‘Parable of the Talents, a novel by Octavia E. Butler, published in 1998, portrays a dystopian United States under the control of Christian fundamentalists. The group, known as “Christian America,” is led by President Andrew Steele Jarret, whose slogan is “Make America Great Again.”…’

— via Boing Boing

‘There’s nothing like an antisemite speaking at an event denouncing antisemitism. Which is what donald trump did yesterday in Washington, D.C., where he warned the conservative Israeli-American Council that if he loses in November, “the Jewish people” will be to blame.

“I will put it to you very simply and gently: I really haven’t been treated right, but you haven’t been treated right because you’re putting yourself in great danger,” trump warned, before whipping out his trusty old dog whistle.

“If I don’t win this election…I’m not going to call this as a prediction, but in my opinion, the Jewish people would have a lot to do with a loss…”‘

— via Boing Boing

‘JD Vance’s repeated attacks on Haitian immigrants have fueled a common refrain from Democrats — that he and former president donald trump are “scapegoating” immigrants by trying to shift manufactured blame onto them for the real-world problems of Springfield, Ohio.

The Republican ticket is indeed scapegoating Haitian immigrants. But for Vance, especially, there is likely nothing accidental or impulsive about it. In his own writing, the GOP vice-presidential nominee has clearly conveyed the power — and possible dangers — of scapegoating, casting “efforts to shift blame and our own inadequacies onto a victim” as “a moral failing, projected violently upon someone else.”…’

— via POLITICO

‘donald trump briefly followed the first attempt on his life with calls for unity. This time he’s going straight to a far more brazen message: Democrats’ rhetoric put my life in danger….’

— via POLITICO

‘If the former president wins the East Coast trio of Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Georgia, he will go back to the White House….’

— via POLIICO

‘Students of all ages still haven’t made up the ground they lost during the pandemic….’

— via Vox

‘Thousands of beepers and two-way radios exploded in attacks against Hezbollah, but mainstream consumer devices like smartphones aren’t likely to be weaponized the same way….’

— via WIRED

‘The best times to view the event will depend on your location, but the lunar eclipse will peak at 10:44 p.m. ET, according to NASA. All of North and South America will have a chance to see the partial lunar eclipse and harvest supermoon depending on the weather. Europe and Africa will also have an opportunity to see the eclipse.

This lunar eclipse will be a partial one, with only the upper portion of the moon being plunged into the darkest part of the Earth’s shadow known as the umbra…’

— via NPR

‘Dead Internet Theory says that you’re the only human left online. It started out as a conspiratorial joke, but it is edging ever closer to reality…’ 

— via Prospect

‘In November of 2020, a freak wave came out of the blue, lifting a lonesome buoy off the coast of British Columbia 17.6 meters high (58 feet).

The four-story wall of water was finally confirmed in February 2022 as the most extreme rogue wave ever recorded at the time.

Such an exceptional event is thought to occur only once every 1,300 years. And unless the buoy had been taken for a ride, we might never have known it even happened….

“Proportionally, the Ucluelet wave is likely the most extreme rogue wave ever recorded,” explained physicist Johannes Gemmrich from the University of Victoria in 2022.

 

“Only a few rogue waves in high sea states have been observed directly, and nothing of this magnitude…

Unfortunately, a 2020 study predicted wave heights in the North Pacific are going to increase with climate change, which suggests the Ucluelet wave may not hold its record for as long as our current predictions suggest.”…’

 

— via ScienceAlert

‘The safeguards that kept trump in check during his first term have collapsed — starting with the MAGA-fication of the Republican Party. “We know from the first administration that trump was an amateur and lots of people stopped his most radical actions,” says Jason Stanley, a Yale professor and author of How Fascism Works. He underscores that trump’s darkest ambitions were present from the beginning — from the Muslim ban to the coup attempt of Jan. 6. “The only thing that stopped him from being a full-on dictator was other people,” Stanley says. “We know that that’s not going to happen anymore.”…’ (via Rolling Stone)

‘When asked by Fox News why trump felt moderators hadn’t given the same treatment to Harris, trump answered: “Because they’re dishonest.” Perhaps, instead, Harris didn’t have the gall to lie so flagrantly and frequently on the national stage….’

— via The New Republic

‘If donald trump wins in November and launches a full-blown authoritarian presidency next year—as he has promised to do in his own words—what exactly would that national nightmare look like?

