Red Flags for Republicans, Hard Challenges for President Biden

S43

Red Flags for Republicans, Hard Challenges for President Biden     After former President Donald Trump was arraigned for trying to overturn the 2020 election results, a strange question looms over the 2024 race: Will the former president and current GOP front-runner win the presidency, go to prison, or both?The challenges facing Democrats and President Joe Biden’s 2024 reelection campaign include low voter enthusiasm and poor approval ratings. The president also faces unsubstantiated allegations from some in the GOP that he is entangled in his son Hunter’s foreign-business misadventures, and some House Republicans are weighing whether to hold an impeachment inquiry this fall. Continued here

S1

Are You Failing to Prepare the Next Generation of C-Suite Leaders? - SPONSOR CONTENT FROM DAGGERWING     For many people leaders, that’s been the mantra for the past three years. “Let’s just get through this moment in time, focus on the short-term solutions for our immediate needs, and when things go back to normal, we’ll deal with all the issues we’ve been putting on the backburner.” Continued here

S2

Why William Friedkin's undersung masterpiece Sorcerer represents everything Hollywood has lost     Following news of the loss of filmmaker William Friedkin this week, aged 87, social media seemed to be in rare relative agreement about the greatness of an artist's body of work. The legendary director of The Exorcist (1973) and The French Connection (1971) had not made a feature film for over a decade (the last was the gloriously sleazy Killer Joe, in 2011), but was due to premiere a new one later this month at the Venice Film Festival.  No matter: his back catalogue is enough to keep film buffs and cultural commentators talking endlessly. The praise and conversation around this giant of US cinema has, of course, come for a sad reason. But it has also emphasised the fact that he had sparkling gems within his filmography that were never properly appreciated in their era – not least his once-maligned 1977 film Sorcerer, which was his own favourite of his works. Continued here

S3

Offices: how bad will the property crunch be?     There has been much talk for a while about offices heading for the buffers. The nightmare scenario is many thousands of office buildings being deemed virtually worthless as leases come up for renewal, leaving owners and even lenders run aground. Landlords, investors and financiers have all been looking over their shoulders nervously. This is compounded by the longstanding anxieties around retail due to the move from bricks and mortar to more online shopping. Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s right-hand man, has warned of a major pullback in lending to commercial property. He argues that American banks are full of bad loans associated with previously lucrative assets. Continued here

S4

Trump's free speech faces court-ordered limits, like any other defendant's -- 2 law professors explain why, and how Trump's lawyers need to watch themselves too     Co-Director, National Security and Civil Rights Program, Loyola University Chicago A 90-minute court hearing on Aug. 11, 2023, that would have been routine in almost any other case was, in fact, historic. It was the first time lawyers prosecuting and defending former President Donald Trump on charges he attempted to overturn the 2020 election appeared before the federal judge in the case. Continued here

S5

After Maui fires, human health risks linger in the air, water and even surviving buildings     People returning to what remains of the beachside town of Lahaina, Hawaii, and other Maui communities after one of the nation’s deadliest wildfire disasters face more dangers, beyond the 2,200 buildings destroyed or damaged and dozens of lives lost. The fires also left lingering health risks for humans and wildlife.When fires spread through communities, as we’ve seen more often in recent years, they burn structures that contain treated wood, plastics, paints and hazardous household wastes. They can burn vehicles and melt plastic water pipes. All of these items release toxic gases and particles. Continued here

S6

We can and should keep unemployment below 4%, says our survey of top economists     Visiting Fellow, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University Australia’s leading economists believe Australia can sustain an unemployment rate as low as 3.75% – much lower than the latest Reserve Bank estimate of 4.25% and the Treasury’s latest estimate of 4.5%. Continued here

S7

Ghana's national health insurance users often end up paying as much as those who don't belong. So why join?     Health financing is a challenge any country has to deal with to provide good healthcare services. It’s especially important for developing countries such as Ghana, where ability to pay is a hindrance to accessing all the healthcare services that people might need. The “cash and carry” system, where sick people have to pay out of pocket to obtain care, has obvious adverse implications. People who can’t pay won’t be attended to. This could lead to irreversible consequences – even death. Continued here

