Sri Lankan situation gets even more tense

A bizarre standoff is in place in Sri Lanka where the president Gotabaya Rajapaksa, who promised to resign on July 13th and fled the country, did not in fact resign but merely appointed the prime minister Ranil Wickremesinghe as acting president during his absence from the country, though it is unlikely that he will ever return, given how much anger there is against him and his family.

Wickremesinghe is also hated and his not resigning has angered them even more. The protestors refuse to recognize him in any capacity and his appointment as acting president created more anger and the protestors invaded and occupied his office building as well, once more overwhelming by sheer numbers the security forces who tried to hold them back. So there was a Grand Slam of occupations of four premises, the official residences and offices of both the prime minister and president.

Wickremesinghe, tone deaf as usual, has imposed a state of emergency and a curfew and ordered the security forces to “do whatever is necessary to restore order” and and “end this fascist threat to democracy” and return the occupied premises to “the proper custody”. Being called fascists by someone whom they have the deepest contempt for has infuriated the protestors against him even more. By playing games with their promised resignations, Rajapaksa and Wickremesinghe are playing with fire. The security forces have so far used just tear gas and water cannons in their failed efforts to control the situation. The situation is tense and could explode if they start using live ammunition and people get killed.
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A last ditch effort to cling to power and escape consequences

When mass protests forced the Sri Lankan president Gotabaya Rajapaksa to fire his brother as prime minister and two other brothers and a nephew as cabinet ministers, he appointed Ranil Wickremesinghe as prime minister. I wrote back then about possible reasons as to why he chose someone whose party had been roundly defeated in the 2019 elections and had only one seat in parliament. I suggested that it may be because Wickremesinghe is a Rajapaksa stooge who had shielded the family from consequences when he was prime minister earlier. Although he is a person of little or no talent or political skill who has got where he was because of nepotism, he was also desperate to become president, having failed in a previous election. He may have been calculating that if Rajapaksa resigned a president, then as prime minister, he was next in line to be president. After the mass protests last Saturday that demanded both their resignations, Rajapaksa and Wickremesinghe said they would resign but did not actually do so. Rajapaksa said he would do so today (the 13th) while Wickremesinghe said he would do so after a new government was formed. Protestors saw in this scenario an attempt by this disgraced duo to somehow stay in power.

It looks like that fear was well founded.

In scenes bordering on farce, yesterday Rajapaksa and his wife fled the country in a military plane to nearby Maldives, sparking protests among Maldivians against the Maldivian government for allowing him into the country. He had apparently earlier been foiled in other attempts to leave.
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A seriously unserious man

The fall of Boris Johnson provides a good example of how fragile power is when it is based on celebrity status. His undoing, from winning a massive victory to getting kicked out of office in less than three years, was almost entirely of his own making.

Johnson has always been a decidedly unserious person. I do not mean that he is stupid. It is true that the wheels of his success were greased by him coming from a wealthy family that enabled him to attend prestigious schools and universities and have well-connected friends, the typical road to success of Conservative party leaders. But there is also evidence that he was also academically somewhat gifted, winning scholarships and honors.

He was also highly ambitious and wanted to be the center of attention and popular and he seems to have decided early on in life that the way to be so was to also act like a clown, to the extent of looking disheveled and deliberately messing up his hair before he went out in public. This lovable scamp act brought with it two benefits. It drew attention to himself. It also enabled him to avoid taking responsibility for his mistakes and deflect criticism by claiming ignorance and carelessness rather than deliberate dishonesty. And there was plenty of dishonesty to be hidden. Apart from his chronic lying, he was also utterly self-serving and treacherous in his dealings with others, perfectly willing to stab his erstwhile party colleagues in the back in his rise to power. It is also clear that he had almost no political principles, except for the standard issue conservative one of cutting taxes and regulations on businesses and undermining the social safety net.
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The evolutionary puzzle of children and grandparents

As a grandfather, I am well aware that the conventional wisdom is that I have outlived my usefulness as far as evolutionary theory goes. Once you have had offspring and raised them to an age where there are independent and capable to having offspring of their own, you have pretty much exhausted your biological usefulness. This leads to one speculation as to why our bodies, after a certain age, tend to fall apart. It is because there is no selection pressure to develop mechanisms keep it going.

