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Supernatural Creep: When explanations slide off to the fringesOriginally published as Supernatural Creep: The Slippery Slope to Unfalsifiability for my column Sounds Sciencey on csicop.org May 29, 2013.
I’m taking a step beyond sciencey with the following topic. What happens when science doesn’t cooperate with your subject area? Researchers of unexplained events may get frustrated and disenchanted with the scientific process when the eyewitness accounts they collect are too weird to explain via conventional means. They go unconventional.
Captain Jean-Baptiste Duhamel led the hunt for a beast that was attacking and devouring victims in the Gevaudan, France, in 1794. He had a problem. He could not catch and kill the man-eating monster. Being a proud man, he had to justify why he could not conquer this particular foe. Since the option that he was an inadequate huntsman was not acceptable, the creature must be supernatural in its abilities to escape his capture. The characteristics of the beast were exaggerated—it was huge, cunning, and not just an ordinary wolf. Captain Duhamel left defeated by what must truly be an extraordinary beast.
The cognitive dissonance experienced by the French captain is reflected today by those who can’t capture Bigfoot. When normal processes and causes fail to satisfactorily explain events or answers to questions, then the reasoning slips beyond nature, into super nature, beyond the testable claims of science.
I call this “supernatural creep.” Although, I swear I’m not the first one to name it as such. I searched to find where I have seen this referenced before. (If anyone knows, please email me so I can give the originator due credit.) Once I noticed this kind of reasoning, I saw it frequently. Wherever I come across this concept, it reveals a bit about human nature:
If you have to choose between the belief or a rational explanation, the rational explanation may be that which gets rejected.
The effect of supernatural creep can be seen with UFOs, anomalous natural phenomena (Fortean topics), and in bizarre stories categorized as “high strangeness” (which I’ll explain a bit further on in this piece). A perfect example is that of “black dogs” whose appearance is spectral or demonic and is associated with either protection from or nearness of bad spirits. Could it be just a big black dog? Witnesses perceive that it’s more than that. When the circumstances feel uncanny, we slip into thoughts of the supernatural. An enjoyable book that illustrates supernatural creep quite nicely is Three Men Seeking Monsters by Nick Redfern. Fun stuff.
With phantom black dogs, there is a connection to local legends and ghost stories. A modern example of the dispute about supernatural creep is evident in the Bigfoot/Sasquatch community.
Bigfoot proponents generally fall into two camps: those who search for a real animal that functions as nature intended (called ‘apers’) and those who entertain the option that the entity is not natural (paranormalists).
In their 2006 book, The Yowie: In Search of Australia’s Bigfoot, authors Tony Healy and Paul Cropper appear to have a parting of the ways when trying to explain all the Yowie accounts at face value—some of which, like our American Bigfoot are pretty bizarre. What is up with an animal that is sometimes described as having three toes, sometimes four or five? And, after all this time, why can’t we trap one or find a body? The creature has a stupendous ability to escape human grasp by eluding our cameras and leaving only tenuous, dubious traces of its corporeal existence. It can run outrageously fast and may be able to see infrared light. With the Yowie, we can’t think of a way to get a wild man on the island continent. It seems so implausible. But as Healy and Cropper note, it’s uncomfortable to explain the Yowie as a paranormal entity, perhaps as a psychic phenomenon, because it results in replacing one mystery with another.
Characteristics of hairy hominids or other unidentified cryptids may be just marginally odd—avoiding detection for decades among people, expert at hiding in plain sight, unusually developed senses of hearing or sight, fantastic strength or incredible speed. Or, they may get a bit spooky—glowing eyes, inability to be photographed, immunity to bullets, seen everywhere but found nowhere. They get to the point where it’s beyond natural—telepathy, shape-shifting, apporting or dis-apporting, signaling illness or death. In the case of some monster sightings, they are associated with UFO sightings, sychronicities, and time loss or distortion.
In order to hang on to the literal interpretation of eyewitness accounts, researchers may take tiny steps away from a purely natural explanation of their quarry. If the animal is shot at close range, why is it not injured or killed? Instead of questioning the story (or the marksmanship of the gunman), the assumption is that the thing must have some extra quality like bullet-proof skin, or perhaps it is impervious to bullets. If these stories are regarded as valid, and more like it come along, instead of doubting the witness, the researcher concludes there must be something paranormal going on to explain it.
The slip down the supernatural slope is really apparent when there are accounts of “high strangeness“—mind-boggling stories that have absurd elements. This term was originally used by Dr. J. Allen Hynek to describe extremely peculiar UFO cases that appeared to be associated with dream-like details, such as mysterious phone calls, electronic glitches, and Men in Black visits. If a report is one of “high strangeness,” it’s more than the typical “I saw a UFO” or “I saw a Bigfoot” story. It turns into a “I saw a Bigfoot go into a UFO” story—a whole other level of weirdness that now strains a natural explanation, if true.
And so it goes with Bigfooters. I recently read a blog post about a person who was rejected from the Bigfoot Field Research Organization (BRFO) because he dared mention a telepathic experience related to a Bigfoot encounter. There are Bigfoot researchers who discard reports that involve any paranormal or supernatural element because it sounds less credible to admit such ideas if they wish their work to be taken seriously. (This is a bit weird for the BFRO, I thought, since Matt Moneymaker ascribes some incredibly bizarre, paranormal talents to Bigfoot like the ability to “stun” people and immobilize them. I can’t take his speculations seriously.)
In my previous writings, I noted that it appeared that the ghost investigation field seemed to be moving away from the sciencey focus and more into the supernatural, dealing with demons, angels, and religious qualities of hauntings. Science is failing them, as well. In order to retain that important core that ghosts, or whatever X-file, is real, the natural explanations are no longer suitable as explanations; it must be something beyond human understanding. The cryptozoological community is sliding down a similar path at the behest of authors like Redfern who think that the field should expand to include “zooform” phenomena—entities, not actual animals, that appear in animal form. This would constitute a shift from scientific inquiry to a completely experienced-based view. How convenient. You gain great flexibility when you discount natural laws.
You may be able to see the immediate problem with an experience-based view and accounts of high strangeness. Since many skeptical paranormal researchers are very aware of the problems with eyewitness accounts, we notice the mistake certain non-skeptical researchers make when reading popular accounts of local tales or Charles Fort’s collection of books. The writers take every detail of the witness at face value! We know, however, that people mess up observations. We know that our memories are flawed, and we know that stories change over time, often becoming very different from the original account. Stories are poor evidence. To build a conclusion on just these story elements means that you must reject the foundation of knowledge we already have about how the world works (which is pretty well tested) and accept that there are visitors from other dimensions harassing our rural population or that we are able to conjure up monsters just with our collective mind power. That’s absurd. I’ll need more than a few good stories to accept that.
Supernatural creep is the way researchers hold onto their cherished ideas that a mysterious phenomenon, as they perceive it, is really out there. Being too invested in the idea to let it go, they reinvent reality instead.
By the way, the Beast of the Gevaudan? It was wolves. They were only unusual in that they were really hungry and good at catching people and not getting caught themselves. They were eventually dispatched. But the legend remains of the monsters of the Gevaudan. It’s too good of a story to give up.
References
Bord, Janet and Colin. 1981. Alien Animals. Stackpole Books.
Healy, T. and P. Cropper. 2006. The Yowie: In Search of Australia’s Bigfoot. Anomalist Books.
Redfern, Nick. 2004. Three Men Seeking Monsters. Paraview Pocket Books.
Smith, Jay M. 2011. Monsters of the Gevaudan: The Making of a Beast. Harvard University Press.
#BeastOfGevaudan #Bigfoot #blackDogs #cryptids #highStrangeness #Paranormal #Sasquatch #supernatural #Yowie #zooform https://sharonahill.com/?p=5112 -
Supernatural Creep: When explanations slide off to the fringesOriginally published as Supernatural Creep: The Slippery Slope to Unfalsifiability for my column Sounds Sciencey on csicop.org May 29, 2013.
I’m taking a step beyond sciencey with the following topic. What happens when science doesn’t cooperate with your subject area? Researchers of unexplained events may get frustrated and disenchanted with the scientific process when the eyewitness accounts they collect are too weird to explain via conventional means. They go unconventional.
Captain Jean-Baptiste Duhamel led the hunt for a beast that was attacking and devouring victims in the Gevaudan, France, in 1794. He had a problem. He could not catch and kill the man-eating monster. Being a proud man, he had to justify why he could not conquer this particular foe. Since the option that he was an inadequate huntsman was not acceptable, the creature must be supernatural in its abilities to escape his capture. The characteristics of the beast were exaggerated—it was huge, cunning, and not just an ordinary wolf. Captain Duhamel left defeated by what must truly be an extraordinary beast.
The cognitive dissonance experienced by the French captain is reflected today by those who can’t capture Bigfoot. When normal processes and causes fail to satisfactorily explain events or answers to questions, then the reasoning slips beyond nature, into super nature, beyond the testable claims of science.
I call this “supernatural creep.” Although, I swear I’m not the first one to name it as such. I searched to find where I have seen this referenced before. (If anyone knows, please email me so I can give the originator due credit.) Once I noticed this kind of reasoning, I saw it frequently. Wherever I come across this concept, it reveals a bit about human nature:
If you have to choose between the belief or a rational explanation, the rational explanation may be that which gets rejected.
The effect of supernatural creep can be seen with UFOs, anomalous natural phenomena (Fortean topics), and in bizarre stories categorized as “high strangeness” (which I’ll explain a bit further on in this piece). A perfect example is that of “black dogs” whose appearance is spectral or demonic and is associated with either protection from or nearness of bad spirits. Could it be just a big black dog? Witnesses perceive that it’s more than that. When the circumstances feel uncanny, we slip into thoughts of the supernatural. An enjoyable book that illustrates supernatural creep quite nicely is Three Men Seeking Monsters by Nick Redfern. Fun stuff.
With phantom black dogs, there is a connection to local legends and ghost stories. A modern example of the dispute about supernatural creep is evident in the Bigfoot/Sasquatch community.
Bigfoot proponents generally fall into two camps: those who search for a real animal that functions as nature intended (called ‘apers’) and those who entertain the option that the entity is not natural (paranormalists).
In their 2006 book, The Yowie: In Search of Australia’s Bigfoot, authors Tony Healy and Paul Cropper appear to have a parting of the ways when trying to explain all the Yowie accounts at face value—some of which, like our American Bigfoot are pretty bizarre. What is up with an animal that is sometimes described as having three toes, sometimes four or five? And, after all this time, why can’t we trap one or find a body? The creature has a stupendous ability to escape human grasp by eluding our cameras and leaving only tenuous, dubious traces of its corporeal existence. It can run outrageously fast and may be able to see infrared light. With the Yowie, we can’t think of a way to get a wild man on the island continent. It seems so implausible. But as Healy and Cropper note, it’s uncomfortable to explain the Yowie as a paranormal entity, perhaps as a psychic phenomenon, because it results in replacing one mystery with another.
Characteristics of hairy hominids or other unidentified cryptids may be just marginally odd—avoiding detection for decades among people, expert at hiding in plain sight, unusually developed senses of hearing or sight, fantastic strength or incredible speed. Or, they may get a bit spooky—glowing eyes, inability to be photographed, immunity to bullets, seen everywhere but found nowhere. They get to the point where it’s beyond natural—telepathy, shape-shifting, apporting or dis-apporting, signaling illness or death. In the case of some monster sightings, they are associated with UFO sightings, sychronicities, and time loss or distortion.
In order to hang on to the literal interpretation of eyewitness accounts, researchers may take tiny steps away from a purely natural explanation of their quarry. If the animal is shot at close range, why is it not injured or killed? Instead of questioning the story (or the marksmanship of the gunman), the assumption is that the thing must have some extra quality like bullet-proof skin, or perhaps it is impervious to bullets. If these stories are regarded as valid, and more like it come along, instead of doubting the witness, the researcher concludes there must be something paranormal going on to explain it.
The slip down the supernatural slope is really apparent when there are accounts of “high strangeness“—mind-boggling stories that have absurd elements. This term was originally used by Dr. J. Allen Hynek to describe extremely peculiar UFO cases that appeared to be associated with dream-like details, such as mysterious phone calls, electronic glitches, and Men in Black visits. If a report is one of “high strangeness,” it’s more than the typical “I saw a UFO” or “I saw a Bigfoot” story. It turns into a “I saw a Bigfoot go into a UFO” story—a whole other level of weirdness that now strains a natural explanation, if true.
And so it goes with Bigfooters. I recently read a blog post about a person who was rejected from the Bigfoot Field Research Organization (BRFO) because he dared mention a telepathic experience related to a Bigfoot encounter. There are Bigfoot researchers who discard reports that involve any paranormal or supernatural element because it sounds less credible to admit such ideas if they wish their work to be taken seriously. (This is a bit weird for the BFRO, I thought, since Matt Moneymaker ascribes some incredibly bizarre, paranormal talents to Bigfoot like the ability to “stun” people and immobilize them. I can’t take his speculations seriously.)
In my previous writings, I noted that it appeared that the ghost investigation field seemed to be moving away from the sciencey focus and more into the supernatural, dealing with demons, angels, and religious qualities of hauntings. Science is failing them, as well. In order to retain that important core that ghosts, or whatever X-file, is real, the natural explanations are no longer suitable as explanations; it must be something beyond human understanding. The cryptozoological community is sliding down a similar path at the behest of authors like Redfern who think that the field should expand to include “zooform” phenomena—entities, not actual animals, that appear in animal form. This would constitute a shift from scientific inquiry to a completely experienced-based view. How convenient. You gain great flexibility when you discount natural laws.
You may be able to see the immediate problem with an experience-based view and accounts of high strangeness. Since many skeptical paranormal researchers are very aware of the problems with eyewitness accounts, we notice the mistake certain non-skeptical researchers make when reading popular accounts of local tales or Charles Fort’s collection of books. The writers take every detail of the witness at face value! We know, however, that people mess up observations. We know that our memories are flawed, and we know that stories change over time, often becoming very different from the original account. Stories are poor evidence. To build a conclusion on just these story elements means that you must reject the foundation of knowledge we already have about how the world works (which is pretty well tested) and accept that there are visitors from other dimensions harassing our rural population or that we are able to conjure up monsters just with our collective mind power. That’s absurd. I’ll need more than a few good stories to accept that.
