Here comes yet another Brexit cliffhanger!

If anyone had hopes (or fears) that Brexit drama would end today with the UK parliament voting to approve the deal that Boris Johnson had agreed upon with the EU and thus leave the EU on October 31, those were shattered when, despite his wheeling and dealing, cajoling, and threats, the vote was 322-306 on a plan that withheld support from the deal until further conditions were met. The plan was put forward by a former Conservative cabinet member, Oliver Letwin. As a result of this vote, the government did not put forward its withdrawal plan for a vote and so today was yet another humiliating defeat for Johnson, who as prime minister has a 100% record for defeats by his ruling Conservative party, a record that will be hard to beat.
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Rugby World Cup quarterfinals begin today

All the group matches have been completed in the World Cup with the top two teams from each of the four groups moving on to the next quarter-final knockout stage. On Saturday, England will play Australia while New Zealand plays Ireland. On Sunday, Wales plays France while Japan plays South Africa.

A major typhoon Hagidis hit Japan during the tournament forcing organizers to cancel some matches and treat them as drawn games. Whether this might have affected the group results is hard to say. Intransitive discussed the implications of the cancellations
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Trump gets outmaneuvered by Erdogan

Yesterday, Donald Trump released a letter sent by him to Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan warning him about dire consequences if his actions in Syria went too far, though he failed to specify what that limit was. The wording is so absurd and childish that you know that Trump himself must have authored it and he seemed very proud of the tough talk in it. It looks like a parody letter, instead of one sent by one head of state to another. You really should read it for yourself to appreciate it.

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The politics of celebrity absolutions

Comedian and daytime talk show host Ellen DeGeneres was recently seated next to former president George W. Bush at a Dallas Cowboys football game in the special luxury box owned by wealthy owner of the team Jerry Jones. She was clearly pleased to be with Bush and was shown laughing and generally having a good time with him. When she was criticized for this, she gave the following apologia on her show as an example of how we should all get along with people with whom we might disagree.

“I’m friends with George Bush. In fact, I’m friends with a lot of people who don’t share the same beliefs that I have. We’re all different, and I think we’ve forgotten that that’s OK that we’re all different. … Just because I don’t agree with someone on everything doesn’t mean that I am not going to be friends with them. When I say be kind to one another, I don’t mean only the people that think the same way you do. I mean be kind to everyone.”

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Democrats duck from the truth about the American empire

Jon Schwarz writes that in the Democratic debate on Tuesday, none of them grappled with the fact of how American imperialism has been a bipartisan debacle years in the making and the incoherence on what to do about the current situation with Turkey, Syria, and the Kurds is just a manifestation of it. His view is a more fleshed out version of my briefer reaction.
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Good news: Rikers Island jail to close by 2026

The notorious jail will be replaced by four smaller, more modern jails close to New York’s main courthouses.

The Rikers complex counts 10 jails on an island between Queens and the Bronx that mainly houses inmates awaiting trial. The complex has housed jail inmates since the 1930s and has long been known for brutality. It saw hundreds of stabbings each year during the 1980s and early 1990s. It has been nicknamed Gladiator School, Torture Island, the Guantánamo of New York and, in summertime, the Oven.
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Vandal grannies

This story describes a couple of grandmothers in Russia who took the law into their own hands and vandalized a children’s playground.

Two women in Russia’s Leningrad region have been filmed destroying a children’s seesaw after complaining about the noise.

Brandishing a saw, the two women took turns cutting the playground equipment into pieces.
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On social media, critics condemned the behaviour of the two women.

These “vandal grannies will now need to either set up a new seesaw at their own expense or fix this one,” one social media user declared.

“They should have brought some oil to stop the seesaw from screeching,” another commented. “But they took a saw and now they are all over the news like some vandals.”

It reminded me of this Monty Python sketch

A doozy of a mixed metaphor

A metaphor is often used to conjure up a visual image to illustrate an abstract idea in a concrete way. In his essay Politics and the English Language (1946), George Orwell wrote that when someone mixes their metaphors, it is a sign that they are merely cobbling together words and phrases that sound good to them without paying attention to what they are saying. Matt Taibbi has hilariously highlighted the many occasions when New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman does this.

But a few days ago, I came across a real doozy of a mixed metaphor by someone described as a former senior Trump administration official who was explaining why Senate Republicans were unwilling to step out of line and criticize Donald Trump. The official said, “Nobody wants to be the zebra that strays from the pack and gets gobbled up by the lion. They have to hold hands and jump simultaneously.”

My mind immediately tried to imagine zebras holding hands and jumping together, though how that would enable them to escape a marauding lion was not clear to me.

I cannot imagine that even Friedman would descend to such depths.

The need to tighten vaccination mandates

The editors of Scientific American magazine have come out with a strong editorial arguing that the present exceptions for vaccinations given to people based on their religious and philosophical beliefs is threatening public health. While many of the people seeking exceptions do so on religious grounds and come from the ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities or Muslim or Christian academies or alternative-learning institutions, quite a few claim philosophical exemptions because they have been frightened by the refuted study of Andrew Wakefield that has been touted by celebrities such as Jenny McCarthy and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and spread widely over social media.
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What a possible Brexit deal might look like

One big sticking point in getting a Brexit deal that will be agreeable to the EU and can get passed by the UK parliament is what to do about the border between Ireland and Northern Ireland. The UK leaving the EU means that Northern Ireland would also leave while Ireland remains in the EU. That would seem to require a customs and tariffs barrier between the two parts of the island, something everyone hates and would be a deal breaker. A proposed deal being worked on by government of Boris Johnson would make the customs and tariffs barrier run down the Irish sea separating the two islands. But this would mean that goods could flow freely across the land border dividing Northern Ireland and Ireland even though Northern Ireland is subjected to UK rules and the Ireland to EU rules.
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