Weekend Links

Battleground Polls as of September 14 7:30 am PT:

National: Harris +2.7 (48.1 - 45.4)

Arizona: Trump +0.8

Georgia: Trump +0.7

Michigan: Harris +1.6

Nebraska d2: Harris +5.0

Nevada: Harris +0.1

North Carolina: Even 

Pennsylvania: Harris +0.7

Wisconsin: Harris +2.8

HEADLINES:

• Bomb threats force second consecutive day of school closures in Springfield, Ohio (NBC)

• Haitian immigrants helped revive a struggling Ohio town. Then neo-Nazis turned up (Guardian)

• Trump Claims Ignorance of Laura Loomer’s 9/11 Conspiracy Theories (NYT)

• Marjorie Taylor Greene calls far-right activist Laura Loomer’s rhetoric ‘huge problem’ that ‘doesn’t represent MAGA’ (CNN)

• Far-right activist Laura Loomer's access to Trump reveals a crisis in his campaign (NBC)

• Young women are more liberal than they’ve been in decades, analysis finds (AP)

• What if Trump Wins? (Rolling Stone)

• The ‘feral 25-year-olds’ making Kamala Harris go viral on TikTok (WP)

• Pope Francis slams both US presidential candidates over what he calls anti-life policies (AP)

• Democrats taunt ‘chicken’ Trump for refusing second debate with Harris (Guardian)

• MAGA Scrambles to Excuse Trump Chickening Out of Second Debate (TNR)

• 33,000 Boeing factory workers go on strike after rejecting contract offer (AP)

• How Google altered a deal with publishers who couldn’t say no (Verge)

• Tech companies don’t want to pay up for power-hungry data centers (WP)

• Biden meets with British leader and brushes off Putin’s threats about weapons for Ukraine (AP)

• Zelenskiy says 'victory plan' could push Russia to end war diplomatically (Reuters)

• Afghan women defy Taliban and continue medical school in Scotland (WP)

• ChatGPT maker says its new AI model can reason and think ‘much like a person’ (CNN)

• Scientists Receive $10 Million Grant To Melt Stuff (The Onion)

From a Train Window

Whenever I travel the length of the East Bay via Bart to the last station on the line, which is in San Jose., along the route I see homeless encampments here and there, little clusters of tents with clotheslines, shopping carts, bicycles, and people cooking over campfires.

There have been many attempts to explain homelessness. There have been many ideas about what to do about it. But it persists and in some places seems to be getting worse. 

Some write it off to a combination of mental illness, drug addiction and other pathologies, but I can’t help considering the uncomfortable possibility that it may be a logical outcome of the American way of life. What economists might call an externality, a social cost of doing business as usual.

Here in the heart of Silicon Valley, the competitive pressures for housing and jobs are as severe as anywhere in the land. You can see and feel it when you're around young people, even pre-high-school students in moderately well-off families.

These kids are well aware that there are billionaires in the neighborhood who live in mansions, drive cars almost as expensive as mansions, and ride private rockets into space for fun.

The average 12-year-old could be forgiven for assuming that these guys (they are almost all guys) aren’t like them. They probably out-performed everyone else in school or anything else they tried. They probably never stumbled, screwed up, or made a mistake — they must have been supermen, close to perfect.

These myths are just that — myths, of course — but that fact rarely penetrates the insular worlds of youth culture. In fact, if the homeless can be written off as externalities, I’d argue that billionaires should be as well. They are a social cost of business as usual, plus a few billionaires can do far more harm to the planet than all the homeless people in history have done collectively. 

(To be fair, some billionaires do a lot of good things by giving away some of their money, but it is the process by which they acquire such extreme wealth that is the problem.)

In our time, these extreme outcomes are inextricably linked. A few people can only become absurdly rich if many people become absurdly poor. So what kind of social reforms could be implemented that help us avoid this fate? 

The answer is a society that strives for a reasonable balance, for an equitable distribution of resources, a society committed to its middle class. And that's the kind of society I'd like my grandchildren to inherit, not one of such extremes.

These are 760 billionaires and over 653,000 homeless people in the U.S. 

