Trump’s obsessions may have sunk his defense

This article describes the dramatic moments during the last moments of the trial of serial sex abuser and convicted felon Donald Trump (SSACFT).

I had thought that getting a unanimous guilty verdict would be difficult, that there might be at least one juror who might hold out, causing a mistrial, which the MAGA crowd would see as a vindication of their hero.

Despite his bluster about the process itself, former President — and now convicted felon —Donald Trump secretly confided to advisors that one juror in his Manhattan criminal trial would come to his rescue.

After he was found guilty on all 34 felony counts, Rolling Stone reported Thursday that Trump’s hopes of a man on the jury he reportedly referred to as “my juror” were evidently dashed. Reporters Adam Rawnsley and Asawin Suebsaeng wrote that Trump had his eye on one male juror in particular whose body language he interpreted as friendlier than the rest.
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It wasn’t immediately clear which juror the Trump team was paying attention to. It could have been juror #2, an investment banker who said during the voir dire process that his primary source of news was Truth Social — the ex-president’s far-right social media platform. It could have also been juror #8, who is a retired wealth manager from the Upper East Side, and is originally from Long Island (traditionally more conservative than the rest of the New York City metro area).
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An acquittal on all 34 counts would have been unlikely, given that Trump has never prevailed in any civil — and now criminal — court proceeding in New York. But the defense was hopeful that they could at least have one or more jurors refuse to sign onto a guilty verdict, thus hanging the jury and effectively ensuring the former president wouldn’t get a new trial until after the election, if ever.

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Understanding the verdict

As I said in my initial reaction to the verdict, I was surprised that serial sex abuser and now convicted felon Donald Trump (SSACFT) was found guilty on all charges. I had heard many legal experts opine before that of all the cases that were brought against him, this was the weakest as it hinged on a combination of fairly esoteric offenses and that the key witness against SSACFT Michael Cohen was himself someone who was an admitted liar. Since a conviction requires a unanimous verdict that is beyond reasonable doubt, all it required was for one juror to hold out for there to be a mistrial, which would be trumpeted by the Maganuts as an acquittal.

In addition, SSACFT is a former president and though that should not be a factor in their consideration, jurors are human and I thought that it was unlikely that jurors would convict him unless they thought that the case was a slam dunk. The fact that the unanimous verdict came in on all counts in the relatively short time after about 10 hours of deliberations seem to indicate that they indeed thought it was a fairly easy decision.
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Are the rich good for anything at all?

It used to be considered that the wealthy had some use because they would benefit society via philanthropy by supporting the arts, funding libraries, cultural centers, charities, and so on. It was a kind of trickle down mentality, that they would use some of their surplus wealth to benefit the broader community, if not out of a sense of altruism, at least to head off potential resentment and anger.

Benjamin Wallace-Wells writes in a review of a book by Italian historian Guido Alfani that the new billionaire class does not have the social function that they were once considered to have .and are now increasingly becoming seen as a menace as inequality increases.

In the past generation, the ranks of the super-rich have grown dramatically. Between 1990 and 2020, the number of billionaires in the U.S. increased ninefold. In China, the growth of the super-wealthy has been more explosive still: in a single year, between 2020 and 2021, that country’s billionaire count grew by sixty per cent. Private fortunes of this scale are fundamentally transnational and less moored to individual nations that might make demands of them.
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The story behind Airplane!

Airplane! (1980) is one of the funniest films ever made. While it was clearly a parody of the disaster films that were a popular genre at that time (in addition to parodying iconic scenes from other films) I was not aware that the film was so closely based on an actual 1957 film titled Zero Hour, with many scenes lifted entirely from that older film as setups for the newer film’s jokes.

Zero Hour is a thriller about a passenger flight that turns dangerous when the crew is felled by food poisoning, leaving traumatized war pilot Ted Stryker (Dana Andrews) as the only man on board able to land the plane. The film was written by Arthur Hailey, who was also behind the Airport movies that were also part of the inspiration for Airplane!. ZAZ actually bought the rights to Zero Hour, which allowed them to literally remake a great number of scenes — they didn’t just use the script, but copied staging, camera angles and everything. And it’s all used as the lead-in for a great many of the comedy’s most well-loved jokes.

You can see this similarities in this comparison of scenes from the older black-and-white film and the new one.

Key actors like Leslie Nielsen, Robert Stack, Lloyd Bridges, and Peter Graves had, prior to Airplane!, mostly played serious roles in dramatic films. The Airplane! creators exploited this fact and told them to say their lines as if this were a serious film, so that their deadpan delivery made it even funnier.

If you have never seen Airplane!, you have missed a treat, though there are a couple of jokes in scenes involving children that nowadays would not have been made, and rightly so.