S8

The Problem of Nature Writing     The Bible is a foundational text in Western literature, ignored at an aspiring writer’s hazard, and when I was younger I had the ambition to read it cover to cover. After breezing through the early stories and slogging through the religious laws, which were at least of sociological interest, I chose to cut myself some slack with Kings and Chronicles, whose lists of patriarchs and their many sons seemed no more necessary to read than a phonebook. With judicious skimming, I made it to the end of Job. But then came the Psalms, and there my ambition foundered. Although a few of the Psalms are memorable (“The Lord is my shepherd”), in the main they’re incredibly repetitive. Again and again the refrain: Life is challenging but God is good. To enjoy the Psalms, to appreciate the nuances of devotion they register, you had to be a believer. You had to love God, which I didn’t. And so I set the book aside.Only later, when I came to love birds, did I see that my problem with the Psalms hadn’t simply been my lack of belief. A deeper problem was their genre. From the joy I experience, daily, in seeing the goldfinches in my birdbath, or in hearing an agitated wren behind my back fence, I can imagine the joy that a believer finds in God. Joy can be as strong as Everclear or as mild as Coors Light, but it’s never not joy: a blossoming in the heart, a yes to the world, a yes to being alive in it. And so I would expect to be a person on whom a psalm to birds, a written celebration of their glory, has the same kind of effect that a Biblical psalm has on a believer. Both the psalm-writer and I experience the same joy, after all, and other bird-lovers report being delighted by ornithological lyricism; by books like J. A. Baker’s “The Peregrine.” Many people I respect have urged “The Peregrine” on me. But every time I try to read it, I get mired in Baker’s survey of the landscape in which he studied peregrine falcons. Baker himself acknowledges the impediment—“Detailed descriptions of landscape are tedious”—while offering page after page of tediously detailed description. The book later becomes more readable, as Baker extolls the capabilities of peregrines and tries to understand what it’s like to be one. Even then, though, the main effect of his observations is to make me impatient to be outdoors myself, seeing falcons. Continued here

S9

China's Economic Miracle Is Turning Into a Long Slog     As prices rise in the United States, they are falling in China. In the twelve months leading up to July, China's Consumer Price Index fell by 0.3 per cent, the National Bureau of Statistics announced this week. (During the same period, consumer prices rose by 3.2 per cent in the United States.) On the face of things, lower prices are a boon for Chinese consumers. But this deflation has been accompanied by other signs of economic weakness, including a sharp slowdown in G.D.P. growth, sluggish retail sales, a fall in exports, and a renewed downturn in real-estate prices. These developments have raised fears that the world's second-largest economy, which for many years looked like a miracle, could be descending into an extended slump. "It is a perilous moment," Eswar Prasad, an economist and China expert at Cornell University, told me, "because of the possibility that you could have declining growth, faltering confidence, and price deflation all leading to a downward spiral and reinforcing each other."After growing strongly at the beginning of the year, triggered by Beijing's abandonment of strict COVID restrictions, China's G.D.P. expanded by just 0.8 per cent in the three months from April to June. That's well below the Chinese government's growth target of around five per cent for all of 2023, and it's far, far below the double-digit rates that the economy produced in its miracle days. And yet the Chinese government has resisted calls for a big fiscal stimulus of the sort that the Biden Administration introduced at the start of its term, leaving little hope for an immediate rebound. Continued here

S10

Classes You're Allowed to Take in Florida     Following Florida's recent ban on certain courses that were deemed "too woke," school curricula statewide are starting to look very different from those in the rest of the country. Luckily, these Florida classes provide a more than sufficient education for real Americans, and offer instruction in a broad variety of subjects.Now that A.P. psychology courses have been banned, Florida schools will provide an alternative, teaching students how to recognize various disorders such as Queerness, Being Trans, the Woke-Mind Virus, or the mental illness that affects millions: General Liberalism Disorder. Continued here

S11

You Need to Watch the Most Groundbreaking Zombie Show On Netflix ASAP     If you ever wondered how you'd fare in a zombie apocalypse, this reality show is about as close as you'll get.In professional wrestling, “kayfabe” is the shorthand term used to acknowledge the scripted nature of the sport and the constant acceptance of it as reality. When wrestlers act furious with each other even outside of the ring, they’re not really rivals, they’re just keeping kayfabe. Continued here

