We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
In case you’re wondering, the apostrophe in the title is not a contraction for “is”. It marks the possessive and refers to the large amount of garbage in Puerto Rico. Apparently Puerto Rico’s landfill sites are overflowing, and this has been recognised as an environmental problem for years.
It would be amusing to do a whole post about the deficiencies of waste disposal in an unincorporated territory of the United States without ever mentioning what brought the subject to the forefront of my mind. I seek to amuse, so that is what I am going to do, although readers from the future who seek context might like to click on one or two of the names to which I link below.
I did a quick internet search for articles containing reference to “Puerto Rico” and “trash” or “garbage”, but containing no reference to “Hinchcliffe” or “Trump” or “Biden”. Here are some news reports from the last few years that demonstrate that Puerto Rico’s garbage problem is not new:
I have heard that Trump was quite entertaining at the Al Smith Memorial dinner, but this riposte from the Guardian’s Helen Sullivan displays true comic genius. Her effortless mastery of the role of the po-faced straight man (replace “mastery” and “straight man” with gender-neutral equivalent terms if required) is a joy to behold.
03.35 BST
Trump’s speech ends and he receives warm applause from the crowd. We will end our coverage of this event now.
03.31 BST
Trump says he will bring back the SALT tax deduction. Some context from NBC’s Sahlil Kapur: [screenshot of tweet]
03.26 BST
Trump makes another transphobic joke.
03.26 BST
Trump repeats claims that he has been treated worse than any other president.
He takes a jab at Gaffigan, saying that hopefully his role as Tim Walz will be short-lived.
03.25 BST
Trump makes a joke to boos, then says, “That’s nasty. I told the idiots who gave me this stuff.”
The joke was about Harris’s support for childcare and was directed at her husband, Dough Emhoff and paid child care workers.
“Last time I did this I was wondering against crooked Hillary…I had the meanest guy you’d ever seen write stuff up and man was the room angry,” Trump says.
They said “It’s too much, but I did it anyway.”
Trump jokes that he is meant to make self-depracating jokes, then says, “So here goes. Nope! I got nothing”.
03.15 BST
“Chuck Schumer is here looking very glum, Trump says. “But look on the bright side chuck, considering how woke your party has become, if Kamala loses you still have the chance to become the first woman president,” Trump says – it is a transphobic joke.
03.13 BST
Trump again refers to Harris not appearing in person, and says she is “receiving communion from Gretchen Whitmer,” to claps and cheers.
“If the Democrats really wanted someone to not be with us this evening, they would have just sent Joe Biden,” Trump says.
Trump claims – not clear if joking – that Biden is having second thoughts and wants to come back. There is no evidence of this.
Trump says the term “fake news” is no longer in vogue.
He refers to President Barack Obama as “Barack Hussein Obama” – dog whistling for the baseless ‘birther’ conspiracy theory that Obama is secretly a Muslim born in Kenya.
03.07 BST
Trump says of Harris, “I like her a lot, but now I can’t stand her.”
“Catholics you gotta vote for me,” Trump says. “I’m here and she’s not.”
Trump lists good deeds done by Catholics.
“If you wanted Harris to accept your invitation you should have told her the funds were going to bail out the rioters and looters in Minneapolis,” Trump says, to loud whoops and cheers.
Trump is referring to the George Floyd protests that took place in the historically Catholic city of Minneapolis in 2020.
03.03 BST
“The last Democrat not to attend this important event was Walter Mondale,” Trump says, “And it did not go very well for him. He lost 49 states and he won one: Minnesota. So I said there’s no way I’m missing it.”
Mondale “was expected to do well, then it didn’t work out,” Trump jokes. “It shows you there is a god.”
Trump then says that Harris is weird and it is weird that Harris isn’t here tonight – saying the word several times, referring to the insult Harris and Tim Walz direct at Trump and his supporters.
03.01 BST
“Always: It’s a rule, you gotta go to the dinner, you gotta do it, otherwise bad things are going to happen to you from up there,” Trump jokes, getting a laugh – he is referring to God.
“But my opponent feels that she does not have to be here which is disrespectful to the event and in particular to our Catholic community,” Trump says. The crowd claps.
02.59 BST
“They’ve gone after me. Mr Mayor, you’re peanuts compared to what they did to me,” Trump says.
02.58 BST
“Mayor Adams, good luck with everything, they went after you,” Trump says to a big laugh.
02.57 BST
Trump is receiving a warm response from the crowd.
“They told me under no circumstances are you allowed to use a teleprompter and I get up here and see there is a beautiful teleprompter,” he says.
Unclear if that is a joke or more of Trump’s obsession with whether Harris is using teleprompters or not.
I particularly loved Sullivan’s deadpan re-telling of Trump’s jokes in the character of a robot explaining human humour: ‘…if Kamala loses you still have the chance to become the first woman president,” Trump says – it is a transphobic joke’ and ‘Trump claims – not clear if joking – that Biden is having second thoughts and wants to come back. There is no evidence of this’.
Do I detect a call-back to a famous anecdote about one of Bruce Bairnsfather’s cartoons depicting life in the trenches during World War I? The cartoon in question, headed “So Obvious”, shows an old soldier – probably but not certainly his recurring character “Old Bill” – slumped wearily against a brick wall with an enormous hole in it while his younger companion looks on. The caption says,
The Young and Talkative One: “Who made that ‘ole?”
