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What you want to say – 5 August 2020 August 5, 2020

Posted by WorldbyStorm in Uncategorized.
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As always, following on Dr. X’s suggestion, it’s all yours, “announcements, general discussion, whatever you choose”, feel free.

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1. terrymdunne - August 5, 2020

Out now is episode one of Peelers and Sheep: Rebel Tales from the Land entitled ‘The Forgotten’ it covers the 1919 Meath and Kildare farm workers’ strike, the background of the strike i.e. the agrarian economy of the time and the food supply legislative measures of W.W.1, before culminating with some local accounts of the general strike in support of hunger-striking prisoners in Mountjoy Gaol in April 1920.

https://peelersandsheep.ie/podcast/ep-1-the-forgotten/

The topics of the next episodes are the 1920 agrarian movement in the West of Ireland (to be released at the beginning of September) and the Leinster Regiment and the Malabar rebellion of 1921 (to be released at the beginning of October).

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tafkaGW - August 5, 2020

That sounds very interesting. I’ve always thought rural revolt is not covered enough.

Found and downloaded on my Antennapod without a bother. Will listen later today if I get the chance.

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terrymdunne - August 5, 2020

Thanks tafkaGW, the thing is we have an urban left – in the broad sense of the term – and it is those people who have resurrected the memory of the Dublin Lock-Out or the Limerick Soviet – and fair play to them for doing so, if you go back to 1920 or 1760 or 1830 though, I would say rural social conflict – often, but not always, agrarian – is what loomed large.

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tafkaGW - August 6, 2020

Listened to it last night and I learned a lot, about the tillage orders, the rural origins of the Transport Workers Union, and about just how organised and inventive they were, when they had the material advantage.

Great materialist history, Terry. I especially liked the quotations from primary sources.

Highly recommended podcast – I’m looking forward to the episode about the West.

BTW – we need a new world-wide tillage order, the bio-systems of which we are a part are being hammered and can’t support general meat production.

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terrymdunne - August 6, 2020

There was a whole wider issue of food supply at the time that I don’t really go into (compulsory tillage had more direct relevance to strikes and unionisation) – this included agitation for allotments and attempts to set prices and control exports – it all strikes me that this does indeed have a modern ecological resonance regarding local food and resilience and what not.

Also – amazingly – the only practical work of the Dail dept. of agriculture during the revolutionary years was to help set up co-operative farms and have a national day of tree planting – there was a particular emphasis on local groups planting 16 trees to commemorate the executed 1916 leaders.

Apart from government compulsory tillage the idea of a turn back to tillage was a current one among folk from different parts of the political spectrum, the idea was there would be more employment plus more possibilities for spin-off industries either down-stream or up-stream from the farm.

Thanks again for the positive feedback!

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WorldbyStorm - August 6, 2020

Said it before rural radicalism is amazingly underconsidered on the Irish left. Seeing this history addressed is key. Thanks Terry.

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2. Tomboktu - August 5, 2020

Mam! I’m being patronised again. Stephen Donnelly’s back on the radio.

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3. NFB - August 5, 2020

Is it really bad of me to see Vinters association types howling about pubs having to stay closed and how some of them will never re-open, and my first reaction to be “The country could do with a few less pubs”? I hate people out of work, but this country’s dependence on alcohol as the primary avenue for socialising is so embarrassing sometimes, and there’s little effort to counteract that. Was it true that one of the only reasons the health service was able to cope during the worst period was that alcohol-related admittances were down substantially?

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tafkaGW - August 5, 2020

Taking your point about jobs, I agree the drinks industry has far too much social and economic power in RoI. It won’t be a bad thing if the Covid crisis weakens it.

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WorldbyStorm - August 5, 2020

Agreed. Hate the idea of people losing jobs but the drinks industry is remarkably powerful.

I hadn’t heard that re admittances – the times I’ve been in A&E the last three or so years it is striking on a Monday AM how many there are there due to drink inflicted injury of one form or another.

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irishelectionliterature - August 5, 2020

Talking to someone who works in the health sector and they were telling me similar regarding A&E and the pubs. She also remarked about the lack of sporting injuries which would normally make a good proportion of patients. She was dreading rugby coming back as that is responsible for the majority of sports injuries.

