Sunrise — 6:23:12, 6:23:49, 6:24:11.

"It’s not me being out there like Jane Fonda or something. It’s different, and the approach is different. It’s just like code-switching."

"If I lived in [Los Angeles], my conversation is absolutely going to be different. But we also know you’ve got to read the room, you’ve got to know your audience and know who you’re talking to."

Said North Carolina State Rep. Diamond Staton-Williams, a Democrat, quoted in "In N.C., some Black voters are uneasy with Harris’s abortion rights focus/Democrats worry that socially conservative Black voters in the South are wary of Harris’s outspoken support for reproductive freedom" (WaPo)(free-access link).

AND: I'm also reading this Kathleen Parker column in WaPo: "Tim Walz isn’t exactly what he seems/How America’s new wonder dad has gilded his record for political gain" (free link):

"Cary Grant was an idol of mine and I was in awe watching him in the movies and I wanted to copy him. I love thick suits with structure. I think masculine is feminine."

Said Diane Keaton, quoted in "How Diane Keaton redefined the movie star look/The 78-year-old actress has gathered a voluminous selection of her most celebrated, most treasured and most questionable looks in a new book, 'Fashion First'" (WaPo)(free-access link, so you can see the photos and because it's the last day of the month and I've got 2 more to use).

"Mr. Trump had instructed his young sidekick to fight forcefully through those initial attacks, and later said Mr. Vance’s execution exceeded his expectations..."

"... according to three allies who insisted on anonymity to discuss private conversations. In a quintessentially Trumpian display of bravado, the former president has privately praised Mr. Vance by comparing himself to Vince Lombardi, telling people that his eye for political talent was now on par with the Hall of Fame football coach’s ability to find Super Bowl-caliber players. But beyond Mar-a-Lago, early returns on Mr. Vance are less enthusiastic. Polls show that he effectively amplifies Mr. Trump’s political strengths but that he also magnifies his weaknesses. Mr. Vance’s approval rating improved by nearly double digits among the nation’s least educated and poorest voters since joining the Republican ticket — but plunged by even wider margins among college graduates and independent women, according to an NPR/PBS News/Marist poll...."

From "JD Vance’s Combative Style Confounds Democrats but Pleases Trump/Over dozens of events and more than 70 interviews, Mr. Vance’s performances as Donald Trump’s attack dog have endeared him to his boss, even if America broadly is less enthusiastic" (NYT).

For another class politics article in the NYT, try "Here’s Why We Shouldn’t Demean Trump Voters" by Nicholas Kristof. Why? It's "politically foolish." It's also "morally offensive, particularly when well-educated and successful elites are scorning disadvantaged, working-class Americans who have been left behind economically and socially and in many cases are dying young. They deserve empathy, not insults. By all means denounce Trump, but don’t stereotype and belittle the nearly half of Americans who have sided with him...."

AND: Take a look at "'Dangerous and un-American': new recording of JD Vance’s dark vision of women and immigration/Trump’s running mate rants against feminism, immigrants and Ilhan Omar in a newly unearthed podcast from 2021" (The Guardian). We're told — without a link to the audio or a transcript or even the name of the podcast — that there's a 2021 interview in which Vance said that "professional women 'choose a path to misery' when they prioritize careers over having children in a September 2021 podcast interview in which he also claimed men in America were 'suppressed' in their masculinity." I don't trust the Guardian's summary and decontexualization, but it's important to know the line that is being sold to the nondeplorables.

ADDED: I think this is the podcast — "Moment of Truth" — "The Hillbilly Has a Moment, featuring J.D. Vance." 

"Kamala Harris' Election Odds Slide With Bookmakers After CNN Interview."

Newsweek reported last night.

Here's what I'm seeing at Real Clear Politics right now:

Trump impersonates Elon Musk.

NEW: Donald Trump does an impersonation of Elon Musk, imitates Elon talking about one of his Space X rockets.

Lmao.

"With Elon, it's like, 'well, you know, I'm doing a new stainless steel hub that can get us around the engines much quicker.'"

"'Because there's a problem with… pic.twitter.com/7eOIrgAyWG

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) August 31, 2024

Trump's analysis of Musk's speech pattern: "I'm hearing everything that's going through his mind."

"Until recently, standard liposuction didn’t deliver the definition many men desired. To gain more, one possible solution..."

"... had been to inject fat directly into the abdominal muscles to enlarge and enhance them. But performing the procedure without precision was seen as too dangerous. Then Rio de Janeiro plastic surgeon Alvaro Cansanção had an idea. In 2019, he began using ultrasound technology to pinpoint the exact location where the fat should be injected to inflate the abs. 'We have created an evolution,' Cansanção told The Washington Post. 'Now they can have a six-pack without renouncing the pleasures of life.'"

From "'VANITY IS A VIRTUE'/Chasing the perfect abs, men flock to plastic surgery" (WaPo)(that's a free-access link, because it's the last day of the month, and I still have 3 gift links left and because you've got to see all the carved-out-of-fat abs).

Now, I understand the photos I've been seeing of men with protruding bellies that somehow have what looks like ab definition. It's bumps of relocated fat! There is a renouncement of a pleasure of life: the pleasure of authenticity. If you see something that you perceive as beautiful because it represents health and fitness, but then learn or feel that it is something else, that is a loss of pleasure. This entire procedure is a testament to the desire to be looked at but not touched and not understood. That is the renouncement of pleasure, other than the pleasure of being admired from a distance.

"You've had two Democratic candidates who've not been able to give unscripted interviews, which is extraordinary."

