Sunrise — 6:44, 7:01, 7:12.

"She makes me happy. ... She'll probably lose, but she makes me happy. I like seeing her. It's the joy you have when your best friend, who doesn't have their homework, gets called on...."

"It is the face — your friend confides in you: They did nothing. They go, bro... I didn't open the book. 'Cause this was me in school. Like I didn't open a book. And then they'd call me, and they'd be like: Mr. Dillon, what do you think? And I'd go: I'm trying to create an opportunity economy. Like, I'd say shit kind of like her. She still won't study. Like, she's running for president. She's still won't really even — which is what I like about it! If she was like really trying, I'd find it disturbing. The fact that she's kind of half-assing it on the biggest stage — there is no bigger stage.... She's kind of half-assing it on the largest stage. And... I wanna hang out with her. I wanna have drinks with her. I think she'd be a fun person. 'Cause a few years from now, she's just gonna be somebody fun in California.... She's gonna be like: Remember what I was? They tried to make me President. And we're all gonna laugh about it.... There's so, so much hot-under-the-collar anger at her... but we can't forget that this is essentially just a person who had no idea any of this was going to happen.... She never thought that it was going to happen the way that it happened.... And, she refuses to study. She will not open the book."

Says Tim Dillon, in the new episode of his podcast (audio and transcript at Podscribe).

ADDED: I listened to that as I was out on a walk, but the post I had meant to write — just before I gave in to the whim to do a walk — was based on Maureen Dowd's new column, "Where Is the Fierce Urgency of Beating Trump?" (NYT). And now that I'm getting back to it, it feels like the same idea as Dillon's, just way more polite. Dowd says:

[Kamala Harris] needs to make the case for herself more assertively.It’s hard to understand why she didn’t sit down with a yellow pad or laptop long ago and decide why she wanted to be president, what her top priorities would be and how she would get that stuff done. The Vision Thing. Even when getting softballs from supportive TV hosts, Harris at times seemed unsure of how to answer.

ALSO: Here's the Tim Dillon monologue in video form: 

33 things "our most aggressive adversaries would likely implement if they wanted to destroy America from within, and had the ability to take control of our leadership."

A number of my good friends and family have been surprised about my decision to support @realDonaldTrump for president. They have been surprised because my political giving history has been mostly to Democrats, my voting registration has typically been Democrat (in NY, you must…

— Bill Ackman (@BillAckman) October 11, 2024

"Then the vice president enters amid a rain-like patter of footfalls, and the energy in the room changes. 'Hi! How are you? Good to see you again!' Harris says, grabbing my hand and folding down into the opposite seat."

Let's fold down into Vogue Magazine.

I'm reading Nathan Heller's "Vice President Kamala Harris on Her Race to the Finish."

Distinctive photos... by Annie Leibovitz.

Althouse and Meade photograph an ash tree at 7:43 a.m.

Photo #1 by Althouse, photo #2 by Meade.

Open thread in the comments.

"Hospitals and shops catering to pets have become ubiquitous, while childbirth clinics have all but disappeared..."

"... as South Korea’s birthrate has become the lowest in the world. In parks and neighborhoods, strollers are more often than not carrying dogs. Online shopping malls say they sell more baby carriages for dogs than for babies.... 'Liam is like a child to me,' said Ms. Sim, 34, who does not plan to get married or have children. 'I love him the way my mom loved me. I eat old food in the refrigerator, saving the freshest chicken breast for Liam.' Her mother, Park Young-seon, 66, said she felt sad that many young women had chosen not to have babies. But she said she had come to accept Liam as 'my grandson.' On a recent weekend, the mother and daughter joined six other families who took their dogs on a picnic to Mireuksa, a Buddhist temple in central South Korea. So-called temple stays are a way for ordinary people to meditate and enjoy the monastic quiet. Now, some temples encourage families to bring their dogs along. All participants, human and canine, wear gray Buddhist vests and rosaries."

From "One of the World’s Loneliest Countries Finds Companionship in Dogs/They have become pampered family members in South Korea, which has the world’s lowest birthrate and where much of the population lives alone" (NYT).

"Since buying Twitter in 2022, the centaur Elon Musk has been using the platform to reinforce his personal views."

"He fired about 80 percent of employees, unilaterally decided to rename it X and has no compunction about using the platform to support his chosen candidate, Mr. Trump, and to spread disinformation about Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. Not only did Mr. Musk fire most of the people who were tasked with identifying and eliminating disinformation; he reposts it himself. Since Mr. Musk bought it, the company’s reported value plummeted to about $12.5 billion as of January 2024, down from the $44 billion purchase price. Maybe buying Twitter was just a bad investment, but an even more frightening hypothesis is that it was worth $31.5 billion to Mr. Musk, who is still worth $260 billion, to silence his opponents. This is how founder mode theory gets dangerous not just for investors but also for all of us...." 