One set of oft-floated worst-case scenarios looks something like this: trump orders his pliant pick for attorney general to prosecute Liz Cheney and other high-profile critics and frog-march them before the cameras. trump invokes the Insurrection Act to dispatch the military into cities to crush mass protests. trump unshackles deportation forces to drag millions of undocumented immigrants from homes and workplaces. trump purges our nation’s intelligence services, stocks them with loyal foot soldiers, and unleashes them as a domestic spying force to gather information on designated enemies of the MAGA movement.

It would be folly to dismiss these possibilities, since trump has repeatedly threatened to carry out something resembling every one of those things. He has vowed to prosecute his political opponents without cause. He has loudly called for the indictment of members of the congressional committee that investigated his January 6, 2021, insurrection attempt. He has mused aloud that he might send the military into Democratic-run cities. trump and his advisers have floated plans for mass migrant removals facilitated by huge detention complexes and even potentially carried out by the military. trump has repeatedly pledged to purge the supposedly corrupt “deep state”—his shorthand for federal law enforcement and intelligence services—and has openly suggested he would use state power to persecute domestic enemies he describes as “vermin.”

Yet as horrifying as all that is, another, less-garish scenario also potentially looms—and in some respects it might be a more plausible one. A second trump presidency could unleash a kind of lower-profile, slow-burn authoritarianism, something that unfolds much more quietly and largely behind the scenes. In its targeting of internal enemies and its efforts to carry out revolutionary changes via far-right governance, it could end up being much less dramatic, visible, or splashy—but at the same time, extremely insidious, difficult to track, and very challenging to mobilize against….’

— via The New Republic

‘The tiny asteroid will complete a wide orbit over the course of 53 days, but don’t get your hopes up about seeing it….’

— via Gizmodo

‘The city of Springfield, Ohio, is already witnessing the consequences of trump’s baseless conspiracy theory that Haitian immigrants are eating people’s pets….’

— via The New Republic

‘…[T]he reaction from Republican vice presidential hopeful JD Vance … stood out as especially amazing. This was the message the Ohio senator pushed on Fox News, just hours after the former president’s related rant:

We admire Taylor Swift’s music, but I don’t think most Americans, whether they like her music, are fans of hers or not, are going to be influenced by a billionaire celebrity who I think is fundamentally disconnected from the interests and the problems of most Americans.”
He added that the celebrity hasn’t been “hurt” by “grocery prices.”

0 seconds of 5 minutes, 49 secondsVolume 90%

Can Swifties shift the election? Taylor ‘absolutely’ moves the needle for young women
05:49
For now, let’s not dwell on the fact that grocery price inflation has already cooled significantly in recent months. Let’s instead consider the latest in a series of examples of Team Trump flunking tests of self-awareness.

Americans are unlikely to be influenced by a billionaire celebrity who is fundamentally disconnected from the interests and the problems of most Americans? Unless Trump is planning to drop out of the 2024 race, Vance’s running mate happens to be a billionaire celebrity who is fundamentally disconnected from the interests and the problems of most Americans.

Despite Harris’ challenge, Trump vows no more 2024 debates
In fact, it was of particular interest that the GOP senator referenced Swift and grocery prices, given that Trump has repeatedly made public comments suggesting he has no idea how grocery stores even work — including suggestions that he thinks consumers need to show identification to buy boxes of cereal….’

— via MSNBC

‘Earthquake scientists detected an unusual signal on monitoring stations used to detect seismic activity during September 2023. We saw it on sensors everywhere, from the Arctic to Antarctica.

We were baffled – the signal was unlike any previously recorded. Instead of the frequency-rich rumble typical of earthquakes, this was a monotonous hum, containing only a single vibration frequency. Even more puzzling was that the signal kept going for nine days.

Dickson Fjord is surrounded by steep mountains. Uwe Dedering / wiki, CC BY-SA
Initially classified as a “USO” – an unidentified seismic object – the source of the signal was eventually traced back to a massive landslide in Greenland’s remote Dickson Fjord. A staggering volume of rock and ice, enough to fill 10,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools, plunged into the fjord, triggering a 200-meter-high mega-tsunami and a phenomenon known as a seiche: a wave in the icy fjord that continued to slosh back and forth, some 10,000 times over nine days.

To put the tsunami in context, that 200-metre wave was double the height of the tower that houses Big Ben in London and many times higher than anything recorded after massive undersea earthquakes in Indonesia in 2004 (the Boxing Day tsunami) or Japan in 2011 (the tsunami which hit Fukushima nuclear plant). It was perhaps the tallest wave anywhere on Earth since 1980….’

— via The Conversation

‘…[H]undreds of millions of dollars wiped off the value of his media company as markets react to a dismal debate performance.

