Bye, bye, Boris

Boris Johnson, who was forced resign as prime minister in July 2022, has now also resigned from his position as a member of parliament, ahead of the release of what was expected to be a critical report from a parliamentary committee that he violated his own government’s covid-19 protocols by attending parties and then misled parliament about it, something that come to be called, inevitably, ‘partygate’.

His resignation statement was long and angry and very Trump-like, loudly proclaiming his innocence and claiming that he was wronged by his enemies and the target of a witch hunt by those opposed to his vision for the UK and angry about his role in championing Brexit.

Since leaving the prime minister’s office, he has been at best a lackluster backbencher, voting just four times since then, choosing instead to spend his time giving lucrative speeches.

Along with his resignation, two close allies of his also resigned as MPs. One was Nadine Dorries, seemingly over some inside-baseball stuff about her being nominated for a peerage by Johnson and then having it withdrawn, and Nigel Adams. This means that there will be three by-elections in Conservative-held districts within a short time, giving the first major test of how the government of Rishi Sunak is viewed by the public. Currently they are behind Labour in the polls. General elections have to be held by January 28, 2025 at the latest.

If the Conservatives take a beating at the next general election, Johnson might try to make a comeback as party leader and prime minister, using the fact that he lead the party to a huge 80-seat majority at the last general election in 2019.

The sad case of Waltine Nauta

I think it is safe to say that before yesterday, very few people apart from his immediate circle had heard the name Waltine Nauta. Then he was named alongside serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) in the 38-count federal criminal indictment that special prosecutor Jack Smith unsealed yesterday and now faces a raft of serious charges for essentially being an accomplice in SSAT’s mishandling of classified documents.

The 40-year old Nauta is described as a personal aide or valet to SSAT, a sort of Jeeves to SSAT’s Bertie Wooster. This brief biography says that he is from Guam and served in the navy and worked as a cook at the White House before he became an aide to SSAT when he was president and then stayed with hm when SSAT returned to private life.
[Read more…]

What the Trump indictment contains

The indictment against serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) and his personal aide Waltine Nauta have been unsealed and can be read here. It is far more wide-ranging than I anticipated. The indictment describes how sloppy SSAT was with the documents, including for a time having boxes of them on the stage of one of the ballrooms at Mar-a-Lago, in a bathroom and shower, an office space, his bedroom, and a storage room, and showing documents to others who had no security clearance, and moving some of them to the Bedminster golf club in New Jersey when he went there.

The indictment consists of 37 felony counts but 31 of them are the same charge but related to different individual documents, leaving just seven distinct categories.

31 of those counts are for “Willful Retention of National Defense Information” and each relate to individual documents that are at issue. (p. 28-33)

#32 is for “Conspiracy to Obstruct Justice” and deals with a conspiracy by SSAT and Nauta to obstruct justice by keeping “classified he had taken with him from the White House and to hide and conceal them from a federal grand jury (p. 34)

#33 is for “Withholding a Document or Record” and describes how the two of them misled one of their attorneys by hiding documents from him so that he would make false statements to the grand jury. (p. 36)

#34 is for “Corruptly Concealing a Document or Record” by hiding boxes from the attorney so that he would not find them and give them to a grand jury. (p. 37)

#35 is for “Concealing a Document in a Federal Investigation”. (p. 38)

#36 is a “Scheme to Conceal”. (p. 39)

#37 is for “False Statement and Representations” with SSAT hiding information. from his own attorney causing his attorney to make false statements to the grand jury that all requests for documents had been complied with. (p. 40)

#38 is against Nauta for lying to the FBI about his knowledge about the boxes and what had been done with them.

It is clear from the indictment that this was not a case of SSAT haphazardly packing up boxes of stuff at the last minute when he was forced to leave the White House on January 20, 2021 and possibly accidentally taking classified documents among them. It is clear that he really wanted these documents and was willing to go to great lengths, even lying to the authorities and hiding them from his own lawyers, to hang on to some of them. The indictment did not speculate on the motives for doing so.

What a stupid, stupid, man.

The second Trump indictment drops

Serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) has now been indicted on criminal charges for the second time. The first time was a few months ago in Manhattan on state charges related to his paying hush money to porn stars. This time it is on federal charges in Florida relating to his withholding of classified documents after he left the presidency. He is expected to turn himself in in a Miami federal courthouse on Tuesday where the indictment will be unsealed and he will be formally charged. SSAT’s lawyer has said there are seven criminal counts including violations of the Espionage Act, obstruction of justice and conspiracy. He will of course plead not guilty but by all accounts the case against him this time is stronger than the earlier one.

The main danger for SSAT in this case is the charge that he willfully withheld classified documents even when asked for them, thus triggering prosecution under the Espionage Act, which is pretty serious. If he had readily handed them over when they were found (as Mike Pence and Joe Biden did), then he would likely not have been charged. There is evidence that he knew that he had classified documents in his possession and yet did not hand them over when asked to do so. For some reason that I still cannot fathom, SSAT wanted to keep these documents even after leaving office. SSAT’s motivations are mostly grifting and narcissism but it is not clear where those fit in in this case.
[Read more…]

A hateful voice is no more

Televangelist Pat Robertson has died at the age of 93. He was a malign influence on US politics, creating a toxic mix of religious bigotry and rightwing politics.

Robertson’s enterprises also included Regent University, an evangelical Christian school in Virginia Beach; the American Center for Law and Justice, which defends the first amendment rights of religious people; and Operation Blessing, an international humanitarian organization.

But for more than half a century, Robertson was a familiar presence in American living rooms, known for his 700 Club television show, and in later years, his televised pronouncements of God’s judgment on America for everything from homosexuality to the teaching of evolution.
…

Robertson started the Christian Coalition in Chesapeake in 1989, saying it would further his campaign’s ideals. The coalition became a major force in Republican politics in the 1990s, mobilizing conservative voters through grassroots activities.