Supernatural creep is the way researchers hold onto their cherished ideas that a mysterious phenomenon, as they perceive it, is really out there. Being too invested in the idea to let it go, they reinvent reality instead.
By the way, the Beast of the Gevaudan? It was wolves. They were only unusual in that they were really hungry and good at catching people and not getting caught themselves. They were eventually dispatched. But the legend remains of the monsters of the Gevaudan. It’s too good of a story to give up.
References
Bord, Janet and Colin. 1981. Alien Animals. Stackpole Books.
Healy, T. and P. Cropper. 2006. The Yowie: In Search of Australia’s Bigfoot. Anomalist Books.
Redfern, Nick. 2004. Three Men Seeking Monsters. Paraview Pocket Books.
Smith, Jay M. 2011. Monsters of the Gevaudan: The Making of a Beast. Harvard University Press.
#BeastOfGevaudan #Bigfoot #blackDogs #cryptids #highStrangeness #Paranormal #Sasquatch #supernatural #Yowie #zooform https://sharonahill.com/?p=5112 -
Supernatural Creep: When explanations slide off to the fringesOriginally published as Supernatural Creep: The Slippery Slope to Unfalsifiability for my column Sounds Sciencey on csicop.org May 29, 2013.
I’m taking a step beyond sciencey with the following topic. What happens when science doesn’t cooperate with your subject area? Researchers of unexplained events may get frustrated and disenchanted with the scientific process when the eyewitness accounts they collect are too weird to explain via conventional means. They go unconventional.
Captain Jean-Baptiste Duhamel led the hunt for a beast that was attacking and devouring victims in the Gevaudan, France, in 1794. He had a problem. He could not catch and kill the man-eating monster. Being a proud man, he had to justify why he could not conquer this particular foe. Since the option that he was an inadequate huntsman was not acceptable, the creature must be supernatural in its abilities to escape his capture. The characteristics of the beast were exaggerated—it was huge, cunning, and not just an ordinary wolf. Captain Duhamel left defeated by what must truly be an extraordinary beast.
The cognitive dissonance experienced by the French captain is reflected today by those who can’t capture Bigfoot. When normal processes and causes fail to satisfactorily explain events or answers to questions, then the reasoning slips beyond nature, into super nature, beyond the testable claims of science.
I call this “supernatural creep.” Although, I swear I’m not the first one to name it as such. I searched to find where I have seen this referenced before. (If anyone knows, please email me so I can give the originator due credit.) Once I noticed this kind of reasoning, I saw it frequently. Wherever I come across this concept, it reveals a bit about human nature:
If you have to choose between the belief or a rational explanation, the rational explanation may be that which gets rejected.
The effect of supernatural creep can be seen with UFOs, anomalous natural phenomena (Fortean topics), and in bizarre stories categorized as “high strangeness” (which I’ll explain a bit further on in this piece). A perfect example is that of “black dogs” whose appearance is spectral or demonic and is associated with either protection from or nearness of bad spirits. Could it be just a big black dog? Witnesses perceive that it’s more than that. When the circumstances feel uncanny, we slip into thoughts of the supernatural. An enjoyable book that illustrates supernatural creep quite nicely is Three Men Seeking Monsters by Nick Redfern. Fun stuff.
With phantom black dogs, there is a connection to local legends and ghost stories. A modern example of the dispute about supernatural creep is evident in the Bigfoot/Sasquatch community.
Bigfoot proponents generally fall into two camps: those who search for a real animal that functions as nature intended (called ‘apers’) and those who entertain the option that the entity is not natural (paranormalists).
In their 2006 book, The Yowie: In Search of Australia’s Bigfoot, authors Tony Healy and Paul Cropper appear to have a parting of the ways when trying to explain all the Yowie accounts at face value—some of which, like our American Bigfoot are pretty bizarre. What is up with an animal that is sometimes described as having three toes, sometimes four or five? And, after all this time, why can’t we trap one or find a body? The creature has a stupendous ability to escape human grasp by eluding our cameras and leaving only tenuous, dubious traces of its corporeal existence. It can run outrageously fast and may be able to see infrared light. With the Yowie, we can’t think of a way to get a wild man on the island continent. It seems so implausible. But as Healy and Cropper note, it’s uncomfortable to explain the Yowie as a paranormal entity, perhaps as a psychic phenomenon, because it results in replacing one mystery with another.
Characteristics of hairy hominids or other unidentified cryptids may be just marginally odd—avoiding detection for decades among people, expert at hiding in plain sight, unusually developed senses of hearing or sight, fantastic strength or incredible speed. Or, they may get a bit spooky—glowing eyes, inability to be photographed, immunity to bullets, seen everywhere but found nowhere. They get to the point where it’s beyond natural—telepathy, shape-shifting, apporting or dis-apporting, signaling illness or death. In the case of some monster sightings, they are associated with UFO sightings, sychronicities, and time loss or distortion.
In order to hang on to the literal interpretation of eyewitness accounts, researchers may take tiny steps away from a purely natural explanation of their quarry. If the animal is shot at close range, why is it not injured or killed? Instead of questioning the story (or the marksmanship of the gunman), the assumption is that the thing must have some extra quality like bullet-proof skin, or perhaps it is impervious to bullets. If these stories are regarded as valid, and more like it come along, instead of doubting the witness, the researcher concludes there must be something paranormal going on to explain it.
The slip down the supernatural slope is really apparent when there are accounts of “high strangeness“—mind-boggling stories that have absurd elements. This term was originally used by Dr. J. Allen Hynek to describe extremely peculiar UFO cases that appeared to be associated with dream-like details, such as mysterious phone calls, electronic glitches, and Men in Black visits. If a report is one of “high strangeness,” it’s more than the typical “I saw a UFO” or “I saw a Bigfoot” story. It turns into a “I saw a Bigfoot go into a UFO” story—a whole other level of weirdness that now strains a natural explanation, if true.
And so it goes with Bigfooters. I recently read a blog post about a person who was rejected from the Bigfoot Field Research Organization (BRFO) because he dared mention a telepathic experience related to a Bigfoot encounter. There are Bigfoot researchers who discard reports that involve any paranormal or supernatural element because it sounds less credible to admit such ideas if they wish their work to be taken seriously. (This is a bit weird for the BFRO, I thought, since Matt Moneymaker ascribes some incredibly bizarre, paranormal talents to Bigfoot like the ability to “stun” people and immobilize them. I can’t take his speculations seriously.)
In my previous writings, I noted that it appeared that the ghost investigation field seemed to be moving away from the sciencey focus and more into the supernatural, dealing with demons, angels, and religious qualities of hauntings. Science is failing them, as well. In order to retain that important core that ghosts, or whatever X-file, is real, the natural explanations are no longer suitable as explanations; it must be something beyond human understanding. The cryptozoological community is sliding down a similar path at the behest of authors like Redfern who think that the field should expand to include “zooform” phenomena—entities, not actual animals, that appear in animal form. This would constitute a shift from scientific inquiry to a completely experienced-based view. How convenient. You gain great flexibility when you discount natural laws.
You may be able to see the immediate problem with an experience-based view and accounts of high strangeness. Since many skeptical paranormal researchers are very aware of the problems with eyewitness accounts, we notice the mistake certain non-skeptical researchers make when reading popular accounts of local tales or Charles Fort’s collection of books. The writers take every detail of the witness at face value! We know, however, that people mess up observations. We know that our memories are flawed, and we know that stories change over time, often becoming very different from the original account. Stories are poor evidence. To build a conclusion on just these story elements means that you must reject the foundation of knowledge we already have about how the world works (which is pretty well tested) and accept that there are visitors from other dimensions harassing our rural population or that we are able to conjure up monsters just with our collective mind power. That’s absurd. I’ll need more than a few good stories to accept that.
Supernatural creep is the way researchers hold onto their cherished ideas that a mysterious phenomenon, as they perceive it, is really out there. Being too invested in the idea to let it go, they reinvent reality instead.
By the way, the Beast of the Gevaudan? It was wolves. They were only unusual in that they were really hungry and good at catching people and not getting caught themselves. They were eventually dispatched. But the legend remains of the monsters of the Gevaudan. It’s too good of a story to give up.
References
Bord, Janet and Colin. 1981. Alien Animals. Stackpole Books.
Healy, T. and P. Cropper. 2006. The Yowie: In Search of Australia’s Bigfoot. Anomalist Books.
Redfern, Nick. 2004. Three Men Seeking Monsters. Paraview Pocket Books.
Smith, Jay M. 2011. Monsters of the Gevaudan: The Making of a Beast. Harvard University Press.
#BeastOfGevaudan #Bigfoot #blackDogs #cryptids #highStrangeness #Paranormal #Sasquatch #supernatural #Yowie #zooform https://sharonahill.com/?p=5112 -
It's February, Chicago, 1916, second-string kids from New Orleans, like The Stones at the Marquee, get there to fill a spot, it's fricken freezing, promoter gets overcoats from Sally Ann, all oversized. March lands a gig at Schiller's Cafe. Nick says to ramp it up, invents a new dance fitting the bustle. Gig is white band, lower East Side, what's chances that drunk in the back is Irish? Jazz it up boys, he shouts! Wtf? sez Nick, but he liked the sound of it…
By spring, every teen in Chicago was wearing an oversized overcoat. Louis told Papa Joe in '22 he couldn't play that stuff. Papa Joe said get your ass on that stage and blow.
#GodspeedBrewery may have a Schiller's Moment Wed Jan 28th 6-9 😊
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It's February, Chicago, 1916, second-string kids from New Orleans, like The Stones at the Marquee, get there to fill a spot, it's fricken freezing, promoter gets overcoats from Sally Ann, all oversized. March lands a gig at Schiller's Cafe. Nick says to ramp it up, invents a new dance fitting the bustle. Gig is white band, lower East Side, what's chances that drunk in the back is Irish? Jazz it up boys, he shouts! Wtf? sez Nick, but he liked the sound of it…
By spring, every teen in Chicago was wearing an oversized overcoat. Louis told Papa Joe in '22 he couldn't play that stuff. Papa Joe said get your ass on that stage and blow.
#GodspeedBrewery may have a Schiller's Moment Wed Jan 28th 6-9 😊
-
It's February, Chicago, 1916, second-string kids from New Orleans, like The Stones at the Marquee, get there to fill a spot, it's fricken freezing, promoter gets overcoats from Sally Ann, all oversized. March lands a gig at Schiller's Cafe. Nick says to ramp it up, invents a new dance fitting the bustle. Gig is white band, lower East Side, what's chances that drunk in the back is Irish? Jazz it up boys, he shouts! Wtf? sez Nick, but he liked the sound of it…
By spring, every teen in Chicago was wearing an oversized overcoat. Louis told Papa Joe in '22 he couldn't play that stuff. Papa Joe said get your ass on that stage and blow.
#GodspeedBrewery may have a Schiller's Moment Wed Jan 28th 6-9 😊
-
It's February, Chicago, 1916, second-string kids from New Orleans, like The Stones at the Marquee, get there to fill a spot, it's fricken freezing, promoter gets overcoats from Sally Ann, all oversized. March lands a gig at Schiller's Cafe. Nick says to ramp it up, invents a new dance fitting the bustle. Gig is white band, lower East Side, what's chances that drunk in the back is Irish? Jazz it up boys, he shouts! Wtf? sez Nick, but he liked the sound of it…
By spring, every teen in Chicago was wearing an oversized overcoat. Louis told Papa Joe in '22 he couldn't play that stuff. Papa Joe said get your ass on that stage and blow.
#GodspeedBrewery may have a Schiller's Moment Wed Jan 28th 6-9 😊
-
It's February, Chicago, 1916, second-string kids from New Orleans, like The Stones at the Marquee, get there to fill a spot, it's fricken freezing, promoter gets overcoats from Sally Ann, all oversized. March lands a gig at Schiller's Cafe. Nick says to ramp it up, invents a new dance fitting the bustle. Gig is white band, lower East Side, what's chances that drunk in the back is Irish? Jazz it up boys, he shouts! Wtf? sez Nick, but he liked the sound of it…
By spring, every teen in Chicago was wearing an oversized overcoat. Louis told Papa Joe in '22 he couldn't play that stuff. Papa Joe said get your ass on that stage and blow.
#GodspeedBrewery may have a Schiller's Moment Wed Jan 28th 6-9 😊
-
CW: Minor injury, archery, stupidity
Some painful lessons from archery practice today.
Shortly after starting to shoot I had a misfire. The bowstring slammed into my arm and the arrow fell just in front of me. I couldn't work out what had happened. There didn't seem to be anything wrong with either the bow or arrow, and I hadn't had anything quite like this happen before. Confused and sore I carried on shooting and all was fine for an end or two, but then it happened again. Now bewildered and very sore I spent some time trying to work out what was happening. I wondered if the arrow had dropped off the arrow rest just before release, but it didn't seem that it had. At a loss I shot a few more ends then it happened a third time. This attracted the attention of a couple of other club members who came over to see if I was OK and help me work out what was happening. Consensus was that the most likely explanation was that my arrow nocks were too loose on the bowstring and my finger tab was allowing my forefinger to rest on the top of the arrow, and the combination was causing me to inadvertently dislodge the arrow from the string during release. At this point I decided to end my practice for the day.
Several things I (re)learned:
1. Excessively loose nocks are dangerous, it's better to err on the side of too tight. I knew this, but not well enough it seems.
2. Nocks can get looser over time due to wear, so they may start OK but become dangerous later. Check this regularly, replace nocks as required.
3. Finger tabs should be adjusted to prevent too much contact with the arrow.
4. Even a low draw weight bow (my limbs are 24 lb) stores a *scary* amount of energy at full draw. When most of that energy gets directed into slapping your arm instead of propelling an arrow it really, really hurts.
5. If you're doing something and it suddenly really, really hurts you DON'T KEEP DOING THE THING UNTIL IT HURTS YOU SEVERAL MORE TIMES. Stop, and only continue *after* you've worked out what was going wrong. -
Disney drops Zootopia 2 bombshells at CinemaCon 2025—new cast, epic footage, and a Nov 26 release! Judy & Nick are back, and we’re obsessed.
Here's everything we know about it: https://www.theomenmedia.com/post/zootopia-2-gets-a-release-date-disney-unveils-exciting-details-at-cinemacon-2025
#Zootopia2 #DisneyReveal #CinemaCon2025 #AnimationNews #MovieBuzz #JudyHopps #NickWilde #DisneyAnimation #FilmFans #Thanksgiving2025
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Disney drops Zootopia 2 bombshells at CinemaCon 2025—new cast, epic footage, and a Nov 26 release! Judy & Nick are back, and we’re obsessed.
