The new class of weight loss drugs also have miracle drug impacts it seems and given that both good health and the lack thereof have enormous economic structures build around them, their impact is likely to be quite dramatic.

Some junk-food companies and alcohol sellers are freaking out about the prospect of reduced appetites or booze cravings. As they should: The average household with at least one family member on a GLP-1 is spending about 6 percent less on groceries each month within six months of adoption. That translates to about a $416 reduction in food and drink purchases per household a year. Spending reductions are even greater for high-income households, according to a new study by researchers at Cornell University and Numerator.

Some categories have been hit harder than others. For example, these households are spending about 11 percent less on chips and other savory snacks and 9 percent less on sweet bakery items. Select healthier foods, such as fresh fruits and yogurts, have gotten a very tiny bump.

There are some potential retail winners. For example, rapid weight loss has encouraged some patients to replace their wardrobes. Theclothingrental company Rent the Runway recently reported that more customers are switching to smaller sizes than at any time in the past 15 years.

Airlines could save significant money on fuel if passengers slim down en masse, a financial firm projected. Life insurers could cash in, too, given the many mortality risks linked with chronic obesity. “Generally, running a life insurance company right before immortality is discovered — cancer vaccines, antiaging therapeutics — is a good business to be in!” said Zac Townsend, CEO of the life insurance company Meanwhile.

Nearly every GLP-1 user I’ve interviewed in the past year has also mentioned spending money on new hobbies, such as pottery classes or pickleball leagues. Some deliberately picked activitiesto replace social engagements that revolve around food or alcohol; others said they simply gained the energy and self-confidence to try new things.

“I am way more active than I have been,” said Mitchell, whom I interviewed for a recent PBS NewsHour story about Ozempic economics. “I took my daughters horseback riding on the beach last Christmas. We’ve been snow tubing, things that I would have never thought to do.”

OK, some of this seems anecdotal. However:

The Danish pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk, maker of Ozempic and Wegovy, nearly single-handedly kept its home country’s economy out of recession last year while most of Europe struggled. And because Americans are the primary customers of these meds, U.S. dollars flowed heavily into Denmark, causingthe Danish krone to strengthen relative to other currencies.

To keep the krone’s value steady relative to the euro, the Danish central bank had to cut interest rates. Put another way: Overweight Americans unintentionally helped Danes get cheaper mortgages.

Wow.

In any case, good health is good! And it has good effects!

Obesity is a chronic disease associated with dozens of other ailments, including joint problems and cancers. So helping Americans lose weight has the potential to make the public much healthier — and reduce spending on other (costly) care.

Seven women in Mitchell’s family, for instance, had breast cancer and both of her parents developed forms of dementia. Mitchell herself developed diabetes, too. All of these problems have linkages with obesity. “I don’t want to be sick,” said Mitchell,explaining why she turned to Wegovy after previously trying diets, exercise, therapy and surgery. “After taking care of my parents, I said, ‘I don’t want my children to have to take care of me.’” Her obesity is now in remission and she no longer has diabetes.

Of course, such potential health benefits — and cost savings — will materialize more broadly only if patients keep up with their medications and adopt healthier habits to help maintain lower weights. Which is a big if.

Research suggests most patients who wereprescribed these meds stop taking them within a year. Some stop because they’ve successfully reached their goal weight. But many others report stopping because of costs, unpleasant side effects, drug shortages or squeamishness about needles.

Who knows what will happen with all of this. But it sure is one of the more fascinating things to come along in the last couple of years. I bet RFK will have thoughts……

The post Weight Loss Drugs and the Economy appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

Jimmy Carter has died. Carter was a pretty bad president and then one of the two greatest ex-presidents, along with John Quincy Adams. He’s become something of a beloved figure among liberals in the last twenty years or so, both because of his brave stance denouncing Israeli apartheid against Palestinians and because he lives his faith through Habitat and his other actions, with no sense of the hypocrisy so common among evangelicals. But still, Carter really sucked as president.

Born in 1924 in the small southwestern Georgia farming town of Plains, Carter grew up in the region’s small farming elite. His parents owned a lot of land and his father was a successful businessman. This gave the young man a lot of chances that even many Georgia whites did not have. Of course, his father was a staunch segregationist and they were the wealthiest family in a largely African-American area. But Jimmy went to the local public schools and succeeded there. Then he fulfilled his childhood dream of attending the Naval Academy in Annapolis. It took awhile for a boy from southwest Georgia to make this happen. First, he spent a year at Georgia Southwestern College in Americus and then a year at Georgia Tech in Atlanta. Finally, in 1943, he got accepted to the Naval Academy. He did well, graduating 60th in a class of 820 in 1946. With World War II just having finished, the expanding U.S. military presence around the world required a lot of officers and Carter would spend the next seven years at bases all over the place, both in the U.S. and being deployed in the Atlantic and Pacific fleets. He started his family at this time too, having married Rosalynn in 1946.

Carter became interested in submarines and eventually qualified for command of ships. In 1952, he started working in the Navy’s growing nuclear submarine program. He was based out of Schenectady but spent time at the Naval Reactors Branch of the Atomic Energy Commission in Washington as well. When a partial meltdown took place at Canada’s Chalk River Laboratories in 1952, U.S. experts went to help, including Carter. He was exposed to radiation while disassembling the reactor. He was in protective gear and didn’t suffer any negative health consequences, but this permanently affected his position on nuclear weapons and nuclear power.

In 1953, Carter started training to serve on a nuclear submarine. But he was tiring of military life and when his father died, Carter and Rosalynn chose to return home to Plains. At first, he and his family, now consisting of three small boys, lived in public housing in Plains, making him the only president to have lived in public housing. But he soon took over the family farm and his father’s peanut operations. Being a scientific man, he made this a going concern.

One thing that always drives me nuts about how conservatives talk about Carter is their dismissal of him as a “dumb peanut farmer.” Sure, and a Naval officer who worked on nuclear submarines.

