The Orange Vindictive Narcissist is Back

Donald Trump will be President of the United States for another term of office, four years after we thought we'd seen the back of him.

I'm feeling bereft today - a mild depression that has lasted until the now, the late evening. Everyone knows the democratic Party are useless, and at times, as Joe Biden has shown, murderous. But the idea that Kamala Harris would have been a worse president that Donald John Trump is laughable. Anyway, the orangse buffoon is back, 78 years old, fizzing with resentment and stupidity. The rot that started with the "election" of George W Bush in 2000 continues. At least this time around the result is clear, and Trump, to his cedit, may even have won the popular vote.

As a good little liberal, I used to believe in abstract concepts like democracy. But then as an ill-tempered Jewish Professor once hissed at me "Even Adolf Hitler was elected, never forget that!"

Joe Biden is inaugurated

It is hard to describe the feeling of relief seeing Joe Biden sworn in as the 46th President of the United States.

He looked pretty good for his age, but I hope very much that four years from now he's handing over to Vice President Kamala Harris. Poor Joe, he's wanted to be president for decades but what a hell of time to start! 

The COVID pandemic is out of control, the economy is in deep trouble and there's horrible political division. About 2/3rd of the Republicans believe the election was rigged. Then there's longer term stuff like coping with climate change and the rise of China.

I believe he's too old for the job. None the less, no matter what he does, he'll be better than Donald Trump. As for the ceremony itself - Biden's speech went on too long and the country singer was rubbish (surprise surprise). But Lady Gaga (I'm not a fan) sang really well and the poet wasn't too cringy either. 

Let's hope President Joseph Biden is as good as his word and restores some sanity to the White House. 

So happy and such a wonderful sense of relief!

After several interminable days of waiting, the meja have finally decided that Joe Biden will be the next President of the United States.

This is such a relief after the four disgusting years of Donald Trump, a stinking human being with almost no redeeming qualities whatsoever. 

Trump of course hasn't conceded, defeat - that isn't the Trump way. Fortunately he still has about 10 weeks to get used to the idea. Unfortunately, for those 10 weeks he's still, nominally at least, in charge. 

Lets hope he doesn't do anything especially stupid during that time - we can take it as read he'll do something stupid.  

Linda Tripp

Amid all the gloom, the death of the disgusting and repulsive Linda Tripp came a welcome ray of sunlight.

No, I'm not arguing Bill Clinton wasn't a lecherous old goat, but the way Linda betrayed the trust of the very young Monica Lewinsky was truly evil. And Linda never had any regrets, at least publicly. As recently at 2016 the repulsive bitch was claiming that she saved Monica's life.

The world is a brighter happier place without Linda Tripp. 

Trump: Day 1162

There's an excellent article in the Guardian today about Donald Trump's 'leadership' of the United States during the Corona virus epidemic.

Jonathan Freedland describes Trumps various lunatic twists and turns over the past month or so and concludes with one of the most truthful paragraphs I've ever read:

But these are small consolations for America and indeed for the world, which needed the leadership only a US president has the clout to provide. Instead, the world’s peoples now look at the US and comfort themselves with the small solace that they, at least, face only a lethal disease, and not the malignancy that is Donald Trump.

Trump - Day 3 - Year Zero "Alternative Facts"

Trump's press secretary made a series of silly remarks about the size of the crowd that gathered for the inauguration on Friday.

It seems that president Fart was upset that more people showed up for Barack Obama than for him in an equivalent ceremony years before.

To their credit, the normally passive and naive United States press were spurred into an rare energetic burst of fact checking, and quickly published photographs and mass transport data to show that Obama did pull a far bigger crowd.

But what really made people smile and shudder was one of Trump's advisers, a right wing former beauty queen Kellyanne Conway who went on television to claim that the press secretary was giving us "alternative facts" about the inauguration. 

Oh shit - they're even worse than I thought.

Trump - Day 1, Year Zero

I watched Donald Trump being inaugurated as the 45th President of the United States yesterday afternoon. 

 Actually I was in the car while the actual inauguration took place so I heard it on the radio and then watched a recording of it with M about an hour later. He gave a horrible speech in when he didn't make a single reference to Hillary Clinton (present at the ceremony and putting a brave face on things). 

Instead he sounded like some vile dictator from the 1930s, blithering on about political elites and how power has passed to the people. I wonder if there's ever been a dictator who hasn't claimed he's a man of the people? Never mind - all political careers end in failure. There are many ways in which the career of Donald John Trump can end. He can: 

• Be voted out out of office in 2020. 
• Be assassinated 
• Be impeached 
• Resign, either voluntarily or involuntarily like Richard M Nixon

But the speech itself wasn't entirely nonsense. The best passage was a surprisingly eloquent description of the closed factories scattered all over the American landscape like grave stones. 

