The implications of Mamdani’s win

The thin veneer that enables the political establishment to pretend that the Democratic and Republican parties represent any fundamental differences gets stripped away whenever someone with socialist leanings breaks through the space formed by the neoliberal Democratic party establishment and the right-wing extremist Republican party, which is where the political establishment lives. Thus the democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani’s win on a populist platform in the New York City Democratic mayoral primary has sent shock waves through the political establishment.

Now that right wing alliance is gearing up to defeat Mamdani, using red-baiting, xenophobia, and Islamophobia, with the New York Times joining in the effort. It is at times like these that that newspaper sheds its superficially liberal or neutral mask and reveals itself for the establishment rag that it is. As evidence of this, Margaret Sullivan writes that the paper is trying to blow up a trivial story into something big.
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China opens up as the US shuts down

As the US increasingly restricts the people who can come to the US and hassles people at the border who come here and thus discourages visitors, China has gone in the opposite direction. It has added more than 70 countries to its list of those whose citizens can get visa-free entry for 30 days, thus promoting tourism. Many countries are excluded from this relaxation, including the US, UK, Canada, Russia..

In December 2023, China announced visa-free entry for citizens of France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and Malaysia. Almost all of Europe has been added since then. Travelers from five Latin American countries and Uzbekistan became eligible last month, followed by four in the Middle East. The total will grow to 75 on July 16 with the addition of Azerbaijan.

About two-thirds of the countries have been granted visa-free entry on a one-year trial basis.
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Those from 10 countries not in the visa-free scheme have another option: entering China for up to 10 days if they depart for a different country than the one they came from. The policy is limited to 60 ports of entry, according to the country’s National Immigration Administration.

The transit policy applies to 55 countries, but most are also on the 30-day visa-free entry list. It does offer a more restrictive option for citizens of the 10 countries that aren’t: the Czech Republic, Lithuania, Sweden, Russia, the United Kingdom, Ukraine, Indonesia, Canada, the U.S. and Mexico.

Aside from the U.K., Sweden is the only other high-income European country that didn’t make the 30-day list. Ties with China have frayed since the ruling Chinese Communist Party sentenced a Swedish book seller, Gui Minhai, to prison for 10 years in 2020. Gui disappeared in 2015 from his seaside home in Thailand but turned up months later in police custody in mainland China.

China is clearly seeking to take advantage of the US’s decreasing attractiveness as a tourist destination.

Balancing the universality of humanism with one’s specific ethnic heritage

I found this interesting short clip of the versatile physician, writer, director, documentarian, comedian, and public intellectual Jonathan Miller, who died in 2019 at the age of 85, talking with Dick Cavett about how he views his own Jewish ethnicity. I found completely relatable his views about subordinating the ethnic and religious heritage into which he was born to a more universal sense of humanity.

The exchange is well worth watching for anyone trying to navigate rejecting ethnic and religious sectarianism and embracing solidarity with the human race as a whole, without giving the impression that they are disowning or are even ashamed of being born into a specific heritage. As he said, the only time he feels it necessary to tell anyone that he is Jewish is when they turn out to be an antisemite.
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Great moments in driving

New cars have many features that seek to prevent you from causing an accident due to a momentary lapse in concentration. Many of the most recent ones I do not have since my car is 12 years old and even then was not a top-of-the-line model. But it does have one feature that I really like and that is the rear view camera, which is of great help especially when parallel parking into tight spaces. There are other features that I have seen on other cars, such as giving an alert when you seem to be drifting into the next lane and another that alerts you when you are getting too close to a stationary obstacle or the moving car ahead and even triggers the brakes to slow you down.

But what these things cannot take into account is other idiot drivers on the road. Someone was telling me the other days that she was stuck on the highway where traffic was crawling along at about two miles per hour when the man behind her started honking. Puzzled, she looked in the mirror and he was angrily gesturing to her to close the small gap between her and the car in front. But the sufficiency of the size of the gap between her car and the one in front for the speed at which they were traveling had been determined by her car’s computer and sensors and it had determined that her car was close enough. To get closer would have made the alarm system keep beeping.
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Steve Coogan blasts the UK Labour Party

Back in 1961, the ground-breaking British sketch comedy revue Beyond the Fringe featuring Alan Bennett, Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller, and Dudley Moore took British comedy by storm, breaking old patterns and inspiring a new generation of comedians including the Monty Python troupe.

In the opening sketch, they had a commentary on America.

At the 2:57 mark, Jonathan Miller explains to Dudley Moore, who is on the eve of a trip to the US, the two-party system here, saying “They’ve got the Republican party, you see, which is the equivalent of our Conservative party and then there’s the Democratic party which is the equivalent of our Conservative party.”