One of the critical questions about Carter is how he more or less overcame the racism so central to his growing up. That he followed someone as utterly awful as Lester Maddox as governor makes his rise and career even more interesting. Carter’s early political career is one of racial moderation but not a lot of racial courage either. He mostly kept quiet about his belief that segregation should be abolished. That doesn’t mean his positions weren’t known. When the White Citizens’ Council approached him to join them, he refused and then they boycotted his peanut warehouse. There was room for moderation among whites on segregation and that’s where Carter firmly remained. Not every white was a WCC or KKK member, even if very very few took any real risks on promoting desegregation.

In 1961, Carter became the chairman of the Sumter County School Board and here he did vocally approve of integration. When he ran for state senate the following year, the Democratic Party machine wanted him to lose, so they fixed the election with the aid of the county sheriff. Carter challenged the result, the fraud was uncovered, and Carter won the next election.

But Americus was a place of racial violence. That was hitting a peak in the early 1960s and Carter basically did not speak out about it out of fear of alienating the segregationists he needed for his political career. This was the politics of the racial moderate. For an ambitious politician from southwestern Georgia, this was not unexpected. He certainly could have been a whole lot worse.

Carter was a very hard worker and very ambitious. These traits served him well. He rose rapidly within the Georgia Democratic Party, taking speed-reading courses so he could digest more material. He got a position on the state Democratic Executive Committee and became chairman of the West Georgia Central Planning and Development Commission, overseeing the distribution of state and federal grants. This made him regionally powerful and also put him in conflict with established interests who disliked the anti-corruption politics of the newcomer.

All of this was intended to set him up to run for governor in 1966. Carter was something of a late entry, but his political enemy, the Republican Bo Callaway, whom he had clashed with on the planning commission, ran on a pro-segregation platform. Democrats feared losing the state for the first time since Reconstruction and Carter decided to take him on. He ran as a moderate and came in third in a three-way primary, behind the loathsome violent racist Lester Maddox and the old New Deal liberal Ellis Arnall. Maddox won the run-off and then the general.

Carter was devastated—coming in third was not his plan and seeing Maddox take power was definitely not his plan. But he ran again in 1970, this time a more experienced party leader and a savvier politician. He managed, somehow, to court both the black vote and the segregationist vote. He met with Andrew Young and Martin Luther King, Sr. while also inviting George Wallace to come make a speech in Georgia. Overall, this was a more conservative campaign than four years earlier. He attacked his liberal primary opponent for being a northern-style progressive and, toward the end of his campaign, actually disseminated racist ads showing his opponent with black basketball players. Such was the reality of Georgia politics in 1970.

The moment he took office, Carter completely turned his back on the segregationists. They were angry. In his inaugural address, he said the time for racial discrimination was over. That was fine, but he wasn’t a particularly effective governor for reasons that repeated themselves in his presidency. He didn’t like working with the legislature, in no small part because he hated the glad-handling that required, which he associated with corruption. He also felt government was too big and while there may have been good reasons behind his goal of streamlining government, reducing departments, and placing greater power in the governor’s office, this would also serve some less than progressive ends in the White House.

On race, Carter appointed a lot of African-Americans to offices, the first governor of Georgia to do so since Reconstruction. On the other hand, he opposed busing as a strategy to integrate schools, co-sponsoring an anti-busing resolution with George Wallace at the National Governors Association annual meeting in 1971, and he supported the death penalty, which of course was disproportionally applied to black people.

Carter would also embrace really bad positions for political reasons. For example, when William Calley, architect of the My Lai Massacre that killed over 500 innocent Vietnamese, was convicted of his crimes, he led a statewide initiative that created something called American Fighting Man’s Day and had Georgians drive with their light on during the day for a week as a symbol of their support for the war criminal.

Carter seems like an unusual presidential candidate, or more accurately, an unusual person to actually win the nomination. He was always very ambitious. He tried to align with conservative forces at the national level so he could balance the McGovern ticket and become the VP candidate in 1972. That obviously did not work. He did the work to raise his profile, but it was still low. In 1973, Carter appeared on What’s My Line, where the panelists had to guess his occupation. It took a long time before Gene Shalit (who still lives!) figured it out. Carter was just a medium-sized state first term governor with no national profile. That was not going to stop him.

Carter announced his presidential candidacy in December 1974. No one cared. By January 1976, he had just 4 percent support among Democrats in polling. But, with overall disgust at Washington after Watergate, Carter managed to rise fast in early 1976. He won in both Iowa and New Hampshire. He was the moral outsider moderate, not Nixon, not Wallace, and not McGovern. It worked. The darkhorse won the candidacy, naming the liberal Walter Mondale as his vice-president. He had a big lead early in the general, but Ford nearly came back to win; in fact, Ford won more states. But Carter became president, the most unlikely person to win a presidential election since Warren Harding.

Unfortunately, Carter really sucked at being president.

The problem with Carter’s presidency is that he was bad at the job. Really, he was bad at it in many ways. The ultimate micromanager, he could get distracted with trivia. His distrust of established politicians meant that he found himself surrounded by economic advisors who told him repeatedly to triangulate between the parties, alienating everyone. He had opportunities to change the nation’s trajectory by passing groundbreaking legislation with large congressional majorities, especially in his first two years, but he just wouldn’t do it. His moralistic take on the world had some value in a post-Nixon era, but also blinded him to the complexity of many problems and the kind of deals one had to make in order to succeed.

