Mano Singham
Just another Freethought Blogs site
Trump is known for his obsessions, wildly irrational beliefs that he holds on to despite any evidence to the contrary. One is his hatred of windmills. While that is well known, less known is his obsession with the technology used to rapidly accelerate fighter jets from the decks of aircraft carriers. Older ships have largely a mechanical system of catapults but more modern ships have shifted to an electromagnetic system. Trump, for some reason, hates the newer systems.
What is troubling is that he seems determined to impose his will on a new aircraft carrier that is being built and demanding that they change the system to his preferred one.
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There is a familiar pattern to stories of people with great wealth. It starts with the first generation becoming wealthy, usually by luck (they find oil on their property, say) or by developing some idea that they then ruthlessly exploit people and the earth’s resources to create their wealth. And then you have the subsequent generations that inherits that wealth. Some of them continue their ancestral business but others drift into hedonistic lifestyles where they do nothing productive at all but indulge their fantasies.
Jon Ronson writes about how, via his son, he stumbled onto the story of Chris Mark, whose great-grandfather Clayton had founded the steel company Clayton Mark & Company and made a fortune. Mark does not seem to have done anything on his own with his life but instead has nurtured the dream of using his inherited wealth to becoming a new Hugh Hefner, the founder of Playboy magazine, notorious for living in a mansion that was populated by scantily clad young women known as ‘bunnies’. (As far as we know, those women were not underage, which distinguishes Hefner from Jeffrey Epstein.)
Mark created his own mansion in the form of a massive medieval castle that he built in 2010 in rural Connecticut, complete with spires, towers, turrets, gargoyles, and a drawbridge. His dream seemed to be to entice attractive young women to come there and dress up and act like ‘princesses’, tiaras and all, who would curtsey before him and say things like “Yes, my lord”, and from among whom he would pick one to be his ‘queen’, while the others would have sex with one another. The lure for these women was that he told them he was producing a reality show for Netflix called 101 Princesses. Sadly, in these days of increasingly lurid and exploitative TV, this seemed plausible.
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In a special election to replace Eric Swalwell in the California congressional seat he was forced to resign due to allegations of sexual misconduct, a progressive easily defeated a party establishment and Israel lobby backed candidate.
[Aisha] Wahab defeated Melissa Hernandez, a fellow Democrat who is on the Bay Area Rapid Transit board of directors, in the special election after the two got the most votes in the June 16 primary. The race moved to a one-on-one contest after no one secured a majority.
Wahab took 43% to Hernandez’s 17% in the initial primary, but Tuesday’s election was much closer. With 95% of the expected vote in, Wahab led 53% to 47%.
A super PAC aligned with the pro-Israel American Israel Public Affairs Committee spent heavily in the race’s final weeks, dropping about $2.5 million against Wahab.
Wahab has said Israel’s conduct in its war against Hamas in Gaza is genocide, and her campaign website includes a statement panning “AIPAC-linked dark-money PACs” trying to “tear Aisha Wahab down.” Hernandez, meanwhile, was the only candidate who did not answer “yes” when she was asked at an April forum whether Israel was committing genocide.
AIPAC and the other members of the Israel lobby are by no means eliminated as a factor but their once-mighty clout in politics has definitely been diminished.
Progressive Angie Nixon scored an upset win over the Democratic Party establishment candidate Alexander Vindman despite being vastly outspent by him by a ratio of 16-1..
In an upset for the Democratic establishment, progressive Angie Nixon won the party’s US Senate primary in Florida, beating former army intelligence officer Alexander Vindman.
Nixon, a state representative and member of the Democratic Socialists of America, had significantly less funding going into the primary – with $975,000 to Vindman’s $16.3m at the end of July, according to Florida Politics.
…Nixon, who was born in Jacksonville, has aggressively opposed DeSantis’s policies, including with a sit-in at the governor’s office this spring to protest Republican redistricting, the Miami Herald reported. That demonstration resulted in her facing misdemeanor charges of trespassing and resisting, which she is fighting in court.
Vindman’s campaign had been focused on Moody, not his primary opponent, and he did not agree to debate Nixon, despite her public calls for him to take the stage with her.
“Floridians don’t want the establishment in Washington DC deciding who their Democratic nominee and US senator is going to be,” Nixon told the Tampa Bay Times in an earlier interview. “I’m someone who’s willing to debate. He’s not. I’m someone who doesn’t have to be briefed on the issues Floridians are facing because I’ve been fighting the attacks alongside them for nearly two decades.”
After the humiliating reversal over the charges to four people accused of vandalizing the Lincoln Reflecting Pool, US attorney and former Fox News personality Jeanine Pirro was lambasted by her cult leader Trump for backing down and saying that the pool fiasco was caused by shoddy and rushed work.
Now, no doubt in an effort to suck up to him, she has brought vandalism charges against a 41-year old homeless woman Melissa Farris for defacing a World War II memorial. As usual, her prosecution team made absurdly exaggerated statements and tried to make out that this was a grave assault on America itself.
