None Sense

Pullback Leaves Green Berets Feeling ‘Ashamed,’ and Kurdish Allies Describing ‘Betrayal’ Obama hails death of Muammar Gaddafi as foreign policy success

overcoming learned helplessness

TRANSCRIPT (by speechpad) Hi. This is Jaime Escuder and welcome to another episode of None Sense. I like to drive. I've always been kind of fascinated with mechanical things, and engines in particular are really fascinating. I just love the idea of having sort of a powerful thing like an engine under my control. And just the whole sensation of kind of moving through space quickly like that and, again, having that sort of power at one's command is just a lot of fun. I remember (my mother doesn't know this), I once went drag racing on the Courtney Campbell Causeway in Tampa just the one time (and I'm a lawyer now, so I think I feel safe talking about this because I know the statute of limitations has passed on this), but I just did it the one time but it was exhilarating and I'm not at all advocating that anyone do this, but the fact of the matter is in my final moments when my life flashes before my eyes I'm just gonna remember the sensation of that. But it's more than that. There's a great deal in the U.S. actually that's just off limits, if you think about it. All these places we can't go. For example, where I live in Texas it's a very beautiful place and it's wide open with huge expanses, but it's all walled off and it's inaccessible to me unless I were willing to, you know, climb a fence or trespass or whatever. And, of course, other countries have different rules about this. Other countries have a lot more leniency with regard to people exploring. In fact, I think Finland is famous for having these rules of like this idea that wandering is allowed. And it's understood that you can kind of walk the country. It's your county and you can kind of walk it, and so long as you don't do damage or even allowed to sort of camp out on private property and stuff. Well, you know, not here in the United States. We're not really allowed a lot of places. But the roads are public. You know, the roads are a place where you're allowed to be. And so I always kind of...even looking at a map, and I'm kind of obsessed with maps, looking at the roads, to me those lines indicate the zones of freedom that I'm allowed to explore in my car. And, you know, it's a big country, of course, that we live in, but really, if...and I've actually met people who've done this, if you wanted to, you could explore the whole country. You could explore, you know, Acadia National Park and the great, you know, coasts and shorelines of both coasts, and then the Rocky Mountains and the deserts. And an engine allows you to do that. And so the point is I like driving. And why am I talking about this? It's because I've talked before about artificial intelligence and all this stuff, but it seems to me that one of the things that we're really desperate or eager or just so focused on developing is this thing called the self-driving car. In fact, just the other day I read an article about how Google has in fact developed a special kind of computer chip specifically developed to AI called a "tensor processing unit," which I don't know anything about other than I'm gathering that it's a very powerful computer chip. And the express purpose, one of the express purposes of developing these hyper-intelligent computer chips is to allow for driverless cars. So I just want to take a moment to pause and think about...and I think maybe the driverless car thing is a good kind of prism through which to look at this, but to think about what we give up for what we gained. Because I've noticed there's really a balance to everything in this universe and nothing is gained without something else being lost. And sometimes the things that are lost are worth it and maybe the tradeoff is worth it, but I always think it's a good idea to maybe think about that before we just rush headlong into one thing. So driverless cars, I think the benefits are great. Right? We know that it'll reduce accidents, maybe even eliminate accidents. And you can read. Right? You could take a nap.

"Novotna produced one of the defining sporting moments of the 1990s when she stumbled in sight of victory against Steffi Graf, and then dampened the Duchess of Kent’s shoulder with her tears." Related: "I told her we were both just very ill and needed to let other people help us sometimes."

In this episode, I discuss how I, as a none, contend with grief. MICHIKO DEAD Día de los Muertos a log wind-blown plywood Nevermore.

