Sunrise — 6:16:00, 6:16:21, 6:17:41.

"Subtract your age from 100, and you’ll end up with the number of pages you need to read before dropping a book."

Writes Maya Chung, in "Go Ahead, Put Down That Book" (The Atlantic)(free-access link).

That links to "When Is It Okay to Not Finish a Book?/How to decide to put down a book—without all the angst" (also in The Atlantic, with a free-access link).

Before dropping a book, you need to figure out what’s motivating you to stop reading it.

RFK Jr.'s issues — he's made it very clear — are censorship, chronic disease in children, and the war in Ukraine.

From RFK Jr.'s speech announcing his endorsement of Trump:

Three great causes drove me to enter this race in the first place, and these are the principal causes that persuaded me to leave the Democratic Party and run as an independent, and now to throw my support to President Trump. The causes were free speech, the war in Ukraine, and the war on our children.... 

The military-industrial complex has provided us with a familiar comic book justification, as they do in every war, claiming this one is a noble effort to stop Vladimir Putin. Tiny Ukraine is a proxy in a geopolitical struggle initiated by the ambitions of U.S. neocons for American global hegemony.

I'm not excusing Putin for invading Ukraine; he had other options. The war is Russia's principal response to the reckless neocon project of extending NATO to encircle Russia, a hostile act....

The Ukraine war began in 2014 when U.S. agencies overthrew the democratically elected government of Ukraine and installed a hand-picked pro-Western government that launched a deadly civil war against ethnic Russians in Ukraine. In 2019, America walked away from a peace treaty.... In April 2022, we escalated the war....

President Biden stated that month that his objective in the war was regime change in Russia. His defense secretary, Lloyd Austin, simultaneously explained that America’s purpose in the war was to exhaust the Russian army and degrade its capacity to fight anywhere else in the world. These objectives had nothing to do with what they were telling Americans about protecting Ukraine’s sovereignty. Ukraine is a victim in this war; it is a victim of the West.... 

Judging by her bellicose and belligerent speech last night in Chicago, we can assume President Harris will be an enthusiastic advocate for this and other neocon military adventures. President Trump says he will reopen negotiations with President Putin and end the war overnight as soon as he becomes president. This alone would justify my support for his campaign....

Less than two hours after President Trump narrowly escaped assassination, Calley Means called me on my cell phone.... I was delighted when Calley told me that day that he had been advising President Trump. He told me President Trump had been anxious to talk to me about chronic disease and other subjects, and to explore avenues of cooperation.... In a series of long, intense discussions, I was surprised to discover that we are aligned on many key issues.

In those meetings, he suggested we join forces as a unity party. We talked about Abraham Lincoln’s "team of rivals." That arrangement would allow us to disagree publicly and privately, even fiercely if need be, on issues over which we differ while working together on the existential issues upon which we are in concordance.... [W]e are aligned with each other on... ending the Forever Wars, ending the childhood disease epidemics, securing the border, protecting freedom of speech, unraveling the corporate capture of our regulatory agencies, and getting the U.S. intelligence agencies out of the business of propagandizing, censoring, and surveilling Americans, as well as interfering in our elections....

In case some of you don’t realize how dire the condition is regarding chronic disease, I would urge you to view Tucker Carlson’s recent interview with Calley Means and his sister, who was the top graduate of her class at Stanford Medical School.... This is the most important issue. It has the potential to bring us together, so let me share a little bit about why I believe it is so urgent....

Two-thirds of American adults and children suffer from chronic health issues. Fifty years ago, that number was less than 1%. We have gone from 1% to 66%.... When my uncle was president, juvenile diabetes was effectively nonexistent. Today, one out of every three kids who walk through a doctor’s office door is diabetic or prediabetic.... There has been an explosion of neurological illnesses that I never saw as a kid: ADD, ADHD, language delay, Tourette’s syndrome, narcolepsy, Asperger’s, autism. In the year 2000, the autism rate was one in 1,500. Now, autism rates in kids are one in 36 according to the CDC nationally....

Why are we allowing this to happen to our children?... So, what is causing this suffering? I will name two culprits. First, and the worst, is ultra-processed food.... The second culprit is toxic chemicals in our food, medicine, and environment. Pesticides, food additives, pharmaceutical drugs, and toxic waste permeate every cell of our bodies. The impact on our children's hormones is relentless.... The good news is we can change all this, and we can change it quickly....

I got involved with chronic disease 20 years ago, not because I chose to or wanted to, but because it was thrust upon me. It was an issue that should have been central to the environmental movement.... 

For 19 years, I prayed every morning that God would put me in a position to end this calamity. The chronic disease crisis was one of the primary reasons for my running for president, along with ending censorship and the Ukraine war. It is the reason I made the heart-wrenching decision to suspend my campaign and support President Trump....

