Black police officers and the insurrectionists

We have seen a lot of videos of the insurrection that took place on January 6th at the US Capitol building. Some of those images showed white people bearing confederate flags and Trump signs attacking an overwhelmed security force, some of them black police officers. The officers said that their superiors had not been ready for the assault and did not seem to have any plan of action, leaving it to the officers to improvise against overwhelming odds. This has led to a loss of confidence in their leadership. Two police officers have taken their own lives following the attack.
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A lesser known aspect of Trump’s attempted coup

While much attention has focused on Trump inciting a mob to attack the US Capitol on January 6th, there was another activity that Trump was engaged in that shows the extent to which he was willing to go to overturn an election in which he lost. This alone is, to my mind, worthy of him being convicted in the trial. This occurred just before the insurrection and involved his attempt to use the department of justice to falsely claim that they were investigating election fraud claims. He was willing to go to the extent of firing the acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen, who refused to send out such a letter, and replacing him with a lower level official Jeffrey Clark who came up with the idea and was willing to send it out.
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These tough guys turn out to be such snowflakes

One of the features of the insurrection of January 6th was the tough talk of the people invaded the Capitol building with weapons in what seemed, at least on the part of some, to be an effort to take congresspeople hostage. But as soon as they were arrested, they started to whine about how they have been so misunderstood and that they were not armed insurrectionists who planned to take over the government and prevent the certification of Joe Biden as president but were merely ordinary people only doing only what the president wanted them to do.
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Blame-shifting for the emergence of the coronavirus

There is a team of international scientists under the auspices of the UN currently in China to study the origins of the coronavirus, particularly how it made the jump from animals to humans. The first major outbreak occurred in Wuhan which instituted a massive lockdown that managed to suppress the spread so that the city is bustling with activity again, with traffic jams, busy restaurants and markets, and people now move around freely and do all the normal things, though there are still a few restrictions such as you have to wear masks all the time outdoors and groups of people must not exceed a dozen.
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Trump waived anti-lobbying rules on his way out

Trump campaigned in 2016 on being the only person who could ‘drain the swamp’ in Washington by getting rid of the influence peddling that is endemic there. One of his first acts was to impose a five-year ban on former aides lobbying. That was a good move for which he deserved credit. But it seems like he now thinks that the swamp is not such a bad place bad after all. On his way out the door, one of his very last acts was to rescind that rule.

Maybe it is because all the people who worked for him are finding it so hard to get jobs now and it was embarrassing for him to have close aides find themselves not being able to get lucrative work.

Ghastly inequality in the Gulf states

The Gulf states market themselves as glitzy tourist places filled with luxury high rise hotels and shopping malls and recreational areas. But they are also some of the most oppressive places for workers, where migrant workers are brought in and treated almost like slaves, working under extremely harsh conditions and poorly paid, thus resulting in some of the world’s greatest income inequality between the small number of people who are citizens and the huge number of desperately poor imported workers who cannot become citizens nor permanent residents and can be harshly punished if they make the slightest protest.

Bernard Freamon describes the incredibly oppressive conditions of the migrant workers in those countries.

The six city-states on the Arab side of the Persian Gulf, each formerly a sleepy, pristine fishing village, are now all glitzy and futuristic wonderlands. In each of these city-states one finds large tracts of ultramodern architecture, gleaming skyscrapers, world-class air-conditioned retail markets and malls, buzzing highways, giant, busy and efficient airports and seaports, luxury tourist attractions, game parks, children’s playgrounds, museums, gorgeous beachfront hotels and vast, opulent villas housing fabulously affluent denizens. The six city-states ­– Dubai and Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Manama in Bahrain, Dammam in Saudi Arabia, Doha in Qatar, and Kuwait City in Kuwait ­– grew into these luminous metropolises beginning in the 1970s, fuelled by the discovery of oil and gas, an oligarchic accumulation of wealth, and unconditional grants of political independence from the United Kingdom, the former colonial master of the region.
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