"The Buck Stops Here"

Donald Trump—who is president at the moment—is not a normal person, and not in a good way. 

He has a few basic motivations. 

1. Taking revenge.
2. Making money. 
3. Attracting cheap attention. 

Items 1 and 2 are obvious; everyone is well aware of how much money he makes from schemes that are not exactly illegal.   Also, he throws people he does not care for under the bus.  He also makes money in such a way that he hopes that his perceived enemies will be very angry.  I myself am not super angry, so if Trump was aware of my existence he just might be annoyed.  Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure he doesn't know about me!

But the most pathetic thing that he does is to attract attention.  It's just like cheerleaders, saying "Look at me!!!"  All this reflecting pool nonsense is because he wants to draw attention to himself.  Someone should make an elaborate movie starring Donald, and then accidentally burn it.

Also the Arch, the Ballroom, the Kennedy Center; all to draw attention to himself.  The war in Iran.  Our attention probably briefly flagged, and he wanted it back. 

Most of the brutal ideas he's trying to implement aren't his.  Steven Miller originates many of them.  Even some of the most hare-brained schemes come from outside. 

There are also runners who bring him ideas from certain Big Business robber barons.  Some of those ideas seem too clever to have been hatched in Trump's feeble brain; they're probably Elon Musk's brainchilds, especially if they have to do with Bitcoin, and stuff like that.  Or with Don Jr, and Eric.  They don't have very deep understanding of non-fungible assets; they just pick up a bit from here, a bit from there; just enough to get themselves in financial trouble. 

Interestingly enough, Iran—or some Iranian group—is said to have taken out a Fatwa, a contract, on Trump. That might not be true; if we leave him to his own devices, he'll kill himself by accident. 

Arch 

Write!

About 20 years ago (it may have been even further back in the mists of the distant past) I began writing a story.  It was about a girl, who was able to do all sorts of amazing things.  Presently, after doctoring up this story, I published it as an e-story on a website that published stories online, but I used a pseudonym. 

That was the beginning of a flood of stories that I wrote, under various pen-names, until I 'sold' close to about 5000 copies of those stories.  People buy stories on the internet for all sorts of reasons, and often they don't remember the names of the authors, so I'm not really well known as an author.  Remember, I use pen-names, so it's difficult for anyone to connect me with those stories.  I'm never going to disclose my authorship, because some of the stories are a bit racy.  (Even this Blog is under a pseudonym, though I have no problem letting anyone know my real name, but now writing under the net-name Archimedes has become a habit.)

If all the things I do, writing these stories gives me the greatest satisfaction.  I read a post by an author, who writes that writing a novel would be the most satisfying thing a person could do, and I want to throw my support behind this advice.  She says that you could write for just an hour a day, and still end up with a respectable novel.  I agree.  I'm not going to say how long my stories are, just to make it harder for me to be connected with my pseudonyms, but—in retrospect—these stories are quite huge, and far exceed the (size of) 400-page books found on internet retailers. 

Well, start writing, dear readers!

Arch 

Preparing for Life!

This post is for a very specific audience: students in college or university; or parents of students in college or university.  Knowing what you want to be once you finish your education has often been praised as indicating a person's future success.  I will add an asterisk here: congratulations; it is good to have a goal in life.  But prepare for anything.  Be prepared, as British Boy Scouts (or boy scouts anywhere) take as their motto.  Most people with moderate intelligence unconsciously prepare; they learn first aid; they learn CPR; they learn how to calm a hysterical person down, how to change a flat tire.  I think most people need to learn more than this first layer of general preparedness. 

Learn as many skills as you can.  There's no way to predict the roles you'll be called upon to play.  Entertain children.  Cook meals.  Camp in the woods.  Sew or mend clothes; do complicated laundry: colors, delicates, knits.

Teach unexpected subjects.  This is something I had to learn, being a mathematician.  I had expected to have to teach people of roughly the level at which I had been when I was a freshman.  But standards always change, and I had to adapt. 

