Paying tribute to Biden

People from all over have lined up to talk about their high esteem for Joe Biden and to credit him for the decision to quit the race. For those of us on the outside, the decision may have been obvious and perhaps long overdue but we should not forget the seductive allure of power, especially for someone who spent a lifetime in politics and sought the job he now has and finally won it.

All of us older people tend to believe that we can still do what we have done before and that there is no need to step away. One can easily persuade oneself that there is more to be done and that you are the best person to do it. Furthermore, in the US, being a one-term president is a sign of being a loser. So the desire to run again must have been immensely strong and Biden must be credited with accepting the realization that the time has come to leave the stage for the good of the party and the country and hand the reins over to someone else.

It is not hard to imagine what might have happened on the GOP side. Even if serial sex abuser and convicted felon Donald Trump (SSACFT) were to speak and behave in an even more deranged fashion than he currently does, so that it would be obvious to anyone outside his cult following that he should be under constant care, he would never leave the stage of his own accord and none of those around him in the party leadership would have the guts to be the first to state that the emperor had no clothes, even if he literally took off all his clothes in public, an image that I apologize for foisting on you.

Stephen Colbert was one of those who saluted Biden for his decision.

Kamala Harris comes out swinging

My biggest reaction to Joe Biden announcing that he was quitting the race was relief. Each day had been a little tense, wondering whether he might do or say something that would give further fodder to the endless speculation that he was too old and losing it. Suddenly, with his exit, that focus shifts to serial sex abuser and convicted felon Donald Trump (SSACFT) whose cognitive decline will now be under greater scrutiny now that he will be compared to the far more youthful-looking, energetic, and articulate Kamala Harris.

In speaking to the election campaign staff at their headquarters in Delaware yesterday, Harris did not disappoint. She gave a rousing speech that lasted about 18 minutes, with Joe Biden watching remotely and chiming in, that laid out the themes she will likely pursue during the campaign.


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Republicans caught flat-footed by Biden’s decision to quit

Kamala Harris has moved rapidly to consolidate her position as the most plausible person to replace Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee, with prominent Democrats all lining up to endorse her candidacy All the people who had been floated as possible alternatives have either ruled out running or have directly endorsed her. The very top leadership of Charles Schumer in the Senate and Hakeem Jeffries in the House of Representatives have not as yet done so (nor has former president Barack Obama) but that may be because they do not want to give the impression that the party is steamrolling the process and not giving the rank and file a chance to voice their preferences. But Nancy Pelosi has done so.

In many ways, this is not unlike the way that the UK selects its prime minister. The party insiders pick the leader of the party who then becomes the prime minister should the party win the majority of seats. In the UK, the party leader only contests their own constituency but that is seen as enough of a mandate to be the prime minister of the whole country while in the US, the nominee, however they are selected, still has to gain the support of voters in the general election.
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The election gets even wilder

With Joe Biden’s exit, suddenly the presidential election process gets a major shot of adrenaline. The attention immediately shifts to the process of the Democrats selecting another nominee at its convention in August 19-22 in Chicago. A party’s nominee is always selected at the party convention by a majority of delegates although due to the primary process, almost all the delegates are committed to specific candidates even before the convention starts and so there is little suspense. In this case, Biden already had a majority of delegates. With his exit those delegates become free agents and the process becomes wide open, although the process of finding a new nominee is fairly straightforward.

On the first ballot, a winning nominee would need to secure the votes of a majority of Democrats’ roughly 4,000 pledged delegates. If no candidate won a majority on the first ballot, Democrats would continue on to a second ballot, in which so-called “superdelegates” would have an opportunity to vote.

Superdelegates are mostly senior Democratic party leaders, and they would go to the convention not pledged to any candidate. With the roughly 700 superdelegates added to the voting pool, the winning candidate would then need to secure about 2,300 delegates to capture the nomination.

Although superdelegates would make up a relatively small share of the delegate pool, they could play an important role in choosing the nominee. Their support for a particular candidate would speak volumes and could sway fellow delegates.

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Joe Biden withdraws from the race

He announced today that he will no longer seek the Democratic nomination for the presidency.

Although his decision is being described as a ‘shock’, this did not come to me as a surprise. Ever since his poor debate performance created doubts about his cognitive abilities, there has been an increasing number of calls from his supporters that for the good of the party and the country, he should quit. The whole process became a sort of sad deathwatch, knowing that the inevitable was near but not knowing when. I felt that Biden was going through some of the Kubler Ross five stages of grief, namely denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance, and that he would at some point bow to the inevitable.

It would not have been easy for Biden to reach the acceptance stage. He is a lifelong politician whose ambition to become president was thwarted multiple times before achieving it late in life. He also had a pretty successful presidency, and must have wanted to continue it. But his tenure was marred by several bad moves, the biggest of which was his support for Israel’s horrendous treatment of the people of Gaza. That clearly angered many young people who can see injustice much more clearly than adults can and are less willing to compromise and make excuses for it.

