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From Vox
M. Night Shyamalan’s Old, HBO’s The White Lotus, and the existential terror of right now -
Old’s Gael Garcia Bernal and The White Lotus’s Connie Britton both went on vacation and got older, but everything happened much more quickly for one of them. | Universal/HBO
Both were filmed in Covid-19 bubbles, and both are about going on vacation in a world slipping into the sea.
Around halfway through director M. Night Shyamalan’s latest movie Old, Maddox, played by Thomasin McKenzie, has just begun to realize the weight of what has happened to her.
While on vacation with her parents and younger brother, Maddox went to the beach as an 11-year-old (at which point, she was played by a different actor). But thisbeach ages people at the rate of roughly one year per half-hour. Pretty soon, she’s a teenager. As the day passes, she progresses through her 20s and 30s. (McKenzie takes over the role about 30 minutes into the film, when Maddox is 16, then plays her for most of the rest of the movie.)
Maddox is a problem solver, as so many eldest children are. She begins to pace on the sand, insisting to herself that she must keep it together. But she can’t stop thinking about all she’s lost, an 11-year-old in a young adult’s body. Prom, graduation, college — they’re all slipping away in a matter of hours. Her world is collapsing beneath her.
Old is full of kids like Maddox, kids who’ve assumed their lives will always be safe and predictable, only to suddenly learn they’re anything but on the beach that makes you old. One kid tells his friend they’ll be best friends forever, until they both live next door to each other and have mortgages. Another kid, now a teenager thanks to the beach, gets pregnant; neither she nor the boy who impregnated her have any idea how it happened. Even Shyamalan’s camera gets in on the action, doing long pans across the beach from one position to another. Each time it returns to its starting point, something has changed or new information has appeared in the frame, often unpredictably. The message is always the same: Something safe has failed us. The world is falling apart.
Old is a movie about how parents are rendered inadequate and helpless when faced with the task of preparing their children for a world that stops making sense. It is also one of the first wide-release movies to have been filmed entirely in the middle of a pandemic-imposed bubble, and the existential terror of a year in quarantine informs almost every moment of the movie.
The film is not the only recent release to embrace this thematic sensibility. Another, similar project, HBO’s limited TV series The White Lotus, currently airing on Sundays, also takes place in a tropical setting drenched with omens of something dark and terrible just over the horizon. Old is a horror movie; The White Lotus is a social satire. They’re still weirdly in conversation.
Both Old and The White Lotus were produced under similar Covid-19 safety protocols (an isolated location, a small cast of actors, lots of filming outdoors). Both are informed by their respective filming bubbles, and both are also interested in the ways the world feels a little less “normal” with every day. Both are soaked through with pre- apocalyptic dread, and both prominently feature an ocean that looms in the background, occasionally sweeping a smartphone away or washing a dead body onto the shore. It’s not that far a stretch to suggest those moments are provoked by anxiety over rising sea levels.
Old and The White Lotus are convinced we live in a world that is falling apart, both broadly (nothing makes sense anymore!) and more granularly (the planet is heating up!). They both serve to underline how there’s very little we can do about any of it.
The symbiotic relationship between Covid-19 bubbles and the filming of Old and The White Lotus
Universal Pictures
Gael Garcia Bernal and Vicky Krieps play two parents who watch in horror as they and their children’s lives spiral out of control.
Old and The White Lotus might seem to have very little in common, beyond a tropical setting and the fact that they both feature dead bodies.
The former is a horror movie from a love-or-hate director whose career has become emblematic of big twist endings and overwrought dialogue. The latter is an acidic social satire set at a Hawaiian resort whose many guests have gathered for a variety of reasons — a family getaway, a honeymoon, a mourning ritual. It’s written and directed by Mike White, of Enlightened fame, who is one of television’s best observers of rich white people’s blind spots and idiosyncrasies. The former is an overblown B-movie. The latter is akin to an American Renoir film, complete with all the class warfare you could hope for.
That’s where their production commonalities factor in. Old and The White Lotus were both filmed in the midst of the pandemic, in complete production lockdowns. By replicating the rhythms of a vacation and traveling to a singular destination, then quarantining and establishing a Covid-19 bubble, each could limit who was on and off the set, simply thanks to geography. Shyamalan went so far as to rent an entire resort in the Dominican Republic so that his cast and crew could remain isolated from the world at large. The White Lotus filmed at the Four Seasons resort in Maui, with the hotel completely closed to the public for much of production.
