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Harv's Corner
QUANTUM LEAP IN WARMING |
President Biden's administration is strengthening the alliances in East Asia and Oceania to deter aggressive behavior from countries like North Korea and China. Building a powerful coalition of countries ensures mutual safety and security in the region and is a crucial step toward maintaining peace and stability. Q! Is Biden doing the right thing, or is this just a waste of time? |
Japan is an ally the U.S. can count on
A state visit by the prime minister reflects the tight ties between Tokyo and Washington.
Amid growing challenges in a turbulent world, a true friend to America arrives in Washington on Wednesday: Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida.
He'll take part in a leader-to-leader meeting with President Joe Biden, a trilateral summit with Biden and Filipino President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., and a state dinner, as well as address a joint session of Congress. Kishida will also meet with business leaders and everyday Americans to try to impress upon them the multiple, mutual benefits of the U.S.-Japan alliance.
The advantages for this country are clear: An indispensable, increasingly capable ally in the Indo-Pacific region that can be counted on as a bulwark against a rising and increasingly reckless China — particularly its claims to Taiwan — as well as a provocative North Korea, which not only directly threatens South Korea but Japan and, by extension, the U.S.
Kishida, building on the bold constitutional reforms of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, continues to transform Japan's defense posture into one willing to engage in "collective self-defense" — a geopolitical boost to likeminded democracies in the region.
Accordingly, the likely key summit deliverables include modernizing military command structures to improve interoperability, potential co-production of weapons systems and allowing U.S. naval vessels to be maintained and repaired in Japan so they can stay closer to where they're needed most — in and around the South and East China Seas to counter China's increasingly aggressive maritime claims and conduct.
There's also a possibility of Japan furthering its alliance with the U.S. by taking part in other multilateral defense partnerships, potentially including the grouping of Australia, the U.K. and the U.S. known as AUKUS.
And the alliance may not just be blossoming in Asia and North America, but potentially in space, as the leaders are likely to commit to Japan taking part in NASA's Artemis moon program.
"The Biden administration has carried forward a lot of the previous Trump administration's focus on Asian security, but what I think they've done particularly well is to corral allies to join the United States in taking a common position," Raymond Kuo, a senior political scientist at the Rand Corporation, told an editorial writer. Kuo, who's based in Minneapolis, noted the tighter ties between Washington, Tokyo and Seoul, and said that Japan is "probably our closest allied state other than the U.K."
The transition from Abe to Kishida is resulting in an even closer strategic security alignment with the United States, Kuo said. "They're focusing on a certain degree of power projection and offsetting Chinese advantages in a way that will help alleviate the burden for U.S. forces in the region."
As with any alliance, there is friction, although most of it is domestic. Pressure points include Biden's resistance to allow a Japanese firm, Nippon Steel, to purchase U.S. Steel. But most of these issues are manageable, especially given the growing stakes of geopolitical conflict.
And as with any democratically chosen leader, Kishida realizes there could be another eventual transition in Tokyo, especially since some members of the ruling party are caught up in a significant bribery scandal.
Biden, of course, has his own domestic political challenges and is in a tight re-election race against the presumptive Republican nominee, former President Donald Trump. Still, it's important that the alliance endure and even grow regardless of who is in office in either capital.
For now, Kuo said, the Biden-Kishida meeting "is further cementing their relationship, and I think pushing forward in terms of all those economic and security areas."
That's good news for America: Global conflict is always best met multilaterally with reliable allies.
Harv's Corner
Not many people think about NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization). Some are suggesting that it is "obsolete" and not functioning properly, and that many participating nations have not paid for their participation. This raises the question of why we would want to lead an organization like that. However, it's really important to consider the facts and come to our own conclusions. |
Trump’s wrong about need for NATO
The transatlantic alliance, formed 75 years ago this week, is more essential than ever.
To mark the 75th anniversary of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization this week, a statue of former President Harry Truman is being installed at the U.S. ambassador to NATO's residence in Brussels. It's a fitting tribute.
Truman was commander in chief when the U.S. became a founding member of NATO, and the transatlantic alliance shares many of the traits that defined him, including a resolute, responsible commitment to collective defense.
Defense of territory, to be sure. But also something even more profound, as defined by Dwight Eisenhower, the president who succeeded Truman.
"We do not keep security establishments merely to defend property or territory or rights abroad or at sea," Eisenhower said in 1954. "We keep the security forces to defend a way of life."
The support from successive presidents, one a Democrat and the other Republican, had endured on a bipartisan basis through subsequent generations.
Until, that is, the presidency of Donald Trump, who as a candidate called the alliance "obsolete." More recently, at a campaign rally, Trump told the crowd that "one of the presidents of a big [NATO] country stood up and said, 'Well, sir, if we don't pay and we're attacked by Russia, will you protect us?' I said, 'You didn't pay? You're delinquent? ... No, I would not protect you. In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want.'"
