The Cybertruck breaks a record, and not in a good way

For the longest time the Ford Edsel, launched in 1957, held the record as the biggest flop automotive history, the measure used being the target sales compared to actual sales.. (Via Rob Beschizza)

Ford launched the Edsel in 1957 with projections of 200,000 units in its first year. It sold less than one-third of that target, and its vertical grille (mocked as resembling a toilet seat) became shorthand for corporate failure that has endured nearly seven decades.

But superachiever Elon Musk has beaten that record with his Cybertruck, launched in November 2023.
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Anthony Fauci slams senator Rand Paul as ‘unhinged’

The loony right has been obsessed with the belief that the Covid-19 virus did not jump from animals to humans but was because of a Chinese lab leak, and that scientists especially Anthony Fauci who spent 38 years at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and was a key figure in the fight to prevent the virus from harming more people than it did, was part of the cover-up.

Senator Rand Paul has been relentlessly pushing this notion and targeting Fauci and called him up before a special hearing. But Fauci refused to answer his questions and called him unhinged.

The hearing was centered around an assertion Paul has promoted for years: that the Covid pandemic began in 2020 as a “leak” from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, even as virologists see a natural jump from animals to humans as more likely.

This belief underpinned Paul’s argument for bringing Fauci before the committee. If the pandemic was indeed started by a “lab leak”, Fauci “could be responsible for this entire pandemic” because the National Institutes of Health (NIH) provided the institute with a sub-grant, he later told reporters.

His only witness was Fauci, who served as a key adviser to Trump and Joe Biden during the pandemic, and has become a political punching bag on the right.

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Jon Stewart blasts the White House Correspondents Dinner

This annual event, where Washington-based journalists meet, eat, drink, and schmooze with the people they cover, with other celebrities thrown in, is a disgusting example of the incestuous world of politics, shattering the illusion that these reporters are hard-hitting seekers of the truth even if their work antagonizes politicians. This year Trump was the main speaker and to say that he bombed is putting it mildly. Even his ardent supporters found it hard to find anything good in his rambling tirade of venomous insults.

Jon Stewart, in a funny skewering of Trump’s dreadful speech says that the event should be put in the dustbin. As a stand-up comedian, Stewart knows how to tell jokes and he brutally dissects Trump’s ineptness at telling even the simplest ones.

The rightwing snit over the The Odyssey (2026)

It takes very little to set the rightwing nut jobs off into starting a new front in the culture wars, usually over things that are either non-existent or highly unlikely, such as fears that immigrants are eating their pets or that a drug cartels are taking over American city streets or that it was forbidden to say “Merry Christmas” any more.

I find it particularly amusing when right wingers get up in arms when some recounting of stories in films and TV do not conform to their weird ideas of authenticity. It becomes even more ludicrous when the stories are purely fictional so that appeals to history make no sense. Remember the insistence that Santa Claus is white? Or the flap over the live action remake of the Little Mermaid because the title character was a person of color?

The latest silliness involves Christopher Nolan’s film The Odyssey that has opened to rave reviews and massive box office sales. It is the latest retelling of the Homeric poem and it features actors of color in key roles such as Helen of Troy and a transgender actor in another role. Of course, the whole epic is an obvious myth (the fact that Helen was hatched from an egg that was the product of Zeus transforming himself into a swan and mating with Leda, the queen of Sparta, should have been a clue) but that did not deter these loonies.
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Anti-establishment candidates keep winning Democratic primaries

In the latest result in a congressional primary race in Arizona yesterday, a candidate defeated a rival who had been backed by the Democratic Party establishment in the race for an open congressional seat that had been held by a Republican and is now contested by a Trump-backed candidate.

Amish Shah, an emergency room doctor, beat back the choice of Democratic leadership in Arizona on Wednesday in the latest sign that the party’s voters are increasingly willing to override the national machine.

Shah won his primary in Arizona’s 1st congressional district over the candidate favored by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) in Washington, a significant result in a race the DCCC has identified as central to retaking the House.
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The DCCC had thrown its weight behind the former Republican Marlene Galán-Woods, a former television journalist in Phoenix who switched parties in Trump’s first term.

The competition for the 1st congressional district, an affluent area that includes north-east Phoenix, Scottsdale, Fountain Hills and Paradise Valley, is rated by both parties as one of the more winnable Republican-held districts in the country, and is expected to help determine control of the US House of Representatives. Although Republicans hold a voter registration advantage, the district has shifted toward the center over the last decade.

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How Joe Biden enabled Israel’s war crimes

One of the most disgusting things about the Biden administration was his steadfast refusal to condemn Israel’s horrific genocidal behavior in Gaza. Kamala Harris’s refusal to distance herself from that policy when she became the Democratic nominee, and the Democratic Party establishment’s condoning of the genocide, was one of the factors that led to a lack of support for her, especially among the progressives and the young, and led to the poor performance in the 2024 elections.

David Kirkpatrick writes about how Biden ignored the plea of Mirjana Spoljaric, the president of the International Committee of the Red Cross, that Israel was egregiously violating human rights and asking him to do something.