Old had been greenlit in 2019, but it didn’t begin shooting until September of 2020; production wrapped in November. HBO actually approached White in mid-2020 to ask if he could construct a story that could be filmed in a single location very quickly, to facilitate production during lockdown. He began shooting The White Lotus in October of 2020 and was done by the end of the year. At the time, Hawaii had seen very limited Covid-19 cases; Maui County has had just under 5,500 Covid-19 cases ever.
If you poke at the seams of Old and The White Lotus, you can see how they were each designed to accommodate pandemic safety concerns. Both have extremely limited casts of characters, neither of which expands that much throughout their respective stories. Both feature a lot of scenes filmed outdoors or on large, open-air patios. Both are set at resorts, which are reasonably easy to lock down, provided you’re willing to buy out the whole place — a much easier prospect during a global event that has enormously diminished world travel.
Both stories are also informed by pandemic-era sensitivities and share a deep-seated claustrophobia common to works predominantly set in a single location. The people on the beach in Old cannot escape said beach, and the people at the resort in The White Lotus don’t seem to want to leave the resort. Everybody’s trapped, usually with their families and a random assortment of strangers, like in your average quarantine-era apartment building. Children, left unsupervised, get into trouble on their own, and their parents are too exhausted or apathetic to do anything about it. Everybody gets into arguments about just how fucked they are.
The existential dread present in Old is more obvious, and more immediate. “We are going to die here!” has a bit more urgency to it when you’re on a beach that ages you rapidly than when you’re simply muddling through life on a planet that is killing you and everyone you know very, very slowly. Yet it’s not hard to look at both projects and compare them to the sandcastle that two characters build near the end of Old, or the smartphone one character loses to the ocean in The White Lotus. Everything we do and everything we have is impermanent. The earth is finding new ways to remind us of that every day.
Covid-19 anxiety art as an amuse-bouche for climate catastrophe anxiety art
<img alt="Sydney Sweeney (in glasses) and Brittany O’Grady (clutching a bag) await someone."
Sydney Sweeney (left) and Brittany O’Grady play two of the young people trying to deal with an endless vacation in The White Lotus.
The global uncertainty that defined 2020 underscored and highlighted a question plenty of prospective parents are asking right now: Is it unethical to bring a child into a world that is crumbling? Or is having children an essential act of hope for the future? People have continued to have babies in far more dire situations than the one we’re currently in. Why would we stop now?
Still — if things keep getting worse, have you just brought a child into a world that will increasingly become uninhabitable? What happens when you bring your kids to a place where the rules you grew up with no longer hold sway? How do you cope with the idea that the world might fall apart to such a degree that they won’t have a prom, a graduation, a college education? What if it comes to that?
There are, of course, billions of people on the planet for whom horrible instability has always been a given, but the awful, democratizing effect of both Covid-19 and climate change is that their horrors are somewhat more evenly spread across the species. While the horrors that Covid-19 inflicted on privileged people around the globe have been far less cataclysmic than those inflicted on everybody else, everyone is affected by it at least a little bit, and climate change seems likely to follow a similar template.
Science-fiction writer Charlie Jane Anders recently wrote in her newsletter about just how much her fear of climate change’s effects on humanity has bled into her writing. She also observed, however, that there can be something healing in acknowledging that fear.
I’m honestly terrified of what’s coming, and the fact that we’re already starting to live through heat waves and superstorms and (maybe) zoonotic diseases doesn’t do anything to make the future climate disruption less scary. At all. We are going to suffer, all of us, in ways we’ve barely wrapped our heads around so far. And yet, I don’t think fiction about climate change needs to be disaster porn, or pure misery, or something engineered to “scare us straight.” At all. A lot of my work on climate change is about surviving and adapting.
The trick of being alive right now is pretending that everything we’re doing still matters. There is abundant evidence that nothing might be as important as humans banding together in a last-ditch effort to slow the effects of climate change, such that the planet might continue to support life as we know it. Whatever anxiety Covid-19 has provoked, including in so many artists, feels like an appetizer for the main course.
“We’re still parasites on the Earth!” one character exclaims in The White Lotus, hoping to underline the hypocrisy of his family members, who are squabbling about the right way to organize society. They all know he’s right; they also are powerless to stop being parasites. They are the super- rich, and they are loath to change their ways because it’s easier to be comfortable than to do something difficult but right. Old touches on this idea as well, in a moment I dare not spoil here. Both works are very interested in the ways in which unchecked capitalism has contributed to the state of the world, past, present, and future, but The White Lotus, in particular, is excoriating about the upper classes.