That joke worked in 1961 because at that time there were significant differences between the Conservative and Labour parties in the UK, which were not reflected in the Republican and Democratic parties here.. It would not work as well now because, thanks to the neoliberalism of Tony Blair and now Keir Starmer, the Labour party is becoming indistinguishable from the Conservatives.

Actor Steve Coogan has blasted Starmer and the Labour party of betraying its supporters and warned that when angry voters see that neither party is looking after their interests, they will move towards Nigel Farage’s Reform party. His analysis rings true to what we see in the US as well.
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Nautical units

I had heard of the term ‘nautical mile’ and also of the term ‘knots’ but had no idea where they came from, only that they were terms used by aircraft pilots and seafarers. I knew that a nautical mile was a little longer than a standard mile (one nautical mile is now defined as exactly 1,852 meters or 1.151 miles) while a knot is just one nautical mile per hour. Why we still used two units of distance and speed that were so close to each other was unknown to me. I assumed that nautical miles and knots were retained for sentimental reasons.

But I have learned that those units have an interesting meaning and practical use in that one nautical mile originally was defined as one minute of latitude. If one takes the circumference of the Earth and divide it by 360 degrees (the number of degrees in a full circle) and then again by 60 (the number of minutes in a degree), the number that you get is one nautical mile. So by knowing the difference of two latitudes in degrees, one could immediately calculate the distance between them along a great circle (i.e., following a line of longitude) in nautical miles by multiplying it by 60.
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The terrible budget bill that just passed

Congress has passed Trump’s budget bill and, to no one’s surprise, it is an appalling piece of legislation that is reverse Robin Hood, taking from the poor and giving to the one-percenters, plus feeding his xenophobic passion to expel people whom he thinks do not belong here.

Here are the lowlights.

The wealthiest households would see a $12,000 increase from the legislation, and the bill would cost the poorest people $1,600 a year, mainly due to reductions in Medicaid and food aid, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office analysis of the House’s version.
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The bill would provide some $350 billion for Trump’s border and national security agenda, including for the U.S.-Mexico border wall and for 100,000 migrant detention facility beds, as he aims to fulfill his promise of the largest mass deportation operation in U.S. history.

Money would go for hiring 10,000 new Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, with $10,000 signing bonuses and a surge of Border Patrol officers, as well. The goal is to deport some 1 million people per year.
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The threat posed by masked law enforcement

There have been a vast number of news stories and videos of masked plain clothes ICE agents going around in unmarked cars and grabbing people, striking terror with this death squad-like behavior. Astonishingly, the attorney general Pam Bondi claims that she is unaware of this practice.

The attorney general, Pam Bondi, professed ignorance of reports of immigration officials hiding their faces with masks during roundups of undocumented people, despite widespread video evidence and reports that they are instilling pervasive fear and panic.

Challenged at a Wednesday Capitol Hill subcommittee hearing by Gary Peters, a Democratic senator for Michigan, Bondi, who as the country’s top law officer has a prominent role in the Trump administration’s hardline immigration policy, implied she was unaware of plain-clothed agents concealing their faces while carrying out arrests but suggested it was for self-protection.

“I do know they are being doxxed … they’re being threatened,” she told Peters. “Their families are being threatened.”

Bondi’s protestations appeared to strain credibility given the attention the masked raids carried out by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents have attracted on social media and elsewhere.

Yes, she has the nerve to claim that the federal agents who are terrorizing ordinary people are the real victims and scared. Law enforcement officer have long had their names and badges visible so why are ICE agents so scared? It is because they know that they are doing wrong. They are probably ashamed to have their friends and neighbors know what they are doing.
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Blog comments policy

At the beginning of every month, I will repost my comments policy for those who started visiting this site the previous month.

As long time readers know, I used to moderate the comments with a very light hand, assuming that mature adults would know how to behave in a public space. It took outright hate speech targeting marginalized groups to cause me to ban people, and that happened very rarely. But I got increasingly irritated by the tedious and hostile exchanges among a few commenters that tended to fill up the comment thread with repeated posts about petty or off-topic issues. We sometimes had absurdly repetitive exchanges seemingly based on the childish belief that having the last word means that you have won the argument or with increasingly angry posts sprinkled with puerile justifications like “They started it!”

So here is one rule: No one will be able to make more than three comments in response to any blog post. Violation of that rule will result in banning.

But I also want to address a couple of deeper concerns for which a solution cannot be quantified but will require me to exercise my judgment.
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