And another day of not having to ‘vote again,’ Agenda47, racist attacks against Harris, MAGA bogus lawsuits, AI and politics, support slipping for female US president, $1M starter homes, ‘wellness farms,’ a blood test for Alzheimer’s, zyn, and PFAS in condoms and lubes comes to a close:
“You have to get out and vote. You won’t have to do it anymore. Four years, it will be fixed, it will be fine…In four years, you won’t have to vote again.” — Donald Trump (He’s telling you he’s going to be a dictator.)
“I’m giving federal immunity to police officers.” -- Donald Trump (Straight up fascism here.)
Former president implores Christian supporters to vote ‘just this time’, then says he’s not Christian. “You know what? It’ll be fixed! It’ll be fine. You won’t have to vote any more, my beautiful Christians.” At that point, with a slight shake of his head and his right hand pressed against the left side of his chest, Trump said, “I’m not Christian.” But he added: “I love you. Get out – you gotta get out and vote. In four years, you don’t have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good, you’re not gonna have to vote.”
As Trump creates distance from Project 2025, the conservative Agenda47 comes into focus. While some also proposed solutions that would be ushered in under a conservative president, voters don't have to guess Trump's plans; instead, they can simply head over to his website...Called Agenda47, the campaign materials paint a big picture of what Americans may expect under another Trump presidency...Many of the actions proposed would be achieved through executive order and touch on topics ranging from climate change and education to the economy and immigration...Agenda47, on the other hand, is the official outline for Trump's campaign. -- Be very concerned about his official plans, as well as about his unofficial plans.
The Far Right Has Finally Figured Out How to Hone Its Racist Attack on Kamala Harris. Kat dissects how this innocuous little acronym [DEI] became the latest dog whistle for Fox News hosts and elected Republicans, drawing parallels to Nixon’s Southern strategy, which also deployed coded language to appeal to old bigotry. Earlier attempts to caricature Kamala Harris caught right-wing pundits somewhat flat-footed, when compared to their other misogynistic masterpiece: their attacks on Hillary Clinton (a phenomenon documented by Kat in her first video for Mother Jones). But in the days since Harris locked up enough delegates to be the Democratic Party’s presumptive nominee, talking heads have filled the airwaves with what is now considered a three-letter epithet, twisted by figures like Tucker Carlson and Charlie Kirk to mean people who got jobs even though they are talentless and incompetent, especially from minority groups. Harris is their new prime example.
The GOP’s Secret Weapon for 2024? Bogus Lawsuits. More curious than these alarming numbers—and the implications of voter fraud—was how the party came up with them. To estimate registration rates in each county, the RNC compared voter data from the secretary of state to a US census dataset that averaged populations over five years. The census data does not account for the tens of thousands of people who migrated to Nevada during the pandemic. More crucially, it often misses people who are lawfully registered to vote but temporarily residing elsewhere—such as college students and military service members. The RNC’s lawyers also, at one point, projected what they thought Nevada’s voting registration should be by extrapolating from a census survey of 54,000 Americans nationwide, not Nevadans specifically...“This is comparing apples to orangutans.”...However math-challenged, the RNC’s organized and well-financed legal approach is a sea change from 2020, when the party’s effort to hijack the Oval Office was frenzied and reactionary...“These claims are designed not to change policy between now and November, or to change administrative procedure in elections between now and November,” says David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research, “but to seed the ground or claims that an election was stolen.” -- MAGA can only cheat their way into power because they know most Americans are not in favor of what they have planned for the country.
A manipulated video shared by Musk mimics Harris’ voice, raising concerns about AI in politics. The video gained attention after tech billionaire Elon Musk shared it on his social media platform X on Friday evening without explicitly noting it was originally released as parody. The video uses many of the same visuals as a real ad that Harris, the likely Democratic president nominee, released last week launching her campaign. But the video swaps out the voice-over audio with another voice that convincingly impersonates Harris.
Number of Americans who say US ready for female president dipping: Survey. While the respondents said that both Trump and Harris are equally qualified for the job, with 49 percent saying they are, voters are hesitant about the idea of a female president — 54 percent of the country says they are ready for a woman president and 30 percent said they aren’t. That number is down from 2015, when an Economist/YouGov poll found 63 percent of voters were ready for a woman president. That survey was taken in May of that year, just a month after Hillary Clinton declared her candidacy for president, and a month before she became the first woman to secure a major party’s presidential nomination. As Harris contends to be the second to do so, gender may serve as a significant roadblock. Forty-one percent of Americans assume that more than half of their fellow countrymen would not be willing to vote for a woman over a man if the two candidates are equally qualified.
Covid surges in US as unequal access plagues vaccination and treatment rates. Covid is surging across the US, with levels of the virus on track to exceed last summer’s wave nationally and approaching the peak of last winter’s wave in the west, according to wastewater data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Yet vaccination and antiviral uptake, plagued by inequitable access, have remained low, and other precautions like mask-wearing are being met with increasing resistance...The summer surge comes as some federal and state policies have pulled away from efforts that can stop the spread of the virus, experts say.
California’s largest wildfire explodes in size as fires rage across US West. More than 110 active fires covering 2,800 square miles (7,250 square kilometers) were burning in the U.S. on Friday, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. Some were caused by the weather, with climate change increasing the frequency of lightning strikes as the region endures record heat and bone-dry conditions.
