Sunrise — 5:48, 6:20, 6:20.

Talk about whatever you like in the comments. And please support the Althouse blog by doing your Amazon shopping going in through the Althouse Amazon link.

“A Fish Falls From the Sky and Sparks a Brush Fire in British Columbia.”

“Officials say a flying osprey dropped its catch, which then struck power lines, causing sparks that ignited dry grass.”

NYT. 

"Think of us as the 'Inglourious Basterds' of the House Democrats. We will do anything to win this."

"Trump has fundamentally changed the rules of political engagement in this country. If they attack, you attack back."

Said Rep. Jimmy Gomez (D-California), quoted in "Blue-state Democrats face hurdles countering Texas GOP’s new election map/Democratic leaders in California, Illinois and New York are exploring retaliatory measures to offset the creation of more safe red seats. Moving as swiftly as their GOP counterparts will be difficult" (WaPo)(free-access link).

I saw the movie "Inglourious Basterds," but I don't remember what the characters did other than that they felt justified in doing it because they were fighting the Nazis, so I sought out help from Grok —  How unscrupulous and awful were the Inglourious Basterds?

From Grok's answer:

Maureen Dowd knows what guys want.

I'm reading Maureen Dowd's new column (NYT):

It was one of the most erotic things I ever heard. A man I know said he was reading all the novels of Jane Austen in one summer. 

At first, I figured he was pretending to like things that women like to seem simpatico, a feminist hustle. But no, this guy really wanted to read “Northanger Abbey.”

How does she know what this guy wants?! Maybe he's good at pretending. Maybe he wants it as a means to an end and it's the end that is really wanted. He wants you to think that he wants what you want him to want. 

"Some people seem so obsessed with the morning/Get up early just to watch the sun rise...."

So begins the song Spotify chooses for me after it comes to the end of the album I'd chosen and as I am emerging from the overgrown forest path and looking back to see the sun has finally emerged above the smoke on the lake. 

That's a little too on the nose, Spotify. If you're really following me that doggedly you ought to act more nonchalant.

The album that was my choice — the soundtrack for my sunrise walk/run — was "New Morning." I'd picked it because as I drove up there was a "rabbit runnin’ down across the road" — as Bob sings in the title song. Yes, Bob, like Chuck Schumer, drops his G's.

I got back home and assembled my coffee-and-peanut-butter breakfast and then got a late start blogging because I became quite involved testing whether Grok would replicate my hypothesis about the progression of songs on the "New Morning" album. Seriously, I'm not going to bother you, the blog reader, with the details of my hypothesis about the alternating 5 themes. I'll just say I was surprised that Grok found "One More Weekend" to be "possibly... sinister." Oh, really?! We — Grok and I — got fixated on the first line "Slippin' and slidin' like a weasel on the run." Grok:

"Ya know, it keeps gettin' worse...."

Did Chuck Schumer always drop his G's like that?

Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) blatantly lies and says DOGE cuts are being used to pay for the $200M White House ballroom.

In reality, President Trump and private donors are paying for the ballroom.

All Schumer does is lie, lie, and lie.pic.twitter.com/KeQ04qxwOH

— Paul A. Szypula 🇺🇸 (@Bubblebathgirl) August 1, 2025

"They're gonna spend 2 effin' hundred million dollars" — yeah, 200 effin' million dollars of donated money.

There are 4 more dropped G's in that clip and it's only 26 seconds long. 

"The Russiagate scandal has long been one of the most convoluted, hard-to-follow news stories of all time...."

"Those of us who covered the story from the start had a difficult time explaining to audiences what it was, as we ourselves didn’t know. Now we do.... Finally, it seems, we can explain.... It wasn’t the start of a corruption story about Trump, but the cover-up of a still-unresolved Hillary Clinton scandal. This is purely a Clinton corruption story.... With the help of the declassified Durham material, we can explain the whole affair in three brushstrokes. One, Hillary Clinton and her team apparently hoped to deflect from her email scandal and other problems via a campaign tying Trump to Putin. Two, American security services learned of these plans. Three — and this is the most important part — instead of outing them, authorities used state resources to massively expand and amplify her scheme.... Hillary Clinton got in a jam, and the FBI, CIA, and the Obama White House got her out of it by setting Trump up. That’s it...."

Writes Matt Taibbi, in "No Doubt Left: Russiagate Was a Cover-Up/The most infuriatingly complex scandal of all time has just been reduced to a page or two, thanks to another declassified release" (Substack).

More from Taibbi at "The New York Times Can't Stop Sucking/How many times can one newspaper screw up a story?" (Substack).

ADDED: This post is really a place-holder. It marks my own nonfollowing of the story. Notice what I am quoting — Taibbi's acknowledgment that the story is too hard for people to follow. And it's not as though he's solving the problem for us. The quoted material is conclusory assertion. For someone who isn't already pro- or anti-Trump, you still have no way to sort out what's true. I also read The New York Times, and here's Taibbi telling me The New York Times is systematically screwing it up. Maybe. How am I supposed to know? 

