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This year's Republican convention has been a mess.  A delightfully anarchistic mess for those of us who do not wish him well, but a mess nonetheless.  Although he is unchallenged as the Republican nominee, he still faced a floor challenge to his candidacy.  In previous conventions - and you have to go back to 1976 for this - you at least had to have another candidate to rally round, but not this time.

Donald's wife gave a speech that had significant elements plagiarised from Michelle Obama's 2008 convention speech, which gave us the excellent spectacle of hardened Trumpites loudly applauding the sentiments of the current First Lady.

The principal speakers at the convention have all shown clear signs of madness.  Rudy Giuliani, once a respected New York mayor, tried to be Donald Trump on acid.  Chris Christie, once a governor who briefly looked as if he could reach across partisan divides, played his role as chief witch-hunter (prosecuting chief witch Hillary Clinton) to a perfection that would have been admired in Salem back in the day.

Only Ted Cruz - Ted Cruz!! - has emerged with any credit from this nonsense, and he did so by adding to the fiasco.  Unlike Marco Rubio - who prostrated himself on video before the Donald - Cruz used his convention speaking slot to basically stab Trump in the front.  He clearly loved doing it.  I think Cruz is in many respects a repulsive politician, probably in league with the sulphur burners, but he did this bit very well.

Yet despite it all, it probably doesn't matter.  The Telegraph's Tim Stanley makes a good case for suggesting that the conservative Cruz has fatally holed the Trump candidacy, but I'm not so sure.  Trump has succeeded on the back of a lamentable campaign that would have sunk anyone else.  But that is rather the point of Trump.  The media classes and the liberals and all those who hate him have rejoiced in a hopeless, divided convention.

Trump's supporters won't have heard any of that.  All they want to see and hear is their man telling them that all the ills of the world, all of their own poverty and economic dislocation, is down to dastardly forces and people who can be evicted from American society.  He'll tell them that again and they'll lap it up.  He won't lose any of that support on the basis of a lamentable convention week.  

Liberal democracy is in crisis at the moment because it turns out that it has failed to gain the support of significant numbers of left-behind voters.  In America, Trump has those people.  If it turns out there are actually more of them than there are of the many different groups Trump offends, then he's on course for the White House.  His convention plays no role in that calculation.

Kamal Haasan has represented India 7 times at Oscars. This is the most by any actor including 3 consecutive films in the years 1985–1987. He directed one movie in that 7. Below I have listed the seven movies of Padmashree Kamal Haasan which represented India at Oscars.

  1. Saagar (1985)

     wikipedia_Saagar_(film)

Saagar is a 1985 Bollywood film

 directed by; Ramesh Sippy

Starcast ;Rishi Kapoor ,Dimple Kapadia ,Kamal Hassan.

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2.Swati Mutyam (1985)

8.3/10 Wikipedia

Swati mutyam was a 1985 Telugu Film 

written and directed by ;K. Viswanath

star cast; Kamal Haasan and Radhika in the lead roles.

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3. Nayagan (1987)

 8.9/10 Wikipedia

Nayagan, also known as Naya

kan, is a 1987 Tamil film.

 written and directed by ;Mani Ratnam 

 starring ; Kamal Haasan.

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4. Thevar Magan (1992)

 8.8/10 Wikipedia

Thevar Magan is a 1992 Indian Tamil film produced , written , and starring Kamal Hassan in the title role. 

 directed by ;Bharathan

 stars;kamal hassan, Sivaji Ganesan, Nassar, Revathi and Gouthami in pivotal roles.

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5. Kuruthipunal (1995)

  8.6/10 Wikipedia

Kuruthipunal is a 1995 Tamil action film.

 directed by veteran cinematographer P. C. Sriram. 

The film stars Kamal Haasan in the lead role, with Arjun and Nassar in supporting roles.

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6. Indian (1996)

 8.2/10 Wikipedia

Indian is a 1996 Tamil political thriller film directed by S. Shankar and produced by A. M. Rathnam. 

The film stars Kamal Haasan in dual roles with Manisha Koirala, Urmila Matondkar, Sukanya and Goundamani appearing in other pivotal roles.

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7. Hey Ram (2000)

 8.1/10 Wikipedia

Hey Ram is a controversial bilingual Tamil and Hindi film.

It also had a simultaneously produced Hindi version and was released in 2000.

The film was written, directed and produced by; Kamal Haasan and he also starred as the protagonist in the film.

Many critics said he would have won many Oscars if he had been born outside India, but Kamal Haasan said he want to make his own style of film in his own country instead.

 Oscar is near to him, hopefully very soon.

