Good election day for progressives

Primary elections in the US are a test of the relative strength of intra-party factions. On the Republican side, the fight is between Trump and anti-Trump (or at least non-Trump) factions and the Trump side has been clearly dominant. On the Democratic side, the fight is between new and younger progressives on the one hand and the old guard favored by the party establishment led by their senate leader Chuck Schumer and their House leader Hakeem Jeffries on the other.

Yesterday’s primaries were a resounding win for the progressives. In New York, progressive candidates won their races.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani waded into Democratic U.S. House primaries to boost three progressives over establishment-backed candidates. All of them won Tuesday, defeating two incumbents and essentially ensuring that two self-described democratic socialists will be elected to Congress in their deep blue districts.
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Palestine Action protests in the UK

I do not feel any sympathy for the collapse of Keir Starmer’s premiership. Apart from his abandoning his earlier pledges to help ordinary people and instead throwing them under the bus, one of his most despicable acts as prime minister was to declare war on the group Palestine Action. The group says that it is “committed to ending global participation in Israel’s genocidal and apartheid regime” and was protesting Israeli atrocities in Gaza and the West Bank, but Starmer’s government pushed through parliament a law branding it as a terrorist group.

Palestine Action, which was formally proscribed by the UK last July, is a British protest group founded six years ago. It says it uses “disruptive tactics” to target “corporate enablers” and companies involved in the manufacture of weapons for Israel, such as Israeli group Elbit Systems, Italian aerospace company Leonardo, French multinational Thales and Teledyne from the United States. The group has targeted British facilities linked to those companies.
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Will Burnham learn from Starmer’s fall?

As widely expected, Keir Starmer resigned as UK’s prime minister and it is widely expected that newly minted MP Andy Burnham will become party leader and thus prime minister around September when the formal leadership process is completed. Burnham will then have about three years in office to try and turn around Labour’s fortunes before the next general election is due. The question is whether Burnham will take the lesson’s of Starmer’s fall seriously enough to drastically change course.

Starmer’s biggest problem was that he gained the Labour Party leadership in 2020 with his 10 pledges that outlined a progressive agenda and then, after winning the leadership, systematically abandoned them, as this document by disappointed supporters carefully details. This analysis compares his original pledges with his platform for the 2024 election and finds a significant shift towards neoliberalism.
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The Lincoln Pool fiasco

I have to admit that I am throughly enjoying the debacle over the Lincoln Pool. It shows the utter incompetence and grift of the Trump administration and how his grandiose schemes fall apart. I can enjoy this one because unlike his other debacles, this one has not cost lives nor injuries nor harm to ordinary people. True, it is a waste of taxpayer money but on a much smaller scale than his other colossal wastes and (as far as we know) it has not gone into his own pockets like his other grifts, though I would not be surprised to learn that he or his family got a kickback from the contractor, because we know that no amount of money is too small for him to try and get his greedy hands on it. What is best about this fiasco is that it cannot be easily covered up, like the way he had a tarp cover the removal of his name from the Kennedy Center. The pool in all its algae-infested green glory is visible to everyone.

It is not just the algae in the pool turning it green that is causing problems. It appears that the blue paint is peeling off like a layer of plastic. In their attempts to suppress information, they even arrested some random guy who merely tried to touch the peeling paint.
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That didn’t last long

The Memorandum of Understanding signed by the US and Iran was always on shaky ground. Many of its features were ambiguously phrased and depended upon conditional factors and careful sequencing of actions by the US, Israel, and Iran. The one thing that seemed to be definite was the full ending of the US naval blockade and the removal US forces from the proximity of Iran within 30 days, and the opening of the Strait of Hormuz by Iran. The US also said that it will immediately “issue waivers for the export of Iranian crude oil, petroleum products and derivatives, and all associated services, including banking transactions, insurances, transportation, etc.” While Iran committed to opening the Strait, it openly declared that it would start charging tolls after 60 days and since this did not create any pushback from the US, one assumes that this will be the new normal. So one result of Trump’s war is that Iran will be permanently charging tolls where there had been none before. What a great negotiator Trump is!

The entire MOU is like a chain of dominoes that need to be toppled in exact sequence for it to be a success. Israel was always the weak link in the sequence because of the very first item in the MOU that said:

The United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran and their allies in the current war are signing this MOU to declare the immediate and permanent termination of military operations on all fronts, including in Lebanon, and undertake from now on not to initiate any war or any military operation against each other, and to refrain from the threat or use of force against each other, and ensuring the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Lebanon. The final deal will confirm the permanent termination of the war on all fronts, including in Lebanon and other provisions of this paragraph.

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Burnham set to challenge Starmer for UK premiership

Over in the UK Andy Burnham, who had been the mayor of Greater Manchester, won a byelection in the nearby constituency of Makerfield yesterday. This means that he is now an MP and thus in a position to challenge Keir Starmer for the Labour party leadership and, if he wins, become the next prime minister. Indeed, that clearly has been his goal all along and the MP who had represented Makerfield resigned his seat just so as to create an opening for Burnham.

