Elon Musk and Twitter

I try to avoid reading anything about Elon Musk, even though my news sources constantly bombard me with headlines about something he has said or done. I find people who constantly promote themselves, and Musk is a particularly extreme example of this, to be really annoying. For some reason, the media seem to think that his pronouncements on anything, even world affairs, are to be taken seriously enough as to be relayed to us. Such is the power of money to bestow credibility to people on topics on which they have no expertise whatsoever.

But I was vaguely interested in the saga of his on-again, off-again effort to buy Twitter and the deal was finally completed on Friday. Musk uses Twitter as his main vehicle for drawing attention to himself and may have thought that owning Twitter would enable him to get even more exposure by being his own personal platform. He has plans to take the company private by buying up all its shares.
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Liz Truss and Jacob Rees-Mogg: Two useless people in high places

Liz Truss gave her farewell speech and seemed as clueless as ever. She advised her replacement Rishi Sunak of the need to ‘be bold’ although it was her very own boldness that led to one of the most spectacular downfalls in recent UK political history. She is is most likely to be remembered as the answer to two future trivia questions: Who had the shortest tenure as UK prime minister? And who was prime minister when Elizabeth Windsor died?

It is unlikely that Sunak will take her advice to be bold. He has probably learned that he needs to take things slow and at least give the appearance of being deliberative so as to remove the image that the Conservatives have now acquired for being reckless, even as he pushes the same right-wing policies that the Conservatives always push. Although he is cut from the same cloth as other Conservative leaders, coming from a wealthy and privileged background and went to the ‘right’ schools, I am sure that he is mindful that he is different in being an ethnic South Asian and Hindu. Being the first in any major category (gender, ethnicity, nationality, religion) to occupy a high position means that people are closely watching you. Failure will cause many to whisper that ‘people like them’ are simply not cut out to hold such positions. So Sunak’s first goal will be to not mess things up as much as Truss did and thus cautions is called for.
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Trump is unlikely to testify publicly to the January 6th committee

When the January 6th congressional committee voted to subpoena Trump to testify before it, I thought that there was a real possibility that he would because, despite the risks that he will say something incriminating, Trump loves to be on TV so much and the ratings for such a hearing, the only measure that he seems to really care about, would go through the roof. He could use the event to ignore the questions and instead rant about all his pet peeves.

It seems like the committee was well aware of this possibility and vice-chair Liz Cheney said that Trump’s testimony would not be live, in order to avoid the hearings becoming a circus.
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Let the next round of infighting begin!

The contest to see who becomes the next Conservative party leader and thus prime minister was remarkable for its swiftness. As this timeline of events shows, Liz Truss resigned on the afternoon of Thursday and by Monday morning the contest had been settled.

In the end Rishi Sunak managed to avoid a vote of the Conservative party membership (which he lost to Truss less than two months ago) when his rivals Boris Johnson and Penny Mordaunt withdrew their candidacies because they could not reach the high bar of 100 MP support that the party leaders had set for them to be nominated. The party leaders had clearly wanted to avoid putting it to a vote of the party membership, given how disastrous their selection of Truss had been and the likelihood of Johnson winning it this time, and their plan succeeded.

Sunak, apart from having South Asian ethnicity and being a Hindu, seems to be cut from the same cloth as other Conservative party leaders and prime ministers, being wealthy and privileged and having attended an elite private school (Winchester College) and Oxford University and has admitted in the past to socializing with only the wealthy and aristocratic and not having had any friends from outside that class. In addition he is married to a very wealthy woman, the daughter of an Indian billionaire. So he is, apart from his ethnic origins, just like the others in the British oligarchy. Although he is viewed as a safer set of hands to steward the economy than the pitiful Truss, he was once a supporter of Johnson and served as his Chancellor of the Exchequer until his resignation helped to topple Johnson.
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The Conservative party and Republican party have a lot in common

What they share is much more than a right-wing ideology. One commonality is that they both have former leaders (Boris Johnson and Donald Trump) who are lying, egotistical, narcissists. Another is that despite their manifest faults that should in a sane world disqualify them from any leadership position, both ex-leaders seem to be viewed favorably by a vociferous base of the party faithful (Conservative party members in the UK and Republican primary voters in the US). The third is that both party establishments seem to have lost their grip on the party and are now struggling to regain control. The final similarity is that both parties seem to have given up on having any specific agenda or party platform and now seem to be going with whatever the leader says. Recall that in 2020, the Republican party did not even bother to come up with a new platform for their convention, essentially saying that their platform was whatever their nominee Trump said.
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The fight for the UK Tory leadership could get very ugly

I have just been able to view the first season of the BBC TV satire The Thick of It that ran from 2005 through 2012. It purports to show the brutal backstabbing that goes on behind the scenes of UK politics and the media. Peter Capaldi is clearly having a great time playing Malcolm Tucker, the prime minister’s ruthless ‘enforcer’, who gets to do the PM’s dirty work such as getting ministers to take the blame for any mistakes even if they are not at fault, firing them, and then writing their ‘resignation’ letters. He is a domineering and aggressive person whose is constantly scheming and whose in-your-face belligerence cows everyone around him. His very appearance in their office makes their hearts sink. He wields tremendous power over even ministers of state, ordering them and their staff around. He is the PM’s spin doctor manipulating the media, This clip gives you a good sense of his character.
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And the winner is … the lettuce!

