The current pandemic has reached a strange state. On the one hand, people are still getting infected in large numbers. In the US, on average there are 100,000 cases per day and the true number is likely to be greater since so many people are now testing at home and may not be reporting positive results to the CDC.
Readers may recall a recent post of mine where I described the heated emotions about the move to add a bike and pedestrian trail in the small town of Del Rey Oaks that I live in that would provide easier access to a small body of water accurately called the Frog Pond. Opponents of the move had put on the ballot an initiative known as Measure B that would have prohibited the trail and the vote was held on June 7th. Since California routinely allows mail-in voting, it takes a long time to get the final results and just this past week the official results were announced and Measure B had been defeated, which means that construction of the trail will proceed.
The result was a squeaker, with 387 ‘Yes’ votes and 399 ‘No’ votes, a narrow margin of 12 votes. Noteworthy was the fact that the total number of people who voted was 799. Since the town has a population of only 1520 with 1216 registered voters, the turn out was 65.7% of registered voters, more than twice the countywide average of 31.1%. This shows the intensity of the feeling that the Frog Pond generated. Leading up the the election, the only people who came to my door to canvass were those on both sides of this issue, not any of the candidates for office. Also, the overwhelming amount of literature that I received was about Measure B.
Of the 799 people who voted, for unknown reasons 13 did not vote on this particular issue, greater than the margin of the result. In big elections, it is is easy to feel that one’s vote does not matter and decide not to bother. It is small town elections that reveal the importance of voting.
During Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony that has been highly damaging to Trump World, committee vice chair Liz Cheney mentioned two messages that potential witnesses received before that day that contained veiled threats to pressure them to not say anything damaging to Trump and his enabling cronies. We now learn that Hutchinson was the recipient.
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Maybe because of my love of puns and other forms of wordplay, my brain, whenever it encounters any ambiguity in a sentence due to its construction or punctuation, immediately seizes upon the more bizarre meaning, rather than settling on the more reasonable interpretation. Take for example this story about fish falling from the sky.
Fish are falling from the sky in parts of San Francisco, and a boom in coastal anchovy populations is to blame.
Reddit user sanfrannie posted earlier this month that about a dozen 8-inch silver fish “rained down from the sky” onto their friend’s roof and back deck in the Outer Richmond. Several other users commented with similar experiences — one person said they “heard a whoosh sound behind me and heard a massive splat” before seeing fish scattered on a nearby driveway. Another commented that they “almost got hit by a fish waiting for a bus” in the Castro, and a third person said they assumed “a band of roving kids were doing a Tik Tok sardine-throwing challenge on a roof somewhere” after seeing several fish fall onto an Outer Richmond sidewalk.
Local fishers and researchers are blaming seabirds that, because of an explosion in the anchovy population off the coast of the Bay Area, now have more fish than they know what to do with.
My attention was caught by the line about someone saying that they “almost got hit by a fish waiting for a bus”. My thoughts went along the lines of: Why was the fish waiting for a bus? Was it in order to get back to the ocean? What did this person do to the fish that it tried to hit them? How does a fish hit someone anyway? With its tail? Its fins?
That is the way my brain works. Newspaper headlines are often my biggest source of raw material because their enforced brevity makes them ripe for misinterpretation for warped minds like mine.
In a detailed profile of Florida governor Ron DeSantis who is clearly running for the Republican party’s presidential nomination in 2024, Dexter Filkins writes that he is following the path that Trump opened up, that seeks to motivate base voters by being fiercely combative. The difference is that DeSantis is more articulate, determined, and focused.
For decades, the Democratic Party had commanded a majority of Florida’s registered voters. But the state was changing, as Trump’s election helped energize a shift in political affinities. The Republican Party’s rank and file became increasingly radical, and G.O.P. leaders appeared only too happy to follow them. “There was always an element of the Republican Party that was batshit crazy,” Mac Stipanovich, the chief of staff to Governor Bob Martinez, a moderate Republican, told me. “They had lots of different names—they were John Birchers, they were ‘movement conservatives,’ they were the religious right. And we did what every other Republican candidate did: we exploited them. We got them to the polls. We talked about abortion. We promised—and we did nothing. They could grumble, but their choices were limited.