Here's everything we know about it: https://www.theomenmedia.com/post/zootopia-2-gets-a-release-date-disney-unveils-exciting-details-at-cinemacon-2025
#Zootopia2 #DisneyReveal #CinemaCon2025 #AnimationNews #MovieBuzz #JudyHopps #NickWilde #DisneyAnimation #FilmFans #Thanksgiving2025
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New #BookReview, The Darkness in the Pines by David Green. We get to know Nick Holleran from the early days as he gets to grips with becoming a #Paranormal Investigator.
https://markkieltywriter.com/2025/06/04/book-review-the-darkness-in-the-pines-by-david-green/
#Octobooks #Supernatural #Ghosts #IrishBookBlogger #ReadingCommunity #MastoDaoine
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Glacial Tomb – Lightless Expanse Review
By Cherd
I’m always surprised by what a hotbed for underground metal Denver, Colorado is. As a casual visitor, it’s such a clean, outdoors-oriented kind of place. It’s a place you go on your way to a mountain ski resort or to watch your sports team beat one of theirs. But beneath the clear Rocky Mountain air, the craft breweries, and the cannabis boutiques, something grimy stirs, belching forth established and ascendant underground darlings like Blood Incantation, Khemmis, Primitive Man, and Wayfarer. Meanwhile, bands like Doldrum come out of seemingly nowhere with records that land in my year-end top five.1 Denver death metal-ers Glacial Tomb have been plying their trade in the Mile High City since 2016. Their eponymous debut didn’t leave much of an impression around here,2 Will we see the light in sophomore follow-up Lightless Expanse?
Glacial Tomb’s brand of death on Lightless Expanse is brutal, somewhat blackened, sludgy, and sometimes toes the line just this side of tech death. The black comes mostly from vocalist Ben Hutcherson’s delivery, which falls into the now-standard contemporary death metal trope of half brontosaurus rumbles, half pterodactyl shrieks, but tremolo riffs also crop up, as on “Worldsflesh.” The sludge comes through in the viscosity of guitar tone built between Hutcherson and bassist David Small (both also of Khemmis), but there are also times, such as the midsection of “Voidwomb” and late in “Abyssal Host” when the band will drop their more technical death metal chops to fully embrace sludge metal structures. Songs like the excellent “Enshrined in Concrete” lean so hard this way they end up in beatdown hardcore territory. Lightless Expanse will at times call to mind Carnosus (“Stygian Abattoir,” “Seraphic Mutilation”), at others Warcrab (“Abyssal Host”), but ultimately they bring their own flavor to the ever-branching death-metal-plus genre.
Lightless Expanse is a record that gets better the more you marinate in it. That doesn’t mean it lacks immediacy. The surefire gym playlist addition “Enshrined in Concrete” struck me hard on first listen and has quickly climbed up my favorite songs of 2024 list. Meanwhile, opener “Stygian Abattoir” had to grow on me. Not because it’s a bad song, but because the three that follow it are so good that it’s hard to imagine making that the intro to the album. This is an album with two huge peaks surrounded by thankfully shallow valleys. The first peak, from the stomping “Voidwomb” to the deceptively melodic “Abyssal Host,” is tall enough to be littered with the corpses of those arrogant enough to attempt the summit. It’s a world-beating three-song stretch of brutality and tasteful songwriting. The second peak runs from the majestic “Seraphic Mutilation” to “Worldsflesh,” a song built for headbanging sure to get necks wrecked when played live, to “Wound of Existence.”
I mentioned above that opener “Stygian Abattoir” had to grow on me a bit, and the same can be said for the closing title track. It’s less immediate than the considerable high points elsewhere on Lightless Expanse, but Glacial Tomb were ultimately smart putting it last because it ends on a soaring guitar solo and breakdown that could have been the album’s pinnacle if sequenced in the middle. Instead, it closes the proceedings in a way that leaves you wanting more and helps you realize that the last 36 minutes have been spent in a very agreeable manner. If there’s one song that doesn’t quite live up to the standards set around it, it’s the album midpoint “Sanctuary,” but even that contains a memorable bass solo, and when played in sequence barely registers as a speed bump in an otherwise hard charging record.
I haven’t gone back to listen to Glacial Tomb’s debut, so I’ll trust Dr. Wvrm‘s assessment that it had its issues with integrating multiple genres and with songwriting. Whatever those might have been, I’d say they’ve thoroughly come out in the wash on their follow-up. This is a gem of brutality that I’ll be revisiting frequently, and another win for the Denver metal scene.
Rating: 4.0/5.0
DR: 6 | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps mp3
Label: Prosthetic Records
Websites: glacialtomb.bandcamp.com | facebook.com/glacialtomb
Releases Worldwide: September 20th, 2024#2024 #40 #AmericanMetal #Carnosus #DeathMetal #GlacialTomb #LightlessExpanse #ProstheticRecords #Review #Reviews #Sep24 #Warcrab
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Glacial Tomb – Lightless Expanse Review
By Cherd
I’m always surprised by what a hotbed for underground metal Denver, Colorado is. As a casual visitor, it’s such a clean, outdoors-oriented kind of place. It’s a place you go on your way to a mountain ski resort or to watch your sports team beat one of theirs. But beneath the clear Rocky Mountain air, the craft breweries, and the cannabis boutiques, something grimy stirs, belching forth established and ascendant underground darlings like Blood Incantation, Khemmis, Primitive Man, and Wayfarer. Meanwhile, bands like Doldrum come out of seemingly nowhere with records that land in my year-end top five.1 Denver death metal-ers Glacial Tomb have been plying their trade in the Mile High City since 2016. Their eponymous debut didn’t leave much of an impression around here,2 Will we see the light in sophomore follow-up Lightless Expanse?
Glacial Tomb’s brand of death on Lightless Expanse is brutal, somewhat blackened, sludgy, and sometimes toes the line just this side of tech death. The black comes mostly from vocalist Ben Hutcherson’s delivery, which falls into the now-standard contemporary death metal trope of half brontosaurus rumbles, half pterodactyl shrieks, but tremolo riffs also crop up, as on “Worldsflesh.” The sludge comes through in the viscosity of guitar tone built between Hutcherson and bassist David Small (both also of Khemmis), but there are also times, such as the midsection of “Voidwomb” and late in “Abyssal Host” when the band will drop their more technical death metal chops to fully embrace sludge metal structures. Songs like the excellent “Enshrined in Concrete” lean so hard this way they end up in beatdown hardcore territory. Lightless Expanse will at times call to mind Carnosus (“Stygian Abattoir,” “Seraphic Mutilation”), at others Warcrab (“Abyssal Host”), but ultimately they bring their own flavor to the ever-branching death-metal-plus genre.
Lightless Expanse is a record that gets better the more you marinate in it. That doesn’t mean it lacks immediacy. The surefire gym playlist addition “Enshrined in Concrete” struck me hard on first listen and has quickly climbed up my favorite songs of 2024 list. Meanwhile, opener “Stygian Abattoir” had to grow on me. Not because it’s a bad song, but because the three that follow it are so good that it’s hard to imagine making that the intro to the album. This is an album with two huge peaks surrounded by thankfully shallow valleys. The first peak, from the stomping “Voidwomb” to the deceptively melodic “Abyssal Host,” is tall enough to be littered with the corpses of those arrogant enough to attempt the summit. It’s a world-beating three-song stretch of brutality and tasteful songwriting. The second peak runs from the majestic “Seraphic Mutilation” to “Worldsflesh,” a song built for headbanging sure to get necks wrecked when played live, to “Wound of Existence.”
I mentioned above that opener “Stygian Abattoir” had to grow on me a bit, and the same can be said for the closing title track. It’s less immediate than the considerable high points elsewhere on Lightless Expanse, but Glacial Tomb were ultimately smart putting it last because it ends on a soaring guitar solo and breakdown that could have been the album’s pinnacle if sequenced in the middle. Instead, it closes the proceedings in a way that leaves you wanting more and helps you realize that the last 36 minutes have been spent in a very agreeable manner. If there’s one song that doesn’t quite live up to the standards set around it, it’s the album midpoint “Sanctuary,” but even that contains a memorable bass solo, and when played in sequence barely registers as a speed bump in an otherwise hard charging record.
I haven’t gone back to listen to Glacial Tomb’s debut, so I’ll trust Dr. Wvrm‘s assessment that it had its issues with integrating multiple genres and with songwriting. Whatever those might have been, I’d say they’ve thoroughly come out in the wash on their follow-up. This is a gem of brutality that I’ll be revisiting frequently, and another win for the Denver metal scene.
Rating: 4.0/5.0
DR: 6 | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps mp3
Label: Prosthetic Records
Websites: glacialtomb.bandcamp.com | facebook.com/glacialtomb
Releases Worldwide: September 20th, 2024#2024 #40 #AmericanMetal #Carnosus #DeathMetal #GlacialTomb #LightlessExpanse #ProstheticRecords #Review #Reviews #Sep24 #Warcrab
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Glacial Tomb – Lightless Expanse Review
By Cherd
I’m always surprised by what a hotbed for underground metal Denver, Colorado is. As a casual visitor, it’s such a clean, outdoors-oriented kind of place. It’s a place you go on your way to a mountain ski resort or to watch your sports team beat one of theirs. But beneath the clear Rocky Mountain air, the craft breweries, and the cannabis boutiques, something grimy stirs, belching forth established and ascendant underground darlings like Blood Incantation, Khemmis, Primitive Man, and Wayfarer. Meanwhile, bands like Doldrum come out of seemingly nowhere with records that land in my year-end top five.1 Denver death metal-ers Glacial Tomb have been plying their trade in the Mile High City since 2016. Their eponymous debut didn’t leave much of an impression around here,2 Will we see the light in sophomore follow-up Lightless Expanse?
Glacial Tomb’s brand of death on Lightless Expanse is brutal, somewhat blackened, sludgy, and sometimes toes the line just this side of tech death. The black comes mostly from vocalist Ben Hutcherson’s delivery, which falls into the now-standard contemporary death metal trope of half brontosaurus rumbles, half pterodactyl shrieks, but tremolo riffs also crop up, as on “Worldsflesh.” The sludge comes through in the viscosity of guitar tone built between Hutcherson and bassist David Small (both also of Khemmis), but there are also times, such as the midsection of “Voidwomb” and late in “Abyssal Host” when the band will drop their more technical death metal chops to fully embrace sludge metal structures. Songs like the excellent “Enshrined in Concrete” lean so hard this way they end up in beatdown hardcore territory. Lightless Expanse will at times call to mind Carnosus (“Stygian Abattoir,” “Seraphic Mutilation”), at others Warcrab (“Abyssal Host”), but ultimately they bring their own flavor to the ever-branching death-metal-plus genre.
Lightless Expanse is a record that gets better the more you marinate in it. That doesn’t mean it lacks immediacy. The surefire gym playlist addition “Enshrined in Concrete” struck me hard on first listen and has quickly climbed up my favorite songs of 2024 list. Meanwhile, opener “Stygian Abattoir” had to grow on me. Not because it’s a bad song, but because the three that follow it are so good that it’s hard to imagine making that the intro to the album. This is an album with two huge peaks surrounded by thankfully shallow valleys. The first peak, from the stomping “Voidwomb” to the deceptively melodic “Abyssal Host,” is tall enough to be littered with the corpses of those arrogant enough to attempt the summit. It’s a world-beating three-song stretch of brutality and tasteful songwriting. The second peak runs from the majestic “Seraphic Mutilation” to “Worldsflesh,” a song built for headbanging sure to get necks wrecked when played live, to “Wound of Existence.”
I mentioned above that opener “Stygian Abattoir” had to grow on me a bit, and the same can be said for the closing title track. It’s less immediate than the considerable high points elsewhere on Lightless Expanse, but Glacial Tomb were ultimately smart putting it last because it ends on a soaring guitar solo and breakdown that could have been the album’s pinnacle if sequenced in the middle. Instead, it closes the proceedings in a way that leaves you wanting more and helps you realize that the last 36 minutes have been spent in a very agreeable manner. If there’s one song that doesn’t quite live up to the standards set around it, it’s the album midpoint “Sanctuary,” but even that contains a memorable bass solo, and when played in sequence barely registers as a speed bump in an otherwise hard charging record.
I haven’t gone back to listen to Glacial Tomb’s debut, so I’ll trust Dr. Wvrm‘s assessment that it had its issues with integrating multiple genres and with songwriting. Whatever those might have been, I’d say they’ve thoroughly come out in the wash on their follow-up. This is a gem of brutality that I’ll be revisiting frequently, and another win for the Denver metal scene.
Rating: 4.0/5.0
DR: 6 | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps mp3
Label: Prosthetic Records
Websites: glacialtomb.bandcamp.com | facebook.com/glacialtomb
Releases Worldwide: September 20th, 2024#2024 #40 #AmericanMetal #Carnosus #DeathMetal #GlacialTomb #LightlessExpanse #ProstheticRecords #Review #Reviews #Sep24 #Warcrab
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Happy Caturday!!
Last night, Kamala Harris and Tim Walz held their biggest rally yet in Glendale, Arizona, a Phoenix suburb. The crowd numbered around 15,000 people. Once again, the atmosphere was joyful and enthusiastic, with the crowd cheering lustily. Later last night, Trump spoke to a much smaller crowd, in a large venue with hundreds of empty seats. There was no joy at his sad rally.
The Guardian: Harris and Walz whip up crowd at packed Phoenix rally – but ‘we are the underdog.’
Kamala Harris and Tim Walz rallied a packed arena outside Phoenix, Arizona, on Friday – drawing perhaps the largest Democratic crowd of the election cycle this year.
The presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, her running mate and the local leaders who joined them on stage whipped up the crowd, discussing immigration, abortion rights and Indigenous sovereignty.
Noting the Indigenous leaders in the room, Harris also said: “I will always honor tribal sovereignty and respect tribal self-determination.” Indigenous voters are credited with helping deliver Arizona to Joe Biden in 2020; the state is home to 22 federally recognized tribes.
At one point during her speech, Harris was interrupted by protesters chanting “free, free Palestine” and other messages in support of Gaza. She stopped her speech to address the protesters.