The 2020s might very well become a decade of art forged in paranoia and anxiety at the thought of a warming climate that is outpacing our ability or willingness to act before it’s too late. But art that is terrified about a slowly building apocalypse isn’t a new phenomenon. The 1920s were filled with art set in beautiful baubles of decadence that felt uneasily gleeful (or deeply traumatized) in the wake of World War I and the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic. The 1950s and ’60s were rife with art terrified by the seeming inevitability of nuclear war. We imagine our apocalypses in great detail, perhaps in hopes that we can avert them in reality.
That sense of looming apocalypse is what most unites Old and The White Lotus in the end. Old suggests that at least some of us might find a way out of our current series of existential threats; The White Lotus isn’t so sure. But for as attuned as both works are to this particular moment in time, they also have one eye on what has always been true: We’re always heading toward an ending of some sort. Every beach you visit makes you older by virtue of the time you spend there, just not as quickly as the beach in Old. The planet is going to get you eventually.
Everything we do is impermanent, regardless of whether we halt climate change. Centuries from now, if humanity exists, no one will be talking about Old or The White Lotus or this article discussing the two. People will have new concerns and new thoughts to ponder through their art. The things that are permanent — or at least as close to permanent as our conceptions of time will allow — are the ocean and the sand and the endless chain of life that stretches behind and beyond us. Having a child right now is a tremendous act of faith that things might turn out okay in the end, but having a child is always a tremendous act of faith. The world is always ending, and it’s always beginning, too. You have to make your peace with that somehow.
Or, to put it more bluntly, as one character says after watching a whale surface in the ocean in The White Lotus: “What the fuck?”
How should a person be in the age of climate change? -
People rest at a cooling station in Portland, Oregon, on June 28. | Kathryn Elsesser/AFP via Getty Images
Scientists and activists have been warning about climate change for decades — and plenty of people around the world have experienced its effects long before now. John Paul Mejia, for example, became a climate organizer as a Miami high school student, after seeing what Hurricane Irma did to “people who both looked like me, and came from the same background as I did.” (Climate change didn’t cause Hurricane Irma, but it did worsen its impacts.)
Thomas Lohnes/Getty Images
“These are the harbingers of climate change that have now arrived in Germany,” said German Minister of the Environment Svenja Schulze in response to the flooding in northwest Europe earlier this year.
“I understood the climate fight through the justice lens from experience, not from an article,” Mejia, now a spokesperson for the Sunrise Movement, which mobilizes youth to fight climate change, told Vox.
But through the events of this summer, many Americans — including those from more affluent communities that have been insulated so far — have seen more direct and devastating impacts of climate change on their own lives. For a lot of people, that can come with a sense of despair: What can one person possibly do to save a world literally on fire?
“What happens is, when people first realize how bad it is, they feel powerless,” Mary Annaïse Heglar, a climate writer and co-creator of the podcast Hot Take, told Vox. With the extreme weather this year, “there’s a new wave of new people realizing how bad it is.”
Indeed, 40 percent of Americans feel helpless about climate change, and 29 percent feel hopeless, according to a December 2020 survey. It’s also no surprise that these emotions are coming up during a devastating pandemic — yet another global disaster over which individual humans have seemingly little control.
To help stop climate change, we’ve sometimes been told to change our personal habits: recycle, reuse, take shorter showers, etc. But these individual choices are dwarfed by the actions of corporations and countries.Just 100 companies are responsible for 70 percent of the world’s carbon emissions since 1988, according to one study, and sweeping changes aren’t possible without government intervention. Not to mention the fact that poverty and other factors constrain the choices many people can make in the first place.
Given all this, it’s no surprise that “all of a sudden, everybody’s going into nihilism,” as Heglar puts it.
But experts say we’re notcompletely powerless, and there’s a way to live in an age of climate change without giving up or sticking your head in the sand. It’s not necessarily about going vegan or making your home zero- waste, either.
The idea of reducing your personal carbon footprint, while not inherently wrong, has often been used as a distraction, “pitting working people against each other with morality choices about how sustainable you are,” rather than “realizing how much you actually have in common,” Mejia said.
Instead, many say the key to fighting despair is to think beyond the individual and seek community support and solutions — especially those that put pressure on governments and companiesto make the large-scale changes that are necessary to truly curtail emissions. As Heglar put it, “the most detrimental thing to climate action is this feeling that we’re all in it alone.”