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sonofstan - August 6, 2020

” the drinks industry is remarkably powerful”

It’s the pub industry really: one of the ways it manifests itself is the near impossibility of getting a temporary license in Ireland. In England, its relatively easy, as long as you are ‘of good character’, to get a temporary dispensation to serve drink at your gig, your theatre show, your bookfair or whatever. All of which can very usefully cross-subsidise the main object. Whereas in Ireland….

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WorldbyStorm - August 6, 2020

Yeah, it is amazing how much of a strangle hold that is, and the knock on effects in terms of events and so on…

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4. tafkaGW - August 5, 2020

This particular ‘what if’ bad dream has plagued me over the last couple of days:

What if the funders and behind the scenes powers in the GOP get together and decide not to endorse Trump for president at their convention, deciding he’s a dead man golfing, and instead select, say a not too rabidly conservative woman, in, say, her 50s. Much in the way Obama arranged Biden’s defeat of Sanders behind the scenes.

She then runs explicitly portraying Biden as a semi-senile groper at best, and rings some of the bells that Trump rang in the rustbelt without his incoherence. She does subtle Clinton/Biden structural and carceral racism as opposed to crude racism. She runs on the basis of being the first woman president.

Would she not stand a good chance against Biden?

Are the GOP capable of this kind of pivot at this stage?

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NFB - August 5, 2020

She would…excepting the impact a betrayed and suitably rabid Trump would have on such an election.

My fear is of a Trump defeat in November where he refuses to accept the legitimacy of the result and where that could lead.

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tafkaGW - August 5, 2020

I get the impression that if he and his family were promised immunity Trump might be persuaded to throw in the towel at this stage.

But who knows.

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NFB - August 5, 2020

I don’t think that man would be persuaded to back away from anything if it cost him an ounce of face, or any bit of his enormous ego. I think he’ll have to be dragged, kicking and screaming, from the White House, and I think I might mean literally.

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Miguel62 - August 5, 2020

It might come to that. Would the Joint Chiefs intervene and kick him out I wonder? What would be the long term implications of a move like that? Slippery slope once the military assume a political role…

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WorldbyStorm - August 5, 2020

I find it difficult to believe that Trump could or would hang on. But then again, it is Trump and for the first time in generations the question of a US president not leaving has a certain resonance. What’s difficult to see is how either the judiciary of the legislature could stand over such an outcome even if it was close. I can’t help but feel that a lot of what we’re hearing is Trump doing his usual inept covering all bases and throwing shade too. Agree Miguel62, never a good look when the military come in, even in order to uphold the constitution but… in fairness the military seems to be in some ways more enlightened than their political masters.

Most amazing thing about this is it makes Nixon look like a class act. Trump is so far down the curve by contrast that Nixon’s very very evident flaws seem if not minor, somehow lesser. Though I’ve always had a (misguided) slight soft spot for Nixon for some reason, a strange and complex person and vastly more intelligent than Trump.

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Miguel62 - August 5, 2020

The Trump v Nixon comparison is interesting too. Nixon was doomed only when the Republican party turned against him. Today’s GOP shows absolutely no inclination to do so.
Increased polarisation, a drift to extremism and the narrowing of the centre ground is ominous.

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WorldbyStorm - August 5, 2020

Very ominous – that’s true re the GOP and Nixon. The current GOP have really doubled down on Trump

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oliverbohs - August 5, 2020

If Trump wasn’t a raging narcissist, had spent more of the past 3.5 years being assiduous in being closer to the military and the spooks, didn’t have a revolving door of advisors, wd at least do an impression of a guy in control like Cuomo is getting away with, then maybe. But in 2016 he positioned himself as a critic of intel sources and the deep state so you’d wonder has he any traction there.