Once you're a parent, your responsibilities become a far- reaching array of demands, and you'll be remembered for the most unexpected jobs you did. 

It will be the rare person who earns adulation for their main occupation; usually, praise is only earned for the most tangential services you may have performed in passing.  The more intelligent, the more public-spirited, the more outgoing you are, the more enthusiastic will be the praise you receive for some inexplicable service. 

Be interested in as many things as you can, and learn what it takes to be helpful in those areas. 

Arch 

Are Businessmen Truly on Our Side?

During the election season, some candidates declare that they're on the side of 'Business.'

A lot of people either work for a business, or themselves own businesses.  They all think that, if something is good for business, it's good for them.  In an ideal world, this is definitely true.  But many businessmen (and women) are trying to slant the deals so that most transactions favor the business, and not the customer. 

Often, the businesses have a captive market; that is, the customers have to buy from one trader or seller, no matter how unfair or dear the product is.  This happens if the business has put all their competitors out of business, or sells—temporarily—at such a low price that the competition gets outsold; or has to match that low price though they can't afford it.  This is a standard trick, when one retailer is so wealthy that they can sell some product at a slight loss, just long enough to put a smaller retailer out of business, and then raise their prices, once they have no competition.  Business is a dirty game,  in general, though there certainly are businesses that do not resort to that sort of trick. 

Credit cards, for instance, play lots of games.  If you've had a particular card for many years, and have got into the habit of not paying off your balance entirely, they raise your interest rate gradually, until you're paying almost 30% a year (or 2.5% per month!), and you may not realize it. 

A common ruse of manufacturers is to reissue a product—say breakfast cereal—in a package that looks familiar, but contain less of the product, like, say, 14 oz instead of a full 16 oz.  This is called 'Shrinkflation' by whistle blowers, such as Elizabeth Warren, and Robert Reich.  A bill was written in some state house, to require that these products state on the packaging that the new package is smaller (that is, contains less) than the former package. 

I can just imagine that some conservative will argue against this, saying: it's a free country, and this is an example of government overreach!  Yes, it is a free country. But truth in advertising is usually strongly disliked by businesses, who feel that customers should find out these matters for themselves.  And that is a valid point.  But people depend on the government for this sort of information (that disadvantages manufacturers).  This is why DOGE shut down so many regulations, in the name of streamlining bureaucracy.  

So,  bear in mind.  A candidate may be a friend to business.  This only means that businesses will rush to buy television commercials for them.  But this candidate will not rush to protect consumers if these businesses trick consumers into paying for things they do not want. 

Arch 

The Semi-Quint Centennial

OK.

Most of us love the USA enough to want to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence wholeheartedly. 

We would also like to prevent Trump from interfering with the celebration in any way; that's what is needed to encourage any celebrity artists to come celebrate with us.  On the other hand, we don't want to concentrate all the talent in one spot.  That might be too much of a temptation for maniacal MAGA people to come visiting with their fancy firearms. 

One possibility would be to focus on local celebrations only.  This would be depressing, for such an important anniversary, when we would have been expected to have an enormous gathering.  But what are we to do?  If we had all gone to the polls, and prevented Trump from stealing the election, and put our energy behind Kamala Harris, things would be very different today.  But there are a great many "Never Kamala" people among our fellow liberals, and some of them Never.a.woman,.anyway people.  To give them their due, they were probably making a pathetic calculation, thinking: "nobody else will vote for a woman, so let's not waste our votes."

We could actually have a location in which to all gather.  Central Park in New York City; some spacious location in Minneapolis; somewhere in Texas; those sorts of places.  Would be easy to have ICE come in and cause havoc.  I wonder whether armed liberals are itching for an armed confrontation, but that would feed into Trump's desire to mobilize the armed services.  But we have to think of all the angles, and start planning now. 

Archeopterix 

Brucie is getting to be a Curmudgeon

There are dogs in homes surrounding ours on all sides.  Sometimes they start barking; and now Brucie is at a stage of life where puts his head on his paws, and silently endured the racket as long as he can stand it.  Then he snaps, and roars through our house, barking furiously, as if to say, don't make me come out there, and give you a piece of my mind!!!