S12

Could This Detector Deep Underground Finally Find Dark Matter?     Over the past 30 years, scientists have developed an experimental program to try to detect the rare interactions between WIMPs and regular atoms.Physicists like me don’t fully understand what makes up about 83 percent of the matter of the universe — something we call “dark matter.” But with a tank full of xenon buried nearly a mile under South Dakota, we might one day be able to measure what dark matter really is. Continued here

S13

79 Years Ago, A Classic Star Trek Villain Was Created -- Before Star Trek Even Existed     The Gorn are back in the Strange New Worlds Season 2 finale, but their origins go all the way back to 1944.Everyone knows Captain Kirk first fought the Gorn in the classic Star Trek episode “Arena,” which aired on January 19, 1967. But when you do a deep dive into the origins of this episode, the bizarre truth is “Arena” and the Gorn predate the TV show. As Strange New Worlds continues to reinvent the Gorn and put the canon of “Arena” in a new light, it’s time to revisit a story that existed two decades before Star Trek even existed. Continued here

S14

'Baldur's Gate 3' Proves 2023 Is the Year of Horny Games     Baldur’s Gate 3 is the latest game to take the internet by storm, wracking up over 800,000 concurrent players on Steam just days after launch. While Baldur’s Gate 3’s quality speaks for itself, part of that attention has invariably been driven by the game’s romance options, namely how outright horny everyone seems to be. It’s refreshing to see a game so unabashedly afraid of talking about and using sex, especially in such a choice-driven format. Baldur’s Gate 3 is the latest in a line of games released this year, showing that video games might finally be coming to grips, at least a bit, with their sexlessness. Roughly 60 hours into Baldur’s Gate 3, I’ve quite literally stumbled into multiple romance scenes, with characters practically lining up to take me to bed. My generally “good” and friendly character has seemingly set the loins of the entire world aflame. I’ve been a bit taken aback by how easy these romance options have been, as generally, these kinds of RPGs make you painstakingly build up a relationship for dozens of hours. Continued here

S15

What Animal is the Best Pet to Boost Our Mental Health? The Answer is Not What You Think      Research shows that animals are good for our health, but one animal might beat out the rest. Pets give us so much. The pandemic year of 2020 showed us just how much our furry (and hairless, spiny, scaly, etc.) friends buoy us through. Perhaps the most obvious evidence is through the sheer number of pet adoptions seen during the height of the pandemic. Continued here

S16

You Need to Play This Love-Letter to '80s Action Movies on Xbox Game Pass ASAP     If you’ve ever wondered why your games moving left to right just feels right, the answer is Romans. Rome has given us a lot of things. Things like concrete, calendars, and even “adult novelties” can all be traced back to Western civilization’s biggest empire. The backbone of it all was Latin, the grandaddy of European languages and the reason most of the world reads left to right. This is why so many video games move left to right. It doesn’t account for why so many of those games involve shooting; that’s just good ol’ U.S. imperialism. And one game on Xbox Game Pass has mastered the thrill of moving right and shooting everything in your way, ‘Merica-style. Continued here

S17

Why Does the Inside of Your Home Feel So Hot, Even With the AC on? There's a Surprisingly Simple Answer      Trees, awnings, and exterior shades can reduce mean radiant temperatures by blocking direct sunlight.Picture two homes on the same street: one constructed in the 1950s and the other in the 1990s. There are no trees or other shade. The air conditioning units are identical, recently replaced, and operating perfectly. Identical thermostats are set at 82 degrees Fahrenheit (27.8 Celsius). Continued here

S18

The 50 cheapest, most clever home improvement products on Amazon     Home improvement can be an expensive undertaking — at least if you watch those home-makeover TV shows. But in my opinion, those shows are unrealistic. I can’t completely replace my shower stall on a whim, nor my kitchen counters, unless I want to spend thousands and live in a construction zone. But there are things I can do. They just have to be easier and able to stay within a realistic budget. The upgrades I’m currently willing to undertake start with an Amazon purchase and end with an adult beverage, and there are plenty of those. In fact, these are the 50 cheapest, most clever home improvement products on Amazon. Continued here