Month: July 2024

Here’s what I’ve found interesting: honoring Joe Biden’s sacrifice; there has been an open and transparent process to make Kamala Harris the Democratic nominee; a guide to countering the dishonest attacks coming for Harris; reporters were once again fooled by a fake Trump unity pivot; Trump cannot be the sole source of information about his ear injury; JD Vance, Menstrual Surveillance Hawk; remembering reporter Evan Gershkovich after his false conviction in Russia; the Port Chicago 50 sailors are finally exonerated; Congress accidentally legalized weed; and you’ll never believe to whom Donald Trump made a donation in September 2011.

#1

Biden can go down as an American hero — but only if Harris can beat Trump (Will Bunch, The Philadelphia Inquirer)

One of our earliest political legends is the tale of the ancient Roman leader Cincinnatus. It’s believed that in the year 458 B.C., Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, a former senator — considered an old man for his time — was plowing his small farm when a delegation from Rome pleaded with him to return to the capital and put down a popular insurrection and vanquish the city-state’s restive neighbors.

Cincinnatus donned a toga, returned to Rome, crushed the various uprisings in just 15 days, and — mission accomplished — happily surrendered power and went back to his farm. His story is still told, 25 centuries later, as a parable of civic virtue and selflessness.

At 1:46 p.m. on the languid Sunday afternoon of July 21, 2024 — a date now etched in American history — President Joe Biden made his bid to become the American Cincinnatus.

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

President Biden became the rare political leader who chose to put the nation ahead of his ambition and relinquish power by choice. As Biden once said about the passage of the Affordable Care and Patient Protection Act, that decision is “a big fucking deal.”

I think one has to go back to George Washington’s two Cincinnatus moments (when he returned to private life rather than demanding political power after resigning as Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army in 1783 and when he declined to seek a third presidential term in 1796) to find something comparable in our nation’s history.

While Lyndon Johnson ended his presidential campaign in 1968, the presidential primary process had just begun. Biden had the delegates required to secure the nomination. Only he could stop that process.

The media and many fellow Democrats treated Biden unfairly in the wake of his disastrous debate performance. His first 15 minutes were the worst ever recorded by a presidential or vice presidential candidate in a debate. He then improved but needed to be more. Meanwhile, former President Trump lied and lied and lied, although that apparently doesn’t matter so much since he did it with a loud voice.

Biden’s performance was a legitimate issue. However, pundits and reporters should have covered Trump’s failures with a similar focus. Democrats should have gone on the record with their concerns about Biden rather than providing a death-by-a-thousand-cuts drip of cowardly anonymous comments.

After three weeks of pummelling, Biden faced a horrible choice after a response that was not as vigorous as it had to be to stop the political body blows. He could keep going and likely lose—or serve as the bridge to a new generation of leaders.

It may seem like Biden chose the obvious path, but we didn’t have 3,896 delegates pledged to vote for us on the first Democratic National Convention ballot nor the ego required to seek the nation’s highest office in the first place.

Biden has given Vice President Kamala Harris a real shot at winning this election. I hope everyone who cares about our democracy will honor this BFD sacrifice by fighting hard to support Harris’ campaign.

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#2

AP survey shows Kamala Harris backed by enough delegates to become Democratic nominee (Zeke Miller, Leah Askarinam, Maya Sweedler, and Chad Day, The Associated Press)

Vice President Kamala Harris has secured the support of enough Democratic delegates to become her party’s nominee against RepublicanDonald Trump, according to an Associated Press survey, as top Democrats rallied to her in the aftermath of President Joe Biden’s decision to drop his bid for reelection.

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

There is a bunch of social media whining on right now about how the Democrats should have had a process and a fight at the Convention to determine the party’s new nominee.

But let’s be clear: there was an open nomination process to replace President Biden. All of his delegates had the freedom to support the candidate of their choice on the first ballot. Politicians decided of their own free will not to run against her because of their internal calculations.

It’s just that this open Convention did not deteriorate into a contested one. Alas, for our reporter and pundit friends.

Vice President Harris did the work. She called people and earned endorsements. Delegates quickly announced that they supported her succession to the top of the ticket. We call that campaigning in the real world.

Some people seem shocked (and disappointed) that Harris has locked in overwhelming delegate support so quickly. But Democrats had been mulling over this decision for weeks—since the debate. It was not a surprise that they may need to vote for a new nominee. So many were ready to decide quickly.

I know many reporters and pundits wanted a contested Convention so they could enjoy higher ratings and cover some political chaos from their hotel bars. The Democratic Party does not owe the media an episode of chaotic disarray.

#3

A guide to the coming attacks on Kamala Harris (Judd Legum, Popular Information)

Some of the attacks on Harris were predictable. For example, shortly after Biden’s announcement, the Trump campaign blamed Harris for a “migrant crime wave” over the last three years. This was also the centerpiece of Trump’s campaign against Biden, but the “migrant crime wave” does not exist. Violent crime has decreased every year since Biden took office — and is down sharply again in 2024. (The last time violent crime increased was 2020, when Trump was president.) Further, a study of the 14 Texas counties along the border with Mexico by crime analyst Jeff Asher found “no evidence of increasing violent crime along the US border with Mexico.” In fact, border counties “have seen a relatively steady violent crime rate below that of the rest of their state and the nation as a whole.”

Other attacks include those that seem to pop up any time a woman seeks a position of power. The RNC Research X account, which attacks Trump’s opponents on behalf of his campaign and the Republican National Committee, posted a video attacking Harris for being “annoying.” The post features a video of Harris saying a short phrase — “what can be, unburdened by what has been” — in various settings for four minutes. This is only a slight variation of the common complaint that ambitious women are “shrill.”

Other criticisms, however, were more specific to Harris. They will be featured in millions of dollars of campaign advertisements, incorporated into Trump’s stump speech, and discussed frequently on Fox News. Here is a brief guide to some of the attacks that will be used to define Harris in the weeks ahead.

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

I hope Democrats have learned that they must loudly defend their candidate from unfair charges after what happened to John Kerry in 2004, Hillary Rodham Clinton in 2016, and President Biden in 2024.

So now is an excellent time to learn what actually happened so we can immediately counter when Trump or Republicans bring up Jaleel Stallings (he’s a military veteran who was the victim of police brutality), bans on red meat (nope), crimes committed by undocumented people Harris freed (there’s important context where she reformed a program after a mistake), or ending private health insurance (I wish).