Here’s the trailer.

Going overboard with portmanteaus

A portmanteau, for those unfamiliar with the term, is a new word that is obtained by smashing two familiar words together so that their meanings get combined. Many portmanteaus have now passed into regular usage and we no longer think of them as such. Examples are spork (spoon+fork), brunch (breakfast+lunch), motel (motor+hotel), malware (malicious+software), and frenemy (friend+enemy). For more examples, see here.

‘Portmanteau’ (meaning a large suitcase that opens up into two halves) is itself a portmanteau made up of two French words ‘porter’ (to carry) and ‘manteau’ (a cloak).

Some portmanteaus have an ephemeral existence because their lifetimes are clearly limited. Examples are Brangelina and Bennifer that have been coined for celebrity couples.

Journalists tend to try to insert portmanteaus into usage to liven their reporting and they sometimes seem forced because the combined meaning is not obvious. For example, I recently heard on the news someone using the word ‘vibecession‘. This is a portmanteau of the words ‘vibes’ and ‘recession’ and “refers to a disconnect between the economy of a country and the general public’s negative perception of it, which is mostly pessimistic.”

I find other portmanteaus to be too cute or ugly or unnecessary. Examples are ‘snowmageddon’ (snow+Armageddon to denote a massive snowstorm), ‘staycation’ (stay+vacation to denote spending your vacation at home), and the one I hate the most ‘bleisure’ (business+leisure to denote travel that is done for both business and leisure)

Language is dynamic and grows with the addition of new words and giving new meaning to old ones. The staying power of any new word or phrase is determined by how many people find it appealing and start using it. No single person’s opinions matter but there are some portmanteaus that I find grating and hope will disappear.

A better AI system?

Via Kevin Drum, I learned that the Wall Street Journal had tested five AI engines and the winner was one that I had not heard of before called Perplexity, where the basic version is free.

As readers may recall, back in December I tried out ChatGPT and Bard with the prompt “What can you tell me about Mano Singham?” and got back some accurate information mixed in with false ones. I read that turning out some false information was common in these AI systems, making them of highly dubious value.

I tried the prompt “Who is Mano Singham” on Perplexity and got results that were fairly extensive and correct and did not have any false information. I used a prompt asking about myself not because of vanity (at least not entirely) but because that way I can know what is true and false immediately without having to do any further research.
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The courtroom sketch artists at the Trump trial

The trial of serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) in New York does not allow live TV coverage of the proceedings and photographers have only been allowed to take photographs before the day’s proceedings begin. There have been complaints by the media that the public has a right to know what is going on in high-profile cases like this and that a live video feed should be allowed in the public interest.

While there would undoubtedly have been considerable interest (even though much of court proceedings are routine and boring), I am not convinced that allowing TV cameras and photographers is a good idea. A trial is not an event aimed at the general public. The only audience that matters are the jurors and the goal should be to give them the best experience of the case. When TV cameras are present, it might subtly distort that behavior of all the participants, and photographers vying for the best shot could also be distracting.
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Sunak’s puzzling election gamble

Many observers were taken by surprise at UK prime minister Rishi Sunak’s decision to dissolve parliament and hold general elections on July 4th. Elections were not due until January and he himself had repeatedly said that he wanted to wait until later in the year, which observers had interpreted as October or November. So why move things up suddenly?

The reason to hold elections early is either because things are looking very good for you right now or because you think things will get worse as time goes by. The former seems unlikely to be the reason since both the Conservative party and Sunak personally are polling badly, with the party over 20 points behind that of Labour. So it must mean that he felt things might get even worse. But it is not clear why he thought that. Furthermore, by calling for an early dissolution, he has shut the door to getting things passed in parliament that he had promised to do when taking up the position, giving him even fewer accomplishments to run on.
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The schisms in the Michigan GOP

In Sri Lankan politics, one of the tendencies was for parties to splinter and become increasingly fragmented. On the right end of the spectrum, the parties tended to split due to factions centered around individuals while on the left they tended to split along ideological lines, as factions argued that the party had failed some purity test on one or more issues. Once started on this road, further splintering occurred along new ideological fault lines, until there were many tiny leftwing parties that no longer had much influence on politics but engaged in squabbles among themselves. That left an opening for more extreme parties to fill the vacuum.

I was reminded of the latter when reading Andy Kroll’s deep dive for ProPublica into what is going on in Michigan, one of the key states that both Biden and serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) seek to win. It is a fascinating read for those who like to see how Republican politics plays out at the local level, with splintering occurring repeatedly. It is also worth following closely considering how important a role that state plays.
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