Kansas progressive rallies update

I wrote earlier about the efforts to try and wrest congressional seats away from Republicans by advancing progressive politics in what is considered deep-red Kansas. Briahna Gray provides an update on the rallies and other efforts by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in support of two progressive candidates James Thompson and Brent Welder in two congressional districts in Kansas where primary elections will be held on August 7. Gray says that the message that the two gave were clearly aimed at a larger audience than just those two constituencies.
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Can progressive politics succeed in Kansas?

When people look for a state that supposedly represents dyed-in-the-wool red state conservatives in the Midwest, Kansas is the top choice. When people push for more progressive policies for the Democratic party, the frequent response from the leadership is to grudgingly conceded that it might have some appeal in the urban coastal areas but will not play at all in the Midwest, the supposed heartland. This is false historically but that has not stopped the argument from being advanced.
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What does a zombie eating brains sound like?

I have written before about the fascinating sound effects produced by Foley artists for films. They use mostly everyday items to create sounds for films and then have to carefully sync those sounds with the final film. They do that by matching the image to the sound film clip while watching the film. In this clip, Matt Davies eats tomatoes and peppers and other assorted food items, plus does other things to them to create the gross-out sounds of horror films, such as zombies eating brains and flesh and so on.
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How did Montenegro suddenly become a danger?

Montenegro, formerly part of Yugoslavia before that country broke up in the early 1990s, finally became an independent state in 2006 and joined NATO in 2017. In a recent interview, Donald Trump was asked about the clause in the NATO treaty that requires that an attack on any member be treated as an attack on every member. The questioner asked him whether the US would go to war if Montenegro, with a population of just 630,000, was attacked.
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The military-sports complex in all its glory

It is routine to see overt and ostentatious displays of patriotism at sporting events in the US. Of course, these days ‘patriotism’ means symbolic acts like singing the national anthem and God Bless America, praising the military and the police forces by having them involved in ceremonies such as hauling out a massive American flag onto the field, military flyovers, the cameras panning to service members in the crowds and thanking them for their service, and even reunions where service members returning from one of the many never-ending wars are shown meeting their family members at the game.
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If you want to see your reflection, you need to smile

There is an old belief that when you smile, your spirits get lifted, as do the spirits of those around you. When you look in a mirror, do you smile? This is not something that people may do consciously and until I saw this video below about the invention of a mirror that shows the image only when people smile, I couldn’t recall whether I usually smiled or not. With this mirror, I would know.