"I mean my father and uncle were so proud of... the United States — our capacity to engage in debate, to defend who we were in the world, to defend a vision of our country, to articulate it to be the rest of the world, to be the leaders of the Free World, and... have a command of the facts and of knowledge, and to be eloquent. And how can you be a leader in the world? What does the rest of the world think of us right now? I mean what could they possibly think? We have two Democratic party candidates who were not able to explain themselves in an interview.... If you want to if you want the job of handling the nuclear codes, you've got to do an interview first. And... how can you go 39 days without talking to the press, without being able to defend your record, to explain who you are to the American people? And if you talk to Democrats about this, and you can get past the anger and past the vitriol — this kind of wall of of tribal resistance to any new knowledge coming in... or any contrary fact — what they'll say is, well, we're not really voting for Kamala, we're voting for the apparatus. Then you ask the next question: Has that apparatus served you? You know, has the open border served you? Has the $35 trillion debt served you? Has all the endless war served you? Has the destruction the American middle class — highest inflation rate in a generation — has any of that — that apparatus — produced something for the United States that you're so proud of that you want to blindly vote without knowing who you're voting for?"

Said Bobby Kennedy.

Recorded before the Harris/Walz interview with Dana Bash.

"When going down into the hole... it was really scary, but this is indeed the duty of a firefighter; we have to overcome the fear and surrender to God."

"It is pitch black in that pipe. You don't want to know what's in there. It's full of human waste and other garbage. We decontaminate immediately after each dive."

Said a firefighter and a sewer worker quoted in "Search for woman swallowed by 8m sinkhole now 'too risky'" (BBC). It's been 8 days since the woman, Vijaya Lakshmi Gali, 48, "disappeared into a pavement sinkhole in Kuala Lumpur." There have been 110 rescue workers. "But apart from a pair of slippers found in an initial 17-hour search, their efforts have been unsuccessful."

There is security camera footage of the hole opening up beneath the woman, here.

Sunrise — 6:18, 6:17.

"At the end of their life span of around 20 years, [wind turbine blades] are chopped into pieces and buried in a handful of landfills... wind turbine graveyards...."

"Researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory have developed what they say is a turbine blade made from plant material that can be recycled. The new substance is made from inedible sugar extracted from wood, plant remains, used cooking oil and agricultural waste.... Recycling a turbine blade made from traditional materials is nearly impossible because it is very difficult to break its strong chemical bonds.... But the new material... can be recycled by dumping it into a bath of methanol heated up to around 440 degrees Fahrenheit, which turns it into an elastic liquid that can be molded into a new shape.... 'It’s heat plus solvent.... That will break it apart.'..."

From "Turbine Blades Have Piled Up in Landfills. A Solution May Be Coming. Wind power has a waste problem that has been difficult to solve. Turbine blades made from a new plant-based material could make them recyclable" (NYT).

"And I figured I was going to come here and we were going to make a speech. I had a speech all set for you — I was ready — and they said, sir, you're actually doing a town hall."

"I said, oh, nobody told me that. I said Who's doing it? They said Tulsi. I said, well, that's at least good news. I've been a fan of hers for a long time, I have to tell you. So. So I didn't even know. I'm I'm in the plane, and I'm looking over some material, and we're going to give you a hell of a speech tonight. We were set to give you one hell of a speech. They said, no, sir, it's a town hall. I said why doesn't somebody tell me this stuff, and I don't even have any idea who we're doing it for. I don't know. Is it for a network or what? I see a lot of television all over the place, so maybe it's on all of them, but I did get to see uh the strangest thing today I looked at the news conference of Kamala — I call her Comrade Comrade Kamala Comrade Kamala — she's a uh you know that she's uh a Marxist. Her father was a Marxist before her, so she was brought up in the family tradition, and she really is, and this country is not ready for a Marxist. We don't want a Marxist as a President, and she destroyed San Francisco, she destroyed California, and we're not going to let it destroy our country, I'll tell you, it's not going to happen so — but just to finish — so for some reason she won't talk to anybody so...."

Said Donald Trump, quite chaotically, at the town hall in La Crosse, Wisconsin last night. Maybe "Comrade Kamala" won't talk to anybody, but Trump will talk and talk, riffing from subject to subject, revealing the awful confusion behind the scenes, acknowledging the town hall and the presence of Tulsi Gabbard, but frantically filibustering as if desperate to prevent the audience and Tulsi from sharing the spotlight. Oh, that speech he would have given! It was one hell of a speech! But you're not going to get it... and you're not going to get that town hall either, not if he can string enough topics together into a crazy patchwork that can't end, won't end....

"And what I realized was that this was a moment that could only happen on Donahue. It was a moment that I don't think ever would've happened..."

"... if it were just Donahue and Ayn Rand sitting on stage talking to one another. I don't think Rand would've been that rude to this powerful TV host. She would only act that way toward an ordinary person. So what you get because of this complicated ecosystem that Donahue has created is this totally unfiltered version of this intellectual titan. And it's pretty ugly. And while you're watching this happen, you start to wonder what truly animates Ayn Rand? Is it this ruthless, uncompromising philosophy at the center of her bestselling books? Or is it maybe that she just doesn't like other people? Whatever was really going on here, it is revealing, it is messy, it is unexpected, and it is fantastic television. And all of it was orchestrated by the guy Philip John Donahue, whose biography in no way prepares you for this kaleidoscopic boundary pushing national conversation that he invited the country to have day after day for 30 years."

Says Michael Barbaro, on today's episode of the "Daily" podcast, "What Phil Donahue Meant to Me" (link goes to the Podscribe transcript, which includes the audio).

Barbaro is 44, and he tells us he listened to "The Phil Donahue Show" when he was a kid and was very influenced by it. The episode with Ayn Rand was on in 1979, so he wasn't watching that episode (unless it was a rerun).

How rude was Ayn Rand to the woman in the audience? Rand was "rude" in that she announced that the audience member was "rude" and refused to answer a question from her because she was rude. Is it rude to call somebody else rude? The standard tactic is to maintain your demeanor and show strength by answering the question on its substance, but clearly that was not Rand's approach. Donahue and Barbaro trash her for for not being more kindly toward the female human who was a mere audience member. I'm just guessing that Ayn Rand chose to treat her exactly as she deserved based on what she said. Here's the entire 1979 show. The "rudeness" incident begins at 27:47:

"Jolie signed up to the film knowing she would actually have to learn how to sing opera...."

