Catching Up

There are a great many things in the news about which I have an opinion, but you know, just because an opinion exists is really not an excellent reason to air it.  (Especially since my readership is getting to be small!)

Politics 

Lots of different things happening; maybe I should review them.  For a while, there seemed to be a sustained assault on Minnesota, especially Minneapolis.  The more well attended the peaceful protests in that city were, the more vicious the ICE attacks were.  They shot many people, including Renee Good, a married lesbian, with at least one child; and some time later, Alex Pretti, a health care worker attached to a VA hospital.  (Generally speaking, the Trump administration seems to view Veterans and POWs, and retirees from the Pentagon with manifest disrespect.  Added to the fact that Trump evaded conscription several times, quoting heel spurs, I can't imagine why servicemen and women don't resign en masse from the services.)

It's well known that the Trump Cabinet consists of wildly unqualified, and even inept ìndividuals recruited from the ranks of TV personnel, some of then, and some of them— Kristi Noem springs to mind— from no obvious source.  (Yes, she was the Governor of Montana, but ... I still don't know how that pathway works out, except that she claims to have shot a puppy.  It might just be a story made up to appeal to Donald.  She's very much into cosplaying a cowgirl, and spending government money to draw attention to herself, ɓut no qualifications other than those.)

The government has run out of money at least twice, having cut taxes for high income Americans, and of course, extravagant White House redecorating sprees, and playing golf on the weekends. 

There must still be some who support the GOP and MAGA for being uninformed of misadventures of the federal government.  It's been more than a year, though, of ineffective Trump tweaking of the economy, with the expert help of Elon Musk, and the faithful conservatives should not have any remaining hope that Trump will make the USA a better place; a shinier, bigger, city on a bigger hill than Reagan imagined.  Now Trump is grasping at straws, such as schemes for discouraging women from going to the polls (by making the voting procedures more difficult).

Will the conservatives lose this election?

Unless Trump's—and his enablers'—cheating works, and they steal the election, they will lose the election.  If the Republicans win, I expect a repeat of January 6th, except that this time it will be the anti-trump folk that will be enraged.  They're playing with fire.  The liberals have rolled over and played dead for so long, that Trump and his playmates expect that it will be a cakewalk.

War again 

Trump's attack on Iran was unjustified.  Certainly the theocratic leadership of that country was repugnant to a large sector of the population, including almost all the women.  Heaven knows Trump is no friend to women, especially Islamic women.  But the US did not drop bombs on Teheran to cut the women a break.  It was, most likely, to draw attention away from the Epstein Files.

Why does he care so much about the Epstein files?  We knew he was a pedophile all along, and all his MAGA Bros, and Fox news, they all knew that Trump and friends were no respectors of women (and girls).  So why not own up to it, and have some wild parties at the White House?  Decent women would certainly stay away, e.g. the US Olympic hockey team.  Ónly team players like Tulsi Gabbard, and Kristi N, and Pam Bondi, would attend, and blind eyes will certainly be turned.   (Ooo, am I nåsty?)

Arch 

Isaac Newton's Date of Birth

Well, I'll be snookered!

Remember when I made posts about how J.S. Bach's birthday was incorrectly recorded?

Well, let's review the facts, this time using some convenient terminology.  (Truly, language helps us clarify an absolute host of obscure ideas.)

Basically, our Earth year is not an exact number of days.  Little kids are taught that a year is 365 days long.  But most of us learn later, that it's about 365-and-a-quarter days.  We let the quarters pile up, and every 4 years or so, we add in Feb 29.  (You realize that February usually only has 28 days.)

Unfortunately, a year is a tiny bit less than 365 and a quarter days.  So, the Feb 29th Leap Day is advancing the calendar too fast.  Over several centuries, the Equinox landed almost a month too late.

By the time the papal astronomers got up the guts to make a move on this problem, it was the papacy of one Pope Gregory (Pope Gregory XIII, 1572–1585), a millennium and a half after Julius Ceasar.  Luckily for everybody, the shortfall is, I believe, in the order of a few minutes.  But over so many years, these minutes certainly added up.

In certain parts of Germany in the 1600s, people hated the Pope with a passion.  (Remember: Martin Luther was from Saxony, the very region in which Bach was born.)  They stuck with the outdated Julian Calendar.  The dates recorded for births in Thuringia, for instance, were according to the Julian Calendar.  Some time later, everybody realized that calendars had little to do with religion, and using the new Gregorian Calendar had huge advantages.  The Gregorian dates were called New Style Dates, and the older dates were called Old Style Dates.  Bach's Old Style Birthday was March 21.

I celebrate his birthday on that date, because it's the Equinox, which is cool.  Also, if Bach were somehow raised from the dead, he would give his DOB as March 21.

Well, guess who else had an axe to grind about the calendar?  The English!  At the time of Isaac Newton, England, too, used the Old Style Julian dates.  Isaac's birthday had been celebrated for a Century or two on Christmas Day!  But then, British astronomers saw the light, and Isaac's birthday was revised to be January 4th.

You might not realize that the divergence between Old Style and New Style dates grows steadily, as those minutes add up.  In 1643/1642, Newton's birth year, the difference was just about 10 days; in Bach's time it was about the same.  Today, if anyone aspires to use the Old Style Calendar, the divergence would be crazy.  (I should be able to tell you exactly how much, but I'm too unmotivated to figure out out; after all, I'm retired.  Or just plain tired.)  [Added later: 13 days.]

Well, Happy Wednesday, as the man said!

Arch 

Deeply Ashamed

Since I made my last post, 

(1) Trump has made a kidnapping run into Caracas, and abducted the Venezuelan PM, Nicholas Maduro (and his wife), and brought them to the USA.  Oil company executives were informed, but not Congress. 