A statement like that undermines NATO's deterrence effect "by creating a lot of uncertainty in the minds of our allies and maybe giving false hopes to a country like Russia," Thomas Hanson, diplomat-in-residence at the University of Minnesota Duluth, told an editorial writer.
Hanson, a former Foreign Service officer and former director for NATO and European Affairs at the Atlantic Council, said that NATO was "essential during the Cold War when there were only 12 members as a defensive alliance holding off the Soviet Union during the period of containment, and it's as important as ever because with the end of the Cold War it redefined itself and began to take on missions beyond the original intent."
Including in Afghanistan in the wake of 9/11, when the U.S. became the first and only NATO nation to invoke the collective-defense mechanism known as Article 5. America's allies were there for us then, and we should be there for them in the future.
That's the unambiguous intent of President Joe Biden, who has correctly identified the fundamental struggle of this era as one of democracy vs. autocracy.
NATO is an alliance of democracies and is indispensable in keeping them that way. Meanwhile, an ad hoc alliance of autocracies has formed between Russia, China, Iran and North Korea.
But none of those countries — together, let alone individually — have the force multiplier of the world's strongest alliance, NATO, which was significantly geographically, militarily and politically boosted last year with the addition of the 31st member, Finland, and just last month when the 32nd nation, Sweden, was added.
Trump's concern over the number of countries investing the targeted 2% of GDP in defense is legitimate. His way of pressing for it, however, is not, since it potentially alienates allies and emboldens adversaries.
The good news is that the Pentagon recently said that this year 18 nations will meet or exceed that mark, up from just three when then-President Barack Obama — another stalwart supporter of NATO — led an alliance-wide "Defense Investment Pledge" in 2014. Since then, there has been "an unprecedented" rise of $600 billion in defense spending, according to NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg.
History — and common sense — shows that retreating from collective defense won't make America safer. And history shows that this is not just an international issue, but a domestic and indeed statewide concern.
Minnesotans in all branches of the armed forces — including the Minnesota National Guard, which has taken part in major NATO training exercises — may be impacted.
The NATO alliance is designed to avoid direct conflict, and to date the deterrent effect has worked, in part because of bipartisan U.S. leadership.
Hanson, paraphrasing Biden administration officials, said the president has built on former President Ronald Reagan's belief in "peace through strength" and broadened it to "peace through American and allied strength."
That's an ethos that should last another 75 years — and beyond.
Harv's Corner
Here's something we all know. It's hot! Records were broken all over the country last year. This year it's starting even earlier. This appears to be a blip in a larger pattern of Global Warming but is says the world is edging closer. THINK . . . who is most likely to address this situation - Biden or Trump. |
Hot just keeps getting hotter
Study also finds since 1979, heat waves last longer, hurt more people.
By SETH BORENSTEIN Associated Press
Long hot summers affect those who work outside more. This photo from last summer shows a security guard in Beijing wearing an electric fan on his neck.
Climate change is making giant heat waves crawl slower across the globe and they are baking more people for a longer time with higher temperatures over larger areas, a new study finds.
Since 1979, global heat waves are moving 20% more slowly — meaning more people stay hot longer — and they are happening 67% more often, according to a study in Friday's Science Advances. The study found the highest temperatures in the heat waves are warmer than 40 years ago.
Studies have shown heat waves worsening before, but this one is more comprehensive and concentrates heavily on not just temperature and area, but how long the high heat lasts and how it travels across continents, said study co-authors and climate scientists Wei Zhang of Utah State University and Gabriel Lau of Princeton University.
From 1979 to 1983, global heat waves would last eight days on average, but by 2016 to 2020 that was up to 12 days, the study said.
Eurasia was especially hit hard with longer lasting heat waves, and heat waves slowed down most in Africa, while North America and Australia saw the biggest increases in overall magnitude, which measures temperature and area.
"This paper sends a clear warning that climate change makes heat waves yet more dangerous in more ways than one," said Lawrence Berkeley National Lab climate scientist Michael Wehner, who wasn't part of the research.
Just like in an oven, the longer the heat lasts, the more something cooks. In this case it's people, the co-authors said.
"Those heat waves are traveling slower and so that basically means that ... there's a heat wave sitting there and those heat waves could stay longer in the region," Zhang said. "And the adverse impacts on our human society would be huge and increasing over the years."
The team conducted computer simulations showing this change was due to heat-trapping emissions that come from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas. The study found climate change's fingerprint by simulating a world without greenhouse gas emissions and concluding it could not produce the worsening heat waves observed in the last 45 years.