The Trump-Vance campaign, the Republican National Committee, and MAGA media are already trying to define Harris with lies about these situations. They have been successful before.

But we know that, too. So we can fight back. Legum has done the background work to explain the real stories. Harris’ supporters need to be quick and relentless in explaining the truth—starting today.

#4

The Pivot That Never Was: How Trump’s ‘Unity’ Speech Fooled the Press Again (Parker Malloy, The Present Age)

The media’s reaction to Trump’s RNC speech presents a troubling picture of journalistic responsibility and the dangers of premature narrative-setting. Perhaps most alarming is the number of newspapers that ran headlines seemingly written before Trump actually delivered his speech, focusing almost exclusively on his calls for unity while ignoring the divisive content that made up the bulk of his remarks.

Consider these headlines from major newspapers:The Detroit News: “Trump: We must heal discord”Pioneer Press: “Trump takes a unity tone”The Dallas Morning News: “Trump emphasizes unity”The Boston Globe: “In a departure, Trump calls for unity, healing in America”

These headlines, and others like them, paint a picture of a dramatically transformed Trump that simply did not match the reality of his speech. They appear to be based more on pre-speech expectations and perhaps early excerpts than on the full content of Trump’s address.

This disconnect between headlines and content raises serious questions about journalistic practices. Are deadlines and the pressure to be first trumping accuracy and comprehensive reporting? Are news outlets so invested in the “pivot” narrative that they’re willing to ignore contradictory evidence?

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

We must not let what happened with the coverage of former President Trump’s nomination acceptance speech get lost in the chaos of all the news that subsequently occurred.

How many times must reporters and editors be fooled by claims that Trump has finally learned his lesson and will pivot toward responsibility? As Taylor Swift wrote in her song Exile: “I think I’ve seen this film before // And I didn’t like the ending.”

Why do so many in the media still give Trump the benefit of the doubt after everything we’ve experienced in the nine years since he drifted down that golden escalator?

The problem is that too many in the media have accepted that what Trump does is (ick) “normal.”

Take, for example, this recent conversation between Zeteo’s Mehdi Hassan and Washington Post Editorial Board member Shadi Hamid.

‘Trump would upend our democracy’: Two former Trump officials react to his unhinged RNC speech

There’s a lot to process, pick apart, and debunk from Donald Trump’s 92-minute-long speech at the Republican National Convention. In the latest episode of Mehdi Unfiltered, Mehdi looks past the more ‘somber’ version of Trump that the world saw at the start of his speech, and unpacks just how concerning the rest of it was.

Zeteo

Hamid: “I don’t think the speech in the RNC that he gave was ‘batshit crazy’. A lot of it was just normal Trump.”

Hasan: “But normal Trump is batshit crazy. This is the mistake you’re making.”

Say it again for the people in the back of the room.

This has been the dyanmic of the Trump political era. He gets away with so much because people expect him to be so batshit crazy.

We don’t have to accept this framing. We don’t have to accept this kind of activity from a major party presidential candidate.

Saving our democracy requires rejecting it.

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#5

Donald Trump cannot be the sole medical source on the ear injury (Jennifer Schulze, Heartland Signal)

Let’s be honest: Trusting Donald Trump about anything, even his own injury, is not a smart move. Trump — who infamously told over 30,473 documented lies during his presidency — should not be the sole medical source on his ear injury.

Yes, his ear was clearly injured. But how?  How was it treated? What are the resulting health issues, if any? Will there be medical follow-ups? Voters deserve answers to these questions so where are the briefings, official statements and medical reports?

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

It has now been 11 days since the assassination attempt against former President Trump, and we still have no official information about his injury.

Where is the medical briefing? Did a bullet hit him, as he claims, or was it glass fragments, as some of the reports suggest? Why did he have such a prominent bandage throughout the Republican National Convention? Did he suffer any additional head or brain injuries as a result?

Donald Trump and Rep. Ronny Jackson (the guy demoted from admiral to captain by the Navy for improper conduct and allowed his medical license to expire) are not credible sources.

A couple of weeks ago, the White House press corps attempted to become experts in Parkinson’s disease diagnosis because of a misinterpretation of the White House visitor logs. Doesn’t the aftermath of injuries suffered by a former president in an assassination attempt demand equal energy?

#6

JD Vance, Menstrual Surveillance Hawk (Josh Marshall, Talking Points Memo)

This spring, HHS finalized new regulations under HIPAA to limit law enforcement access to medical records tied to reproductive health. The rule was first proposed in the aftermath of the Dobbs decision as a way to limit the ability of state and local law enforcement agencies to access medical records to stymie or criminalize access to legal reproductive health services, most specifically abortions, but not only abortions. It also applies to contraception and the full range of other endangered reproductive care.

So for instance, consider the ability of a woman from an abortion-ban state to travel to another state to get a legal abortion, or her ability to receive legal abortion drugs through the mail. The news has been filled with proposed or actual laws which would attempt to restrict travel to receive abortions in other states, charge those who travel or criminalize those who might facilitate such travel or facilitate the legal shipment of prescribed abortion drugs through the mail. Of course, local police agencies might simply take it upon themselves to pull records to see who had unexplained disruptions to their menstrual cycles.

Your local sheriff might just want to know.

And so does JD Vance, it turns out.

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

Folks, I wish that headline were an exaggeration. But we have only begun to scratch the surface of how anti-woman JD Vance is as an elected official.

(Also, yes: JD Vance’s office confirmed that he prefers that we do not use periods for his name. As someone on social media said—and I am so sorry I cannot find the original post to give proper credit—this shows just how extreme Vance is about anything involving a period.)

How is tracking menstrual cycles consistent with a small government or conservative philosophy? Oh, that’s right. It’s not. But it is consistent with Trump’s Project 2025 and Trump’s abortion ban.

Vance and Trump aren’t small government proponents. They aren’t conservatives.

I suspect Vice President Kamala Harris will focus on this insanity between now and election day. I am here for it.

#7

For Years, Evan Gershkovich Saw Those He Knew Convicted and Imprisoned in Russia. Now It Has Happened to Him. (Eliot Brown, Wall Street Journal)

Evan Gershkovich thrived while reporting on Russia. He camped in a forest for days to cover wildfires that were ravaging Siberia, he delved into the opaque world of Vladimir Putin’s wartime decision-making and he watched as dissidents and journalists were increasingly jailed.

Writing on Russia, he tweeted in July 2022 that it had become “a regular practice of watching people you know get locked away for years.”

On Friday, it happened to him.