This episode was inspired by an article I read about the race to develop artificial intelligence. It reminded me of a story that I heard about Jospeh Heller, which got me thinking about the concept of enough. References Tech Giants Are Paying Huge Salaries for Scarce A.I. Talent Vonnegut on Heller on Enough 6,200 Pairs of Shoes A $248,000 Tree House 30,000,000 to 8,000 as peanuts are served today 4,000,000 to 0 by accident 0 to 4,000 600 times more powerful than paper clips to end the world cowboys v. spacemen (Boulding's original paper here) freedom, books, flowers, and the moon incredibly lucky the great filter Men standing with pile of buffalo skulls, Michigan Carbon Works Transcript Hi, this is Jaime Escuder. And welcome to another episode of None Sense. I read a headline this morning and it reminded me of something, a story that I once heard about Kurt Vonnegut. And so, I'm gonna talk to you about all of that. Here's the headline, "Tech Giants Are Paying Huge Salaries for Scarce A.I. Talent: Nearly all big tech companies have an artificial intelligence project. And they are willing to pay experts millions of dollars to help get it done." Okay. And here is the Vonnegut story. This is Vonnegut speaking. "True story, Word of Honor: Joseph Heller, an important and funny writer, now dead, and I were at a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island. I said, 'Joe, how does it make you feel to know that our host only yesterday may have made more money than your novel Catch 22 has earned in its entire history?' And Joe said, 'I've got something he can never have.' And I said, 'What on earth could that be, Joe?' And Joe said, 'The knowledge that I've got enough.'" This podcast today is going to be about the idea of enough. Enough is something that people really don't do. We are avaricious and greedy. Most of us are demented, as Walt Whitman said, "with the mania of owning things." This is why Imelda Marcos had over 1,200 pairs of shoes. This is why a guy named Dan Burnham spent $248,000 on a tree house for his grandkids. "Adorable and worth every penny," said Mr. Burnham. And we are rapacious. This is a thing that we do: we develop technologies, and then we abuse them. There used to be, think about this, 30 million buffalo in North America. Do you know how many un-hybridized buffalo there are in America right now? There's a general population of 500,000. So, down from 30 million to 500,000. That's an astonishing decline. [98.4%] But of those, you know how many are un-hybridized, meaning the actual buffalo that were here originally? 8,000. [0.026%] Here's another example. Did you know that the United States used to be the largest producing caviar exporter in the world? And that the caviar was of exceptionally high quality? This is from a website I found on the history of caviar. This is the quote, "There was so much American caviar being produced in North America at the time (so around the turn of the 20th century) that bars would serve the salty delicacy to encourage more beer drinking, as peanuts are served today." At the turn of the 19th century, there was more caviar going to Europe from North America than from Russia. At that time, there were roughly 4 million pounds of sturgeon being harvested from the Great Lakes per year and now, virtually gone. I'm mentioning this because it's the concept...it's the idea that we don't accept the concept of enough, as Joseph Heller did, that causes us to do things like fracking. And it's also the idea that we don't accept the fact that we have limitations, that we cannot be trusted with these technologies as we develop them that causes us to create things like nuclear weapons, which we then do things like leave them unguarded. They've been flown across the country by accident. [Same incident.] They've been overbuilt. We have...there's something like 4,000 nuclear weapons in the American arsenal.

In this episode, I explain why I believe that packing the courts with conservative jurists, as Trump and McConnell plan to do, will cause us to lose our rights. I also talk about John Rawls and Alexander Hamilton. What do they have in common?  They both think that you shouldn't make rules for other people without expecting them to apply to yourself. Also, they both liked rap. (Actually, I'm not so sure about that rap thing.) ReferencesSuicide by Elevator 5th Cir.: Dirty Mexicans Are Suspicious The Right to Remain Silent Does Not Include Remaining Silent An Eye For Not An Eye "Expert": Black People Are More Violent Than White People The Veil of Ignorance Federalist 78