"'I was terribly nervous,” she said... 'I spent almost seven months training....' [Director Pablo Larraín knew the actress could capture Callas’s magnetic presence and relate to the pressures the singer felt around her fame, but he strenuously did not want this to be a lip-syncing job. He planned on shooting close-ups of Jolie as Callas and felt it would immediately feel inauthentic to the audience if his lead actress didn’t know the sensation of singing opera, even if the sounds used in the film aren’t entirely her own.... [Jolie] listened endlessly to tapes of Callas teaching others how to sing opera... What we hear in the film are tracks mixing Jolie and Callas. The moments of Callas in her prime are mostly Callas with a fragment of Jolie — and then at other, more raw points, particularly as her voice degrades, it’s more Jolie...."

From "Angelina Jolie soars into the Oscar race with Venice film ‘Maria’/Jolie, who’s been locked in a legal battle with ex Brad Pitt, called the role of legendary opera singer Maria Callas 'therapy I didn’t know I needed'" (WaPo).

A quote from Jolie: "I think when your life is full, when you’ve felt a certain level of despair, of pain, of love, at a certain point, there [are] only certain sounds that can match that feeling. And to me, the immensity of the feeling encapsulated within the sounds of opera, there’s nothing like it, … It is the only sound that would explain that pain."

Vague, vacuous, and not flustered... 2 looks at that Kamala Harris interview.

"Kamala Harris didn’t hurt herself in her interview this week with CNN’s Dana Bash. She didn’t particularly help herself, either."

Writes Bret Stephens in a NYT piece with a meaner headline: "A Vague, Vacuous TV Interview Didn’t Help Kamala Harris."

But really, absorbing that meanness, isn't vague and vacuous what they were aiming for? I'm saying "they" not because I'm rejecting the she/her pronouns Harris has announced but because I presume her performance was developed by a team.

Stephens identifies pluses and minuses. On the plus side, "she came across as warm, relatable." (Did she?) 

On the minus side, we see the basis for that headline:

She’s vague to the point of vacuous. She struggled to give straight answers to her shifting positions on fracking and border security other than to say, “my values have not changed.” Fine, but she evaded the question of why it took the Biden administration more than three years to gain better control of the border, which it ultimately did through an executive order that could have been in place years earlier. It also doesn’t answer the question of why she reversed her former policy positions — or whether she has higher values other than political expediency.

We can infer the answer easily enough. What's she supposed to do, come right out and own it? 

The Stephens reaction is paired with a reaction from another NYT opinion writer, Michelle Cottle, who says, "I think that went pretty well, don’t you?"

Since you asked, I'll answer. Yes. Expectations were low, and there's no mistake for her enemies to feast on today. There were no big silences and no memorable passsage-of-time inanities.

Cottle gives Harris credit for not "ducking" questions or "getting flustered."

Flustered! To quote something I said in 2013: "That's a word that people have traditionally used — this is my observation — to portray a woman as incapable of standing her ground and dealing with emotional turmoil."

Why are you waiting to see if a woman gets "flustered"? It feels as though you're expecting her to prove her worth by not seeming like a stereotype of a woman. 

And Cottle continues with this "flustered" business:

The not getting flustered part was as important as the answers themselves. She absolutely needed to avoid giving any opening for the MAGA trolls — who are obsessed with machismo and performative toughness — to accuse her of being overly emotional or weak or easy to rattle. Amusingly, Bash looked more flustered than Harris did for most of the interview....

Yeah, why was that amusing... to Cottle? I'd have to guess that Cottle wanted Harris to win, and Bash's terror counted toward the Harris win. How presidential Harris was! She intimidated Bash. As if that means Putin and other dictators will be intimidated by Harris. But that inference is entirely unjustified. Bash was chosen because she was thought to be most inclined to help Harris. And Bash had the complex task of helping while seeming to be tough and properly journalistic.

Cottle projects her own worries about womanly inadequacies onto "MAGA trolls." Of course, they are out there, looking for material that can be used to attack Harris: They are "are obsessed with machismo and performative toughness — to accuse her of being overly emotional or weak or easy to rattle." But that doesn't mean Harris's own supporters are free of their own doubts and sexist stereotypes.

Sunrise — 6:23.

"Harris explains in exclusive CNN interview why she’s shifted her position on key issues since her first run for president."

CNN teases, in advance of its airing of the edited, prerecorded interview.

Pressed about how she's changed many of her positions, Harris said:

“I think the most important and most significant aspect of my policy perspective and decisions is my values have not changed.... You mentioned the Green New Deal. I have always believed – and I have worked on it – that the climate crisis is real, that it is an urgent matter to which we should apply metrics that include holding ourselves to deadlines around time.”...

Are there deadlines "around" things other than time?

“My values have not changed. So that is the reality of it. And four years of being vice president, I’ll tell you, one of the aspects, to your point, is traveling the country extensively.... I believe it is important to build consensus, and it is important to find a common place of understanding of where we can actually solve problems.”

The values don't change. This is the rhetorical move to abstraction. Everything can be coordinated if you go to a high enough level of generality. There's a limit to how often you can seek refuge in unspecified "values." And you may end up in a "consensus" of nothing. 

The article presents it as significant that she agreed that she "would" when Bash brought up the prospect of choosing one Republican to serve on her cabinet. Bash also brought up "Trump’s assertion, made last month at a conference for Black journalists, that she had altered her racial identity over time." Harris brushed off the issue: "Same old, tired playbook. Next question, please."

"Mr. Zuckerberg isn't denying that the government caused some of Meta's censorship decisions. The letter is too carefully drafted..."

