According to my sister’s book (yes, that was a plug), the 200,000 tonnes of rock that Kalgoorie’s Super Pit blows up every day yields three or four bars of gold. As each bar weighs 12.4 kg, that’s a yield of about 0.00002%. The Great Confusicator’s ratio of information to words must be about the same. Trump’s recent AP interview is typical (and… Read more »
Category: Politics
Another Promise Kept
So tweeted, according to the NY Times, Donald Trump Jr as the Motherfucker Of All Bombs was dropped – as if a single bomb and 40 casualties will end the quagmire in Afghanistan or ISIS, and as if 59 Tomohawk missiles specifically targeted at nothing will solve Syria’s intractable problems. But the President, in his… Read more »
Faster than I Thought
You saw it here first a few posts ago, when I predicted that Trump’s madness, folly and incompetence would soon paint his administration into a corner from which war was the only escape. I didn’t think he’d manage it this fast. (However, if you scroll down today’s NY Times here and here and here and here – and that’s… Read more »
ExecuTweeting the Climate
The climate… Trump said he was going to do it; he did it. As with nearly all the other ExecuTweet orders, this one will be a dud. The reason coal stays in the West Virginian ground is not because of all those environmental regulations, but because it’s too expensive to get out. Even if they can… Read more »
Curry Lamb in Hong Kong
This morning, 777 of Carrie Lam’s best friends voted for her to be Hong Kong’s Chief Executive. The pronunciation of the word “7” in Cantonese is “chat,” but is also a contraction of “chow height” which is the foul language for stinky (“chow”) female genitalia (“height”). Not a good omen, and the selection committee’s subliminal… Read more »
Fact Free Politics
The question is: Can we have a healthy policy without facts? Truth is scarce and difficult, which is why we value it above lies, which are abundant and easy. In the past few weeks, the administration of the US has been promulgating lies at an unprecedented rate. It takes credit for the recent economic performance despite… Read more »
Entertainment
A friend of mine who’s a journalist hoped Trump would get in because things had been dull under Obama – and that prompted a slow epiphany. I’ve said in a previous post that it was about change, that Obama delivered steady growth, blah blah blah, but didn’t make any systemic changes; that there seems to… Read more »
Toothache
A few years ago, I had double toothache. Within seven days, not one but both of my upper wisdom teeth became inflamed. Pulling the uppers ones was easy – they were dead anyway – but one of the opposing lower ones needed to be pulled too. It was a healthy tooth, and one of the… Read more »
Trump for Change?
Here’s a thing. This link is a list of amendments made to the Constitution of the United States of America since it came into being. In summary, the first ten and the twenty-seventh amendment were proposed on 25th September, 1789 and, with the exception of the 27th, passed on 15th December, 1791 (the twenty-seventh amendment was to do… Read more »
Elective Plutocracies
It seems that I am missing the point. When Obama came to power, he promised change. The kind of change Obama delivered was not the kind that his supporters thought he was going to deliver. Obama delivered Obamacare and steady progress on a number of mundane problems, but what his supporters wanted was to break the… Read more »