HEADLINES:

• Trump stokes suspicions about assassination attempt, raising fears of more violence (WP)

• Judge narrows election interference case against Trump in Georgia (NBC)

• Supreme Court’s ruling in Trump v. United States would have given Nixon immunity for Watergate crimes — but 50 years ago he needed a presidential pardon to avoid prison (The Conversation)

• North Dakota judge strikes down the state's abortion ban (AP)

• Harris puts pressure on Trump in an elusive battleground: North Carolina (WP)

• Donald Trump Rejects Doing Another Debate With Kamala Harris (Deadline)

• Congressional Republicans try to hide from Trump’s debate performance (WP)

• Swing state voters respond to the presidential debate: ‘Trump couldn’t even look at her!’ (Guardian)

• Harris and Trump are jockeying for battleground states after their debate faceoff (AP)

• Trump’s debate performance punctured his foreign policy pretensions (WP)

• Harris vs. Trump: Who is leading the polls? (Reuters)

• Trump Media’s Stock Plunges After Debate (NYT)

• America’s most secret spy agency now has a podcast and is opening up about Osama bin Laden (WP)

• OpenAI Announces a New AI Model, Code-Named Strawberry, That Solves Difficult Problems Step by Step (Wired)

• Google DeepMind teaches a robot to autonomously tie its shoes and fix fellow robots (TechCrunch)

• Novel Architecture Makes Neural Networks More Understandable (Quanta)

• There’s more to this year’s smartphones than AI (Verge)

• OpenAI’s Fund-Raising Talks Could Value Company at $150 Billion (NYT)

• ‘He surprised me’: Oprah on her new AI special with Sam Altman (WP)

• Man Replies ‘STOP’ To Political Fundraiser Text Like Powerful Wizard Casting Spell To Ward Off Mythical Beast (The Onion)

Slow-Motion Campaign

Once the dueling versions of reality — and visions for America — on display during Tuesday night’s debate settle in, we might expect to see some movement in the poll numbers, but I doubt any dramatic shift will happen in the short term.

Nationally, the race has been gradually tightening over the past three weeks, with Trump edging closer to Harris, who led by 3.7 points at the close of the Democratic National Convention. She still has the lead but it has shrunk to 2.6 points, 47 percent to 44.4 percent.

The debate will prove to have been a success for Harris if over the coming days and weeks she reverses the erosion of her lead (which peaked on August 23), and adds to it going forward.

Not to be melodramatic, but one way to understand all of this is to imagine that the candidates are passengers on massive ocean liners that can only change direction very, very gradually as they steer the course toward Election Day, now less than two months away on November 5.

They both know all too well that an iceberg looms straight ahead, so in order to win this slow-motion race, each ship needs to adjust its course a little bit to the left or a little bit to the right as they near the iceberg.

One of them is going to guess wrong, hit the iceberg and sink to the bottom. The other is going to claim the prize, which is the Presidency.

To push this theme a bit further than one probably should, think of the ending of James Cameron’s cinematic version of the Titanic story and the fictional characters played by Leo and Kate.

The man is the one who sank and the woman survived to tell the tail.

This time around, that would be a happy ending.

***
Note: The reason I mainly cite 538 when I write about the polls is because that site averages practically of the credible polls that have been published over time, with weight given to the recency, methodology and credibility of the pollsters. I will also link to individual polls on a daily basis, but I consider them less reliable than 538’s “poll of polls.”

HEADLINES: 

• The Debate Was About Trump. That Was Good for Harris. (NYT)

• Donald Trump Had a Really, Really Bad Debate (New Yorker)

• Undecided Americans impressed by Harris - but did debate shift their votes? (BBC)

• Donald Trump faces his own debate fallout just months after benefiting from Joe Biden’s (AP)

• Snap poll after debate reveals state of presidential race between Trump and Harris (Independent)

• Harris and Trump Bet on Their Own Sharply Contrasting Views of America (NYT)

• "In Springfield (Ohio), they're eating the dogs, the people that came in, they're eating the cats. They're eating, they're eating the pets of the people that live there.” (Politifact)

• Hurricane Francine To Make Landfall In Louisiana With Storm Surge, High Winds, Flooding Rain (Weather Channel)

• Smoky skies thicken Las Vegas air as California fires blaze to the southwest (CBS)

• Inflation drops to lowest level since Feb. 2021 as Fed plans rate cut (WP)

• Indian migrants drive surge in northern U.S. border crossings (NPR)

• ‘Do not laugh. Do not wear this. Do not speak aloud’: life under the Taliban (Guardian)