The Fed-up One: “Mice.”
According to the Bairnsfather’s Wikipedia article, in the next war along, the Nazis, puzzled by the apparent paradox that humour about grumpy British soldiers seemed to actually raise British morale, made careful study of the phenomenon and explained it to their own soldiers, using this very cartoon as an example:
Quoting a Nazi textbook taken from a German prisoner of war that shows the cartoon, the clipping reads: “Obviously, the hole was not made by a mouse. It was made by a shell. There is no humor in this misstatement of facts. The man, Old Bill, was clearly mistaken in thinking a mouse had made it. People who can laugh at such mistakes are obviously not normal; therefore we should pay careful attention to their psychology. Their very decadence may prove to be a weapon of self-defense.”
Call me cynical, but I find it hard to believe that anyone, even an employee of the Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, ever really believed that it was necessary to explain that the hole was not made by mice. I suspect that claimed “Nazi textbook” was in truth written by some chap in the British Ministry of Information who enjoyed his work. Helen Sullivan continues in that great comedic tradition.
A theme appears to be building in this splendid US Presidential election.
JD Vance, the running mate for Mr Trump, has been beaten up for talking about “childless cat ladies”; Taylor Swift, the singer, has come out for Harris and proudly declared herself to be a childless cat lady. Mr Trump, meanwhile, apparently made comments about illegal immigrants eating the moggies.
Meanwhile, 10 Downing Street, the official UK residence in London of the Prime Minister, is renowned for also being home to Larry, a cat who has lived through and endured various prime ministers. A benevolent dictatorship behind the scenes?
(Full disclosure: I drive a Jaguar.)
Question: Where do the dog-owners enter this election cycle?
I have seen the light. The man who convinced me of the truth of MMT was someone called Daron Medway, who replied to a tweet by Richard Murphy that said,
The government can never run out of money https://youtu.be/2m3BXdkDJYI?si=cjSA5MJ5AcDWkKgJ
Politicians, commentators and journalists all like to claim that the UK government could run out of money, but that is total nonsense. The UK government can always create the money it needs to pay its debts. It is the one and only organisation in the UK that can never, as a result, run out of money.
Then-Sen. Kamala Harris warned Americans not to say “Merry Christmas” until there was permanent status for some illegal immigrants — amid a Trump-era battle over protections for some illegal immigrants who came to the U.S. as children.
“And when we all sing happy tunes, and sing Merry Christmas, and wish each other Merry Christmas, these children are not going to have a Merry Christmas. How dare we speak Merry Christmas. How dare we? They will not have a Merry Christmas,” she said at a 2017 press conference, a video of which was obtained by Fox News Digital.
Speakers pushed for the passage of the Dream Act, which would grant a pathway to citizenship for some illegal immigrants who came to the U.S. as minors, NBC News reported.
Here is the video and here is the 2017 NBC article to which the article refers.
This clip has got a lot of play because it shows Kamala Harris as a purse-lipped woke puritan. Fair enough, she is one. Even if one completely accepted her point of view that passing the DREAM1 Act was a desirable objective in 2017, why should that not having been done be the thing that made it outrageous for Americans to wish each other “Merry Christmas” until it was done? There were plenty of worse things going on in the world in 2017: wars, famines, natural catastrophes, terrorism, poverty, crime. Why were these miseries not enough to prompt the curtailment of Christmas greetings until they were solved? Nor were these evils limited to the year 2017. So far as I know the DREAM Act has not been passed to this day. So we must assume Kamala Harris has now personally abstained from “speaking Merry Christmas” for six years and seven months and is still saying “How dare you” to anyone else who does it.
Yet in her defence, gestures of self-abnegation as a demonstration of commitment such as Harris made have a long history. In 1601, during the Dutch Revolt, Archduke Albert of Austria was laying siege to Ostend. His wife, Isabella Clara Eugenia, Infanta of Spain, declared that she would not change her shift until the city fell2. Since that did not happen until September 1604, her underwear got a bit grubby, giving rise to the colour term “Isabelline”.
Now that’s what I call commitment. If she wants to be taken seriously, Kamala Harris needs to follow the example of Isabella and urge her followers to do likewise.
*
1No offence, Yanks, but for introducing the idea of bills or laws whose titles spell out aspirational words, your entire nation deserves to suffer the fate of Ostend.
2This story has been fact-checked to the standard expected of the Guardian or the New York Times.
“If I messed up a funny story around my relatives, they would go ‘That’s not how you tell that joke. The prostitute has to be behind the drapes when the wife comes in.’ You went to Duke—that is an unbelievable privilege. I now have an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters degree from Duke University. And if I can figure out a way to use that, I will. I haven’t figured anything out yet. I think it’s pretty much as useful in real life as this outfit I’m wearing. But so what? I’ll take it. My point is we’re embarrassed about things we should be proud of and proud of things we should be embarrassed about.”
– Jerry Seinfeld drops some humorous truth bombs at a college speech.
I only really cemented in my head which of those Billionaires Having Something To Do With the Internet Elon Musk was in February 2018, when he sent his Tesla Roadster into space. I loved him for that, but fell out of love a few months later over Musk’s behaviour towards Vernon Unsworth. Since then, my regard for Mr Musk has crept up again. It’s nice having freedom of speech on the internet back. I now – and I do know how sad this is – follow him on Xitter or whatever it’s called these days.
The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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