(2) A woman was killed by an ICE agent in Minneapolis (?) with a gunshot to her head through a car window.  As far a I know, the woman was unarmed—though ICE is trying to put together a case against the deceased woman as having attempted vehicular homicide. 

Well, that's the background.  Most of us are convinced that all this excitement and government lawlessness is intended to distract from the Epstein files, which are strongly believed to indicate that Trump was connected to a pedophile ring. 

MAGA is at this time sufficiently morally discredited that having a pedophile as head of the USA is not a notable embarrassment.  The degree to which Trump exerted himself to avoid being connected with Epstein suggests that Trump is uncomfortable being accused of pedophilia.  He isn't too upset about sexual harassing adult women. 

Ever since Trump entered the White House in 2017, one thing has been on the rise: the gradual A$$#olification of US men, and some women.

Most of us do a minimum of certain actions: returning shopping carts to their collecting areas; allowing pedestrians to finish crossing the street; making allowances for those carrying infants, especially mothers; being polite to checkout clerks in supermarkets.  Gradually, over the last few years, these acts of common decency seem to be in the wane.  Sometimes I wonder how different this society is, from the one I knew before Trump.

Trump can hardly say a word about President Obama without declaring how terrible he was!  If you compare side-by-side statistics of work done, laws passed, hours taken off for recreational activities, money spent recklessly in supposed improvement of the White House, by President Obama and Trump, I can't believe that Trump would even consider competing with Obama.

Testosterone is fully unleashed.  Hegseth declares that the 'new' armed forces is going to be vicious and muscular. 

And is not going to abide by the law.  Abiding by the law, it appears, is what made the US weak and ineffective. 

Arch. 

Getting inside Another's Head

It's not uncommon to ask ourselves: What was he/she thinking?

People often do inexplicable things.  What we have to do is to get inside their head(s), and try to follow the reasoning they must have gone through.  We've heard the advice that we should not condemn someone until we have walked a mile in their shoes.  That's a slightly different thing: to imagine what they've experienced.

It's my belief that education makes this activity—of imagining what someone else is thinking—a little easier.  It's never truly easy; if it seems easy, you're probably not doing it with enough enthusiasm. 

In these days, I try to imagine what it's like being a follower of Trump.  Bear in mind, though, that there are a number of different sorts of Trump followers.  There are those who (1) have followed Trump for years, and feel that they know exactly what Trump is thinking.  I have to believe that, having done that, they're ready with good reasons why he says things, promises things that he couldn't possibly deliver.  They probably don't take those promises seriously; they probably think: that's just politics; only just a fraction of election promises will be made good!

Then there are (2) people who have made a calculated decision to take Trump as their man because of some aspect of his character: perhaps he looks just like some family member who was uncannily sharp about political outcomes.  Maybe it's the way he talks.  Maybe it's his blonde hair and blue eyes, or how tall he is. 

Maybe there are some (3) who cling to him in the hope that he can do something tangible for them.  There are a lot of people (4) who dislike Democrats and Congress with a passion, and just want to make life as difficult for them as possible.  And of course, there are those who think that there are just too many Federal Regulations.  They don't feel that this is a free country anymore.

Given all this, (a) what do we think that Trump followers are thinking?  Can we get inside their heads?  And (b) what do these Trump followers think we're thinking?  Some writing by Trumpees (about what anti-Trumpers are thinking) are totally off the wall.  Well, at any given moment, people hostile to Trump and his followers could be thinking a lot of different things, that's true.  But I think the proportion of anti-Trumpers thinking to make the Trumpees angry are probably very few!  (Making ICE angry is different.  Also making Lindsey Graham angry could be a lot of fun.)  I, for one, am totally occupied with very different matters, and baiting Trumpees are very far from my mind. 

Thinking what's going on inside the heads of Trumpees 

Quiet! Quiet, Piggy

This whole country appears to be going to Hell in a Handbasket.

There used to be some doubt whether Trump had some psychological condition which made him insensitive to social norms.  But he seems to have surrounded himself with similar people, all of whom are perfectly happy to throw the entire USA under the bus, to stretch the meaning of that phrase.

I've contemplated responding to the flood of terrible administrative actions taken by the White House over the last few months, but being retired, I don't any longer have the necessary vigor to address the problems.  The election of Mr. Mamdani to the mayorship of New York City seems to be one happy thing to celebrate.  Mamdani is due to meet with the prez soon.  I sincerely wish we vould securely archive Mr. Mamdani to the Cloud, anticipating a hostile environment at this meeting, but better heads than mine are probably working on the security problem.

Arch 

Correlation Between Trump's Presidency and Drug Use

I think that there is some suspicion that the current administration might be causing a lot of headaches.  [This idea was first introduced by Andy Borowitz.]  Of course, we know that correlation is not causation; I mean, they teach that in Sunday School.  But if they do a study about the use of painkillers before vs after the inauguration, they might find that use has dramatically increased.  And we can draw the obvious conclusions. 

Arch 

Guns

The Republicans often float outrageous intentions, with the objective of getting a rise out of us.  The paving over of the Rose garden.  The plans to put in a ballroom in the White House.  The idea of leaving the body of the latest victim of gun crimes to lie in state in the Capitol.

These all seem calculated to generally annoy those who oppose guns and oppose the MAGA crowd.

Well, I haven't been on these shores long enough to acquire any feelings of ownership of the various buildings in the vicinity of the Mall, so I'm less insulted than most others.  They must regard this as retribution for the affront of having Martin L. King lie in state in the Capitol.

Arch