• Zelenskiy says 'victory plan' could push Russia to end war diplomatically (Reuters)

• Israel Strikes Area Packed With Displaced Civilians (NYT)

• The US-Russia battle for influence in Africa plays out in Central African Republic (AP)

• Typhoon Yagi kills more than 150 people in Vietnam (Reuters)

• Will California flip the AI industry on its head? (Verge)

• How CEOs Are Using Gen AI for Strategic Planning (HBR)

• Report: Government Shutdown Could Imperil Hundreds Of Americans Currently At Top Of Federally Funded Ferris Wheels (The Onion)

 

The Takedown

The lasting image I took from tonight’s debate is Kamala Harris looking at Donald Trump when criticizing him and his inability to look at her back.

She stared him down.

The debate was a classic case of a prosecutor taking on a felon, and as predicted, she would “slice and dice him into pieces like an onion on a cutting board.” (The Knife)

Harris landed punch after punch. Here are a few.

• “We had to clean up Donald Trump’s mess.”

• “He sold us out” (on China).

• “He was fired by 83 million people. Clearly he is having trouble processing that.”

• (Dictators) can manipulate you with flattery and favors.”

• “He (Putin) would eat you for lunch.”

• “Stop with the continuous lying.”

• “You’re not running against Joe Biden. You’re running against me.”

It wasn’t a flawless performance by Harris. She muffed a couple lines and referred to Trump as the “former Vice-President” at one point.

She kept mentioning to her “plans” but left them mostly unspecified.

But overall, Harris won the debate hands down and, more importantly, she won the psychological chess game. While Trump kept struggling to fight back, his answers frequently devolved into rants about immigrants eating Americans’ pets and the like.

Finally, with Trump cornered, Harris moved in for the kill.

Checkmate!

HEADLINES: 

• Taylor Swift endorses Harris (NBC)

• Harris and Trump offer worlds-apart contrasts on top issues (AP)

• Elon Musk’s misleading election claims reach millions and alarm election officials (WP)

• Ukraine launches largest drone attack yet on Moscow, killing 1, Russia says (WP)

• 'If we can't speak, why live?' - BBC meets women after new Taliban law (BBC)

• An Israeli strike on a Gaza humanitarian zone tent camp kills at least 40 people, Palestinians say (AP)

• US says Russia received missiles from Iran, piles on sanctions (Reuters)

• The Afghan hospital struggling to save its starving babies (BBC)

• Germany tightens controls at its borders in an attempt to crackdown on immigration. (Reuters)

• Blinken slams Israel after IDF says its forces likely shot slain American activist (CNN)

• Nippon Steel flies to Washington for last-gasp push to save US Steel deal (Financial Times)

• US takes on Google's ad tech empire in antitrust trial (AFP)

• Harris’s rise in the polls has stalled, while Trump holds steady (WP)

• How Tennessee Keeps Nearly Half a Million People From Voting (NYT)

• The 20 US cities where the middle class is shrinking fastest (The Hill)

• More than 49 million in US covered by ACA over the past decade (Reuters)

• Ancient Egyptian fort that guarded kingdom against mysterious ‘sea peoples’ uncovered (Independent)

• Apple's slow AI rollout threatens iPhone upgrade cycle (Axios)

• Robots change people's daily lives in China (China Daily)

• A.I. Can Now Create Lifelike Videos. Can You Tell What’s Real? (NYT)

• Cows Go Extinct (The Onion)

 

Showdown: What if our democracy falls within the 'margin of error'?

On the eve of what may well be the only debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, the candidates seemed to be locked in a dead heat. The polling from 538 had Harris ahead nationally 47.2-44.4, or by only 2.8 points, which was down from a high of 3.7 on August 23.

That seems like bad news for the Democrats. Rather than receiving a post-convention bounce, as has happened traditionally, Harris’s lead peaked at the convention and has gone down by 24 percent since.

But it’s important to remember that virtually nothing about this year’s campaign has fit within traditional norms, so we really do not have any historical data to use as a comparison. 

Meanwhile, what is well documented is that, barring a titanic shift, there will be only seven states plus one split-state electoral district in Nebraska where the election will be decided. 