Simply put, Carter is as close to a libertarian as we have ever had as president. That’s a tough one for us to swallow perhaps. We may want to see him as a great liberal. But he wasn’t a liberal at all, especially not on economic issues. He truly believed that nation needed to move on from the New Deal state. He distrusted government programs to help the poor. Although Congress was filled with liberals, he surrounded himself with the new neoliberals who told him repeatedly that inflation mattered much more than either building an effective political coalition or taking brave stances to use his power to create a more equal world. He loved deregulation and repealed many of the protections for consumers that had come into the law over the few decades before this. He fought for lower taxes over economic stimulus, consistently undermining his own Democratic Congress. Moreover, he was a true believer in all of this stuff. It wasn’t political expediency, which you might understand. No, he had a vision for the economy was antithetical to contemporary liberalism. Just because he was a good man personally and a Democrat and a great ex-president does not make any of this untrue.

Now, to be fair, these were tough times. The corporate lobby was now well-organized and seeking to roll back the labor and environmental and consumer regulations Americans had passed in the previous few decades and especially the last ten years. The real impact of that was in the future, but looking back, it was clear where this was headed. The economy was really tough. The nation had not dealt well with the oil crisis and the Vietnam War.

Inflation was a very real problem. Already an issue when he took office, the OPEC oil boycott meant that inflation jumped from 5.8% in 1976 to 13.2% in 1980. That would have caused massive problems for any president. Capital mobility and deindustrialization were beginning to sweep the nation and no one had any answers for communities such as Youngstown. That city’s famed Black Monday, where the first of the big steel plants shut down, took place in the first months of the Carter administration. What to do about Youngstown and other places would be a big theme of this administration. But Carter’s own reticence to take aggressive action on the economy and deindustrialization continues to reverberate today. Basically, Carter didn’t care much about cities like this and effectively offered them nothing to ease their burden.

But even outside of the big issues of the time, Carter wasn’t very good at being president. He always had a more than a bit of the anti-politics politics that drives ideas today like jungle primaries and his lack of attention to partisanship meant that he blew many easy chances to create positive legislation. His micromanaging was legendary and took him away from the things he needed to be focusing on. He started his administration by taking on some western water projects that he thought was pork, which was probably fine in theory, but this is what he chose to spend his first political capital on and all it did was infuriate leading members of Congress from both parties who benefitted from them. As they say in the West, whiskey is for drinking and water is for fighting. If Carter had bothered talking to western politicians about this, he would have known better but that was not his style. Instead, he just made enemies of people who led powerful congressional committees and who started looking at the westerner Ronald Reagan shortly after.

None of this is to say Carter didn’t do some good things. His second day in office, Carter pardoned all Vietnam draft evaders, a clearly morally correct policy and one over which he took a political hit. Carter was also the greatest environmental president we have ever had. It’s worth noting what a missed opportunity the nation had to get serious about its environmental problems and move forward into a clean energy future that could have significantly mitigated the impact of climate change.

Nothing says more about these missed opportunities than Carter having solar panels placed on the roof of the White House and Reagan then having them removed. Carter taking on the energy crisis like it was a war was a great policy, but it’s also not one Americans wanted to hear. Americans want their president to kick some ass. Telling them to turn down their heat and put on a sweater is more or less the opposite of that. Creating the Department of Education was probably a good thing, even though the position is one of the weakest in the Cabinet, which at a time when Linda McMahon is about to lead it is probably a good thing, even if local control over education is in the end creates a lot of problems.

Much of what Carter faced was an era where he was pretty clear-minded about America’s limitations, governing a nation angry at having those limitations exposed. Americans wanted to drive huge gas-guzzling vehicles, not having gas rationing plans, which Carter presented to Congress in 1979. His famous “malaise” speech from later that same year, based on our energy issues, but talking about the overall position of the United States at that time, was widely attacked. One might argue that Carter simply lacked the political skills to be an effective president. Terrible at messaging these issues and too honest for a cynical media, he struggled to connect with Americans. Perhaps a different politician could have taken on these issues more effectively, but we will ever know. In any case, he had so alienated Congress by that point that in May 1979, the House voted against giving Carter the authority to create a gas rationing plan; Carter responded by calling the vote “embarrassing” which did not help him mend those needed relations.

On other environmental issues, Carter was really great. His choice to lead the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, Eula Bingham, was outstanding and this was the only administration in which OSHA was really moving toward the activist force it could be. His 1978 declaration of a federal emergency at Love Canal and the Superfund program that followed was brilliant.

On public lands, Carter was outstanding. His most important action was signing the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, providing protection to 157 million acres of land, 43 million of which were in national parks, the creation of two national monuments, and over 12 million additional acres designated as wilderness, a process that followed Carter using the Antiquities Act to protect 56 million acres as national monuments in 1978, which led him to be burned in effigy in Fairbanks.

On some foreign policy issues, Carter deserves a good bit of credit. The negotiations that led to the SALT II treaty with the Soviets, fixing nuclear missile counts and limiting new development was a very positive step toward peace in the Cold War. The Ford administration had started this process, but Carter is who nailed it down with Brezhnev. The agreement was signed in 1979 and it seemed that Soviet-American relations were improving. But with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan shortly after, relations suffered badly and the Senate refused to ratify SALT II.

On the other hand, Carter, bringing his moralism into foreign policy, decided to boycott the 1980 Olympics. This was a shame. The only people who suffered in this boycott was the athletes who had trained for the Olympics their whole life. The Soviet response to boycott in 1984 meant that you had back-to-back games tainted with political posturing. Carter redoubled efforts to influence Pakistan after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which might make sense from a geopolitical perspective but the Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq regime was pretty awful. No good choices there. But a lot of that funding went to Islamist resistance groups, which did not exactly end well for the U.S. or for the citizens of Pakistan and Afghanistan. Still, Carter always defended this decision.

Fundamentally, Carter bringing human rights and moralism into foreign policy was simply hard to do, especially in the aftermath of Kissinger. It was a welcome change, but it was also applied with massive inconsistency. That’s what we see in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Carter wanted to use U.S. influence for a free Rhodesia and to end apartheid in South Africa, but he faced too many big obstacles, including growing fascism among white South Africans, the election of Margaret Thatcher (and Britain was more influential in South Africa anyway), and the fact that conservatives in Congress such as Jesse Helms liked apartheid. Carter was mostly good, but then he would say nothing against the horrors of Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines because they were too important an ally. These inconsistencies were noted at the time.