"... to say something so obviously untrue.... Mr. Zuckerberg's phrasing... avoids any overt concession that the efforts to influence the company actually caused Meta to suppress speech. The closest the letter comes to admitting causation is Mr. Zuckerberg's assertion that he told his teams at the time that 'we should not compromise our content standards due to pressure from any Administration in either direction -- and we're ready to push back if something like this happens again.' This sounds like bold defiance. But 'if something like that happens again' suggests that Meta didn't push back when it happened before -- a backhanded admission that government pressure caused Meta to 'compromise.'... Mr. Zuckerberg's caution about causation speaks volumes about his fears (or those of his lawyers) that, if the truth were out, Meta would be legally vulnerable."

Writes Philip Hamburger, in "The ‘Tell’ in Zuckerberg’s Letter to Congress/He neither admits nor denies that Meta bowed to government censorship pressure" (Wall Street Journal).

Via Elon Musk this morning, a George Orwell clip.

Musk writes only, "Orwell nail [sic] it."

Orwell nail it
pic.twitter.com/qMvBpBQrtl

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 29, 2024

I'm sure many people will watch that and assume it's George Orwell, but it is the actor Chris Langham playing the part of George Orwell, in "George Orwell: A Life in Pictures," 2003 BBC docudrama.

Here's a Wikipedia article about, which says, "No surviving sound recordings or video of the real George Orwell have been found." That made me sad, but Langham's portrayal is brilliant, with no actual recordings of Orwell, no one can be distracted by any inaccuracy. 

And lucky us: The entire 90 minute documentary is on YouTube:

"Oh, what if it was this contest between A.I. and me? We would both get the same prompts."

"We’ll give a list of possible ideas that readers can choose from, a combination of very summery stuff, like pop songs and sand and sunscreen, and also mixed in are things that I like to write about, like ennui and ambivalence and self-consciousness and privilege.... [We asked A.I. to w]rite a thousand-word short story in the style of Curtis Sittenfeld that includes these elements: lust, kissing, flip-flops, regret and middle age.... To see the speed at which it spits out sentences was the most unsettling part because, in a very biased way, I’m like, my story’s better. But it wrote its story — I don’t know — a million times faster? And my story is probably not a million times better. The speed is unsettling...."

Said the fiction writer Curtis Sittenfeld, in the podcast "Can You Tell Which Short Story ChatGPT Wrote?" (YouTube for NYT podcast).

You'll hear the beginning of the human-written story and the machine-written story and get a chance to notice the distinctive differences. I know that I myself want to learn how to recognize A.I.-written material so that I can maintain a healthy disgust for what is artificial. The uncanny valley must continue to feel uncanny... or what are we living for?

"Movie Trailers Have Gotten Worse. Why Aren’t Studios Having Fun With Them? Promos give away too much or too little or are misleading or don’t leave anything out."

Writes Esther Zuckerman in the NYT with lots of examples of old trailers that were really good and various bad new ones. I'm using my second-to-last gift link of the month on this one, so check it out.

"The room erupted when Harris and Walz walked in, and the band played the school fight song with football players and cheerleaders in the back of the room."

"Leaning into his experience as a former coach, Walz gave a quick speech about teamwork. Harris told the crowd they were all leaders in their own way. Next stop: Sandfly Bar-B-Q in Savannah, a restaurant decorated with license plates from various states. Harris and Walz were greeted by the restaurant's owner, employees and local patrons. Walz sought out a group of teachers and praised their 'noble' work. He talked about the importance of optimism and insisted, 'Our politics can be hopeful.' Outside, a man held a Trump flag."

This is the best NPR can do at puffing the Harris/Walz bus tour of Georgia, in a piece titled "Harris is on a 2-day Georgia bus tour. It’s the latest sign the state is in play."

It's kind of unfair not to mention Walz in the headline. He seems to be doing most of the work — telling the football team that teamwork is important, brown-nosing the teachers, and touting optimism. What did Kamala Harris even do? She "told the crowd they were all leaders in their own way." I must infer that she first did some self-promotion: She's asking to be made the leader of the world. Then, in a show of caring, she speculates that they too are leaders in some obscure way in whatever obscure backwater of Georgia this happens to be.

Why does a public school herd its students into campaign events — replete with student musicians repurposing the school's fight song to support a political candidate? It's compulsory schooling and compulsory participation in politics. The purpose is openly political.

ADDED: Here's video of the event at the high school:

Sunrise — 5:57, 6:16, 6:20.

Last June, we learned of a study that found that 25% of Gen Z job applicants brought a parent along with them to a job interview.

See "So what if Gen Z applicants bring their parents to a job interview?" (L.A. Times).

This week, we learn that the Democratic Party nominee for President of the United States is bringing "America's Dad" to her first interview.

I took that screenshot at Axios.

If you're at all skeptical about whether Tim Walz has been presented to us as America's Dad or you just want to experience some good, old fashioned sad laughing watch this:

"It wasn’t until I was incarcerated that I got into makeup.... I’ve been in here for 28 years, so I’ve tried it all: using the string of a tampon to pluck, thread, and arch my eyebrows..."

"... because I couldn’t afford tweezers; using immersion heaters to melt down black checkers from the game board, let it dry, and make mascara... getting body soap a little wet to make hair gel for my edges, which dries white eventually; shaving down water color paints and colored chalk from art class to make eyeshadow; using that same paint as nail polish..."/"The... homemade makeup I’ve used is colored pencil eye shadow. I put a few drops of water in a lid from a jar of hair grease, dip the pencil in the water, then scrub it around until it becomes soft. Then I can just paint it onto my eyelids as desired. This could also be done with either graphite pencils or colored pencils. Occasionally I’ve painted my lips with M&Ms, licking the candy and rubbing it over my lips to color them. Long ago a friend of mine also taught me how to mix lotion, baby powder, and a few grains of freeze-dried coffee to make a foundation that was surprisingly good...."