Since the era of Ronald Reagan (a fuckwit, now regarded by many fuckwits as a great president), the gradually evolving dominant theme of politics has been globalisation, and how it's impossible to do anything but accept and embrace it. 

Thomas Friedman was onto this idea quite early with books like The Lexus and Olive Tree (1999). Tony Blair was onto it (or more likely his advisers were) in a speech he made in 2005 at the Labour Party Conference. According to John Harris Blair said:

"The pace of change can either overwhelm us, or make our lives better and our country stronger,” he went on. “What we can’t do is pretend it is not happening. I hear people say we have to stop and debate globalisation. You might as well debate whether autumn should follow summer.” 

His next passage was positively evangelistic. “The character of this changing world is indifferent to tradition. Unforgiving of frailty. No respecter of past reputations. It has no custom and practice. It is replete with opportunities, but they only go to those swift to adapt, slow to complain, open, willing and able to change.” 

 John Harris then goes on to describe his own thoughts:

“Most people are not like that.” The words rattled around my head: “Swift to adapt, slow to complain, open, willing and able to change.” And I wondered that if these were the qualities now demanded of millions of Britons, what would happen if they failed the test?

Blair describe[d] his vision of the future – in which one’s duty was to get as educated as possible, before working like hell and frantically trying not to sink."

That really was the dominant theme of both Left and Right for the past couple of decades. The Right embraced globalisation as the ultimate expression of the free market, while the Center Left saw it as a natural phenomenon that could only be coped with rather than stopped.  Only the hard Left saw it as evil, but they were regarded as foolish and extreme, just like the hard Right, who wanted to oppose mass immigration and who saw globalisation as destroying nation states.

It was Trump's genius, probably an accident, that he was able to appear as neither Right nor Left, and to promise people what everyone had been telling them was impossible - a return to a pre-globalisation golden age of well paid jobs in stable successful companies in local communities. 

In many ways I think Trump is dangerous, stupid and reckless. But in one way, I'm rather exhilarated, in that he shows that in a democracy, you only go so far before people will bite back. Since 2008 we've had eight long years of economic misery which people have by and large endured. But with Hillary Clinton promising nothing but more of the same, people were willing to try anything to get meaningful change. That's democracy, in all it's cross-eyed, foolish brilliance. Nobody but nobody after Trump's term of office will be able to take the effects of pure free-market capitalism on the uneducated and the semi-skilled for granted. 

That's a good thing.

I was So Wrong!

I made three predictions this year:

1) Maria Sharapova would be banned from tennis for two and a half years for doping.

WRONG - She was banned for two years, which (scandalously) was reduced to 18 months on appeal.

2) Britain would narrowly vote to stay in the E.U

WRONG - Britain narrowly voted to leave the E.U with completely unpredictable consequences. Personally I think this will be an appalling mistake, whose full impact won't be apparent for several years. But then all my predictions have been wrong recently.

3) Hillary Clinton would beat Donald Trump in the US election.

WRONG - Trump won the election, although it's a small consolation to realise he actually lost the election by two million votes due to anomalies in the US elective system.

I've been blogging since 2004, but it's safe to say that 2016 has been the most historic and surprising year since this blog started. It really shook me up, and caused me to question some deeply held beliefs and attitudes. Perhaps I'll do another post about those next time.   

Trumped

As I write, it looks like Donald Trump will become the next President of the United States.

Even typing that sentence feels unreal.

America has elected a con-man, a liar, a demagogue.

Why? My best guesses are:

• The weakness of Hillary Clinton, one of the least talented and dislikable politicians to ever run for the White House.

• The appalling effects of the 2008 recession, which large parts of the United States have never recovered from.

• The ridiculous levels of executive pay, which cause huge amounts of resentment in ordinary people, whose wages have stagnated and in some cases actually diminished over the past couple of decades. 

• Globalisation, which means that 'ordinary' people now find themselves competing against much of the world.

• The failure of President Obama, who, lest we forget was elected on a 'hope and change' platform. He did provide change, but not enough, and his second term in particular was largely devoid of hope.

There are a two consolations from the election of Donald Trump

1) The entire American political system is designed to restrict the power of monarchs. Many Americans and foreigners don't realise how limited the powers of the President are, and how largely symbolic the role is.

2) With any luck Trump will find Benjamin Netanyahu  as obnoxious and repulsive as Obama did (and every other world leader). But unlike Obama, Trump may be able to turn that dislike into positive action. Dark days for Israel? I fervently hope so.

