Good morning. It's July 18th. The worst of the heat broke last night here in New York and the humidity is beginning to subside, too. Most of the red and magenta have been pushed off the National Weather Service's heat risk map for the country. And this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca taking a look at the day and the news. NBC News is reporting that the disgraced former professional wrestler Hulk Hogan, who was once recorded delivering the worst racist slur in the service of an explicitly racist argument, will speak at the Republican National Convention tonight on the way to presidential nominee Donald Trump's acceptance speech. Trump will be directly introduced by Dana White, the president of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, who was himself caught on tape hitting his wife in public.

This is all part of what Axios described before the convention as the Republican effort to present the election as “weak versus strong.” Last night's show of strength was soft -faced former financier JD Vance, the protégé of debauched tech industry vampire Peter Thiel, delivering a speech that I guess I gotta watch but I haven't gotten around to yet. 

Here I guess is where to do the disclosure that Peter Thiel backed Hulk Hogan and a lawsuit that put my former employer into bankruptcy, part of a pretextual campaign of lawfare by Thiel to punish people who made fun of himself and his fellow Silicon Valley oligarchs. And that's your 21st century Republican party. 

This morning's New York Times finally gets at least some entertainment value out of its access coverage with the story of how JD Vance suckered the shallow and fading Donald Trump into giving him the vice presidential nomination. The story begins with Vance going to Mar -a -Lago to see Trump, who greeted him with a stack of printouts of the negative and accurate things Vance had said and written about Trump in 2016, when being against Trump had seemed like the advantageous position for an ambitious, upwardly mobile conservative to take. Vance, who was running for the Senate from Ohio at the time, this is 2021, apologized to Trump, the Times writes, “told Mr. Trump that he had bought into what he described as media lies and that he was sorry he got it wrong,” which I'm sure he was sorry about having counted on Trump losing and not seizing control of the Republican Party. Then comes the comedy. Mr. Trump closed the conversation, the Times writes, by asking Mr. Vance what he wanted. Mr. Trump told him that everyone else had already been down to Mar -a -Lago begging for his endorsement, a reference to Mr. Vance's potential opponents in the Ohio Senate primary. Mr. Vance, who along with a spokesman for Mr. Trump declined to comment for this article, told the former president he wasn't going to do that. Mr. Trump, surprised, asked Mr. Vance if he wanted the endorsement. Mr. Vance said that of course he wanted it, but that Mr. Trump should let him run his race and see how he did. And there you have it. The master dealmaker, the former most powerful man in the world, got hooked by basic pick -up artist strategy. Old JD negged him, acted like he didn't really want it. The Times writes, “Mr. Trump was impressed. He told allies he thought Mr. Vance was smart and handsome. Those beautiful blue eyes, he'd say repeatedly. Great on TV and a killer at the debates.” Those beautiful blue eyes. A little strategic rejection and a glimpse of those recessive European genes. And that was that. 

Elsewhere on page, after days and days of banging away at boring micro updates on the Trump shooter story, the 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 reporter team finally got something. Apparently the shooter was skulking around the scene, scoping out the warehouse he would use to shoot from. So flagrantly, that a cop took his picture and distributed it to other cops to warn them of a suspicious person to look out for, the Secret Service was also notified, and then they just lost track of him and went ahead with a rally anyway. The shooter also had explosive devices in his car, the paper reports, and a separate story describing in remarkably useful detail how there were cardboard tubes packed with pellets of fertilizer mixed with nitromethane, which the Times writes can be purchased online, inside ammunition cans, and set up to be triggered with a radio -controlled initiation system designed for commercial fireworks demonstrations.

The receivers, the Times writes, send current to an electric match, a wire with a pyrotechnic compound on one end that produces a small flame to ignite the firework. Specifically, according to the investigative report that the Times saw, the receivers appear to be identical to a model called AlphaFire made by RFRemotech, a company based in Guangzhou, China. According to RFRemotech’s website, a set containing 12 AlphaFire receivers and one transmitter can be ordered online for $192, while a set containing a second transmitter costs $216. The product listing for the AlphaFire says that it can reliably initiate fireworks from a distance of about 6 ,500 feet, just in case you wanted a very specific list of what steps you should not take when your goal is to avoid building a bomb. 

Back on page one, cord blood banking was a scam, The heat and power outages are causing record disruptions to Amtrak service. There's a four -column photo of the minaret of a mosque tipped sideways across a street in Gaza after being knocked over by Israeli bombardment. Sort of impressive that the mosque was still standing till now. And back inside the paper on page A16, Joe Biden has COVID. It's almost as if declaring that the pandemic was over and telling everyone it was time to get back to normal was not an effective disease control strategy. Oh well, at least it strengthened his political position.

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That is the news. Thank you for listening. Please subscribe to Indignity to keep us going. And if all goes well, we will talk again tomorrow.