British prime minister Liz Truss resigned today, ending the constant speculation about how long she would last. On October 10th, a tabloid newspaper The Daily Star started running a live stream of a head of lettuce named Lizzie Lettuce with a blond wig above the question, “Will Liz Truss still be Prime Minister within the 10 day shelf-life of a lettuce?”. As it turns out, the contest was not even close, with the lettuce winning at a trot, with Truss having the dubious record of possibly being the shortest serving prime minister who did not die in office, just 45 days.

I must say that while I had been amazed at how quickly Truss had thoroughly botched things up since taking over as prime minister, and expected that she would not last long, her resignation today did surprise me. She had given a pretty vigorous defense in the weekly PMQ session yesterday, defiantly declaring “I am a fighter, not a quitter!” which I thought meant that she was going to try and salvage her premiership.
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California and Monterey elections

The mid-term elections are coming up on November 8th. California allows for early voting and I have already received my ballot along with a thick booklet from the state describing the many ways to vote and also information about all the candidates and the ballot issues, of which there are many. I received another thick booklet about all the issues the pertain to elections in just Monterey County. The second booklet has a sample ballot that I use to check off all my choices before entering them into the actual ballot prior to dropping it off. It is all very efficient and well-organized.

There are helpful guides to get information on the people and ballot issues. One is from the League of Women Voters. Another is from a self-described progressive who lives in Monterey giving his recommendations.

I live in the tiny town of Del Rey Oaks that is adjacent to the town of Monterey. It has a population of just around 1700 and the number of registered voters is about 1300. As a result, politics is very personalized. Both candidates for mayor have come to my home and talked with me. Two of the three candidates running for the two vacant seats in the city council have already come to my house. In fact the current mayor who is running for re-election sat down in my living room and we chatted for about half an hour about local issues. The next day she emailed me with some information about things that we had talked about.

There is something really quaint about small town politics. While I am sure that the people living here span the range of national politics, those highly charged national issues are out of sight. At least for now.

Letting transgender people be themselves

On the latest episode of his show Last Week Tonight, Jon Oliver cuts through all the misinformation spread about transgender issues by those seeking to create a sense of alarm that this is some kind of fad that is exposing young people to harm and are even passing laws forbidding gender-affirming care. He discusses what gender-affirming care actually involves and why it is nothing like what its opponents claim it to be.


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Liz? Liz who? The case of the vanishing prime minister

I have been following coverage of UK politics in the wake of the recent shambles and have been struck by how prime minister Liz Truss seems to have been completely sidelined and that the latest Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt is the person that people are looking to for authoritative answers to government policy questions. In today’s UQ (Urgent Questions) session in parliament, she was mostly absent and it was Hunt who took center stage. Even though one of the questions concerned her sacking of her previous chancellor, it was Penny Mordaunt, the leader of the commons, who had to respond to the question, raising speculations that she was auditioning for Truss’s role. Mordaunt said that Truss could not there due to other urgent commitments, which resulted in raucous laughter.

Truss seems to be so shell-shocked by the strong negative reactions to the policies that she and the previous chancellor Kwasi Kwerteng rushed through, and the strong calls for her to quit, that she seems to have decided to keep as low a profile as possible, making Hunt appear to be the de facto prime minister. Hunt has tried twice before and failed miserably to become party leader and thus prime minister, and now seems to be relishing the power that he has unexpectedly acquired, confidently reversing some of Truss’s policies.

It reminds me of the politics in Sri Lanka where Ranil Wickremesinghe tried on two occasions to become president and lost both times and then lost even his parliamentary seat, along with every member of his party. But then the disgraced outgoing President Rajapaksa and his family maneuvered to get him into the presidency through the back door and now he acts as if he received a sweeping mandate, protecting the Rajapaksa family from any consequences and using draconian anti-terrorist laws to harshly crack down on the leaders of the protests that ousted them.

On Wednesday, the UK parliament has the session known as PMQs (prime minister’s questions) and if Truss is to retain any shred of credibility whatsoever she must attend and put on a strong showing, though she will face a very boisterous crowd.

The British system is one with a strong executive prime minister and so the secondary role that Truss seems to have been reduced to so quickly is quite astonishing.