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CL - August 5, 2020

“The Trump administration is considering taking unilateral action on measures like enhanced unemployment insurance and a moratorium on evictions if it can’t agree with Congress on an economic relief bill, The Washington Post reported on Monday.
But the White House would still rather get a bill through Congress, The Post reported, and President Donald Trump has said his priorities are boosted unemployment checks and an eviction moratorium.”
https://www.businessinsider.com/white-house-unilateral-action-congress-stimulus-unemployment-benefits-eviction-2020-8

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WorldbyStorm - August 5, 2020

That’s a great point oliverbohs. That positioning wasn’t very clever at all. It’s one thing to diss everyone else but unwise to antagonise the intelligence apparatus, the civil service and in many ways the military (and his adminstrations attitude to the outbreak of Covid on that aircraft carrier and the treatment of the Captain was just abysmal). Indeed the only federal agency that seems to sway towards him is arguably Homeland Security. Which is sort of terrifying.

Then again when you have people like Steve Bannon going on about ‘dismantling the administrative state’ you know a serious analysis let alone a clever strategy is unlikely to be forthcoming. Which reminds me, what is it about Bannon that his every word is feted – the Guardian was back at it at the weekend. On any serious level he’s been shown up time and again as the spoofer he is and yet he says a bit of stuff about this that or the other (Dominic Cummings) and he’s treated as some sort of political prophet/genius.

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oliverbohs - August 5, 2020

The thing about Cummings is he’s still around. Propriety, as a reason for him to resign that time in May, turned out to be meaningless. He’s seemingly on a mission. Bannon by contrast looks amateurish, cdn’t hold out in his broom cupboard in the White House. Trump might only listen to family members’ wheezes to get govt officials to stay in his hotel resorts for weeks longer than necessary

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WorldbyStorm - August 5, 2020

Yeah, amateurish is it. Cummings a limpet. He won’t let go ever.

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yourcousin - August 5, 2020

“Much in the way Obama arranged Biden’s defeat of Sanders behind the scenes.”

You mean the Democratic Party primaries?

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tafkaGW - August 5, 2020

Nope – Obama rang around persuading competitors to stand down in favour of Biden.

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yourcousin - August 5, 2020

Just so we’re clear, we’re talking post S. Carolina, but pre Super Tuesday?

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6to5against - August 5, 2020

I’m not a huge fan of Obama, but when we talk about either about ‘behind the scenes’ politicking and/or the primaries, aren’t we just talking about politics?

I really liked Sanders in terms of policies, but had my doubts about him as a candidate. About Biden too. But I can’t imagine either being shocked about behind-close-doors agreements, political positioning etc…

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WorldbyStorm - August 5, 2020

Always felt that once he had the heart attack that was Sanders done for as a serious candidate in this election. Not his fault but it’s one of those things I suspect many of those who were warmer to him than ohters would find problematic – and that’s before we get to the great US voters.

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oliverbohs - August 5, 2020

He did win the California primary, and pushed Biden hard in Texas. The rest, yeah. The momentum Biden got in the southern states wasn’t to be stopped. Let the record show however that the Dems had to get Buttegieg and Harris to drop out, keep Warren running till Super Tuesday so as to hive off votes away from Sanders (and no other reason) and put everything behind Biden. No real use complaining, that’s politics, but it shows they were scared of Bernie for a time. And the voter suppression was all too dismally real.
Biden still won’t back universal health care. And all the talk of John Hume this week shines light on how early stages of dementia more or less ended his political career soon after winning the Nobel Peace prize. Are we meant to believe Biden is a one term president, never mind two? (And yeah, Sanders is older still, a definite disadvantage, though he’s way more lucid than the two presidential candidates)

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6to5against - August 5, 2020

I think its too late to do this now? Both in terms of not having enough time to establish a candidate, and also in prosaic details like getting on the ballot in all 50 states

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tafkaGW - August 6, 2020

Good: the wisdom of this crowd seems to be that the GOP is locked into Trump.

And perhaps Biden will have to hand over to a vice-president, if he gets elected and perhaps that will be a good thing.

We live in muted hope.

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CL - August 6, 2020

Biden if he wins will when inaugurated be older than Reagan was when he finished his second term.
Remember the Reagan jokes; What did he know and when did he forget it?
This time the choice of VP candidate will be more important than usual.

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WorldbyStorm - August 6, 2020

V V important.

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sonofstan - August 6, 2020

Too late?
Are Trump and Biden even officially on the ballot papers yet? neither party has had their convention.

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WorldbyStorm - August 6, 2020

Short of catastrophe though that’s it isn’t it?

