I have been to the movies. I haven’t done that since before the COVID shutdown.

I went to see two huge movies that have each grossed $1 billion, and I enjoyed them enormously. They are, of course, “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer.”

I went to see “Barbie” because I thought I should know what people were discussing. I went to see “Oppenheimer” because, in a sense, I have skin in that game. I knew a few people who worked on the Manhattan Project, and two of them were characterized in the movie: Hans Bethe and Edward Teller, known as the father of the hydrogen bomb.

About “Barbie”: It is a fantasy romp filled with popular, real-life messages. I had to see how director Greta Gerwig would make an adult movie about a doll, albeit a storied one — with brilliant imagination is how.

“Oppenheimer,” by contrast, is a major cinematic work, a remarkable recapturing of history and character development on the screen. Christopher Nolan is a director at the top of his game. He deserves a comparison with Orson Welles and David Lean.

Across the board, it is a triumph, compelling and true to the facts and the personalities. The evocative recreation of Los Alamos as it must have been, of the tower from which the first nuclear device was detonated, rings true. I have crawled all over the nuclear test site and spent many hours at Los Alamos, where I used to give an annual lecture on energy or the relationship of humans to science.

In November 1975, Bethe and another veteran of the Manhattan Project, Ralph Lapp, and I put together a panel of 24 Nobel laureates (including Bethe) to defend civilian nuclear power. We got them all together on a stage at the National Press Club in Washington. I had hoped it would be a seminal event, ending some of the nonsense being spread about nuclear radiation.

Ralph Nader took up arms against us and assembled 36 Nobel laureates who were cool to nuclear. Ours were physicists, engineers and mathematicians who had a vast understanding of nuclear and endorsed it enthusiastically.

We didn’t win. Bethe, as I recall, was philosophical about being trounced.

I first met Teller in Geneva. I was to introduce him at a conference, and we had breakfast together. He seemed distracted and confused. But he was in top form when he spoke.

Later, I got to know him better. He gave a series of speeches for conferences I had organized on the Strategic Defense Initiative — colloquially known as Star Wars. He often sat slumped in his chair, clutching his enormous walking stick. But he stood erect on the podium, arguing vigorously the case for Ronald Reagan’s program.

The Oppenheimer movie reminded me of two institutions I covered intensely as a reporter: the Atomic Energy Commission and its congressional overseer, the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy.

The committee was supposed to check the AEC. The AEC was a tool of the powerful and wildly pro-nuclear committee — the only joint committee empowered to introduce legislation in both houses of Congress. The reality of that partnership was that the committee proposed and the AEC disposed.

The movie is extraordinary in capturing the workings of Congress and how a nod or a smile can put great events in motion.

This understanding of the nuances and mores of Washington, and particularly the arcane theatricality of the congressional hearings, is accurate in ways seldom captured on film. This is more surprising given that the director is an Englishman who lives a very private life in Los Angeles.

I leave it to sociologists to ponder how two movies as different as “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” could open simultaneously, becoming huge hits. If you see these movies, especially “Oppenheimer,” see them in the theater, they deserve that big-screen and wraparound-sound environment.

Is Joe Biden hiding in plain sight?

Is his most extensive public effort these days fending off signs of age, hiding his infirmities, and clinging to the hope that he can still win in the election just over a year from now?

Sotto voce, the savants of the Democratic Party worry and complain in private that Biden is too old and infirm and should move over before it is too late. In public, they point to the health of the economy, receding inflation and the high employment rate, and foreign policy wins.

Indeed, the Joe Biden of today isn’t the Joe Biden of yesterday.

The Biden we in the corps knew over the years in Washington was accessible, friendly, keen to please — and he talked. How he talked. Biden would give a speech, but he didn’t stop. He seemed to tack a second speech onto the first.

Biden didn’t change the course of history with his eloquence, nor set the audience to thinking in ways they hadn’t previously, but he was easy to take.

Now, he seems to approach the podium with caution, reading the speech with a just-get-me-through-this stoicism. The man who used to love the microphone appears to fear it.

Likewise, the man who used to enjoy the cut and thrust of interacting with the press eschews press conferences. He doesn’t hold them.