If I am given the chance to fix the chronic disease crisis, I promise that within two years, we will watch the chronic disease burden lift dramatically. We will make Americans healthy again....

MAHA. 

This is a spiritual journey for me. I reached my decision through deep prayer and hard-nosed logic.... I am 70 years old. I might have a decade to be effective. I cannot imagine a President Harris allowing me or anyone to solve these dire problems. After eight years of President Harris, any opportunity for me to fix the problem will be out of my reach forever.

President Trump told me this is what he wants to be his legacy. I am choosing to believe that he will follow through....

My dad and uncle made such an enduring mark on the character of our nation.... They were able to put their love into the hearts of ordinary Americans and to unify a national populist movement of Americans—blacks, whites, Hispanics, urban and rural Americans—with love, high hopes and a culture of kindness.... That is the spirit with which I ran my campaign and I intend to bring into the campaign of President Trump, instead of vitriol and polarization.... The most unifying theme for all Americans is that we all love our children....

"And multiple speakers delighted the crowd by alluding to the fabricated viral claim that Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance, wrote in his memoir about having sex with furniture."

"'I wouldn’t trust them to move my couch,' Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said of the GOP ticket on the final night. 'I know a couch commando when I see one,' Rep. Jason Crow (D-Colo.) said minutes later. The jabs were just part of a more expansive case against Trump that Democrats laid out over four nights in Chicago. But they reflected a broader shift in tone for Democrats toward a no-holds-barred kind of rhetorical warfare many in the party once eschewed. Eight years after the Philadelphia convention cheered Michelle Obama’s famous line 'When they go low, we go high' — and with Trump still waging a campaign full of personal insults and baseless accusations... some Democrats said they are tired of being polite...."

From "Democrats once strove to ‘go high’ against Trump. Not anymore. This year’s convention culminated recent efforts to needle Trump on topics known to strike a nerve in the former president, with some Democrats saying they are tired of being polite" (WaPo)(free-access link).

This gets my "civility bullshit" tag, which in this case reflects my belief that the old "When they go low, we go high" was just a strategy choice, to be abandoned when it didn't seem effective... or when the low material is tantalizing enough, like that well-upholstered couch that seems be calling out to you.

"But the potential for researchers to bias the outcomes of these trials has become a common critique of the psychedelic research field."

"It is unusual for a drug under F.D.A. consideration to also be used personally and recreationally by the researchers studying it, or even for clinical trial researchers and clinicians to be encouraged to test the drug themselves. But that’s exactly what Lykos has done with MDMA. In a phone conversation after the F.D.A. decision, Dr. Doblin told me that therapists should be 'strongly encouraged' to have their own psychedelic experiences, as it 'really helps therapists to better understand their patients.' He says almost all of the researchers in the Lykos phase 3 clinical trials underwent MDMA experiences themselves, and many studying the drug are open about their own recreational use. It’s difficult to disentangle the personal enthusiasm for psychedelics with the study of these drugs as therapeutic interventions. And the extraordinary claims of some of its leading researchers — Dr. Doblin has professed a belief that psychedelics will usher in world peace — as well as criticisms of the quality of the clinical trials only accentuate how much the enthusiasm has gotten ahead of the science...."

From "How Psychedelic Research Got High on Its Own Supply" (NYT)(free-access link).

"One of the joys of my life in the social churn of New York is living with a son whose inability to read the room makes him incapable of telling anything but the truth."

"Once, as my husband, Harry Evans, and I left a pretentious social gathering in the Hamptons, Georgie told the host sunnily: 'Thank you very much. No one spoke to me really, so it was a very boring evening. The food was OK. I doubt I will come again.' 'I have never been prouder of you in my life!' shouted my husband in the car. How many times have all of us wanted to say that as we gushed about the fabulous time we just hadn’t had? Then there was the moment he went up to Anna Wintour at one of my book parties and asked if she was Camilla Parker Bowles. And the time at the intake meeting for a supported work program, when the therapist asked Georgie, 'Has anyone ever molested you?' 'Unfortunately not,' he replied. Georgie teaches me every day how much we depend on social lies to make the world go round...."

Writes Tina Brown, in "My Son and Gus Walz Deserve a Champion Like Tim Walz" (NYT)(free-access link).

Tina Brown, the famous author and editor, is the mother of "Georgie, a 38-year-old on the spectrum who still lives with me." She "recognized" Tim Walz's son Gus as "one of 'ours,' a sweet, unfiltered, slightly bewildered-looking young man who wasn’t quite sure what was expected of him in this epic moment of political adulation."

Imagine going to posh parties filled with celebrities at the Anna Wintour level and bringing along a 38-year-old man who does not — and seemingly cannot — refrain from saying insulting things to people. It's like being inside a Marx Brothers movie and forbidden to laugh. 

Jon Stewart daringly but silently calls Bill Clinton a sexual predator... then coyly laughs about it.