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sonofstan - August 6, 2020

Yeah, I was responding to 6to5 – I think it would be possible for either party to replace the candidate now and ratify at convention.

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WorldbyStorm - August 6, 2020

Yeah, it would. I guess if either candidate went down with Covid-19 or something like that. Small wonder they’re staying away. In fairness, so would I if I were them.

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6to5against - August 6, 2020

Hmm….it appears the dates vary from state to state. Found this on 538. It says most states have a deadline reached by early October, so I suppose there is still time.
It goes through all the possible scenarios for replacing candidates, though it’s focussed on Covid rather than an intraparty coup.
I only had a quick read, but it seems like a lot of not-implausible scenarios would leave things unclear…

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5. 6to5against - August 5, 2020

On this issue of whether Trump will quietly leave office if/when he is defeated, we have to remember that the person putting this into the discussion is Trump himself. Like so many other things he has done, if this was a developing country or one we knew little about, we would already be saying that democracy has died. But I think in this case he is shooting himself in the foot.

I’m inclined to believe that a significant factor in boosting his vote in 2016 was simply that his election would be the most interesting outcome of the election. Even while hating everything he stands for, a little part of me watched the 2016 result with fascination. A little like the Brexit result, or a great plot twist at the end of a TV episode, it left me wondering, ‘Well, what the hell is going to happen now?’ And eagerly tuning in for more.

Perhaps I’m uniquely lacking in moral fibre, but I think others – who actually had a vote – were similarly fascinated. And so dull had electoral politics become by 2016, and so ingrained a pernicious political perspective, that I can understand people wanting to vote in a way that would be seen as transgressive, just to shake things up. I’ve no idea how big this factor was, but I’m convinced that it was out there in 2016 – and every small factor, in a way, can be seen as decisive in a close election.

But now? Would another Trump victory be the most interesting part of the political soap opera. Would that be the outcome that keeps us all glued to our TV screens in November? Not now that Trump has introduced a great plot twist at a pivotal moment. ‘What will he do next? What will the army do? What heroes will stand up for democracy?’

I know what way I’d vote if I was just trying to shake things up.

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WorldbyStorm - August 5, 2020

Don’t think it’s a lack of moral fibre. There was a fascination element in terms of novelty and what would he do next. What’s interesting is that there is no ‘next’ in politics in that sense. It’s all pretty much straight down the line however much we may disagree. Simply being combative or ‘disruptive’ doesn’t really do much. And in a weird way he’s literally the worst person to try this because he’s so clearly limited in so many ways. But yes, that’s a very good point. Is that part of the performance, to see how it ends? Cut to Stephen King’s The Dead Zone.

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CL - August 5, 2020

“President Donald Trump said the coronavirus pandemic is “going away,” as the U.S. continues to see tens of thousands of new daily cases and recorded 1,380 deaths on Tuesday.
“This thing’s going away. It will go away like things go away,” Trump said Wednesday morning in a telephone interview with Fox News. He said the U.S. is in “very good shape” while touting economic indicators….
“This is a terrible thing that China sent us,” Trump said.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-08-05/trump-says-surging-virus-will-go-away-like-things-go-away

“The latest composite forecast from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention projects an average of nearly 1,000 deaths per day through Aug. 22….
Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, has struck a far more cautious tone than Trump or any other member of the task force about the nation’s move to “reopen,” provoking the frustration of a president who sees a resurgent economy as key to winning another four years in office….
Trump’s undercutting of his health advisers makes it all but impossible for the federal government to speak with a single, authoritative voice at a time of national crisis, critics say.
https://apnews.com/ee505d5a774598babc6b4b925d7bfa6f

“There are more than 18 million active cases in the world, with more than 4.8 million of them in the United States of America. The U.S. has about 59,000 to 66,000 cases per day—a catastrophically high number, especially when you compare it to Laos and Vietnam, which have almost no new cases and which have few fatalities (Laos has none; Vietnam has had six). How does one understand the total failure of the Trump administration to break the chain of the infection?….

Testing and contact tracing would allow precise isolation for populations who could carry the infection to others. None of this is happening….