So now the process of finding a successor begins.

I have never seen a presidential race like this one. On the Republican side you have an absolutely awful liar and narcissist grifter who has somehow managed to captivate a large number of supporters and bully his entire party leadership into groveling before him. On the Democratic side, you have a process in which they have less than four months to find a new nominee and rally support for them. The experience of other countries that do not have such an insanely long election process suggests that this timetable is feasible, though for Americans it will be novel.

The right to access a toilet

Indoor plumbing that directs human waste into channels where it can be properly treated and disposed of has been one of the biggest contributions to public health. So it is a little surprising that there isn’t a more concerted effort to have more plentiful and easily accessible public toilets because the need for one can arise when one is away from home. But Guido Corradi says that the opposite is happening, that public toilets are getting increasingly scarce.

Toilets were one of the biggest steps forward for humanity: they allowed us to create cleaner spaces, reducing death and improving health. By the 19th century, in Western countries, bathrooms with toilets were increasingly included in home design, catering to essential human needs, such as urination, defecation and personal cleaning.
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And yet, the vast majority of public restrooms have not yet embraced this aspect of wellbeing. On the contrary, the poor state of them often elicits disgust and repulsion. In severe situations, for some people, these adverse psychological responses can escalate to pathological levels, including incontinence, urinary problems, anxiety, and significant alterations to their normal social life.

For many people, most of the time, the state of restrooms is something they think about only when they fail, if they are unusable or unavailable, or there simply aren’t any. Yet toilets often fail when you need them the most. And it’s in such moments you realise that these invisible parts of our cities are fundamental. So, why are restrooms typically tucked away at the back of establishments, hidden both literally and metaphorically? We all must keep in mind that the use of public bathrooms is inevitable, and that making them accessible and appropriate is a matter of human dignity.
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Political maneuvering in France

The recent French elections for the National Assembly resulted in the far-right National Rally party being pushed into third place but with no clear winner. The New Popular Front (NFP), a broad alliance of left-wing parties, won the most seats but not enough to form a majority and the center-right parties refused to form an alliance with them, fearing that their leader would become prime minister.

But then two days ago, a last-minute alliance of all the center right parties and a few unaffiliated members resulted in one of their candidates Yaël Braun-Pivet being re-elected head of the National Assembly, opening the door to president Emmanuel Macron appointing a prime minister from his own party.
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Bob Newhart (1929-2024)

The comedian died yesterday at the age of 94.

A former accountant who began moonlighting in comedy venues, Newhart first rose to fame in the 1960s for his observational humor and droll delivery. His breakthrough album, The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart, recorded over several days in Houston before Newhart had any stand-up experience, netted him Grammys for best new artist and album of the year in 1961.

“In 1959, I gave myself a year to make it in comedy; it was back to accounting if comedy didn’t work out,” he once said, according to Digney’s statement. Newhart was 30 years old and years into a career as a Chicago accountant when the album went No 1 on the sales charts, the first comedy album to do so.

The comic went on to dominate the sitcom landscape for nearly two decades with two beloved TV shows, first with The Bob Newhart Show, which aired on CBS from 1972 until 1978. The show, in which Newhart starred as a befuddled psychologist in Chicago, became one of the most popular sitcoms of all time.
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Born on 5 September 1929 in Oak Park, Illinois, George Robert Newhart ushered in a new style of comedy in the 1960s, breaking from the mold of vaudeville and Borscht Belt routines for bits based in observation and psychology. His performance style incorporated stammering, deadpan delivery and quietly subversive material that appealed widely.

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What are these people afraid of?

Elon Musk made an announcement that he is moving the headquarters of Space X from California to Texas. Fine. It’s his company and he can do what he damn well likes with it, although uprooting the lives of the many employees because of his personal pique about some public policy is the action of an entitled jerk.

But what struck me was the reason he gave for the move.

He called a new law signed Monday by California Gov. Gavin Newsom that bars school districts from requiring staff to notify parents of their child’s gender identification change the “final straw.”

“I did make it clear to Governor Newsom about a year ago that laws of this nature would force families and companies to leave California to protect their children,” Musk wrote.

What exactly are these people protecting their children from? If children are identifying their gender differently in school but not telling their parents about it, that says to me that the problem lies at home, not at school, that their children are afraid of what their parents might do. Experiencing doubt and uncertainty about one’s gender identity must undoubtedly be very difficult for children to deal with and if they feel the need to seek a school teacher or counselor to discuss this, then requiring schools to inform parents will only result in the children not talking to counselors and instead seeking someone who may be a lot less responsible or qualified.
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