So obviously curmudgeonly!

Arch 

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.  Inside 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 

More than meets the eye? The Trump - Pope fued?

Well.

Apparently, Trump distrusts both his Vice President and his Secretary of State, according to a Trump Tea-Leaf reader.  This is quite possible, because Trump is facing impeachment; after the Mid-Terms, at the latest, and possibly earlier.  When he is forced out of the presidency, he doesn't want Rubio or Vance salivating after his job.  (Now that they've seen how the grifting is carried out, they're probably certain that they can do it with more class.  Anyone could, honestly, given how stupid Trump is.)  Apparently one of those two must cooperate with the impeachment process. 

Anyhoo, Trump's attack on the Pope is, I hear, in fact an attack on Vance by Trump.  Trump wants to get Vance mired in religious arguments with the Pope, so that he'll be discredited.  Sounds far- fetched, but this is Trump trying to be clever.  (He confuses cleverness with deviousness, which sort of works with finagling crooked financial deals.  Hard to believe Trump screwed up the Federal government to this extent mainly to skim off these enormous chunks of wealth into the vaults of his family.  But it does look that way.)

Kash Patel, meanwhile, has indulged in some baffling excesses: heavy drinking, abuse of the security detail attached to him, profligate spending on his girlfriend, and so on.  This is going on so much that he (Kash) must suspect the end is nigh.

RFK Jr. is merely a distraction.  A bad distraction, because he harms the health of masses of gullible people, but still a distraction. 

Judging from the level of anti-trump posting that's coming into my feed, everybody is getting more angry, but that's not to say that trump- removal is actually imminent.  Interesting: lots of former MAGA voters are coming out as furiously anti-trump.  Probably not going to help us liberals/Democrats very much.

The former trump insider who dropped this insight into the trump/pope wars is Anthony Scaramucci, whom some people will never trust again, but he knows how Trump thinks, I'm willing to bet. 

Arcch

A Quick Word Before I'm Due To Visit The Phlebotmist

I used to think that I knew a huge amount of the music of Bach, because I was familiar with more of his music than my friends were, but the more I study his opus, the smaller the estimate of my familiarity with it shrinks!

I encountered Bach in these ways: 

1. When I was but a child, My dad was in the habit of playing a favorite Bach tune at bedtime: Jesu joy of Man's Desiring (an miserable metrical English replacement for the first line of the German chorale), a number in Cantata 147.  This chorale was wildly popular in Britain, and as a result, also in Sri Lanka.  Our recording was by the legendary Bach Choir of London, led by Sir Reginald Jacques, on an old 78 rpm bakelite disc, played on our (non-electric) phonograph!

The reverse side had two movements from the B minor orchestral suite: the Rondeau, and the Badinerie, which I loved greatly.

2. When I started school at Wesley College, Colombo, I heard the choir sing the selfsame chorale from BWV 147.  I resolved to sing in this fabulous choir as soon as they would let me, and when I was 12, I did. 

3. A couple of years later, I began music lessons, for exams of the Trinity Schools of Music, and my first piece was a Bach minuet.  (This piece was from the Anna Magdalena music collection—curated by Bach's second wife, many of whose entries have been recently suspected of being not by Bach, but by his contemporaries.  The three minuets have been generally considered beyond suspicion for more than a century.  But the needs of musicologists will intermittently drag all of Bach's works back under the microscope.)

4. Once my elder relatives happened to notice my interest in Bach, I was given sundry Bach music and recordings, the latter of which I played incessantly. 

5. A certain teacher at school, who had recently returned from graduate school in England, and was a Bach enthusiast, was temporarily given in charge of our school choir.  He wasted no time in inserting Bach chorales from the Christmas Oratorio into our Christmas carols.  The next term, for Prize Day, the choir prepared and sang another well-known chorale: Wachet auf, or Sleepers wake.  Soon my passion for Bach choral music was kindled!

