Why is creepy Trump ramping it up to 12?

Future historians, political scientists, and media watchers are going to spend a vast amount of time and effort analyzing the current election during which the term ‘unprecedented’ risks going up in flames from overuse. I can see a blizzard of dissertations and books in our future. One of the things that they will focus on is what drives the seemingly erratic behavior of creepy Donald Trump.

People who have an analytical bent tend to look for reasons underlying the actions of individuals, trying to find motives that can explain what might otherwise seem irrational. And that is where the trap is when it comes to creepy Trump, who lurches from one outrageous statement to another, from one easily disprovable lie to another, from one racist or otherwise bigoted trope to another, all with a rapidity that makes one’s head spin and leaves one struggling to keep up. It is tempting to throw in the towel and say that there is no hidden motivation to unearth, no strategic plan, no shrewd cunning, and that he simply says whatever comes into his head at any moment, triggered by whims or grievances or petty annoyances or whatever he happened to see on TV just prior.

But at the same time, there is the unsettling feeling that such explanations may be too facile, that there may be some underlying reasoning at work that we just have not figured out as yet.
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RFK Jr joins Club Weird

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. shares with JD Vance the quality of being weird, as shown in this story where he says that he was the one behind the mystery of a dead bear cub that was found 10 years ago.

Robert F Kennedy Jr released a bizarre video on Sunday in which he admitted that, a decade ago, he dumped a dead bear cub in New York City’s Central Park and staged the scene to make it look like a bicyclist had run over the animal.
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In the video, the presidential candidate is speaking to actor Roseanne Barr and recounts the story of travelling through New York’s Hudson Valley on a falconry expedition and coming across a young bear that had been hit and killed by another driver.
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In the video, Kennedy says he picked up the carcass and put it in his van, planning to skin it and eat it later. However, he ran out of time to take the bear home before having to catch a flight.

Kennedy said he and the group he was with – some of whom had been drinking – then came up with a plan to take an old bike he happened to have in his van and place the bear’s carcass in Central Park to make it look like the bear had been hit by a bike, taking advantage of a recent rash of bicycle crashes in New York.

“We thought it would be amusing for whoever found it,” Kennedy said.

“The next day it was on every television station,” Kennedy said to Barr. “I was like, ‘Oh my god, what did I do?’

“I was worried because my prints were all over that bike … Luckily, the story died down after awhile.”

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Sri Lanka places third in Olympics – for uniforms

Sports Illustrated ranked the uniforms that athletes wore at the opening ceremonies in Paris and Sri Lanka placed third, after Mongolia and Mexico

“The Sri Lanka Opening Ceremony fits are inspired by the look of the 19th-century royal court, and the details are hand embroidered,” SI explained. 
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Each garment features elements such as the Olympic rings, the national Lion emblem and personalised athlete details, showcasing Sri Lanka’s craftsmanship and artistic legacy.

It is quite elegant.

You can see the top 11 outfits here. The top-ranked Mongolians look terrific.

John Oliver on the West Bank

On last week’s episode of his show Last Week Tonight, Oliver focused on what is happening in the Occupied Territories of the West Bank, where events have been largely overlooked because of the horrendous genocidal behavior of Israel in Gaza. In the West Bank, there has been a steady effort to expropriate Palestinian land and hand them over to Jewish settlers by heavily subsidizing them so that they move there.

In the clip, he shows how the settlers rationalize their behavior, by pretending that they are only taking land that was not being used by Palestinians, ignoring the fact that it is the Israeli authorities that refuse to grant permits to Palestinians to build homes or grow crops. He shows one settler being confronted by a Palestinian woman who asks him how he can live with himself knowing that he is living in her home that was forcibly taken away from her. He smugly replies that if he does not live there, some other settler will, as if that makes it ok.

I already knew that the situation in the West Bank was appalling. Oliver’s show makes me even more furious at the horrific injustice that the US government is complicit in.

Creepy Trump and Weird Vance

It has become clear that ever since Minnesota governor Tim Walz, a potential running mate to Kamala Harris, used the term ‘weird’ to describe the Trump-Vance ticket, it has caught fire and various surrogates for the Harris campaign have started using it whenever they can, though they sometimes throw in other terms like ‘strange’ and ‘sick’ just for variety.. This seems to be an actual policy by the Harris campaign. In a speech at her Atlanta rally, Harris taunted Trump for being scared to debate her and again called him and Vance weird.

This article by Jay Caspian Kang discusses the appeal of the ‘weird’ strategy.
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Julien Alfred wins 100m gold at Olympics

I only follow the Olympics cursorily, consisting mostly of scanning the headlines in the news sites that I read. Within those, I am mostly interested in the track and field events and the stories that grab me are those of athletes from small countries that have next to no infrastructure to produce top athletes and almost never win medals.

And boy, did these games produce such a story!