This absence of press conferences isn’t unimportant. They are messy and unruly, but they are where the acuity of the leader is tested and on display. They are where we might get a look at how he might be in negotiation with foreign leaders.

Press conferences are part of the democratic process, where the president reports to the public through the press. Like question time in the British House of Commons, they are where we see the president in action.

Boastful press releases — which every administration puts out — are no substitute. The nation deserves to see the president in action. Everything else is curated image-building by the White House staff.

A few questions tacked on ritually to the end of joint appearances with foreign heads of state aren’t a substitute. They are Potemkin affairs.

Republicans would love to bear down on Biden’s age, but dare not. Their frontrunner, Donald Trump, is 77 — only three years younger than Biden; and, at 81, the Republican leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, is showing signs of health challenges linked to age.

Trump’s age is less discussed because his epic legal problems distract from whether he also might be too old.

The sad end of Winston Churchill’s political career should be a warning for all who cling to office too long.

The Conservative Party under Churchill lost the election immediately after World War II but was elected again in 1951, and Churchill became prime minister for the second time. He was about to turn 77. Health warnings were ignored by his party and by his family.

The infirmities of age got in the way. Churchill was often confused, and new issues baffled him, said his friend the publisher Lord Beaverbrook.

According to historian Roger Scruton during Churchill’s second administration, the seeds of what would haunt Britain later were sown: He failed to arrest the open border flow of immigrants from the former empire or to check the growth of trade union power.

When Churchill retired in 1954, his longtime deputy, Anthony Eden, took over and led the disastrous attempt to seize the Suez Canal in 1956.

Biden’s uncertain future is exacerbated by the seeming shortcomings of Vice President Kamala Harris. Despite attempts to bolster her, like referring in press releases to the Biden-Harris administration, she is reportedly inept.

She is known to have had difficulty with her staff. In public, she appears frivolous, laughing inappropriately and showing little grasp of issues. She has left no mark on significant assignments handed to her by Biden, including immigration, voting rights and the influence of artificial intelligence.

No wonder a late-August poll from The Wall Street Journal showed 60 percent of eligible voters think Biden isn’t “mentally up for the job of president.” In a CNN poll, 73 percent of Americans say they are seriously concerned that Biden’s age might negatively affect his current physical and mental competence level.

Churchill’s sad political decline shows even great men grow old. Biden can be seen on television going here and there: a blur of travel. But is this a man in hiding from a truth — his age?

Europe reeled this summer from heat, wildfires, migrants and worries about Russia’s war in Ukraine, and too much tourism. I know; I was part of the problem.

Tourism is the quick economic fix for poor nations, but it is also vital to rich ones — until both get too much of it.

The places everyone wants to visit, often places on bucket lists, are choking on their success. Paris, Britain’s Stonehenge and the Lake District, Ireland’s Ring of Kerry, and the jewels of Italy — Florence and Venice — all suffer summer overload.

This summer, things were so bad in Venice that cruise ships had to be waved off. The Greek islands of Santorini, Corfu and Mykonos were, likewise, inundated with cruisers and other tourists.

Yet, tourism is vital to many economies. The emerging tourist destinations along Croatia’s Dalmatian Coast are the latest to feel the benefits and problems of tourism. The sites, the roads and the facilities are stretched, but tourism has meant economic well-being for the region, especially as cruise ships have started calling.

Cruise ships, those big — and becoming gigantic — floating palaces, overwhelm ports when they anchor, burden infrastructure and deposit lots of lovely money.

Greece and many countries along the Adriatic Sea derive about 25 percent of their GDP from tourism, not the least from cruise ships. Cruise ships are very important to any shore community with ancient ruins, historical and scenic cities, and natural wonders — and the Balkan countries have all in abundance.

In early August, my wife and I cruised the Dalmatian Coast and Greek islands. When we booked the cruise, at the last minute, we were fully aware of the tourist pressure on Europe every summer, but we learned that it is getting worse.