From "Fighting for Beauty Behind Prison Walls/For incarcerated women, access to makeup can mean access to their authentic selves. So why is it often denied?" (NY Magazine).

"Valiant says that he tries not to use the word 'intelligent' to describe people (in fact, he is 'sometimes taken aback' when he hears others use it)..."

"... instead, he is drawn to 'valuable abilities that somehow involve learning and are not well captured by conventional notions of IQ.' An educable mind, he writes, can learn from books, lectures, conversations, experiences, and Zen koans—from anything, really—and notice when relevant aspects of almost forgotten knowledge reveal themselves.... To a degree, the connections, recombinations, and new applications of knowledge involved in being educable are useful precisely because they aren’t obvious.... A civil-engineering class I took in college, which focussed on the structural forces shouldered by bridges and skyscrapers, comes back to me with great regularity when I think about all sorts of things. Wind exerts its force along the length of a skyscraper, causing it to bend. Similarly, a new source of stress in your life can’t be compartmentalized; it increases the pressure everywhere. It’s interesting to see one’s mind through the lens of educability. It makes you wonder what other cross-pollinations have occurred.... Reading widely about things that don’t seem immediately or practically useful, in the hope that what you learn now may prove meaningful later—that’s pretty much the definition of a liberal-arts education. Who knew that one of its best defenders would turn out to be a computer scientist?"

Writes Joshua Rothman, in "What Does It Really Mean to Learn?/A leading computer scientist says it’s 'educability,' not intelligence, that matters most" (The New Yorker).

Valiant =  Leslie Valiant, the computer scientist. His book is “The Importance of Being Educable.” 

"The tone of the new charges was apparent from the first paragraph of Mr. Smith’s filing, which described Mr. Trump as 'a candidate for president of the United States in 2020.'"

"The original indictment had referred to him as 'the 45th President of the United States and a candidate for re-election in 2020.'... Perhaps the most significant change between the 36-page superseding indictment and the original 45-page indictment was that Mr. Smith’s deputies removed all allegations concerning Mr. Trump’s attempts to strong-arm the Justice Department into supporting his false claims that the election had been rigged against him. The initial charging document accused Mr. Trump of conspiring with Jeffrey Clark, a loyalist within the Justice Department who had promised to launch 'sham election crime investigations' and to 'influence state legislatures' to back Mr. Trump’s false claims of election fraud.But in its ruling on immunity, the Supreme Court effectively struck those accusations from the case.... [T]he court decided, a president’s dealings with the department were part of the core official duties of his office and, for that reason, were immune from prosecution."

From "Special Counsel Revises Trump Election Indictment to Address Immunity Ruling/Jack Smith’s filing, in the case charging the former president with plotting to overturn the 2020 election, came in response to the Supreme Court’s ruling giving former presidents broad immunity" (NYT).

"The push to ban masks in some public settings began in June after some pro-Palestinian demonstrators covered their faces during protests."

"They said that they had done so to avoid online harassment, though some activists used the anonymity provided by their masks to harass people or to engage in acts of vandalism.... The Nassau County law, the Mask Transparency Act, makes it a misdemeanor to wear a face covering in public for reasons other than health or religion. It was passed by the county’s Republican-controlled Legislature this month. Masks that are not worn for health or religious reasons 'are often used as a predicate to harassing, menacing or criminal behavior,' the legislators wrote in the bill. Violators could face a fine of up to $1,000, up to a year in jail, or both.

From "Man Is First to Be Charged in New York With Wearing a Mask in Public/Wesslin Omar Ramirez Castillo was frisked and charged with knife possession after the police stopped him for wearing a ski mask" (NYT).

Castillo, 18, "was walking down Spindle Road, a residential street of tidy lawns and single-family homes in Hicksville, wearing dark clothes and a ski mask in August, the county police said in a statement."

Sunrise — 6:17, 6:21, 6:21.

"So, Harris is trying something no sitting vice president has ever attempted: running as an insurgent and treating Donald Trump as the incumbent."

"In her telling, she is the fresh new face on the political scene, while Trump is the one running for reelection. She is asking voters to forget that she co-presided over an unprecedented panoply of disasters over the last four years and is now campaigning on a message of denying Trump another term. This is absurd. Democrats have been in power for the past 3 1/2 years and have held the White House for 12 of the past 16 years. But, so far, that strategy is working.... Trump needs to make clear that Harris not only helped craft those Biden catastrophes, but also she plans to double down on the administration’s failures — and that a Harris presidency would be a second Biden term."

Writes Marc A. Thiessen, in "A sitting VP has won once in 188 years. Harris won’t likely be next. Only one sitting vice president has been elected to the top office in the last 188 years" (WaPo).

Waiting for the play to begin.

At the American Players Theater today. The play was "The Virgin Queen Entertains Her Fool." Excellent play, I thought, and the acting was astounding.

I just bought my ticket this morning, one of the last available seats for the matinee. That's why my view of the set is all the way to one side, but it didn't diminish my enjoyment of the performances. I highly recommend the show, but it's sold out for the rest of its run. Instead, take a chance on anything playing at APT. We're going out again soon, this time to see "King Lear." Like "King Lear," "The Virgin Queen Entertains Her Fool" has an aged monarch with a succession problem and a Fool character. The same actor, Josh Krause, plays both fools this summer. 

At the Bookstore Café...

... you can talk all afternoon.

Bonus points if you can identify this excellent place.

"I’ve said this from the beginning: I am not a church boy. I have so many skeletons in my closet that if they could all vote, I could run for king of the world."

Said RFK Jr., quoted in "Environmental group calls for RFK Jr. to be investigated for reportedly sawing off whale head/In a resurfaced 2012 interview, his daughter shared he had once used a chain saw to cut off a dead whale’s head to bring it home, reportedly to study" (WaPo).

