Wry & Dry: a cynical and irreverent review of the week in politics, economics and life. For intelligent Readers who disdain the trivial.
Ten stories you may have missed…
“Kamala, Kamala, remember the day…“ Part I
Kamala Harris has four things going for her: She’s black, she’s female, and she’s not the Trumpster.
And the fourth is that she gets under the Trumpster’s very thin skin. Already he has gone peak troppo about her. It is an observable phenomenon that strong women in general haunt his grey matter: Nancy Pelosi, Stormy Daniels or even Liz Chaney. Ms. Harris might cause him to go one step too far.
And that may be enough, because of Big Mo.
Big Mo is not Merv Hughes, that former Australian fast bowler with a moustache denser than the Amazon rainforest, but ‘Momentum’. This group behavioural theory is now alive in Democrat land. Ms. Harris has… Big Momentum!
The whole Democrat world has awoken from a Sleepy Joe-induced somnolence. Readers can feel the excitement, feel the vibe. Hear the words: ‘transcendent’, ‘generational change’ and ‘X-factor’. The Momentum is building. Be excited!
But hold the phone. And allow Wry & Dry give Readers an antidote to a mass hypnotic delusion. Ms. Harris’ Big Mo will disappear faster than Merv’s mo in a charity shave-off.
Ms. Harris comes from the ‘progressive left’, that economically illiterate cohort that is fixated by identity. And that sees its role as fighting for a larger slice of a shrinking pie on behalf of different voter blocs. Each bloc with its own curated identity, but all sharing the same fiscal and cultural begging bowl.
However, she has the opportunity to capture the shrinking but moderate and swinging middle ground of US politics. This fertile ground for votes has been vacated by the Trumpster, as he moves to the far right of the soup spoon, down the food chain and to dreams of a Handmaid’s Country.
“Kamala, Kamala, remember the day…“ Part II
But Ms. Harris has form of never missing an opportunity to miss an opportunity. Her first speech since her anointment dispelled any thoughts that she would try to capture the moderates.
She missed the opportunity. And effectively said, “Swing votes? Who needs them.” And steered left.
Sleepy Joe at least represented the ‘broad church’ of the centre left. Ms. Harris’ narrow beliefs are already meat and drink to the Trumpster’s media attack hounds. “Cry havoc. And slip the dogs of war,”1 has been the cry.
Moderates in the Midwest are too sensible to listen to the empty noise of the right-wing rants. But they know that Ms. Harris couldn’t run a bath. She has never managed anything. Not in business, not in politics. Early in his term, Sleepy Joe handed her the most prominent project in American domestic politics, coming up with ideas to manage illegal immigration from Mexico.
She lamentably failed to see the opportunity to ‘do something’. She did nothing. Resa ipsa loquitur.2
But she is not a fool. She is pitching her campaign as the future versus the past. It was Nikki Haley who warned Republicans that the first party to select a nominee from the next generation will have a political advantage. The young against the old. Readers will recall Kennedy, Clinton and O’Bama.
Did Sleepy Joe set her up to fail or to succeed when he appointed her? He will only find out when he finds out that he has quit the presidential race.
1 Spoken by Mark Antony in Act 3, Scene 1, of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.
2 The thing speaks for itself.
Australian citizen, but no English?
A federal government review of multiculturalism remains under lock and key. Which means that Albo doesn’t like the recommendations.
But Wry & Dry’s spy in Canberra has unearthed that apparently there were 29 recommendations, with ten suggested for “immediate implementation”.
One of the latter caught Wry & Dry’s eyes: for the Department of Home Affairs to conduct an immediate review of the citizenship test, including the possibility of “providing the test in languages other than English.”
Hold the phone! Run that past Readers again. The gurus want to have a test for the citizenship of a country the language of which is English in a language other than English?
So much for “…we are one and free.”
We’ll always have Paris, err, Yekaterinburg
Later today, athletes from A (Afghanistan) to Z (Zimbabwe) will compete for personal best speeds (citius), heights (altius) and strengths (fortius). And an array of other sports that are subjectively judged.
But there will two countries missing in the Bs and Rs: Belarus and Russia. Y’see, when Tsar Vlad decided to invade Ukraine, the IOC told him DCP3.
Tsar Vlad has a vengeful gene even larger than the Trumpster’s: he is not having a high bar of the IOC. He is reviving the ‘Friendship Games’, to be held in 2025 in Moscow and Yekaterinburg4.
Readers will recall that the 1984 Friendship Games was the Soviet Union’s revenge for the USA and other countries boycotting the 1980 Olympics (in Moscow) because of Secretary General Brezhnev’s invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.
Part of the revenge was the Soviet Union and 14 Soviet-friendly countries boycotting the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.