The study also looks at the changes in weather patterns that propagate heat waves. Atmospheric waves that move weather systems along, such as the jet stream, are weakening, so they are not moving heat waves along as quickly — west to east in most but not all continents, Zhang said.
Several outside scientists praised the big picture way Zhang and colleagues examined heat waves.
This shows "how heat waves evolve in three dimensions and move regionally and across continents rather than looking at temperatures at individual locations," said Kathy Jacobs, a University of Arizona climate scientist.
Harv's Corner
So starts the Trump campaign. I am looking for an agenda, but I need help finding it. Let me know immediately if you see one that will help the country and its people.
TRUMP TIES HIS FATE TO RIOTERS
Presidential candidate’s new running mates — ‘horribly and unfairly treated Jan. 6 hostages’
Story by MARIANNE LEVINE, ISAAC ARNSDORF and CLARA ENCE MORSE • Photo by SCOTT MUTHERSBAUGH • Washington Post
Shortly after Donald Trump walked onstage at a recent rally, the announcer instructed the crowd to rise "for the horribly and unfairly treated January 6th hostages." Trump saluted, and the loudspeakers blasted a rendition of the national anthem performed by people accused or convicted of crimes related to the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol.
Trump then kicked off the rally with a promise to help the defendants — a group that includes violent offenders he has glorified as "patriots" and "hostages" and pledged to pardon if he returns to power.
"We're going to be working on that the first day we get into office," Trump said at the rally this month in Dayton, Ohio.
That vow is part of a broader renewed emphasis by Trump to align himself with Jan. 6 rioters, as he intensifies his use of dark, graphic and at times violent language as he has closed in on and secured the GOP nomination. Until November, he called the Jan. 6 defendants, some of whom have been detained by court order or are serving sentences, "political prisoners" before introducing the term "hostages," according to a Washington Post analysis of his speeches in this campaign cycle.
The analysis also showed an uptick in his references to Jan. 6 defendants, as well as the word "criminals," which Trump has used to describe prosecutors, political opponents, the press and undocumented immigrants.
The escalation overlaps with his own mounting legal jeopardy — a more than $450 million bond his lawyers say he has been unable to finance, while he appeals a civil fraud verdict against his businesses, and four separate criminal cases charging him with paying hush money to an adult film star, mishandling classified documents, and interfering with the 2020 election results.
"Every time there is a big event that is 'negative Trump lawsuit,' he'll do something to distract attention from that," said Kim Lane Scheppele, a professor at Princeton University who studies the rise and fall of constitutional government.
"These outbursts with language that's just unacceptable in U.S. politics happen when he is under pressure."
While Trump quickly secured the GOP nomination, defeating his rivals by wide margins in early contests and driving them to withdraw from the race, some Republicans are voicing concerns that his misrepresentations of the Jan. 6 attack and the people involved could weaken him with general election voters.
"It's not the way that I would talk about it. I was there," Sen. Mike Rounds, R-S.D., said of Jan. 6. "We want to broaden our support, we want to broaden, at least that's the way I would look at it." Rounds added that Trump is "probably not going to take my advice."
In December, Trump said he'd govern as a "dictator" on "Day One" to "close the border" and drill for oil — a remark he went on to repeat, later claiming he was making it in jest. In a March social media post, he added to those two promised first acts that he would also "Free the January 6 Hostages."
In January, Trump warned of "bedlam" if he lost, and declined to rule out violence by his supporters. In March, he threatened a "bloodbath" after he spoke about promising to enact tariffs. (Allies and his campaign argued he was speaking figuratively about the economy.)
Nightly vigil
On Friday, Trump on social media promoted a flyer for the nightly vigil outside the Washington jail supporting Jan. 6 defendants housed there, led by the mother of slain rioter Ashli Babbitt. Babbitt's mother, Micki Witthoeft, said at Wednesday's vigil that Trump called her that day about "setting these guys free when he gets in." She added, in remarks that were livestreamed online: "He said to pass that on to the guys inside that they're on his mind, and when he gets in they'll get out."
Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt drew a connection between the prosecutions of Trump and his supporters. Local authorities brought two of the cases against Trump with no evidence of coordination, and a special counsel acting independently of the White House brought the two federal cases against him. Asked in an email whom Trump was referring to when talking about "hostages" and promises of pardons, Leavitt did not directly answer.
"President Trump will restore justice for all Americans who have been unfairly treated by Joe Biden's two-tier system of justice," she said.
Since January, Trump has made reference to Jan. 6 "hostages" more frequently at his rallies, mentioning the term so far at every rally this month, the Post analysis showed. He has advanced other arguments that have also alarmed experts and critics.
Dating back to November, Trump has sought to portray Biden as a "threat to democracy," seeking to turn the tables on Democrats' arguments against him and concerns among some experts that a second term would be more extreme than his first.