Carter faced the Latin American dictatorships and responded with at least some level of disapproval, telling the Argentine junta to quit throwing people out of airplanes. He didn’t respond well to the rise of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, but at least he didn’t instantly move toward murderous militarism in the same way as Reagan would. He also worked out the treaty with Panama to return the Panama Canal to that nation in 1999. That undermined an increasingly problematic site of protest by anti-colonial forces that reminded the world of American imperialism. It also led to a massive right-wing backlash, becoming the culture war issue of the 1980 election and leading to the defeat of several long-time politicians who supported it, such as Frank Church in Idaho. This is one of those issues that is almost impossible to wrap your head around today—why did returning the Panama Canal to Panama cause such a widespread reaction. But that’s OK, in 50 years, people will wonder the same thing about Critical Race Theory and the modern Republican Party. Amazingly, we are now talking about taking over the Panama Canal today because our next president is not only a zillion years old, but is partly a response to Carterism anyway.

Of course, Carter’s signature achievement was his work toward peace in the Middle East. The Camp David Accords did not in fact bring peace to the region, but Israel and Egypt have more or less gotten along ever since and that reduced overall tensions tremendously. Unfortunately, the assassination of Anwar El-Sadat and the rise of Hosni Mubarak placed sharp limitations on Egyptian governance and the recent history of Israel is of a nation turning far to the right. But getting those two nations to sit down and work out an agreement was an actual foreign policy achievement far greater than nearly any president has had in foreign policy.

It’s hard to say much positive at all about Carter’s response to the Iran hostage crisis. To be fair, there weren’t a lot of great cards to play. But the rescue operation was an unmitigated disaster and Carter deserved the blame he received for it. Early on, I don’t think you can criticize Carter too harshly. He announced sanctions and proclaimed he would not order a military action that would “cause bloodshed.” But as his 1980 reelection campaign struggled against the rise of Ronald Reagan, Carter ordered an invasion of Iran to rescue the hostages. Operation Eagle Claw was one of the worst disasters in American foreign policy history. First, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance explicitly told Carter that this was a terrible idea, but Zbigniew Brzezinski was a more influential advisor—and he wanted a military solution. The actual operation of the mission was a complete disaster, with botched preparations, the waste of fuel, and then desert sand blasted into the refueling tanker, leading to two planes going down in the Iranian desert. Vance resigned in disgust. This both showed American incompetence and gave the Iranian regime endless propaganda with their own people and globally. Coming on the heels of Vietnam and the oil crisis, this was a huge blow to American prestige and self-confidence.

Of course, the media also savaged Carter in horrendously unfair ways. He was seen by the Beltway elite as a redneck outsider who didn’t share their values or interests. His infamous Playboy interview when he said, “I’ve looked on a lot of women with lust. I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times” led to a lot of chortling among the media. His evangelicalism was funny to them. Nothing sums up how awful Carter fared with the Beltway hacks that make up our mainstream media then and now than the infamous rabbit incident. Carter was a man with a farm in rural Georgia. He was used to dealing with animals and knew how to handle a rabbit. But these Beltway hacks found it hilarious. What a buffoon, that Carter! He had a difficult brother that was a media joke. Good thing the media handles problematic family members of Democratic presidents reasonably today! He also had his young daughter Amy in the White House with him and she received way too much media attention for a girl that age. I don’t have much positive to say about how the media has evolved over time, but largely leaving the underage children of presidents alone is a good thing, even if you are unfortunate enough to have Donald Trump as your father. Presidential children of age who are trying to implement fascism, well, that’s another thing entirely.

But it was really on the economy that Carter’s presidency floundered. A believer that inflation was caused by monopolies, he believed strongly in deregulation. Carter’s emphasis on deregulation wasn’t entirely out of order; after all, he did help create the modern microbrewery movement through it. And while the Airline Deregulation Act did usher in an era of cheap airfare, it also laid the groundwork for the almost comically terrible experience of flying today. But overall, his emphasis on deregulation as opposed to better regulation played no small role in the neoliberal era that has snowballed into the all-out war on the regulatory state today. He had no vision for fighting inflation except for softer versions of the pro-corporate policies that Reagan would later pursue, while not offering any sort of message that Regan would be so effective at. But his austerity programs and desire to cut social programs led to a lot of disturbance among Democratic leaders. As Tip O’Neill said in 1979, “Can you reelect the president on austerity?” The answer was no.

Perhaps nowhere did Carter show his massive limitations of imagination and governance than on the Humphrey-Hawkins Act. That bill, which would have created true full employment, initially with the right to sue the government if you could not find a job, was an attempt to rebuild the liberal coalition by appealing to the best of the New Deal job programs and to the black community, which suffered so badly from underemployment. The bill’s sponsors thought Carter was on board with them during the 76 campaign, but they were wrong.

Carter surrounded himself with neoliberal economic advisors who prioritized inflation over every other goal and governed significantly to the right of his quite liberal Congress, infuriating the left. Carter sent Charles Schultze, his chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, to torpedo Humphrey-Hawkins. Schultze effectively shut down any provision that would actually create full employment or commit the government to putting money into job creation. The final bill, a mere shell of the original, committed the government more to fighting inflation than to helping the poor.

What happened with Humphrey-Hawkins repeated itself over and over during the Carter administration, infuriating unions and the left. As Jefferson Cowie tells in his great book Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class, near the end of Carter’s administration, a journalist asked International Association of Machinists president Wimpy Winpisinger how Carter could revive his reputation in the labor movement. Wimpy answered, “Die.”