What lies ahead? Who the hell knows - perhaps a recession followed by a shallow recovery followed by the election of someone more able 4 years from now? Urgh. My predictive powers have been rubbish this year

Great Essay on Donald Trump

It looks almost certain that the American electorate (poor sods) will get an appalling choice between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.

I loathe Hillary Clinton, but she's not as dangerous as Donald Trump.

Here's great essay by Andrew Sullivan, a writer and commentator I've admired for years, on Donald Trump and the threat he poses to America and the world.

It's rammed full of thought provoking stuff - here are a few selected quotes:

This is an age in which a woman might succeed a black man as president, but also one in which a member of the white working class has declining options to make a decent living...

The deeper, long-term reasons for today’s rage are not hard to find, although many of us elites have shamefully found ourselves able to ignore them. The jobs available to the working class no longer contain the kind of craftsmanship or satisfaction or meaning that can take the sting out of their low and stagnant wages. The once-familiar avenues for socialization — the church, the union hall, the VFW — have become less vibrant and social isolation more common. Global economic forces have pummeled blue-collar workers more relentlessly than almost any other segment of society, forcing them to compete against hundreds of millions of equally skilled workers throughout the planet. No one asked them in the 1990s if this was the future they wanted. And the impact has been more brutal than many economists predicted. No wonder suicide and mortality rates among the white working poor are spiking dramatically.

This is an age in which a woman might succeed a black man as president, but also one in which a member of the white working class has declining options to make a decent living. This is a time when gay people can be married in 50 states, even as working-class families are hanging by a thread. It’s a period in which we have become far more aware of the historic injustices that still haunt African-Americans and yet we treat the desperate plight of today’s white working ­class as an afterthought.

One More Prediction

Here's another prediction to add to the two below:

The vile Hillary Clinton will narrowly beat the vile Donald Fart in the US Presidential election.

Commemoration

This August, Britain has been commemorating the start of the first world war, which began 100 years ago.

As part of the commemoration, 800,000+ artificial poppies have been placed in the moat at the Tower of London, each poppy representing one British or Commonwealth life lost.

It must have been the most devastating war to live through. What always strikes me travelling through Britain and France is how many names there are on each village memorial. Particularly as the villages were almost always much smaller in those days, at least in Britain. Some small communities must have lost all the guys aged between 16 and 35. Probably every family in Britain lost someone; mine certainly did. There was a brother of my father's mother 'shot while trying to escape' from being taken prisoner, which she seemed to find entirely in character. Then there was my mother's mother's father, who survived the trenches only to die in vile influenza epidemic that broke out during the last year of war and the first years of peace.

On my many travels I've developed a theory that Britain and America were actually quite similar in outlook up to 1914. There was an unashamed patriotism, and a strong belief in science and technology as agents of positive change. There was also quite a lot of religious belief expressed and publicly celebrated. Both nations, and indeed countries like France and Germany, felt they were special and unique and blessed by god, or at least good fortune.

After 1918, in Britain and Europe, many people felt that modern war had rendered such beliefs absurd. How do you believe in a technological utopia when science has produced poison gas, high explosive and the machine gun? How would any kind of loving god sit on his hands whilst Europe bleeds itself white, and then rewards the peace with an influenza outbreak that kills almost as many people who died in the war? How can one be patriotic, when patriotism has led to so many pointless deaths? Above all else why was the war fought and was the price in blood and treasure remotely worth paying?

Now I know America did enter the war (late as usual as British cynics would add). But although Imperial Germany felt the growing weight of American arms towards the final months of war, American casualties were, by European standards, tiny. Now don't get me wrong, 100,000+ deaths is awful - far greater than the numbers of US dead in for example, Vietnam. But from a population of 90 million, they don't have anything like the same effect as 700,000+ British dead from a population half that size.

So in the years that follow, the United States remains very religious (at least on the surface), supremely optimistic about science and technology, and unashamedly patriotic. European culture is the exact opposite; and I reckon it's because of the first world war.

The Myth of 'It's Complicated'

One of the most annoying and persistent myths of the Israel Palestinian conflict is how complicated it allegedly is, and how us mere mortals, perhaps with the added handicap of being Goy, simply can't grasp the subtleties.

It's complete bullshit of course, and the myth of complication is nicely dismantled in this excellent piece written by Lawrence of Cyberia:

Despite the endless propaganda we are subjected to, about Palestinians (and Arabs and Muslims) being people who are “not like us”, whose values are inimical to our own, and with whom we are condemned to be engaged in an endless clash of civilizations, the conflict in Palestine is actually rooted in the fact that Palestinians are exactly like us. 