The incompetence of the Trump administration—mirroring the dangerous incompetence of Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil and Narendra Modi of India—coming on top of a destroyed public health system and a failed private sector testing establishment has condemned millions of people in the U.S. to catch the disease and pass it on. There is—thus far—no prospect of breaking the chain of infection in the United States.”-Vijay Prashad
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/08/05/how-trump-managed-to-lead-the-world-with-the-worst-response-to-the-covid-pandemic/

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WorldbyStorm - August 5, 2020

He’s a bit caught – it’s terrible but it’s going away. Hmmm

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6. CL - August 6, 2020

-Ireland and Slavery: Debating the ‘Irish Slaves Myth’-

“The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation. On their heels treads the commercial war of the European nations, with the globe for a theatre”-K.Marx

“This approach to understanding the centrality of slavery serves up a crushing riposte to far Right apologists, but it also marks off an alternative framework from which to understand the evolution of chattel slavery in the Americas – one that captures complex aspects of its development missing from the debate thus far, and perhaps excluded by the way it has been framed by Hogan and others. In Ireland the enduring legacy of the ‘revisionist’ reappraisal of the past is evident in writing on indenture and, more obviously, on Irish complicity in the transatlantic slave trade. Fearghal Mac Bhloschaidh has written perceptively of the ideological thrust of the revisionist project in Ireland: the “main current dominating Irish historiography,” he asserts, can be best understood as an ‘idiosyncratic Irish manifestation of a wider liberal defence of power”, which “employs a vulgar empiricism and constrictive ontology to prohibit a radical reading of the past or an awareness of history as process.”
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/08/06/ireland-and-slavery-debating-the-irish-slaves-myth/

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WorldbyStorm - August 6, 2020

That’s a really solid piece CL, thanks for the link. The way it links class and capitalism in while pointing to the distinctive differences between slavery and indentured servitude notes that even across that area there were alliances formed is very valuable. Perhaps even crucial in regard to deconstructing the lies of the right and far-right in this context and offering a way forward built on solidarity and a sense that while the experiences were distinctly different there were echoes that every Irish person should find sufficiently strong to push aside any vile sentimentality as to equivalence or even worse diminishment of the awful realities of the slave trade.

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EWI - August 9, 2020

The utterly reactionary nature of so-called ‘revisionism’ is possibly its least remarked-upon feature. Defence of power and privilege somehow always seems to be the outcome.

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WorldbyStorm - August 9, 2020

Very true. It’s built in. What it defends is privilege and in a way it was clever to co opt sincere antipathy to political violence to that end.

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7. CL - August 6, 2020

“TWO MEN ARE to face fraud charges linked to Northern Ireland’s biggest-ever property deal, the region’s Public Prosecution Service (PPS) has announced….
The loan book was sold to US investment fund Cerberus in 2014 in a deal named Project Eagle.”
https://www.thejournal.ie/nama-project-eagle-3-5169182-Aug2020/

“It emerged the successful bidders, Cerberus, had transferred £15m to an Isle of Man bank account as a fixer fee.”
https://www.rte.ie/news/business/2020/0806/1157694-explainer-project-eagle/

“Cerberus Capital Management, L.P. is an American private equity firm,[2] specializing in distressed investing.[3] The firm is based in New York City, and run by Steve Feinberg, who co-founded Cerberus in 1992 with William L. Richter, who serves as a senior managing director. The firm has affiliate and advisory offices in the United States, Europe and Asia.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wik./Cerberus_Capital_Management

“Feinberg is a major Republican donor.[20] In 2016, he served on the Trump Economic Advisory Council during Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, donated nearly $1.5 million to pro-Trump PACs, and co-hosted a $50,000 per person Republican National Committee and Trump fundraising dinner alongside other financiers.[21][22] In February 2017, the New York Times reported that President Trump will assign Feinberg a role in the White House leading a review of the US intelligence agencies”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Feinberg

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8. tomasoflatharta - August 6, 2020

For what it’s worth, my personal reaction, and advice to Jeremy Corbyn et al from the western side of the Irish Sea : prepare a split from the British Labour Party now – show firm and decisive leadership – study the Stalin anti-Bolshevik manual of the early 1920’s, and compare it with the salami tactics used today by the Starmer gang – do not try to reason with the Starmer-Stalin gang, that’s a waste of time – gather together the willing fighters and fight, fight, fight – nothing to lose, everything to gain – the Starmer-Stalin purge is coming. https://tomasoflatharta.wordpress.com/2020/08/06/civil-war-in-the-british-labour-party-intensifies-sir-keir-starmer-targets-jeremy-corbyn/

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9. Tomboktu - August 6, 2020

An update.

