Trump’s war on the postal service

It has been clear for some time that Donald Trump is gunning to destroy the US Postal Service. As with so many of his obsessions, it is hard to find a rational basis for them. Among other things he seems to think, against all the evidence, that the USPS gives preferential treatment to Amazon and he is angry because Amazon is owned by Jeff Bezos who also owns the Washington Post that Trump regularly castigates as part of the news network arrayed against him.
[Read more…]

Stephen Colbert has a funny, incisive analysis of yesterday’s developments

He made fun of the Biden-Harris appearance in an empty gymnasium where they kept socially distanced. US presidential campaigns, especially party conventions have, in my opinion, far too much pomp and pageantry, with large crowds cheering on cue and balloons and confetti and the like. I find those things utterly boring and never watch such events and I must say that I much prefer the current scaled-down, low-key format. I hope that even after the pandemic ends, we keep things the way they are now.

If we get rid of the glitz, then we will get to see more of the substance.

Trump is clearly increasingly desperate

Seth Meyers wonderfully deconstructs Trump false statements about what his latest Executive Orders will do. The correct answer is ‘very little’. They are either meaningless or unconstitutional. Some measures he has proposed, like the deferment in the payroll taxes and the deferment of student loan repayments only last until December, i.e., until after the election. Trump is essentially using them as bribes, suggesting that if people want them to continue, they will have to re-elect him. What next, giving everyone a loan that will only need to be repaid after the election? Pathetic.

Meyers also discusses Trump’s delusional hope that his face might be added to Mount Rushmore.

The Uighurs

The plight of the Uighur minority in China is something that I was peripherally aware of and kept meaning to look into more closely to find out exactly what was happening but never got around to it. Fortunately John Oliver had a program that dealt precisely with this issue.

Has Sean Hannity not seen Monty Python’s Life of Brian?

It appears that Fox News personality and Trump whisperer Sean Hannity, no doubt in an attempt to appear erudite and impress his audience, bungled the Latin motto he put on the cover of his new book.

At first, the cover featured the Latin tagline “vivamus vel libero perit Americae” – a phrase that Hannity told viewers on Fox means “live free or America dies”. But as Indiana University Bloomington classics student Spencer Alexander McDaniel laid out on his blog in May, the Latin phrase makes little sense.

“It is clear that whoever came up with this motto does not even know the basic noun cases in Latin or how they work,” wrote McDaniel. “The words in Hannity’s motto are real Latin words, but, the way they are strung together, they don’t make even a lick of sense.”

McDaniel, who was not the only classicist to question Hannity’s “perplexing” Latin, translated Hannity’s Latin text as “Let’s live or he … passes away from America for the detriment of a free man”. He then inferred that the incorrect Latin had been arrived at by putting “live free or America dies” into Google Translate.

Here’s the relevant scene from Life of Brian.

The publisher should also make Hannity write out the correct Latin phrase 100 times so that he does not make the same mistake again.