Here things are trending ever so slightly in Harris’s favor as of 8 am PT this morning:

• Wisconsin — Harris +2.8

• Michigan — Harris +1.9

• Pennsylvania — Harris +1.0

• Nevada — Harris +0.4

• Georgia — Trump +0.5

• North Carolina — Harris +0.3

• Arizona — Trump +0.6

• ‘Blue Dot’ Nebraska d2 — Harris +5.0 (no recent polls)

So the good news for Harris is she is ahead by a whisker in five of the seven swing states plus the blue dot of Nebraska. Obviously, these all have to be considered as within the margin of error, however, i.e. too close to call. In fact, it may be that the fate of our country has fallen within the margin of error, considering what would happen if Trump were elected.

Meanwhile, this battle between the parties resembles that of two siblings fighting over a single piece of pie. Each is determined to make sure that the other one doesn’t get a bigger share, so much so that it all comes down to a few crumbles one way or another. 

Note that all this, again according to 538, is based on only what 91.6 percent of the voters say they are gonna do. So what about that other 8.4? That’s enough to take the whole pie fight to another level.

Okay, forget about the pie and go back to the electorate. Are those 8.4 percent going to sit this thing out, or are they those elusive “undecideds” we keep hearing about, or do they inhabit the dark margins of society where no pollster dares to venture? (I thought Trump had the dark side all tied up.)

Now in case all this oddball math has you scratching your beret, rest assured that whatever the answers to these questions may be, one thing is crystal clear: The stakes tonight are very, very high. 

HEADLINES: 

• Trump and Harris Neck and Neck After Summer Upheaval, Times/Siena Poll Finds (NYT)

• Pennsylvania is key as Harris and Trump prep for a Philadelphia showdown (AP)

• Seven Tips for Harris to Win Her Debate With Trump (Bloomberg)

• Don't mention Trump - how Republicans try to sway women voters (BBC)

• House Republicans and Democrats issue dueling documents casting blame for mistakes made in US withdrawal from Afghanistan (CNN)

• Russia focusing on American social media stars to covertly influence voters (Reuters)

• News publishers in spotlight at Google’s latest monopoly trial (WP)

• DOJ claims Google has “trifecta of monopolies” on Day 1 of ad tech trial (ArsTechnica)

• Southern California Line Fire explodes in size; Nevada fire forces evacuations (WP)

• Israeli strikes in Syria leave 14 dead, Syrian state media says (AP)

• Princess Kate says she has finished cancer chemo treatment (WP)

• James Earl Jones, legendary actor known for unmistakable baritone voice, dies at 93  (NBC)

• Harvey Weinstein in hospital for emergency heart surgery (BBC)

• Near Death Experiences May Strengthen Human Interconnectedness (NeuroscienceNews)

• How a viral AI image catapulted a Mexican startup to a major Adidas contract (TechCrunch)

• Apple Unveils an AI iPhone (WSJ)

• Can Apple’s iPhones Pass the A.I. Test? (NYT)

• Horrified Taylor Swift Realizes Football Happens Every Year (The Onion)

 

Separated by Degrees

One of the earliest joys of the Internet in the 1990s was the new-found ability to uncover just how closely connected we all are with others. We previously had no easy way of knowing that stuff. Six degrees of separation were all that separated each of us from presidents, actors, athletes, billionaires and beauty queens.

Alternatively, we found out we were not all that far removed from some pretty nasty characters as well.

We cross paths with new people all the time, online and off, and one of my occasional preoccupations is to wonder how closely we may have been to meeting each other sometime in the past, but didn’t.

Perhaps we passed within a block of each other in some random city years ago -- one of us going one direction, one in another.

We just missed.

The opposite is also true. We may meet someone in some consequential way that sticks in our memory but never encounter them again. We didn’t get to know them, really and we never will. But that one meeting mattered,

This kind of thing has happened to me many, many times, both with famous people and strangers. For example, I’ve met Jesse Jackson twice. Both times I just happened to be standing in a crowd when he walked up and shook my hand. Other than that, we’ve never spoken and I’m quite sure he has no idea who I am.

Other random encounters happened when I was traveling, especially overseas. 

Often, one of these one-timers pops up in the news and remind me of when we encountered each other over decades ago.

An example currently in the Senate, Chuck Grassley of Iowa, was a 40ish chair of a House agricultural committee when he questioned a 30ish journalist rather harshly half a lifetime ago. 

He had an untamed Midwestern twang and probably assumed the reporter was some city slicker from San Francisco who cared only about the environmental issue he termed the "Circle of Poison," and didn’t care about the plight of farmers like those in Grassley’s district.