In June, I recounted my niece’s horror at eating potatoes that had been in the ground, prompted by a gift to her of some pots with vegetables.

Today I had an update: the lettuces have been eaten, but not by her; the carrots are coming along nicely. And then there is the peas. The pea plants now have flowers but no signs of pods, and she wanted to know should she pull the flowers off.

I’m glad she asked before she acted!

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tafkaGW - August 7, 2020

🙂

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10. Joe - August 7, 2020

I’ve started reading Paradise Alley by John D Sheridan – the Seven Towers re-issue. There’s an excellent introduction by the late Sarah Lundberg and Joe Mooney relating the fictional book to real-life East Wall in the first half of the twentieth century.
One piece talks about football and football clubs and great footballers who came from around there. And one of them is “Republic of Ireland and Rangers star Alec Stevenson”. I’ll definitely have to look him up. If he played for Rangers he was a Prod. A Prod from East Wall playing for Ireland and Rangers. My kind of story.

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sonofstan - August 7, 2020

There were a few collections of Sheridan’s newspaper pieces in the library of one of the schools I attended, and I devoured them as a early teen – I can still remember lines from some of them rather better than I can the names of people I met yesterday.

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Joe - August 7, 2020

You and Gay Byrne, SoS. Two big Sheridan fans.

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CL - August 7, 2020

“In the years before television began to impinge on the time devoted to reading books, John D. Sheridan was so popular that he was usually referred to as just John D. This was mainly due to his weekly column in the Irish Independent where his humorous observations of the foibles of his fellow-citizens caused him to be sometimes referred to as Ireland’s Charles Lamb….
The critic Brian Cleeve claimed rightly enough Sheridan was “one of the most popular and best loved contemporary writers”. His last novel The Rest is Silence, called “quiet and sincere by one recent critic, was published in London and New York, but he never made the real breakthrough. Born in 1903, he died in 1980. Today he is all but forgotten….
The author of Paradise Alley would opine that our nation has gone down a blind alley. But the new readers of the novel itself will be brought in touch with the truly meaningful past.”
https://www.irishcatholic.com/heres-to-the-memory-of-a-dubliner/

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CL - August 7, 2020

“Sheridan wrote for the Irish Independent, while Myles wrote for the Irish Times, the other major Irish national daily. Both writers were Catholics, though many readers of Myles might be surprised to learn of his religious faith. John D. Sheridan, on the other hand, was much more straightforwardly devout, writing for a magazine called The Irish Rosary and even producing a book-length defence of Catholic doctrine (The Hungry Sheep)….

Writers like him are a good source of social history. In one of the articles in My Hat Blew Off– a piece decrying the observance of the New Year– he records that the “War on Christmas” had begun as long ago as 1951 (the year the collection was published):…
Sheridan’s essays usually reflect a comfortable, middle-class world– “the office” is taken to be the typical working hours location of the reader–…
Sheridan’s most touching and enjoyable pieces are usually his forays into nostalgia…
New Lamps for Old is a fascinating description of electrification, and an affectionate tribute to the oil lamp
https://irishpapist.blogspot.com/2012/05/john-d-sheridan-laureate-of-catholic.html

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Joe - August 7, 2020
Paul Culloty - August 7, 2020
11. CL - August 7, 2020

Dublin in the rare oul’ times:

“”He entered Capel Street and turned northwards. Now he was in the heart of a slum district…Everything here excited a savage hatred of society in him; barefooted children with a hectic flush on their pale, starved faces, tottering old people with all manner of disease scarring their wasted features, offal in the streets, houses without doors, and broken windows, a horrifying and monotonous spectacle of degrading poverty and misery everywhere. The fetid air reeked with disease.”-

Liam O’Flaherty, ‘The Assassin’

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12. gypsybhoy69 - August 8, 2020

Last night when I was trying to work out the timeline between the split in the WP and the ‘election I came across this article:
http://www.irishnews.com/news/northernirelandnews/2018/08/25/news/workers-party-split-in-1992-sparks-london-interest-1415501/
At least something still thought I was engaging in class war!