6. My father was appointed Chaplain to one of the campuses of the University of Ceylon, and we found ourselves surrounded by Bach lovers, who were ever ready to form impromptu choruses to sing at every church celebration.  From there, it was just a short step to having to rein in my Bach mania, because not everyone was happy with a never-ending stream of Bach music all the time. 

7. When I arrived in Pittsburgh for graduate school, I discovered that American libraries had not only books, but collections of recordings, and even phonographs and headsets with which library users could sit and listed to the recordings at all hours of the day and night, until they were expected home for meals.  Furthermore, the university bookstore stocked inexpensive recordings of the Bach orchestral works ($1.98) which I bought, one on each payday!  I played these at as high a volume as I was allowed, and I presently acquired a tape recorder, with which I recoded all the Bach music onto cassettes.  Then I got a little cassette player on which I could play the cassettes, even as I was walking between classes, waiting for classes to begin, or walking home. 

8. Across the plaza from the Pitt Library, was another library: The Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, which had sheet music!  I lost no time in acquiring the scores of my favorite movements, and playing them with my friends.  They were impatient with how slow I was with sight-reading; they could play anything at sight. 

Then came the Internet (maybe shouldn't capitalize the word anymore), and now Bach material was everywhere, and I'm not going to itemize from where Bach information was seeping into my brain.  Then I arrived in Williamsport, and it was the home of the John V Brown Library, which had a great collection of recordings, and also sheet music.  At this point, I foolishly assumed that I could consider myself sort of an authority on Bach.  But, in the nature of the subject, different people could consider themselves authorities on different parts of the study.  By playing organ to accompany church services for years, I found myself memorizing the Bach harmony for numerous hymns.  (Bach harmony has long been the preferred harmony, by the Church of England, for hymns not usually associated with Bach, for instance Now thank we all our God, and From all that dwell below the skies.)

Arch, on Bach's Old Style birthday anniversary 

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 (each year) 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 that 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 as 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. 

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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.  [Added later: That wasn't just a taunt, they actually started doing it.]  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 [MAGA] must regard this as retribution for the affront of having the body of Martin L. King lie in state in the Capitol.  [Giving  a non-white — or a woman — any sort of recognition gives some people acute indigestion.]

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A General Post About Cookware

Some years ago, nonstick cookware was all the rage.  It continues to be popular among people stuck with cooking duties with which they're unfamiliar!

After all, nobody wants to be stuck cleaning burnt-on food off the bottom of a fry pan.  (Unfortunately, non-stick coatings are made out of a type of plastic that does not react with anything, which is why it is nonstick.  But they're impossible to destroy—well, hard to, anyway—which means they stay in landfills for hundreds of years, which is an alarming thing, and considered a biohazard.  Dupont is vilified for inventing Teflon, and justly so.)  There are ways to avoid burnt-on food, and with modern equipment, and with a little knowhow, you can avoid the need for Teflon coatings. 

• Avoid very high cooking temperatures.  Only a very few cooking procedures actually need super-hot pans, and only for a brief period of time—searing a steak, for instance.  Even boiling water can be done with moderate heat; using the highest available temperature does not boil the water faster. 
• Using low temperatures makes the pan heat more uniformly across the base, which makes super-hot 'hot spots' less likely.  Those hot-spots are the places where food burns. 
• Cooking newbies (or 'noobs' which are usually guys) are often in a hurry, and so use super high temperatures, to get food cooked quickly!  That often gets food burned, which in turn gets the frustrated cook interested in nonstick.  If the cook uses low temperatures, then cast iron or ceramic-coated cookware works perfectly well. 
• If you do use cast-iron cookware, many of the recipes you use—but not all—can be completed in the oven.  That's an expert-level procedure. 

ARch 

A New Burner!

The term 'burner' could mean many things.  I'm using it in the sense of one of those round things on which you cook—be it your spaghetti, or boil your water—and, in our home, possibly a curry of some sort.  Or fry your eggs.  You name it. 