Writes Kim Scott, former executive at Google and Apple and author of "Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity," in "'Founder Mode' Explains the Rise of Trump in Silicon Valley" (NYT).

"Founder mode" is a coinage that refers to a management style where the founder makes decisions on his own.

Interesting that Kim Scott speaks of Musk buying Twitter (and losing money on it) "to silence his opponents." Didn't he replace the people at Twitter who were silencing their opponents? 

Scott ends her article this way:

"When it’s made clear that certain kinds of speech are not only not going to be punished, but that prominent individuals who were deplatformed for it are now reinstated, it sends an extremely clear signal to everyone that this speech is now explicitly welcome on the platform."

Said Paul E. Smaldino, a professor of cognitive and information sciences, quoted in "Twitter Barred Them. What Happened When Elon Musk Brought Them Back?" (NYT).

I get the feeling the NYT doesn't know that people who care about free speech feel good when it’s made clear that certain kinds of speech are not going to be punished, that speakers who were once punished are participating public debate once again, and that it's extremely clear that even false, misleading, offensive, delusional, and — gasp! — right-wing speech is explicitly welcome on X.

Is the NYT implying that those of us who take the strong free-speech position ought to heed Elon Musk's insistence that it is crucial to vote for Trump?!

"But the threat of a second Trump presidency means that having my birth certificate reflect present reality has turned into a matter of grave importance."

"Quite frankly, whatever is on that document may in the not so distant future determine whether one can live one’s life in peace."

Writes Jennifer Finney Boylan, in "Why I Changed My Birth Certificate 25 Years After I Transitioned" (NYT). Boylan is 66 and "transitioned nearly 25 years ago."

Despite the essay title, there's nothing more about the why — no detail about why Trump is a threat and why a revised birth certificate would work as protection against that threat. Most of the essay is about the process of getting the new birth certificate.

It reminded me of the David Rakoff essay "Love It Or Leave It" in his 2005 book "Don't Get Too Comfortable" (commission earned). It begins:

George W. Bush made me want to be an American. It was a need I had not known before.

"I decided to record my feelings right away, because all year I had been training for situations like today, developing what I call my 'prison Zen.'"

"Whatever way you look at it, nine years, especially in 'strict' conditions, is an extremely long sentence. In Russia, the average punishment for murder is seven years. A prisoner sentenced to an extra term of nine years is going to be upset, to say the least. When I got back to the prison, everyone—who of course already knew about the sentence—furtively gave me a particular kind of look. How was I taking it? What was the expression on my face? It is, after all, intriguing to see someone’s reaction when they have just been told they will be serving the longest sentence of anyone in the entire prison complex. And that they are going to be sent somewhere especially grim and usually reserved for murderers. Nobody is going to come over and ask how I feel, but everyone is curious to see how this plays out. It’s an occasion when a person might hang themselves or slash their wrists. But I am completely fine. Even 'my' jailer said in the course of a really annoying full strip search, 'You don’t look to me to be all that upset.' I am really O.K. I am writing this not because I am willing myself to keep up a pretense of being carefree and blasé but because my prison Zen has kicked in...."

From "Alexei Navalny’s Prison Diaries/The Russian opposition leader’s account of his last years and his admonition to his country and the world" (The New Yorker).

If you are reading this on a mobile phone and can see that I've activated the "mobile" view...

 ... please let me know if this is helping you in any significant way.

I don't like how it looks and plan to turn it off again unless I can understand the benefit.

I believe one "benefit" is the ability to reply to a comment and have your reply appear under that comment. That's something I don't like. I prefer a straight line of chronological comments (and you can simply quote what you are replying to or write @username at the beginning of your comment).

UPDATE: Thanks for all the comments. I'm switching it back. Feel free to keep commenting. This is an option I could turn back on if I saw a good enough reason.

The sky at 3:22 a.m.

We were out at 3:22 a.m. in the hope of seeing the northern lights, but it was not to be. I know people saw the lights much earlier in the evening — around 8, which seems much easier to do. The 3 a.m. slot is the least used hour of the day — is it not? It is when it is most likely that night owls and early birds will both be in bed. But it's a lovely time. Giving up on the lights, we drove around town, just for fun, before heading home.

Another night approaches. Use it well! If you need a place to write, you can write about whatever you like in the comments.

Garnering Amish votes.

I'm reading "The famously secluded Amish are the target of a Republican campaign to drum up Pennsylvania votes for Trump" (WaPo):

Amish PAC aims to garner more votes for President Trump in 2020 in a state both the president and the Democrats are desperate to win. Amish people tend to align strongly on policy with Republicans.... But making voters out of the Amish, who forgo television and the Internet and believe fiercely in the separation of their religious community from government intrusion, may be a steep goal....

A quote from Ben Walters, who co-founded Amish PAC: “The Amish care about religious liberty, business regulation, abortion and judges. Those are four things that the Amish overwhelmingly support President Trump over whoever the Democratic candidate is. We talk a lot more about issues than we do about candidates."