Julien Alfred from St. Lucia, a tiny country in the eastern Caribbean islands that has a population of just 180,000 and had never produced any medal winner before, ran away from the competition to win the 100m gold medal, the most prestigious of the track events. (Click on the ‘Watch on YouTube’ link.)


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Why Roy Cooper pulled out of the race

I wrote a post soon after it became clear that Kamala Harris would be the aDemocratic party nominee that I thought that North Carolina governor Roy Cooper would be the best choice to be her running mate. He withdrew his name from contention a few days after that. The main reason Cooper gave for his decision is that he did not want to have the lieutenant governor Mark Robinson, an utterly extreme MAGA Republican, to act as governor while he was away campaigning.

In that state, the top two positions are voted on separately and do not run as a single ticket, which is why two very different people can end up in the two posts. But it is even worse than that, as Cooper explains in this interview that he gave explaining his decision to withdraw so quickly.
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When and why did JD Vance become so hateful and weird?

Sofia Nelson is a public defender in Detroit. They are also transgender. They became close friends with JD Vance when they entered law school together in 2010 and kept in touch with him and followed his career and even attended his wedding. They say that while Vance was always conservative, he used to be thoughtful and compassionate and respectful of other people’s views and they were shocked by the dark turn that he took when ran for the US senate in Ohio in 2022, when he adopted Trump’s cruel and dismissive tone when talking about people, and that ended their friendship. In an interview with the Detroit Free Press, Nelson gave more details about how Vance changed around the time he was considering running for the Ohio senate in 2018.

There was no path forward for him as a never-Trumper. He essentially turned his back on his values and reconstituted himself, not only changing his position on every imaginable issue, but also his tone. The decency, the thoughtfulness and the desire to understand disappeared, and now he mimics Donald Trump with this cruelty and name calling.  

I think that is well captured in the “cat lady” controversy. … That was just never present in him. I mean, he was sarcastic and contemptuous of some elitism, for sure, as am I. But he never exhibited the kind of cruelty that he exhibits now in his public persona. That really changed when he decided to reconstitute himself as a MAGA Republican. So it wasn’t just his position on LGBTQ+ issues or immigration or police brutality that’s completely changed — I mean, this is a man who was incredibly sympathetic and understanding about the overpolicing and the brutality of policing against Black Americans, and that’s reflected in our email exchanges. … Every conceivable issue he’s changed his position on, but he’s also changed the way he talks about people.
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James Baldwin (1924-2024)

Today is the 100th anniversary of the birth of James Baldwin, one of the most influential figures in American literary life and a prominent public intellectual who was not hesitant to speak harsh truths.

He attacked a persistent myth held by many people, that if only Black people adopted the values and behavior of white people, then their situation would improve. What sticks most in my mind is this passage from The Fire Next Time, where Baldwin captured the absurdity of this expectation.

White Americans find it as difficult as white people elsewhere do to divest themselves of the notion that they are in possession of some intrinsic value that black people need or want. . . . There is certainly little enough in the white man’s public or private life that one should desire to imitate.

Black people are not as impressed with the virtues of whites as whites are, and see little need to emulate them. After all, the whites were the ones who brought Blacks over as slaves and kept them in abject servitude and poverty for generations. Lynchings, beatings, and being set upon by dogs and buffeted by water from fire hoses are all things that are within living memory of Black people. Given this history, to ask blacks to adopt white behavior as role models for virtuousness seems presumptuous, to put it mildly.

The Daily Show on the search for Harris’s running mate

Serial sex abuser and convicted felon Donald Trump (SSACFT) made a weird assertion to a group of Black journalists that Kamala Harris had always claimed that she was Indian until recently when she suddenly became Black.

It should be noted that Harris attended Howard University, a flagship university of the Historically Black Colleges and Universities, and while there joined Alpha Kappa Alpha, the first (and possibly biggest) sorority of Black women. She has been a proud and visible member of it ever since. The idea that she is a Jenny-Come-Lately to being Black is being greeted with hoots of derision.

Alpha Kappa Alpha is a historic African American sorority, founded on the campus of Howard University, Harris’ alma mater. It was the first Black sorority of its kind, and is a part of the “Divine Nine,” a group of Black Pan-Hellenic organizations.

Members of Alpha Kappa Alpha and other groups in the Divine Nine have already rallied to support Harris’ bid for the presidency, networking and organizing to raise millions upon millions of dollars for her campaign. Harris is also a frequent presence at high-profile events, including Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc.’s biennial convention earlier this month.

The sorority has been a critical source of support and sisterhood not just for Harris, but for the 360,000 some women across the US and the world that make up its ranks. AKA members are political leaders, civil rights activists, literary icons and scientists, and the sorority’s cultural impact has deep, wide-reaching roots.

“When you become a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha, you become a member for life,” Danette Anthony Reed, international president and CEO of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc. told CNN.

Ronny Chieng discusses the search process as well as SSACFT’s weird comment about Harris’s ethnicity.