According to Town & Country magazine, Kennedy once heard that a dead whale had washed up on Squaw Island in Hyannis Port and “ran down to the beach with a chainsaw, cut off the whale’s head, and then bungee-corded it to the roof of the family minivan for the five-hour haul back to Mount Kisco, New York.” 

“Every time we accelerated on the highway, whale juice would pour into the windows of the car, and it was the rankest thing on the planet,” Kick Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy’s daughter, told the magazine then. “We all had plastic bags over our heads with mouth holes cut out, and people on the highway were giving us the finger, but that was just normal day-to-day stuff for us.”

Personally, I'd keep the car windows rolled up if it were raining whale juice. But that doesn't mean Kick — who calls their kid Kick? — was lying.

It's interestingly similar to the story of Mitt Romney's dog on the car roof, which also involved kids grossed out by animal liquid leaking onto the window.

By the way, how scrupulous are you about the laws about collecting animal parts? I'm the pusillanimous type who admonishes my companion "Don't touch it!" when there's a feather lying on the trail.

The classic "Fear and" title is "Fear and Loathing," but somehow, in these days of loathing, we've got "Fear and Joy."

I'm so skeptical... as I'm reading "Fear and Joy in Chicago/The excitement that radiated through the Democratic National Convention was the other side of what had until recently been a deep despair" by Fintan O'Toole (NYRB).

[T]he Democrats in Chicago were singing a redemption song. It had three parts: valediction, malediction, and benediction....

Having taken a break to listen to "Redemption Song" (see below), I will concentrate on the malediction:

[B]ad-mouthing Trump at a Democratic convention is not that hard. Yet it too had its complications. Just as the Democrats had to navigate between loving Joe and giving him a jubilant cheerio, they had to figure out how to manage another contradictory feat: cutting Trump down to size while retaining a clear sense of the threat he poses to the very existence of the American republic...

They seemed — to O'Toole — to be trying "to reconfigure Trump as the Wizard of Oz, a little man who has conjured an illusion of MAGA magnitude." 

Even the renegade Republican Adam Kinzinger was entirely on message when he called Trump “a weak man pretending to be strong. He is a small man pretending to be big…. He puts on quite a show, but there is no real strength there.”

I add my favorite blog tag, "big and small." 

"Nearly three weeks ago, on an airport tarmac in Detroit, Eugene asked VP KAMALA HARRIS about plans for a sitdown interview."

Eugene Daniels, Rachael Bade, Ryan Lizza report at Politico.

Harris gave him a deadline: “I’ve talked to my team,” she said. “I want us to get an interview scheduled before the end of the month.”

That’s four days from now, on Saturday. Of course, “scheduled” doesn’t mean the interview will happen by then....

And "want" doesn't mean she's promising to fulfill her wants... or ours. 

Harris campaign staff have been asking reporters who they think she should talk to. Behind the scenes, TV producers from big name anchors have been calling the campaign to pitch their talent as the person she has to do it with.

That's a good way to make people feel included and to create a sense that there is progress. We're going forward, not back, but ever forward... collecting names, collecting dreams... wishes and dreams... what do you want and what do you want... who's your most favorite best-ever big time anchor that in your dream-of-all-dreams interview you see Kamala Harris — the woman who talks to no one — talking to? 

Harris has had a light schedule since accepting the nomination Thursday in Chicago....

She's resting, perhaps. Listening to music. Laughing. Hasn't she done enough?

The Politico writers brainstorm about how to participate in the massive enterprise of imagining who should do the interview and how one might sell the campaign on that name.

"Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Monday that the Biden administration was "wrong" to pressure the company to censor certain inaccurate content during the COVID-19 pandemic."

 Axios reports.

In 2021, senior administration officials "repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content," Zuckerberg wrote in a letter to the House Judiciary Committee. 

• This included censoring "humor and satire," he added, noting that officials "expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn't agree." 
• "I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it," Zuckerberg wrote. 
• Meta wouldn't make the same decision today and would "push back" if presented with such a scenario again, he added.

Where is the news in the NYT that Tulsi Gabbard just endorsed Trump?

I had to do a search of the website to find it 7 paragraphs into "How Democrats View Kennedy and Trump: ‘A Weirdo Campaign Just Got Weirder’/Democrats once seriously worried that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. would be a spoiler. Now, after his endorsement of Donald Trump, they see a political opportunity":

And on Monday, after Tulsi Gabbard, the former Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii who has rebranded herself as a celebrity in the MAGA movement, endorsed Mr. Trump, the D.N.C. issued a news release with the headline: “Trump’s Circle of Weirdos Gets Even More Extreme.”

The NYT expresses some disapproval of the weirdness theme, calling it "a playground-style strategy" and giving us this juvenile quote:

“A weirdo campaign just got weirder,” said Matt Bennett, a co-founder of Third Way, a Democratic think tank that has led efforts to stop independent and third-party candidates from siphoning votes from Democrats. “This campaign of freaks is not going to do Republicans any favors.”

Tulsi Gabbard's name appears in another NYT article this morning, "Trump Hits Harris Over ‘Humiliation’ in Military’s Afghan Exit/Courting military votes, Donald Trump visited Arlington National Cemetery to observe the anniversary of a deadly Kabul bombing and then spoke at a National Guard group’s conference."

Sunrise — 6:23, 6:24, 6:25, 6:26.

"Rawdoggers seem to believe they have invented a new form of meditation, and who am I to say they have not?"

"Whereas the Buddhist might accept the captive circumstances of a long flight as an invitation to let go of worldly snares, the rawdogger seeks to overcome them through refusal and its public performance. He rejects the movie. He rejects the frail crinkle of the plastic airline-refreshment cup. He rejects the tender sorrow that cruising altitude somehow always amplifies. Having ascended thanks to the ingenuity of humankind, the rawdogger now rises above the very idea of ascent.... The practice evolved from the broader rise of asceticism, especially among (young, very online) men.... What is natural... about being hurtled through the troposphere in a pressurized metal tube burning petroleum distillates refined from dinosaur debris?... But to pursue a state of purity—even a fictional one; even a made-up, obviously impure one—still feels righteous. To act on an attempt to become closer to nature, or some imagined state of unadulteratedness, also makes one feel as if one is getting the best of it...."