Evan, falsely accused of espionage, was convicted by a Yekaterinburg court after a brief closed-door trial that the U.S. government has condemned as a sham and sentenced to 16 years in a high-security penal colony. 

It was another blow for the gregarious, energetic, ever-smiling 32-year-old who has devoted much of his career to telling the story of Russia—and has spent more than a year in Russian prisons since he was detained by the security services in March 2023.

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

We need to remember that the Putin regime has falsely imprisoned Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich.

Former President Donald Trump has on a few occasions stated that Putin will release Gershkovich only to him.

Which is an odd thing to say. And it seems like that should be something worthy of conversation and follow-up by our esteemed members of the political media.

How does Trump know this? Has he made an October Surprise kind of deal with Putin? Has Trump violated the Logan Act by conducting a private foreign policy? Is he making it all up because he figures no one will hold him accountable?

#8

Exonerated: Bay Area leaders react after Navy clears Black sailors convicted in World War II Port Chicago explosion (Katie Lauer, Bay Area News Group)

Hundreds of Black sailors charged with mutiny and disobeying wartime orders in the wake of a deadly explosion at Contra Costa County’s Port Chicago in 1944 have been fully exonerated, Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro announced Wednesday.

The decision comes 80 years after the blast that killed 320 sailors and civilians; almost two-thirds of the victims were Black. It clears the names of 258 Black servicemen who were court-martialed, jailed and threatened for refusing to return to work loading munitions in the disaster’s aftermath — citing the dangerous conditions, lack of proper training and segregation of Black sailors who were given hazardous assignments on the naval base, which is tucked along the shores of Suisun Bay.

“The Port Chicago 50, and the hundreds who stood with them, may not be with us today, but their story lives on, a testament to the enduring power of courage and the unwavering pursuit of justice,” Del Toro said in a statement. “They stand as a beacon of hope, forever reminding us that even in the face of overwhelming odds, the fight for what’s right can and will prevail.”

For several community leaders who have pushed for exoneration for decades, the Navy’s decision addresses a historic injustice by restoring equity to the treatment of these men — both on the naval base and in the courtroom.

…

The blast shot a massive fireball into the night sky, sent a shock wave of flying shrapnel that flattened Port Chicago and measured 3.4 on the Richter scale in nearby Berkeley.

While the exact cause of the explosion was never determined, historical records put the blame on Navy leaders for circumventing proper protocol while training the majority of African American sailors to load munitions at Port Chicago.

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

The events described here happened less than 10 miles from where I live in the San Francisco East Bay. I’ve been monitoring this situation for several years.

So, I celebrate this exoneration! But yet, it is well past due. I hope it provides some solace to the families of the sailors impacted by one of World War II’s most racist actions.

Future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall tried to defend these sailors from the injustice they faced for demanding the same safety measures as their caucasian colleagues.

No one should have been punished for fighting for their lives. It is a travesty that it took 80 years for the Navy to clear their names.

#9

Congress Accidentally Legalized Weed Six Years Ago (Mike Riggs, The Atlantic)

In fact, neither medical nor recreational marijuana is legal in North Carolina. Technically, we’re getting high on hemp.

This is probably not what Congress had in mind when it passed the Agricultural Improvement Act of 2018, commonly called the 2018 Farm Bill, which made the production of hemp—cannabis’s traditionally nonpsychoactive cousin—legal for the first time in nearly a century. Lawmakers who backed hemp legalization expected the plant to be used for textiles and nonintoxicating supplements, such as CBD oil and shelled hemp seeds (great on an acai bowl). They didn’t realize that, with some chemistry and creativity, hemp can get you just as high as the dankest marijuana plant.

The upshot is that although recreational marijuana use is allowed in only 24 states and Washington, D.C., people anywhere in the U.S. can get intoxicated on hemp-derived THC without breaking federal law. These hemp-based highs are every bit as potent as those derived from the marijuana available in legalization states. I know this because I’ve tried recreational pot in California and Colorado, as well as 11 different hemp-derived intoxicants legally available here in North Carolina. I am not exaggerating when I say that they are indistinguishable in effect. In other words, six years ago, Congress inadvertently legalized weed across the entire United States.

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

Thank you to Jeff, one of my awesome paid subscribers, for sharing this story. It is the epitome of unintended consequences, in which chemists proved smarter than the lawmakers who drafted the law.

This is one reason we should be troubled by the Supreme Court’s recent decision to overturn the Chevron deference doctrine. The doctrine allowed the executive branch’s scientific experts to make regulatory decisions consistent with the often vague laws passed through legislative sausage-making.

The real-world impacts created by this loophole are harming legalized cannabis markets across the nation. Hemp companies can use banks and credit cards, systems not open to cannabis businesses, given that they are still illegal at the federal level.

I hope we can have a rational conversation about this next year with a new Congress and a new president. A bunch needs to go right, though, to make that possible.

The Closer

Yep! Donald Trump made donations to Kamala Harris during her Attorney General re-election campaign. $6,000 worth. Seems relevant. You can find the confirmation of the donation here on page 3 of the donations summary.

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Here’s what I’ve found interesting: wait for the evidence and don’t spread conspiracy theories about the assassination attempt, refuse to obey in advance to demands to silence legitimate criticism, how Trump has already pivoted away from unity, remembering why Trump needed a new Vice President, we shouldn’t fall for the GOP’s abortion platform lie, recalling that time J.D. Vance said women shouldn’t leave abusive marriages, People magazine publishes one of the best articles so far about Project 2025, the story of a wrongful conviction made possible by horrific police interrogation tactics, and the U.K. Prime Minister’s nuclear letters of last resort.

#1

Don’t Spread Baseless Conspiracy Theories About The Assassination Attempt (Noah Berlatsky, Everything is Horrible)

As everyone probably knows, Donald Trump survived an assassination attempt [Saturday]. And, to no one’s surprise, social media is not covering itself in glory in the aftermath.

Of course, many on the right are already floating rabid conspiracy theories arguing with no evidence that the shooter was somehow radicalized by Democrats who pointed out (accurately) that Trump is a threat to democracy.

But progressives have not been particularly sober or responsible either. Some commenters are insisting (with little historical evidence, and no polling) that Trump being shot at assures him of victory in November. Even more irresponsibly, many people who should know better are speculating—utterly without evidence, or, I should say, in the face of all the evidence we have so far—that the shooting was a false flag operation, which must have been organized by Trump himself.

