Early movies, with remarkable quality, going back to the 1890s. The Biograph process used 68mm film, which offered much better quality than the 35mm film used in the Edison process.
Ships and trees. Wooden shipbuilding and its dependence on forests.
Chinese agricultural drone pilots and the low-altitude economy.
Empathy is generally thought to be a good thing…but can increased empathy lead to increased political polarization?
Meditation and mindness are also thought of as benign…but can they have a dark side?
Abigail Shrier writes about Republican mistakes in going after Kamala Harris, and has thoughts on how to do it better:
https://www.thefp.com/p/abigail-shrier-republicans-kamala
“The question Republicans ought to confront before leveling any attack is: “Will this energize my supporters more or hers?” For nearly every ad hominem salvo currently flung at Harris, the answer is: hers.”
Well, also the question should be about effects on those on the fence, or near the fence, as well as on hard-core supporters of either.
The problem with a lot of the day-to-day discussion of politics and current events has little connection to what is actually happening. It’s not that such talk is corrupt but that it as designed to take up space as people (I cannot call us normal) in the political bubble spit chiclets at one another.
My questions to Shrier are 1) Who specifically is doing the sl*t-shaming? A candidate? A proxy? Or just somebody in the political commentary bubble with a Twitter following? 2) Do you think her supporters can be any more energized than they are now? The atmosphere for the past week-and-a-half has been almost sexual. 3) Attack dogs? What do you think is the role for a vice presidential nominee? As far as his wife, how condescending. I think she knows him better than you do. Maybe you just don’t get former Marines from Ohio, his wife does
I like April, enjoy her commentary, and took some points from this piece to heart when I read it yesterday. However my question to her do you comprehend how this election will be run, the emotion, and physics involved? Do you think a few Willie Horton ads showing the “real Kamala” are going to cut it? Going to burn through the media wall? When Biden was on the ticket this was going to be a “Don’t Let Hitler Win” campaign of blood and iron. And they just whacked a sitting president in a manner if Hersh is correct was technically criminal; these guys are playing for all the marbles or (since the baseball trade deadline was yesterday) they’re all in. Plan accordingly.
Why is there less ornamentation on buildings than there once was?
https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-beauty-of-concrete/
Abigail Shrier writes about Republican mistakes in going after Kamala Harris, and has thoughts on how to do it better:
She forgets that there are hours of videos with Kamala saying the things she tries to deny. Also married women and mothers in families are already GOP voters. The single “cat ladies” are unreachable.
Mike K….the segmentation isn’t nearly that perfect. There are plenty of married women, with and without children, who vote Democratic.
I’ve seen several comments, one in the WSJ, IIRC, by women who said they were leaning toward Trump/Vance but the cat ladies comment turned them in the other direction.
Vance was certainly correct that we should be concerned that so many national leaders are childless. But remark like this leads people to take it personally.
Vance is something of an intellectual, I believe, and tends to think out loud. This does create some political vulnerabilities,
The race appears to be tightening for now. Maybe support for Kamala will collapse as more voters learn about her record and positions. Maybe not. I wouldn’t bet against the Democrats. They play the political game better.
I think that Shrier is right about female voters. The single leftists who get charicatured as cat ladies are never going to vote Republican, but middle-of-the-road and married women may.
The Democrats usually avoid discussing policy issues in detail, lest they get rhetorically pinned down and criticized. Instead they focus on Trump’s personality: a supposed bigot and creep, he can be framed as being just like the creepy and predatory men most women have encountered in their lives. The “weird” canard about Vance is the start of an attempt to do the same thing to him. This is pure Alinskyism and obviously successful. The NYC rape judgement against Trump may have been bullshit but it and the other personal accusations against him will resonate with many female voters.