He used the phrase in most of his speeches in January, and in every speech in February and March, according to the Post analysis. He has also increasingly used the word "criminal" more at each rally — up to eight times a rally on average in March.
Trump opened his first 2024 campaign rally in Waco, Texas, last year, while saluting to the song with Jan. 6 defendants titled "Justice for All." He routinely plays it on the patio at Mar-a-Lago, according to a person familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk about private interactions. Trump played it at Mar-a-Lago the night he was arraigned last spring in New York. He also saluted to the song at a November 2023 rally in Houston.
'Proud political dissident'
At a recent rally in Greensboro, N.C., Trump discussed his legal problems in similar terms to how he has described people charged with or convicted of crimes related to Jan. 6. "I stand before you today not only as your past and hopefully future president, but as a proud political dissident and as a public enemy of a rogue regime," he said.
"The J6 hostages, I call them because they're hostages," he added at the same rally. "They're put in jail for extended periods of time, for very long periods of time.
They're hostages. You heard them singing. You heard the spirit that they have, the spirit is unbelievable. That song became the number one song."
Although the cause of Jan. 6 defendants has become popular in the MAGA movement and among Trump-aligned GOP officials, others who condemned him after a pro-Trump mob stormed the U.S. Capitol criticized his use of that term or avoided the topic altogether.
Asked if it was appropriate for Trump to call the defendants "hostages" or "patriots," Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who recently endorsed Trump, replied: "I'm going to avoid talking about the presidential election."
A Washington Post-University of Maryland poll in December found that 58% of Americans said protesters entering the U.S. Capitol threatened democracy, compared to 12% who said they defended democracy. Some 50% categorized the protesters as "mostly violent," while 28% said they were "equally peaceful and violent" and another 21% said they were "mostly peaceful." The poll also found that 72% of Americans say punishments of people who broke into the U.S. Capitol have been fair, though that declined from 78% in 2021. (A smaller majority of Republicans said the punishments were fair.)
A Post analysis published on the third anniversary of the attack found that federal judges have sentenced more than half of the roughly 1,200 people charged with breaking the law on Jan. 6. For nearly every defendant convicted of a felony, judges ordered prison time.
About half of those convicted of misdemeanors received some jail time. The Post found that in the vast majority of the sentences up until that point, judges issued punishments below government guidelines and prosecutors' requests.
"Calling them hostages is offensive in the extreme," said Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, who voted to convict Trump twice in his impeachment trials. "He says outrageous things day after day and people just get used to it and dismiss it as being him the way he is."
Harv's Corner
A cyber warning for health care Attack on UnitedHealth Group owned company has had a broad, harmful impact. The company has faced criticism from providers for its response, and now should step up.
The email from a Star Tribune reader had the word "Desperate" in the subject line. The author: Karin Olson, 76, of Richfield, who has Type 1 diabetes and depends on her Dexcom continuous glucose monitoring system to manage this serious condition.
Olson, a former registered nurse, recently found herself facing a potential care crisis through no fault of her own. The sensors on her Dexcom system are designed to last for up to 10 days before needing replacement, and monthly costs range from $440 to $470, according to GoodRx. com. Medicare typically covers the supplies she needs. But after a recent cyberattack on a medical claims-processing company acquired by Minnesota-based UnitedHealth Group in 2022, Olson couldn't get new sensors at her local Walgreens or anywhere else.
"Now I'm in panic mode. No pharmacy is willing to refill my sensor supplies because Medicare can't reimburse them as a result of the recent hacking. I'm running out of supplies. This is a life-threatening situation for me and others with Type 1 diabetes," Olson wrote on Thursday morning. As for just paying for the supplies herself, Olson told an editorial writer that she's on a fixed income with limited resources.
Fortunately, by Thursday afternoon, ongoing efforts by Walgreens and UnitedHealth appeared to have resolved this snag. In a phone call, a Walgreens district manager told Olson that a workaround had been found, and her prescription was ready for pickup with the usual copay.
Even though it ended well, Olson's plight merits a broad spotlight and deeper understanding by policymakers and the public, with Congress in particular needing to explore how the cyberattack happened and how to prevent another one. At a minimum, a high-profile hearing is in order.
Vulnerabilities to outages and nefarious hackers are inherent in this digital era for any industry, but they are especially alarming in health care. As Olson's case illustrates, a ransomware attack on a company she'd never heard of could swiftly impact her and other patients. An attack like this can also jeopardize the financial well-being of health care providers, with widespread claims-processing delays putting medical providers in a cash-flow crunch.
The UnitedHealth-owned company targeted is called
"Change Healthcare".
It's helpful to think of it like the Visa or MasterCard of the health care world, handling a broad array of claims and related financial transactions.
The attack on the company resulted in the process of billing and paying for health care in many areas across the nation coming to a virtual standstill.