There had been some concerns that the candidate of the surging right wing Reform UK party led by Nigel Farage might take the seat away from what had once been thought to be a safe Labour seat, held by them for more than 120 years but that did not happen. Burnham won comfortably by 55% to 35%, even increasing the party’s majority from the 2024 election, which they won 45% to 32%. The new more extreme right wing party Restore Britain won just 7%, while the Conservatives, Greens, and Liberal Democrats continued their slide with 2.2%, 0.7%, and 0.4% respectively.
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The reviews are coming in for the MOU

The reviews are coming in for Trump’s Memorandum of Understanding with Iran and the general consensus seems to be that it was largely a capitulation on his part, a grudging recognition that the grand aims that he outlined at the beginning of his and Israel’s war could not be realized with force and that he had to scale back his goals, even to achieving less than what had been in the previous JCPOA that was signed in 2015 and that he threw out. As Patrick Wintour, the Guardian‘s diplomatic editor, writes:

Only a man with an unparalleled ignorance of history such as Donald Trump would have signed America’s peace treaty with Iran at Versailles, the byword for national humiliation. And only a man with an impish sense of humour such as Emmanuel Macron would have suggested it.

It is easy to cast Trump in the role of the humiliated and hurt German Count Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau. The treaty of Versailles after all was based on 14 points, just as the memorandum of understanding has 14 clauses.

But the memorandum is not a full-scale surrender document; it is an admission that America could not achieve what it sought through war.

If the memorandum, taken with Trump’s remarks at his hour-long press conference at the G7, is compared with the final document the Americans tabled in 2025, it is possible to see how far the US has been forced to retreat. Red line after red line has been erased.

The 2025 document was tabled by the US immediately before Israel – with US support – began the 12-day war culminating in the bombing of Iran’s nuclear sites. Under its terms, Iran would have had no domestic enrichment capabilities beyond the limited enrichment for medical and agricultural needs; all nuclear supply would be imported from outside Iran; all enriched uranium stockpiles would be shipped out of Iran immediately upon signing the agreement; all enriched stockpile material would be down-blended to 3.67%; Iran would not build any new enrichment facilities; and Iran would dismantle all programmes capable of uranium conversion. Instead, a consortium including Iran, the US and the Gulf states would undertake enrichment outside Iran.

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The curious saga of the US-Iran deal

The last few days have seen the spectacle of Trump yet again announcing that a peace deal with Iran has been reached. He has said this about 40 times before so one can be excused for being skeptical. This time is different as even the Iranians said that a ‘Memorandum of Understanding’ had been arrived at and would be signed on Friday, making the claim more plausible. The details of the agreement were leaked from the US side and CNN published what it claimed was the text of the 14-point agreement. As is often the case, these things are deliberately leaked in order to gauge the feedback so that claims can be walked back if necessary.

Iran has agreed to re-open the Strait of Hormuz for traffic with no charge for 60 days, and promised not to “procure or develop nuclear weapons” and to allow the IAEA back into the country. The latter had been part of the JCPOA negotiated earlier that Trump scrapped.

As for sanctions, the US has agreed to “terminate all sanctions” both its own unilateral ones and the multilateral ones. The US and its partners will also “develop a definitive, mutually agreed plan with at least USD 300 billion for the reconstruction and economic development” of Iran. The MOU also states that the “US Department of Treasury will issue waivers for the export of Iranian crude oil, petroleum products and derivatives, and all associated services, including banking transactions, insurances, transportation, etc.” and the US “undertakes to make fully available for use the frozen or restricted funds and assets of the Islamic Republic of Iran upon the implementation of this MOU.” The US also”undertakes to remove its forces from the proximity of the Islamic Republic of Iran within 30 days after the final deal.”

Many of the details are to be determined within the 60-day period following the signing but as I read it, it looks like the Iranians have got much of what they wanted in return for re-opening the Strait of Hormuz
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What makes a film worth watching again?

There are so many potentially enjoyable films out there that it seems a waste of time to watch a film that one has already seen. And I rarely do. And yet recently I watched two films that I have seen not just once but a few times before. And it got me thinking about what makes a film so good. It is definitely not high production values, a stellar cast, dazzling special effects or frenetic action, the stuff that seems to power the blockbuster films. Instead it is good writing, direction, and strong character portrayals.

One film was The Castle a 1997 low-budget Australian film that I have praised highly before. ‘Low budget’ hardly does it justice. The cast is largely unknown outside Australia and it took less than two weeks to film at a cost A$750,000. To save costs, the name of the family (Kerrigan) was chosen so that the film makers could use trucks that belonged to an actual towing company with that name.
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Can we stop ‘going forward’?

There are some popular phrases that just grate on my nerves. You find them everywhere, especially when people are speaking on TV. They are just filler, often not serving any real function, and almost always they can be eliminated with any loss of clarity.

Here is an example that I found in a recent post by PZ Myers where he quoted the CEO of some video company saying the following:

“We’ve been a little bit too romantic about the idea that we should have employees and give people long-term job security. I think that got us into a place where, reaching the heights of Monument Valley 3 [production], contractors were always a relatively low percentage of our employee base. I think that’s something we’re looking to change going forward.

I think going forward, we’ll see that we’ve got a core team and any growth will come through contractors, which is something I hate about the industry. I’ve been in the industry for 20 years, and those of us who joined in the early 2000s, we had it very good. You want to be able to give that kind of stability […] but I think that’s a shift in how we want to work with people going forward.”

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