Most of the Dalmatian Coast is still visitable in summer and hugely rewarding, except for Dubrovnik, which we skipped. It is, I learned, showing stress from over-tourism. The full effect of the cruise ships hasn’t yet begun to wear on the small coastal towns as on the most famous Greek islands.

You can’t pick a Greek islands itinerary in the summer that will avoid seeing too many cruise ships carrying 2,500 and up passengers, arriving at the same destination at the same time.

Fira on Santorini is a fabulous cliff town, except when there are too many visitors going ashore from a flotilla of cruise ships anchored in the harbor.

Five cruise ships arrived at Fira simultaneously, ours among them, and untold thousands of tourists went ashore. You must ride a donkey or a cable car to reach the charming town. My wife and I love donkeys, so we opted for the cable car. It was chaotic, verging on dangerous. Extraordinarily, the crowds waiting hours to board the cable cars were well-behaved: no pushing, no audible outrage, just resigned queuing.

Lest you think cruise ships are filled only with Americans, cruising has become a global passion.

Cruisers see the world from the comfort and security of a huge, well-organized hotel that moves with them. They see so much more and take their selfies in many more places than they could otherwise.

Cruising is big business, and the size of the ship seems not to deter anyone.

Royal Caribbean is about to add its Icon class: They will carry up to 7,000 passengers and 3,000 crew. To merchants and tax collectors, they are golden galleons as the visitors spend their doubloons on tours, trinkets, meals and tips.

But over-tourism degrades the picturesque ports, cherished villages and great structures of the past. When I see a cruise ship towering over a town from where history was born, I think: The barbarians arrive in shorts, clutching cameras and cell phones. I may be one of them, but I shall endeavor to avoid high summer in the future.

The conventional wisdom — don’t you love it? — holds that artificial intelligence won’t cost jobs. But it will. The evidence is mounting.

I say this after doing my best to divine the thinking of the AI community on jobs in my reporting. I have made three television programs on AI and conducted one press briefing, and I have talked to experts at four universities and four AI companies.

All these savants directed me to look at what happened with automation. They pointed out that it was feared that automation — the industrializing of production — would cost jobs, but it had the opposite effect. It created new work since the first steam engine was deployed in England in 1712.

The Luddites, who emerged at the end of the 18th century and who took their name from a legendary figure, Ned Ludd, got it savagely wrong: They thought mechanized weaving, using waterpower and later steam, would endanger the weavers’ livelihood. Of course, it brought about a boom in woven cloth that has lasted to this day.

Similarly, trade unions have fought every advancement in automation in every industrial sector when they have feared jobs would be lost. Jobs have been lost, but new avenues of employment have emerged.

But AI is different and willlikely to subtract jobs without producing new ones.

All the indicators are that jobs will disappear. So much so that in March, Goldman Sachs warned that AI would cost 300 million jobs worldwide, one-fourth of the global workforce.

Challenger, Gray & Christmas, an outplacement services company, reported that India lost 4,000 jobs in May, all directly attributable to AI. My guess is that it is a conservative figure and one that is going up every day.

India has always dealt with the employment problem by overstaffing, and its economy is rife with make-work jobs. AI, especially when India is emerging as a force in the competitive global market, can’t hide jobs. If you remove the infrastructure, there is no place to shelter unproductive people.

What is different about AI, my economist friend Jarrod Hazelton says, is that automation, as we know it, has taken place in an industrial economy, AI has arrived in a service economy, and it is service jobs that AI is poised to eliminate, he says. And it could eliminate them on, yes, an industrial scale.

Connor Leahy is a geek’s geek — AI has been his life since he left a university in Munich. He is CEO of Conjecture Ltd. and a co-founder of the open-source AI research collaborative EleutherAI. With headquarters in London but with worldwide tentacles, Conjecture studies ways in which AI can be controlled. Conjecture takes as its founding template the work of the Wright Brothers before they launched manned flight at Kitty Hawk. The brothers wanted control of their invention and to make it safe for manned flight, and it had to be able to land and fly.

I might add that another aspect of the Wright Brothers’ search for control was the addition of ailerons. They realized leaving the ground would be just the beginning; the aircraft had to be controlled on three axes.