Of course, Winpsinger didn’t want Carter to die, but that’s how far Carter’s reputation had fallen on the labor left by 1980. Carter’s response to the decline of the steel industry was almost nonexistent. He was more focused on propping up foreign steel suppliers to fight inflation than worried about the jobs lost in the U.S. The Japanese and European steel companies dumped their extra supplies on the U.S. market, undermining the ability of American firms to compete in their home markets. This undermined his own base voters in critical northern states and, taken aback by the closures, he simply struggled to even articulate a coherent response and nothing that happened undermined his belief that growing imports would only help the U.S., both in domestic and foreign policy. Carter shrugging his shoulders at Youngstown and other sites of deindustrialization infuriated working class voters.

In short, Carter had the congressional majorities to rebuild the New Deal coalition. Instead, he pandered to conservatives on economics, defied his own congressional caucus, and proceeded to fail entirely in stopping the Republican Party in 1980. I don’t know if reestablishing New Deal politics would have stopped the rise of Reagan and the right, but it couldn’t have ended worse than Carter’s actual policies did. Again and again, Carter sent bills to Congress that no one liked. His alienated his own party, Republicans didn’t support the bills either, and he simply would not build political coalitions to help himself out. You can’t help those who won’t help themselves and Jimmy Carter would not help himself.

By 1980, Carter was heavily damaged goods. The growing right certainly wasn’t going to vote for him over Reagan. Yet, he had strongly alienated his fellow Democrats, both in Congress and the base, which was still pretty strongly union-based at this time. His racial moderation wasn’t going to appeal to southern whites and he lost the chance to really lock in high participation from African-American communities by his economic policies that did not take the fight against poverty seriously. It’s fair to say that Ted Kennedy’s primary run against Carter was stupid and just hurt the president, but then Carter had pretty much asked for a liberal challenger. In fact, I don’t really have a problem with Kennedy deciding to challenge Carter, but Kennedy himself ran an awful campaign, so he damaged Carter without actually beating him, the worst of both worlds. Who knows if Kennedy would have defeated Reagan, but this was still the pre-serious part of his career, so I am skeptical.

In the general, Carter actually started out ahead of Reagan in polling, but by the fall, it was clear that Reagan was going to win. He did, going away. Carter only won his home state of Georgia, Minnesota, West Virginia, Maryland, Rhode Island, and DC. The electoral college total was an awful 489-49. Reagan won 50.1% of the popular vote to 41% for Carter and 6.6% to John Anderson. What a disaster.

After Carter lost, he had every right to be bitter and withdraw into private life. In 1981, there wasn’t too much of a precedent for what ex-presidents did, by which I mean that they did all sorts of things. Some were old and died soon after. LBJ went back to Texas, relaxed a bit, and started teaching at the University of Texas occasionally. Eisenhower golfed. Hoover stewed in endless bitterness at FDR. Nixon sought to rehab his reputation.

Carter chose none of these paths. Rather, he went into a life of public service unprecedented among an ex-president since John Quincy Adams. This started with the founding of the Carter Center in 1982, which I think is the first serious foundation founded by an ex-president. Carter made the most of it, fighting for worldwide democracy and human health.

Carter is most famous for his work with Habitat for Humanity, which seems like such an institution now that one forgets how central Carter was to its growth. He and Rosalynn started working with Habitat on a 1984 project in Americus, near Plains. Soon after, he led his own Habitat group to New York and a long collaboration had begun. Now, while we can that this sort of voluntarism has a downside because the government should be taking care of housing for the poor, of course the government is very much not doing that. Carter, believing in living his faith, helped spur a new path of voluntarism and this was a tremendously positive thing.

Carter’s work on tropical diseases is even more important. It’s hard to state just how horrific diseases such as Guinea worm and river blindness are. In 1986, the Carter Center decided to take on Guinea worm. That year, 3.5 million people suffered from the disease, spread through 21 countries. Today, it is almost completely eliminated. This is how you do a post-presidency. Carter long said he wanted to outlive Guinea worm. He may not quite have done so, and it could come back without continued vigilance, but what an amazing accomplishment. Moreover, through the whole thing, although Carter has no small ego himself, he handled himself with such grace and class and modesty. Bill Clinton, who always had a complicated relationship with Carter, could have learned more than a few things from the man about personal behavior, both during and after his presidency.

Carter also continued to take brave and bold stances on the issues he most cared about. He had no reason to take controversial positions. But he felt it was the right thing to do. That was especially true with his advocacy to peace in the Middle East. His continued efforts for peace in the Middle East were always incredibly noble, if out of fashion with an Israel no longer interested in a two-state solution or peace with the Palestinians. He spent a decent amount of time in North Korea, talking to that nation about giving up their nuclear program and in 1994, persuaded Kim Il-Sung to agree to a freeze, although of course that didn’t last. His election monitoring in politically troubled countries, particularly in Africa, was crucial work as well. In 2002, he received the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts. Unlike Barack Obama’s Nobel Prize for not being George W. Bush, Carter truly earned his Nobel.

Up to the end, Carter spoke out. He criticized Trump for ending the Iran nuclear deal, a true foreign policy disaster, showed up around the nation for various events, often revolving around the Carter Center, and bemoaned the state of the government. He was a moral voice. He wasn’t a good president, not by a long shot, and recent efforts to revive his reputation aren’t very convincing. He was outstanding in some areas, but the number of unforced errors severely undermined him. But he was absolutely a good man. We will all miss him. But definitely not for his presidency, which was bad.

The post Jimmy Carter appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

Well this is something special, a holiday treat for the end of 2024: a group of archivists (including Chris Person) has uploaded an HBO magic special by Ricky Jay that has been largely unavailable since it aired in 1996.

This is an RF rip of Ricky Jay and His 52 Assistants, to date the greatest card magic special ever produced, directed by David Mamet of all people. This special was produced by HBO and to date has never had a home release, although poor home recordings of this special exist online.

