in the field as ‘below threshold’ — being able to drive errors down while scaling up the number of qubits.” How big was that? According to Javad Shaman, director of the Center for Quantum Information Physics at NYU, “one of the highlights of the recent decade.”

Nevin doesn’t seem to “worry about being admired.” In his blog this week he tied his qubit “below threshold” accomplishment to “helping us discover new medicines, designing more efficient batteries for electric cars, and accelerating progress in fusion and new energy alternatives.” That seems a far cry from Paul Krugman’s highlighting of “the pettiness of plutocrats who used to bask in public approval and are now discovering that all the money in the world can’t buy you love.”

Gallup has been conducting an annual survey of “Americans Satisfaction With The Way Things Are Going In The U.S.” for roughly a half century. Currently only 22% say they are satisfied. Back in 1986, that number peaked at 70%. That was the year that Robert Fulcrum wrote a little book that remained on the New York Times Best Seller list for nearly two years. Some criticized the book as “trite and saccharine,” but 17 million copies of his books remain in circulation.

The 1986 book was titled, “All I Really Need To Know I Learned in Kindergarten.” Here are his top ten learnings:

Share everything.
Play fair.
Don’t hit people.
Put things back where you found them.
Clean up your own mess.
Don’t take things that aren’t yours.
Say you’re sorry when you hurt somebody.
Wash your hands before you eat.
Flush.
Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you.

I was trying to figure how members of my own family could vote for a man to lead our nation who routinely and deliberately breaks most of these rules. I’ve come up with two reasons:

Greed. They simply don’t want to share any of their wealth or good fortune with others.
Religious certainty. They do not believe in separation of Church and State, and do not respect individual self-determination and free will. And yet values can not be enforced on human beings. They must be freely embraced to become permanently embedded.

Comparisons may be toxic, but Hartmut and Paul point us toward the truth. We the citizens of America (not our leaders regardless of their human deficits) need to get our act together. We are responsible for the outcome of this past election. What will the future hold? As Nevin the information scientist teaches, optimism flows from purpose and the promise of service. And Krugman, the Nobel economist, teaches that money alone can not buy you love – or peace, or lasting joy, or contentment.