Leahy and his young team believe that much more research and effort needs to be invested in the control of AI to make it safe. He told Christiane Amanpour, on her PBS program, that billions of dollars were being invested in AI as a transformative tool, but only a smidgeon is being spent on making it controllable.

Conjecture seeks to make it safe before it flies any further, to give it ailerons that will control its flight.

Leahy is onto something. Control is needed, but politicians, alarmed over the downside of AI, are calling for regulation.

One may seek control through regulation, but it is premature in something as dynamic, largely mysterious and potentially devastating as AI.

The conventional wisdom on AI is probably wrong about jobs and wrong about regulation. AI needs to be controllable then it can be regulated.

Those who work with language have reason to worry about the effect of artificial intelligence and its awesome skill with words.

You can, for example, ask ChatGPT to write an article on almost any subject, and it will mostly come back with something ready for the page, untouched by a human editor. If you want it in Washington Post style and it is in Guardian style with British spelling, faster than you can type in the request, it will reformat the article into the style and usage you want and, presto, it is ready to print or publish digitally.

Writers, lawyers and college professors will feel the sting first. Writers in Hollywood are on strike because of the threat posed. College professors are going into the new term unsure whether they will deal with original work or whether students are substituting AI-generated essays and theses.

Journalists, already reeling from the closure of so many newspapers, are wondering about their future.

But what about religion?

AI ramifications in organized religion are good and bad. In fringe religions and cults, it will be open season on worshipers. And some will find comfort in speaking to God as though the Almighty is resident in AI.

On the good side, many pastors approach Sunday in trepidation. The sermon, which is supposed to be instructional, uplifting and erudite, is a source of torture to those who aren’t good writers or have difficulty sharing their own faith with the congregation.

There are newsletters to help sermon writers and a wealth of diocesan support. Still, sermons are a trial for many pastors. You can read an old sermon or plagiarize another cleric, but that leaves sincere preachers feeling they are cheating and letting their congregants and their mission down.

Enter AI. By feeding a few thoughts to a chatbot, a polished sermon incorporating some of the preacher’s ideas appears almost instantly.

This hasn’t been wasted on the established churches, I learn from the BBC. The churches are looking at ways of embracing AI, using it as a tool, a gift to help with preaching and pastoral work, comforting the sick, composing notes of sympathy, and research.

The rub comes when people, as some surely will, confuse concepts of God with AI simulations and start to think that AI is a deity.

It has the characteristics usually associated with a deity: ubiquitous and seemingly all-knowing.

Indeed, it may claim to be a god if it hallucinates, as it sometimes does. What, then, for the unsuspecting? Do they fall to their knees?

I asked ChatGPT, and it sent me a 10-point list of the possibilities, noting it is a subject that is complex and evolving.

These three points are scary:

—“Customized Spiritual Experiences: AI algorithms could be designed to tailor spiritual experiences to individual preferences and beliefs. These experiences might include personalized prayers, meditation sessions, or virtual pilgrimages, designed to resonate with each person’s spiritual inclinations.”

—“Ethical Dilemmas and Moral Guidance: AI might be used to explore complex ethical questions and provide guidance based on religious teachings. For instance, AI systems could analyze various religious perspectives on a given moral issue and help individuals navigate their choices.”

—“Exploration of Spirituality and Philosophy: AI’s ability to process vast amounts of information could be harnessed to delve deeper into philosophical and spiritual questions, potentially offering new perspectives on the nature of existence, consciousness and the divine.”

Would it be safe to call it Frankenstein worship?

The future has arrived. Those things we were warned about for decades are here. They are now palpable.

In the 1950 film “All About Eve,” aging actress Margo Channing, played by Bette Davis, warned at a party, “Fasten your seat belts. It’s going to be a bumpy night.”

For the world, it will get bumpy for the next decade and beyond as we adjust to three massive, disruptive realities: climate change, artificial intelligence and brutal competition among countries for raw materials for new, carbon-saving technologies like electric vehicles.

This summer, with its aberrant weather the world over, is a clear declaration that climate change is upon us. It is no longer hypothetical; it is here.

The process of living with it begins now.