The Minnesota Hospital Association (MHA) merits praise for giving early warning to the nation about the cyberattack's potentially dire financial impact on providers. "We could be fast approaching a financial cliff," MHA CEO and president Dr. Rahul Koranne said on Thursday.
U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., whose involvement drew praise from the state's medical providers this week, clearly understands the urgency.
"This cyber-attack by apparent foreign operatives threatens access to lifesaving care and underscores the urgency of strengthening our cybersecurity systems," she said in a statement to an editorial writer on Friday.
"I have also raised this issue directly with senior officials at the Department of Health and Human Services to ensure they are taking direct and immediate action to protect the health care community. United- Health Group must do everything in its power to swiftly address this situation and ensure patients can continue to access the medications and care they need."
Klobuchar's leadership is welcome. The Star Tribune Editorial Board also urges her to take the lead in congressional follow-up. She's authored a book about antitrust issues. The cyberattack's broad, harmful impact deepens concerns about ongoing consolidation within health care. It's important to note that federal officials challenged United's $13 billion acquisition of the company.
Klobuchar's ending comment about UnitedHealth is on point. Late Thursday afternoon, UnitedHealth announced "substantial progress" in mitigating the cyberattack's impact on consumers and care providers.
"Electronic prescribing is now fully functional with claim submission and payment transmission also available as of today," the statement said.
Electronic payment functionality will be available for connection beginning March 15, 2024 the company reported. And, "We expect to begin testing and reestablish connectivity to our claims network and software on March 18, 2024 restoring service through that week." UnitedHealth Group CEO Andrew Witty also said in the statement that "We are determined to make this right as fast as possible."
That's commendable, but the American Hospital Association and other providers have been far from satisfied with United's assistance to them so far. "We need real solutions — not programs that sound good when they are announced but are fundamentally inadequate when you read the fine print," the American Hospital Association's president said in a Monday letter to United leadership.
In 2023, United "saw an adjusted profit of $22.38 billion on revenue of $371.6 billion," the Star Tribune reported. This well-run Minnesota corporation has the financial resources to better assist struggling providers.
This crisis will pass, but what will be remembered long afterward is how United rose to the challenge of helping those affected by the cyberattack.There's work yet to do.
Harv's viewpoint
"It is widely believed that Putin is responsible for the cyberattacks on the US infrastructure. What's more concerning is that Trump has openly expressed his admiration for Putin and has even trusted him over our national security team. These actions raise serious questions about his judgment, priorities, and loyalty to our country. Given the gravity of these concerns, it's hard to comprehend why anyone would consider Trump for president."
"It is widely believed that Putin is responsible for the cyberattacks on the US infrastructure. What's more concerning is that Trump has openly expressed his admiration for Putin and has even trusted him over our national security team. These actions raise serious questions about his judgment, priorities, and loyalty to our country. Given the gravity of these concerns, it's hard to comprehend why anyone would consider Trump for president."
Harv's Corner
Tis the traditional season for charitable giving. Taxpayers get a break on what they owe so long as their charitable contributions are made before year-end. The number of people who can itemize their charitable giving is down significantly after the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act went into effect in 2018. The legislation sharply increased the standard deduction and fewer taxpayers have enough deductions for itemizing to make sense.
There are still plenty of taxadvantaged ways to give away money for those with means. Among them: Contributing appreciated stock, real estate, and other assets to charities, a tax-effective way to give; opening a donor-advised fund at a financial institution or community foundations; and making qualified charitable distributions (QCDs) directly from IRAs for those age of 70 ½ and older.
Charitable giving by individuals fell last year, although individuals still account for a majority of charitable donations.
The latest "Giving USA 2023: The Annual Report on Philanthropy for the Year 2022" calculates that giving by individuals fell by 13.4% after adjusting for inflation in 2022 compared with 2021. Charitable giving has dropped only three other times in the last 40 years in current dollars. First in 1987, the year of the Black Monday stock market crash and during the Great Recession of 2008 and 2009. Last year's decline probably reflected a combination of economic uncertainty, stock market volatility, and the end of the 2020 pandemicdriven surge in giving.
There is much more to charitable giving than tax breaks at year-end, of course. I like the poem "When Giving Is All We Have" by Alberto Rios, named Arizona's first poet laureate in 2013. Rios writes: "Giving has many faces: It is loud and quiet, Big, though small, diamond in wood-nails.
Its story is old, the plot worn and the pages too, But we read this book, anyway, over and again:"
Giving repeatedly and regularly makes a difference to ourselves and our community.
One theme of mine is that giving is the underappreciated foundation of good money management. The amount of money given away typically pales compared to retirement savings contributions and mortgage payments.
What matters in the mindset.