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WorldbyStorm - August 8, 2020

🙂

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13. CL - August 8, 2020

“When asked on RTÉ Radio whether meat factories had been subjected to rigorous health inspections that pubs and restaurants had, the Health Minister said: “Yes they have”.
https://www.thejournal.ie/stephen-donnelly-lockdown-kildare-laois-offaly-5170992-Aug2020/

“Sinn Féin spokesperson on Health David Cullinane TD has called for much stronger prevention and control measures for high risk workplaces, in light of the announcement of regional lockdown implementation. He also said that HSA inspections and testing needs to be stepped up….
“Up to early July there had been no on site inspections in meat factories.

“How many have been conducted since? What was reported? Has rolling testing been put in place? Are we doing enough to prevent and contain outbreaks in high risk areas?
https://www.sinnfein.ie/contents/57666

“Uruguay has recorded the lowest number of COVID-19 cases and deaths per capita in South America, if not the entire western hemisphere….
First, because Uruguay has such a well coordinated public health system, it was able to produce a lot of its own conventional PCR coronavirus tests. And so it had a really large supply ready for the second important factor: contact tracing – that epidemiological investigative work that tracks down who an infected person may have infected. And as you know that’s something places like Florida have had trouble with.”
https://www.wlrn.org/post/small-uruguay-big-proof-committing-public-health-can-contain-covid-19#stream/0

Repeated lockdowns are inevitable without an effective testing, tracking, and isolation system.

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14. Alibaba - August 9, 2020

‘Only half the population of Britain definitely would accept being vaccinated against Covid-19. …The study found vaccine rejection was strongest among those whose beliefs reflect greater scepticism about science … Likely refusal was also linked to those who tended to be less willing to wear face masks.’

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/aug/09/only-half-of-britons-would-definitely-have-covid-19-vaccination

Anti-vaccination is rife and I suppose it’s not only in Britain too.

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WorldbyStorm - August 9, 2020

Definitely here as well

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15. Paul Culloty - August 9, 2020

Election day in Belarus – Lukashenko is an old-school Soviet-style dictator, so significant contrast between the official results:

And the external estimates:

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WorldbyStorm - August 9, 2020

I wouldn’t disregard those external polls, but I’d wonder what the internal poll is actually like. Not difficult to believe that there’s been some level of falsification, the only question being the degree of same.

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16. alanmyler - August 10, 2020

Brendan Halligan has passed away. I don’t know much about him politically, other than seeing that he contributed to the 1980 Labour Party program which is a pretty good document overall.

Left Archive: Labour, The Party Programme, Irish Labour Party Conference, 1980

Other than that he was a lecturer in Kevin St college when I was there. He lectured my class in management studies in 4th year. I’ve no recollection of the content of that course but I do recall that he had a witty personality and seemed like a nice guy.

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WorldbyStorm - August 10, 2020

I’d be the same – re my lack of knowledge – is it my imagination or did he become very europhiliac?

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alanmyler - August 10, 2020

I think so. He was the director or something of the IIEA where I came across him long after college when herself blagged a couple of invitations to a talk there given by Gorbachev.

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WorldbyStorm - August 10, 2020

That’s impressive!

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17. Starkadder - August 10, 2020

For those of us who share Shelley’s view that “Monarchy is only the string that ties the robber’s bundle”, Tribune has a good article by
Podemos co-founder Juan Carlos Monedero about why Spain needs to become a republic:

https://tribunemag.co.uk/2020/08/the-case-for-a-new-spanish-republic

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Colm B - August 10, 2020

What a pity that there isn’t a left wing party in government in Spain which could push for concrete steps towards establishing a democratic Republic, allowing a genuine right to self-determination for the the Catalan and Basque nations etc…oh wait a second…

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Alibaba - August 11, 2020

I assumed the left despises monarchy until I discovered that this is false. Respectable social democrats collude with it, as did Prime Minister Sánchez. Fair enough to Joan Carlos Monedero in the call for a republic but one wonders if Pablo Iglesias Turrion concurs, let alone with abolition of the monarchy.