In a masterful display of breathtaking hypocrisy, in justifying the 1984 boycott, the Soviet TASS news agency accused the United States of trying to “exploit the Games for its political purposes” and that the “arrogant, hegemonic course of the Washington administration in international relations is at odds with the noble ideals of the Olympic movement”.
Pot calling kettle black… Some things never change.
3 Don’t Come to Paris.
4 Yekaterinburg was where in 1918 deposed Tsar Nicholas II, his wife Alexandra, and their five children were executed by the Bolsheviks, under the orders of Lenin. Their remains were discovered in 1979, exhumed and re-interred at St. Peter and Paul Cathedral, St Petersburg, in 1998, on the 80th anniversary of their execution. The remains of almost all Russian emperors and empresses from Peter the Great to Nicholas II are entombed there. Doubtless, Tsar Vlad will ensure that will be his final resting place.
When Russia reopens, Wry & Dry recommends that Readers visit the church. It is as biographical as the floor of Westminster Abbey in London.
Melbourne: on top, again
Melbourne is Australia’s least fertile state capital. And that’s not a reference to the rich alluvial soil of the banks of the Yarra river. It is that the Ladies of Melbourne have the lowest fertility rate.
Ladies, don’t be offended. ‘Fertility rate’ doesn’t measure your ability or willingness to have babies. It is the number of babies you collectively will be expected, on average, to have over your lifetime.5 For Ladies of Melbourne, that number is 1.44, compared with 1.57 for Sydney and 1.61 for Brisbane.
Within Melbourne, Ladies of Carlton have the lowest fertility rate: 0.61. Too much time at Prince’s Park, perhaps?
All other things being equal (which they are never), Melbourne’s population will decrease. And Australia-wide, the picture is grim.
Since a peak growth rate of 6.9% in 2006 (but excluding the covid boom of 7.3% growth – well, what else was there to do?) the growth in the number of births has now fallen to minus 4.6%.
The gap between fewer births (-4.6%) and population growth (2.5% in September, 2025) is mostly immigration. And, as Readers know, increasing immigration is the only reason that Australia’s GDP is rising.
5 Absent immigration, the fertility rate required for population stability is 2.1.
Tesla’s profit falls. Again
The Trumpster’s new bestie, Elon Musk, may have a problem meeting his promise to donate US$45m per month to the Trumpster’s election campaign.
Y’see, Musk’s toy electric car company, Tesla, has reported a second consecutive drop in quarterly profits, this time falling by 45%. This because of that wicked blend of metrics that all companies hate: both falling prices (cut to compete with Chinese competition) and falling sales (the ‘first mover’ advantage has waned, and Chinese alternatives are cheaper).
But it would be a fool to write-off Mr. Musk. He is spending heavily on data centres and developing self-driving robo-taxis and humanoid robots. Tesla will spend some US$10bn this year on AI-related expenditure, including 50,000 supercomputer H100 chips (@ US40,000 each) for its Texas ‘gigafactory’. These little beauties come from Nvidia. Each contain 80 billion transistors in a card smaller than a Reader’s mobile phone!
Mr. Musk is thinking 20 years ahead, other motor vehicle manufacturers perhaps no more than five years. But he might go bust in the meantime.
Anyone for a jihadist-theocracy Iranian satellite state?
Earlier this week, Hamas (nominal government of what is left of Gaza) and Fatah (Palestinian Authority – PA – nominal government of the West Bank, but in reality, a husk within which a series of NGOs provide services) agreed to form a unity government.
The curious thing is that China brokered the agreement. And the deal was signed in Beijing. What is China doing in the Middle East? Wry & Dry hears Readers ask.
Firstly, the facts. On Tuesday, PA’s many factions signed an agreement with Hamas and Islamic Jihad to form a unity Palestinian government. No mistake, this is a victory for Hamas.
It is a way for Hamas to advertise its diplomatic success. Carrying out the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust has weirdly improved its standing in Beijing, Moscow and Pretoria, without jeopardising support from Tehran, Doha and Ankara. Hamas has become a bigger player on a large stage.
Secondly, why China? Simple: Emperor Eleven, like Tsar Vlad, enjoys enabling anti-American forces and disrupting U.S. diplomacy. Since Hamas has proved effective at sparking wars that stress the U.S. regional alliance system and US presidents, China will help keep Hamas in business.
The world’s far left insist on a Palestinian state without asking what kind of a state it would be. Currently, the world is looking at a jihadist-theocracy Iranian satellite state.
Like many university students around the western world, Sleepy Joe fails and failed to understand this. Kamala, Kamala will do no better.