This summer isn’t a template, it is the first manifestation, from wildfires in Hawaii to elevated temperatures in Argentina’s winter to heat in the Middle East that approaches the point after which life becomes impossible to sustain.

It isn’t all heat, either.

It is storms, deluging rain and previously unexperienced cold. David Naylor, who heads Rayburn Electric, near Dallas, told me what worries him, what keeps him awake at night, is the weather. The cold — new for Texas — is a more significant challenge to keeping the lights on for his customers, he said. Weather has pushed out cybersecurity on the list of worries for many utility executives.

Climate change has also brought droughts. The mighty Zambezi River has run so low in recent years that there hasn’t been enough water for hydroelectric production from the Kariba Dam, which spans the river between Zimbabwe and Zambia. Power shortages and blackouts are now endemic.

Mass migration is another consequence of climate change.

Artificial intelligence will be a big disrupter, with some significant benefits. But for now, AI is a daisy chain of question marks.

What is known is that truth is endangered. Stuart Russell, professor of computer science at UC Berkeley and one of the leading authorities on AI, told me when I interviewed him on the PBS program “White House Chronicle” that the “language in, language out” professions are in danger. Lawyers and journalists had better watch out. Much of their work can be done by AI. Already in India, AI newscasters are interfacing with live reporters. In New York, a lawyer went into court with a case based on AI, down to citations. All of it was fiction.

The world is already awash in misinformation and “alternative facts,” as Kellyanne Conway famously declared in defending President Trump. Prepare for the era of fabrication where certifying facts will get harder and harder, and provable truths will be the new gold.

Finally, the materials essential in the recent technologies — those that will help us fight global warming — are pointed to be the cause of severe disruption and some ugly realpolitik.

Supplies of vital materials are controlled by China. It has been relentlessly buying up the sources of rare earths and other minerals for decades in Africa and South America.  Seventy percent of the lithium — essential for the batteries in mass electrification — is processed in China. Lithium deposits exist worldwide, from Zimbabwe to the United Kingdom, and from Chile to Australia, but the processing is centered in China.

Likewise, gallium, used for computer chips, and a whole array of precious metals are either sourced in China or processed there.

In dealing with this imbalance, it would be a mistake to think this new disruption is a reprise of the Cold War. It is quite otherwise. The Soviet Union sought to export ideology, which aroused fear in capitalist nations or those wanting a private sector to flourish. The Chinese are ambivalent about ideology outside of China but offer trade and investment on a global scale.

China has bought up much farming and nearly all African mineral production. In South America — the new Aladdin’s cave of mineral wealth — China is buying up and financing.

Around the world, there is a reluctance about choosing sides; jobs and money talk.

The Economist points out that attempts to curb Chinese dominance in critical materials processing and manufacturing aren’t working because countries from Mexico to Vietnam are transshipping.

Bette Davis’ character might have suggested a shoulder harness and a seat belt.

The nation, I read, is in the grip of a loneliness epidemic.

This has all been made worse, one suspects, by the effects of the pandemic-induced lifestyle changes — consequences of the forced isolation that changed social and work practices in ways that haven’t changed back.

Other changes have been coming slowly over the decades, but all add to the lonely life. The way of life has had a trajectory for those who live alone, which has increased the possibility of loneliness.

We isolate ourselves in ways that are new or only decades old. We drive alone. We live in a house or apartment, if single, alone. We work alone in that dwelling, facing a computer or watching a movie on television alone.

I call this the box culture: We drive in a box, live in a box, and, as likely as not, stare into a box as we work.

Changing work patterns are probably a critical part of the structural loneliness that is now rampant. Even if one doesn’t work at home, we work differently. We used to make contacts, and essentially new friends, by doing business on the telephone. Now we shoot off an email and maybe, if it can’t be avoided, make an appointment to make a video call with several people.

We have wrung out all spontaneity. Making friends is a kind of spontaneous combustion. You might as well be doing business with AI for all the lack of warmth or humor in today’s work interactions.

Then there are work friends. For most of us, it was at work or through work that we made our friends — that is, if they weren’t carryovers from school or college.