My solution to the gun violence problem. (It's not what you think.) CORRECTION: In this episode, I claim that the population density of Cook County, Illinois is 9,000 people per square mile. This is incorrect. It's about 5,500 per square mile. My claim that Brewster County's population density is 1.3 people per square mile was closer. It's actually 1.5. Transcript (by speechpad.com): Hi. This is Jaime Escuder. Welcome to another episode of None Sense. Let's talk about guns. You know, I don't really wanna talk about guns, but guns seems to be a particular problem in my country in that we have these endless horrible mass shootings that keep happening over and over again. And I think maybe we ought to talk about why. (I know that the gun debate is not something that's at all new but I think it's important. And I haven't really waited on it and so I'm gonna do that.) I'm gonna do that by starting off with a surprise. And this is the surprise, I'm a very liberal ... well, this is not the surprise ... I'm a very liberal person. Super liberal. I think that ... I mean, if I could wave my magic wand, I would legalize virtually every victimless crime, so prostitution, drug use, whatever. I think we live in a far too criminalized society. America is an over-criminalized, "overruled," I like to say, country. And I'm very liberal in that way and I think that people should just be allowed to do stuff so long as there's not a victim. And when I talk like that, people naturally assume that I'm a Democrat, which is true. And, of course, every Democrat is a big proponent of gun control, right? Well, not me. I'm actually not a big gun control guy and this is very surprising to people who, after they get to know me a while when they learn this about me, it's a shock to them and it's somewhat disappointing to them. So I wanna explain why, and then maybe because, yes, I'm a Democrat but I'm not a big gun control Democrat, those of you who are skeptical of what I'm about to say might be a little bit more willing to listen. So, I'm not a gun control guy, number one, because I like freedom. I think people should be allowed to do stuff. And I think one of those things is if you wanna be a gun collector or own guns, I can understand why you would wanna do that. Guns are actually pretty amazing machines if you think about it. They don't require batteries or electricity, they just kind of harness the laws of physics and chemistry to function and that's a rare thing. And I'm not a gun owner, I'm not a gun nut, but I can see, you know, it's a rare thing, it's a rare instrument that sort of functions merely out of alignment with the laws of nature. And a gun does and that's kind of amazing and so I could see how, for historical reasons and just kind of neat mechanical reasons, why people might wanna own guns. And more importantly, even if couldn't see that, I just think people should be allowed to be free in a free country and so one of the things you should be allowed to do is have guns. The other thing is I'm not at all blind to the fact that guns have their uses. The police in these types of situations ... there was just a mass shooting, like, I think I may have mentioned, in Las Vegas. I think the last count was 58 people dead ... in these kinds of situations, so Sandy Hook or Virginia Tech etc., the police always get there too late. Now, that's not to blame the police, there's no way they could know it ahead of time but it's gonna take them some minutes to get there. And if, in that time, the only person with a gun in a room full of people is the guy who's killing people, that's how you get to numbers like 58 people or whatever the number was at the Pulse Nightclub, dozens of people killed. So there's a value I recognize to having guns in places where this is gonna happen. And then the 3rd thing is, gun control is ... even the very concept of gun control is completely ignorant of the fact that it absolutely will not w...

