This should be interesting

In what seems like a desperate attempt to get media attention away from the positive coverage that euphoric Democrats are getting for their Kamala Harris-Tim Walz ticket and the negative press his weird running mate JD Vance is receiving, creepy Donald Trump has said that he will take part in a ‘major interview’ with Elon Musk. It is not clear whether it will take place on one or both of their social media platforms.

Donald Trump will participate in a “major interview” with billionaire and X owner Elon Musk on Monday, the former president announced in a social media post.

“ON MONDAY NIGHT I’LL BE DOING A MAJOR INTERVIEW WITH ELON MUSK — Details to follow!” Trump wrote in a post shared to Truth Social.

The announcement comes one week after Trump’s calamitous interview at the annual convention of the National Association of Black Journalists, where he questioned Kamala Harris’ race.

The NABJ interview was initially supposed to be an hour long, but it ended after just 34 minutes, as the audience jeered many of Trump’s responses. He will likely face an easier audience with Musk.

This will be an interesting psychological experiment to see what happens when you have two extreme narcissists and egomaniacs with a history of inflammatory remarks and blatant disregard for the truth talking to each other.

We might reach a stage of criticality in which runaway nonsense explodes into a full-blown meltdown.

More on RFK Jr. and the dead bear cub

Michael Kosta of The Daily Show explores the bizarre nature of the story about how RFK Jr. acknowledged responsibility for leaving a dead bear cub in New York’s Central Park ten years ago. Kosta breaks down the video of the conversation that RFK Jr. had with Roseanne Barr (that he presumably agreed to have recorded and released) where he told her about what he did. There is only one word to describe the whole episode: Weird.

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Kamala Harris picks Tim Walz to be her running mate

I think that she made a good choice for all the right reasons.

Minnesota’s governor captured the internet’s attention and swayed Democrats’ messaging by succinctly summing up how he views Republicans: they’re weird.
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It’s not just the “weird” of it all: he’s been able to run through a list of what Democrats want, and what he’s done as governor during a banner time for Democrats in his state, that articulates to voters what they would be voting for, not just the danger of what they’re voting against. He speaks plainly and pragmatically, showing the commonsense policies his party stands for.
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Walz, 60, was born and raised in small-town Nebraska. He became a teacher, first in China, then in Nebraska and finally in Mankato, Minnesota, where he taught geography and coached the high school football team. He was the faculty adviser for the school’s first gay-straight alliance chapter in 1999, long before Democrats nationally stood for gay rights. He also served in the army national guard for 24 years, enlisting at age 17, a role that took him around the country and on a deployment to Europe. And like JD Vance, Walz has a penchant for Diet Mountain Dew.

He had a whole life before politics.

“Frankly, a lot of politicians are just not normal people,” said David Hogg, a gun control advocate and a Walz fan. “They just don’t know how to talk to normal people.”

He comes across as what he is: a straight-talking teacher, America’s youth football coach. He’s “right out of central casting as the way you think of Minnesota governor would be like”, said Michael Brodkorb, the former deputy chair of the Minnesota Republican party.
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In Minnesota, Democrats secured a narrow government trifecta in 2022, taking both chambers of the legislature and the governorship, and Walz and his colleagues in the legislature got to work, delivering a laundry-list of progressive policy wins such as free school meals, abortion protections, gun restrictions and legal marijuana.

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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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