“This was a brazen attack on one of the Nation’s most sacred monuments—an enduring symbol of freedom and a solemn tribute to the sacrifice of so many,” Assistant U.S. Attorneys Charles Klug and Samuel Deau wrote in a brief that also carries Pirro’s name in the signature block.
“Rather than honoring the courage and selflessness of the World War II Veterans, Defendant chose to assault that symbol of sacrifice for her own gain and to make a public spectacle,” prosecutors added. “Defendant’s actions are not just criminal, they violate the American values that the Memorial represents.”
…While most vandalism cases get little attention from U.S. attorneys, Pirro posted twice on social media about Farris’ arrest. The prosecutor also said she was personally aggrieved by Farris’ actions.
Trump’s desperation over his failed war with Iran is getting more obvious, especially his threat to bomb Oman, a long-time ally, using his usual vulgar language.
“If Oman gets in the way, we’ll bomb the shit out of them,” Trump told Fox News on Monday, the second time he has directed such a threat at Muscat, a longtime US strategic partner that has traditionally served as a key backchannel between Washington and Tehran.
…Trump also dismissed concerns that Washington’s own arsenal was being depleted by nearly six months of fighting, telling Fox News that what the US had expended against Iran so far is “peanuts”.
He suggested many of the US’s more advanced munitions, including air defense systems, had already been “given away” to Ukraine under his predecessor, Joe Biden – a claim that echoes warnings from defense analysts earlier in the war that US and allied stockpiles were being drawn down faster than they could be replenished.
…In a casual aside at a cabinet meeting in May, the president also threatened to “blow up” Oman if it failed to “behave”.
Greg Sargent argues that simply because the justice department has dropped all the charges against the four people who had been accused of deliberately vandalizing the Lincoln Reflecting Pool does not mean that the problems for Jeanine Pirro, the US attorney for Washington DC, who gleefully announced the indictments before later dropping them, will go away.
When the charges were dropped, they were done ‘without prejudice’ meaning that they could be filed again. Norm Eisen, the lawyer for David Hearn who had been charged with a felony that could have had him imprisoned for ten years, is first seeking to have the charges dropped ‘with prejudice’ to prevent Pirro from carrying out what Trump clearly wants, which is to charge them again. But in addition, he is seeking to have the transcripts of the grand jury proceedings that led to the indictments released, because they will show if the jurors were grossly misled by Pirro, which could result in sanctions against her.
Eisen and Hearn’s other lawyers are not letting this drop. For some time now, they’ve been seeking access to full transcripts of the grand jury proceedings—including instructions that prosecutors gave jurors on charging guidelines—to determine whether prosecutors misled them to secure Hearn’s indictment.
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I did not know anything about the person known as Perez Hilton but his name occupied the periphery of my consciousness because of its occasional appearance on the splash pages of the news sites I frequent. His real name was Mario Armando Lavandeira Jr. but he adopted his pseudonym deliberately because of its similarity to the better known Paris Hilton, so that it would be catchy.
He suddenly vaulted into the mainstream news when a few days ago he live-streamed harming himself in what looked like a suicide attempt, that resulted in a rescue team being called in and him being taken to hospital.
So what was his claim to fame before this? Brady Brickner-Wood gives some background into what seems like an odious person who achieved celebrity status by viciously gossiping about other celebrities.
Before “troll” became commonplace in the internet lexicon, Hilton embodied the definition: a prurient, prolific shitposter who drew dicks and semen on paparazzi photos, called Adam Sandler’s two-year-old daughter “ugly,” and, after Heath Ledger’s accidental overdose, sold T-shirts with the slogan “Why couldn’t it be Britney?” On his website, which at its peak, around 2007, received as many as eight million hits a day, he outed celebrities, picked apart stars’ appearances, and mocked their addictions. He cloaked his cruelty in camp, suffusing his blog posts with exclamation points and cheap puns.
As expected, Reform party leader and generally odious person Nigel Farage has won the Clacton byelection that he triggered by resigning his seat. There were 34 candidates but none from any of the major parties, who accused Farage of pulling a stunt to try and avoid a parliamentary inquiry into money he received from a cryptocurrency billionaire.
But Farage cannot be pleased with the result, because of the low turnout and that his main opponent was Count Binface, a joke candidate who won nearly 27% of the vote, the first time that he has not lost his deposit of £500, which requires a candidate to get 5% of the vote.
After a campaign in which a record-breaking 34 candidates vied for the coastal seat, Farage held on to Clacton, with 22,239 votes (62.8%) of the vote.
His nearest competitor, Count Binface, a parody candidate dressed as an intergalactic rubbish bin, won 9,455 votes (26.7%). The turnout was 44%.
Farage did not attend the traditional ceremony where the results are announced, because he was afraid that he would be embarrassed by Binface.