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18. tafkaGW - August 11, 2020

Feck me , this is all a bit previous, isn’t it?

Feeding your daughter burgers during Mad Cow is one thing, but using them as a vaccine guinea-pig?

Wouldn’t it be something if this Sputnik turned out to be safe and effective?

I hope it does, but skipping Phase 3 trials seems to be erm, very adventurous, to say the least.

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WorldbyStorm - August 11, 2020

Scarily so.

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19. CL - August 11, 2020

Biden has picked Kamala Harris to be his running mate.

“Harris regularly describes her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, as the most important influence on her life….
To her supporters, her family’s immigrant story comes as almost an implicit rebuke of President Trump’s policies limiting immigration to the U.S….
Gopalan was the precocious daughter of an Indian diplomat and a women’s rights activist in the southeastern state of Tamil Nadu….

her father…was the first and only black professor in the economics department at the time, according to contemporaries, and one of just a handful of black professors at the university…..
Harris….was popular among students for his skepticism of prevailing economic views…
When Harris was scheduled to leave Stanford after his two-year visiting professorship in 1974, students objected that the university wasn’t doing enough to hire and retain “radical” and “Marxist” professors with a diversity of economic ideas,…
Administrators decided to keep him on as a full professor in 1975, and Harris helped develop a program of “alternative approaches to economic analysis,” where students explored theories, including Marxism, that went against the dominant views of the time…..

Photo; “baby Kamala Harris with her great-grandmother Iris Finegan during a visit to Jamaica.”

How Kamala Harris’ immigrant parents shaped her life — and her political outlook

Mr Biden’s maternal great-great-grandfather, Owen Finnegan, emigrated from the port of Newry, County Down, in 1849.”

How Kamala Harris’ immigrant parents shaped her life — and her political outlook

“Now be aisy, good Mister Finnimore, sir, and take your laysure like a god on pension and don’t be walking abroad”-Joyce, Finnegans Wake.

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WorldbyStorm - August 12, 2020

Interesting pick

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CL - August 12, 2020

“We know that an unprecedented economic cataclysm has rippled across the globe. But the precise consequences of this catastrophe — for the global economy, geopolitics, climate change, and our own little lives — remain opaque….

There’s a remarkable overlap between the climate-denying coalition and the COVID-denying coalition, the most obvious axis being that between the two biggest states in the Western hemisphere, Brazil and the U.S.

In the U.S., I think what we’re seeing is that everything is at stake in the coming election, the aftermath of the election, and, more broadly, in whether progressive forces can assemble the coalition necessary for turning the United States into a cooperative actor in managing the risks of the Anthropocene. Which it currently is not….

We don’t know how things are going to go in the next 90 days. We really need to know whether this electoral process will go smoothly and whether it will deliver what it is supposed to, which is a decisive vote of the American public that confirms somebody to the presidency and thereby demonstrates the capacity of this place to govern itself.
And there is a very distinct possibility that that won’t happen. Or that the decision will fall in favor of the candidate and party that has demonstrated its incapacity to govern — and has in fact demonstrated its capacity to drive this country to ever-greater degrees of ungovernability…
But there was something really extraordinary that happened in March, in which nearly the entire world — individually and collectively — made this decision to shut down the economy to preserve human life. “- Adam Tooze.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/08/adam-tooze-how-will-the-covid-19-pandemic-change-world-history.html

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tafkaGW - August 12, 2020

Thanks for the link. Tooze is always worth a read. Not least because he charts how we’ve moved into uncharted waters.

It’s a very good implicit point that capitalist governments didn’t have to close down economies – they could have simply allowed a triage of older / sick people and lived with the disablement of others.

There were those representing (in more or less coded form) this position. For instance Otto von Jizzmark was reported to commented at first “if that means some pensioners die, too bad”. The Brexitanian goverment denies this, of course.

The reason it didn’t happen has perhaps to do with the political dominance of asset-manager capitalism. Asset price inflation and fund-manager profits and fees continue to pile up despite the depression in the rest of the capitalist economy.

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