This election is all about perception, and the media keeps talking about the issues.
The most important article you will read this week is in the “New Yorker”:
“Among America’s ‘Low-Information’ Voters”:
https://apple.news/
I hear from these people every day. You’re never going to change their opinion. If you quote the “Times,” they’ll point to Facebook. They’re not budging from their support of Trump and…
We’ve got the Pro-Palestinian contingent. Weren’t they supposed to disrupt the convention, turn it into another ’68? Well, it turns out the noise made by a few was larger than the feelings of the many. We live in a myopic country, most people can’t find Gaza on a map, they might hate the Jews but that has got nothing to do with this election.
It’s old versus new, baby. The known versus the unknown. Depression versus joy. A potentially bright future compared to a return to a bleak past. The world only moves forward, do you want to go back?
https://lefsetz.com/wordpress/
I have a crow in my backyard in D.C. that has been cawing for three weeks. It has been driving me crazy, so I was happy to get out of town and back on the trail.
But now comes Donald Trump cawing and cawing even louder than the damn crow.
If you need more evidence that Trump is flummoxed about how to counter Kamala Harris, just check out his daffy reaction to her dynamite convention.
Friday morning, Trump crowed on Truth Social: “My Administration will be great for women and their reproductive rights.”
The Florida governor, who was about to launch his campaign for president, had just successfully strongarmed his Legislature through one of the most culturally conservative lawmaking sessions in state history.
The result was a right-wing triumph: Despite months of angry protests and ugly clashes in the state Capitol, Florida lawmakers had passed a long list of long-sought ultra-conservative policies — including one of the strictest abortion bans in the nation — that DeSantis would soon begin signing into law and selling on the campaign trail in Iowa.
“I don’t think we’ve seen a six-month stretch that has ever been this productive in the history of our state,” DeSantis said at a May 2023 ceremony to celebrate the end of that year’s session.
https://jasongarcia.substack.
Back in May, when the image of a decapitated child in Rafah started circulating, my friend texted: This is the image. This is the one. Now the world’s going to roar. For many of us, this has been the reality of the last months: waiting for the image that will shake complacency and complicity; waiting for the image so staggering it’ll be non-negotiable. An amputated toddler. A blown-apart body. A girl hanging from the side of a building. We are still waiting.
https://www.theguardian.com/
In the end, it wasn’t culture war feuding over restricting LGBTQ+ rights, thwarting Black voters or vilifying immigrants that finally broke Republicans’ DeSantis fever in Florida.
Nor was it his rightwing takeover of higher education, the banning of books from school libraries, his restriction of drag shows, or passive assent of neo-Nazis parading outside Disney World waving flags bearing the extremist governor’s name that caused them to finally stand up to him.
It was, instead, a love of vulnerable Florida scrub jays; a passion to preserve threatened gopher tortoises; and above all a unanimous desire to speak up for nature in defiance of Ron DeSantis’s mind-boggling plan to pave over thousands of unspoiled acres at nine state parks and erect 350-room hotels, golf courses and pickleball courts.
“This can be one cause of every poker player’s worst fear: ’tilt,’ the phenomenon where your perception of what’s happening at the table has gone completely askew and you’re making blunder after blunder. Poker players tend to think of tilt as an emotional state—anger after a bad beat, boredom after a slow run of cards, or overconfidence after a winning streak. But it can also have biological causes. In big moments when you’re confronted with a high-stakes decision, you’re essentially working with a different operating system than the one you’re used to. If a player reacts by going into an anxiety spiral, ‘it’s like a blue screen on your computer where your mind is just either frozen or so emotionally hijacked that you’re no longer thinking straight,’ said Tendler.”
“On the Edge”
Nate Silver
Trump is on tilt.
But let’s be clear, Biden was on tilt after the June debate, or close to it. Joe was desperate, on the run, he gave public performances that just reinforced the step he’d lost. He refused to leave the race, and was oblivious to the truth, that he had lost the faith of his party and would probably not win the election.
https://lefsetz.com/wordpress/
During the Reagan years, Republicans embraced Milton Friedman’s neoliberalism with its free trade, opposition to unions, ending free college, and tax cuts for the fat cats. They called themselves “the party of new ideas.” They may have done more harm than good, but for most Republicans it was a good-faith effort.
Today, they’ve pretty much given up on all of that. All they have left is cruelty.
https://hartmannreport.com/p/
It has been a rough month for Ron DeSantis’s rightwing rebranding of higher education in Florida. Embarrassments at two high-profile universities where the Republican governor has been waging his culture war against “woke” have forced his administration into something of a cleanup.
Sarasota’s New College, the once liberal arts school subjected to a “hostile takeover” by well-rewarded, ultra-conservative DeSantis allies, was exposed by the city’s Herald-Tribune for dumping thousands of library books, including a clear-out of its gender and diversity center.
Democratic politicians likened it to Nazi-era book burning, and a preview of the extremist Project 2025 agenda linked to the Republican former president Donald Trump’s campaign to win back the White House in November.
https://www.theguardian.com/
Miami’s richest celebrities have found their hideaway. It’s on an island in Biscayne Bay, guarded by its own police force and led by its own mayor. Beyond the entrance gate, you’ll find more than 30 mansions, a golf course, a country club.
https://www.miamiherald.com/
The hamburger-and-fries model is one of the most enduringly beloved and omnipresent styles of fast food. Dozens of massive chains have made fortunes by giving people what they want — a fried or grilled beef patty (or two, or three), stuck between a bouncy bun and topped with cheese, onions, lettuce, tomatoes, pickles, and such. But across the board, a hamburger is always going to be pretty much the same thing. In the highly competitive burger world, chains have to do whatever it takes to make their take on the classic sandwich stand out from and rise above the others. Many focus on providing customers with an excellent, flavorful patty.
Kaos, the new venture from Charlie Covell, the creator of Channel 4 drama series The End of the F**king World, is anything but chaotic. Multi-stranded, immaculately paced and plotted, it’s a reimagining of Greek mythology that is subtle and intricate, witty, rigorous, hugely intelligent, funny and brutal. It flies.
Covell’s script is a masterpiece – so confident, so apparently effortless, so light on its feet – as it builds an alternative modern world in which pantheism (and Zeus) still rules, and gods mix with mortals, rarely to good ends. The eight episodes are stuffed with action, jokes (however much events darken as we go on) and grace notes. A huge cast of characters is deployed without a single one feeling underdeveloped or unnecessary, with Covell using them to interrogate what it means to be human, to have power, to be desperate, to have free will or not. They are all folded seamlessly into its furiously fun embrace.