Many Americans are recognizing the reality of climate change
Climate anxiety and despair are far from new phenomena. But thisdisastrous summer has drivenhome the message that the changing climate “is not something we can avoid,” Sarah Jaquette Ray, leader of the Environmental Studies Program at Humboldt State University, told Vox. “I’m literally talking to you from the smoke right now.”
That message is showing up in polling. About a third of Americans (and two- thirds of Republicans) still don’t believe that humans are causing climate change, but a lot of people have been growing more concerned in recent years. This year, for example, 50 percent of participants in a Morning Consult poll said the changing climate poses a “critical threat” to American interests, up 6 percentage points from 2019 and 10 points from 2017.
American attitudes about what to do about climate change are evolving too. Carbon emissions have often been treated as a problem to be solved by changing our personal consumption habits, with an explosion of green products aimed at capitalizing on people’s desire to be environmentally friendly. Aside from the irony of getting people to buy more stuff as a way of reducing their environmental impact, this approach also obscured the real culprits, many say: companies that produce or use large amounts of fossil fuels, and governments that have been far too slow to curb emissions.
Indeed, oil companies like ExxonMobil have used sophisticated PR campaigns to make climate change seem like an issue of personal responsibility, and deflect blame away from their own actions, as Rebecca Leber reported for Vox. “A lot of the individualist solutions that have propagated across society and across our discourse, such as the carbon footprint and the idea of self-sacrifice in order to save the planet, really have the fingerprints of a few oil companies,” Mejia said.
In truth, the biggest contributors to carbon emissions in the United States, transportation, electricity, and industry, are only partly under individuals’ control. People can choose to use less energy in their homes, but household electricity use only accounts for about 10 percent of CO2 emissions in the US — even getting rid of it entirely wouldn’t be enough to stop climate change. And while some people can choose to drive an electric car or go car-free, they can’t individually shut down coal plants or redesign America’s public transit systems to make that an option for everyone.
That’s why it will take government action, not just individual sacrifice, to meaningfully rein in emissions. For example, Congress could pass a nationwide clean electricity standard, requiring utilities to get their electricity from renewable sources like solar, rather than fossil fuels. Without that, even supposedly environmentally-friendly individual decisions like driving an electric car may not mean much, since that electricity could still come from burning coal. And only governments have the money and authority for the improvements to public transit and other infrastructure that are needed to dramatically reduce emissions over the long term.
In recent years, there’s been growing awareness of the outsize role that big companies and government entities play in climate change. “We’ve really changed the conversation around climate change away from individual action, which I think we really needed to do,” Heglar said. However, now we’re “in danger of the pendulum swinging too far,” she said, with people thinking “they can’t do anything at all.”
Here are some ways Americans can think about — and act on — climate change
Giving upon our climate is not an option, experts and advocates say. As Mejia puts it, “cynicism serves no purpose but to uphold the status quo.”
Instead, people who’ve been steeped in climate action for years or decades have some advice for those who might feeling powerless today in the face of the problem.
Don’t try to do everything. Do what you can.
Individual “green” behaviors aren’t enough to stop climate change on their own. And not all people have the same ability to reduce their carbon footprints. Many Americans can’t afford solar panels or insulation for their hot water heaters — many others don’t live in places where they can control such things. Time is also a factor — reducing waste in a society designed to produce a lot of it is labor- intensive, and that labor often falls disproportionately on women, as Alden Wicker reported at Vox.
So rather than beating ourselves up when we fall short of environmental perfection — or criticizing others when they do — we can choose the most meaningful actions that are doable for us. Things like reducing consumption of animal products, driving less, and taking fewer airplane flights likely have the biggest impact on our personal carbon use.
Everyone’s capabilities are different. Overall, “it’s important to find the ways that you can reduce your consumption, that work for your lifestyle and within your means,” Heglar said.
And it’s important to remember that those consumption decisions are just the beginning. “It’s a good starting point, but it’s a really dangerous stopping point,” Heglar said. People need to exercise their power as consumers, but remember that they have power as citizens and community members, too.
Think communally
The most important step, many say, is collective action. In America, “we have such a myth of individualism,” said Humboldt State’s Ray, also the author of A Field Guide to Climate Change: How to Keep Your Cool on a Warming Planet. That myth can make people feel “that they have no power, because they can’t do anything against such as something so big as climate change.” For many in climate movements, the antidote to that feeling — and the way to build real power — is to band together.