“We’re here to fight for our democracy, which includes respecting the voices that I think we are hearing from. Let me just speak to that for a moment and then I’ll get back to the business at hand,” she said. “I have been clear: now is the time to get a ceasefire deal and get the hostage deal done. Now is the time. And the president and I are working around the clock every day to get that ceasefire deal done and bring the hostages home.” Her statement represented a noticeable change in tone from her approach to Gaza protesters in Detroit on Thursday.
Harris and Walz took the stage at the Desert Diamond Arena, a venue that can hold 20,000 people. Although official estimates are not yet available, the Harris campaign confirmed that more than 15,000 people attended the Phoenix rally. On stage, in front of attendees waving signs that read “Coach!”, Walz said the rally “might be the largest political gathering in the history of Arizona”.
“It’s not as if anybody cares about crowd sizes or anything,” he added.
Other Harris campaign events this week that have drawn crowds of up to 15,000, invoking the ire of Donald Trump, who claims to have “spoken to the biggest crowds”.
The Harris-Walz rally represents a renewed push to put the Sun belt back on the map for Harris’s still young campaign. Before Friday night, the state appeared to be leaning red, with Trump leading Harris by single digits in recent polls. But by the evening of the rally, Harris and Trump appeared neck and neck in the state, with polling from FiveThirtyEight showing Harris’ 44.4% closely following Trump’s 44.8%.
Polls on Friday morning showed Harris narrowly leading Trump nationwide.
Harris also addressed immigration in her Arizona speech. AP: Kamala Harris makes an immigration pitch in Arizona as she fights to gain ground in the Sun Belt.
Vice President Kamala Harris drew on her prosecutorial background to make her first expansive pitch on immigration to border-state voters as she and her new running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, attracted thousands to a campaign rally in Arizona during their tour of battleground states.
Harris, the former attorney general of California, reminded the crowd that she, as a law enforcement official, targeted transnational gangs, drug cartels and smugglers.
Trump won’t be happy with the latest polls of swing states. Also from The Guardian: New poll shows Harris four points ahead of Trump in three key swing states.
“I prosecuted them in case after case, and I won,” Harris said in front of a crowd of more than 15,000 in Glendale, a suburb of Phoenix. “So I know what I’m talking about.”
Harris promoted a border security bill that a bipartisan group of senators negotiated earlier this year, which Republican lawmakers ultimately opposed en masse at Republican nominee Donald Trump’s behest.
“Donald Trump does not want to fix this problem,” Harris said. “Be clear about that: He has no interest or desire to actually fix the problem. He talks a big game about border security, but he does not walk the walk.”
Trump won’t be happy with the latest swing state polls.
The Guardian: New poll shows Harris four points ahead of Trump in three key swing states.
A major new poll puts Kamala Harris ahead of Donald Trump in three key swing states, signaling a dramatic reversal in momentum for the Democratic party with three months to go until the election.
The vice-president leads the ex-president by four percentage points in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan, 50% to 46%, among almost 2,000 likely voters in each state, according to new surveys by the New York Times and Siena College.
The polls were conducted between 5 and 9 August, in the week that Harris named midwesterner Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota and a former high school teacher, as her running mate for November’s Democratic ticket.
It provides the clearest indication from crucial battleground states since Joe Biden pulled out of the race and endorsed Harris amid mounting concerns about the 82-year-old’s cognitive wellbeing and fitness to govern for a second term. The results come after months of polling that showed Biden either tied with or slightly behind Trump.
Harris is viewed as more intelligent, more honest and more temperamentally fit to run the country than Trump, according to the registered voters polled.
The findings, published on Saturday by the Times, will boost the Democrats, as Harris and Walz continue crisscrossing the country on their first week on the campaign trail together, holding a slew of events in swing states that are likely to decide the outcome of the election….
While only a snapshot, Democrats will probably be heartened to see that 60% of the surveyed independent voters, who always play a major role in deciding the outcome of the race, said they are satisfied with the choice of presidential candidates, compared with 45% in May.
The swing appears to be largely driven by evolving voter perceptions of Harris, who has been praised for her positivity and future-focused stump speeches on the campaign trail. In Pennsylvania, where Biden beat Trump by just more than 80,000 votes four years ago, her favorability rating has surged by 10 points since last month among registered voters, according to Times/Siena polling.
Harris will need to win Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan – crucial battleground states that Biden clinched in 2020 – if the Democrats are to regain the White House.
There’s also good news out of Nevada. The Nevada Independent: New Nevada poll sees Harris with biggest lead over Trump yet.
A new poll of likely Nevada voters found Vice President Kamala Harris with a nearly 6 percentage point lead over former President Donald Trump — the largest lead for a Democrat in any presidential poll of Nevadans this cycle.
While Nevada polls have been relatively scarce since Harris replaced President Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee, the vice president appears to have closed the gap that existed between Trump and Biden, who had not led Trump in a single public poll taken in the state since October 2023.
A Bloomberg/Morning Consult poll of Nevada in late July found Harris with a 2 percentage point lead in the head-to-head matchup — Democrats’ first leading poll of the cycle — and the Cook Political Report moved Nevada back into the “toss-up” category Thursday after previously categorizing it as “lean Republican.”
This latest poll, conducted by Decipher Ai’s David Wolfson, a pollster and Columbia University lecturer, sampled 991 likely voters across Nevada from Aug. 3-5 in a SMS/text-to-web poll on the presidential and House races. The statewide margin of error is 3 percentage points and between 6 percentage points and 7 percentage points for House races….
On the presidential ballot, Harris garnered 49.2 percent support while Trump received 43.6 percent. Independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. received only 3.9 percent of the vote. Kennedy’s vote share is lower than the 8 percentage points to 10 percentage points he had been receiving, on average, when Biden was on the ballot. In an interview, Johnston said Kennedy’s polling fade reflects what typically happens to third-party candidates as the election nears.
Harris’ lead in this poll may be an outlier, but it mimics Biden’s position at this point in the cycle in 2020 when FiveThirtyEight polling averages showed he led in Nevada by about 6 percentage points. Biden ultimately won the state by about 2.4 percentage points.
Harris has received some major endorsements. From CNN:
Harris gains major endorsements: The nation’s oldest and largest Latino civil rights organization, the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), has endorsed the Harris-Walz ticket. It is the first time LULAC has endorsed a presidential. candidate in its almost 100-year history. Culinary and bartenders unions in Las Vegas also endorsed the Harris-Walz ticket Friday.
The United Auto Workers (UAW) also endorsed Harris this week.
In her speech last night, Harris told the crowd that she worked at McDonalds one summer. The Independent: Kamala Harris could make history as the first president to work at McDonald’s.
More than 13 percent of Americans, or roughly 41 million people, have worked at a McDonald’s restaurant at some point in their lives. That includes Kamala Harris, who worked at a restaurant for a summer while she was in college.
Harris mentioned her brief stint on the fryer when she joined the picket line with fast food workers in Las Vegas in 2019 and during an appearance on The Drew Barrymore Show in April. (Her order? “Quarter pounder with cheese and fries,” and barbecue sauce for dipping if she gets McNuggets).
Now, the Democratic presidential candidate’s campaign is nodding to her summer job to highlight her upbringing and a platform to boost American workers that stands in stark contrast to her Republican rival Donald Trump, who “has no plan to help the middle class — just more tax cuts for billionaires,” according to a recent ad.
McDonald’s is all over influential Americans’ resumes (former House Speaker Paul Ryan and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos have also worked in McDonald’s restaurants), but service worker labor unions and fast food employees have been leading nationwide efforts to improve working conditions for lower-wage workers, including calls to boost the federal hourly minimum wage to at least $15.
They could soon have a powerful advocate in one of their former coworkers.
Harris — who has earned endorsements from several influential unions, including Service Employees International Union, which supported the nationwide Fight for $15 campaign — stood with striking McDonald’s workers and protesters as she was launching her first presidential campaign.
“If we want to talk about these golden arches being a symbol of the best of America, well, the arches are falling short,” she said from Las Vegas in June 2019. “We have got to recognize that working people deserve livable wages.”
“I did the french fries and I did the ice cream,” she told workers.
“There was not a family relying on me to pay the rent, put food on the table and keep the bills paid by the end of the month,” she added. “But the reality of McDonald’s is that a majority of the folk who are working there today are relying on that income to sustain a household and a family.”
Harris also made a point of stopping “lock him up” chants from the crowd. Ryan J. Reilly at NBC News: Harris shutting down ‘lock him up’ chants shields Trump’s federal Jan. 6 case from even more delays.
Vice President Kamala Harris’ efforts to shut down “lock him up” chants targeting Donald Trump at Harris-Walz rallies this week may be an effort to avoid engaging in the type of rhetoric seen at Trump rallies in 2016.
But there’s also a very practical reason for Harris to avoid showing any support for that type of language: Any comments or signs of approval she makes could further delay or complicate the pending federal criminal charges Trump is facing. That includes the Jan. 6 and 2020 election interference case brought by special counsel Jack Smith.
If Harris wins the election in November, Trump’s Jan. 6 case — though weakened by the Supreme Court — will continue to move toward trial. As sitting vice president in the administration that appointed the attorney general with oversight of the case, any comments Harris makes related to the trial could be fodder for the former president’s lawyers to argue in court that her comments interfered with Trump’s due process rights. That includes any suggestion that locking up Trump would be an explicit goal (as Trump repeatedly said about Hillary Clinton during the 2016 campaign).
When a “lock him up” chant broke out at a Harris rally in Wisconsin this week, she said to supporters, “We’re gonna let the courts handle that,” and used a similar line when the same chant broke out at another rally. “Our job is to beat him in November,” she said.
Harris, a former prosecutor herself, has been cautious in her references to the array of civil and criminal cases that Trump has faced in recent years. Harris is aware of the impact she could have on Trump’s pending federal cases and has surrounded herself with Justice Department veterans — including her brother-in-law, Tony West, a former top DOJ official, and former Attorney General Eric Holder, who vetted her vice presidential candidates.
This is important, because Trump’s DC case on January 6 and election subversion is active again and back in the capable hands of Judge Tanya Chutkan.
Joyce Vance wrote yesterday at Civil Discourse: Jack Smith Asks for More Time.
Late today, lawyers in the Special Counsel’s office and lawyers for Donald Trump filed the joint status report that wasn’t due until tomorrow in the Trump election interference case in the District of Columbia. The Special Counsel advised the court that it “continues to assess the new precedent” laid down by the Supreme Court creating the doctrine of presidential immunity and went on to ask the court for an additional three weeks to file “an informed proposal regarding the schedule for pretrial proceedings moving forward.” Trump’s lawyers didn’t oppose Jack Smith’s request. Now the timeline is up to Judge Chutkan.
What does that mean, and why is the government asking for more delay in the case? Those are legitimate questions, but I would not be quick to criticize the Justice Department here.
Part of the answer comes in the pleading itself, where Smith relates that under the relevant portion of the special counsel regulations, he is required to consult with other components in DOJ before moving forward: “A Special Counsel shall comply with the rules, regulations, procedures, practices and policies of the Department of Justice. He or she shall consult with appropriate offices within the Department for guidance with respect to established practices, policies and procedures of the Department, including ethics and security regulations and procedures. Should the Special Counsel conclude that the extraordinary circumstances of any particular decision would render compliance with required review and approval procedures by the designated Departmental component inappropriate, he or she may consult directly with the Attorney General.”
Here, the parties’ task is to provide the court with a schedule for moving forward, but it’s deciding what events belong on that schedule that is problematic. Smith has an indictment that consists of four counts, 45 pages of allegations, and a mountain of evidence.
Click the link to read the rest.
In Trump news, people are still talking about the former “president’s” so called “press conference.”
Tom Nichols at The Atlantic: The Truth About Trump’s Press Conference. His obvious emotional instability is frightening, not funny.
Donald Trump’s public events are a challenge for anyone who writes about him. His rallies and press conferences are rich sources of material, fountains of molten weirdness that blurp up stuff that would sink the career of any other politician. By the time they’re over, all of the attendees are covered in gloppy nonsense.
And then, once everyone cleans up and shakes the debris off their phones and laptops, so much of what Trump said seems too bonkers to have come from a former president and the nominee of a major party that journalists are left trying to piece together a story as if Trump were a normal person. This is what The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, has described as the “bias toward coherence,” and it leads to careful circumlocutions instead of stunned headlines.
Consider Trump’s press conference yesterday in Florida. Trump has been lying low since President Joe Biden withdrew from the presidential race, at least in terms of public appearances. But Vice President Kamala Harris, the new Democratic nominee, and her running mate, Governor Tim Walz, are gaining a lot of great press, and so Trump decided it was time to emerge from his sanctuary.
Trump, predictably, did an afternoon concert of his greatest hits, including “Doctors and Mothers Are Murdering Babies After They’re Born,” “Putin and Xi Love Me and I Love Them,” and “Gas Used to Be a Buck-Eighty-Something a Gallon.” But the new material was pretty shocking.
Trump not only declared that mothers are killing babies in the delivery room—he’s been saying that for years—but added the incomprehensible claim that liberals, conservatives, and independents alike are very happy that abortion has been returned to the states. (When asked how he would vote in Florida’s abortion referendum, he dodged the question, which suggests that maybe not everyone is happy.)
He said (again) that the convicted January 6 insurrectionists have been treated horribly, but this time he added that no one died during the assault on the Capitol. (In fact, four people died that day.) He made his usual assertion that Russia would never have invaded Ukraine if he’d been in office, but this time he added how much he looked forward to getting along with the Iranians, despite also bragging about how he tanked the nuclear deal with them.
He claimed that Harris was sliding in the polls, a standard Trump trope in talking about his opponents, but he added that he was getting crowd sizes up to 30 times hers at his rallies. Harris recently spoke to approximately 15,000 people in Detroit; 30 times that would be nearly half a million people, so Trump is now saying that he’s having rallies that are five times bigger than the average crowd at a Super Bowl—bigger, even, than Woodstock—and somehow fitting them all into arenas with seats to spare….
“Nobody has spoken to crowds bigger than me,” Trump said. And then, referring to the crowd that gathered at his behest on January 6, he compared it to the 1963 March on Washington: “If you look at Martin Luther King, when he did his speech, his great speech, and you look at ours: same real estate, same everything, same number of people.”
The March on Washington drew a quarter million people, almost six times the number that showed up during the attack on the Capitol. Trump agreed that official estimates said his crowd was smaller than King’s. He pressed on anyway: “But when you look at the exact same picture and everything is the same—because it was the fountains, the whole thing all the way back to go from Lincoln to Washington—and you look at it, and you look at the picture of my crowd … we actually had more people.”