The company’s stock price was at its lowest intraday level since the Truth Social app owner began publicly trading as DJT on the Nasdaq in late March.

The stock price was down about 15% early Wednesday, hovering above $15, though it had risen to $16 and change by lunchtime. After its initial offering earlier this year, eager investors briefly drove the price up to nearly $70. While the stock market is hardly rational, the slump is a reminder that value of the company, little more than a money-losing Twitter clone, is predicated entirely on the prospect of its majority stakeholder returning to power in November….’

— via Boing Boing

‘Let me give you an example. Early on in the debate, the moderators tried to press Harris on President Joe Biden’s unpopular immigration record, asking her if she would have done anything differently from her current boss — a topic favorable for trump.

Harris answered the question — but then took a seemingly unrelated shot at trump’s rallies.

“I’m going to invite you to attend one of donald trump’s rallies because it’s a really interesting thing to watch. You will see during the course of his rallies he talks about fictional characters like Hannibal Lecter. He will talk about [how] windmills cause cancer. And what you will also notice is that people start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom,” the vice president said.

This gave trump a choice; either prosecute Harris on immigration, an issue where she’s weak, or go on a rant in defense of his vaunted rallies. You can guess what he chose.

“Let me respond as to the rallies,” trump said. “She said people start leaving. People don’t go to her rallies. There’s no reason to go. And the people that do go, she’s busing them in and paying them to be there.”

That began a tailspin: a series of weird tangents, including a humiliating rant about the completely fake problem of Haitian migrants supposedly eating dogs in Springfield, Ohio, punctuated by immense concern about the honor of trump rallies. He never really got back to what he should have been doing — attacking Harris on migration across the southern border.

By needling trump where it hurts — the rallies he cares about so much — Harris managed to get him off balance, and he honestly never really recovered.

Harris deployed this strategy again and again.

During an exchange on crime, Harris brought up trump’s own criminal conviction — leading him to go on a diatribe about “political prosecutions” instead of effectively pushing Harris on her flip-flops on crime policy.

She brought up world leaders calling him a “disgrace,” pushing him into bragging about his relationship with Hungarian “strongman” (in trump’s words) Viktor Orbán, perhaps not a callout that the swing voters of Michigan, Wisconsin, or Pennsylvania were clamoring for. She needled his closeness with Russia’s Vladimir Putin, blasting “what you think is a friendship” with a “dictator who would eat you for lunch.”

Each time, trump took the bait — losing control of his temper and going off message, while Harris looked on with what must have been glee.

In hindsight, this strategy might seem innovative, but it speaks to something well-known about trump’s psychology….’

— via Vox

If ever it was said that politics makes strange bedfellows… (POLITICO)

‘Coverage of donald trump’s mental fitness for office is not just fair game. It’s necessary….’ (The New Republic

‘There is a reason why trump would rather whine than win: He’s preparing for the post-election Big Lie 2.0…’ (Salon.com)

(Reddit : r/pics)

‘As Kamala Harris visited New Hampshire on Wednesday, donald trump’s campaign in the state is almost nowhere to be seen….’ (POLITICO)

‘Kurt Steiner,… holds a Guinness World Record for “most skips of a skimming stone”—he skipped a rock a whopping 88 times at Red Bridge, near Kane, Pennsylvania, on September 6, 2013… I recently stumbled across a video posted by WIRED where Steiner explains the physics behind stone skipping, and it’s one of the most fascinating and informative things I’ve ever watched. WIRED describes the video:

Kurt Steiner is record holding champion stone skipper—and a master of the physics that underpin the sport. A labor of love that’s evolved into a world-class passion, see where Kurt harvests his preferred rocks, the qualities he seeks in them, and each factor he considers in order to throw like a pro.

In the video, Kurt discusses various aspects of the process of skipping a stone that he has to take into account—including the speed at which he’ll throw it, the spin he’ll give it, and the various angles he has to balance, including tilt angle, attack angle, and twist angle. He also talks about how he must be mindful of the direction of the wind, the water’s surface, and his footing. He also describes the “makings of a really good rock,” which include things like a flat surface and a little bit of a curved top edge that is a bit sharp but not too sharp (stone skipping is clearly both a science and an art). In the video, he demonstrates various rocks that are good choices and shows us some of his throwing techniques as he explains the physics of it all.