When we give away money, we're actively showing what matters to us. The mindfulness of giving and the connections the act forges in our community can also inform the rest of our personal finance decisions, including spending and investing.
Chris Farrell is senior economics contributor, "Marketplace"; commentator, Minnesota Public Radio.
Harv's Corner
Have you ever mixed up the names of your children? Struggled to remember key dates or the year a loved one died? Recent news of mental lapses by President Joe Biden and Donald Trump have sparked a national conversation and social media posts about what memory mistakes really mean about aging and brain health.
Matt Griffin, 54, who works in communications for a school district in Vancouver, Wash., said he thinks about his father, Grady Griffin, every day, and he remembers what he was doing the night his father died. But he can’t remember the exact date of his death from terminal brain and lung cancer. (He looked it up, and it was 19 years ago this month.) “I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect everybody to recall everything,” he said. “The thing I know that is ever present is my dad is gone, and I miss him.”
Experts agree. Memory, no matter what your age, is fallible and malleable. Our brain processes incalculable amounts of information at a given time, and there’s simply not room for all of it to be stored. And surprisingly, the act of forgetting is an important aspect of memory.
Mental acuity has been a flash point affecting both leading presidential candidates, but it has taken on new urgency following a special counsel report into Biden’s handling of classified documents. The report noted that Biden, 81, had trouble recalling the years he served as vice president and didn’t remember the exact date his son Beau had died, among other issues. Trump, 77, has struggled with his own memory lapses, most recently confusing former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, his last remaining rival for the Republican presidential nomination, with former House speaker Nancy Pelosi .
Several memory experts noted that the cognitive abilities of Biden and Trump can’t be evaluated based on anecdotal memory lapses. Formal evaluations are needed to truly assess someone’s brain health. But they noted that memory lapses at any age are normal and, for most people, aren’t a signal of mental decline.
“Most of us have memory slips all the time,” said Earl K. Miller, professor of neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “We can’t remember where we put our car keys. We can’t remember dates or names. But we don’t really notice the mistakes when we’re young. It’s when people get older that mistakes in memory seem to have more significance. Memory lapse really is normal at every stage of life.”
How our memories work
Our brain can process and hold vast amounts of information, but it has limits. Facts, dates and events can be stored and recalled for days and weeks — or even across a lifetime. As new memories are created, the brain must prioritize important memories, making it more difficult to recall less important details or events.
When we encounter new information, our brains encode it with changes in neurons in the hippocampus, an important memory center, as well as other areas. These groups of cells work together to hold onto the specific information of a memory, creating a memory trace, known as an engram.
Much of this information is forgotten unless it is stored during memory consolidation, which often happens during sleep, making the memories more stable and long-term.
These neurons become active when the event happens and “when you recall the memory, they’re active again,” said Sheena Josselyn, a senior scientist at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto who studies memory.
Unlike a computer, our memories are not fixed . Each time we access and reconsolidate a memory, it is subject to change. Sometimes, when we have conversations about a memory or see news footage related to it, the mind can recombine these experiences and wrongly store them as memories.
That’s why the stories we tell about our real memories may shift and change over time, and misremembering is common. Mitt Romney once shared a memory about a jubilee in Detroit that took place before he was born. Hillary Clinton once spoke of being under sniper fire in Bosnia, only to later admit that she had her facts wrong.
“Memory is never perfect even when it seems perfect,” said Miller. “We remember what we want to remember.
That’s true for everyone at every stage of life. If we literally remembered everything, it would be too much for our brains. Our brains would be completely overwhelmed. We always have selective memory.”
Why forgetting is necessary
What we remember tends to be distinctive, emotionally loaded and deemed worthy of reflecting upon after the event happened. Our memories are centered on what has affected us the most. As a consequence, more insignificant details are often cast off.
Our imperfect recollections are the price we pay for a memory system that is adapted to the things we want to remember in our everyday lives.
“We don’t want a memory system that’s going to encode every single trivial detail of our experience and retain that over time,” said Daniel Schacter, psychology professor at Harvard University and author of “The Seven Sins of Memory,” which covers the common ways our memories are forgotten or distorted.
“The possible consequences of retaining every detail of every experience might be a very cluttered mind and an inability to sort through relevant and irrelevant experiences,”
Schacter said. “So the fact that we don’t encode and retain typically every detail of every experience leaves us prone to forgetting, but on balance is probably a good thing because we end up, by and large, remembering the most important things.”
Forgetting allows us to identify important knowledge from our experiences as we age, Josselyn said.
“We tend to lose the nonimportant things so we can extract the important principles,” she said. “Rather than remembering the time and details, we remember the concepts and the generalized principles.”
Memory changes as we age
“It’s very clear that there are a number of changes that occur with aging and cognition that are just part of getting older,” said Bradford Dickerson, a professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School who has studied cognitive super-agers.