Person described his process for archiving videos at Aftermath:

Before getting into preservation generally, it’s worth considering how we got here. Why is so much media lost or badly preserved? A recurring reason is that the people in charge are sometimes, but not always, asleep at the wheel. Media is forgotten or stored improperly, and humidity and heat have destroyed more of our history than we will ever know. Sometimes companies handle the material sloppily (I’ve blogged about the use of AI before, but there are countless examples in audio too).

Having shared all that, I feel like the quality of this YouTube video of the special is not perceptibly worse than the one uploaded to archive.org? What am I missing?

And as always when I post about Ricky Jay, I recommend Mark Singer’s irresistible 1993 profile of Jay, which begins with this story:

The playwright David Mamet and the theatre director Gregory Mosher affirm that some years ago, late one night in the bar of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Chicago, this happened:

Ricky Jay, who is perhaps the most gifted sleight-of-hand artist alive, was performing magic with a deck of cards. Also present was a friend of Mamet and Mosher’s named Christ Nogulich, the director of food and beverage at the hotel. After twenty minutes of disbelief-suspending manipulations, Jay spread the deck face up on the bar counter and asked Nogulich to concentrate on a specific card but not to reveal it. Jay then assembled the deck face down, shuffled, cut it into two piles, and asked Nogulich to point to one of the piles and name his card.

“Three of clubs,” Nogulich said, and he was then instructed to turn over the top card.

He turned over the three of clubs.

Mosher, in what could be interpreted as a passive-aggressive act, quietly announced, “Ricky, you know, I also concentrated on a card.”

After an interval of silence, Jay said, “That’s interesting, Gregory, but I only do this for one person at a time.”

Mosher persisted: “Well, Ricky, I really was thinking of a card.”

Jay paused, frowned, stared at Mosher, and said, “This is a distinct change of procedure.” A longer pause. “All right — what was the card?”

“Two of spades.”

Jay nodded, and gestured toward the other pile, and Mosher turned over its top card.

The deuce of spades.

A small riot ensued.

Tags: Chris Person · David Mamet · HBO · magic · Mark Singer · Ricky Jay · TV · video

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Let’s talk about education for a minute,” said Matthew Civello, CEO of Scanscraps, at a recent roundtable talk at the Conference of Climate and Compost at Baruch College in New York City. “I’ll just take a show of hands. How many people here today are familiar with alternate-side-of-the-street parking?” Civello’s question was met with laughter and a near-unanimous show of hands in the audience. “It’s probably the most successful program the city has ever rolled out,” he continued. “And how many of us own a car?” More than half of the hands went down. “Even if you don’t own a car, you know about alternate-side-of-the-street parking. … [So, for composting,] education is great, but there has to be a motivational stimulus to make people want to participate. You need to incentivize people with rewards, and also with enforcement, and it has to be on an individual level. It’s a behavioral exercise. First and foremost, it has to become part of our city’s DNA.”

Civello is illustrating the paradox of NYC’s new boroughwide “mandatory” curbside collection of organic waste: How can you compel more than 8 million residents to separate food scraps and other compost from their garbage? How can you regulate the wide-scale collection of different kinds of waste? And how can you even make a smidgen of difference in the composition of some 14 million tons of garbage that NYC annually feeds to landfills?

Structure and Consistency

“Changing behavior requires structure and consistency,” said Baruch conference organizer Samantha MacBride, a sociologist and professor at the college’s Marxe School of Public and International Affairs, in her keynote address. “Once you get behavior going, if you don’t have the physical structure for it to mean something, and the consistency of information being provided, the behavior’s going to peter out.”

A former director of research and operations at the New York Department of Sanitation (NYDS), MacBride cited statistics from earlier pilot programs (2013 to 2023) for curbside organics collection in parts of Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx that showed a continuous decline in participation. “The prior efforts were rolled out district-by-district,” she said. “The current program is now rolling out to entire boroughs, and the trends are all showing declining capture rates—and the capture rates were never high to begin with. The capture rates of the new districts are even lower.”

In recent years, NYC has managed to “divert” about 20% of its recyclables from landfills. But with collection rates of just under 5% for organic waste—in a pilot, no less—New York is a long way from, say, the 80% total diversion rate boasted by San Francisco. MacBride called the New York program “inefficient,” with a lot of trucks bringing in very little material. “You’re paying a lot of money for labor, fuel, with nothing to show for it,” she said. “Municipal programs like that cannot survive.”

MacBride said that the Queens pilot’s low capture rates stem from a lack of education about the curbside organics program; frustration with the city’s on-again-off-again approach; problems with missed collections; and, especially, the structural challenges of separating trash in large buildings. “You can have people wanting to participate all you want in their own kitchens,” she said. “If they don’t have it properly set up in their building, it won’t matter.”

Access and Incentive

Back in the early aughts, when my family started composting in our apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, we dutifully set up a bin in the kitchen and periodically took the contents to our neighborhood garden, which had a public compost bin. At some point that became too much for the garden to manage, and they quietly removed it. We started taking our compost to nearby farmers markets, until they stopped collecting during the pandemic.

In 2023, the New York City Council passed the five-part Zero Waste Act, designed to expand curbside organics collection, set “zero waste” targets by the year 2030, provide yearly progress reports, set up at least three food-scrap drop-off sites in each district, and provide a recycling center in each district. (This follows suit from successful programs in other cities, such as San Francisco and Seattle, whose organic-waste-disposal ban garnered headlines and diversion rates of around 60%.)

To its credit, the Adams administration answered the NYC legislation with its citywide curbside composting program, led by NYDS Commissioner Jessica Tisch (who recently moved on to become police commissioner). The city has touted the benefits of separating compost and food scraps—from the diversion of organic waste from landfills, where it generates greenhouse gasses, to the reduction of rats on the streets—while offering organics bins to buildings in all five boroughs and installing more than 400 app-driven “smart bins” throughout the five boroughs (more on those below).

And yet, it’s not clear what’s going to happen with the curbside program. “All buildings are now supposed to have access to the brown bins,” says Clare Miflin, architect and executive director of the Center for Zero Waste Design. “And as we all know, from the pilot programs in Queens and Brooklyn, even though it’s mandatory, many buildings don’t maintain these bins for their residents.” 