UK – Tories dying out
Demographics is destiny. Or is it the other way around? Either way, the Conservative party (i.e. the centre right party) in the UK is doomed.
Leaving aside Labour’s ignoble policy of lowering the voting age to 16, as many as one in six Conservative voters will depart this mortal coil by the time of the next election.
On the other hand, only one in 19 Labour voters will have passed to a heavenly collective. Add to this the current 13-17 year-old age cohort that will more likely vote Labour in 2029, and even ignoring the commonsense observation that voters become more conservative as they age, this is not good news for the Conservatives.
The net net, is that by 2029, Labour will gain 300,000 supporters, whereas the Conservatives will lose 1,000,000.
A demographic curtain has descended across the UK, from John O’Groats to Land’s End, to paraphrase the most famous Conservative politician of all.6 Not for the first time, he would be turning in his grave.
6 “From Stettin in the Baltic, to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent,” Winston Churchill, speech at Westminster College, in in the small Midwestern town of Fulton, Missouri, March 1946.
Wealth – nice if you can get it
Anglophiles would have noticed that profits from the British monarchy’s land and other property assets more than doubled last year. The Crown Estate’s profit was a record £1.1bn ($1.4bn), largely because of its investments in offshore wind farms.
The wind-farm profits arise because the Crown Estate, which is worth £16bn, owns seabed surrounding England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Offshore wind farms must, by definition, be on land the property of the Crown Estate.
But the Crown Estate is not the main landlord in the heart of London. Four, err, landed families own the most. Londonphiles will be interested in the below:
A close look at the above shows some of the London holdings of some landed gentry, coloured in:
- Purple: Regent Street and St James’s. Crown Estate
- Reddish-brown: Marylebone. Howard de Walden Estate – descendants of the 7th Baron Howard de Walden
- Blue-grey: Mayfair and Belgravia. Grosvenor Estate – Hugh Grosvenor, 7th Duke of Westminster
- Aqua: Pimlico. Formerly part of the Grosvenor Estate, but now held by a consortium
- Yellow: Marylebone. Portman Estate – Viscount Portman
- Red: City of London
- Lime: Chelsea. Cadogan Estate – Earl Cadogan
Musings – unclear on the concept
A picture tells a thousand stories.
The tourist was more shocked than injured.
Snippets from all over
1. Murdoch: bickering children
Rupert Murdoch is locked in a secret legal battle against three of his children over the future of the family’s media empire, as he moves to preserve it as a conservative political force after his death. (New York Times)
Wry & Dry comments: Good grief, he’s not dead, yet.
2. Netanyahu goes to Washington
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dived into a volatile moment in U.S. presidential politics with a fiery address to Congress, defending his handling of the war in Gaza and appealing to both President Biden and Donald Trump to back Israel against its Middle East enemies. (Wall Street Journal)
Wry & Dry comments: Vice President Kamala Harris, the expected Democratic presidential nominee who would normally preside over a joint session, and dozens of Democratic lawmakers skipped the speech.
3. “Israeli athletes not welcome in Paris”
A left-wing member of the French parliament has been accused of inciting attacks on Israelis at the Paris Olympics after saying that they were not welcome at the Games. (The Times)
Wry & Dry comments: Sort of strange – the election was three weeks ago. He already had the votes of the anti-Semites.
4. Airfares to fall?
Ryanair said airfares in the key summer months would be “materially lower” than last year, deepening fears that the industry’s post-pandemic resurgence is waning and sending shares in airlines sharply lower. (Financial Times)
Wry & Dry comments: The company’s profits almost halved in the year to June. The covid-over-so-catch-up-on-travel run is over.
5. “People don’t vote for the common good…”
Hong Kong must be governed by supporters of the Chinese Communist Party rather than by popular mandate, one of its leading politicians has said, in a clear confirmation that the era of representative democracy in the territory is over. (The Times)
Wry & Dry comments: Regina Ip, convenor of the executive council, Hong Kong’s de facto cabinet, went on to say “People don’t vote for the common good. People vote for whatever serves their interests. Just following the popular will is dangerous.”
Data
- Australia: Consumer confidence rose 5.9 % points to a six-month high
- USA: GDP grew at 2.8% in the year to June.
And to soothe your troubled mind…
“No government in living memory has had the same cabinet and ministerial positions for its first two years in office.”
Prime Minister Albo, on the resignation of two of his ministers and foreshadowing a ministerial reshuffle.
Wry & Dry comments: Is the stability to which he referred a virtue, or a sign that he hasn’t had the courage to fire failing ministers, of which there are at least three: Burney, O’Neil and Giles?
Disclaimer
The comments in Wry & Dry do not necessarily reflect those of First Samuel, its Directors or Associates.
Cheers!