This is my tribute to Tom Petty, who was great. Transcript: Hi, this is Jaime Escuder and welcome to None Sense. Tom Petty has died. When I heard that, I, of course, was sad because I liked Tom Petty. He seemed like a really, you know, honestly, a really cool guy. Like an original guy who was kind of uncompromising and just was who he was, and put out the music that he wanted to put out, and said what he wanted to say, and just seemed like the sort of guy who would just be a cool friend. And so, when I first heard that news, there was sadness and a sense of loss, and there were really two feelings that I think, two things that I really felt that as I thought about him some more really kind of grow out of my identity as a member of Generation X, which is to say, someone, who is around 40 years old and who is now kind of entering what Jung called the "Afternoon of Life." The first thing that I thought about, that came to me, was the fact that the old guard that maybe we always thought would be here and that maybe we couldn't really conceive of not being here, is leaving. Tom Petty is gone, Alan Rickman, David Bowie, Douglas Adams, Michael Jackson. I mean, I remember thinking not even be able to imagine a world without Michael Jackson, just thinking Michael Jackson to be around forever. But, guys, Madonna turns 60 next August. So what that really means is the old guard is gone and we are becoming the old guard. We are stepping into the role heretofore played by our parents. Which is to say we are becoming managers of the world. Now, it doesn't seem like it because baby boomers still very much seem to have the helm of the world, but that's not going to last much longer. The truth is that one of the aspects of being in the afternoon of life is navigating the surprising and surreal effect of people that you always kind of relied upon or expected to be there disappearing and moving on. And perhaps the biggest example of that is as we enter our afternoon, our parents are entering their evening and even entering their night. In fact, I mean, both of my parents are actually older than Tom Petty was when he died. So that's the first thing that hearing about this death made me feel. It's a sort of terrifying sensation of being left to go it alone. I mean, we're losing our guides, we're losing our Obi-Wans, our Gandalfs, our Dumbledors. And we have been forced across the line of departure, like it or not, ready or not. Now, there's nothing unusual or unnatural about that. It's a process that every single generation has to go through. It's what our parents went through when their parents entered that phase. But when you are personally going through it, it changes things a little bit. It's one thing to read about it or just to intellectually know that it's something that happens or that it's inevitable that it will happen to you. But when you're actually doing it and you wake up in the morning and you read the news that Tom Petty is dead, it's as I said, it's terrifying and sad, and it's a little unsettling. And the second thing that struck me when I heard about Tom Petty is just sort of an evaluation of him as a person. You know, you kind of maybe overlook certain people until you hear about that they're gone and then when you hear about they're gone you kind of wish you had maybe thought about them more or that it didn't necessarily take their death to make you evaluate how much they meant to you in your life, but I guess that's the reality of the way it is. And so as I look at Tom Petty, I mean, we've lost an artist, we've lost a singer of songs. I mean, I've read a couple of obituaries about him and they kind of mention how, like all great artists, he remained true to himself. The Times obituary noted that even though he sold millions of albums and he headlined numerous shows, his songs stayed down to earth, as they said, "Carrying lyrics that spoke for underdogs and ornery outcasts.

In this second episode of None Sense, I respond to the following statement by Michelle Goldberg: It’s a source of constant astonishment to me that the country has handed over the means to destroy civilization on this planet to an unhinged lunatic who lost the popular vote and was installed with the aid of a hostile foreign power. It’s such an epic institutional failure that it calls everything we thought we knew about this country’s stability into question. What's explained at length in the podcast is summarized like this: if we're expecting institutions like the judiciary to save us from the Trump presidency, we're doomed. Transcript: Hi, I'm Jaime Escuder and welcome to this second episode of None Sense. Today, I'd like to talk about institutions, or rather the appearance of institutions. And I was led to this topic by something I read again in "The New York Times." Remember when someone asked Sarah Palin what her news sources were and she clearly had never read any news in her life because she couldn't name a single, like, news outlet? So, forewarned, my news sources are as follows: "The New York Times," "The New York Times," "The New York Times," "The Guardian," you're gonna be seeing a lot. So, if you read my show notes, you're gonna be seeing lots of links to New York Times articles and The Guardian articles. Also, NPR, although, I gotta tell you, NPR, the website, or the way they do their print journalism, and this may be just because they're fundamentally an audio outlet, a radio outlet, their print is not so great, but the NPR and the BBC. Also, the "Washington Post." But my primary sources of news and this is because they're well-thought out and I really believe they have integrity in the sense of, they don't, well, there's no fake news, I mean, they actually fact-check, etc. And I actually personally know this to be true and I'm saying my main ones are "The New York Times" and "The Guardian," and I know the "Washington Post" does and I'm sure the BBC, I know the BBC does, these are reputable news outlets. I'm not going to be, I'm not much of a "Fox News" reader because I think "Fox News" is terrible news, just junk, terrible, poor quality news. I know that "The New York Times" does fact-checking because I was actually mentioned in an article once that appeared in "The New York Times" and I remember being called by the fact-checker and asked to verify the quotes that had been attributed to me and things like that. So, I was reading "The New York Times" as I want to do and there was an interview with a new columnist there named Michelle Goldberg, here's a quote from Michelle Goldberg (and I will have a link to this article in my show notes): "It's a source of constant astonishment to me that the country has handed over the means to destroy civilization on this planet to an unhinged lunatic who lost the popular vote and was installed with the aid of a hostile foreign power. It's such an epic institutional failure that it calls everything we thought we knew about this country's stability into question." And what gave me pause about that, what made me think about that was that this person, Michelle Goldberg, who's apparently, obviously, very intelligent, highly educated, very thoughtful person, is acting as though she actually, not only believes in institutions and that they exist and that they actually function, but that they have the ability or the will to function when in fact there really is no such thing as an institution. There's just people and then there's an edifice that we put in front of those people to inspire awe or fear or reverence in the hope that they'll obey whatever comes from the institution, but there really is no such thing as an institution, unless the people who populate it have integrity and character and are all of the things that would function well in a society even if they weren't associated with an institution. So,