They sparred over pesticides but the Congressman seemed shocked when the journalist described his deep concern for the small farmers who were among the primary victims of the multinational agrochemical companies he'd exposed in his book.

That was many years ago now, probably forty. I doubt Grassley even remembers the encounter or knew that the city slicker he met that day was the son of a man who grew up on a very small farm in Canada.

***

A decade after I appeared before Grassley’s committee, the most significant legislative attempt to date to address the issues I testified about was introduced by Sen. Patrick Leahy and it was called “Circle of Poison Prevention Act." 

It would have “prohibited the export of pesticides that were not registered for domestic use; were not registered for food use and would not be exported for use on food; or had had the majority of registration canceled.”

The legislation was co-sponsored in the House by Leon Panetta, but it died in committee.

HEADLINES:

• Harris, Trump deadlocked in new New York Times poll (Politico)

• Harris, Trump see tight race in three swing states ahead of debate (The Hill)

• Ahead of the US presidential debate, how are Harris and Trump preparing? (Al Jazeera)

• Election 2024 Swing State Polls: Harris Leading Trump Narrowly In Michigan And Wisconsin—But Tied In Pennsylvania (Forbes)

• Sobering new polls for Harris (Politico)

• The real story of Jan. 6 is found in mountains of shocking evidence (AP)

• The Texas Billionaire Who Has Greenpeace USA on the Verge of Bankruptcy (WSJ)

• Manhunt underway for suspect in Kentucky mass shooting near highway (NBC)

• Mother of Georgia suspect is said to have called school before shooting, warning of ‘emergency’ (WP)

• 3 Israelis Are Fatally Shot at West Bank-Jordan Border Crossing (NYT)

• Russia's RT will continue to work in the West, editor says (Reuters)

• Census will now include questions on sexual orientation and gender identity (The Conversation)

• Is the era of the mega-deal over? (Economist)

• Study: Playing Dungeons & Dragons helps autistic players in social interactions (ArsTechnica)

• Temperatures surpass 100 for fourth day and fuel huge brush fire (SD U-T)

• Southern California fire explodes in size, forcing mountain town to evacuate (WP)

• Scientists Cultivate Robots Controlled By Fungus (ExtremeTech)

• The Robots Are Coming for Our Souls (Jacobin)

• Apple's upcoming iPhone will catapult the tech trendsetter into the age of AI (WRAL)

• Area Eccentric Reads Entire Book (The Onion)

 

Weekend Links

HEADLINES: 

• Record-breaking heat wave expected to extend stay in the West (NBC)

• Even at night, SoCal sees little cooldown from record-breaking heat wave (LAT)

• Is California’s fog disappearing? Here’s what scientists say (Cal Today)

• The jet stream may be starting to shift in response to climate change (New Scientist)

• The jobs report answered one key question — but left us guessing on another (Yahoo)

• Jobs Slowdown Frustrates Investors Who Wanted Certainty on the Fed (WSJ)

• Harris nearly triples Trump’s fundraising in August (Politico)

• Harris narrows Trump's lead in Texas poll (Axios)

• Dick Cheney endorses Kamala Harris ‘to put country over partisanship’ (WP)

• Vance Declines to Denounce Carlson After Interview With Holocaust Revisionist (NYT)

• Trump’s hush-money sentencing will have to wait (Reuters)

• Justice Merchan Had a Surprisingly Good Reason to Delay Trump’s Sentencing (Slate)

• Russia Secretly Worms Its Way Into America’s Conservative Media (NYT)

• Russia ramping up election-meddling efforts to help Trump beat Harris, intel officials say (USA Today)

• Zelenskiy doesn’t get his way on long-range weapons (Reuters)

• If a Threat Is Not a Crime, Can the Police Prevent a School Shooting? (NYT)

• Biden cease-fire push falters again after new demand by Hamas (WP)

• Israeli strikes kill more Gazans (Reuters)

• ‘If journalism is going up in smoke, I might as well get high off the fumes’: confessions of a chatbot helper (Guardian)

• The DOJ wants info on Google’s AI strategy to bust up its search monopoly (Verge)

• A.I. Isn’t Magic, but Can It Be ‘Agentic’? (NYT)

• Report: Mom Sending You Something (The Onion)