A quote from an Amish woman: "I think Trump — who’s Trump? He’s the president, right? — he’s doing pretty good. Just from what I hear people say, he’s trying to improve things."

"These days, in private conversations, Mr. Musk is obsessive, almost manic.... He praises Mr. Trump’s courage under fire..."

".... he endorsed him on the night of the assassination attempt in Butler — and talks about how funny he is. One person who spoke recently to Mr. Musk recalled him saying, without any hint of irony, 'I love Trump.'... It may be impossible to capture the financial value of all the support Mr. Musk is providing to Mr. Trump. This is in part because of his role on X, where he amplifies so much of the former president’s message. Mr. Trump has privately used grand — and unverified — terms to describe what Mr. Musk is donating to the super PAC, telling one associate recently that the figure is $500 million.... Just as Mr. Musk worked late into the night as his companies teetered on the verge of catastrophe, tinkering with rocket designs at SpaceX, sleeping on a couch in the Tesla factory or making staff cuts at Twitter, Mr. Musk has deemed this an all-hands-on-deck moment."

From "Musk Is Going All In to Elect Trump/Elon Musk is planting himself in Pennsylvania, has brought his brain trust to help and may even knock on doors himself" (NYT).

"What is drama? Mamet says it 'is the quest of the hero to overcome those things which prevent him from achieving a specific, acute goal.'..."

"That suggests that [Kamala] Harris needs to show the American people her strongest, most acute and controlling desire, the ruling passion of her soul. I know what Trump wants. He wants to dismantle the elites who he thinks have betrayed regular Americans. It’s unclear what Harris wants most deeply, other than the vague chance to do good and to be president. You don’t communicate your deepest desire when your campaign is run by a committee. Candidates who are not driven by a single, specific, compelling desire become reactive. They hedge and trim according to the polls. People can sense their cautious, calculating nature. On the other hand, those who are compelled by a single strong desire are obsessed with a well-defined problem, which touches the taproot of their soul. They are on the attack, on the move."

Writes David Brooks, in "How Harris Can Finish Strong" (NYT).

Why are we talking about drama? David Mamet's idea was about how to command the attention of the audience. If Harris is reduced to the level of needing to get us to pay attention, she is already falling far short of what it takes to become President. And somehow this brings us back to a topic that's annoyed me for a long time, which I mark with my tag "how does Kamala feel." The election is not about her feelings, and there has always been something insane about acting like it is.

The convention went so well, we were told, because the theme was joy, and Kamala was joyful. No, she wasn't, but they seem to have thought they could keep that bubble bouncing for her super-short run to Election Day. What about our feelings?

The lack of enthusiasm for Kamala Harris "seems to be more pronounced with the brothers."

Said Barack Obama, quoted in "Obama admonishes Black men for hesitancy in supporting Harris/Former president suggests some in the Black community are uncomfortable voting for a woman and are coming up with excuses" (WaPo).

“And you’re coming up with all kinds of reasons and excuses, I’ve got a problem with that,” he said. “Because part of it makes me think — and I’m speaking to men directly — part of it makes me think that, well, you just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president, and you’re coming up with other alternatives and other reasons for that.”...

The “women in our lives have been getting our backs this entire time,” Obama said. “When we get in trouble and the system isn’t working for us, they’re the ones out there marching and protesting. And now, you’re thinking about sitting out or supporting somebody who has a history of denigrating you, because you think that’s a sign of strength, because that’s what being a man is? Putting women down? That’s not acceptable.”

It looked like this:

Former President Barack Obama has a “tough talk” at the Black voters for Harris event in East Liberty. He addressed that Black men have not been as enthused about Harris as during his first run, and he sought to encourage them to join Harris’ movement pic.twitter.com/gDFZhsdLxC

— Ryan Deto (@RyanDeto) October 10, 2024

This gets my "Obama and manliness" tag.

And it made me think of the old "talking down to black people" controversy of 2008 when Jesse Jackson was caught on an open microphone expressing hostility toward Obama, because he had said, in a Father’s Day speech, addressing black men: "Any fool can have a child. That doesn’t make you a father."

But there, Obama was, I believe, attempting to appeal to white voters by displaying a bit of social conservatism. These new remarks of Obama's are, it seems, very directly aimed getting out the black male vote. It's very close to the election, and he's coming forward, at risk of overshadowing Harris, to deliver a strong push to the black men who might tip the balance in the 3 must-win states. Is his rhetoric effective? It's not for me to say. We'll find out.

ADDED: Harris is black because her father is black, but her non-black mother kept the father from participating in the upbringing of his daughters, and Harris continued the estrangement after her mother died and continues it to this day. We never get to hear from this man, Donald Harris, who is still alive. Do the black men who are hearing Obama's instruction to vote for Kamala Harris think about her relationship to her father? And does Obama think about his own father, who's gone now, but who barely took the trouble to know him?