Comedian John Stewart is now calling out the hypocrisy at the DNC. pic.twitter.com/zfzfltVmp3

— Jonathan Choe (@choeshow) August 24, 2024

Stewart is getting points for bravery.

"Of all the repellent Kennedy spectacles of the past 60 years, today's spectacle of Kennedys disavowing other Kennedys for not being good Kennedys..."

"... is really the kind of false aristocratic creepiness that makes me want to, you know, drive off a bridge."

Tweets John Podhoretz.

"At the Democratic convention, especially on the opening night, 'corporate greed' was a scourge, and speaker after speaker sought to link 'freedom'... to programs that protect the middle class..."

"... from the depredations of concentrated wealth.... [Y]ou have to understand how [Lina] Khan, a 35-year-old legal wunderkind, became both so revered and so abhorred. Khan is a heroine to many on the left.... But she’s also respected by many populist conservatives... What brings Khan’s fans together is suspicion of Big Business, Big Finance and Big Tech, even if the reason for their suspicion differs.... To Khan, as I suspect to Harris, price gouging means more than just corporations raising prices during emergencies. Rather, it’s shorthand for a whole range of exploitative practices that leave consumers feeling taken advantage of. 'Oftentimes, the way people are taught about prices is it’s just the result of supply and demand,' she said. 'These natural forces. And I think over the last few years in particular, people have started picking up on the fact that actually there are a whole bunch of other factors that can affect pricing.' That can mean outright collusion, but it can also mean things like junk fees and subscription traps. (Under Khan, the F.T.C. has proposed a rule that companies must make it as easy to cancel a subscription as it is to sign up for one.) 'I view the price-gouging conversation as an opening to talk about that broader set of corporate tactics,' said Khan. The fight against those tactics could be an important part of a Harris presidency...."

Writes Michelle Goldberg, in "Billionaire Donors Have It Out for This Legal Prodigy, but President Harris Will Need Her" (NYT).

"The fight against those tactics could be an important part of a Harris presidency...." — could be.  Did Goldberg have to write it like that — in the conditional — because Harris doesn't do interviews?

Sunrise — 6:05, 6:11, 6:18, 6:26.

"Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. plans to endorse former president Donald Trump..."

"... according to a new court filing in Pennsylvania. The filing surfaced ahead of a planned speech in which Kennedy said he would make an announce about the direction of his campaign. Vice President Kamala Harris accepted the Democratic presidential nomination in a speech Thursday in Chicago. Trump is campaigning Friday in Nevada and Arizona. He is scheduled to be joined by a 'special guest' in Arizona."

From "RFK Jr. to endorse Trump, court filing says" (WaPo).

I'm very interested in hearing RFK Jr. explain — with precision — how one goes from where he's been to supporting Trump. 

ADDED: Here's his full speech, which I thought was excellent:

 

From the transcript:

The DNC dragged us into court state after state.... It deployed DNC-aligned judges to throw me and other candidates off the ballot and to throw president Trump in jail. It ran a sham primary that was rigged to prevent any serious challenge to President Biden, then, when a predictably bungled debate  performance precipitated the palace coup against President Biden, the same shadowy DNC operatives appointed his successor also without an election. They installed a candidate who was so unpopular with voters that she dropped out in 2020 without winning a single delegate. 

My uncle and my father both relished debate. They prided themselves on their capacity to go toe-to-toe with any opponent in the battle over ideas. They would be astonished to learn of a Democratic party presidential nominee who, like Vice President Harris, has not appeared in a single interview or an unscripted encounter with voters for 35 days. This is profoundly undemocratic. How are people to choose when they don't know who they are choosing? And how can this look to the rest of the world? 

My father and my uncle were always conscious of America's image abroad because of our nation's role as the template for democracy, the role model for Democratic processes, and the leader of the Free World. Instead of showing us her substance and character, the DNC and its media organs engineered a surge of popularity for Vice President Harris based upon... well, nothing. No policies, no interviews, no debates. Only smoke and mirrors and balloons in a highly produced Chicago circus....

How did the Democratic party choose a candidate that has never done an interview or debate during the entire election cycle? We know the answer. They did it by weaponizing the government agencies. They did it by abandoning democracy. They did it by suing the opposition and by disenfranchising American voters. What most alarms me isn't how the Democratic party conducts its internal affairs or runs its candidates. What alarms me is the resort to censorship and media control and the weaponization of the federal agencies when a US president colludes with or outright coerces media companies to censor political speech. It's an attack on our most sacred right of free expression and that's the very right upon which all of our other constitutional rights rest....

Fungus of the Day.

Photo taken yesterday in Blue Mound State Park. 

Talk about whatever you like in the comments.

"Speculation was rampant over the past few days that the 32-time Grammy winner would appear at the convention... But the final speaker of the night, Harris, was followed by 100,000 balloons..."