Allowing the Red Cross to visit detainees during a war or an occupation is one of the brightest lines established by the Geneva Conventions. Yet, after October 7th, Israel, for perhaps the first time in its history, fully blocked the organization’s access to Palestinian detainees from Gaza and the West Bank, putting it in the company of pariah states such as North Korea and Eritrea; even the warring factions in Yemen allowed Red Cross visits. Spoljaric noted that humanitarian groups and journalists had reported a “massive surge” in the number of Palestinians in Israeli prisons. At least a thousand had been released back into Gaza, and many of them gave accounts of torture, even though the Israeli military had concluded that they were not Hamas fighters. The Times reported that one released detainee, a law student named Fadi Bakr, described being beaten so severely that his genitals turned blue and blood still appeared in his urine weeks later. He said that Israeli guards had played music so loudly that one of his ears bled.

Of course, Biden did nothing, other that making weak appeals for restraint to Israeli prime minister and war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu to not do anything extreme, which he completely ignored, so confident was he of unquestioned US support.
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Will Trump step in to rescue the Tates?

Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan represent some of the worst elements of the so-called manosphere, the world of pathetic young male losers who think that by improving their looks and adopting an aggressive macho posturing, wealth will flow to them, and that this will attract women whom they can abuse. This makes them prime targets for influencers who exploit them by telling them that their problems are because the world is controlled by a secretive cabal who keep them down, and offer them courses and dubious investment opportunities that they promise will enable them to become wealthy and break their shackles and make their dreams come true, but in fact only impoverishes them further. Louis Theroux’s documentary Inside the Manosphere that I reviewed here went inside that world and revealed its misogyny, homophobia, racism, and anti-semitism in all its ugliness.

The British-American Tates were arrested on Saturday and held in Miami after being charged by UK authorities with rape and sex-trafficking charges and an extradition request has been issued.

Britain’s Crown Prosecution Service said the new charges relate to four further victims and were brought after authorities received evidence from Bedfordshire Police in southeastern England. The charges include rape, assault, trafficking and offenses relating to “indecent images of a child and extreme pornography.”

The charges announced Saturday, which bring the total number of alleged victims in the U.K. to seven, are the latest in a long-running international legal saga involving the brothers that has spanned the U.S., Britain and Romania. The brothers have denied wrongdoing.

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Count Binface is on a roll in the UK

It is quite extraordinary how Count Binface emerging as the main opponent to Nigel Farage in the Clacton by-election on August 13 has thrown politics and media coverage into a turmoil with people struggling to figure out how to respond.

There are those who positively hate Farage and are relishing the prospect of him having to campaign against someone who was known as a novelty candidate but in this election is emerging as a serious threat. This has resulted in his supporters angrily denouncing Binface’s candidacy as a stunt (which nobody denies) and accusing the mainstream political parties of being behind him, even though it is clear that their decision to boycott the election was because they saw Farage’s resignation as as a stunt and Binface stepping in to fill the vacuum and emerging as a serious candidate something that they had little to do with.

The media are also nonplussed. On the one hand, there are those who are enjoying the comedic aspects of the whole thing, allowing them to interview Binface on show after show, thus increasing his visibility even more.

Then there are others who are tut-tutting, saying that it makes a mockery of democracy. It is not clear why that claim makes any sense. We have an election in which candidates could freely contest and some have chosen to do so. One of them is a candidate in a space suit that has a trash bin on his head. But he has stood in many elections before. It is Farage who created this situation by resigning so he cannot blame anyone else for not contesting.

Here in Binface appearing on the BBC TV show Newsnight where the host was clearly in the tut-tut camp but the other panelists were not.

Although Farage remains the favorite to win, the odds of him winning are getting worse by the day. National opinion polls may not help much in anticipating the outcome of this election since the voters who actually live in Clacton may be torn. Even if they hate Farege and would happily vote for any of the major political parties, they may hesitate to vote to elect Binface as their MP for fear of having their constituency seen as a joke and thus may sit it out. That may the biggest factor favoring Farage.

The Lincoln Pool is a metaphor for the Trump presidency

The algae-infested Lincoln Pool in Washington DC has been drained and it appears that the base of the pool, far from being the vivid blue color that Trump touted, now appears to nowhere close to that, being instead a blotchy gray color. Trump appears to be sensitive to how bad the pool looks and so a dark fence now surrounds it to prevent people from getting a close look at the disaster. But a photographer for the Associated Press got an aerial shot from the top of the Washington Monument. Follow the above link to see how awful it looks.

The newly drained Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool’s bottom surface has noticeably faded since it was lined with a protective coating in a color Donald Trump called “American flag blue” this spring.

An Associated Press reporter and photographer viewed the fenced-off reflecting pool on Wednesday from the top of the Washington Monument. The new liner appears grayer than when the pool was repainted and refilled with water in early June. Debris that had been visible earlier this week after the pool was drained is now largely gone, after work crews removed it.
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The interior secretary, Doug Burgum, whose agency oversees the National Park Service, said that after the water is drained and debris is cleaned from Independence Day fireworks, the plan for the pool is straightforward: “Repair the vandalism that was done. Fill it back up again.” He was speaking with conservative podcaster Katie Miller.

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