Sunrise — 5:33.

Talk about whatever you like in the comments. And please support the Althouse blog by doing your Amazon shopping going in through the Althouse Amazon link.

Bonus: Water lillies at sunrise:

"Ms. Maxwell cannot risk further criminal exposure in a politically charged environment without formal immunity."

"Nor is a prison setting conducive to eliciting truthful and complete testimony. Of course, in the alternative, if Ms. Maxwell were to receive clemency, she would be willing — and eager — to testify openly and honestly, in public, before Congress in Washington, D.C. She welcomes the opportunity to share the truth and to dispel the many misconceptions and misstatements that have plagued this case from the beginning."

Said David Oscar Markus, Ghislaine Maxwell’s attorney,  quoted in "Ghislaine Maxwell quietly moved from Florida to Texas prison as lawyers seek Trump pardon" (Independent).

And there's this from Trump: "Well, I’m allowed to give her a pardon, but nobody’s approached me with it. Nobody’s asked me about it."

I want to be good at spotting iterations of trends that I don’t already know about. I don’t want to be the out-of-it blogger...

... who criticizes something for being off or weird when it’s actually a thing. I want to get out in front of it, recognize it as a thing, and criticize it from a savvy position, or at least know to shut up about it.

I don't know how good my skill is, because this one might be too dumb and obvious to be tricky....

"To other Gen Zers, the stare may signal a cool detachment, showing that they understand the irony..."

"... especially when selfies are paired with absurd captions or filters. In sum, the Gen Z stare isn’t just a blank look—it’s an important signal. It pushes back against older norms of digital self-presentation, reflects changing attitudes toward visibility and authenticity, and may also be a subtle form of emotional boundary-setting in an age of constant exposure."

From "The Psychology Behind the Gen Z Stare/Have you seen the Gen Z stare? What's really behind it?" (Psychology Today).

There's something called the "aesthetic of resistance."

"There is no precedent for politicians so aggressively raising money for their own entities when they do not have a campaign to use it for."

Writes Theodore Schleifer, in "Trump, Term-Limited, Amasses $200 Million War Chest for Political Ambitions/The money is meant to beat Democrats, but some Republicans worry it could be used to beat Republicans, too" (NYT).

In the first half of 2013, a similar political group supporting a term-limited Barack Obama, Priorities USA, raised just $356,000. As of that June, it held $3.4 million, less than 2 percent of the cash on hand of Mr. Trump’s super PAC.... 

"[T]he White House is currently unable to host major functions honoring world leaders and other countries without having to install a large and unsightly tent approximately 100 yards away..."

"... from the main building entrance. The White House State Ballroom will be a much-needed and exquisite addition of approximately 90,000 total square feet of ornately designed and carefully crafted space, with a seated capacity of 650 people — a significant increase from the 200-person seated capacity in the East Room of the White House.... The White House Ballroom will be substantially separated from the main building of the White House, but at the same time, it’s theme and architectural heritage will be almost identical. The site of the new ballroom will be where the small, heavily changed, and reconstructed East Wing currently sits. The East Wing was constructed in 1902 and has been renovated and changed many times, with a second story added in 1942...."

The White House announces, on its website. The project costs $200 million, and Trump and other donors are paying for it

Am I correct in reading that text to mean that the East Wing will be demolished? I don't see the word demolition, but I see that the structure as it now exists is called "small, heavily changed, and reconstructed." So that seems to mean the structure will be heavily changed and reconstructed one more time, don't you think?

Reading the history of the East Wing as recounted by Wikipedia, I can see why the part of it that's above ground can be regarded as unworthy and subject to complete replacement:

"Elon Musk continued to bankroll Republican candidates after his public fallout with US President Donald Trump, donating millions of dollars to campaign groups gearing up for next year’s midterm elections."

Financial Times reports.

On July 5, a frustrated Musk claimed to have formed the “America Party”, saying he would “focus for the next twelve months” on supporting candidates standing against Republicans. However, there has been no sign of Musk or his allies taking the necessary steps to establish a party, either at a local level or nationwide....

"And um recently I made the decision that I just for now I don't want to go back in the system. I think it's broken...."

"I believe and I always believed that as fragile as our democracy is, our systems would be strong enough to defend our most fundamental principles. And I think right now that um they're not as strong as they need to be. And I just don't want to for now I don't want to go back in the system. I want to I want to travel the country. I want to listen to people. I want to talk with people. And I don't want it to be transactional where I'm asking for their vote...."

Said Kamala Harris, to Stephen Colbert (scroll to 6:02). 

Colbert said it is "harrowing" to hear her say that. When she responded: "Well, but it's also evident, isn't it?... It is harrowing..." Colbert broke in to rescue her. It sounds as though she's saying that she doesn't "want to be part of the fight anymore."