Nichols goes on to recount Trump’s story about going down in a helicopter with San Francisco’s Willie Brown (Brown says this never happened.) and also the media’s attempts to make sense of Trump’s rambling rants. He concludes:
The Republican nominee, the man who could return to office and regain the sole authority to use American nuclear weapons, is a serial liar and can’t tell the difference between reality and fantasy.
Donald Trump is not well. He is not stable. There’s something deeply wrong with him.
Any of those would have been important—and accurate—headlines.
Politico has finally located the man who actually was in that helicopter with Trump years ago: The other Black politician who says he was with Trump in that near-fatal chopper crash.
The man who almost crashed in a helicopter with Donald Trump told POLITICO Trump confused him with former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown — despite the former president’s repeated insistence it was Brown.
It was Nate Holden, a former city councilmember and state senator from Los Angeles, who said in an exclusive interview late Friday that he remembers the near-death experience well. He and others believe it happened sometime in 1990.
“Willie is the short Black guy living in San Francisco,” Holden said. “I’m a tall Black guy living in Los Angeles.”
“I guess we all look alike,” Holden told POLITICO, letting out a loud laugh.
Holden, who is 95 years old, was in touch with Trump and his team during the 1990s when the flamboyant Manhattan developer was trying to build on the site of the historic Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Holden represented the district at the time and supported the project.\
In the interview, Holden said he was watching Trump’s press conference on Thursday when the former president claimed that Brown was aboard during the white-knuckle helicopter ride.
In fact, Holden says he met Trump at Trump Tower, en route to Atlantic City, New Jersey, where they were going to tour the developer’s brand new Taj Mahal casino. In the lobby at Trump Tower, Holden says he was greeted by several people as “senator,” salutations that miffed the host.
“He said, ‘You know I own this building but nobody seems to know who I am,’” Holden remembered the mogul saying.
Finally, I want to highlight this piece in Propublica by Andy Kroll and Nick Surgey: Inside Project 2025’s Secret Training Videos.
Project 2025, the controversial playbook and policy agenda for a right-wing presidential administration, has lost its director and faced scathing criticism from both Democratic groups and former President Donald Trump. But Project 2025’s plan to train an army of political appointees who could battle against the so-called deep state government bureaucracy on behalf of a future Trump administration remains on track.
One centerpiece of that program is dozens of never-before-published videos created for Project 2025’s Presidential Administration Academy. The vast majority of these videos — 23 in all, totaling more than 14 hours of content — were provided to ProPublica and Documented by a person who had access to them.
The Project 2025 videos coach future appointees on everything from the nuts and bolts of governing to how to outwit bureaucrats. There are strategies for avoiding embarrassing Freedom of Information Act disclosures and ensuring that conservative policies aren’t struck down by “left-wing judges.” Some of the content is routine advice that any incoming political appointee might be told. Other segments of the training offer guidance on radically changing how the federal government works and what it does.
In one video, Bethany Kozma, a conservative activist and former deputy chief of staff at the U.S. Agency for International Development in the Trump administration, downplays the seriousness of climate change and says the movement to combat it is really part of a ploy to “control people.”
“If the American people elect a conservative president, his administration will have to eradicate climate change references from absolutely everywhere,” Kozma says.
In the same video, Kozma calls the idea of gender fluidity “evil.” Another speaker, Katie Sullivan, who was an acting assistant attorney general at the Department of Justice under Trump, takes aim at executive actions by the administration of President Joe Biden that created gender adviser positions throughout the federal government. The goal, Biden wrote in one order, was to “advance equal rights and opportunities, regardless of gender or gender identity.”
Sullivan says, “That position has to be eradicated, as well as all the task forces, the removal of all the equity plans from all the websites, and a complete rework of the language in internal and external policy documents and grant applications.”
Head over to ProPublica to read the whole thing.
That’s it for me. What’s on your mind today?
https://skydancingblog.com/2024/08/10/lazy-caturday-reads-174/
#childlessCatLadies #CulinaryUnionNevada #JackSmith #JudgeTanyaChutkan #McDonalds #NateHolden #Project2025TrainingVideos #swingStatePolls #TimWalz #TrumpLies #TrumpPressConference #UAW #WillieBrown
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Happy Caturday!!
Last night, Kamala Harris and Tim Walz held their biggest rally yet in Glendale, Arizona, a Phoenix suburb. The crowd numbered around 15,000 people. Once again, the atmosphere was joyful and enthusiastic, with the crowd cheering lustily. Later last night, Trump spoke to a much smaller crowd, in a large venue with hundreds of empty seats. There was no joy at his sad rally.
The Guardian: Harris and Walz whip up crowd at packed Phoenix rally – but ‘we are the underdog.’
Kamala Harris and Tim Walz rallied a packed arena outside Phoenix, Arizona, on Friday – drawing perhaps the largest Democratic crowd of the election cycle this year.
The presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, her running mate and the local leaders who joined them on stage whipped up the crowd, discussing immigration, abortion rights and Indigenous sovereignty.
Noting the Indigenous leaders in the room, Harris also said: “I will always honor tribal sovereignty and respect tribal self-determination.” Indigenous voters are credited with helping deliver Arizona to Joe Biden in 2020; the state is home to 22 federally recognized tribes.
At one point during her speech, Harris was interrupted by protesters chanting “free, free Palestine” and other messages in support of Gaza. She stopped her speech to address the protesters.
“We’re here to fight for our democracy, which includes respecting the voices that I think we are hearing from. Let me just speak to that for a moment and then I’ll get back to the business at hand,” she said. “I have been clear: now is the time to get a ceasefire deal and get the hostage deal done. Now is the time. And the president and I are working around the clock every day to get that ceasefire deal done and bring the hostages home.” Her statement represented a noticeable change in tone from her approach to Gaza protesters in Detroit on Thursday.
Harris and Walz took the stage at the Desert Diamond Arena, a venue that can hold 20,000 people. Although official estimates are not yet available, the Harris campaign confirmed that more than 15,000 people attended the Phoenix rally. On stage, in front of attendees waving signs that read “Coach!”, Walz said the rally “might be the largest political gathering in the history of Arizona”.
“It’s not as if anybody cares about crowd sizes or anything,” he added.
Other Harris campaign events this week that have drawn crowds of up to 15,000, invoking the ire of Donald Trump, who claims to have “spoken to the biggest crowds”.
The Harris-Walz rally represents a renewed push to put the Sun belt back on the map for Harris’s still young campaign. Before Friday night, the state appeared to be leaning red, with Trump leading Harris by single digits in recent polls. But by the evening of the rally, Harris and Trump appeared neck and neck in the state, with polling from FiveThirtyEight showing Harris’ 44.4% closely following Trump’s 44.8%.
Polls on Friday morning showed Harris narrowly leading Trump nationwide.
Harris also addressed immigration in her Arizona speech. AP: Kamala Harris makes an immigration pitch in Arizona as she fights to gain ground in the Sun Belt.
Vice President Kamala Harris drew on her prosecutorial background to make her first expansive pitch on immigration to border-state voters as she and her new running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, attracted thousands to a campaign rally in Arizona during their tour of battleground states.
Harris, the former attorney general of California, reminded the crowd that she, as a law enforcement official, targeted transnational gangs, drug cartels and smugglers.
Trump won’t be happy with the latest polls of swing states. Also from The Guardian: New poll shows Harris four points ahead of Trump in three key swing states.
“I prosecuted them in case after case, and I won,” Harris said in front of a crowd of more than 15,000 in Glendale, a suburb of Phoenix. “So I know what I’m talking about.”
Harris promoted a border security bill that a bipartisan group of senators negotiated earlier this year, which Republican lawmakers ultimately opposed en masse at Republican nominee Donald Trump’s behest.
“Donald Trump does not want to fix this problem,” Harris said. “Be clear about that: He has no interest or desire to actually fix the problem. He talks a big game about border security, but he does not walk the walk.”
Trump won’t be happy with the latest swing state polls.
The Guardian: New poll shows Harris four points ahead of Trump in three key swing states.
A major new poll puts Kamala Harris ahead of Donald Trump in three key swing states, signaling a dramatic reversal in momentum for the Democratic party with three months to go until the election.
The vice-president leads the ex-president by four percentage points in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan, 50% to 46%, among almost 2,000 likely voters in each state, according to new surveys by the New York Times and Siena College.
The polls were conducted between 5 and 9 August, in the week that Harris named midwesterner Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota and a former high school teacher, as her running mate for November’s Democratic ticket.
It provides the clearest indication from crucial battleground states since Joe Biden pulled out of the race and endorsed Harris amid mounting concerns about the 82-year-old’s cognitive wellbeing and fitness to govern for a second term. The results come after months of polling that showed Biden either tied with or slightly behind Trump.
Harris is viewed as more intelligent, more honest and more temperamentally fit to run the country than Trump, according to the registered voters polled.
The findings, published on Saturday by the Times, will boost the Democrats, as Harris and Walz continue crisscrossing the country on their first week on the campaign trail together, holding a slew of events in swing states that are likely to decide the outcome of the election….
While only a snapshot, Democrats will probably be heartened to see that 60% of the surveyed independent voters, who always play a major role in deciding the outcome of the race, said they are satisfied with the choice of presidential candidates, compared with 45% in May.
The swing appears to be largely driven by evolving voter perceptions of Harris, who has been praised for her positivity and future-focused stump speeches on the campaign trail. In Pennsylvania, where Biden beat Trump by just more than 80,000 votes four years ago, her favorability rating has surged by 10 points since last month among registered voters, according to Times/Siena polling.
Harris will need to win Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan – crucial battleground states that Biden clinched in 2020 – if the Democrats are to regain the White House.
There’s also good news out of Nevada. The Nevada Independent: New Nevada poll sees Harris with biggest lead over Trump yet.
A new poll of likely Nevada voters found Vice President Kamala Harris with a nearly 6 percentage point lead over former President Donald Trump — the largest lead for a Democrat in any presidential poll of Nevadans this cycle.
While Nevada polls have been relatively scarce since Harris replaced President Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee, the vice president appears to have closed the gap that existed between Trump and Biden, who had not led Trump in a single public poll taken in the state since October 2023.
A Bloomberg/Morning Consult poll of Nevada in late July found Harris with a 2 percentage point lead in the head-to-head matchup — Democrats’ first leading poll of the cycle — and the Cook Political Report moved Nevada back into the “toss-up” category Thursday after previously categorizing it as “lean Republican.”
This latest poll, conducted by Decipher Ai’s David Wolfson, a pollster and Columbia University lecturer, sampled 991 likely voters across Nevada from Aug. 3-5 in a SMS/text-to-web poll on the presidential and House races. The statewide margin of error is 3 percentage points and between 6 percentage points and 7 percentage points for House races….
On the presidential ballot, Harris garnered 49.2 percent support while Trump received 43.6 percent. Independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. received only 3.9 percent of the vote. Kennedy’s vote share is lower than the 8 percentage points to 10 percentage points he had been receiving, on average, when Biden was on the ballot. In an interview, Johnston said Kennedy’s polling fade reflects what typically happens to third-party candidates as the election nears.
Harris’ lead in this poll may be an outlier, but it mimics Biden’s position at this point in the cycle in 2020 when FiveThirtyEight polling averages showed he led in Nevada by about 6 percentage points. Biden ultimately won the state by about 2.4 percentage points.
Harris has received some major endorsements. From CNN:
Harris gains major endorsements: The nation’s oldest and largest Latino civil rights organization, the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), has endorsed the Harris-Walz ticket. It is the first time LULAC has endorsed a presidential. candidate in its almost 100-year history. Culinary and bartenders unions in Las Vegas also endorsed the Harris-Walz ticket Friday.
The United Auto Workers (UAW) also endorsed Harris this week.
In her speech last night, Harris told the crowd that she worked at McDonalds one summer. The Independent: Kamala Harris could make history as the first president to work at McDonald’s.
More than 13 percent of Americans, or roughly 41 million people, have worked at a McDonald’s restaurant at some point in their lives. That includes Kamala Harris, who worked at a restaurant for a summer while she was in college.
Harris mentioned her brief stint on the fryer when she joined the picket line with fast food workers in Las Vegas in 2019 and during an appearance on The Drew Barrymore Show in April. (Her order? “Quarter pounder with cheese and fries,” and barbecue sauce for dipping if she gets McNuggets).
Now, the Democratic presidential candidate’s campaign is nodding to her summer job to highlight her upbringing and a platform to boost American workers that stands in stark contrast to her Republican rival Donald Trump, who “has no plan to help the middle class — just more tax cuts for billionaires,” according to a recent ad.
McDonald’s is all over influential Americans’ resumes (former House Speaker Paul Ryan and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos have also worked in McDonald’s restaurants), but service worker labor unions and fast food employees have been leading nationwide efforts to improve working conditions for lower-wage workers, including calls to boost the federal hourly minimum wage to at least $15.
They could soon have a powerful advocate in one of their former coworkers.
Harris — who has earned endorsements from several influential unions, including Service Employees International Union, which supported the nationwide Fight for $15 campaign — stood with striking McDonald’s workers and protesters as she was launching her first presidential campaign.
“If we want to talk about these golden arches being a symbol of the best of America, well, the arches are falling short,” she said from Las Vegas in June 2019. “We have got to recognize that working people deserve livable wages.”
“I did the french fries and I did the ice cream,” she told workers.
“There was not a family relying on me to pay the rent, put food on the table and keep the bills paid by the end of the month,” she added. “But the reality of McDonald’s is that a majority of the folk who are working there today are relying on that income to sustain a household and a family.”
Harris also made a point of stopping “lock him up” chants from the crowd. Ryan J. Reilly at NBC News: Harris shutting down ‘lock him up’ chants shields Trump’s federal Jan. 6 case from even more delays.
Vice President Kamala Harris’ efforts to shut down “lock him up” chants targeting Donald Trump at Harris-Walz rallies this week may be an effort to avoid engaging in the type of rhetoric seen at Trump rallies in 2016.
But there’s also a very practical reason for Harris to avoid showing any support for that type of language: Any comments or signs of approval she makes could further delay or complicate the pending federal criminal charges Trump is facing. That includes the Jan. 6 and 2020 election interference case brought by special counsel Jack Smith.