NYC’s “mandatory” program is based on the participation of buildings. And its enforcement will fall—not unlike the enforcement of recycling collection—on those buildings, in the form of fines for noncompliance, due to take effect next year. According to an NYDS educational video, the “warning period” for all five boroughs will extend until the spring of 2025. “That’s when you really need to look at participation,” Miflin noted wryly, “because lots of people don’t do anything until they start enforcing it, right?”

Cultural Mosaic

From a waste-disposal standpoint, Gotham was unusual from the get-go. “Most other U.S. cities, like Chicago and Philadelphia, have alleyways where garbage can go to await pickup; the men who designed Manhattan’s grid in 1811 didn’t give us such spaces,” Miflin writes in the essay “Vital City.” “Continuous street facades—with few loading docks or parking garages—create a lively, walkable city, but they make it hard to hide the trash.” Another unique challenge is NYC’s polyglot population. “New York is tough because it’s such a variety of density,” Miflin says. “What works here is different—actually, it’s better to take from Europe, where cities don’t have garages or alleyways.”

Then there’s New York’s decades-long infatuation with big black garbage bags, where most trash currently resides on streets until pickup. Many reports trace this practice to a 1968 sanitation-workers strike, which plunged the city into a garbage crisis, yet led to widespread use of plastic bags in place of Oscar the Grouch–style metal cans. But the trash bags, a ubiquitous part of the cityscape, generate their own problems: they create litter, smell, and block sidewalks; they’re susceptible to vermin, require a lot of cleanup, and, according to Miflin, are socially inequitable: “It’s why richer parts of the city are clean and parts of the city that don’t have the staff to clean up are dirty, because we have a system that requires a lot of labor to do it properly.”

Miflin’s firm has been advocating for “containerization” of NYC’s garbage for years; in 2017, it published Zero Waste Design Guidelines, with strategies ranging from shared, permanent public containers for lower-density neighborhoods to big four-wheel bins that can be stored in large multifamily buildings and rolled out for collection. “The larger buildings have waste rooms,” Miflin said. “Many of them have trash chutes. They can just store the stuff inside and wheel it out to a temporary place on the street. Whereas the smaller buildings don’t have trash chutes and don’t have as much staff. It makes sense that their residents take stuff straight to the street and put it in permanent containers.”

In 2023, the DSNY published its “Future of Trash” report, pointing to containerization models from other cities including Paris, Barcelona, and Amsterdam. “In that report, the DSNY suggested they would have all four waste types in the street,” Miflin said, referring to organics, glass and plastic, mixed paper, and trash. “Then they realized it would eliminate too much parking, so they said, ‘OK, we’ll just do it for trash.’ In places where they’re trying shared containerization—such as Morningside Heights—I’ve talked to residents who say, ‘Oh, I can just take the trash straight outside, but I have to go to the cellar to get rid of my recycling and organics?’ It disincentivizes people to separate garbage if it’s easy to throw away trash and more difficult to throw away recycling and food scraps. It perpetuates this trash-centric system.”

Where Does it Go?

The “smart bins” for compost started appearing on Upper West Side streets in 2023, to the bafflement of many of my family and friends, until it became clear that downloading the NYCCompost app provided access to unlock the bins any time day or night. Voila! The bin on our nearest corner became our go-to place to deposit food-scraps—unless the app said it’s “full,” which happens fairly frequently, leading to a search for another bin or a wait until another day to get rid of compost.

We also were pleased when our co-op building (with 40-plus units) acquired a brown bin for organics from the city in October. However, that bin was used for just a few short weeks before it disappeared from our garbage area. One night, when asked where it went, one of our building workers replied that it was “taking up too much room,” then added, paradoxically, that it “didn’t hold much stuff.” So we reverted to the nearby “smart bin” for dropping off compost.

“The smart bins are a great idea,” said MacBride. “They’re part of the solution because they’re convenient, and they absolutely do bring in cleaner organics than curbside collections. Unfortunately, right now, the smart bins are being mixed with school organics on collection truck routes, and school organics are highly contaminated. The material that’s coming into the smart bins is being wasted in terms of being good clean organics that could be composted locally.”

Both MacBride and Miflin pointed out that collecting organic waste on a citywide scale inherently involves contamination—which means it’s less “pure” and reusable. About 80% of the organic material collected by the NYDS goes to sewage-treatment plants, where it’s anaerobically treated. “Those are the big silver digestion eggs you see at Newtown Creek, where it’s made into this kind of slurry,” Miflin said. “That’s way better than having it all go to the landfill, hundreds of miles away. But it’s not true composting.”

Miflin said there’s no substitute for the kind of compost that NYC community groups have been collecting for decades. “With these grassroots groups, they check it when people drop it off. People don’t put in plastic bags, so it’s very good quality compost. They then apply it for street trees, or they bring it to school gardens or community gardens. That compost is used in the city to make soils healthier.”

Grassroots Groups Struggle 

In NYC’s never-ending budget battles, collection of compost and organic waste has often been treated like a bastard stepchild. In 2020, neighborhood composting groups, as well as curbside composting pilot programs, were defunded by the de Blasio administration during the pandemic. “It wasn’t purely because of Covid,” MacBride said. “It was already going on the chopping block.” 

After a public outcry from New Yorkers, a segment of the neighborhood composting funds were restored for the 2021 fiscal year, only to face new budget cuts from the Adams administration early this year. Another public outcry ensued, leading to another partial refunding announcement by the City Council. Meanwhile, Grow NYC, which has spearheaded many of the composting efforts at neighborhood farmers markets and community gardens, gets a much smaller part of the fiscal pie. “Most likely, all those dropoffs you saw in farmers markets are not going to come back,” Miflin said. Indeed, Grow NYC has permanently closed a long list of compost dropoff sites, directing residents to the curbside composting page of nyc.gov for alternatives.