She takes the hint: "No. Oh, absolutely not. I am always going to be part of the fight. That is not going to change. I am absolutely going to be part of the fight."

And then she plunges into a Biden-worthy garble:

"Professors like myself hate ChatGPT and similar platforms because our students turn in artificially generated, robotic papers. But..."

"... if we ordinarily gave vapid, shallow papers the D’s or F’s they deserved, this problem wouldn’t exist. The fact that such papers routinely get A’s or B’s shows that we have come to expect and to train humans to write robotic papers. Similarly, when I worry I can’t distinguish a colleague’s genuine sentiments from the vaporous generalities Gmail’s AI suggests, what am I really worrying about? Is it that the machine is so good? Or that my interactions with my colleague are so empty? Once we step back from the paranoid reaction, the problem presented by AI facial recognition assumes different contours. In posing anew the question of facial control, the technology provides us with an opportunity to think about how such control works in both its artificial and natural forms...."

Writes Michael W. Clune, in "Your Face Tomorrow/The puzzle of AI facial recognition" (Harper's)(Harper's gives you 2 free articles a month, and I used one of mine to read that. I doubt that you'll find 2 better choices and recommend that you go ahead and redeem your freebie on the first of the month).

Sunrise — 5:29, 5:49, 6:12, 6:13.

Talk about whatever you like in the comments.

And please support the Althouse blog by doing your Amazon shopping going in through the Althouse Amazon link.

"It was intense... and deeply personal," says Kamala Harris without intensity and sounding utterly impersonal.

But she must stand there, in front of the camera, and hold the book she's obligated to promote, however wanly:

What the world saw on the campaign trail was only part of the story.

My new book is a behind-the-scenes look at my experience leading the shortest presidential campaign in modern history.

107 Days is out on September 23. I can't wait for you to read it: https://t.co/G4bkeZB4NZ pic.twitter.com/taUof0L4hs

— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) July 31, 2025

The wanness is almost amusing. Yesterday, I was reading the NYT news article, "Harris Will Not Run for California Governor Kamala Harris, the former vice president, announced that she has decided not to run for California’s top office," and I stumbled across this:

Ms. Harris has spent the months since November largely out of the public eye, delivering a paid speech in Australia and appearing at weddings of some of her famous friends. She was in England last week for the wedding of the Apple heiress Eve Jobs, whose mother, Laurene Powell Jobs, is a close friend. In June, she attended the wedding of Hillary Clinton’s top aide and the son of a Democratic megadonor. In May, she was spotted at the Met Gala in New York.

Is she even interested in politics? 

Can't understand the haircut? It's Maude Frickert!

I'm seeing Scott Adams assert "I can't get past the haircut."

He's looking at this:

🔥BREAKING: Media Matters is on the brink of collapse.

After two decades of smearing conservatives, the Soros-funded attack dog is under siege—from lawsuits by @elonmusk, FTC probes, & state AG investigations. Why? Donor fraud, defamation, & LYING to destroy Twitter.

Thread🧵 pic.twitter.com/LfYzbt7Rsb

— Rod D. Martin (@RodDMartin) July 30, 2025

I'm seeing Maude Frickert:

Sorry about the sexism! I just wanted you to see the wig Jonathan Winters wore back in the 1960s.

"Worldwide search traffic has fallen by 15 percent in the past year.... Now that AI-generated summaries are being integrated into search results..."

"... anyone looking for information has less reason to click through to the websites where that information originates. For media publishers whose business models rely on referral traffic to bring them advertising revenue, this shift feels nothing short of catastrophic. There’s no getting around the decline in traffic. Last week, the Pew Research Center released a report showing not only that people who see an AI-generated summary on Google search are significantly less likely to click on external links than users who don’t, but that people almost never click on the links included in the AI summary. (They do so just 1 percent of the time.).... One strategy is trying to demand compensation from AI companies for crawling their content. Media companies are also investing in their own channels that deliver content directly to readers. They are launching new subscriptions, newsletters, events, membership programs, and even platforms and apps. Wired’s Katie Drummond wrote recently that the... trick... is to 'connect our humans to all of you humans.'...."

From "Traffic Apocalypse/Google’s AI Overviews are killing click-throughs to news sites" (Columbia Journalism Review).

"As profound as the abundance produced by AI may one day be, an even more meaningful impact on our lives will likely come from everyone having a personal superintelligence..."

"... that helps you achieve your goals, create what you want to see in the world, experience any adventure, be a better friend to those you care about, and grow to become the person you aspire to be. Meta's vision is to bring personal superintelligence to everyone.... This is distinct from others in the industry who believe superintelligence should be directed centrally towards automating all valuable work, and then humanity will live on a dole of its output. At Meta, we believe that people pursuing their individual aspirations is how we have always made progress expanding prosperity, science, health, and culture. This will be increasingly important in the future as well.... Personal devices like glasses that understand our context because they can see what we see, hear what we hear, and interact with us throughout the day will become our primary computing devices.... Meta believes strongly in building personal superintelligence that empowers everyone...."