The incentives to believe this nonsense are obvious enough. Trump remains a terrifying threat to democracy and an evil man. People do not like to admit that bad things can happen to bad people, because they do not want to sympathize or express any level of concern for bad people who are threatening them. False flag conspiracy theories allow you to turn the victim into the perpetrator, which is a lot more comfortable when the victim is someone as horrible as Trump.

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

Violence is never acceptable in our political process. I hope former President Donald Trump is recovering well from his injuries. I extend my condolences to the family of the victim who was killed and everyone who has been traumatized by these horrible events.

What happened Saturday night is not a joke. It is another warning of the crisis facing our democracy.

Nothing good is served by speculating about what happened. We need the facts. I am sure the FBI and other law enforcement agencies will do all they can to determine a motive. I anticipate we will learn how a potential assassin could get so close to a presidential candidate with a direct line of sight to take their shot. We need to let the investigation answer some of these questions.

That said, I agree with journalist Jennifer Schulze, who is wondering how it is possible that we still do not have any official word on Trump’s injuries more than 48 hours after the shooting. How are the same media outlets that aggressively (and wrongly) speculated about President Biden’s health last week not asking more questions about what happened on Saturday night? Was Trump hit by a bullet or by glass? What is the delay in determining and publicizing these fundamental facts? Failing to answer these basic questions will lead to more conspiracy theories. We should be demanding answers.

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#2

Rewriting the Rules of Engagement: GOP’s Attempt to Silence Legitimate Criticism (Parker Malloy, The Present Age)

By equating criticism and standard campaign rhetoric with calls for violence, these Republican figures are engaging in a dangerous form of false equivalence. They’re not just misrepresenting their opponents’ words; they’re actively working to reshape the boundaries of acceptable political discourse, chilling legitimate criticism and debate. This is, to put it simply, nonsense.

As Financial Times Associate Editor Edward Luce wrote on X, “Almost any criticism of Trump is already being spun by Maga as an incitement to assassinate him. This is an Orwellian attempt to silence what remains of the effort to stop him from regaining power.”

This is especially rich coming from the party that openly discusses being in the middle of “the second American Revolution,” wear AR-15 pins on the House floor, whose leader mocked the attempt to assassinate Paul Pelosi, and posts videos of Biden tied up in the back of a pickup truck.

North Carolina’s Republican Lieutenant Governor and candidate for governor, Mark Robinson, who just last month went on a hateful rant about how “some folks need killing,” is one of the scheduled speakers at this week’s Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. For this party to pretend that stating the obvious about Trump’s authoritarian aspirations is incitement to violence, to pretend that they are suddenly “words are violence” people? I don’t buy it.

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

In his book On Tyranny, Tim Snyder, an expert in authoritarianism, shared 20 lessons from the 20th Century about defending freedom. His first lesson was, “Do not obey in advance.”

This lesson is one Democrats must remember as we decide how to react to these bad-faith demands from Republicans that President Biden and Democrats must stop talking about what Trump did in his first term and what he plans to do if he wins in November.

As Garbage Day’s Ryan Broderick observed, “So I’m unclear why both mainstream media and Democratic leadership are finding it so hard right now to express what I think is a fairly basic point. Political violence is bad and a second Trump presidency means more of it.”

The first two days of the Republican National Convention have demonstrated that MAGA supporters are not going to stop with their violent and authoritarian rhetoric. They do not get to decide how we respond. Democrats must not stop telling the truth about the stakes of this election. Democrats must not agree in advance to surrender to Trump and to MAGA.

#3

Trump’s Ugly New Post-Shooting Rant Instantly Wrecks His “Unity” Pivot (Greg Sargent, The New Republic)

Only a few hours after that report appeared, Trump uncorked a new rant on Truth Social that left zero doubt that he remains fully committed to the range of positions that make Trump and his movement such a profound threat to democratic stability in this country—the very same ones that have done so much to bring about the “tinder box” that Axios imagines he is now preoccupied with addressing.

This led some to chortle that media predictions of a Trump “pivot”—a stock joke at this point—have imploded yet again. But it should occasion something else too. If media figures are so eager to depict Trump as unifying, then let’s lay down a hard metric: Before such claims are made, the absolute minimum threshold he must clear is fully renouncing the authoritarian designs he is threatening to inflict on this country and its people if reelected president.

…

I propose we go further, by insisting on the following: No calling Trump a “unifier” until he renounces plans to pardon the January 6th rioters and prosecute his opponents, stops casting the application of the law to himself and his movement as inherently corrupt, repudiates his threat to terminate parts of the Constitution, unequivocally commits to accepting the election results, and tells his allies to stop planning to treat any election loss as illegitimate in advance. And that’s just a start.

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

I wish we lived in a universe where Donald Trump reacted to the assassination attempt against him to seek to unify the country. Alas, such an outcome will remain in the dreams and stories of our nation’s political pundits.

I agree with Sargent that, at a minimum, we should establish some measurable goals to help us determine if Trump is seriously attempting to unify the country. His list is a great start.

There’s also no chance Trump will do any of it. So, can we stop with the unifying dreams and deal with our political reality?

#4

The most important story about Trump’s VP is why he needs a new one (Matt Gertz, Media Matters)

Pence won’t be joining him, however. Indeed, Pence, who maintains that “Trump was wrong” and that the then-president bears responsibility for the insurrection, says he won’t be supporting Trump at all in the general election. 

Pence wouldn’t pretend that Trump won the 2020 election, and he refused to help him remain in power unlawfully, and so he is off the ticket in 2024. And it beggars belief that Trump might pick someone without getting assurances that they would follow through where Pence balked. Journalists understand what’s going on here, and they don’t serve their viewers, listeners, and readers by hiding the ball. 

Indeed, while the contenders have various pluses and minuses, they share two qualities. They all looked at what happened on January 6 and decided they were still willing to take the VP slot, and they’ve all spent the last several months publicly supplicating to Trump by winking at 2020 election denial and pooh-poohing questions of whether they would accept the results of the 2024 race.

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

I tried brainstorming whether there was a job I’d be willing to take despite knowing my potential boss had encouraged his supporters to murder my predecessor. It’s not the 14th Century, after all, and no duchies appear to be available. Alas.

I realize Trump and the Republicans are working to rewrite the history of the January 6, 2021, insurrection. However, Trump’s need for a new vice presidential candidate is one of the most obvious indications of the national trauma we experienced that day.

Yes, President Grover Cleveland needed a new Vice President when he won his second non-consecutive term. But that was because Cleveland’s first vice president died of a heart attack after just eight months in office—it wasn’t because Thomas Hendricks refused to go along with a plan to stop the peaceful transfer of power. That’s a significant difference.