If Harris wins the election in November, Trump’s Jan. 6 case — though weakened by the Supreme Court — will continue to move toward trial. As sitting vice president in the administration that appointed the attorney general with oversight of the case, any comments Harris makes related to the trial could be fodder for the former president’s lawyers to argue in court that her comments interfered with Trump’s due process rights. That includes any suggestion that locking up Trump would be an explicit goal (as Trump repeatedly said about Hillary Clinton during the 2016 campaign).
When a “lock him up” chant broke out at a Harris rally in Wisconsin this week, she said to supporters, “We’re gonna let the courts handle that,” and used a similar line when the same chant broke out at another rally. “Our job is to beat him in November,” she said.
Harris, a former prosecutor herself, has been cautious in her references to the array of civil and criminal cases that Trump has faced in recent years. Harris is aware of the impact she could have on Trump’s pending federal cases and has surrounded herself with Justice Department veterans — including her brother-in-law, Tony West, a former top DOJ official, and former Attorney General Eric Holder, who vetted her vice presidential candidates.
This is important, because Trump’s DC case on January 6 and election subversion is active again and back in the capable hands of Judge Tanya Chutkan.
Joyce Vance wrote yesterday at Civil Discourse: Jack Smith Asks for More Time.
Late today, lawyers in the Special Counsel’s office and lawyers for Donald Trump filed the joint status report that wasn’t due until tomorrow in the Trump election interference case in the District of Columbia. The Special Counsel advised the court that it “continues to assess the new precedent” laid down by the Supreme Court creating the doctrine of presidential immunity and went on to ask the court for an additional three weeks to file “an informed proposal regarding the schedule for pretrial proceedings moving forward.” Trump’s lawyers didn’t oppose Jack Smith’s request. Now the timeline is up to Judge Chutkan.
What does that mean, and why is the government asking for more delay in the case? Those are legitimate questions, but I would not be quick to criticize the Justice Department here.
Part of the answer comes in the pleading itself, where Smith relates that under the relevant portion of the special counsel regulations, he is required to consult with other components in DOJ before moving forward: “A Special Counsel shall comply with the rules, regulations, procedures, practices and policies of the Department of Justice. He or she shall consult with appropriate offices within the Department for guidance with respect to established practices, policies and procedures of the Department, including ethics and security regulations and procedures. Should the Special Counsel conclude that the extraordinary circumstances of any particular decision would render compliance with required review and approval procedures by the designated Departmental component inappropriate, he or she may consult directly with the Attorney General.”
Here, the parties’ task is to provide the court with a schedule for moving forward, but it’s deciding what events belong on that schedule that is problematic. Smith has an indictment that consists of four counts, 45 pages of allegations, and a mountain of evidence.
Click the link to read the rest.
In Trump news, people are still talking about the former “president’s” so called “press conference.”
Tom Nichols at The Atlantic: The Truth About Trump’s Press Conference. His obvious emotional instability is frightening, not funny.
Donald Trump’s public events are a challenge for anyone who writes about him. His rallies and press conferences are rich sources of material, fountains of molten weirdness that blurp up stuff that would sink the career of any other politician. By the time they’re over, all of the attendees are covered in gloppy nonsense.
And then, once everyone cleans up and shakes the debris off their phones and laptops, so much of what Trump said seems too bonkers to have come from a former president and the nominee of a major party that journalists are left trying to piece together a story as if Trump were a normal person. This is what The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, has described as the “bias toward coherence,” and it leads to careful circumlocutions instead of stunned headlines.
Consider Trump’s press conference yesterday in Florida. Trump has been lying low since President Joe Biden withdrew from the presidential race, at least in terms of public appearances. But Vice President Kamala Harris, the new Democratic nominee, and her running mate, Governor Tim Walz, are gaining a lot of great press, and so Trump decided it was time to emerge from his sanctuary.
Trump, predictably, did an afternoon concert of his greatest hits, including “Doctors and Mothers Are Murdering Babies After They’re Born,” “Putin and Xi Love Me and I Love Them,” and “Gas Used to Be a Buck-Eighty-Something a Gallon.” But the new material was pretty shocking.
Trump not only declared that mothers are killing babies in the delivery room—he’s been saying that for years—but added the incomprehensible claim that liberals, conservatives, and independents alike are very happy that abortion has been returned to the states. (When asked how he would vote in Florida’s abortion referendum, he dodged the question, which suggests that maybe not everyone is happy.)
He said (again) that the convicted January 6 insurrectionists have been treated horribly, but this time he added that no one died during the assault on the Capitol. (In fact, four people died that day.) He made his usual assertion that Russia would never have invaded Ukraine if he’d been in office, but this time he added how much he looked forward to getting along with the Iranians, despite also bragging about how he tanked the nuclear deal with them.
He claimed that Harris was sliding in the polls, a standard Trump trope in talking about his opponents, but he added that he was getting crowd sizes up to 30 times hers at his rallies. Harris recently spoke to approximately 15,000 people in Detroit; 30 times that would be nearly half a million people, so Trump is now saying that he’s having rallies that are five times bigger than the average crowd at a Super Bowl—bigger, even, than Woodstock—and somehow fitting them all into arenas with seats to spare….
“Nobody has spoken to crowds bigger than me,” Trump said. And then, referring to the crowd that gathered at his behest on January 6, he compared it to the 1963 March on Washington: “If you look at Martin Luther King, when he did his speech, his great speech, and you look at ours: same real estate, same everything, same number of people.”
The March on Washington drew a quarter million people, almost six times the number that showed up during the attack on the Capitol. Trump agreed that official estimates said his crowd was smaller than King’s. He pressed on anyway: “But when you look at the exact same picture and everything is the same—because it was the fountains, the whole thing all the way back to go from Lincoln to Washington—and you look at it, and you look at the picture of my crowd … we actually had more people.”
Nichols goes on to recount Trump’s story about going down in a helicopter with San Francisco’s Willie Brown (Brown says this never happened.) and also the media’s attempts to make sense of Trump’s rambling rants. He concludes:
The Republican nominee, the man who could return to office and regain the sole authority to use American nuclear weapons, is a serial liar and can’t tell the difference between reality and fantasy.
Donald Trump is not well. He is not stable. There’s something deeply wrong with him.
Any of those would have been important—and accurate—headlines.
Politico has finally located the man who actually was in that helicopter with Trump years ago: The other Black politician who says he was with Trump in that near-fatal chopper crash.
The man who almost crashed in a helicopter with Donald Trump told POLITICO Trump confused him with former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown — despite the former president’s repeated insistence it was Brown.
It was Nate Holden, a former city councilmember and state senator from Los Angeles, who said in an exclusive interview late Friday that he remembers the near-death experience well. He and others believe it happened sometime in 1990.
“Willie is the short Black guy living in San Francisco,” Holden said. “I’m a tall Black guy living in Los Angeles.”
“I guess we all look alike,” Holden told POLITICO, letting out a loud laugh.
Holden, who is 95 years old, was in touch with Trump and his team during the 1990s when the flamboyant Manhattan developer was trying to build on the site of the historic Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Holden represented the district at the time and supported the project.\
In the interview, Holden said he was watching Trump’s press conference on Thursday when the former president claimed that Brown was aboard during the white-knuckle helicopter ride.
In fact, Holden says he met Trump at Trump Tower, en route to Atlantic City, New Jersey, where they were going to tour the developer’s brand new Taj Mahal casino. In the lobby at Trump Tower, Holden says he was greeted by several people as “senator,” salutations that miffed the host.
“He said, ‘You know I own this building but nobody seems to know who I am,’” Holden remembered the mogul saying.
Finally, I want to highlight this piece in Propublica by Andy Kroll and Nick Surgey: Inside Project 2025’s Secret Training Videos.
Project 2025, the controversial playbook and policy agenda for a right-wing presidential administration, has lost its director and faced scathing criticism from both Democratic groups and former President Donald Trump. But Project 2025’s plan to train an army of political appointees who could battle against the so-called deep state government bureaucracy on behalf of a future Trump administration remains on track.
One centerpiece of that program is dozens of never-before-published videos created for Project 2025’s Presidential Administration Academy. The vast majority of these videos — 23 in all, totaling more than 14 hours of content — were provided to ProPublica and Documented by a person who had access to them.
The Project 2025 videos coach future appointees on everything from the nuts and bolts of governing to how to outwit bureaucrats. There are strategies for avoiding embarrassing Freedom of Information Act disclosures and ensuring that conservative policies aren’t struck down by “left-wing judges.” Some of the content is routine advice that any incoming political appointee might be told. Other segments of the training offer guidance on radically changing how the federal government works and what it does.
In one video, Bethany Kozma, a conservative activist and former deputy chief of staff at the U.S. Agency for International Development in the Trump administration, downplays the seriousness of climate change and says the movement to combat it is really part of a ploy to “control people.”
“If the American people elect a conservative president, his administration will have to eradicate climate change references from absolutely everywhere,” Kozma says.
In the same video, Kozma calls the idea of gender fluidity “evil.” Another speaker, Katie Sullivan, who was an acting assistant attorney general at the Department of Justice under Trump, takes aim at executive actions by the administration of President Joe Biden that created gender adviser positions throughout the federal government. The goal, Biden wrote in one order, was to “advance equal rights and opportunities, regardless of gender or gender identity.”
Sullivan says, “That position has to be eradicated, as well as all the task forces, the removal of all the equity plans from all the websites, and a complete rework of the language in internal and external policy documents and grant applications.”
Head over to ProPublica to read the whole thing.
That’s it for me. What’s on your mind today?
https://skydancingblog.com/2024/08/10/lazy-caturday-reads-174/
#childlessCatLadies #CulinaryUnionNevada #JackSmith #JudgeTanyaChutkan #McDonalds #NateHolden #Project2025TrainingVideos #swingStatePolls #TimWalz #TrumpLies #TrumpPressConference #UAW #WillieBrown
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🔐 Secure AI workloads with OAuth 2.1 and Zero Trust policies. Learn how with Nick Taylor at ConFoo Feb 25–27.
https://confoo.ca/en/2026/session/agentic-access-oauth-gets-you-in-zero-trust-keeps-you-safe -
🔐 Secure AI workloads with OAuth 2.1 and Zero Trust policies. Learn how with Nick Taylor at ConFoo Feb 25–27.
https://confoo.ca/en/2026/session/agentic-access-oauth-gets-you-in-zero-trust-keeps-you-safe -
🔐 Secure AI workloads with OAuth 2.1 and Zero Trust policies. Learn how with Nick Taylor at ConFoo Feb 25–27.
https://confoo.ca/en/2026/session/agentic-access-oauth-gets-you-in-zero-trust-keeps-you-safe -
🔐 Secure AI workloads with OAuth 2.1 and Zero Trust policies. Learn how with Nick Taylor at ConFoo Feb 25–27.
https://confoo.ca/en/2026/session/agentic-access-oauth-gets-you-in-zero-trust-keeps-you-safe -
🔐 Secure AI workloads with OAuth 2.1 and Zero Trust policies. Learn how with Nick Taylor at ConFoo Feb 25–27.
https://confoo.ca/en/2026/session/agentic-access-oauth-gets-you-in-zero-trust-keeps-you-safe -
Damon Albarn is a genius and deserves far more recognition then he gets.
He deserves to have his name mentioned in the same breath as people like Dylan, Hendrix, Miles Davis, Louis Armstrong, Lennon & McCartney, Bowie and many more. True musical heroes, legends, architects of modern music.
Blur have been going since the early nineties and have produced a lot of good music in that time. It might not be everyone’s cup of tea, especially the ‘Britpop’ years. But you can’t deny their longevity.
There’s No Other Way:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJzCYSdrHMI&list=RDLJzCYSdrHMI&start_radio=1Song 2:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSbBvKaM6sk&list=RDSSbBvKaM6sk&start_radio=1On Your Own:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQVIIWq9gIQ&list=RDkQVIIWq9gIQ&start_radio=1Coffee & TV:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6oqXVx3sBOk&list=RD6oqXVx3sBOk&start_radio=1Crazy Beat:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohyqek7fj6Y&list=RDohyqek7fj6Y&start_radio=1We’ve Got a File on You:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLII83gJm-Y&list=RDpLII83gJm-Y&start_radio=1The work he has done as the driving force behind Gorillaz: different styles and genres, a plethora of different artists collaborating, a lot of good music.
Clint Eastwood, Dirty Harry, Feelgood Inc., On Melancholy Hill, Stylo – all good songs.Punk:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_O6T25qA78&list=RD3_O6T25qA78&start_radio=1M1A1:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWvPWQCWbsU&list=RDHWvPWQCWbsU&start_radio=1White Light:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P91kQ8ADh5Q&list=RDP91kQ8ADh5Q&start_radio=1His side projects such as ‘The Good, The Bad and The Queen’ and the short lived ‘Rocket Juice and the Moon’.
His solo music.
Everyday Robots:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjbiUj-FD-o&list=RDrjbiUj-FD-o&start_radio=1Mr. Tembo:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODG3VRkncBc&list=RDODG3VRkncBc&start_radio=1Heavy Seas of Love:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCUfitpIsW8&list=RDCCUfitpIsW8&start_radio=1A minor acting career.
The sheer number of collaborations he has done with artists from all over the world.
Charity work with the Cancer Trust, DRC Music, Oxfam and through the ‘Africa Express’ program.
Advocating for African music in general.
The ‘Mali Music’ album with Toumani Diabaté.Anti-war activism, criticism of celebrity culture and tirelessly using musical collaborations to break down borders and erase divisions.
He's a legend but most people have never even heard of him.
Yet everyone knows who Nicky ‘Tuna Casserole’ Minaj and Justin ‘Two Spleens’ Bieber are.
What’s wrong with this situation?
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Damon Albarn is a genius and deserves far more recognition then he gets.
He deserves to have his name mentioned in the same breath as people like Dylan, Hendrix, Miles Davis, Louis Armstrong, Lennon & McCartney, Bowie and many more. True musical heroes, legends, architects of modern music.
Blur have been going since the early nineties and have produced a lot of good music in that time. It might not be everyone’s cup of tea, especially the ‘Britpop’ years. But you can’t deny their longevity.