From Mark Zuckerberg's manifesto at Meta. 

If you want the "personal" touch, here's the purported person, Mark Zuckerberg, interfacing with the camera to explain how personal the Meta approach to AI is going to be:

Today Mark shared Meta’s vision for the future of personal superintelligence for everyone.
Read his full letter here: https://t.co/2p68g36KMj pic.twitter.com/Hpzf77jAiG

— AI at Meta (@AIatMeta) July 30, 2025

AND: Speaking of eyeglasses that understand and facilitate your personal agenda... here's the ad that was served up to me in the very next thing that I read, "Virginia Giuffre’s Family Was Shocked That Trump Described Her as 'Stolen'/The siblings of one of Jeffrey Epstein’s most prominent accusers wonder what the president knows":

"Biden’s post-presidency is already striking. His memoir sold for $10 million — a major sum, but tens of millions less than Barack Obama’s."

"At least one report has suggested he may be struggling to raise money for his presidential library, though a spokesperson described this characterization... as 'unfair.'... In official Washington, there is little... expression of appreciation for the former president. Biden still casts a long shadow over his party. In recent days, his former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg had to answer for whether he said all he knew about Biden’s cognition in office. ('I told the truth, which is that he was old,' Buttigieg told NPR’s Steve Inskeep. 'You could see that he was old.') And had his former VP Kamala Harris actually run for California governor, the NYT noted, she would 'have faced difficult questions about how much she knew about President Biden’s decline and whether she participated in shielding his diminished health from the public.'...  Biden... has kept himself at a remove from the Oversight proceedings and the former aides who are testifying...."

From "Playbook: How Joe Biden is living" (Politico).

Quotes about the House Oversight proceedings from "two people familiar with Biden’s thinking":

At the Wednesday Night Café...

 ... you can say what you've got to say.

"Have you noticed that trump is one of the very few presidents who does not have any kind of pet? I would sooner get rid of those folks than the cats and dogs. Absurd."

A comment on the NYT article, "We Love Our Dogs and Cats. But Are They Bad for the Environment? Some pets have wide-ranging effects on the planet. Here’s how to lessen them."

In the comments, everything always gets around to Trump. 

From the article: "Gregory Okin, a geographer at the University of California, Los Angeles, calculated in a 2017 study that the estimated 163 million cats and dogs in the United States consume a whopping quarter of the country’s animal-derived calories.

"'It is kind of our job to give a "wow" experience,' says William, a Trader Joe’s employee in Seattle.... 'Hey, how’s it going?' is William’s only prepared line."

"'From there, if they seem like they want to talk, I’ll ask more questions. If not, I’ll let it be, I just ring them out and bag them and let them go.' Shoppers tell him about their ongoing chemotherapy and the death of their beloved cats.... During morning shifts at Trader Joe's, elderly people come in wanting someone to talk to.... On TikTok, nearly 6 million followers tune in to watch actor and longtime server Drew Talbert dramatize restaurant behavior from a server’s perspective. Bartenders go viral for satirizing pushy customers. Lawrence, who does stand-up comedy, makes videos reenacting interactions with customers who inexplicably demand made-up coffee drinks. Servers have taken to TikTok to imitate the 'Gen Z stare,' a reference to the way some young adults stare coldly at servers, as if rebuking them for the question, 'Hi, what can I help you with today?'"

From "What your barista thinks of your small talk game/Some people live for chitchat. Others hate it. Service workers have two seconds to figure out which camp a customer is in" (WaPo).

If it's Trump news, the good news can't be good news.

Headline at The New York Times scrambles to squelch whatever lift you might get from the news that the economy grew in the second quarter: "U.S. Economy Grew in Second Quarter as Tariffs Scrambled Data/Gross domestic product rebounded in the spring after contracting at the start of the year, but consumer spending remained weak" (NYT).

We're serving tariff-scrambled data this morning. 

Let's read the text:

Economic growth softened in the first half of the year, as tariffs and uncertainty upended business plans and scrambled consumers’ spending decisions.

Your brains are scrambled! There's growth, but it's soft-boiled growth. Yuck!

The disruptions extended to the economic data itself.

"Wow. Now the crazy Left has come out against beautiful women. I’m sure that will poll well…."

Tweeted Ted Cruz, quoted in "Ted Cruz is latest to defend Sydney Sweeney's American Eagle ad ripped as 'Nazi Propaganda'" (NY Post).

I already blogged Sweeneygate yesterday, and I wouldn't bring it up again — certainly not just because Cruz weighed in — but it resonates with this New York Times "Opinions" podcast I'm in the middle of listening to this morning:

"Thin, White and Right: The Ideal Christian Woman/How skinny became a conservative calling card."

That's a gift link that goes to the NYT page with the audio and a transcript. Keep in mind that there's an idea that there's something right wing/Nazi about beautiful white women. The NYT isn't quite saying that. The columnist Jessica Grose, interviewed at the link, is working on something (presumably) more sophisticated):

"Can you imagine what would happen if politicians started paying for people to endorse them. All hell would break out."