The venom of his message was masked by his genial, avuncular manner and the occasional goofy pronouncements where he would blame all manner of human-caused and natural disasters on the LGBTQ+ community and other perceived enemies of his version of Christianity.
[Read more…]

The Republican race for the nomination takes shape

This is an unusual race. Normally, if an incumbent president runs for election, few will try to challenge them for the nomination and at least in the recent past, none have succeeded in doing so. Lyndon Johnson was a notable case in that he decided to not run again in 1968. This was due to the intense opposition to the Vietnam war but it is not clear what might have happened if he had sought the nomination. The fact that his own vice-president Hubert Humphrey, whom he endorsed, got the nomination suggests that he might have won.

If an incumbent wins the presidency but loses their re-election bid (Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, George H. W. Bush) they fade from the scene and do not try to come back four years later, leaving the field wide open for another member for their party to seek the nomination, and that usually leads to a large field of candidates.

This year is an anomaly at least on the Republican side. We have a one-term president in serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT), who is not only seeking to make a comeback after losing his re-election bid, he even claims that he did not lose. And we have a large segment of the party establishment and membership either actually endorsing that delusional claim or pretending to in order not to offend SSAT. And SSAT seems to have the support of a significant number of party faithful

Because of this fact, SSAT is almost like an incumbent and so I am surprised that so many Republicans have decided to challenge him. We have SSAT’s vice president Mike Pence, Florida governor Ron DeSantis, Former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, South Carolina senator Tim Scott, Former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, Former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson, current governor of North Dakota Doug Burgum (whom even someone like me who follows politics closely had never heard of), right wing activist Vivek Ramaswamy, and radio host Larry Elder. That makes 10 in all including SSAT. And there may be more to come.
[Read more…]

The problem with men

We live in a world dominated by men in pretty much every area of life. Hence anyone who argues that the state of men is in danger has a pretty tough row to hoe. And yet, that is the alarm that some people are sounding, that in our efforts to create gender parity, we are overlooking the fact that many men are currently really struggling to cope in contemporary US society and that the trends for them are not good.

To have a serious discussion about this, we have to first get beyond the more absurd exaggerations of people like former Fox News host Tucker Carlson.

[W]ho could forget the “Tucker Carlson Originals” special “The End of Men,” which introduced the world to “bromeopathy,” the patriotic practice of bathing one’s testicles in red light? That special also featured hand-wringing about “soy boys,” paeans to raw-egg slonkers, and homoerotic montages, apparently filmed on Alex Jones’s bocce court, that looked like Abercrombie & Fitch ads directed by Leni Riefenstahl. Again, it’s easy to brush all this off as a campy, desperate ploy for attention, which it was. But “The End of Men” also made an argument: American men are being systematically emasculated by some sort of ill-defined global cabal, for the purpose of slowing down birth rates in “the West”; only “well-ordered, disciplined groups of men,” presumably after being armed and restored to testicular health, can “reëstablish order” and restore Western civilization. This is the sort of thing that seems funny until it doesn’t.

The more serious aspects of this issue are discussed by Idrees Kahloon in the January 20, 2023 issue of The New Yorker.
[Read more…]

The Girl From Ipanema

Astrud Gilberto, who sang The Girl From Ipanema, has died at the age of 84.

Her version of the song was released in 1964 and became a huge hit and by some accounts it is the song that has been recorded the most often.

It has a gentle bossa nova beat and its great appeal may lie in the fact that it plaintively expresses the forlorn state of someone who tries, perhaps too subtly, to convey their attraction to a person who does not seem to even know that they exist.

That is something that many non-assertive young people have experienced at some time in their lives.

Negatives of electric vehicles

Rowan Atkinson is well known as an actor and comedian. But his undergraduate education was in electrical and electronic engineering, with a subsequent master’s degree in control systems. He has written a thoughtful opinion piece on how his early infatuation with electric vehicles as a way to combat climate change has cooled as he learned more about the hidden environmental costs of this technology.

I bought my first electric hybrid 18 years ago and my first pure electric car nine years ago and (notwithstanding our poor electric charging infrastructure) have enjoyed my time with both very much. Electric vehicles may be a bit soulless, but they’re wonderful mechanisms: fast, quiet and, until recently, very cheap to run. But increasingly, I feel a little duped. When you start to drill into the facts, electric motoring doesn’t seem to be quite the environmental panacea it is claimed to be.

As you may know, the government has proposed a ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars from 2030. The problem with the initiative is that it seems to be based on conclusions drawn from only one part of a car’s operating life: what comes out of the exhaust pipe. Electric cars, of course, have zero exhaust emissions, which is a welcome development, particularly in respect of the air quality in city centres. But if you zoom out a bit and look at a bigger picture that includes the car’s manufacture, the situation is very different. In advance of the Cop26 climate conference in Glasgow in 2021, Volvo released figures claiming that greenhouse gas emissions during production of an electric car are 70% higher than when manufacturing a petrol one. How so? The problem lies with the lithium-ion batteries fitted currently to nearly all electric vehicles: they’re absurdly heavy, many rare earth metals and huge amounts of energy are required to make them, and they only last about 10 years. It seems a perverse choice of hardware with which to lead the automobile’s fight against the climate crisis.

[Read more…]

Annoying film titles

They say that you should never judge a book by its cover but I admit there are some film titles that are so annoying to me that I resist watching them. The ones that are most annoying are the ones with deliberately misspelled words that strike me as too cute by half. Three examples that come to mind are Inglourious Basterds, The Pursuit of Happyness, and Biutiful.

This article looks at those and other titles and explains which have some justification in the plot and which are just directorial vanities.