Palestinians do not accept that equal citizenship in their own homeland should be denied them because of their ethnic/religious background, any more than Americans would accept ethnic justifications for denying them equal citizenship in the United States. Palestinians do not accept that a population that is 96.7% Muslim and Christian should be ethnically cleansed to make way for a sectarian Jewish state, any more than we would accept that the 97.5% of Americans who happen to be not-Jewish should be ethnically cleansed to make way for a Jewish state here.  In short, Palestinians reject and resist Zionism because they do not accept being treated in ways that we, likewise, would never accept for ourselves.

The Horror of Gaza

Israel has been bombarding Gaza for nearly a week now, and the inevitable consequence of bombarding densely populated urban areas is a lot of dead children. Children killed in the cruellest way imaginable.

Until relatively recently, there was of course a complete taboo on images of this kind ever getting beyond paramedic and military training programmes. Like so much else in the world the Internet is changing all that, to the point when I wonder if aerial bombardment of urban areas even has a future.

It's hard to express how much Israel is damaging itself by bombarding Gaza, and how much images like this damage Israel's cause. The sheer RAGE I'm feeling now at people like Netanyahu and 'Mr Cool' President Obama is impossible to express. And I'm not alone.

NOTE: I've found these pictures being distributed from several places and on FaceBook, and am assuming they are in the public doman to help spread the word about Gaza. If you can prove to me you own a picture or pictures here, please let me know and I'll either remove them or credit you. 

I Told You So

The result of the US election which came in on Wednesday morning last week gave me the chance to type the most beautiful phrase in the English language:

I told you so

Predicting the future is bloody difficult, as my 100% wrong Olympics prediction proved, so it's nice to get the US election result correct, especially as America has been such a bitterly divided country for almost 15 years now. 

Sorry to say I'm also taking enormous pleasure from the howling and madness of the more extreme Republican and conservative commentators. Their reactions are nicely summarised on Andrew Sullivan's blog here.


Although it's as well to point out that as time passes and emotions cool, not every conservative has lost his or her mind:

U.S Election

As I type, Americans are choosing their next President; whether to keep Barack Obama for another 4 years, or whether to bin him and elect Mitt Romney instead,

Towards the end of last year I choose Barack Obama to win the race and I'm sticking with that prediction, although the race will be a tight one and America has been bitterly divided almost 50/50 between Republicans and Democrats since 2000. 

Holidays End

It's wonderful to have 10 and 1/2 days off (they chucked us out of the office at 2pm on Friday 23rd December). There was the option of working for the three days between Christmas and the New Year, but I didn't take it.

So M and myself have had a great time relaxing and doing very little except eat and watch telly and sleep.

I'm dreading going back to work on Tuesday and the only consolation is our tennis group starts again on Saturday January 7th.

2011 was a shocking year in terms of new events (it reminded me of 1982 in that respect) and there seems universal gloom about the economic prospects for 2012. I'm not so sure, not least because prediction is a really inaccurate business, the US economy is showing signs of revival at last, and the Olympic Games in London will give the South East economy a small boost and the entire country a psychological one.

Having said that prediction is a difficult business, here's the text of a message I wrote to David Young who asked me my opinion of the US Presidential race, specifically the Republican candidates:

At this stage, there have been several drop-outs already, and the players (runners?) left are:

Michelle Bachmann,
Newt Gingrich,
Jon Huntsman Jr.
Ron Paul,
Rick Perry,
Mitt Romney
Rick Santorum

The most recent poll I could find (today on the Gallup site) had the candidates in the following order:

Romney (26%)
Gingrich (24%)
Paul (11%)
Perry (7%)
Bachman (5%)
Santorum (5%)
Huntsman (2%)

I believe that while the poll numbers fluctuate quite a bit, we can safely exclude the candidates in single figures - they've lost too much ground, and lack charisma and/or credibility. A pity really, as I enjoyed the batshit insanity of Michelle Bachman very much. Definitely an 'only in America' type candidate.

Of the three remaining 'serious' players there seems to be a well coordinated attempt to discredit and attack Ron Paul. A great shame, as he seems to be the only candidate whose offering some fresh thinking and new approaches, particularly on things like the crazy war on drugs and the very costly and dubious foreign policy blunders that have marred the last decade. In other words, lets exclude Ron Paul.

As for the last two, it's much tougher to choose. I believe Newt Gingrich is carrying too much baggage from the past to secure the nomination, even though he's got a huge amount of political experience and 'will to win.' By a process of elimination, that leaves Mitt Romney as the Republican candidate, whom almost nobody really believes in. He will go on to lose a tight race against Barrack Obama next year. Obama goes on to have the traditionally ineffective and disappointing second term...



It'll be fun to see how right or wrong this prediction is.