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White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony on Tuesday of Trump’s obnoxious behavior of throwing food and dishes and overturning all the content of a table when he is displeased reveals more than that of an adult who is childish. It also shows the utter contempt he has for people, such as the valet for his private dining room, who have to clean up after him. Needlessly creating work for those who work for you and having no concern for them is a sign of a narcissistic personality. But of course, we already knew that about Trump.
I notice that in all the attempts by Trump supporters to discredit her testimony, this description of Trump’s behavior has gone unchallenged, perhaps because it is so believable from what we already know about him.
Long time readers know of my antipathy towards any monarchical system. The relics of feudal systems seem to me to have no place in any Democratic society and the British royal family is a prime example of an institution that should no longer exist. Its members tend to think of themselves as above the law, as indeed they often are, using their wealth and privileged position to shield themselves from the consequences of the most shameful behavior.
For an example, one needs to look no further than the Queen’s son Andrew and his disgraceful role in the whole ugly Epstein-Maxwell affair. The latter has just received a sentence of twenty years in prison for her role but Andrew managed to settle with Virginia Giuffre the person who brought charges against him that she was forced to have sex with him while she was underage.
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The sudden scheduling of yesterday’s hearings with no clue as to what to expect made some observers think there would be something explosive. I for one thought that it might turn out to be anti-climatic but I was wrong. The two-hour session featured just one witness Cassidy Hutchinson, who was an aide to White House chief of staff Mark Meadows. I, like many others, had never heard of her before these hearings began so her sudden prominent role took me by surprise. She occupied the office right next to Meadows and just down the short corridor from the Oval Office. In her role, she was often the conduit for people who wanted to reach the president. They had to to through Meadows which meant that she was the person whom they often first contacted. As such, she was in the thick of things. Her account of the events that led up to January 6th was a must-watch occasion.
We already knew that Trump has the temperament of a petulant two-year old. What she revealed was that he has the temperament of a violent, reckless, and petulant two-year old who has been thoroughly spoiled by his parents and has a tantrum and throws food and dishes when things do not go his way.
Cassidy Hutchinson testified that Donald Trump was outraged with former attorney general William Barr for refusing to go along with the president’s lies about widespread fraud in the 2020 election.
In December 2020, Barr told the AP in an interview, “To date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.”
Trump was so enraged by Barr’s comments that he threw a plate at a wall in the White House, Hutchinson said. She walked in to the room where Trump had eaten lunch that day to see a porcelain plate shattered on the floor and ketchup smeared on the wall.
When asked whether this was a common occurrence for Trump, Hutchinson said, “There were several times throughout my tenure with the chief of staff that I was aware of him either throwing dishes or flipping the tablecloth.”
I am following the he congressional hearings on the causes of the riot on January 6, 2021, the latest of which is taking place today. Jordan Klepper talked to some people who were attending a Trump rally in Mississippi s asked them for their response to the hearings so far. Many said that they had not watched the hearings at all (unsurprising), some said that they were not even aware that hearings were going on (surprise), and some even said that they had no idea what the term ‘January 6th’ refers to and did not know what had happened on that day in 2021 (incredible).
When he showed them clips of Trump’s own attorney general Bill Barr saying that the election fraud claims were “bullshit”, they claimed that it might be doctored video. When two women said that they only believed Trump and his family, he showed them the clip of Ivanka Trump saying that she believed Barr when he said there was no fraud. Their response? That it was not Ivanka at all but possibly a clone. That actually is plausible. There is something curious about Ivanka’s stiff affect. She looks like a Barbie doll with a voice synthesizer installed.
I was surprised to read that Prince Charles had accepted large amounts of cash from a billionaire Qatari, apparently to go towards his charity.
Claims in the Sunday Times that Charles accepted three donations between 2011 and 2015 from former Qatari prime minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber al-Thani – known as “HBJ” – were described as “shocking” by critics. One donation, totalling €1m, was reportedly handed over in a small suitcase and another was stuffed in a carrier bag from upmarket department store Fortnum & Mason.
The cash, allegedly then counted by Charles’s aides and subsequently collected by Coutts bank, was paid to the Prince of Wales’s charitable fund which aims to “transform lives and build sustainable communities” through awarding grants.