Said Donald Trump, quoted in "Trump demands Kamala Harris, Beyoncé, Oprah be prosecuted over 2024 campaign payouts: 'Totally illegal'" (NY Post).

What about paying them to not denounce you? Wasn't Trump prosecuted for that?

"The first waves began hitting the U.S. West Coast after an 8.8-magnitude quake off Russia’s coast put a swath of Pacific nations on alert."

Live updates from the NYT. Gift link, here.

ADDED: "The Kamchatka Peninsula is so known in Russia for its wilderness and lack of communication links that it has become a byword for 'remote.'... Unlike Turkey and Syria, countries that have been devastated by earthquakes in recent years, Kamchatka is sparsely populated — and the Soviet-era housing there typically has only one or two stories.... Moving around Kamchatka is difficult: The peninsula has just a few hundred miles of paved roads, mostly around major towns, and there are no roads to cross the swampland separating it from the mainland. Kamchatka has become a popular destination for tourism in recent years, with travel companies offering camping, helicopter rides and off-road tours for the visitors to see the volcanoes or admire the pristine forests and rivers.... A tour guide in the Kuril Islands, Yelena Kotenko, posted a video of tourists running out screaming from a two-story building as tiles rained down from its roof. The tourists went up the side of a volcano while a tsunami was rising on the coast, she said."

"We banned assault weapons, but our laws only go so far when an AR-15 can be obtained in a state with weak gun laws and brought into New York to commit mass murder."

Said New York Governor Kathy Hochul, quoted in "Even New York’s Strict Gun Laws Couldn’t Prevent the Midtown Shooting" (NYT).

At the Tuesday Night Café...

... you can talk about whatever you want.

If people are poor, give them money.

I've heard that said as if it's obtuse to concoct more complicated policies. But now I'm seeing:

[A] rigorous experiment, in a more direct test, found that years of monthly payments did nothing to boost children’s well-being.... After four years of payments, children whose parents received $333 a month from the experiment fared no better than similar children without that help, the study found. They were no more likely to develop language skills, avoid behavioral problems or developmental delays, demonstrate executive function or exhibit brain activity associated with cognitive development....

It has long been clear that children from affluent families exhibit stronger cognitive development and fewer behavioral problems, on average, than their low-income counterparts. The question is whether their advantage comes from money itself or from related forces like parental health and education, neighborhood influences or the likelihood of having two parents in the home....

From "Study May Undercut Idea That Cash Payments to Poor Families Help Child Development/Rigorous new research appears to show that monthly checks intended to help disadvantaged children did little for their well-being, adding a new element to a dispute over expanded government aid" (NYT)(gift link).

"They jaywalk across bike paths, swagger through crosswalks barefoot like the Beatles, preen in the parks and..."

"... sometimes strut between office buildings and cultural landmarks in the city center. In parks, the problem can be even worse, with the droppings matting the grass and squishing into the treads of shoes."

From "Finland’s Short, Precious Summers Are Plagued by Goose Poop/Finns trying to enjoy beaches and parks during their all-too-brief summers have been vexed by legions of geese — and their droppings. The smelly mess has resisted even the most innovative solutions" (NYT).

The "innovative solutions" are ineffective pooper scoopers in the litter box that is the sandy beach. Outside of Finland, "officials fight the problem at its source: the birds themselves."

"Terry Long, football gave me CTE and it caused me to drink a gallon of antifreeze.... Please study brain for CTE. I’m sorry. The league knowingly concealed the dangers to our brains to maximize profits. They failed us.”

Wrote Shane Tamura, quoted in "NYC mass shooter Shane Tamura found with note blaming NFL for giving him CTE — even though he never played pro football" (NY Post).

Terry Long, was a "former Pittsburgh Steelers player who was diagnosed with CTE after downing antifreeze to kill himself 20 years ago."

Tamura apparently intended "to shoot up the NFL HQ — but 'mistakenly went up the wrong elevator banks' and ended up on a higher floor."

Was Tamura influenced by Luigi Mangione?

By the way, "CNN’s Erin Burnett is being skewered for reporting that the gunman who opened fire in a Midtown skyscraper — killing an NYPD cop and three others — was 'possibly white' after viewing the initial security footage released immediately after Shane Tamura’s deadly rampage" (NY Post).

"I think what’s getting people talking — or rather, why everyone was watching these TikToks obsessively over the weekend and picking them apart — is how regressive the ads seem."

"The line about her having great jeans — several people are suggesting in the comments on Instagram and TikTok that this is a 'pro-eugenics ad.' Whether or not that’s the case, it is part of a wave of imagery of influencers, pop stars and musicians that feels tethered to the values of another time."