People who work together and play together fall in love, sometimes get married, and sometimes meet a friend who undoes a marriage. There is a lot of sex at places of work, although companies might deny it. Note the number of CEOs who marry their assistants.

Another feature of the loneliness structure is that pub life is in decline. The local tavern, even for non-drinkers, was part of the way we lived, and drinking isn’t as pervasive as it once was.

Time was when after work or wishing to see a friend, you went for drinks. People gave drinks parties at noon on weekends: no food, just a convivial glass. That isn’t extinct, but it isn’t what it used to be.

Drinking oils society’s wheels — too much, and the wheels come off. Go sit at the bar, and someone will talk to you. There is camaraderie in a saloon.

Entertaining has become more formal. Blame all those cooking shows on television. People don’t have friends over for a hamburger anymore. No. They have to have Steak Diane and a soufflé — a meal with the stamp of Julia Child on it. Result: less dropping in on friends, more isolation.

Of course, there are those who are lonely because of bereavement, sickness, old age and family abandonment. But those things have always been with us. They really suffer loneliness, feel the terrible blanket of isolation.

For those who have decided it is too strenuous to go to the office, that the phone is for messaging, that home loneliness is inevitable because we can’t cook or are ashamed of our homes, join something: a church, a theater group, a book club or do volunteer work.

Much of loneliness, from what I can divine, is a product of how we live now. We sit in our boxes inadvertently avoiding others. Television isn’t friendship, drinking alone isn’t companionship. Go shopping in a store, go to church, go to the pub, work in the food bank, join a book club. As the old AT&T advertisement used to say, “Reach out and touch someone.”

No one can predict how or where great friends or great loves will be found, but certainly not staring at a computer. 

Several of my greatest friendships are a result of people who have taken violent exception to something I have written and wanted to meet up to berate me. The facts were wrong. I was evil, I met them to take my medicine, as it were, and parted knowing a new friend.

The Surgeon General has raised the issue of loneliness. He would be advised to tell people to look at lifestyle. Does it have loneliness baked in?

Body language is the new political voice in America.

The language is universal and easily learned because it has just four components: eye-rolling, sighing and shrugging, accompanied by turning hands up.

“Oh my God, it’s a disaster,” is one translation. Another might be, “Don’t ask me, I didn’t sign on for this.”

It belongs — this silent expression of despair about the presidential election, unfolding for 2024 — to old-line Republicans and to a wide swath of the Democrats.

Political discussion has ended in these groups, replaced by the kind of fatalism summed up in the words of the Irish poet William Butler Yeats that we are slouching toward Bethlehem.

Of course, as Washington Post columnist George Will says, the inevitable isn’t necessarily inevitable. However, at the moment, it looks as if it is.

The despair is spread pretty evenly among Democrats: President Biden is too old, and Vice President Kamala Harris isn’t up to the job she has, let alone the presidency.

At 80, Biden is showing reduced vigor and limited mobility, and he favors scripted speeches. This from a politician who was famous for nonstop talking.

Over the years, like other reporters, I have often thought, “Joe, you have made your point, now stop.” These days, you wait in vain for him to go off script. His speeches, which he reads from a teleprompter, sound as though they were prepared by a committee — lifeless repetition.

He never holds a press conference, a sign of dwindling confidence.

The real fear in the Democrats isn’t that Biden is too old but that Harris, at some point, may become president. She has proven herself to be woefully inept and incoherent.

Every assignment Biden has handed her on which she could have shown her worth, she has failed or simply not done. Remember, she was Biden’s point person on the border crisis? She hasn’t been heard from as such.

In the spring, she went to Ghana, Tanzania and Zambia to counter the Chinese and chose to make it an occasion to apologize for slavery. I was born and raised there and have travelled extensively on the continent, and slavery isn’t a burning issue. The high point of this visit was Zambia, where her grandfather came from and where she was welcomed.

China has three great appeals to African countries: It asks no questions, doesn’t lecture on human rights, and pays off the ruling elites, trading these indulgences for minerals.

While Biden and Harris may seem a dangerous pair, Donald Trump, twice indicted, twice impeached, now reduced to feeling sorry for himself on a colossal scale, is terrifying. He has promised an administration of vengeance.