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Choosing The Right Dress

A man and hise wife went for shopping to get new sarees for wife. After seeing numerous sarees she shortlisted around 100 and further brought down to 25. Out of those 25 she finally asked her husband to choose 5 sarees among them. Then she finally picked up one saree and It took almost three hours for his wife to finalise. The husband settled the bill and commented: Adam was very lucky because he and Eve used to wear only leaves. He need not have to waste too much of time. Ultimate comment by wife: Who knows how many trees Adam had to climb and finally choose the leaves as per the wish of eve.

Summer is a promissory note signed in June, its long days spent and gone before you know it, and due to be repaid next January.
Read more at: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/keywords/june.html

Summer is a promissory note signed in June, its long days spent and gone before you know it, and due to be repaid next January.
Read more at: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/keywords/june.html

Summer is a promissory note signed in June, its long days spent and gone before you know it, and due to be repaid next January. Hal Borland
Read more at: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/keywords/june.html

"Summer is a promissory note signed in June, its long days spent and gone before you know it, and due to be repaid next January." -  Hal Borland

Running: June was a pretty good running month with a one week setback where I was sick so I laid off the miles during that week. However, I still managed to get three weeks with mileage around 60 miles, bringing my month's total to 235 miles with a total elevation gain of about 45,000 feet. I did no hiking and my cycling miles were puny = 1.7 miles. My Garmin has been on the fritz, so I am not totally tracking all of my data but so far my elevation gain for the year somewhere near 210,000 ft, which is well over my target for this time of the year. My mileage is also over target, but I do expect to have a slower and milder 2nd half of the year, running-wise.

Reading: In June, I read 6 books. None of them were really very good! I gave all of them 2 stars on Goodreads except for the last two, which I gave three. As before, starred books below are for the RHC and bolded ones are "owned" books. Total RHC books read so far = 12/24 ; total owned books read = 3/12.

In the Unlikely Event
Reminiscence of a Stock Operator
Holy the Firm*
The Disappeared
The Beautiful Mystery
After You

Travel: I actually stayed local two weekends this month, as plans fell through one of the weekends and I was sick on the other. However, the other two weekends were spent up in Tahoe: one in the north and one in the south. Both were beautiful, although running up there still involves a lot of snow scrambling, slipping and sliding and route finding, so runs are a lot more work than normal. One of the days we went on a 26 mile run/slog which ended up taking almost 10 hours, although only about 7 and a half of it was "moving" time. The rest of the time was spent route finding, map gawking and head scratching! However, the scenery was stunning, as you can see from the  Lake Aloha photos below.

Lake Aloha

Lake Aloha

My brother and I met up on one of the "local" weekends and did an anniversary Mt. Diablo hike. Three years ago, on almost the same day, we did a 14 mile run/hike and it was probably about 100 degrees that day. It was during the drought and some of the water fountains were turned off. We remember it as being hot and dry and dusty and unpleasant!! So, the other day I got this photo from Google:

2013

So we decided to try it again! We went for a 12 mile hike and once again, El Diablo lived up to its name. It was hot and dry and dusty and we were so thirsty! How's that for two suckers! The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Fool me twice, shame on me!

2016

How have you been spending your long summer June days? It's mid-year: how are you doing on your yearly goals so far?

Here’s a chance for the Tory selectorate to prove they’re not just right-wing shadows of Momentum.  Will they take it?

1.              The Tory grassroots voted overwhelmingly for Leave.  Theresa May didn’t.

2.              The Tory grassroots is as representative of the electorate as a whole as your slightly loopy grandparents who are appalled at all these gays and rather regret having to leave the 1950s.  Andrea Leadsom voted unapologetically against gay marriage.

3.              The Leave campaign which received so many Tory votes was notable for  a number of porkies which quickly became apparent after they won – the most obvious being that £350 million pounds a week that isn’t going to fund the NHS because it doesn’t actually exist.

4.              Andrea Leadsom has had to busily revise her CV because the original, declaring her to have managed million pound investment funds and manage hundreds of people in major teams, wasn’t actually quite 100% accurate.  Turns out she didn’t.  Do either.

5.              Tory grassroots occasionally latch on to genuinely loopy ideas, like the one that suggests we’d all be much happier paying privately for our health care.  One of Andrea Leadsom’s signature policies is to do with babies’ brains.  No, I’m not entirely sure either.

6.              After the hustings when Andrea competed against four other Tory MPs, one cabinet minister noted that “only four of them were sane”.  Don’t know who he meant.

7.              Theresa May once suggested that people saw the Tories as “the nasty party”.  Ooops.

8.              Andrea Leadsom dislikes gays, isn’t keen on Europe, is distinctly incurious about the world around her, is a social reactionary, thinks the EU is just going to hand us a great deal on a plate and, in the words of the great right-wing commentator Douglas Murray, confuses stubbornness for principle.   Tory members are cut from an entirely different cloth.