At the Sunrise Movement, for example, that means advocating for a Green New Deal, alongside other priorities like climate investment in the infrastructure deal currently before Congress. The movement has hosted marches across the country in recent months to bring the Biden administration’s attention to the problem, as well as reaching out to more than 6.5 million voters in the 2020 election. “Since the winds of change are blowing,” Mejia says, “why don’t we make them sail in our direction?”
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Rep. Cori Bush (left) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rally hundreds of young climate activists near the White House June 28.
The Sunrise Movement is just one of many groups working on climate advocacy today, and for some, getting involved with collective action can seem as daunting as reducing your individual carbon footprint: Where do you even start? For Heglar, the answer is simple: “You do what you’re good at, and you do your best.”
“If you’re good at organizing, organize. If you’re good at taking care of people, take care of people who do other things, Heglar said. And “no matter who you are, build community.”
Around the world, people are already working on communal solutions to environmental degradation, and have been for generations, whether that’s Indigenous firefighting practices or the fight to protect the rainforest in Colombia. And for Americans looking for ways to join together to help one another and the planet, there are many options, like local mutual aid groups that help communities cope with the impact of climate change, such as by providing water and sunscreen during heat waves. Local Buy Nothing groups can help people reduce waste by giving away and sharing used items.
Putting pressure on elected officials is one of the most important collective actions people can take. People can urge their representatives in Congress, state legislatures, and city governmentsto support climate investments, public transit, and clean energy standards, for example. The Natural Resources Defense Council has a guide to lobbying your legislator.
Getting involved in communities doesn’t just multiply your impact — it can also stave off despair. Ray has seen this in her classes at Humboldt State, in which she encourages students to build trust, express their feelings about climate change, and essentially practice for going out into the wider world. “The alleviation of anxiety that happens when you’re working towards a common goal, even if it’s a really depressing one, in community is actually very joyful and very fulfilling,” she said.
Think long-term
Just as no one person can fix climate change, the crisis isn’t going to be solved overnight — and it may not be “solved” in a conventional way at all. In order to confront this fact, people need to think of fighting climate change as a long-term process they engage with over time, Heglar said.
We should see the problem “in the same realm that you would see reproductive justice or racial justice or any other justice issue,” she explained. “You would never say, what’s the one thing I can do about racism?”
Especially since the uprisings last summer following the murder of George Floyd, more Americans — especially white people — arebeginning to internalize the idea that the fight against racism will be a long-term struggle, one that probably won’t ever be “over,” but that they have a responsibility to keep committing to, again and again. And racial justice activists have experience working for a cause that can seem hopeless, and confronting an existential risk to themselves and their families — but they keep doing the work anyway.
It’s also important to remember that for many communities the world over, facing a major threat to the present and future is nothing new. Anti-colonial and abolitionist movements “have had long traditions of movement resilience that have a lot to teach the climate movement,” Ray noted, including the message that climate change is not “the first and only existential threat we’ve ever faced.”
Indeed, social movements from the opposition to apartheid in South Africa to Indigenous rights activism here in the US have “seen a lot of reason for despair, and no evidence for hope, and have still figured out how to fight the fight,” Ray said.
Seek joy, but allow for grief
The fight against climate change can be slow, difficult, and painful. But in order to stay committed for the long haul, people need to think about the positive too, Ray said, to “actively discipline into your life the cultivation of joy.”
That could mean something as simple as reading news about environmental successstories or successful activism in your local community. Ray is involved in a local group with the Just Transition movement, which works toward an equitable shift away from fossil fuels, and says “the newsletter that they send me is enough to keep me going.”
“The world is awful,” Ray said. “And there’s so much beauty, joy, and delight to be had too.”
Nathan Howard/Getty Images
Cliff divers spend time at High Rocks Park in Portland during the heat dome that descended over the Pacific Northwest in June.
It’s also okay to feel the awfulness of the world. After all, climate change for many Americans today means risk to themselves or their loved ones, or destruction of their homes or places they’ve come to love. And part of acknowledging climate anxiety and grief, for people not yet personally affected by disasters, can be asking yourself, “If I am hurting so much, what is happening to people who are less privileged?” Kritee, a senior climate scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund, recently told the New York Times.