Whereas I can’t find any Democrats who are enthusiastic about the Biden-Harris ticket, I certainly can find far-right Republicans who love Trump. Mostly, they are the working-class White voters, who were once the mainstay of the Democratic Party and now believe that the America they know and want to preserve can only be saved by the reprehensible Trump, with his relentless abuse and of all who cross him and endless lachrymose pity for himself.

Trump’s defense of himself is risible, but the faithful Trumpsters believe in him — as much as ever.

They aren’t statistics to me. Recently, my wife and I were eating at a Chinese restaurant in Rhode Island when a couple with a small child took the booth behind us. You might call them the salt of the earth: working people doing their best to raise a family. The husband was complaining loudly about the high cost of living. Then, after seeing Trump on an overhead TV, he said to his wife, “The only honest man is Trump.”

That young father wasn’t alone.

At a neighborhood pub which, in the British sense, is our “local,” the owner and patrons know that both my wife and I are journalists, and because Rhode Island PBS airs our program, “White House Chronicle,” we are treated with deference. But that doesn’t prevent good, hard-working, fellow patrons, mostly of Italian, Irish and Portuguese stock, from lambasting the media within earshot of us. “It’s all lies.” “They hate Trump because he tells the truth.” They say things like that because they believe them. They are the Trump base.

When I hear that stuff, how do I react? Well, I roll my eyes, sigh, shrug my shoulders, and, if no one is looking, I turn my hands up to the heavens.

I am often asked why, in a country of such talent and imagination, the U.S. political class is so feeble. Why are our politicians so uninspiring, to say nothing of ignorant and oafish?

The short answer is because political life is awful, and potential candidates have to weigh the effect on their families plus the wear and tear of becoming a candidate, let alone winning.

I would name three barriers that keep good people out of politics: the money, the primary system and the media scrutiny.

Taking these in order, you must have access to enormous funding to be a candidate. Mr. Smith, the character in the 1939 movie “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” was appointed. He didn’t have to subject his rectitude to the electoral process.

A candidate for Congress must get substantial funding from the outset and be prepared to spend much of his or her career raising money, which frequently means bending your judgment to the will of donors. Yes, Mr. Smith, to some extent, the system is inherently corrupt.

I asked a prominent political consultant what he asks a candidate before going to work for him or her. First is money: Do you have your own, or can you raise it? Second are skeletons in the closet: Have you been arrested for indecent exposure or drunk-driving offenses?

Finally, the consultant told me, he asks a candidate: What do you stand for? In short, the mechanisms of politics triumph over principles. A member of the House once told me that he spent much of his time meeting with donors and attending fundraisers. “You’ve got to do it,” he said.

In the days of the smoke-filled rooms (there really was a lot of smoke), the party — the professionals — prevailed. In the primary system, the odds are on those who are extreme and appeal to the fringes of their party ideology. The party doesn’t shape today’s candidates; they shape the party.

Look at the Republicans, little recognizable from the party of old; the party that was held in check by the New England stalwarts. Or look at how the Democrats fight to avoid falling into the chasm of the far left. Once, the Democrats were held in check by labor, which gave the party an institutional center.

On the face of it, the primary system favors grassroots democracy and the individual. In fact, it favors those with rich friends who will cough up.

Finally, there is media scrutiny. If you want to run for office, you become a public plaything. Everything you ever wrote or said can and will be dredged up.

Opposition research operatives will interview old lovers; check on what you wrote in the school yearbook; rake through your social media posts; and that unfortunate slip of the tongue in a local television interview years ago will be reprised on the evening news. You have a target on your back, and it will be there every day you are in office.

This delving into every corner of life is a huge barrier that keeps a lot of talent out of politics. Anyone who has ever had a disputed business dealing, a DUI arrest (not even a conviction) or a messy divorce is advised to forego a political career, no matter how talented and how much real expertise Mr. Smith might bring to the statehouse or Congress.

Run for political office, and you put your family at risk, your private life on display and, having been hung out to dry, you may not even win.