Writes Ian Bogost, in "Young Men Have Invented a New Way to Defeat Themselves/Rawdogging is a search for purity that cannot be achieved" (The Atlantic)(free-access link, in case you need "rawdogging" defined, etc.).

I'm giving this my "scrupulosity" tag.

"A California beach town is banning residents from smoking inside their own homes, saying the health benefits outweigh concerns over government overreach."

"Carlsbad, a surfing hot spot near San Diego, has decided to prohibit people from lighting up inside apartments, condos and other shared buildings where multiple families live.... At least 84 of California’s 483 municipalities — including Beverly Hills, Cupertino and Pasadena — have enacted similar bans in multi-family private residences, according to the American Nonsmokers’ Rights Foundation."

The London Times reports.

Yes, sometimes I get my news of what's happening in the U.S. from a U.K. paper.

Here's another one: "California’s TikTok generation must learn joined-up handwriting/US state is the latest to adopt rules that require cursive writing to be taught in schools." I'd never seen the expression "joined-up handwriting." By the way, I didn't see the term "cursive" back when I was learning it. It was just called "writing" — as opposed to "printing." Somewhat later, before "cursive," I saw "script." But "joined-up handwriting" is completely new to me, and it really makes it seem silly: Whatever was so important about not lifting the pen up when going from letter to letter? It was once believed to be faster, and there was so much time to be saved.

One Californian proponent of the new requirement (a Democrat) asserted that "there’s a lot of research that shows that cursive handwriting enhances a child’s brain development, including memorisation, and improves fine motor skills."

"Even though electricity demand from A.I. is expected to at least double in the coming years, the efficiency of the technology could increase at an even higher rate...."

"After the mania has calmed down, other incentives kick in,' said Jonathan Koomey, a former scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who is now an independent researcher. 'here is a huge incentive for the industry to become more efficient.' The big tech companies are working on ways to streamline their software, hardware and cooling systems to reduce electricity consumption in their data centers. They are locating computing facilities in northern countries, pulling in cold outdoor air as a coolant to reduce electricity and water use. And they are investing in alternative energy sources. If those efforts are successful, and if we’re smart about how we use A.I., it might eventually offer a lot of environmental bang for the buck."

From "Will A.I. Ruin the Planet or Save the Planet? It’s a notorious energy hog. But artificial intelligence can also foster innovation and discovery, and it could speed the global transition to cleaner power" (NYT).

There's so little attention to this issue. If there were more, though, it would fuel suspicions about the seriousness of the climate change emergency. I see an occasional article like this, which really only says, don't worry, technology will find solutions... which is what is said by people who oppose taking strong action on climate change. 

I've been suspecting that Kamala Harris will back out of the debate with Trump.

Why should she expose herself when running on nothing — AKA "joy" — has been working so well?

But suddenly here's news that Trump might be in the process of weaseling out of the debate:

At CNN: "Trump campaign casts fresh doubt on September debate with Harris over microphone dispute." We're told that "a source familiar with the matter" is telling CNN that "Trump’s campaign is casting fresh doubt on whether the September 10th debate will take place on ABC." Trump himself has written: "Why would I do the Debate against Kamala Harris on that network?" But what is the "microphone dispute"? I'm seeing: "The Harris campaign is requesting that ABC and other networks seeking to host a potential October debate keep microphones on, according to a senior campaign official." That relates to an October debate, and the doubt is coming from the Harris campaign, not Trump's. And isn't it funny that the tables have turned on who wants the microphones to shut off?

At The Washington Post: "Trump suggests he might skip ABC debate with Harris/The Sept. 10 debate with ABC is the only one both campaigns have agreed to do with one of the major networks." This piece begins with the Trump statement, "Why would I do the Debate against Kamala Harris on [ABC]?" And this article too shows the Harris campaign attempting to change the rules: "Brian Fallon, the Harris campaign’s senior adviser for communications, said in a statement, that the campaign has told ABC and other networks that 'both candidates’ mics should be live throughout the full broadcast.'"

At Politico: "Playbook: Scoop: The secret debate about the Trump-Harris debate." 

"Kinda worried the Democrats are so thrilled with the sudden transformation from Biden to Harris they won’t be as obsessed as they ought to be."

Said Gail Collins in this week's "Conversation" with Bret Stephens.

The next thing Bret Stephens said is "Tim Walz’s football analogy about Democrats having the ball and driving down the field while they’re down by a field goal was a good metaphor." How is that a good analogy? Didn't Walz intend us to think of a game with only a few seconds left?

In any case, in politics both teams have to worry about offense and defense at the same time. You can do either or both whenever you want. But this convention felt like a big sugar high. That's the metaphor that comes to mind for me. A big spike of energy, but then what? That's what Collins is "kinda worried" about. We need some substance, and the "sudden transformation" people are adamantly denying us substance... and I'm getting hangry.

Ah, I see Bret Stephens comes in with another metaphor... about that insipid "joy" theme:

But as our colleague Patrick Healy pointed out in an astute essay, “Joy is not a strategy.” Actually, it’s more like a helium balloon that rises and rises — until it deflates and crumples....

"This is a tribute in honor of Bobby. I will establish a new independent presidential commission on assassination attempts, and..."

"... they will be tasked with releasing all of the remaining documents pertaining to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy."

Said Donald Trump, at his Friday rally with RFK Jr., quoted in "Trump vowed to release all remaining JFK files. What could they contain? Despite their differences about what they suspect happened on Nov. 22, 1963, in Dallas, two prominent researchers agree the remaining files should be released" (WaPo).

