• A quick video re. the Polio vaccine’s beneficial impact from Kristen Panthagani.  She encourages sharing!

• David Chandler advocates for the ideals of John Rawls in his NYT essay The Democrats Are in Trouble. This Man Can Save Them.

• Zeynep Tufekci writes in the NYT re. some of the reasons JFK Jr. is a less than ideal selection for HHS secretary: John F Kennedy Jr. Could Do Almost Limitless Harm

• In his NYT opinion piece Trump Says the Country Is ‘Dying.’ The Data Say Otherwise, Steven Pinker tries to narrow the optimism gap by presenting evidence that the U.S. is really in pretty good shape. Worth a read if only to make yourself feel a little bit better about things…

• Joy of Tech strikes again:  

• Keren Landman M.D. has an excellent story in Vox about what the arrival of private equity interests in the practice of Emergency Medicine has done – and it isn’t good. It’s worth a read –
The profit-obsessed monster destroying American emergency rooms

• In a signed letter, more than 100 Republican National Security Leaders Endorse Vice President Harris for President.  An excerpt:

“We believe that the President of the United States must be a principled, serious, and steady leader who can advance and defend American security and values, strengthen our alliances, and protect our democracy. We expect to disagree with Kamala Harris on many domestic and foreign policy issues, but we believe that she possesses the essential qualities to serve as President and Donald Trump does not. We therefore support her election to be President.

We firmly oppose the election of Donald Trump. As President, he promoted daily chaos in government, praised our enemies and undermined our allies, politicized the military and disparaged our veterans, prioritized his personal interest above American interests, and betrayed our values, democracy, and this country’s founding documents. In our view, by inciting the violent attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021 and defending those who committed it, he has violated his oath of office and brought  danger to our country.”

More than 230 Republicans have signed on to the Bush, McCain, and Romney Alumni for Harris Statement:

“We know now, thanks to exit polling and voter data, that it was moderate Republicans and conservative independents in key swing states that ultimately delivered the presidency to Joe Biden—honest, hardworking Americans in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, and beyond that put country far before party. We’re heartfully calling on these friends, colleagues, neighbors, and family members to take a brave stand once more, to vote for leaders that will strive for consensus, not chaos; that will work to unite, not divide; that will make our country and our children proud. Those leaders are Vice President Kamala Harris and Gov. Tim Walz.”

And Scientific American endorses Kamala Harris here.

• Dana Milbank of the Washington Post chronicles the follies of the House republicans here. Read it and weep for the U.S.

• Yes, it’s getting all too easy to generate completely realistic photo images using Google’s Pixel 9 and Magic Editor/Reimagine functionality.  This has the potential to become a dangerous tool, especially without proper watermarking.  See this article in the Verge. An excerpt:

“The industry’s proposed AI image watermarking standard is mired in the usual standards slog, and Google’s own much-vaunted AI watermarking system was nowhere in sight when The Verge tried out the Pixel 9’s Magic Editor. The photos that are modified with the Reimagine tool simply have a line of removable metadata added to them. (The inherent fragility of this kind of metadata was supposed to be addressed by Google’s invention of the theoretically unremovable SynthID watermark.) Google told us that the outputs of Pixel Studio — a pure prompt generator that is closer to DALL-E — will be tagged with a SynthID watermark; ironically, we found the capabilities of the Magic Editor’s Reimagine tool, which modifies existing photos, were much more alarming.”

• From Jamelle Bouie’s August 10 opinion piece in the NYT, JD Vance has right-wing friends in high places:

“When asked to explain his worldview, Vance has cited his former boss, Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist who has written passionately against democracy (“I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible”), and Curtis Yarvin, a software developer turned blogger and provocateur who believes the United States should transition to monarchy (“If Americans want to change their government, they’re going to have to get over their dictator phobia”). Yarvin has also written favorably of human bondage (slavery, he once wrote, “is a natural human relationship”) and wondered aloud if apartheid wasn’t better for Black South Africans…

Take Vance’s view that the United States is in a period of Romanesque decline. “We are in a late republican period,” Vance said on a podcast in 2021. “If we’re going to push back against it, we’re going to have to get pretty wild, and pretty far out there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.”…

Vance is close enough to Jack Posobiec — an alt-right lunatic who pushed the vile and absurd Pizzagate conspiracy theory and collaborated with online neo-Nazis to spread antisemitic hate — to blurb his latest book, a polemic devoted to the idea that liberals and leftists are Untermenschen who must be stopped lest they destroy civilization. “As they are opposed to humanity itself,” Posobiec and his co-author, Joshua Lisec, write, “they place themselves outside of the category completely, in an entirely new misery-driven subdivision, the unhuman.””