Senator J.D. Vance has admitted he wouldn’t have certified the 2020 election had he been vice president. Vance will also ensure the implementation of the extremist Project 2025 agenda. Trump learned that he needed personal loyalty to fulfill his commands. Vance has made clear that he will support Trump and not the Constitution. I hope we discuss this situation during this campaign.

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#5

Don’t Fall for the GOP’s Platform Lie (Jessica Valenti, Abortion, Every Day)

A leaked draft of the new Republican party platform says that fetuses have a constitutional right to personhood, a radical stance in a moment when Americans overwhelmingly oppose bans and want abortion to be legal. And despite headlines to the contrary, the GOP’s abortion plank still supports a national ban.

But because political reporters and mainstream news outlets have fallen for a Republican disinformation campaign, the platform’s new language is being covered as a ‘softening’ on abortion rights. 

The stakes are high so I’m not going to mince words: This is about as big of a fuck up as it gets. So let’s get into it.

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

Argh. Will people really fall for this?

As we’ve discussed before, the Republican Party and Trump’s Project 2025 don’t need to pass a law to enact a nationwide abortion ban. Trump can order the Department of Justice to enforce the Comstock Act, a zombie law that prohibits mailing medical devices used for abortions. Trump could order the FDA to revoke its approval of the abortion drug mifepristone.

Most importantly, the GOP platform calls for giving fetuses equal rights under the 14th Amendment. As Slate’s Susan Rinkunas explained, “The platform’s language embraces the idea that the 14th Amendment protects fetal personhood—an interpretation that would ban abortion nationwide. In fact, it infers that the Constitution already prohibits abortion and that such a ban would spring to life as soon as it’s recognized by the Supreme Court, as University of Texas law professor Liz Sepper noted on Twitter.”

Yeah, let’s be clear: this isn’t an issue Trump/Vance and the Republican Party plan to leave to the states.

This election could come down to whether enough people understand that Trump is trying to obfuscate what he’ll do about abortion if he wins this election. Reporters should know better, but we can’t count on that. We need to do the work and build on the great work Vice President Kamala Harris has been doing on reproductive rights.

#6

“Shift spouses like they change their underwear”: J.D. Vance decried divorce — but now loves Trump (Amanda Marcotte, Salon)

As recently as 2021, the newly announced Republican candidate for vice president, Sen. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio, had harsh words for Americans who divorce, including those who did so to leave abusive marriages. Divorcees, Vance argued, are quitters who ruin their children’s lives.

“This is one of the great tricks that I think the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace, which is the idea that like, ‘Well, OK, these marriages were fundamentally, you know, they were maybe even violent, but certainly they were unhappy. And so getting rid of them and making it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear, that’s going to make people happier in the long term,” Vance told the audience at Pacifica Christian High School in Southern California.

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

The Republican Vice Presidential nominee thinks divorce is too easy, even for women suffering from violence. Isn’t it weird that Vance hasn’t offered any recent criticism about the marital history of the former President whose ticket he just joined?

In this piece, Marcotte explains why this isn’t necessarily hypocritical. After all, as she writes, “It’s an attachment to traditional hierarchies that allow such appalling double standards to flourish.”

In that context, all of this begins to make more sense. The thread that ties so much of MAGA and Christian Nationalism together is, as Marcotte writes, “an allegiance to male domination.”

In that frame, it isn’t hard to see why Republicans want to ban abortion, contraception, and no-fault divorces. The plans are in Project 2025. All of this is at stake in this election.

#7

What Is Project 2025? Inside the Far-Right Plan Threatening Everything from the Word’ Gender’ to Public Education (Kyler Alvord, People)

A sweeping proposal for how Donald Trump should handle a second term in office has sparked concern for its implications on the role of federal government and its calls to eliminate a number of basic human rights.

The 2025 Presidential Transition Project, more commonly known as Project 2025, released a 900-page manifesto last year titled “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise.” The policy guidebook — compiled by the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation in partnership with more than 100 other conservative organizations — lays out a far-right, Christian nationalist vision for America that would corrode the separation of church and state, replace nonpartisan government employees with Trump loyalists and bolster the president’s authority over independent agencies.

Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts, a rumored candidate for Trump’s chief of staff in a second term, promoted his group’s extreme positions during a July interview, saying, “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

People magazine publishing one of the best stories about Project 2025 was not on my Campaign 2024 bingo card. But I am here for it.

Alvord puts Project 2025 into a political context, including an explanation of its connection to Christian Nationalism. The story explains the proposals to politicize the civil service, restrict reproductive rights, eliminate protections for LGBTQ+ people, ban an expansive definition of pornography, politicize the Justice Department and FBI, severely limit immigration, empower far-right groups in our schools, and reject climate change action.

The story also includes links so people can dig into the details and see that none of the above is an exaggeration.

This story explains the stakes of this election. I hope many mainstream media outlets learn some lessons from People’s outstanding work.

#8

Pressured by cops, a mom made a false murder confession. Now, her sons can prove she’s innocent (Anita Chabria and Jessica Garrison, Los Angeles Times)

More than a decade later, Dahl would crumble under the relentless questioning of detectives who made false statements about the evidence, and the tricks of her own mind that left her believing that she was involved in the killing — that she was, in fact, the biter whose teeth had sunk into the woman’s back. After a series of manipulative interrogations over a period of years, Dahl falsely confessed that she had participated in the murder.

She told that same false story in court, identifying her ex-boyfriend, Davis, as the killer and sending him away for 16 years to life. She was jailed for four years, before returning home to try to pick up life with her young children.

But she could not escape that terrible image of herself, the consequence of a method of policing that allows detectives to deceive and threaten in pursuit of a confession. And she passed that scar onto her sons, who lived with her addictions and chaos, but still could never quite believe their mother was a killer.

They were right.

In 2020, Davis became the first person in California ever to be exonerated based on genetic genealogy, the use of family trees to track down an identity from unknown DNA samples.

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

Many people believe they would never admit to a crime they didn’t commit. But people do. It’s one of the most common reasons for wrongful convictions.

This story provides another example of how it can happen and how lives are destroyed because the police, prosecutors, and witnesses focus on getting a conviction rather than finding the truth.

The police should not be able to psychologically torture suspects. They should not be allowed to lie to suspects during interrogations.

Wrongful convictions harm generations of people. They allow those who are actually guilty to escape justice. How do such results serve our society?