Declines in the ability to think and remember among the elderly are broad and almost universal, he continued.
“There’s just not much cognitively that’s better in an 80-yearold than in a 20-year-old.”
“The raw power of our memory tends to peak in our early twenties,” said Thomas Wisniewski, a professor of neurology, pathology and psychiatry at NYU’s Langone Health. Mental acuity begins a long, slow slide from then on.
Some of this decline probably is due to structural changes that occur throughout the brain, starting by midlife, said Jason Shepherd, an associate professor of neurobiology at the University of Utah.
Synapses, the connections between neurons, can weaken.
Brain cells may die. Some of the brain’s tissue becomes tattered and thin.
The most obvious effects of age involve processing speed, Dickerson said. Everything gets slower. “And that’s not just cognition.
Movement slows. Sensory processing slows.” The effects can be seen most clearly during speech, he said, an activity that takes place at relatively high speeds and requires considerable mental juggling and swift recall. “But word retrieval becomes more difficult with age, so people stumble while talking,” he said.
“It’s not that they don’t know what a word means, but retrieving it takes more time.”
Aging also “magnifies any vulnerabilities that already exist,” he said. “If someone had difficulties speaking as a young adult, for instance, then getting older is likely to worsen the problem.”
At the same time, older brains can be especially susceptible to stress, distraction and fatigue, he said, all of which worsen memory recall.
Still, older brains can often compensate for their growing weakness, he and other researchers point out. “There’s evidence that older adults can strategically focus memory” on the most important information, Schacter said.
Older brains often become more adept than younger brains at filtering irrelevant information or at making connections between experiences, the researchers agreed, because they’ve had more of them.
“An older brain is a wiser brain. It has experience to draw on,” Miller said.
“The thing I’d most like people to understand is that, yes, there is some normal cognitive decline during aging,”
Shepherd said. “But it’s not a disease state. It’s part of life.” Wisniewski agreed. “We should not be prejudiced about age” and thinking ability, he said. “It’s true that age is the primary risk factor” for Alzheimer’s disease and other types of memory loss. “But many very elderly people remain quite sharp, mentally, and they also have a great depth of wisdom and experience.”
Forgetting dates and names
Some types of information are harder to hold onto. Remembering dates and names can be particularly difficult unless we make a point of rehearsing and strengthening those memories, experts say.
Memory for “when an event happened is something that for everyone, regardless of age, is one of the most vulnerable aspects of memory,” Schacter said.
Names are also harder to recall because they “have no inherent meaning — they’re kind of arbitrary,” Schacter said. (A phenomenon called the Baker-baker paradox highlights that it’s harder to remember the name Baker than if the person’s job was a baker, because we have more information about the occupation than the name.) The inability to retrieve names, even those we know well, is a common complaint of aging. Though it’s something people find worrisome, this by itself is not a sign of cognitive problems, Schacter said.
On social media, some people criticized the special prosecutor for singling out Biden’s memory lapses related to the death of his son, noting that they also have forgotten the date or year a family member died. “Trauma does that,” one person wrote.
“Pretty bad for the special council to criticize Biden for not recalling the details of his son’s death,” Michael Lawson, 36, an architect who lives in Roanoke, wrote on Threads.
“My mom died more than ten years ago, and the day of her death is very memorable but not one I actively maintain in my memory library.”
In an interview, Lawson said his mother, Susan Lawson, died at 53, three years after being diagnosed with ovarian cancer.
Lawson said he remembers his mom’s hospice room, the table where the family would gather to eat a meal or play board games, and the window that looked out to a garden.
“The visual of that room is one of those things that stands out,” Lawson said. “The granularity of the detail isn’t something that I need to go back to.
The fuzzy memories, the way I’m not totally clear on exactly what she said, here and there, is fine with me.”
“We remember what we want to remember. That’s true for everyone at every stage of life. If we literally remembered everything, it would be too much for our brains.”
Earl K. Miller, professor of neuroscience
When she first heard about Hamas' Oct. 7 attack on Israel, Mirela Monte was appalled. The South Carolina real estate agent and self-described holistic healer detests violence and is horrified by war and human suffering.
But as Monte read more in Uncensored Truths, a Telegram group with 2,958 subscribers active on foreign policy and the supposed perils of vaccination, her shock turned to anger. According to the forum, the news reports were wrong: Secretly, Israel was behind the massacre.
Monte now argues the Oct. 7 attack was a "false flag" staged by the Israelis — likely with help from Americans — to justify genocide in Gaza. "Pure evil," she said. "Israel is like a mad dog off a leash."
The Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack is among the most well-documented in history. A crush of evidence from smartphone cameras and GoPros captured Hamas' breach of the border — a strike Israel says left some 1,200 dead, the most deadly onslaught in the country's history.