But the fact remains that people do live longer than is strictly necessary for evolution to function and this article argues that older people can still serve an evolutionary purpose.
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Meanwhile, cricket goes on in Sri Lanka

Despite the massive shortages of most essential items and the political unrest that have resulted in the overthrow of the current political leadership and the president and prime minister driven from office and in hiding, Sri Lanka continues to have cricket matches, with the current tour of the country by the visiting Australian team continuing before large and enthusiastic crowds.

After the Australians won the 20-over series 2-1, Sri Lanka won the 50-over series 3-2. They then played two five-day Test matches, the oldest and most prestigious form of the game. In the first one Australia beat Sri Lanka by an innings while in the second that ended yesterday, the tables were turned and Sri Lanka beat the Australians by an innings. So the two teams ended the tour even, which is good for Sri Lanka since Australia is always a tough team to beat.

For those who are unfamiliar with the intricacies of cricket (that I have heard described as ‘like Calvinball but with more rules’), find it unfathomable, and have no desire to learn more, all you have to know is that when a team wins a five-day Test match ‘by an innings’, it means that it well and truly trounced its opponents. For those more curious about the game, I provided a basic tutorial some years ago.

The people in the subcontinent of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka are particularly cricket mad and as evidence one needs to look no further than how the current tour by Australia went off smoothly as if nothing was going on in the country.

The aftermath of the dramatic events in Sri Lanka

I linked to videos of the protestors in Sri Lanka occupying the official residence of the president and, like many people in Sri Lanka, was stunned at the opulence of the place. The residence is in the heart of the business district in Colombo and I must have passed by it hundreds of times but had never given much thought to what it was like inside. It is a large building and was protected by a high fence with a security guard at the gate. Since only one side of it is visible from the street, I had no idea how extensive the property was.

What the videos reveal is that it is very luxurious with large, well appointed rooms, nice gardens and a swimming pool. Even though the climate is tropical, private swimming pools are a luxury and rare in Sri Lanka and I do not know of anyone who has one. The daughter of a friend of mine was one of the people who entered with the protestors and she had told her mother how they too were stunned by what they saw.
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Donald Trump is not a normal person and not in a good way

Alex Holder is a British documentary producer who managed to get a lot of time to interview Donald Trump and his three oldest children from September 2020 past January 2021. Holder was interviewed by the congressional committee that is investigating the events of January 6th.

When the House select committee investigating the January 6 Capitol attack deposed British film-maker Alex Holder, it heard from a first-hand fact witness who inadvertently observed some of the darkest and most politically fraught days of Donald Trump’s time in office.
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Holder was there for it all: three sit-down interviews with Trump, including one at the White House, numerous other interviews with Trump’s adult children, private conversations among top aides and advisers before the election, and around the Capitol itself as it got stormed.
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Holder testified for about four hours behind closed doors last week about his roughly 100 hours of footage, used for an upcoming documentary titled Unprecedented, and turned over to House investigators the parts demanded in a subpoena compelling his cooperation.

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Sri Lankan president and PM quit as crisis reaches a climax

Gotabaya Rajapaksa, the beleaguered president of Sri Lanka, who had insisted that he would stay on as president for his full term despite widespread protests and calls for him to quit, has finally decided to resign on July 13th.

This news came following a massive protest organized for today (Saturday) in which people were urged to come to Colombo and show their displeasure with the government. The government tried to block the protest by declaring a curfew and stopping transport to the city but that seems to have failed as crowds gathered at Galle Face Green, a beachfront esplanade in the heart of the city, right next to the office of the president and just a block away from his official residence.

The protestors stormed the president’s office, with the overwhelmed security forces looking on helplessly.


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