#9

Now Keir Starmer Has to Decide If He’d Use Nukes (Brian Klaas, The Atlantic)

The moment Keir Starmer is officially made prime minister of the United Kingdom, he will be given a flurry of briefings, piles of documents, and the urgent business to run the country. Lurking among those papers is a moral land mine.

Starmer will be given a pen and four pieces of paper. On each paper, he must handwrite identical top-secret orders that—hopefully—no other human being will ever see. The previous set of orders, written by outgoing Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, will then be destroyed, unopened. These top-secret papers are called the “letters of last resort.”

…

During the Cold War, British authorities constantly feared that London could be wiped out in a surprise nuclear attack by the Soviet Union. If the British government ceased to exist in a blinding flash of atomic light, and everyone in the civilian chain of command was dead, who would have the authority to launch a counterattack? Without the credible threat of a “second strike” in response to a nuclear assault on the capital, Britain lacked a deterrent.

The letters of last resort are the solution to that dilemma: They allow the prime minister to issue orders for a counterattack from beyond the grave. If the submarine captain has reason to believe that London has been destroyed in a nuclear blast (one of the cues is said to be that the BBC has stopped broadcasting), then the captain is to make every attempt to verify that the British government no longer exists. Once satisfied that the worst has indeed taken place, only then may the captain open the two safes, unseal the letters, read their contents, and execute the order from the now-deceased prime minister. Should the United Kingdom release its nuclear arsenal and retaliate—or not?

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

Writing these letters is one obligation that immediately emphasizes the burden of taking over the government of the United Kingdom. The campaign is over. The burdens are real.

What choice will a new Prime Minister make for a nearly unthinkable outcome? Imagine what you would write, knowing how much the situation would have deteriorated if the submarine captains needed to open the safe to read these final orders.

The global security situation is unstable. Russian President Vladimir Putin has engaged in nuclear saber-rattling as part of his Ukranian invasion. More countries are considering creating their own nuclear deterrent. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has set its doomsday clock to just 90 seconds to midnight—the closest it has been to the end.

It is a reality of our world. And it is one of the reasons elections matter.

Post-Game Comments

Today’s Thought from my Readwise collection:

“Maybe the United States turns into a fascist dictatorship. Maybe Leonard Leo coronates King Donald I at the National Cathedral. Maybe another pandemic, caused by climate change, sweeps through the country, killing off a third the population, and there are no scientists left to make new vaccines. Maybe the Northeast states and the Pacific Coast states secede from the Union, on the grounds that the Constitution does not demand allegiance to a monarch. Maybe there will be an actual second Civil War, like the MAGA trolls have been calling for for years. The New Right doesn’t care. They don’t care. To the neo-reactionaries, any outcome is preferable to the woke society we live in now. As long as the Cathedral—or the Deep State, or the regime, or whatever you want to call it—comes tumbling down, it’s all good, as far as they’re concerned. They don’t care. Let me reiterate: They. Don’t. Care.”—Greg Olear, Rough Beast: Who Donald Trump Really Is, What He’ll Do if Re-Elected, and Why Democracy Must Prevail

Thank you for reading Things I Find Interesting. This post is public so feel free to share it.

Thank you for reading my newsletter. Let me know what you think about what you’ve read. Send me things you’ve found interesting! You can email me at craigcheslog@substack.com. 

Please help me spread the word about this newsletter by sharing this post via email or on the social media network of your choice. And if you haven’t already, please consider signing up for a free or paid subscription. 

Here’s what I’ve found interesting: President Biden’s debate performance was terrible but we need to take a deep breath and stop with the panic, the Philadelphia Inquirer rightly calls on Donald Trump to leave the race, a witty and accessible review of Project 2025, Trump proposes having migrants fight each other for sport, how we could lose reality under Project 2025, a conservative-backed group is making a public list of federal workers it believes won’t be loyal to Trump, the real photo that won an AI image contest, I was wrong about the end of Voyager 1, and Newsmax does a better job than CNN of fact-checking the results of 2020 election.

#1

July 27, 2024 (Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American)

It went on and on, and that was the point. This was not a debate. It was Trump using a technique that actually has a formal name, the Gish gallop, although I suspect he comes by it naturally. It’s a rhetorical technique in which someone throws out a fast string of lies, non-sequiturs, and specious arguments, so many that it is impossible to fact-check or rebut them in the amount of time it took to say them. Trying to figure out how to respond makes the opponent look confused, because they don’t know where to start grappling with the flood that has just hit them.

It is a form of gaslighting, and it is especially effective on someone with a stutter, as Biden has. It is similar to what Trump did to Biden during a debate in 2020. In that case, though, the lack of muting on the mics left Biden simply saying: “Will you shut up, man?” a comment that resonated with the audience. Giving Biden the enforced space to answer by killing the mic of the person not speaking tonight actually made the technique more effective.

There are ways to combat the Gish gallop—by calling it out for what it is, among other ways—but Biden retreated to trying to give the three pieces of evidence that established his own credentials on the point at hand. His command of those points was notable, but the difference between how he sounded at the debate and how he sounded on stage at a rally in Raleigh, North Carolina, just an hour afterward suggested that the technique worked on him. 

That’s not ideal, but as Monique Pressley put it, “The proof of Biden’s ability to run the country is the fact that he is running it. Successfully. Not a debate performance against a pathological lying sociopath.”

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

President Biden’s performance during the first half hour was the worst of any candidate in the history of presidential and vice presidential debates. It does not make sense to ignore what happened. People have eyes and ears. But we also shouldn’t panic.

Biden is ultimately responsible for what happened. But my goodness, where was his staff? How could they not leak before the debate that Biden had a cold? How could they not set expectations that we would hear a hoarse voice at a minimum?  

It was also clear that Biden was not just overprepared, but he was overprepared for the wrong kind of debate. He didn’t need to memorize lists of factoids. Anyone who has watched a recent Donald Trump rally knew this debate would not be about policy expertise. Biden needed to be able to call out Donald Trump’s lies—especially after CNN made clear it was not going to let Jake Tapper and Dana Bash handle this fundamental journalist role. As the American Prospect’s David Dayen wrote, “The people who spent a week with Biden at Camp David had a specific duty, which they failed utterly to accomplish.”

Allowing Trump to lie also set up Biden to be a victim of the “Gish gallop” historian Heather Cox Richardson describes in the excerpt I’ve quoted above. It took Biden time to catch up with the cascade of false statements. I’ve experienced this when facing someone screaming false accusations at me. It’s hard to overcome.

