It's not WHAT You Know ...

The Presidency in the US has never been, in my experience, a one man show.  The knowledge spectrum needed is wide; too wide for a single person.  With the twin problems of wealth concentration and climate change lurking in the background, a not-very-bright real estate agent and TV personality could not hope to be able to run a country like the US all by himself.  But Trump did not have a team for the White House ready.  There were plenty of eggheads in the GOP who would have been willing to help, in the first trump administration, but after how badly Anthony Fauci was treated by the MAGA, and GOP, generally, no capable person was willing to take any responsibility, especially in the area of health.  Let's face it; the people trump knows are quacks, and wall street types—and pretty shady ones, too—and Steve Bannon types (or Elon Musk types) who have more ideas about how to subvert government bureaucracy than about how to repair it.  Public health, especially, requires a certain mindset that the friends of robber barons are unlikely to have.  Your Doctor Oz, and other dispensers of TV medical advice, are probably not sufficiently weird to get Trump's approval. 

Sadly, MAGA could never have been expected to put together an administration that could get anything right; but they did not want to get anything right.  They wanted an agent for their anarchy (and racism, and Xenophobia).  It was a very short-term objective.

In other news today, the courts are getting in the way of allowing the super-grifting that trump wants to do quickly, before he gets too sick for the Oval Office.  (Or too sleepy.)  So any day now he's likely to issue a proclamation that all courts are to be shut down, since they're too hung up on laws and stuff. 

Arch 

America: Two Sides

I have lived in the USA for close to fifty years.  (On August 13, it will be exactly 50.)  You must believe me when I say: in retrospect, they were 50 totally awesome years.

Well, actually, not all of them; some of them were hard, some because of things I did; some nobody's fault.  Lots of things that go wrong are nobody's fault. 

Compared, however, to the horror stories I'm reading in the news and the popular media, I have led a wonderful life.  I have had excellent friends, who have looked out for my family and me for all these 50 years.  I was married twice, and both ladies with whom I was married were (and are) exceptional people.  I have a child (who I obviously think is wonderful) who has a number of friends who think the world of my child; I worked a single job the entire time I was employed full-time, and now I'm retired, with a reasonable retirement plan, perhaps not the sort of retirement most people dream about, but comfortable for myself and my wife, in a small home—or maybe medium-sized home—in a blue-collar neighbor-hood that's staring down the barrel of gentrification. 

But great numbers of US citizens are living with great uncertainty; people of all classes are deeply unhappy with the way things are.  We're all unhappy with the way things are being run by the trigger-happy ex-Fox News types in the White House, and the way they've derailed the technology that previous administrations had aimed against climate change. 

But I'm still convinced that life has been good to us; though I feel guilty that there are so many others who have been—and are—miserable.  Some of whom are better off than we are. 

There are some wonderful people in America.  There are also really terrible people here. 

Arch 

Stairs and Steps

I was brought up to call the cement or concrete front steps (or steps from the ground up to the back door, or the back veranda) were just steps.  Indide the house, steps to the upper floors, if any, were stairs.  If they were enclosed, they would be a staircase.

But I'm hearing people calling the front steps stairs, which is a new one on me.  Stairs are always wooden, and inside.  Outside, they're stone or concrete, and called steps.  In our town, it's possible to buy a complete flight of concrete steps for the front of your house from a garden center; a flight of five step, usually. 

But two things confuse the whole issue: firstly, some people have wooden steps for the front of their house; we do, because our front porch veranda is a little higher than usual, so an extra step is needed, or each step has to be a little taller.  Still, nobody has called our front steps stairs; they wouldn't do that unless we started doing it.

Secondly, fire escapes.   These things have metal steps, and lots of them.  So what to call them: steps or stairs?  Well, neither.  The term stairs is usually not used unless they lead from one level of a house to another, and it's a permanent installation, and it's indoors.  Fire escapes being outdoors, wouldn't be called steps.  The individual steps are certainly still steps.  But the whole flight of steps, indoors, would be stairs. 

Fire escapes can only be called that: fire escapes.  If a house has fixed outside stairs to access an upper level, they'd be called outside stairs sometimes.  You see this in homes where the upstairs part has been rented separately. 

Arch