There’s No Other Way:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJzCYSdrHMI&list=RDLJzCYSdrHMI&start_radio=1Song 2:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSbBvKaM6sk&list=RDSSbBvKaM6sk&start_radio=1On Your Own:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQVIIWq9gIQ&list=RDkQVIIWq9gIQ&start_radio=1Coffee & TV:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6oqXVx3sBOk&list=RD6oqXVx3sBOk&start_radio=1Crazy Beat:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohyqek7fj6Y&list=RDohyqek7fj6Y&start_radio=1We’ve Got a File on You:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLII83gJm-Y&list=RDpLII83gJm-Y&start_radio=1The work he has done as the driving force behind Gorillaz: different styles and genres, a plethora of different artists collaborating, a lot of good music.
Clint Eastwood, Dirty Harry, Feelgood Inc., On Melancholy Hill, Stylo – all good songs.Punk:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_O6T25qA78&list=RD3_O6T25qA78&start_radio=1M1A1:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWvPWQCWbsU&list=RDHWvPWQCWbsU&start_radio=1White Light:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P91kQ8ADh5Q&list=RDP91kQ8ADh5Q&start_radio=1His side projects such as ‘The Good, The Bad and The Queen’ and the short lived ‘Rocket Juice and the Moon’.
His solo music.
Everyday Robots:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjbiUj-FD-o&list=RDrjbiUj-FD-o&start_radio=1Mr. Tembo:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODG3VRkncBc&list=RDODG3VRkncBc&start_radio=1Heavy Seas of Love:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCUfitpIsW8&list=RDCCUfitpIsW8&start_radio=1A minor acting career.
The sheer number of collaborations he has done with artists from all over the world.
Charity work with the Cancer Trust, DRC Music, Oxfam and through the ‘Africa Express’ program.
Advocating for African music in general.
The ‘Mali Music’ album with Toumani Diabaté.Anti-war activism, criticism of celebrity culture and tirelessly using musical collaborations to break down borders and erase divisions.
He's a legend but most people have never even heard of him.
Yet everyone knows who Nicky ‘Tuna Casserole’ Minaj and Justin ‘Two Spleens’ Bieber are.
What’s wrong with this situation?
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28 New Songs Out Today
https://www.brooklynvegan.com/28-new-songs-out-today-54/#brooklynvegan_category_music #Music #Arooj_Aftab #Friko #Georgia #Georgia_Gets_By #Golshifteh_Farahani #Grandaddy #halo_maud #Kora_Puckett #Louisa_Stancioff #Maria_Chiara_Argiro #Meshell_Ndegeocello #Mick_Harvey #Mutilation_Barbecue #New_Songs #New_Tracks #Nick_Mulvey #Omni #one_true_pairing #Orion_Sun #Serpentwithfeet #Sinister_Feeling #Wild_Beasts
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28 New Songs Out Today
https://www.brooklynvegan.com/28-new-songs-out-today-54/#brooklynvegan_category_music #Music #Arooj_Aftab #Friko #Georgia #Georgia_Gets_By #Golshifteh_Farahani #Grandaddy #halo_maud #Kora_Puckett #Louisa_Stancioff #Maria_Chiara_Argiro #Meshell_Ndegeocello #Mick_Harvey #Mutilation_Barbecue #New_Songs #New_Tracks #Nick_Mulvey #Omni #one_true_pairing #Orion_Sun #Serpentwithfeet #Sinister_Feeling #Wild_Beasts
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28 New Songs Out Today
https://www.brooklynvegan.com/28-new-songs-out-today-54/#brooklynvegan_category_music #Music #Arooj_Aftab #Friko #Georgia #Georgia_Gets_By #Golshifteh_Farahani #Grandaddy #halo_maud #Kora_Puckett #Louisa_Stancioff #Maria_Chiara_Argiro #Meshell_Ndegeocello #Mick_Harvey #Mutilation_Barbecue #New_Songs #New_Tracks #Nick_Mulvey #Omni #one_true_pairing #Orion_Sun #Serpentwithfeet #Sinister_Feeling #Wild_Beasts
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28 New Songs Out Today
https://www.brooklynvegan.com/28-new-songs-out-today-54/#brooklynvegan_category_music #Music #Arooj_Aftab #Friko #Georgia #Georgia_Gets_By #Golshifteh_Farahani #Grandaddy #halo_maud #Kora_Puckett #Louisa_Stancioff #Maria_Chiara_Argiro #Meshell_Ndegeocello #Mick_Harvey #Mutilation_Barbecue #New_Songs #New_Tracks #Nick_Mulvey #Omni #one_true_pairing #Orion_Sun #Serpentwithfeet #Sinister_Feeling #Wild_Beasts
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This is about as bullshit as it gets. Just having this article up in my news reader makes it stink in here. #ai #capitalism #tech #artistsrights #kleptocracy https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/05/26/2026200/nick-clegg-says-asking-artists-for-use-permission-would-kill-the-ai-industry
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Finally Friday Reads: TACO Tales
“The most transparent administration ever..” John Buss @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
I’m hoping we’re entering a Golden Age of Journalism because the number of stories floating around out there today indicates that we need more investigative journalists than ever before. Because of that, I cannot seem to play the Wake Forest Commencement by Sixty Minutes‘ Scott Pelley enough. His first statement rang true throughout the world. “Our sacred Rule of Law is under attack.” The Speech was entitled “The Meaning of You.”
The path to self-discovery starts with finding what kind of person you are when times get dark. As I’ve said before, these times are very dark. Do you shy away from speaking out? Do you take fighting action on whatever level you can? Do you melt away? Do you just go along or cheer it? I’ve come back to this speech this week because the headlines today show how important the press can be in exposing the dark times and the dark ones and their actions to light. It is then up to us to do something about it and to get our elected officials on it.
The New Republic’s Parker Molloy briefly discusses the importance of the Pelley Speech and the evil MAGA’s response. “Scott Pelley Warns Graduates About the Threats to American Democracy. The “60 Minutes” correspondent never mentioned Trump by name, but his call to defend democratic institutions was apparently too much for the MAGA crowd to handle.”
Earlier this month, journalist Scott Pelley delivered what should have been a fairly standard commencement address at Wake Forest University. The 60 Minutes correspondent spoke about seeking truth, defending democracy, and the importance of courage in difficult times—the kind of boilerplate inspiration you’d expect from a veteran journalist addressing graduates.
But because we live in very normal times, the speech went viral over Memorial Day weekend and triggered a conservative meltdown that’s been fascinating to watch unfold.
The fury started when a pro-MAGA account clipped portions of Pelley’s speech and shared them on X, writing “Scott Pelley raged at Trump in angry, unhinged commencement address at Wake Forest.”
What did Pelley say that sent the right into such a tizzy? Well, he had the audacity to suggest that “our sacred rule of law is under attack. Journalism is under attack. Universities are under attack. Freedom of speech is under attack.” He warned of “insidious fear … reaching through our schools, our businesses, our homes, and into our private thoughts, the fear to speak in America.”
And perhaps most provocatively, Pelley criticized the administration’s attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, saying, “Diversity is now described as ‘illegal.’ Equity is to be shunned. Inclusion is a dirty word. This is an old playbook, my friends.” He also referenced “masked agents” who “abduct a college student who wrote an editorial in her college paper defending Palestinian rights and send her to a prison in Louisiana charged with nothing.”
Pelley’s speech comes as Trump is suing CBS for $20 billion over alleged “election interference” and CBS News CEO Wendy McMahon abruptly resigned, citing disagreements with the company amid the legal pressure.
What’s remarkable is how a fairly conventional call for civic engagement and democratic values could generate such hysteria. But then again, when you’re running an administration built on exactly the kind of authoritarian playbook Pelley described, I suppose any critique—no matter how measured—feels like an existential threat.
Reading the speech in full, it’s hard to see what’s so “unhinged” about urging graduates to be engaged citizens and defend democratic institutions. Unless, of course, you’re deeply invested in attacking those very institutions.
A complete transcript of the speech follows. Also, you may listen to and watch Paley’s address here. The headlines today may be bleak, but the important thing is that reporters and the people supporting the work investigate and can find unbelievable corruption, stark depravity, and many examples of bad human conduct, demeanor, and actions. Then expose it!
When I was born, and as I grew up and my family moved into the middle class, I was instilled with the importance of reading magazines and watching the news. My Grandfather on my mother’s side always sent me books for my birthday and Christmas. My Nana on my mother’s side sent my sister and me subscriptions to National Geographic and The Christian Science Monitor. We read the local newspapers and the Des Moines Register every morning and evening. When I asked my Dad while I was in high school if I could get a subscription to The Manchester Guardian and to Paris Match, he didn’t even hesitate. I can tell you my show and tell performance, as well as my reports from newspapers, were altogether different from my Council Bluffs and Omaha friends.
When I hit university, all the foreign students whom I continually sought out for all dorm meals originally thought I was from Canada. When my family travelled to Europe, I tried to blend in as much as possible and just observe. It is perhaps this that makes me blog today, even though the only journalism classes I took were in high school. I wrote for the school newspaper, an underground newspaper, and the junior high newspaper. I always assumed everyone was as news-hungry as I was growing up in some of the most boring and inane places on the planet. I couldn’t live with oatmeal after reading about Belgian waffles. Can you imagine what happened when I got my first bite of one?
Knowledge of news is important for good citizenship, it’s important for making decisions that impact your household, and it’s important just because things are moving faster than ever. So let me get down to my first suggested reads today.
One of the things I find most threatening these days is seeing my students, my university, and many places leave their brains behind and try to make things easy using AI. It may have a future, but presently, any good professor worth their salt can tell when someone uses it. You should get good at spotting it on the internet, and you will be annoyed when you’re making an important call about something or chatting with some company, and even when it’s given a name, you can tell by the idiosyncrasies and the lack of niceties of American English, this thing ain’t human.
I’ve noticed that the grammar check my University uses completely breaks down when dealing with nuances and colloquialisms. It seems to excel mostly at filling my writing with commas and catching typos. That’s okay by me and easy, but believe me, I can tell when a student overuses AI. We’re being trained at spotting it as well as teaching students how to use it correctly. However, someone who knows what they are doing from years of doing it can make a better decision about its use than those still on the learning curve.
I say this because I watched a news program where the new AI installed at the Social Security phone line repeatedly ignored the question they asked, then kept squawking “Can I help you with something else?” endlessly. This is the point where I hear my Nana’s voice telling little me, “Well, you can, but may you?” AI does not grok manners and polite conversations. It could be because human mutants like Elon Musk and his Dodge cluster have never quite figured that out either. Garbage in, garbage out. But, then maybe that’s what they want. Cease being polite and just be technically acceptable. Okay, it’s long but I’m getting there, I promise.
This phenomenon played out yesterday as one of RFK Jr.’s prodigal research adventures turned into something I wouldn’t even expect from an undergrad or, actually, even someone sitting in my high school or university composition class. He was, of course, a legacy student there because of his father. We also know he was the dorm’s drug dealer from my fellow Westside High School journalism classmate, Kurt Anderson. One thing Westside always turned out was students who knew how to write. That skill got me through all the rest of my degrees because, damn I could write a good paper. Evidently, RFK Jr. did not get that skill.
It’s rather interesting given the difficult times Harvard is facing in protecting its foreign students. Now granted, I helped many a colleague from distant lands to get their excellent research into prime American English form. Everyone always sent them to me before they were sent to a journal for publishing, which bought me a cheap pub. But, every one of them took me farther down the path of being a numbers and stats guru. Did you know kids in India start their calculus classes in like 5th grade? It was also easier for me to actually come up with a sweet hypothesis to test because I was taught to be both analytical and creative. That’s what a good public school can do for you. A good university exposes you to what’s possible and exposes you to all kinds of interesting thinkers. But, again, I guess RFK Jr. was too busy with drugs to take advantage of anything like that. That’s why he’s likely never going to be part of a blog community, a book club, or a group that goes to the Saturday Night Midnight movies.
Okay, I really am getting to the read now. At his advanced age, with his unlimited educational opportunities and his money, he cannot write a research paper. And yet, it showed up in the public sphere because he was trying to prove his very wrong hypotheses at any cost. He didn’t prove anything. He turned to all manner of things to argue his hypothesis. None of his antics were academically sound. At first, the White House’s dumbest Press Secretary announced there were “formatting” errors. But, how could that be when, after investigating sources, reporters found them either made up or seriously in error? The Make America Healthy Again report was just embarrassing.
MSNBC anchor Jen Psaki derided White House Secretary Karoline Leavitt’s defense of a “Make America Healthy Again” Commission report filled with errors and broken links.
NOTUS reported the paper, released under the administration of President Donald Trump and U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., cited at least seven sources that do not appear to exist. The news publication contacted epidemiologist Katherine Keyes, who the MAHA report lists as the first author of a study it cited on adolescent anxiety, and discovered Keyes didn’t write the paper.
“The paper cited is not a real paper that I or my colleagues were involved with,” Keyes told NOTUS. “We’ve certainly done research on this topic, but did not publish a paper in JAMA Pediatrics on this topic with that co-author group, or with that title.”
NOTUS also reported two other studies pertaining to direct-to-consumer drug advertisements for ADHD medications and antidepressants for kids appear nowhere “to be found.” Reporters also could not validate another section claiming 25% to 40% of mild cases of asthma are overprescribed. Additionally, the author of a corticosteroids study’s the MAHA report cited to support its arguments denied writing the study.
NOTUS reporter Jasmine Wright was in the White House briefing room Thursday and asked Leavitt: “does the White House have confidence that the information coming from HHS can be trusted?”
“Yes, we have complete confidence in Secretary Kennedy and his team at HHS,” Leavitt responded. “I understand there were some formatting issues with the MAHA report that are being addressed.”
Psaki, a former White House press secretary herself, did not contain her scorn.
Well, the nation’s biggest and most disappointing media of record investigated and found some interesting things in the MAHA report. Let’s start with the Washington Post. “White House MAHA Report may have garbled science by using AI, experts say. The report, led by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., was intended to address the reasons for the decline in Americans’ life expectancy.” Well, that’s typical of a lot of students. If they can’t do it, they pay someone who can. You can always tell this, though, because if you’ve seen any previous work, you recognize their voice and you know when something is different. AI is the most recent example of buying a paper online, but with a lower cost and perhaps a lower chance of getting caught because you won’t find a cheat paper by searching it verbatim with your student’s work. Believe me, the discussion on this in teacher lounges and faculty clubs is de rigueur these days. Evidently, RFK Jr. didn’t even know the most tell-tale of the signs.
Some of the citations that underpin the science in the White House’s sweeping “MAHA Report” appear to have been generated using artificial intelligence, resulting in numerous garbled scientific references and invented studies, AI experts said Thursday.