From "How American Eagle’s Sydney Sweeney ‘good jeans’ ad went wrong/A provocative new denim campaign featuring the actress leans into retro sexiness — and it’s sparking debate about eugenics and ‘wokeness'" (WaPo).

That's a gift link. My last of the month. In case you want to see the ads people are so worked up about. I've avoided talking about them because I don't want to help make them go viral. But they've obviously gone massively viral, so expect more of the same.

It's a pun: "good genes"/"good jeans." You'd think it would have been noticed, used, and groaned over decades ago and that it would be completely uncool to bring it up now. But what if it's cool precisely because people are sensitive and fearful about a perceived rise in enthusiasm for white supremacy. It's needling those poor souls. It's transgressive. Is that where we are?

By the way, Deepika Padukone used the pun 3 years ago, for Levi's jeans:

Who thinks what about the Epstein files?

The Washington Post has a poll and graphics like this:

Here's a gift link.  Check it out. I think it's interesting to see who thinks what. I'd like to ask them why. Obviously, Democrats are hot to think ill of Trump. But why aren't they more concerned that there's bad stuff about Democrats in there? There needs to be some reason why the Biden administration didn't release this information when it was so desperate to stop Trump in 2024. But the way of the human mind is not reason. It is wishful thinking. We are optimists, even about scurrilous ugly things.

"Formidable economies like the European Union and Japan have abruptly made peace with higher tariffs on their exports, acquiescing to President Trump’s demands...."

"As major economies fall in line to sign agreements that include the highest tariffs in modern history, the president’s vision for global trade is rapidly being realized. That new normal uses America’s economy as leverage, with other countries accepting tariffs of 15 to 20 percent to do business with the United States.... The outcome has seemingly proved Mr. Trump right that his tariff threats are a powerful bargaining tool...."

Writes Ana Swanson, in "Trump Is Winning His Trade War. What Will That Mean for the Economy?/The president’s vision for reshaping global trade is falling into place, but he is embarking on an experiment that economists say could still produce damaging results" (NYT)(free-access link).

They're even submissively adopting his hairstyle:

Once mocked, now emulated.

That's Ursula von der Leyen, the head of the European Commission, enduring the announcement of Trump's victory in the trade war.

"New York City’s Democratic primary voters overwhelmingly believe that Israel is 'committing genocide' in Gaza..."

"... and that the United States should stop arming the Jewish state, according to new polling from a pro-Palestinian group.... Asked if the city should 'enforce the arrest warrant' against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani supports, 63% of primary voters said yes."

Semafor reports, in "Poll: New York Dems side with Mamdani on Israel, Netanyahu."

At the Monday Night Café...

... you can talk until the break of dawn.

After more than 27 years at The Washington Post, including almost 15 as The Fact Checker, I will be leaving on July 31, having taken a buyout.... he financial considerations were impossible to dismiss."

Writes Glenn Kessler, the Washington Post "fact checker," over at LinkedIn.

"So what’s next for The Fact Checker? I’m not sure. As many people at The Post know, I tried to arrange a short-term contract that would have given the editors time to find a worthy successor and allow me to train him or her. I didn’t want The Post to have a gap in fact-checking coverage during this fraught period in U.S. history. But we couldn’t work out an agreement."

Kessler tells us he plans to write books and in fact, he's already written a novel. It's "about a love triangle set in 1920s Dutch East Indies (colonial Indonesia), based on State Department cables I found in the National Archives."

"Harvard University has signaled a willingness to meet the Trump administration’s demand to spend as much as $500 million to end its dispute with the White House..."

"... as talks between the two sides intensify, four people familiar with the negotiations said.... The sum sought by the government, which recently accused Harvard of civil rights violations, is more than twice as much as the $200 million fine that Columbia University said it would pay when it settled antisemitism claims with the White House last week. Neither Harvard nor the government has publicly detailed potential terms for a settlement and what allegations the money would be intended to resolve.... ... Harvard is also skeptical of Columbia’s agreement to allow an outside monitor to oversee its sweeping arrangement with the government. Harvard officials have signaled that such a requirement for their own settlement could be a redline as a potential infringement on the university’s academic freedom...."

From "Harvard Is Said to Be Open to Spending Up to $500 Million to Resolve Trump Dispute/The sum sought by the government is more than twice as much as the $200 million fine that Columbia University said it would pay when it settled its clash with the White House last week" (NYT).

"Buttigieg’s remarks came days after Rahm Emanuel... a potential 2028 presidential candidate, told Megyn Kelly that 'a man can’t become a woman'..."

"... a comment that directly contradicted party orthodoxy and sparked fresh divisions over how Democrats should approach transgender rights. 'I think most reasonable people would recognize that there are serious fairness issues if you just treat this as not mattering when a trans athlete wants to compete in women’s sports,' Buttigieg told NPR."

From "Pete Buttigieg weighs in on ‘fairness’ of transgender kids playing girls’ sports" (Advocate).

