STRAIGHT AND TRUE

JOSIE PAGANI

Diary, 11 February 2016

Johnny Depp plays Donald Trump (what more can I say? Thank God it wasn’t George Clooney?) in a 1980s spoof - a would-be TV movie of the mogul’s 1987 bestselling memoir, Trump: The Art of the Deal. The spoof’s central conceit is that Trump wrote and directed the lost film himself.



*
Political commentator Phil Quin can recite primary results going back twenty years. He calls the New Hampshire results
the establishment’s 'Red Wedding'. (If you haven’t seen Game of Thrones, thats the scene when the lead characters get their throats slit and the minor characters take over.)

*
One lesson from the support for Trump, Sanders or Jeremy Corbyn in the UK is that people want politicians to stand up on a box on a street corner and make a case passionately - and be prepared for some people to hate you for it.

Trump and co are only successful because the alternative is so bland. If the Ministry of Education became a political party it would look like many of the left parties in parliaments across the world right now: risk averse, populated by career politicians, talking in acronyms and platitudes.

*
Trump and Bernie Sanders are not really anti-establishment. As someone said on late night TV, Trump is filthy rich but someone forgot to tell his accent. And Bernie, like Corbyn, has been in the belly of the establishment beast for decades.

Having your own private revolution in a room with the door locked and the curtains closed isn’t more ‘real' than politics as usual. It’s a retreat from reality.

*
Speaking of the angry anti-establishment movement: Seriously false claims about the TPP continue to circulate.

Social media has been full of this tweet from Hayley Holt


As
Stuff reported, the transaction was routine and nothing to do with TPP. Her view is still being widely and approvingly shared.

Someone on
Wikipedia is having a laugh.

Holt Wiki Feb 11

*
Meanwhile, sex toy tosser Josie Butler
says, "The TPPA is the rape of our tino rangitiratanga, the torture our basic human rights, and the murder of our people."

When we marched and demonstrated against evils like apartheid and nuclear incineration, no one had to exaggerate. We just told the truth, because the truth was enough to prevail in the argument.

She goes on to make a very specific claim: "I don’t want to live in a country where families have to choose between potentially life saving medication or feeding their children because of the increased price of medications under the TPPA."

She is misinformed. The TPP will not result in any family having to choose between medicine and food because of increased prices of medicines. It is possible that the agency that buys medicine on behalf of the government may have to continue buying certain medicines (which haven't even even been invented yet) from the inventor of those medicines for two years longer than they currently do before switching to generic copies of those drugs. This will cost the taxpayer a fraction more in the total state medicine budget.