People who have been involved in climate science or activism for years still feel sorrow, despair, or rage, Heglar said. In fact, “I feel comforted by the fact I can still feel that way, because it means I’m not desensitized,” she said. “I never want to be that person who can look at the world burn and feel fine.”
But when climate grief or despair become overwhelming, the key is to reach out to others in your community. “You are not the only one feeling this way,” Heglar said, adding that “it benefits the fossil fuel industry when you think you are. So find the other people who are feeling it too.”
Democrats say Cuomo must resign. He’s refusing. What now? -
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is being asked to resign by prominent Democrats including President Biden. | Spencer Platt/Getty Images
Impeachment looms, but Democrats are still hoping he’ll quit first.
The new report accusing New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, of sexually harassing several women has raised the odds that he’ll be ousted from office — but it hasn’t entirely quieted fears that he’ll be let off the hook.
The report from the New York state attorney general’s office documented testimony from 11 women, mostly state employees, who allege that Cuomo acted inappropriately toward them. The accusations covered conduct ranging from unwanted kissing and touching to inappropriate comments. One state employee claims Cuomo groped her breast; others describe the governor telling sex jokes and commenting on how they looked.
This isn’t even the only scandal Cuomo’s facing — investigators are looking into his handling of data on Covid-19 deaths at New York nursing homes and whether he used state resources to write and promote a book, among other matters. Criminal charges from county prosecutors are also possible. (In response, a lawyer for the governor issued a statement asserting that the worst of the allegations are simply untrue, and Cuomo himself claimed in a Twitter video that he has a habit of touching people’s faces and doesn’t intend anything sexual by it.)
The problem is that, for now at least, he says he won’t.
Win McNamee/Getty Images
In a press conference on Tuesday, August 3, President Joe Biden told reporters that New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo should resign following the results of a state investigation into his behavior.
So, what’s next? An impeachment vote in the New York State Assembly looms, posing the threat that Cuomo could be removed from power involuntarily. But Democrats are still hoping that won’t be necessary. As New York state Sen. James Skoufis said recently, the hope is that once it’s made clear to Cuomo that his impeachment and removal is certain, he’ll resign to save some face.
Scandal-plagued politicians often don’t resign because of shame or docility, but because they’ve concluded that leaving office voluntarily is the least bad, most face- saving option for them personally.
That could still happen. But Cuomo, evidently, has not yet concluded that he’s doomed. We’ve seen politicians fend off calls for resignation and beat back impeachment efforts before, even in the face of seemingly damning evidence. If Cuomo keeps refusing to go, Democrats will have two options to oust him against his will: 1) through impeachment, and 2) in the 2022 elections, if impeachment fails and Cuomo continues his reelection bid.
Cuomo appears headed toward impeachment
A scandal- spurred resignation is nothing new for New York Democrats, given the downfalls of Gov. Eliot Spitzer (in 2008) and Attorney General Eric Schneiderman (in 2018). But Cuomo seems to be trying a different strategy — that of Donald Trump, who stayed in both the 2016 presidential race after several women accused him of sexual misconduct and in the White House after numerous scandals. Cuomo may also be thinking about Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam: Practically every leading Democrat asked him to resign when photos showing him in blackface surfaced in 2019, but he stayed in office and has since been welcomed back into polite Democratic company.
Cuomo’s political position looks far worse than Trump’s or Northam’s, though. While some top Republicans repudiated Trump on occasion, most others remained loyal to him despite years of scandals, as did the vast majority of GOP voters. But polls already show a narrow majority of Democratic voters in the state saying Cuomo should resign.
Northam’s scandal, meanwhile, did not involve official misconduct, so impeachment never went anywhere. But leaders of the New York State Assembly, which has the power to impeach, have said they’re very serious about pursuing Cuomo’s removal and hope to make it happen within months.
David Dee Delgado/Getty Images
On Tuesday, August 3, New York Attorney General Letitia James (center) presented the findings of an independent investigation looking into allegations of sexually harassment by Gov. Andrew Cuomo.
Impeaching a governor in the New York State Legislature plays out similarly to that of a US president in Congress. The Assembly goes first, and a majority vote there is necessary for impeachment. A trial is then held in the state Senate, with a two-thirds vote there being necessary to convict Cuomo, remove him from office, and ban him from holding future elected office in the state. (One difference is that the “jury” in a potential Cuomo impeachment trial would include 62 state senators plus seven judges of the New York State Court of Appeals, all of whom Cuomo appointed.)