After about a half hour, Biden rallied. Thankfully. It was at about that time that Trump began to falter.

But first impressions matter.

I was relieved to see Biden do so well the next day, starting with voter interactions at the Waffle House and an outstanding rally speech. He owned his poor debate performance, reminded his supporters about what is at stake in this election, and once again got up after metaphorically getting knocked down. Biden has made a political career and life out of that.

Biden was pitch-perfect when he said, “I know I’m not a young man. I don’t walk as easy as I used to. I don’t speak as smoothly as I used to. I don’t debate as well as I used to, but I know what I do know — I know how to tell the truth!”

I hope that still matters.

There has been a conversation about whether Democrats should replace Biden as the presidential candidate this year. I’ve been unimpressed by the arguments made by pundits who think a replacement is necessary. A poor performance while ill should not determine presidential campaign strategy—particularly when the alternatives discussed are more unrealistic than an Aaron Sorkin plot.

Critical parts of the Democratic coalition are quite unimpressed with all of the suggestions about replacing the first woman of color to be Vice President with a white man or white woman at the top of the ticket. (Visiting Black Twitter is always worthwhile for a reality check—and don’t overlook how Trump’s debate reference to “black jobs” has hurt him.) Do you think the current post-debate reaction is a crisis? The clusterbleep that would happen if Vice President Kamala Harris were passed over would far exceed it. People also seem to have forgotten that Harris is the only person who could use the millions the Biden-Harris campaign has already raised. Everyone else would start fundraising from zero.

Biden, his family, and his advisors have a difficult decision to make. They need to be sure that the president is up to the challenge. The strategy that led to Biden’s campaign pushing for this debate failed. This election will be too close for another mistake of this magnitude.

Biden had a bad night. However, Trump led an insurrection that prevented a peaceful transfer of power. Trump is a felon. Trump appointed the Supreme Court Justices who overturned Roe v. Wade. Trump failed our country during the pandemic. Trump lied in every answer he gave during the debate. Trump says he wants to help Russia, North Korea, and China be great again. On Sunday Trump reposted on Truth Social an image calling Liz Cheney “guilty of treason” and that she should face a “televised military tribunal.”

We should never accept that kind of rhetoric as normal from a presidential candidate.

Plus, as Stuart Stevens warned on Twitter in answering a question about whether Trump would be pleased or nervous if he were suddenly running against another Democrat: “He’d be relieved. The message from the Democratic Party would be, ‘I guess Trump was right and Biden wasn’t up to it. We’ll give it another shot. Eventually we’ll get it right. And hey, trust us to lead the country.’ It’s madness.”

Sure is. It would be a challenge to build a winning coalition around that perception.

We know Biden can run the country because he has demonstrated it over the past three-and-a-half years. The Biden-Harris ticket needs to win to protect democracies around the world. This debate was a setback. I hope the president has learned a lesson—and that he will once again bounce back from adversity.

So. Let’s take a breath. Campaigns are full of lows and highs. We have work to do. So, as Jimmy Buffett once sang, let’s “breathe in, breathe out, move on.”

Things I Find Interesting is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider joining for free or helping buy me some coffee to drink while I write by becoming a paid subscriber.

#2

To serve his country, Donald Trump should leave the race (Editorial Board, The Philadelphia Inquirer)

President Joe Biden’s debate performance was a disaster. His disjointed responses and dazed look sparked calls for him to drop out of the presidential race.

But lost in the hand wringing was Donald Trump’s usual bombastic litany of lies, hyperbole, bigotry, ignorance, and fear mongering. His performance demonstrated once again that he is a danger to democracy and unfit for office.

In fact, the debate about the debate is misplaced. The only person who should withdraw from the race is Trump.

Trump, 78, has been on the political stage for eight years marked by chaos, corruption, and incivility. Why go back to that?

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

At least one editorial board is willing to ask that question. In this editorial, The Philadelphia Inquirer reviews Trump’s policy failures, his impeachments, and his lying about everything. They conclude that Trump is actually the candidate who needs to step down.

As The Bulwark’s Jill Lawrence also explained, the fact that we are supposed to pretend that the leader of an insurrection designed to overturn the 2020 election is a typical political candidate demonstrates a series of failures by our nation’s institutions. Trump had three opportunities during the debate to agree that he would accept the results of the 2024 election. He refused each time. Shouldn’t that matter?

We must not forget who Donald Trump has proven to be. We must take every opportunity to remind people what actually happened during his first term. The Philadelphia Inquirer does the nation a service by being so blunt in its reminder about what is at stake in this election.

Where are the rest of the pundits and editorial writers? Why do they continue to give Trump a pass?

#3

A Review of Project 2025 (Emily Galvin-Almanza, Twitter via Thread Reader)

You may have heard the term “Project 2025” floating around, and you may even have cracked open the 900+ page document yourself, only to see a lot of kind of bland, policy-wonk text. So let me crack through the policy-speak and tell you WTF is in this document.

This is, um, a long thread. But if you want a lot of info about Project 2025, all in one place, you’ve come to the right place.

This document is what Trump and his team will do if elected. It’s their document, their plan, their platform. So like… it’s not *me* saying what they’ll do, this is *them* saying so.

Shall we dig in? I’ll organize and give you page numbers. I’m going to start with criminal justice stuff (of course) and then we’ll wander through other topics like repro rights (none), discrimination (fine, unless it’s against nuclear power), environmental protection (gone), etc.

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

Emily Galvin-Almanza, the Founder and Executive Director of Partners for Justice, provides a readable and witty summary of Project 2025. She’s done the challenging reading of the 900-page document, so you don’t have to.

I am frustrated that Project 2025 did not come up in the first presidential debate. Voters need to understand what is in the document and how it would fundamentally transform our nation in ways that do not have popular support.

This tweet thread may be a way to get your family and friends to engage with Project 2025 before the election.

#4

Trump’s new pitch: having migrants fight each other for sport (Steve Benen, MSNBC)

Referring to Dana White, Trump told the audience, “I said, ‘Dana, I have an idea. Why don’t you set up a migrant league of fighters and have your regular league of fighters, and then you have the champion of your league — these are the greatest fighters in the world — fight the champion of the migrants.’ I think the migrant guy might win, that’s how tough they are. He didn’t like that idea too much, but actually, it’s not the worst idea I’ve ever had. No, it’s, these are tough people, these people are tough, and they’re nasty, mean.”

