World

Today was supposed to be the big, final day in court for Paul John Manafort Jr., the once-flamboyant political maven and ostrich jacket-wearer turned convicted felon. For decades a controversial character in our nation’s capital, Manafort capped his career in politics as campaign manager for Donald J. Trump from March to August of 2016, the pivotal period when MAGA exploded and Trump seized the GOP’s nomination against the hopes and expectations of Republican elites. The rest, we know. That capstone would prove to be Manafort’s downfall. It’s not like there weren’t portents of a grim ending ahead. Nobody had recently considered Manafort to be any sort of Republican A-lister. His last major campaign before Trump’s was Sen.

Late last night, there was a sense of optimism among British government ministers that Theresa May’s revised deal might have a chance of passing. But those hopes were crushed this morning by Attorney General Geoffrey Cox’s blunt legal advice. With Cox declaring that the legal risk was unchanged, the Democratic Unionist Party were never going to back the deal. That in turn meant the bulk of the Brexiteers in the European Research Group wouldn’t either. In the end, the withdrawal agreement went down by 149 votes — at the worst end of expectations. ‘I profoundly regret the decision that this House has taken tonight,’ May said upon defeat.

Cockburn is back in the Old Country this week, feeling Meghan Markle’s bump, smoking heroin with top soccer players, and making preparations for Brexit, because Britain will leave the EU at the end of March, unless the dimwit government of Theresa May devises some futile means of extending negotiations that everyone knows will go nowhere. He knew what to expect in London. When Cockburn got on the plane he read America’s best newspaper, the only truthful paper in this time of universal deceit. He also read the New York Times. The Times usually supports democracy in backward and violent states, but it hates Brexit. No news is too fake for the Times to print when it comes to Brexit.

Dark days these are, but still the good Lord provides hope—not that we wretches deserve it! On Tuesday, Josh Lederman of NBC News reported: ‘The Trump administration is launching a global campaign to end the criminalization of homosexuality in dozens of nations where it’s still illegal to be gay…a bid aimed in part at denouncing Iran over its human rights record. ‘US Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell, the highest-profile openly gay person in the Trump administration, is leading the effort, which kicks off Tuesday evening in Berlin.

Nationalism is a supremely powerful force in politics, but it’s perennially difficult to forge lasting alliances between competing nationalisms – as this week’s news demonstrates yet again. No country has benefited more from the growing split between Brussels and the European Union’s formerly Communist member states than Israel. In Warsaw, Budapest, Prague, and Bratislava, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu found receptive European audiences, which Israel needed as the EU has soured on Israel’s occupation policies towards the Palestinians and increasingly aggressive rhetoric towards Iran. Netanyahu invested in these new relationships, which were based in more than mere convenience.

Angela Merkel’s decision to allow more than one million migrants into Germany has caused a crisis in Germany’s prison system. About half the prisoners in Berlin and Hamburg are now foreign-born, according to the latest figures in the German press, and in prisons across the country, German is becoming a foreign language. This surge in outsiders on the inside coincides neatly with the 2015 decision to allow in migrants from the Middle East, Africa and Asia. All regions of Germany report a ‘very strong increase’ in the number of foreign and stateless prisoners, according to data from the past three to five years. Prisons throughout Germany are overcrowded and struggling to handle the influx in population.

As high-minded as people who write about politics imagine themselves to be, we all love a good slapfight. The word ‘debate’ might have lofty intellectual connotations but the most prominent war of words in recent history culminated with William F. Buckley calling Gore Vidal a ‘queer’. It would be fun, then, to write something very mean about the newly launched Turning Point UK, but I don’t have the heart. Everyone involved seems frighteningly young, and constructive criticism might achieve more than mockery.

Christopher Wylie burst on to the international scene last year in a series of explosive articles in The Observer and The New York Times. Here was a charismatic, gay, vegan whistleblower for the digital age. Pushed by journalists, academics and tastemakers as the central node in a networked international conspiracy, the Wylie story supposedly showed that democracy could be ‘hacked’ by a coterie of dark money billionaires, Breitbart editors, Russian agents and tech weirdos. It also neatly explained away the problem that so many people voted for Brexit and Trump.

People do inexplicable things in January, like laying off drink for a month, taking out gym memberships they will never use, and making predictions about the year to come. As I shall not be ‘going dry’ this month or any other, and as I do not intend to alter a ‘fitness regime’ of afternoon naps in a sauna, the only remaining way to make a public fool of myself is to predict what will happen in 2019: 1. Look to the skies. I don’t know what a Super Blood Wolf Moon Eclipse is, but it’s coming to the US on the night of January 20. And the year will end with a transit of Mercury, and an annular eclipse over the Arabian Peninsula. I don’t know what that means, either, other than that the atmospherics aren't good. 2. The atmospherics are no better in the markets.

In 1901, Sigmund Freud published a book called The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. It offers entertaining observations about slips of the tongue and pen, ‘bungled actions’ — e.g., you mistakenly reach for your keys when approaching the door of a friend’s house — various forms of forgetfulness, and what Freud congregates under the categories of ‘determinism and superstition.’ As long as you do not take it too seriously, it is an amusing agglomeration of eccentricity and (mostly) mild insanity. It also cries out for updating. Freud died too soon to encounter a stupendous form of everyday psychopathology, one that is everywhere patent in the upper reaches of American society today.