"... and a piped-in recording of Beyoncé’s 'Freedom,' a song the Harris campaign has been using in campaign ads and videos that aired throughout the event.... Columnist Laura Bassett mused: 'teasing a huge surprise guest and leaking that it’s both beyonce and taylor swift just to get people to tune in is actually kind of funny.' In fairness, it wouldn’t have been out of the question. In 2020, Beyoncé seemed to endorse President Joe Biden and Harris: On the eve of the election, she called for Texas residents to vote via an Instagram clip that showed her wearing a Biden-Harris mask...."

From "Beyoncé at the DNC? It wasn’t to Bey. Speculation was rampant that the 'Freedom' singer would make a surprise appearance. She never materialized" (WaPo).

I was trying to picture "a Biden-Harris mask," and thinking of one of those rubbery Halloween things with celebrity facial features and finding it weird that Beyoncé would disguise herself like that. Somehow, Covid had slipped my mind:

 

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Beyoncé (@beyonce)

It's a bad move to trick people into staying tuned and then denying them what they thought they'd get, but I'm glad there was so little use of pop-culture celebrities. I was picturing one celeb after another, but I don't think they did that. I watched very little of the convention, but I got the impression that the Democrats went in the opposite direction and kept filling the stage with clusters of relatively ordinary people who exemplified one issue or another. That's good, though not enough for me to watch. 

I didn't watch the Kamala Harris convention speech — way too late for me — but how can I catch up now?

When things are happening live, you sit through them as they happen, including long breaks, such as the one that impelled me to switch off the TV last night. The stage was empty, music was playing, the conventioneers were waving American flags, and the voice-over commentators were enthusing inanely about how wonderful it was to see such a large crowd waving flags. 

I knew that in the morning, all the speeches would be on YouTube, but when you have recorded speeches, are you really going to watch them through? I'd like to, just so I could write about the effect. Did Kamala do what she needed to do with this speech? We went for a long walk yesterday, and one topic was predicting how well the speech would go. I had a scale from 1 to 100 — 1 being the worst possible speech and 100 the best possible. Think of the absurdities. 50 was just: She did what she needed to do, nothing wrong, nothing special. Meade predicted 51, and I took the "under" bet. 

So there's a vague need to figure out where she did on my scale. I've skimmed the headlines and the text of the speech, but I'm disinclined to watch the whole YouTube. Can I just rely on Mickey Kaus?

Haven't read anyone else's comments on Kamala speech. Here are mine: 

High point: "out of their minds" 

Other effective themes: Caring for one another, non-Dem outreach, Project 2025 attacks (however disingenuous); not a series of ethnic or interest group panders--represents broad American interest. 

Low points: All that family stuff, all the furrow-browed pleading ( joy?), general blandness of text; oratorical Olestra. 

Bottom line: Job of speech was to make her plausibly presidential. Mission not accomplished. I doubt this will hurt her campaign but a big missed opportunity. Hollywood trainers could not transform her (which is kind of reassuring).

ADDED: The "out of their minds" bit was this:

And get this. Get this. He plans to create a national anti-abortion coordinator, and force states to report on women’s miscarriages and abortions. Simply put, they are out of their minds. And one must ask — one must ask, why exactly is it that they don’t trust women? Well, we trust women. We trust women.

Language tip: It's better to say "They are out of their mind," singular, because each person only has one mind. 

The use of children in politics.

Tim Walz is under fire for aggressively pulling his son Gus Walz’s arm on stage at the Democratic National Convention.

The incident was apparently filmed on the third day of the event (Wednesday), the same day Walz gave his speech.

Gus is 17-years-old and reportedly has a… pic.twitter.com/5yMWpgy8Ur

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) August 23, 2024

 

Tim Walz's son Gus is 17. We were discussing him yesterday in "Simply having a neurodivergent son is not enough reason for [Tim Walz] to be praised..." 

Yesterday's post title is a quote from an MSNBC article that goes on to say "what makes the Walz family’s story so reassuring is that they seem to want to help Gus live a good life rather than change who he is." I hope that is what they want. But if we're going to talk about what "they seem to want," then we have to contemplate the way Tim Walz — who's being held out as some sort of Dad for All of Us — yanked the boy into place on the stage. But let's talk about all the children who were — conspicuously or not — yanked onto that stage — or any stage.

It's been bothering me for a long time. I've had a tag — "using children in politics" — to collect the many stories over the years. 

ADDED:

This deceptive clip is going viral on right-wing media for supposedly showing Walz “abusing his son” by grabbing his hand & pulling him. In the 2nd clip, I show that he was pulling his son away from smashing his head into the teleprompter, which his daughter has to walk around. pic.twitter.com/EUE2AH5UdK

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) August 23, 2024

Sunrise — 6:06, 6:15, 6:16.