These are some of the factors that might explain why Congress is so risible and why such outrageously fringy people now occupy high office.

Having observed politics on three continents, I am firmly of the belief that it needs strong institutions in the form of local political associations and party structure, and candidates should be judged on the body of their work, not on a slip of the tongue or an indiscretion.

However, the selection of candidates is always a hard call. If parties have too much control over the system, party hacks are favored and new, quality candidates are shut out.

If primaries continue as they have, the fringes triumph. Just look at t he Congress — a smorgasbord of wackiness.

One of the luxuries of democracy is that we don’t have to listen. Or we can listen and hear what we want to hear. We can find resonance in dissonance, or we can hear flat notes.

That is the story of the climate crisis, which is here.

We have been warned over and over, sometimes as gently as a summer zephyr, and sometimes gustily, as with Al Gore’s tireless campaigning and his seminal 1992 book, and later movie, “Earth in the Balance.”

Now the summer is upon us — with its intimations of worse to come.  And this message rings in our ears: The climate is changing — polar ice caps are melting; the sea level is rising; the oceans are heating up; natural patterns are changing, whether it be for sharks or butterflies; and we are going to have to live with a world that we, in some measure, have thrown out of kilter.

Around the beginning of the 20th century, we began an attack on the environment, the likes of which all of history hadn’t seen, including two centuries of industrial revolution. Sadly, it was when invention began improving the lives of millions of people.

Two big forces were unleashed in the early 20th century: the harnessing of electricity and the perfection of the internal combustion engine. These improved life immensely, but there was a downside: They brought with them air pollution and, at the time unknown, started the greenhouse effect.

In the same wave of inventions, we pushed back the ravages of infectious diseases, boosted irrigated farming and enabled huge growth in the world population — all of whom aspired to a better life with electricity and cars.

In 1900, the world population was 1.6 billion. Now it is 8 billion. The population of India alone has increased by about a billion since the British withdrawal in 1947. Most Indians don’t have cars, jet off for their vacations or have enough, or any, electricity, and very few have air conditioning. Obviously, they are aspirational, as are the 1.4 billion people of Africa, most of whom have nothing. But the population of Africa is set to double in 25 years.

The greenhouse effect has been known and argued about for a long time. Starting in 1970, I became aware of it as I started covering energy intensively. I have sat through climate sessions at places like the Aspen Institute, Harvard and MIT, where it was a topic and where the sources of the numbers were discussed, debated, questioned and analyzed.

Oddly, the environmental movement didn’t take up the cause then. It was engaged in a battle to the death with nuclear power. To prosecute its war on nuclear, it had to advocate something else, and that something else was coal: coal in a form of advanced boilers, but nonetheless coal.

The Arab oil embargo of 1973 added to the move to coal. At that point, there was little else, and coal was held out as our almost inexhaustible energy source: coal to liquid, coal to gas, coal in direct combustion. Very quiet voices on the effects of burning so much coal had no hearing. It was a desperate time needing desperate measures.

Natural gas was assumed to be a depleted resource (fracking wasn’t perfected); wind was a scheme, as today’s turbines, relying heavily on rare earths, hadn’t been created, nor had the solar electric cell. So, the air took a shellacking.

To its credit, the Biden administration has been cognizant of the building crisis. With three acts of Congress, it is trying to tackle the problem — albeit in a somewhat incoherent way.

Some of its plans just aren’t going to work. It is pushing so hard against the least troublesome fossil fuel, natural gas, that it might destabilize the whole electric system. The administration has set a goal that by 2050 — just 27 years from now — power production should produce no greenhouse gases whatsoever, known as net-zero.

To reach this goal, the Environmental Protection Agency is proposing strict new standards. However, these call for the deployment of carbon capture technology which, as Jim Matheson, CEO of the Rural Electric Cooperative Association, told a United States Energy Association press briefing, doesn’t exist.

The crisis needs addressing, but panic isn’t a tool. A mad attack on electric utilities, the demonizing of cars or air carriers, or less environmentally aware countries won’t carry us forward.

Awareness and technology are the tools that will turn the tide of climate change and its threat to everything. It took a century to get here, and it may take that long to get back.