9.               Andrea Leadsom has no appeal to young people (Young Tories who wear bow-ties don’t count).  Neither does the Tory party.

10.          So, over to 150,000 Tory electors for the choice of our next Prime Minister.  Looks like a clear wrap for Theresa May (erm….).  Glad we’ve all managed to “take back control” though. Wouldn’t like to think what would happen to Britain if those meddlesome Eurocrats were in charge with their silly ideas on regulation, open borders and international co-operation.  Hurrah for democracy.

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The Chilcot Report is, as expected, damning of Tony Blair's government and its decision to support America in a war of invasion  against Iraq.  There isn't much that is positive to be taken away from the report, from the war's inception, to its execution and through to its long drawn out, disastrous aftermath.

But Blair did not act alone.  Indeed, it is his slavish desire to show solidarity with the American administration and inability to temper - even a little - that administration's determination on war that is such a contributory factor in his overall failure.

Chilcot is damning about the awful aftermath of the invasion in Iraq.  As well he should be.  But the real responsibility - if we accept that Blair was a mere cipher in this regard - lay with the ultimate planners of the war, and none was more involved than George W Bush's Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld.

It is worth briefly recounting why the Iraq invasion turned that country into such a ruinous state in so rapid a time.

Once determined on war, Donald Rumsfeld was also determined that it should be fought with as few men as possible.  Having scythed through Baghdad, Rumsfeld’s forces were then confronted with a horrendous security operation, and faced with the Secretary’s unyielding demand that this too be undertaken with the most underwhelming force possible.  Rumsfeld, indeed, even stopped one division from going to Baghdad at all, in the belief that it was an unnecessary expenditure. 

The man in the Pentagon thus hamstrung the very forces he had sent into Iraq right from the start. There was worse to come, though, in the form of his sweeping aside of the cautious but politically aware team of American reconstructionists who were in Baghdad and headed by Jay Garner, in favour of the brash, arrogant and wholly unsuited Paul Bremer.  Bremer, a man of supreme egoism who likened himself to General MacArthur, insisted on complete authority to run Iraq.  It couldn’t have gone to a less qualified individual.  Bremer had no knowledge whatever of the Middle East – unlike Garner and his team, or the Iraqi originally slated to be a co-leader, Zalmay Khalilzad.  His foreign experience had been as a chief of staff to Henry Kissinger, and an ambassador to the Netherlands.  It was this lack of any prior involvement in Mid East affairs that endeared him to the ever cretinous Rumsfeld. 

Bremer arrived in May 2003 to an urgent need to establish some sort of authority in Baghdad. His predecessors, Garner and Khalilzad, had been making some useful moves to incorporate previous Iraqi civil servants and military commanders into a new governing authority.  Bremer swept this aside, since he had arrived determined to stamp his authority on Baghdad by dismissing the whole of Saddam Hussein’s political and military structure.  His first order was thus to bar the top four levels of Saddam’s Baath Party from holding any government office.  As the CIA station chief in Baghdad noted, Bremer had just disenfranchised 30,000 people.

Bremer’s Order No 2 was even more catastrophic.  Despite the talks that had been going on between Garner and Khalilzad and potentially sympathetic Iraqi army commanders, Bremer’s order – drafted by former Clinton aide Walter Slocombe – removed the entire military structure that had existed under Saddam.  The reaction in Iraq was furious, with angry demonstrations in Baghdad and other cities; sixteen US soldiers were wounded by violent protests in Mosul, a matter of particular annoyance to General Petraeus whose forces had up to that point been making some headway in winning over the city’s population.  And if Order No 1 had sent 30,000 officials to unexpected unemployment, Order No 2 did the same for 300,000 well armed soldiers.  It is no surprise to discover that many of those soldiers formed the nucleus of the Islamic Army of Iraq and Syria that is causing so much grief today.

Bremer’s orders, confirmed by Rumsfeld, were ill considered and destructive, but even the logic on which they were based was flawed, not least because Bremer failed to make even the most cursory investigation of the country he had come to rule.  Had he done so, he would have discovered that the Iraqi army’s top ranks had far fewer Baathists than he had thought.  A mere half of the generals,  and only 8,000 of the 140,000 officers and NCO’s were committed Baath Party members.  The Iraqi officers who had been in discussions with Garner and Khalilzad knew this, but Bremer had dismissed their contribution out of hand.  He ended up pursuing de-Baathification of a military that hadn’t needed it. 

