‘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.”

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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