Democrats hold large majorities in both the State Assembly and State Senate, so Cuomo’s fate depends on them. As with Trump, Cuomo’s best hope may be the Senate’s two-thirds threshold necessary for conviction. If just 24 senators vote no, he’ll be able to stay in power.
Still, Democrats are hoping to avoid the ugly, protracted process of impeachment by getting Cuomo to resign. One way to do that would be to make clear that he doesn’t have enough support from state senators and that the outcome truly is inevitable — if, in fact, it is.
If Cuomo survives impeachment, there’s an election next year
As of now, Cuomo still seems set on running for a fourth term as governor, and no Democrat has stepped up to challenge him in the June 2022 primary. So if he does manage to fend off impeachment — and if, improbable as it may seem today, he stays in the race — the party would face quite a dilemma.
That is, they’d need at least one strong challenger to oust Cuomo, but if several enter the race and Cuomo stays in, it may be challenging for the party to coordinate around one alternative.
According to the New York Times’s Katie Glueck, “many Democrats hope” that Attorney General Letitia James, whose office released this week’s report on the investigation into Cuomo’s conduct, will run, but it’s not clear whether she will. An early, unified party backing one challenger would be another way to send Cuomo the message that his time as governor is up.
But Cuomo could gamble that he’s more in touch with rank-and-file party voters than his critics. Glueck writes that he’s been seeking “to connect with those voters — especially older voters — who might be sympathetic to his suggestion that many of the allegations of misconduct can be traced to ‘generational or cultural’ differences or misunderstandings.” And, if things truly get to this point, it really would be those voters who make the call.
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Indian 4x400m relay team breaks Asian record but fails to qualify for final in Olympics - India missed out the eight-team final as they ended at ninth spot overall.
Race For The Stars, Mzilikazi, Battista and Queen Of Gibraltar impress - Race For The Stars, Mzilikazi, Battista and Queen Of Gibraltar impressed when the horses were exercised here on Friday (Aug. 6).Inner sand: 600m: Eag
Wrestler Deepak Punia’s coach Gaidarov expelled from Tokyo Olympics - The International Olympic Committee has cancelled Gaidarov’s accreditation after a hearing was held in the matter.
Retaining Messi was a “risky” investment, says Barcelona president Laporta - He blamed Barcelona’s previous administration for the club’s dire financial situation.
Over and out: Marijne says Olympics was last assignment as coach with India women’s hockey team - Indian women came tantalisingly close to winning their maiden Olympic medal before losing to Great Britain 3-4 in a close bronze play-off match
From The Hindu: National News
Rename stadia also after sportspersons: Congress - Welcomes move to retitle Khel Ratna after hockey legend Dhyan Chand
India, China withdraw from Gogra area in Eastern Ladakh - This is second friction area from which disengagement has been done after Pangong Tso in Feb.
Tata Advanced Systems to make Boeing 737 fan cowls in Hyderabad - Tata Advanced Systems (TASL) on Friday said it has been awarded a contract for manufacturing and supply of Boeing 737 fan cowl, at its facility in Hyd
CBI books UP govt officer over alleged irregularities in additional private secretary exam-2010 - The CBI has registered an FIR against Special Secretary in the Uttar Pradesh government Prabhunath for alleged irregularities in the conduct of Additi
Renegotiate Indus Water Treaty to address impact of climate change: Parliamentary Panel - In its report the panel has also reccomended monitoring of Chinese actions on the Brahmaputra river
From BBC: Europe
Olympics expels Belarus coaches over athlete removal - Ms Timanovskaya said she was forced to leave Tokyo after she complained about her coaches online.
Greece battles wildfires near Athens and on Evia island - Strong winds and scorching heat fuel dozens of blazes, forcing thousands to evacuate.
Covid: Italy rolls out ‘green pass’ for public venue access - All those aged 12 and over with at least one jab will be able to access bars, cinemas and gyms.
Vitaly Shishov: Belarus activist feared for life before he died - The girlfriend of a Belarusian activist who died in Ukraine says he would never have killed himself.
Lionel Messi will not stay at Barcelona - Barcelona say Lionel Messi will not be staying at the club “because of financial and structural obstacles”.