But Oct. 7 denial is spreading. A small but growing group denies the basic facts of the attacks, pushing a spectrum of falsehoods and misleading narratives that minimize the violence or dispute its origins.
Some argue the ambush was staged by the Israeli military to justify an invasion of Gaza.
Others say that some 240 hos-tages Hamas took into Gaza were actually kidnapped by Israel. Some contend the U.S. is behind the plot.
These untrue and misleading narratives have been seeded on social media, where hashtags linking Israel to "false flag" — a staged event that casts blame on another party — tripled on services including TikTok, Reddit and 4chan in the weeks after the attacks, according to the Network Contagion Research Institute, a nonprofit tracking disinformation.
It's bleeding into the real world: Demonstrators have shouted the claim at anti-Israel protests and have used it to justify removing posters of hostages in such cities as London and Chicago. At a City Council meeting in Oakland, Calif., several residents disputed the veracity of the attack.
"Israel murdered their own people on Oct. 7," said Christina Gutierrez, an analyst in the city's housing department, where some in the crowd shouted "antisemitism isn't real." Gutierrez didn't respond to requests for comment.
The phenomenon is worrisome to Jewish leaders and researchers who see ties to Holocaust denial, the attempt to undermine the genocide that killed 6 million Jews during World War II, a belief that has surged online. They also see parallels to many pernicious, internet-driven conspiracy theories with antisemitic tentacles, including the QAnon conspiracy theory, which alleges "globalists" — a reference, some say, to Jews — used the pandemic to control the world, and disinformation about the 9/11 terrorist attack, which some fringe groups falsely argue was perpetrated by the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad.
"There's a built-in audience that wants to deny that Jews are the victims of atrocity and furthers the notion that Jews are secretly behind everything," said Joel Finkelstein, chief science officer at NCRI.
In Ukraine and other conflict zones, smartphones coupled with the velocity of social networks allow the public to witness events in real time, providing a sense of "ground truth" about far-flung incidents.
But social media is an equally potent tool for distortion with t he power to erase and twist history.
The head of International Relations for Hamas, Basem Naim, has falsely asserted that the group "didn't kill any civilians" when it attacked Israel on Oct. 7, calling the claim "Israeli propaganda." Such false claims are finding an audience in a variety of online spaces.
"So basically the Hamas attack was a false flag for Israel to occupy Gaza and kill Palestinians," reads a recent post on the Reddit forum r/LateStage- Capitalism. "Expected behavior from nazi wannabes."
LateStageCapitalism is a community of left-wing activists that bills itself as "A One- Stop-Shop for Evidence of our Social, Moral and Ideological Rot." But the claim can be found elsewhere on the internet, including publications critical of Israel like Electronic Intifada and GrayZone, and in messaging groups like Monte's Uncensored Truths, which previously had been focused on pandemic-related gripes about vaccines and conspiratorial ideas about "globalists" ushering in a so-called New World Order. Right-wing Holocaust deniers also have latched onto the claims.
All cherry-pick evidence — some factual, some highly distorted — to push misleading narratives. Israeli citizens have accused the country's military of accidentally killing Israeli civilians while battling Hamas on Oct. 7; the army has said it will investigate. But articles on Electronic Intifada and Grayzone exaggerated these claims to suggest that most Israeli deaths were caused by friendly fire, not Hamas.
One Grayzone story quotes an Israeli helicopter pilot describing difficulty distinguishing between civilians and Hamas on Oct 7. But the account distorts his testimony, in which he describes in Hebrew the dilemma of facing so many terrorists, said Achiya Schatz, director of FakeReporter, an Israeli watchdog dedicated to fighting disinformation and hate speech online.
An Electronic Intifada article from November also argues that "most" Israeli casualties on Oct. 7 were perpetrated by the Israeli army, basing the story, in part, on a YouTube clip of a man who describes himself as a former Israeli general. The clip refers to these outsider observations as "a confession."
Electronic Intifada executive director Ali Abunimah said: "It would appear that the reach and success of the Electronic Intifada in debunking and exposing the kind of pro- Israel propaganda routinely published by the Washington Post is now causing enough worry that you have been assigned to do a hit piece, in which labels such as 'farleft' and 'anti-Israel' will be deployed in order to try to misdirect your readers from our careful, factual reporting."
Two weeks after the Hamas attack, filmmaker Aharon Keshales and his wife were taking a Saturday walk in London when they saw a woman ripping down hostage posters on a bridge.
The couple, who are Israeli, spoke to the woman, who said she was removing the posters because the people had not been kidnapped by Hamas, according to video of the encounter reviewed by the Post. Keshales said he and his wife told the woman that even Hamas has admitted taking hostages. The woman grabbed the posters and walked away.
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