You might think that I'm punching above my weight, here; after all I haven't certified in the culinary arts.  But I've taken freshman physics—and in my case, it was probably closer to sophomore- junior level—and that gave me a firm theoretical foundation for many aspects of food preparation, which I followed up with several years of actual cooking.  (Of course, I made an awful mess in our tiny kitchen, which I cleaned up about three times a year, but not more frequently.)

A little after I remarried, my wife and I made a deal with a friend who was moving into a new home, which had a hardly used glass-top range, which they wanted to swap out for a gas range.  (Glass-tops are all-electric.)  We used that range with great satisfaction, for close to 10 years. 

An aside: from the point of view of physics, a glass top range is almost the least efficient cooking system you could have.  The electric burner under the glass heats up fairly quickly, but then it must heat up the glass, which in turn heats up the cookware.  The electric element also heats up the space between the element and the glass, which takes a long time to cool down, once you turn the burner off, and that indirectly tells you how much heat is being wasted.  The entire space under the glass is sealed off, so we must infer what is there; but there's no doubt that there is a separation between the heating coil and the glass. 

About a year ago, we found the controls of the two front burners were screwed up; they could only be set at Off, or Full.  If you're at all experienced at cooking, you know that Off and Full are not good enough.  The back burners were fully functional, but we gazed at the defective front burners, teary-eyed, as we limped along, with our aging range, and our aging selves. 

It so happened that I saw on Amazon an Induction range—actually, not an entire range, but a single burner—and I thought I would send out for it, just in the spirit of experimentation.  Only cookware that can be magnetized will work on this gadget, but we tried it out, and it did work pretty well!  Like magic, in fact; it makes a humming sound, and gets just as hot as you want.  Once you turn it off, the actual burner is 'off', but still, the burner surface—in this case, also made of Gorilla Glass, or some such thing—takes a while to cool, and so does your cookware, which was cast iron, or heavy aluminum with a steel base.  Well, the most rapid-heating system is gas, but once you shut off the gas, cast-iron takes its own sweet time to cool.

Unfortunately, all the vessels we could use with the induction burner were sort of large: a huge 5-quart pressure cooker, and the 12-inch cast-iron set, which none of us liked to use, because they were hard on our wrists, being super heavy.  They were okay for a pot-roast, or a stir-fry. (Katie got used to doing the latter, but I had to take the thing out to the table once it was cooked.)

So we put the induction burner right over where the front right burner used to be, and we boxed happily on.  We also had a set of non-stick cookware that worked fine on Mr. Induction.  (It looked stupid, to have an induction thing right on top of the unused burner, but Katie and I are good at disregarding appearances.)

But I was getting frustrated at not having a medium-sized cookpot for things like soup, or oatmeal, or a dozen different things for cooking which the enormous cast-iron things (or the pressure-cooker) would be overkill. 

So, I sent out for a 2½ -quart steel / polished aluminum cook pot!  It just arrived yesterday, so we haven't had time to put it through its places.  That's next!

Arch 

P.S. : Well, we've been using the new stainless-steel / polished aluminum / carbon steel cookware for a few weeks, and it wotks like a couple of dreams!  The sides of the pot are stainless-clad aluminum (I believe), but the bottom is definitely a sandwich of stainless-aluminum-carbon steel-aluminum-stainless, a 5-layer cooking base, which is very heavy.  The carbon steel patty engages the induction burner, but after cooking is completed, it takes forever to cool, which is one of my pet peeves with any cooking arrangement.  The pot came with a clever metal/glass lid with a built-in strainer, and we can strain the liquid out easily: pasta, eggs, lentils, whatever, which I like.

Knowing that the heavy pot cools slowly, I can make allowances, and shut the power off a little early; it will continue to cook for several more minutes, and also keep the food warm.  (Having grown up in the Third World, or even a Fourth, really, I was quite OK with eating food at room temperature.  Kate, though, likes her grub piping hot.