From Ars Technica
Rocket Report: Virgin Galactic ups ticket prices, Starship surge in Texas - “It has been a tough journey at times.” - link
Climate contrarians predicted the world would cool—it didn’t - The anticlimate-science blogosphere’s trophy cabinet is bare. - link
Paragon is working to get its ntfs3 filesystem into the Linux kernel - Torvalds seems bullish on getting Paragon’s project across the line eventually. - link
Back 4 Blood beta impressions: A template for potential co-op greatness - As a beta, Turtle Rock’s co-op return already feels like a full-fledged L4D sequel. - link
Apple explains how iPhones will scan photos for child-sexual-abuse images - Apple offers technical details, claims 1-in-1 trillion chance of false positives. - link
From Jokes Subreddit
A husband leans over and asks his wife, “Do you remember the first time we had sex together over fifty years ago?” -
“We went behind the village tavern where you leaned against the back fence and I made love to you.”
“Yes”, she says, “I remember it well.”
OK, he says, “How about taking a stroll around there again and we can do it for old time’s sake?”
“Oh Jim, you old devil, that sounds like a crazy, but good idea!”
A police officer sitting in the next booth heard their conversation and, having a chuckle to himself, he thinks to himself, I’ve got to see these two old-timers having sex against a fence. I’ll just keep an eye on them so there’s no trouble. So he follows them.
The elderly couple walks haltingly along, leaning on each other for support aided by walking sticks. Finally, they get to the back of the tavern and make their way to the fence The old lady lifts her skirt and the old man drops his trousers. As she leans against the fence, the old man moves in.. Then suddenly they erupt into the most furious sex that the policeman has ever seen. This goes on for about ten minutes while both are making loud noises and moaning and screaming. Finally, they both collapse, panting on the ground.
The policeman is amazed. He thinks he has learned something about life and old age that he didn’t know.
After about half an hour of lying on the ground recovering, the old couple struggle to their feet and put their clothes back on. The policeman, is still watching and thinks to himself, this is truly amazing, I’ve got to ask them what their secret is.
So, as the couple passes, he says to them, “Excuse me, but that was something else. You must’ve had a fantastic sex life together. Is there some sort of secret to this?”
My Italian Grandfathers favorite joke about a woman who doesn’t want sex -
Hopefully this joke translates to English. It was my grandfather’s favorite.
A woman goes to see the doctor with complaints of a low sex drive. She tells the Dr “My husband wants me to get medicine so I’ll want sex as much as he does”, Doc tell her no problem he will give her the same hormone pills the Olympic weightlifting team uses . He confidently explains, “all of them want to have sex multiple times a day”
2 months later the woman returns to doctor in tears: “Now I want sex all the time but my husband doesn’t want to have it with me, because I’ve grown hair on my chest.”
The surprised doctor asks her: “How far does the hair go down?”
Woman replies: “All the way to my balls. That is another thing I wanted to talk you about”
A housewife takes a lover during the day, while her husband is at work. Not aware that 9 year old son was hiding in the closet. Her husband came home unexpectedly, so she hid her lover in the closet. The boy now has company. -
Boy: ‟Dark in here.” Man: ‟Yes it’s.” Boy: ‟I have a baseball.” Man: ‟That’s nice.” Boy: ‟Want to buy it?” Man: ‟No, thanks.” Boy: ‟That’s my dad outside.” Man: ‟How much did you say the baseball was again?” Boy: ‟$250.”
In the next few weeks, it happens again that the boy and the mom’s lover are in the closet together.
Boy: ‟Dark in here.” Man: ‟Yes, it’s..” Boy: ‟I have a baseball glove.” Man: ‟That’s nice.” Boy: ‟Want to buy it?” Man: ‟No, thanks.” Boy: ‟I think I just remembered something I needed to tell my dad.” Man: ‟How much did you say the glove was again?” Boy: ‟$750.” Man: ‟Fine.”
A few days later, the father says to the boy, ‟Grab your glove. Let’s go outside and toss the baseball!” The boy says, ‟I can’t. I sold them.” The father asks, ‟How much did you sell them for?” The son says, ‟$1,000.” The father says, ‟It’s terrible to over-charge your friends like that. That is way more than those two things cost. I’m going to take you to church and make you confess.”
They go to church and the father alerts the priest and makes the little boy sit in the confession booth and closes the door.
The boy says, ‟Dark in here.” The priest says, ‟Do not start that shit again.”
My little daughter came to me all excited, saying, “Daddy! Daddy! Guess how old I’ll be this August!” I chuckled, “Oh I don’t know princess, why don’t you tell me?” She gave me a huge smile and held up four fingers. -
It’s now three hours later, the police are annoyed and she still won’t say where she got them!
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