“This administration made it clear, with their initial cuts, that they didn’t value the contribution of community composters—which is, in my opinion, morally wrong,” MacBride said. “You have people who have voluntarily taken it upon themselves to do something that is nothing but positive for the city—they’ve proved that they can do it for close to 30 years. And they’re still fighting being displaced from plots of land where they operate and for relatively small amounts of funding. Still viewed as extraneous to the issue of sustainability in waste.” She advocates a broad-based, cooperative approach that includes staffed community drop-off sites allowing micro-haulers—small bike- or e-vehicle-based neighborhood-level collections—to work alongside DSNY, picking up organics as a service to buildings.

Building Education

While individual behavior is key, the success rate for the curbside compost program will hinge on the participation of buildings, where education and outreach should be intensified. “The labor—the work that’s going to make or break this program—is with the porters,” MacBride said. “These are some of the lowest-paid, lowest status folks who will be asked to do a lot of extra work without necessarily extra pay or resources. The porters and their supers and the building managers should have much more direct attention from DSNY.” 

Such efforts are ultimately intertwined with enforcement of the program. “When we start enforcing, we’ll need to go in and check on arrangements,” MacBride said. All of this will require major groundwork at the building level: How’s the recycling, garbage and organics room set up? What kind of bags line the receptacles? Does the porter have to carry an organics bin upstairs? Where’s the set-out area? Are there signs on every floor in the building telling people where to take their organics? Has educational material been handed out? Has each tenant received a kitchen container for use in their home? “These steps are hugely labor-intensive,” she said. “They involve an agency working with people who do the labor in the building. This is not being carried out—on anywhere near enough of a scale that I believe New York City needs.”

Featured montage by the author.

One thing I have zero fucking patience for this is the idea that Trump has won and we are just going to sit back and watch it happen. NO!!!!! If we don’t fight on every front, then we deserve to lose. And the idea of people being “tired.” Huh? What have you done? Doomscroll? I mean, c’mon, we have a whole set of history of change to build on here that shows how people can turn the worst moments into something that might not be victories but at least are less bad situations. The battle for American democracy is far from over, unless you just don’t give a shit about it.

This leads me to what I thought a useful article at Vanity Fair about holding the Senate accountable:

While the Patel pick only adds to the sense of gloom that Trump’s authoritarian fantasies may come to fruition, it’s important to remember that autocrats want you to believe they are more powerful than they already are. Trump has been president-elect for less than a month and we’ve seen instances in which his ambitions have been checked. His first attorney general pick, Matt Gaetz, had to withdraw because of sexual misconduct allegations (which he denies). The MAGA favorite for Senate majority leader, Rick Scott, lost a secret ballot to John Thune, a lawmaker more in the mold of Mitch McConnell (who, likely not seeking reelection, could be a thorn in Trump’s side). Scott, it should be noted, didn’t even make it to the second round; he got 13 votes, less than not only Thune (23) but John Cornyn (15).

Trump has historically bullied Republicans into doing what he wants, but in a 53-47 senate, he can only afford to lose three senators in trying to get his cabinet picks confirmed (given that JD Vance would be the tie-breaker in a 50-50 vote.) Some who could be swayed against Trump include Maine’s Susan Collins, Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski, and North Carolina’s Thom Tillis. I’d also keep my eye on the independent-minded(ish) doctor Bill Cassidy and Mitt Romney’s successor John Curtis. While it’s fair to be skeptical whether some of the aforementioned senators will buck Trump and the Republican Party line—see Collins and Murkowski’s role in the fall of Roe—it’s no time to cynically write off the Senate as a check on executive power.

Yale historian Timothy Snyder’s second rule of fighting autocracy is to “defend institutions,” which, he writes, “help us to preserve decency.” Snyder adds, “They need our help as well. Do not speak of ‘our institutions’ unless you make them yours by acting on their behalf. Institutions do not protect themselves. So choose an institution you care about and take its side.” These Republican senators have the constitutional power of “advice and consent,” a responsibility we should hold them to—especially if Trump tries to opt for recess appointments to get unconfirmable nominees into positions of great power.

If we are cynical, if we assume the worst from everyone, then we have surrendered in advance. I think it’s important to remember that even Trump responds to pushback. Trump is very reactive, seen, at times, as taking ideas from the last person he’s talked to. The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman last month told her colleague, Ezra Klein, “He doesn’t especially like the work of governing, didn’t when he was in the White House. But he likes power, and he likes being praised, and politics combines both of those things.” There are ways to get Trump to do things; incoming chief of staff Susie Wiles seems to have figured it out. Trump isn’t a mystery, if anything he is very straightforward and transactional.

If pro-democracy voters expect senators to do nothing, they are effectively giving those lawmakers permission to do just that. We should expect our elected officials to protect norms and institutions; that also goes for members of the House, where Republicans hold a slim majority. If people care about democracy and the direction of the country, they should call on senators to do their jobs and subject Trump’s picks, such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, Pete Hegseth, and Patel, to legitimate scrutiny.

Do I think democracy makes it through another Trump administration? Only if democracy supporters stand up for norms and institutions, and resist falling down the path of cynicism and hopelessness. It only takes one person to do the right thing.

I suppose in this case it takes four people. I should say as well I am curious as to what Mitch McConnell is going to do here. He loathes Trump personally and while he is the most cynical human living today, he might be out for some revenge, or at least to knock down a couple of the most ridiculous picks and keep the Senate as an independent body. Of course I wouldn’t bet money on that, but what I am saying is that the battle is not over. Yes, the Senate sucks. Yes, the Senate is going to be worse now than before. Yes, tons of horrible judges will be confirmed. But even given that, we still have room to at least try to claim a part of it as ours and pressure senators to do the right thing. Some of them might at least occasionally do it too! In any case, giving up is for losers.

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