"Last year, torrential rains transformed the playa’s fine dust into a clay-like paste that clung to shoes like resin."

"Vehicles were immobilized; even walking was a slog. It was so calamitous that President Joe Biden was briefed on the situation. This was 'punishing for people who treat Burning Man like Coachella,' said Ross Melford, an art dealer from Santa Cruz, Calif.... 'This isn’t a music festival, with free beer and sponsors,' Melford [said]. He witnessed panicked attendees attempt to drive in the mud, against official advice, and immediately get stuck. 'We had no remorse for these people and reveled in their panic,' he said."

From "Burning Man isn’t sold out — and the die-hards are thrilled/Following last year’s disastrous rains, ticket sales at the psychedelic desert party are flagging" (WaPo).

Sunrise — 6:19, 6:20, 6:21.

"He would disappear into the woods for weeks at a time, often with nothing but the clothes on his back, and emerge ruddy in health and even a few pounds heavier...."

"By way of income, Mr. Brown ran Tracker School, a series of weeklong courses in the intricacies of bare-bones wilderness living and what he referred to as 'the wisdom of the track.'... Students sleep in tents on the ground, eat around a campfire and use field latrines, in between classroom instruction and hours of what Mr. Brown called 'dirt time,' which they spend bent to the earth, looking for traces of woodland creatures.... Mr. Brown and his instructors welcomed hundreds of people a year, including middle-school students, bored computer programmers and seasoned outdoor professionals from around the world. Though he could seem aloof and intense, Mr. Brown built a broad following...."

From "Tom Brown Jr., World-Renowned Survivalist, Is Dead at 74. For decades, he ran a school in the New Jersey wilderness that taught thousands of students how to survive and even thrive in the great outdoors." (NYT).

"When you are half-naked or even sometimes completely naked, it allows for deeper discussion."

"You talk in a way that doesn’t happen when you are sitting around a table with a tie on or at some formal thing."

Said Mikko Hautala, the ambassador of Finland to the United States, in "'Whatever Happens in the Sauna Stays in the Sauna': Diplomacy, Conducted in the Nude/The Finnish Embassy offers one of the hottest invitations in Washington: a chance to discuss serious topics in a sauna" (NYT).

"It was a rare homage to her father, a prominent economist but fleeting figure in her life who has largely been a footnote in her personal and political story."

"The first Black scholar to receive tenure in Stanford University’s economics department, Dr. Harris remains a professor emeritus there, and turned 86 the day after his daughter gave the most important speech of her life at the Democratic National Convention. He was not among the family members who accompanied Ms. Harris to the convention.... Her relationship with her father is a closely guarded part of Ms. Harris’s life about which she has spoken only sparingly.... 'There is no title or honor on earth I’ll treasure more than to say I am Shyamala Gopalan Harris’ daughter,' Ms. Harris wrote in her book. 'That is the truth I hold dearest of all.'..."

"'Run, Kamala, Run': Mention of Harris’s Father Was a Rare Homage to a Fleeting Figure/In her convention speech, Kamala Harris told of being inspired by her father, a prominent economist who was otherwise largely a footnote in her personal story" (NYT).

Ms. Harris’s father has largely declined to weigh in on his daughter’s barrier-breaking political ascent in recent years, except in 2019 when he criticized a comment she made connecting her Jamaican roots to marijuana use. Since then, he has cited his aversion to seeking publicity....

From Professor Harris's 2019 essay:

"In 2019, Criterion started a streaming service called the Criterion Channel, which a few months ago added Criterion24/7, a nonstop live-stream feed..."

"... from its wide-ranging library of releases.... I watched the Criterion live stream (free to the channel’s subscribers) for 24 hours straight, recording the highlights and lowlights and whatever else seemed notable as my brain numbed and my eyes struggled to stay open...."

Writes Lucas Trevor, in "Criterion is streaming movies 24/7. I stayed up all night to see them. The films were from Hollywood and abroad, scripted and unscripted, good, great or unwatchable — and I watched them anyway" (WaPo)(free-access link).

I can't imagine watching movies for 24 hours straight (or even staying up that long), but it's an interesting experiment, because you're accepting what's on — like in the days of TV before Betamax and VHS — instead of selecting what you want. It's a way to push yourself out of your limitations, and Criterion is especially trustworthy. I've made it a free-access link so you can see what the movies were and read Trevor's description of them.

It's a really exciting sequence. He begins at 6 a.m., and by late morning, he's watching 2 of my favorite movies:

"The word almost never spoken was the name of Ms. Harris’s actual hometown: Berkeley, Calif."

"That little yellow house sits on Bancroft Way in the university city known, fairly or not, for a hippy-dippy vibe where residents gamely embrace the nickname, 'People’s Republic of Berkeley.' Ms. Harris’s old neighborhood is now called Poets Corner for its preponderance of streets named for writers such as Chaucer and Byron. The neighbors, who tend a community garden and circulate a newsletter, have a theory about why Ms. Harris does not shout out her hometown much these days. 'Oh, people would definitely think Berserkeley!' said Anna Natille, who lives near Ms. Harris’s childhood home and was walking her pug, Figgy, past it last week. 'We have such a reputation for being on the far left, that we’re all a bunch of communists and socialists.' In other words, maybe not a great way to lure the country’s middle-of-the-road voters to the Democratic ticket.... 'Berkeley is viewed as the most liberal city in the United States, and we’re proud of that,' [[T]he mayor of Berkeley said. 'But maybe for some people in the red states, that may freak them out.'"

From "As Kamala Harris Claims Oakland, Berkeley Forgives/The vice president has virtually erased Berkeley, Calif., her hometown, from her campaign biography. The residents of 'the People’s Republic' say they get it" (NYT).

What if deception freaks people out? What if straight talk is a lure?