There is a final indication – and perhaps an appropriate one – of Paul Bremer’s mendacious ignorance of Iraq and Arab culture.  He and Slocombe had devised a scheme to replace the Iraqi military with a ‘New Iraqi Corps’.  NIC, when pronounced in Arabic, sounds very much like “fuck”.  It is a fitting commentary on a man who has retired into a peaceful life of painting and lecturing in the bucolic countryside of Vermont while the reverberations of his ill-thought out and gung-ho policies continue to condemn thousands of Iraqis to death, torture, or – often at best – a wretched existence carved out in the midst of slaughter, and fear of the ISIL monster which has filled the vacuum he created.   Mr. Rumsfled may not have been in favour of imposing democracy.  The trouble is, he doesn't appear to have been in favour of imposing anything at all.

The book “Cobra II” by Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor (chapter 24) provides much of the narrative detail referred to above.

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The Tories are in a better position than the Labour party as they will undoubtedly quickly unite behind a new leader come September.  The question is, who will that leader be and what does it mean for British politics?  At a time when the Labour party is incapable of providing any clear opposition and the Liberal Democrats remain an irrelevance, the choice of Tory leader is crucial for the country. Sadly, the country doesn't choose.  A few thousand Tory activists do.

Forget the MP tallies in the parliamentary vote for the moment.  That they will put Theresa May through with a substantial - even overwhelming - majority supporting her seems likely (at the moment - though the last week has emphasised the unpredictable nature of politics).  Andrea Leadsom looks well set to be her competitor in the run-off amongst party activists.

And here's the thing.  Leadsom may be relatively new to the party, while May has racked up immense service in the voluntary party even before she went into parliament.  But if you have a look at the way the wind is blowing the activists think they could have found their new Thatcher, and it's not the estimable Mrs. May.

The Conservative Home site remains a useful - though admittedly not infallible - bell-weather inidcator of Tory grassroots opinion.  While the focus of the media commentariat is still on the vote amongst Tory MPs, the key vote, the activist vote, is being monitored by Conservative Home.  It shows a serious movement in Andrea Leadsom's favour, as she edges past Theresa May.

A previous poll from the ConHome panel showed Michael Gove as the firm favourite a mere few weeks ago, and even after his dire week he is still holding up well in third place.  The message for the May faction, however, is that they are nowhere near victory in this race.  While she may seem to the non-Conservative onlooker to embody many of the characteristics of a classic Tory leader - strong on national security and law and order, fiscally sound, compassionate but only to a degree, socially pretty conservative in most areas - she has a serious weakness as far as the grassroots vote is concerned.  Two, actually.

The most serious is that, for all her strengths of character and her low profile in the EU campaign, she is a Remainer.  Yes, she has announced that Brexit is it, Brexit is the way.  But the Tory grassroots were implacably for Brexit over many years.  Their euro-scepticism stymied the frequent attempts of the Tories' most popular national politician, Ken Clarke, to become leader.  Their implicit support for the regular bouts of euro-sceptic rebellion undermined John Major and gave rise to David Cameron's catastrophic referendum decision.  They are socially very conservative and tend to a more isolationist global outlook.  And they want someone who reflects their image.  By endorsing the EU, Theresa May has significantly distorted that comforting reflection.

Second, no matter how quietly (again), Theresa May did support gay marriage.  In the metropolitan, EU supporting part of Britain that is a good thing.  In the Conservative Party, it is a cause of real suspicion.  Before the referendum, nothing alienated David Cameron more from his own party members than his promotion of gay marriage, and it remains significant that he chooses that as one of his signature achievements.

If Theresa May had been facing off a candidate with similar socially liberal tendencies this might not have mattered.  Her support for the EU would still be a stumbling block, but against a Johnson or a Gove there is a chance that her steadier personality and the perception that she is a tough defender of British interests might still have pulled her through.

But May won't be against either of those men.  She will be against a woman who reminds the Tory electorate more than she does herself of their most potent icon.  Margaret Thatcher.

Leadsom is a grassroots member's dream.  They love the fact that she has been "in finance" for over 25 years since nothing screeches success to Tory members more than the ability to make a killing over a long period in the financial markets.  They fully embrace her euro-scepticism, and as the key male leaders of that campaign fall like dominoes, Leadsom's own over-rated role becomes ever more important.  She was a true believer when it still looked like a lost cause.  And she opposed gay marriage.  She will face hostile questioning from a metropolitan media about that, and all the people on social media who aren't members of the Tory party may excoriate her for it, but it is a significant point of unspoken attraction for Tory members.  If homosexual attraction used to be the love that dare not speak its name, genuine hostility towards gay people is the attitude that dare not speak its name within the Tory party.

I would rate Leadsom's chances, over a summer campaign, of gaining a majority of the small Tory grassroots vote as being much better than average.  This race may look like May's to lose, but her star rose only recently, benefitted from Westminster shenanigans, and could dip again as the brighter meteorite of a more clearly Thatcherite lady takes centre stage.

Forget Westminster.  Like the referendum before it, this race is decided amongst ordinary people who have never been plugged in to the Westminster conversation.