Hi! In this inaugural episode, I introduce myself and explain what I'm doing with this podcast. To summarize, I'm a non-religious liberal who loves America. Or the idea of it, anyway. I explain more in the show, so give it a listen. Welcome! TRANSCRIPT Hi, I'm Jaime Escuder and welcome to this inaugural episode of None Sense. What is a "none"? (I'm actually not that kind of nun that you're thinking about. Quite the opposite.) None, N-O-N-E, is someone who is secular or unaffiliated with any religious denomination. I'm not only a none I'm also a lawyer, a liberal a father, a husband, other important and meaningful things, but I wanna focus on my none-ness, because I think it's very important to be open about being that type of person in America at this time. And there's a couple of reasons [for that]. First, there's a lot of us. In "The New York Times" I was reading an article that said one third of all millenials actually identify as a none, and as many as 23% [of all Americans], so nearly a quarter of the entire population of the United States is unaffiliated religiously. And when I say that, I'm not talking about that we're all atheists, or agnostics. [We're] just people who don't for whatever reason subscribe to religion. And it's important for those people to have, I think, people like me out there being open about this, because America, and I really feel like frankly, the world, the way we're going, needs more people who are willing to be upfront about their lack of belief, because the way we view the world makes us behave, and I know this probably is gonna offend a lot of people who are religious, but I just feel like it makes us behave in a much more responsible way towards the earth and towards each other. And here's the reason: we don't believe in heaven. We imagine that there was no heaven, and what that does, is it places incredible importance upon now. Now both in terms of time and here in terms of place. If we don't believe in heaven that means that if we're ever going to experience ecstasy or happiness or joy, it's gotta happen here on this planet, and it also means that we have to be responsible stewards of this planet, because it's all we have; we're not going anywhere else. I believe that if you believe in an after-life, you believe that something is gonna get better later on, then it's okay to abuse the people around you now and the place where you live now because it's just gonna get better. So it's okay to pollute, it's okay...you know, I actually know religious people who are okay with and even in some kind of a warped way, look forward to the apocalypse. They want the world to end because once that happens they're gonna go to a better place. Well, if you are someone like me, and you don't think there's anything after life, other than just nothingness, oblivion, well then you don't really want the apocalypse to happen because it means it's all come to an end, and there's many wonderful things about being alive and being on earth that are not something that I want to end. I have to enjoy it. I enjoy being alive and I'd like to stick around and I wanna enjoy my life and I wanna enjoy the biodiversity of this planet, and I like, you know, I like things like drinking a clean glass of water or breathing in fresh air. Those are good things. And I would like those things to continue and I don't want to diminish those things or cheapen those things by pretending that there's something better waiting, when really it's hard for me to conceive of a more beautiful planet that's possible of creating more vibrant, wonderful, rich experiences than this one. So I don't wanna diminish the now and the earth by talk of some future, and that's part of the reason why I think being a none and practicing a way of life that is kind of an areligious, "there is no god" way of conducting oneself on earth is actually a very responsible and a good way to live. And I have some stories about...