The climate… Trump said he was going to do it; he did it. As with nearly all the other ExecuTweet orders, this one will be a dud. The reason coal stays in the West Virginian ground is not because of all those environmental regulations, but because it’s too expensive to get out. Even if they can… Read more »
Category: Politics
Curry Lamb in Hong Kong
This morning, 777 of Carrie Lam’s best friends voted for her to be Hong Kong’s Chief Executive. The pronunciation of the word “7” in Cantonese is “chat,” but is also a contraction of “chow height” which is the foul language for stinky (“chow”) female genitalia (“height”). Not a good omen, and the selection committee’s subliminal… Read more »
Fact Free Politics
The question is: Can we have a healthy policy without facts? Truth is scarce and difficult, which is why we value it above lies, which are abundant and easy. In the past few weeks, the administration of the US has been promulgating lies at an unprecedented rate. It takes credit for the recent economic performance despite… Read more »
Entertainment
A friend of mine who’s a journalist hoped Trump would get in because things had been dull under Obama – and that prompted a slow epiphany. I’ve said in a previous post that it was about change, that Obama delivered steady growth, blah blah blah, but didn’t make any systemic changes; that there seems to… Read more »
Toothache
A few years ago, I had double toothache. Within seven days, not one but both of my upper wisdom teeth became inflamed. Pulling the uppers ones was easy – they were dead anyway – but one of the opposing lower ones needed to be pulled too. It was a healthy tooth, and one of the… Read more »
Trump for Change?
Here’s a thing. This link is a list of amendments made to the Constitution of the United States of America since it came into being. In summary, the first ten and the twenty-seventh amendment were proposed on 25th September, 1789 and, with the exception of the 27th, passed on 15th December, 1791 (the twenty-seventh amendment was to do… Read more »
Elective Plutocracies
It seems that I am missing the point. When Obama came to power, he promised change. The kind of change Obama delivered was not the kind that his supporters thought he was going to deliver. Obama delivered Obamacare and steady progress on a number of mundane problems, but what his supporters wanted was to break the… Read more »
The Great Confusicator
As Robert Fisk points out, we’re becoming addicted to Trump. Presidency by tweet and publicity stunts are diverting us from the real nastiness happening behind the scenes. But I want to take a step back. Obama came to power promising change, but the type of change he promised wasn’t the type of change we thought he… Read more »
The First Four Weeks
Here’s a (slightly adapted) quote: “[Trump] did not have to destroy democracy; he merely took advantage of the decay of democracy and at the critical moment obtained the support of many to whom, though they detested [Trump], he yet seemed the only man strong enough to get things done.” The big charge against Obama is… Read more »
Trump Chee-Hwa
When Hong Kong reverted to Chinese sovereignty in 1997, one of the first orders of business of Tung Chee-Hwa, its first Chief Executive (the most senior administrative post in Hong Kong) was to establish the supremacy of Chinese Communist Party over the local judiciary. It’s interesting that one of Trump’s first acts is to attempt to establish… Read more »