This gets my tag "2028 campaign." Looks like Emanuel made a significant move and Buttigieg felt obliged to react. But did Buttigieg say anything comprehensible? He also said "The approach starts with compassion, compassion for transgender people, compassion for families, especially of young people who are going through this, and also empathy for people who are not sure what all of this means for them... and just taking everybody seriously." And: "These decisions should be in the hands of sports leagues and school boards and not politicians, least of all politicians in Washington trying to use this as a political pawn."

And here's Rahm:



"So do you believe boys should be able to play in girls sports?"/"No."

"The solipsistic escapism of post-grunge lived on earlier this month too, when Alpine Valley [Wisconsin] became a respite from the real world...."

"A few festivalgoers wore their politics on their sleeves in the form of T-shirts about 'Making the Gulf America Again,' but there were more faux campaign tees emblazoned with Creed ’24 ('Take Me Higher') than MAGA shirts.... Eventually, it was time for Creed to close out the festival.... [A]ll eyes were on front man Scott Stapp, who looks fit and focused.... [I]t was fascinating to watch him interrogate his own failings and turn them into inspiration for the audience... issuing Facebook status wisdom like, 'The past is the past — it does not define today'.... Things threatened to come off the rails when Stapp was at his most political. The meandering message touched on surveillance, taxes, bank runs, credit card interest rates and the true meaning of 'power to the people.' 'If you want change, stop being gaslit by the media, the government and by everyone in charge,' he said conspiratorially, before course-correcting and calling for positive, constructive change — not disruptive anarchy. Then the band launched into 'One,' an anti-affirmative-action missive that preaches unity and now sounds like the theme song to the All Lives Matter movement...."

Writes Chris Kelly, in "I went to see the world’s most hated bands party like it’s 1999/Creed, Nickelback and other leading lights of the post-grunge era explored the nostalgic limits of rock’s most reviled sound at the Summer of ’99 and Beyond Festival" (WaPo).

That's a free-access link, so you can see some interesting photographs of the deplorable crowd and a good overview of the Alpine Valley setup. Maybe you're planning to — or wonder if you should — go to Alpine Valley to see Bob Dylan there on September 19th. I went to Alpine Valley. Once. It was 2 decades ago. I would not go back. Not for Bob. And therefore not for anybody.

"Are you for real?"

I asked at the end of a post about an essay about social media, vacations, and self-knowledge, but it's the same question I want to ask about these videos Meade has been texting me this morning — this and this.

I texted back: "Is this real?" "Is this AI?"

I took my suspicious mind to Grok: "How can I detect AI video? I'm seeing things like [the above-linked videos]. I believe it is AI. It looks off, especially in the mouth. The person doesn't have a name and the person seems to be confidently spewing talking points. The person has attributes that seem chosen to boost credibility (often a nice-looking person of color saying something conservative)."

I know. If I hate AI, why am I using AI? Maybe AI is better at detecting AI than I am. A fight-fire-with-fire concept. It's different, at least. A second opinion.

Here's Grok's answer. It's not conclusive, but for both videos, it finds evidence that these are AI. I won't copy all that Grok had to offer. I'll just say watch the mouth. The lip shapes don't fully match the phonemes in the audio. And is the flow of language human? Catch yourself. You might like it because you think the person is articulate, but it's not human eloquence. Don't become the person who likes what is artificial.

I'm sounding the alarm. Please, we need to preserve our capacity to detect what is fake. But in the end, we are going to lose. I think we already know that, and I fear that many of us are already thinking that we prefer the fake, even if we can tell, maybe even especially when we can tell. 

"Last winter, I did the noble thing and got off social media. I lacked the inner strength to delete my accounts fully, so..."

"... I settled for removing apps from my phone and enlisting my husband to change my Facebook password. It worked. I stopped scrolling and liking and generally monitoring the lives of people I do not actually know. I felt better — less inadequate, more present, vaguely morally superior. The problem is it’s July now, and I just returned from a really great vacation...."

Writes Rachel Feintzeig, in "If I Don’t Post About My Vacation, Did It Even Happen?" (NYT)(free-access link).

What's the point of depriving yourself in pursuit of a feeling of vague moral superiority?! Why not confront your feeling of inadequacy and flip it into something positive? You're not "better" because you travel or because you don't travel and because you scroll or post in social media or because you don't. 

Now, this lady — "a journalist at work on a book about staring down 40" — was able to get the story of her "really great vacation" published in the New York Times, so the answer to whether it feels as though the vacation really happened if she didn't post about it in social media is clearly YES!!!

But what is this "better" feeling that you want? Feintzeig is "staring down 40," and it was half a lifetime ago that I stared down 40. When I was that young — it really is quite young! — I was working out the difference between what it looked like everyone in general valued and what it was that I — personally and specifically — truly valued. I don't think the question is whether your vacation seems real if you don't show people photographs. I think the question is: Are you for real?

"Our country is not perfect, never has been. But we’ve always had the First Amendment, and now Mango Mussolini is trying to take that from us."