White later confirmed that Trump did, in fact, present the idea to him privately.

Apparently pleased with the crowd’s reaction in Washington, D.C., the Republican spoke at a rally in Philadelphia hours later, at which point he pitched the identical idea.

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

I want all of the pundits and editorial writers who have so far failed to demand that Donald Trump leave the race to explain why this kind of idea is an acceptable policy proposal. Trump should not get a pass because they expect him to say outrageous things. He means what he says. Stop covering up for him.

I know Trump may be better for their business. The book deals were undoubtedly better when Trump was in office.

But have reporters, editors, and publishers forgotten all of the historical examples demonstrating how autocrats target these professions as they consolidate power? Do they really think they will get a pass because they didn’t treat his policy ideas seriously now?

I probably don’t want to know their answer to that last question.

Thank you for reading Things I Find Interesting. This post is public so feel free to share it with your family and friends.

#5

The Information Regime of Authoritarianism, coming soon to a Federal Agency Near You (Seth Cotlar, Rightlandia)

This post is inspired by this very insightful thread that Dave Roberts posted on ex-Twitter. It opened with a link to an article that used a wide array of government data to establish convincingly that yes, crime rates are indeed very much down recently. Democracies depend on access to reliable information that citizens can use as the basis for our arguments about what problems we face and how we might solve them. To a great extent, Trump 2.0 (as articulated by the folks at Project 2025) is all about dismantling that sort of democratic knowledge/information regime and replacing it with a dystopian and authoritarian version of it in which knowing things about empirical reality with any degree of certainty will be much harder, if not impossible.

Remember how Trump floated the idea that Covid would go away if we just stopped testing for it? People treated that like it was Trump being dumb, but he was actually articulating a quite savvy, authoritarian way of handling information. Want climate change to go away? Just stop measuring it! If you think I’m kidding, that is precisely what the Project 2025 folks have planned for NOAA.

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

What happens to our public discourse if there are no independent facts? What will happen to all of the government data we rely upon when Donald Trump implements Schedule F and replaces thousands of civil servants with people who have taken a loyalty oath?

As Roberts explains in the twitter thread Cotlar includes in his post, if Trump implements Project 2025 we will no longer know what is really going on with our government, economy, and society. The post-truth world that exists in social media will become our reality.

If we lose these statistical institutions, rebuilding them will be extremely difficult. I hope we can get enough voters to understand what is at stake.

#6

Conservative-backed group is creating a list of federal workers it suspects could resist Trump plans (Lisa Mascaro, The Associated Press)

From his home office in small-town Kentucky, a seasoned political operative is quietly investigating scores of federal employees suspected of being hostile to the policies of Republican Donald Trump, a highly unusual and potentially chilling effort that dovetails with broader conservative preparationsfor a new White House.

Tom Jones and his American Accountability Foundation are digging into the backgrounds, social media posts and commentary of key high-ranking government employees, starting with the Department of Homeland Security. They’re relying in part on tips from his network of conservative contacts, including workers. In a move that alarms some, they’re preparing to publish the findings online.

With a $100,000 grant from the Heritage Foundation, the goal is to post 100 names of government workers to a website this summer to show a potential new administration who might be standing in the way of a second-term Trump agenda— and ripe for scrutiny, reclassifications, reassignments or firings.

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

Yeah, the Trump supporters are getting ready to act if their guy takes office. Can you imagine the chilling effect this is going to have on federal workers, even before the implementation of Schedule F? We know that threats of violence follow when Trump supporters post the names of people with whom they disagree. Trump and his supporters learned how appointments can impact policy. They will not make the mistake of hiring people who place truth—or the Constitution—ahead of their loyalty to Donald J. Trump.

#7

Photographer Wins AI Image Contest with Real Picture, Then Gets Disqualified (Alex Greenberger, Art News)

Astray’s winning picture, a photograph of a flamingo whose head appears to be bent into its body, took first place in the AI category of the People’s Vote Award at the 1839 Photography Awards.

This year, the judges had also given Astray’s photograph, titled F L A M I N G O N E, a third-place prize in the AI category. The juried prizes are decided by representatives from the New York Times, the auction house Christie’s, the publishing house Phaidon, and elsewhere.

On his website, Astray wrote that he had deliberately submitted his photograph as a means to advocate for human-made pictures: “With AI-generated content remodelling the digital landscape rapidly while sparking an ever-fiercer debate about its implications for the future of content and the creators behind it – from creatives like artists, journalists, and graphic designers to employees in all sorts of industries – I entered this actual photo into the AI category of 1839 Awards to prove that human-made content has not lost its relevance, that Mother Nature and her human interpreters can still beat the machine, and that creativity and emotion are more than just a string of digits.”

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

I love this story. I am not sure how many more wins reality will have over artificial intelligence, so I am going to celebrate the heck out of the ones we still get. Besides, that photo is so cool.

#8

NASA says Voyager 1 is fully back online months after it stopped making sense (Wes Davis, The Verge)

Voyager 1, the farthest human-made craft from the Earth, is finally sending back data from all four of its scientific instruments, NASA said this week. That means the agency is once more receiving its readings on plasma waves, magnetic fields, and space-bound particles.

Voyager 1 stopped sending back good data in November, and fixing it was fraught as engineers had to wait 45 hours to hear anything back. In April, the agency got it to start sending back health and status information, then science data from two of its instruments in May.

Now, NASA says Voyager 1, which is over 15 billion miles from Earth, is “conducting normal science operations” and the agency just needs to resync its timekeeping software and do some maintenance on a sparingly-used digital tape recorder.

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

This is such a cool story, and I am so impressed with the work these NASA engineers and scientists did to bring Voyager 1 back to life. Sometimes I love being wrong.

And I think we needed some good news in this issue.

The Closer

The caption is funny. Some network suits want to avoid another lawsuit! But also, I wonder if CNN’s leadership really thinks it is good for their network that Newsmax did a better job of telling the truth about the 2020 election results than it did during the presidential debate.

Post-Game Comments

Today’s Thought from my Readwise collection:

“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back. So the old bamboozles tend to persist as the new ones rise.”—Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

Thank you for reading Things I Find Interesting. This post is public so feel free to share it.

Thank you for reading my newsletter. Let me know what you think about what you’ve read. Send me things you’ve found interesting! You can email me at craigcheslog@substack.com. 

Please help me spread the word about this newsletter by sharing this post via email or on the social media network of your choice. And if you haven’t already, please consider signing up for a free or paid subscription.