In addition to being a world-record-holding stone skipper, Steiner is also a pretty darn good philosopher, which is evident when he describes stone skipping as:

” . . . a simple thing [that], through a mastery, becomes a really visual, spiritual kind of art form. It’s a way of making joy out of nothing. And that’s can’t be valueless, right?”…’ (Boing Boing)

‘…Republicans need to hasten the move to a post-Trump party….’ (POLITICO)

‘The National Institutes for Health has abruptly ended its study of “Havana Syndrome” after it learned that the CIA forced people to participate in it. Though the agency isn’t named in the NIH’s announcement, CNN reports that “some of the people who reported being sick previously claimed that the CIA made them join the research as a prerequisite for getting health care.”

“They wanted us to be a lab rat for a week before we actually got treatment at Walter Reed — and at bare minimum, that is unethical and immoral,” Marc Polymeropoulos told CNN in May.

Polymeropoulos, a former CIA officer who says he has been sick, is an advocate for those struck by what the US government calls “anomalous health incidents.” He said in May that he believes that participation in this research was “ordered” by senior leadership at the CIA.

In March, the CIA issued a statement that denied that people were required to participate. The agency did not respond to CNN’s request for comment Friday.

Forced participation in a study is considered highly unethical and is extremely uncommon, ethicists say.

Havana Syndrome—a mysterious collection of ailments suffered by U.S. personnel serving at embassies abroad—is widely thought to be a somatic disorder. Hyped by credulous national security reporters as caused by electromagnetic weapons (or other tall tales from three-letter agencies), the whole saga is now so murky that to discuss it at all is to juggle conspiracy theories….’ (via Boing Boing)

‘A damning report reveals some staffers on donald trump’s campaign no longer think New Hampshire is winnable….’ (The New Republic)

‘There’s nothing remarkable about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s visit to Mongolia on Tuesday — he’s due to meet Mongolia’s leader, hold talks on developing bilateral ties and attend a gala reception.
What is unusual is that Mongolia, as a member of the International Criminal Court, should have arrested the Russian president as soon as he landed on Mongolian soil Monday evening.
Mongolia’s defiance of its obligations to the ICC are likely to have legal consequences….’ (CNBC)

‘Screen icon Mark Hamill called out donald trump for his “childish” habit of mispronouncing Vice President Kamala Harris’ first name, saying it conveys “disrespect & contempt.”
But rather than hope the former president comes around, the “Star Wars” actor suggested another approach.
“When they go low, we should respond in kind,” he wrote on X. “From now on, don’t call him ‘Don’. Call him ‘Done’.”…’ (HuffPost Latest News)

The Electoral College nitty-gritty

‘The margins in all these swing states are extremely tight. Still, as one scenario for how election night could play out, let’s assume that, as the averages currently suggest, Harris wins Wisconsin, Michigan and the other lean-blue states; Trump wins North Carolina and the lean-red states; and Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada are too close to call.

This would place Harris at 251 electoral votes — 19 away from the 270 she needs to win. And she’d have two paths to get over the threshold.

Path one would be to win Pennsylvania. Its 19 electoral college votes would be just exactly enough. (That’s why it’s the most important swing state.)

Path two would be to win Georgia plus either Arizona or Nevada. Winning only the combo of Arizona and Nevada would not be enough, as that would provide Harris with 17 electoral votes. She’d need Georgia too.

That’s why it matters that all of these states — Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada — look so close. Tiny shifts in them could well determine the outcome. And neither candidate looks to lead comfortably in enough of them so far….’ (Vox)

• trump suing over scathing “Apprentice” movie as 1st clip drops today
• trump says Project 2025 has “policies everyone would like”(but he hasn’t read it)
• Paranoid trump staffers call police thinking they are “bugged” by a plastic toy
• Plastic Clip of “childless cat lady” Taylor Swift sure to trigger JD Vance
• Cop-killing drug kingpin freed by trump jailed for choking wife
• Democrats question Trump about that illegal donation from Egypt

• House and Senate Republicans are starting to panic about a huge money gap with Democrats
• Harris campaign, DNC, announce unprecedented down-ballot spending
• Don’t Trust the Election Forecasts
• The map is wide open and the attack ads are coming in ‘snap election’ between Harris, Trump

‘”Who ever heard, you get indicted for interfering in a presidential election where you have every right to do it, you get indicted and your poll numbers go up? When people get indicted, their poll numbers go down,” ttrump said….’ (Raw Story)

‘Because of Republicans’ advantage in the Electoral College, a race that Harris leads nationally by between 2 and 4 percentage points, on average, is the equivalent of a knife fight in a phone booth, and it’s set to be decided in a smaller-than-usual number of states….’ (POLITICO)