Said a man who identified himself as Matt, AKA "Slim," quoted in "NYC’s ‘We’re With Colbert’ rally for late-night host is a bust with just 20 protesters" (NY Post).

Matt/Slim was one of the organizers of the event. He couldn't get people to show up, and neither could Colbert. Numbers are numbers. The First Amendment protects your right to speak but it won't assemble an audience for you.

Speaking of a low turnout: "Jay Leno slams late-night hosts for alienating half of viewers by targeting just Trump" (NY Post). Leno, who left "The Tonight Show" 11 years ago, said "Why shoot for just half an audience all the time? You know, why not try to get the whole?... I don’t understand why you would alienate one particular group, you know, or just don’t do it at all.... I’m not saying you have to throw your support or whatever, but just do what’s funny.... Funny is funny. It’s funny when someone who’s not​ … when you make fun of their side​, and they laugh at it, you know, that’s kind of what I do."

Sunrise — 5:22, 5:46.

Talk about whatever you like in the comments.

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"Of course the Little Spotted Kiwi isn’t spotted very much! Otherwise, it would be called the Frequently Spotted Kiwi."

A comment at the Metafilter discussion of the RNZ article "Little spotted kiwi found on New Zealand's mainland for first time in 50 years" ("Knowing kiwi pukupuku have survived this whole time in our takiwā is incredible. We are extremely excited and looking forward to working with DOC to secure the future of kiwi pukupuku").

While I'm on the subject of New Zealand birds, let me link to this from a few days ago: "First the dire wolf, now NZ’s giant moa: why real ‘de-extinction’ is unlikely to fly": "[B]irds are harder to 'de-extinct' than placental mammals. One would need a surrogate egg to bring chicks to term, and for many moa species there are no eggs from living birds big enough to house a developing chick. In this case, artificial eggs would need to be developed.... Genetically engineering a tinamou or any other birds in this group to create a moa hybrid would be... much harder than genetically engineering a grey wolf. And in any case, this would not recreate a moa, but merely something that may look like a moa. As one critic put it, it would not have the mauri (life force) of a moa."

I asked Grok to give me more about "mauri" in this context. From the answer: "As one expert reaction put it, 'Genetic tinkering with the fundamental features of a different life force will not bring moa back,' highlighting that mauri cannot be replicated through science alone; it is an irreplaceable, holistic quality tied to the species' natural history, whakapapa, and place in the ecosystem. This critique underscores broader ethical concerns in de-extinction debates, including cultural heritage, interdependence with nature, and the limits of human intervention in restoring extinct beings."

"It took just 75 minutes for President Trump to get what he wanted out of the European Union."

"That’s how long he and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen were away from the cameras. When they returned, Trump was triumphant. Europe agreed to buy $750 billion in American energy products, invest $600 billion in new money in the US and purchase additional US military equipment, according to the terms of the preliminary agreement. Tariffs on many American exports will drop to zero. Duties on most European goods coming into the US rise to 15%. 'I think it’s the biggest deal ever made,' Trump proclaimed."

The New York Post reports.

"The wax lips is my statement against plastic surgery. I’ve been very vocal about the genocide of a generation of women..."

"...  by the cosmeceutical industrial complex who’ve disfigured themselves. The wax lips really sends it home.”

Said Jamie Lee Curtis, posing in wax lips and quoted in "'Generations of women have been disfigured': Jamie Lee Curtis lets rip on plastic surgery, power, and Hollywood’s age problem" (Guardian).

Obviously, the word “genocide” is very strong and risks causing offence, given its proper meaning. To Curtis, however, it is accurate. “I’ve used that word for a long time and I use it specifically because it’s a strong word. I believe that we have wiped out a generation or two of natural human [appearance]. The concept that you can alter the way you look through chemicals, surgical procedures, fillers – there’s a disfigurement of generations of predominantly women who are altering their appearances...."

And yet: 

Curtis’s daughter Ruby, 29, is trans.... “I’m an outspoken advocate for the right of human beings to be who they are.... I’m a John Steinbeck student... and there’s a beautiful piece of writing from East of Eden about the freedom of people to be who they are. Any government, religion, institution trying to limit that freedom is what I need to fight against.””

I guess those Hollywood actresses with their chemicals and surgical procedures are not trying to "be who they are" but to be what they feel others want them to be. How "against plastic surgery" is Curtis? When is it "disfigurement"? When does she feel motivated to use the word "genocide"? One might feel inclined to say that each person is free to make their own decision, but when do onlookers judge them harshly? How do we know who is truly finding their real self in these medical cuttings and who is straining to conform to real or imagined societal expectations?

ADDED: Here's the question I was motivated to ask Grok: "Are trans women mostly attempting to look like beautiful women or is the goal simply to look like an ordinary woman (and to 'read' as a woman)? Or is it enough merely to feel, from their own perspective, that they are expressing their own personal idea of womanliness (or femininity) and not focused on what other people think of what they are seeing?"