Of the 522 footnotes to scientific research in an initial version of the report sent to The Washington Post, at least 37 appear multiple times, according to a review of the report by The Post. Other citations include the wrong author, and several studies cited by the extensive health report do not exist at all, a fact first reported by the online news outlet NOTUS on Thursday morning.
Some references include “oaicite” attached to URLs — a definitive sign that the research was collected using artificial intelligence. The presence of “oaicite” is a marker indicating use of OpenAI, a U.S. artificial intelligence company.
A common hallmark of AI chatbots, such as ChatGPT, is unusually repetitive content that does not sound human or is inaccurate — as well as the tendency to “hallucinate” studies or answers that appear to make sense but are not real.
So, our Secretary of Health and Human Services is so bereft of research skills that he can’t even avoid the number one Rookie mistake. Does he have anyone around him who knew better and could catch this? I can tell you that a team of peers that checks every research paper headed to publication in an academically sound journal would never let this go through to print. If you’re the main author, you try to avoid any humiliating mistakes for serious journals.
AI technology can be used legitimately to quickly survey the research in a field. But Oren Etzioni, a professor emeritus at the University of Washington who studies AI, said he was shocked by the sloppiness in the MAHA Report.
“Frankly, that’s shoddy work,” he said. “We deserve better.”
“The MAHA Report: Making Our Children Healthy Again,” which addressed the root causes of America’s lagging health outcomes, was written by a commission of Cabinet officials and government scientific leaders. It was led by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has a history of misstating science, and written in response to an executive order from President Donald Trump.
The New York Times published the first media review pointing out made-up sources. “White House Health Report Included Fake Citations, ‘A report on children’s health released by the Make America Healthy Again Commission referred to scientific papers that did not exist.” Now, I’m not a scientist, but I lived with a Yale-educated Doctorate in Microbiology who published a lot of things on RNA transcription, ran a lab at a public university, and wound up with the NSF. I have no idea if he’s retired or if he went with the current purge of scientists. I read many of his works pre-publication, and he got published in all the big ones. I think the science journals are more nerve-wracking to write for than the Economics and Finance. Usually, it’s based on lab data rather than the Federal Reserve Beige Book or World Book data, which gets a pass even though the methodology and the model itself get the eagle eye. This report was a hot mess on all accounts.
The Trump administration released a report last week that it billed as a “clear, evidence-based foundation” for action on a range of children’s health issues.
But the report, from the presidential Make America Healthy Again Commission, cited studies that did not exist. These included fictitious studies on direct-to-consumer drug advertising, mental illness and medications prescribed for children with asthma.
“It makes me concerned about the rigor of the report, if these really basic citation practices aren’t being followed,” said Katherine Keyes, a professor of epidemiology at Columbia University who was listed as the author of a paper on mental health and substance use among adolescents. Dr. Keyes has not written any paper by the title the report cited, nor does one seem to exist by any author.
The news outlet NOTUS first reported the presence of false citations, and The New York Times identified additional faulty references. By midafternoon on Thursday, the White House had uploaded a new copy of the report with corrections.
Dr. Ivan Oransky — who teaches medical journalism at New York University and is a co-founder of Retraction Watch, a website that tracks retractions of scientific research — said the errors in the report were characteristic of the use of generative artificial intelligence, which has led to similar issues in legal filings and more.
Dr. Oransky said that while he did not know whether the government had used A.I. in producing the report or the citations, “we’ve seen this particular movie before, and it’s unfortunately much more common in scientific literature than people would like or than really it should be.”
Asked at a news conference on Thursday whether the report had relied on A.I., the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, deferred to the Department of Health and Human Services. Emily Hilliard, a spokeswoman for the department, did not answer a question about the source of the fabricated references and downplayed them as “minor citation and formatting errors.” She said that “the substance of the MAHA report remains the same — a historic and transformative assessment by the federal government to understand the chronic-disease epidemic afflicting our nation’s children.”
The false references do not necessarily mean the underlying facts in the report are incorrect. But they indicate a lack of rigorous review and verification of the report and its bibliography before it was released, Dr. Oransky said.
“Scientific publishing is supposed to be about verification,” he said, adding: “There’s supposed to be a set of eyes, actually several sets of eyes. And so what that tells us is that there was no good set of eyes on this
So, after finding out about all of that, this should make you feel really at ease.
The Trump administration has quietly spread Palantir’s technology through U.S. agencies, paving the way to easily compile data on Americans. The company has received more than $113 million in federal government spending since President Trump took office. nyti.ms/4dJfR0o
— The New York Times (@nytimes.com) 2025-05-30T16:16:57.733Z
I think we can start making the Big Brother is watching you references now. This is the subheading, which is startling IMHO. “The Trump administration has expanded Palantir’s work with the government, spreading the company’s technology — which could easily merge data on Americans — throughout agencies.” Getting your passport ready yet?
In March, President Trump signed an executive order calling for the federal government to share data across agencies, raising questions over whether he might compile a master list of personal information on Americans that could give him untold surveillance power.
Mr. Trump has not publicly talked about the effort since. But behind the scenes, officials have quietly put technological building blocks into place to enable his plan. In particular, they have turned to one company: Palantir, the data analysis and technology firm.
The Trump administration has expanded Palantir’s work across the federal government in recent months. The company has received more than $113 million in federal government spending since Mr. Trump took office, according to public records, including additional funds from existing contracts as well as new contracts with the Department of Homeland Security and the Pentagon. (This does not include a $795 million contract that the Department of Defense awarded the company last week, which has not been spent.)
Representatives of Palantir are also speaking to at least two other agencies — the Social Security Administration and the Internal Revenue Service — about buying its technology, according to six government officials and Palantir employees with knowledge of the discussions.
The push has put a key Palantir product called Foundry into at least four federal agencies, including D.H.S. and the Health and Human Services Department. Widely adopting Foundry, which organizes and analyzes data, paves the way for Mr. Trump to easily merge information from different agencies, the government officials said.
Creating detailed portraits of Americans based on government data is not just a pipe dream. The Trump administration has already sought access to hundreds of data points on citizens and others through government databases, including their bank account numbers, the amount of their student debt, their medical claims and any disability status.
Mr. Trump could potentially use such information to advance his political agenda by policing immigrants and punishing critics, Democratic lawmakers and critics have said. Privacy advocates, student unions and labor rights organizations have filed lawsuits to block data access, questioning whether the government could weaponize people’s personal information.
So, while all this is going on, we’re beginning to hear some interesting information on Elon Musk as he exists stage right. This is from Forbes Magazine. “Lucky” Susan Dorn got this assignment. “Musk Used Heavy Drugs Including Ketamine And Ecstasy While He Became Close To Trump, Report Says. Elon Musk used a copious amount of drugs—and travelled with a pill box that appeared to contain Adderall—last year as he ramped up his donations to President Donald Trump, according to a New York Times report that comes on his last official day at the White House.” He’s the Wolf of Austin, I guess.
Key Facts
- Musk told confidants he was taking so much ketamine it affected his bladder, according to The Times, citing unnamed sources who said he also took ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms.
- The Times also reported it obtained a photo that showed a medication box Musk travelled with containing about 20 pills, including Adderall.
- The alleged drug use overlapped with his campaign activity last year on behalf of Trump—with an endorsement in July followed by $250 million to help elect him.
- The report comes as Musk is set to exit the White House Friday after announcing Wednesday his time leading the Department of Government Efficiency had come to an end.
- Neither Musk nor his lawyer responded to The Times’ request for comment, but Musk has said previously he was prescribed ketamine for depression.
The New York Times has more details. “On the Campaign Trail, Elon Musk Juggled Drugs and Family Drama. As Mr. Musk entered President Trump’s orbit, his private life grew increasingly tumultuous, and his drug use was more intense than previously known.” Of course, they sent two women after this story, too. Kirsten Grind and Megan Twohey were the assigned reporters.
As Elon Musk became one of Donald J. Trump’s closest allies last year, leading raucous rallies and donating about $275 million to help him win the presidency, he was also using drugs far more intensely than previously known, according topeople familiar with his activities.
Mr. Musk’s drug consumption went well beyond occasional use. He told people he was taking so much ketamine, a powerful anesthetic, that it was affecting his bladder, a known effect of chronic use. He took Ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms. And he traveled with a daily medication box that held about 20 pills, including ones with the markings of the stimulant Adderall, according to a photo of the box and people who have seen it.
It is unclear whether Mr. Musk, 53, was taking drugs when he became a fixture at the White House this year and was handed the power to slash the federal bureaucracy. But he has exhibited erratic behavior, insulting cabinet members, gesturing like a Nazi and garbling his answers in a staged interview.
At the same time, Mr. Musk’s family life has grown increasingly tumultuous as he has negotiated overlapping romantic relationships and private legal battles involving his growing brood of children, according to documents and interviews.
I’m not about to go to the Gossip Rag road, but there are rumors about Mush and Steven Miller’s wife if you’re interested. This is from the Independent. “Stephen Miller’s wife leaves the White House to work for Elon Musk ‘full time’, Kate Miller was working as an adviser for Elon Musk at the Department of Government Efficiency.” I should eat some lunch, and I really will not ruin it by going any deeper into these. BLECH.
So, we lose a clown and gain one. Seriously, none of these Trump men are strangers to make-up. This is from ABC News. “Trump taps former right-wing podcast host Paul Ingrassia for key watchdog post. Ingrassia would replace Hampton Dellinger, who opposed Trump’s mass firings.”
President Trump announced Thursday night that he was tapping Paul Ingrassia, a former far-right podcast host, to lead the Office of Special Counsel — an independent watchdog agency empowered to investigate federal employees and oversee complaints from whistleblowers.
The Trump administration has previously taken aim at the Office of Special Counsel, firing the head of the agency, Hampton Dellinger (a Biden appointee) in February. Dellinger expressed opposition to the Trump administration’s firing of federal employees under DOGE-led cuts, noting that many had been fired or laid off without notice or justification.
Dellinger challenged his firing in court and was briefly reinstated to the post until a federal appeals court allowed for his dismissal. Dellinger decided to drop the challenge.
ABC News exclusively reported in February about how Ingrassia, in his role as White House liaison to the Department of Justice, was pushing to hire candidates at the DOJ who exhibited what he called “exceptional loyalty” to Trump. His efforts at DOJ sparked clashes with Attorney General Pam Bondi’s top aide, Chad Mizelle, leading Ingrassia to complain directly to President Trump, sources told ABC News.
Ingrassia was pushed out of DOJ and reassigned as the White House liaison to the Department of Homeland Security, where he was serving prior to Trump announcing his new role, according to a White House official familiar with the matter.
In a post on X, Ingrassia wrote in response to his nomination: “It’s the highest honor to have been nominated to lead the Office of Special Counsel under President Trump! As Special Counsel, my team and I will make every effort to restore competence and integrity to the Executive Branch — with priority on eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse in the federal workforce and revitalize the Rule of Law and Fairness in Hatch Act enforcement.”
For the Senate-confirmed five-year term, Ingrassia will likely face tough questions over his lengthy history of media appearances and posts on social media promoting Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election as well as his ties to far-right media figures.
He was previously spotted at a 2024 rally hosted by white nationalist Nick Fuentes and has publicly praised figures like Andrew Tate — who has faced criminal charges for alleged sexual assault (Tate denies all wrongdoing).
All the best people, folks, all the best. So, I know you just want to know the latest information on the American Soap Opera “As the Tarrifs and the TACO Turns.” This is from CNBC. “Trump accuses China of violating preliminary trade deal.” Dan Managan gets all the serious stories, you know.
President Donald Trump on Friday said that China has “totally violated its” preliminary trade agreement with the United States, and suggested he would take action in response.
“So much for being Mr. NICE GUY!” Trump wrote in a social media post that said China had reneged on a deal that paused retaliatory tariffs between that country and the U.S.
Stock futures fell Friday morning on the heels of Trump’s statement.
U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, in a CNBC interview Friday morning, echoed Trump’s allegation, saying “we’re very concerned with” China’s purported non-compliance with the temporary trade deal.
The “United States did exactly what it was supposed to do, and the Chinese are slow rolling their compliance,” said Greer.
He called that “completely unacceptable and has to be addressed.”
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, in a Fox News interview on Thursday, said that trade talks with China “are a bit stalled.”
CNBC has requested comment from China’s embassy in Washington, D.C.
The U.S. and China on May 12 agreed to a 90-day suspension on most tariffs imposed on each other’s imports.
The agreement was reached after Trump slapped sky-high tariffs on imports from China into the U.S., and China retaliated in kind.
“Two weeks ago China was in grave economic danger!” Trump wrote in his post on Truth Social on Friday.
“The very high Tariffs I set made it virtually impossible for China to TRADE into the United States marketplace which is, by far, number one in the World,” Trump wrote. “We went, in effect, COLD TURKEY with China, and it was devastating for them. Many factories closed and there was, to put it mildly, “civil unrest.” I saw what was happening and didn’t like it, for them, not for us. I made a FAST DEAL with China in order to save them from what I thought was going to be a very bad situation, and I didn’t want to see that happen.”
“Because of this deal, everything quickly stabilized and China got back to business as usual. Everybody was happy! That is the good news!!!” the president wrote.
“The bad news is that China, perhaps not surprisingly to some, HAS TOTALLY VIOLATED ITS AGREEMENT WITH US. So much for being Mr. NICE GUY!”
Trump posted his screed two days after he lashed out at CNBC reporter Megan Cassella at the White House when she asked about the term “TACO trade,” which refers to the phrase “Trump Always Chickens Out.”
The term, coined by a Financial Times columnist, suggests that stock pickers can make money by buying shares after markets fall on news of new tariffs imposed by Trump, knowing that he invariably will pause or reduce the tariffs, sending markets higher.
You had to know he had to have a bully story to cover up all the Court sha-la-la about his on-again, off-again tariffs. Wow, my Grammarly got really dash happy there! Actually, I did it but wondered if it would notice anything and it did. One missing comma. I evidently have a thing against commas.
So, at least it’s the weekend! Hope y’all have a great one! I say TACO, they say TACO!
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
#FartusDeportUs #JohnbussBskySocialJohnBuss #DrugAddict #ElonMuskNAZI #kakistocracy #PalantirDataTheftSpecialists #ScottPelley #TACO #WhoAreYOU_ #WifeStealer