Republicans should probably avoid personal attacks on Kamala. The Democrats can lob that back against them, by talking about Trump’s sexual history and double standards for men and women, and get many women’s attention. Instead the Republicans should focus on Kamala’s leftism and record of failure, of which there is plenty of both. She seems like a nice person, but she and Joe Biden engineered our catastrophic Afghanistan withdrawal, caused two major wars through their weakness and ineptitude, opened our borders to ten million illegals, encouraged the sexual mutiliation of children, and caused the worst price inflation in fifty years. She is not qualified to be President, especially in these dangerous times that she helped to bring about. [etc.]
But, of course, never underestimate the ability of the Republicans to fuck things up. I hope I’m wrong.
I think a great idea for a video product would a recurring show with political commentators having to do a presentation from the point of view of a candidate on how they would actually win an election. The first half would be the presentation and the second half would questions from a “murder board” that would pick apart the strategy. A lot of commentators can put together good columns or even a book that try to explain a slice of the electoral world, but have a worldview, a metaphysic that is badly out of line with current reality. Strategy is hard, sniping at the edges is easy. A good example is National Review which is still stuck in 2007.
I would love to see Shrier on a show like that
Right strategy to take with Kamala?
There are a few big aspects to the strategic terrain to this election, The first is that there is no use in the Republicans holding back from personal attacks that they may find effective. Not only do you never negotiate with yourself, but the Democrats have been quite clear for the past 2 years since the Mar-a-Lago raid and Biden’s 9/1/2022 speech that this was a no-limits campaign against Trump.
Second, at some point in time the real Kamala Harris, somebody who lacks the gravitas to be president, is going to burn through the media bubble. She is a terrible politician, far worse than Biden. The question is how the Republicans are going to exploit that moment, They were never able to do it with Biden’s decrepitude. Laying the context, the groundwork now for her incompetence, whether its through DEI or some other tactic, will allow the Republicans to “pounce”
The big-known is Democrats trying to turn the election into Trump-ageddon. The big unknown is whether the Republicans can take down Kamala. The most instructive historical analogy is 1988 with Dukakis who came into September with a 14+ point lead and the image of a competent technocrat. Lee Atwater, perhaps the last competent Republican campaign strategist before Trump, attacked Dukakis not by going after specific policy positions because that doesn’t resonate with your undecideds. Rather he picked stories that were symbols of those policies, see “Willie Horton.” The fact that there was pictures of Dukakis riding a tank was just gravy.
Lay the groundwork of Kamala now as a grifting, incompetent charlatan floating on the hot air of DEI. Have that in the background so when she generates those awesome clips for you, and given how bad of a politician she is there will be, you tie that background character you developed to the condition of the country that her Administration generated
Btw, behind the headlines, the Democrats are beyond desperation and are under no illusions about Kamala. Once she hits a rough spot, especially if the Republicans can exploit it, there’s a good chance her campaign collapses just like it did in 2019. Then watch out
Shrier is right, the knee pad jokes will wear thin pretty fast and aren’t likely to change many minds. On the other hand, there are, as already said, many hours of Kamala (Say it after me: comma-la, I have it on some authority this is the correct pronunciation, although I tend to go for coma-la.) spouting every extreme radical talking point imaginable and more of her spouting absolute gibberish. If the Republicans can’t manage to get any purchase from that, they are doomed anyway. Not to mention that I sure wouldn’t want to depend on the ability of almost any Republican politician’s ability to sell even a good joke, Trump might be one of the exceptions.
Of course her poll numbers are up from Biden, Attila would make a more appealing candidate than Biden. Her run in 2020 showed that absent a gun held to the head, no one wanted to vote for her then and I have faith that exposure will bring that about again. If the GOP and Trump campaign are really caught flat footed by her, they deserve to lose, this is something even a blind man could have smelled coming for miles.
On a slightly more upbeat note, the U.S. Navy maintains a white oak forest specifically to repair the USS Constitution:
https://www.military.com/history/why-us-navy-manages-its-own-private-forest.html
Contrary to renewable dogma, first class structural timber is a critically endangered resource.
Well she is a joke a dangerous one you ask any question and she is not the right answer
Now vances point is abouf those running the country who despise children look at how they behaved on the baby formula shortage