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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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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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.

On what basis should we vote?

(Pearls Before Swine)

That cartoon reminded me of a discussion I had a long, long, time ago, when I was in graduate school, with a fellow student about voting. He said that each of us should vote based on our own narrow interests because that is the way that the democratic system works best. If each of us thought only of our own interests when voting, then the results would reflect the outcomes that the general population wants, whereas if we voted on the basis of what we think might be better for other people, then the results get skewed because we do not really know what other people actually want and are merely guessing, we only know for sure what we want.

I did not agree with him then but had to acknowledge that it was an interesting argument with a certain logic, the kind that geeky physicists would come up with.
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The Thunderdome that wasn’t

Ever since Joe Biden’s poor debate performance on June 27th, political observers started what looked like a deathwatch, waiting to see if he would drop out of the race. Some of them (like me) were hoping that he might quit because with him as he presumptive nominee, the presidential race looked like a slow-motion train wreck, with the crash occurring on election day, and the only chance, however slim, of avoiding it would be to have a different nominee. But I was not hopeful that it would occur because Biden kept insisting that he was in the race to stay.

Some in the media may have had other reasons to have Biden drop out. They were excitedly speculating that if he did, there would be a knockdown, drag out competition for the nomination among all the Democratic hopefuls that would end up with a contested convention, with heated conflicts inside the convention hall and possibly protests and clashes outside, where the result would not be known until the end. This was sometimes referred to in typical media hyperbolic fashion as a ‘Thunderdome’ event. It would be Chicago 1968 all over again. Even if it was not as violent as back then, it would still be a ratings bonanza for the media, allowing for breathless minute-by-minute updates as people tuned in to all the drama. The GOP would also benefit because even though they felt confident about beating Biden, a bruising convention fight would leave the eventual nominee damaged.
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Trump’s outreach to Black journalists does not go well

He attended the convention of the National Association of Black Journalists. It started out poorly and did not get better.

During a contentious and chaotic panel hosted by the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) on Wednesday, Donald Trump parroted disinformation about immigration and abortion, questioned Kamala Harris’s race and accused a panel moderator, Rachel Scott – the senior congressional correspondent for ABC News – of being “rude” and presenting a “nasty question” when she asked him: “Why should Black voters trust you?”

Another report said:
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