Elon Musk's transgender daughter, in first interview, says he berated her for being queer as a child. Vivian Jenna Wilson, the transgender daughter of Elon Musk, said Thursday in her first interview that he was an absent father who was cruel to her as a child for being queer and feminine...Wilson said that, for as long as she could remember, Musk hasn’t been a supportive father. She said he was rarely present in her life, leaving her and her siblings to be cared for by their mother or by nannies even though Musk had joint custody, and she said Musk berated her when he was present. “He was cold,” she said. “He’s very quick to anger. He is uncaring and narcissistic.”
Why fewer people are choosing to have kids. The proportion of adults in the United States younger than 50 years old who do not have children is growing — leaping from 37% in 2018 to 47% in 2023, according to a new Pew Research Center survey published Thursday...There were many reasons why people said they didn’t have kids, including financial concerns, infertility, or that it just didn’t happen, according to the research. For people younger than 50, the top reason reported for not having children was that they don’t want to...“It is completely normal and valid to not want to have children.”...“It is a myth that everyone, especially women, want to have children.”
A $1 million starter home is now the norm in more than 200 US cities. A Thursday report from Zillow indicates that a typical starter home is now worth $1 million or more in 237 cities, up from 84 cities in 2019, underscoring America’s ongoing home affordability crisis.
Justice Department says TikTok collected US user views on issues like abortion and gun control. The Justice Department warned, in stark terms, of the potential for what it called “covert content manipulation” by the Chinese government, saying the algorithm could be designed to shape content that users receive...The concern, the Justice Department said, is more than theoretical, alleging that TikTok and ByteDance employees are known to engage in a practice called “heating” in which certain videos are promoted in order to receive a certain number of views. While this capability enables TikTok to curate popular content and disseminate it more widely, U.S. officials posit it can also be used for nefarious purposes.
Alzheimer’s blood test catches 90% of early dementia cases, study finds. In comparison, neurologists and other memory specialists correctly diagnosed Alzheimer’s in 73% of their cases. Primary care doctors had even less success, with only a 61% accuracy rate, according to the study.
RFK Jr. Wants to Send People Addicted to Antidepressants to Government “Wellness Farms”. In a virtual event last week that was billed as a “Latino Town Hall,” presidential candidate and anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. unveiled his plan to overhaul addiction treatment programs. Speaking during a live recording of the Latino Capitalist podcast, Kennedy described opioid, antidepressant, and ADHD “addicts” receiving treatment on tech-free “wellness farms,” where they would spend as much as three or four years growing organic produce...Cell phones and other screens, he said, would be prohibited. “We’re going to re-parent people and restore connection to community,” he promised...The range of people receiving such treatment could potentially include wide swaths of the population, since the wellness farms wouldn’t just be for people addicted to illegal drugs, but also for people who are taking antidepressants and ADHD medications. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, approximately 11 percent of Americans ages 12 and older take antidepressants, and about 4 percent of Americans between the ages of five and 64 take medication for ADHD. -- This man deserves zero votes. None. Nada. Zilch. Zippo. He needs to be relegated to the dustbin of history.
Some condom and lubricant brands contain alarming levels of PFAS – study. Toxic ‘forever chemicals’ linked to low birth weight, reduced sperm counts and infertility...“It is chemically certain that the female reproductive tract will be contaminated by some of the chemicals in condoms.”
Technology’s grip on modern life is pushing us down a dimly lit path of digital land mines. It’s a tell-tale moment — one that illustrates the digital pitfalls looming in a culture that takes the magic of technology for granted until it implodes into a horror show that exposes our ignorance and vulnerability. “We are utterly dependent on systems that we don’t even know exist until they break,” said Paul Saffo, a Silicon Valley forecaster and historian. “We have become a little bit like Blanche DuBois in that scene from ‘A Streetcar Named Desire,’ where she says, ‘I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.’ ”...All of the key players still tend to put a higher priority on the pursuit of profit than a commitment to quality, said Isak Nti Asar, co-director of the cybersecurity and global policy program at Indiana University. “We have built a cult of innovation, a system that says. ‘Get technology into people’s hands as quick as possible and then fix it when you find out you have a problem,’” Nti Asar said. “We should be moving slower and demanding better technology instead of giving ourselves up to these feudal lords.”...But it’s becoming increasingly untenable to toggle back to the analog and early digital era of 30 or 40 years ago when more tasks were done manually and more records were handled on pen and paper. If anything, technology appears destined to become even more pervasive now that artificial intelligence seems poised to automate more tasks, including potentially writing the code for software updates that will be checked by a computer — that will be overseen by another computer to make sure it’s not malfunctioning.
Big Tobacco may have its biggest new hit since cigarettes. Governments around the world have tried to kill the tobacco industry. Zyn, the brand of flavored oral nicotine pouches that comes in small, round containers resembling breath mints, is its latest strategy. While it’s ultimately owned by tobacco giant Philip Morris International, Zyn is a tobacco-free product. White pouches similar in size to a piece of chewing gum send more nicotine than what’s in a cigarette right into the bloodstream. Unlike traditional chewing tobacco, you don’t have to chew the pouches or spit the build-up of tobacco juice.
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