When Trump announced his run for president in 2015, he (in)famously boasted:
“I will build a great wall—and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me—and I’ll build them very inexpensively. I will build a great, great wall on our southern border, and I will make Mexico pay for that wall. Mark my words.”
Sadly, the courts had allowed Trump to ignore environmental laws during the wall’s construction, and that mistake proved to be its undoing. As the old Chiffon margarine ad goes: “It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature.”
Trump’s US-Mexico border wall was no match for the heavy rains and accompanying flooding that happened this past week in Southern Arizona. They destroyed a large section of TFG’s wall along the San Bernardino National Wildlife Refuge.
Rain measurements near Douglas, AZ (closest town to the wall) showed 290 cubic-feet of water moving through the area every second – that’s equivalent to 112,200 gallons of water every minute. And it was calculated the storm surge could have reached a height of 25 feet!
Flood gates are common across sections of the wall along the Arizona-Mexico border. Agents must manually raise the gates to protect the steel barriers from thousands of gallons of floodwater laden with sediment, rocks, and tree limbs that can otherwise pile up to create a dam, with the power of the water overwhelming and toppling parts of the border wall.
I want to close on an upbeat note. While things have not gone as well with our exit from Afghanistan as we would have hoped, there were some bright notes.
America’s men and women in uniform have, once again, covered themselves in glory with displays of care and compassion – particularly with Afghani children.
I could not find attributions for these – but I want to include them anyway:
Of course it wasn’t only with children that they displayed their compassion. And I’m sure you join me in thanking them for their service – they did us proud!
Sorry, but this will have to be a very short one – just got too many balls in the air at this time.
But I did find the absolutely perfect restaurant for all those Anti-Maskers & Anti-Vaxxers who want to assert their “Freedumbs” when dining out – the Freedom Café.
I’m going to have to be in absentia for a few days.
My refrigerator no longer refrigerates. Don’t know if it’s reparable or not. (Seems like I remember reading that it’s usually the compressor – but not sure.)
So have fun & behave yourselves. Hope to be back soon.
From the same grifter that last month offered “autographed” photos of himself for $45, Herr Drumpf this week asked his Trumpkins to vote for their favorite design from four offerings to then become the “Offical”[sic] Trump membership card. Trump’s Save America PAC, according to Insider, sent out at least two emails with the four selections of red-and gold cards, similar to credit cards.
“The card you select will be carried by Patriots all around the Country,” the first email said. “They will be a sign of your dedicated support to our movement to SAVE AMERICA, and I’m putting my full trust in you.”
The Trump team said in a follow-up email, “We’re about to launch our Official Trump Cards, which will be reserved for President Trump’s STRONGEST supporters.”
“We recently met with the President in his Florida office and showed him four designs,” the email continued. “Originally we were planning on releasing just one design, but when President Trump saw the cards on his desk, he said, ‘These are BEAUTIFUL. We should let the American People decide – they ALWAYS know best!'”
[EDITOR’S NOTE: “They ALWAYS know best!” He’s right – both Hillary and Biden beat him with landslide votes!]
But two glaring oddities were immediately noticed:
[1] He misspelled “Official” as “Offical”
It’s not all that surprising. After all, we knew they were Nazis – but obviously they’re not GRAMMAR Nazis.
Even more understandable when you meet the proofreading team for the membership card:
[2] Donnie is no longer even trying to hide his true feelings. He brazenly included the official symbol of the Nazis that was first used in 1920s Germany. So it’s not a bit difficult to believe that The Former Guy (TFG) would go with the Third Reich’s official symbol – the Iron Eagle!
As you knew would happen, the Twitterverse pounced!
Trump’s new card, which of course he’s selling to his supporters to continue the grift, has a very Nazi like Third Reich feel. Very on brand for Trump. pic.twitter.com/dpsJZek8Zk
And since request for an armband was raised, I decided to go ahead and design one for them myself:
Word on the street is the card will be well worth having. If your Visa or Discover card is declined at Starbucks, you can use it to at least buy a cup of covfefe. It probably won’t be long before we see TFG borrowing Capital One’s credit card slogan: “What’s in Your Wallet?” I can see it now:
Of course there will be other perks (but only if those Trump businesses still exist) …
Benefits of the Trump Card:
Premium Boarding at Trump Shuttle * VIP Box Seating at New Jersey Generals home games Free complimentary breakfast at Trump Casinos Good for 6 credits at Trump University
While last Tuesday’s gut-wrenching testimony of trauma, terrorism, treason and tears by Police Officers Gonell, Fanone, Hodges and Dunn might not be enough to change the minds of many in the GQP – it did a great deal to restore my faith in humanity.
Consequently, I believe it’s worthwhile to extend that good feeling with today’s offering.
[Editor’s Note: You might want to keep a tissue close by.]
A video taken by someone with the handle “McLiez” and posted on Facebook has been viewed over a million times and shared over 170,000 times – and deservedly so!
It’s just a minute-long clip taken of cars stuck in traffic. But a driver in one of the cars (believed to be in the Philippines) captured the most heart-warming video of a small boy holding a cloth that he most likely uses to clean car windows to earn some money. He approaches a stopped car with another small boy in the back. The child in the car rolls down his window and starts chatting with the boy. He then gives the child in the street a small toy he has so he could play with it, and the small boy is clearly delighted!
As the boys play with each other, the one in the car then gives him a large dirt-digging excavator toy to play with. When the child in the street later tries to return the toys, the boy in the car refuses to take them back.
Not sure what to do, but wanting to show his gratitude, the boy in the street goes to get a bag of snacks that he shares with the boy in the car. As the traffic starts moving again, the two boys wave to each other.
[NOTE: This link to a Facebook posting is NOT the original Facebook posting by McLiez, but one from the “India Times”. I’ve never belonged to Facebook and I’m not sure if the original is even available anymore. But I thought I should give Facebook some type of credit for posting it.]
In the same spirit I thought it’d be worthwhile to share a “Bonus” video of the kindness of one child shown to another, when a little boy comes to the aid of a clearly distraught autistic child on the first day of school.
I doubt children this age know what “compassion” or “empathy” even means. But more importantly, they know how to show it and share it with their fellow human beings.
Mitch was kind enough to recently share a delightful video titled “Birds Can Dance!”
Despite my hearing deficit, I thought it was very cool! Although it was the creative and complex editing that made them look like they were dancing, it was very entertaining.
But it caused me to start wondering: Can birds actually dance? So I started searching, and it turns out the answer is a scientifically proven YES!
But first we need to recognize that this was the answer to the scientific definition of what “Dance” means, because it’s been long believed that only humans have the ability to dance.
“Dancing” is an untutored, spontaneous response where the animal moves on the beat, matching motion to music. The animal cannot have a trainer. There cannot be a human in the room whose moves it copies. It cannot be rewarded for its movements. It cannot spend weeks exposed to the same tune. And when the music changes tempo, it has to change with it, sticking to the beat. So the “dance” is triggered by sound, but the moves come from within the animal itself.
And we need to realize that none of the animals that science has decided can truly “dance” are going to give any of the contestants on “Dancing With the Stars” a run for their money.
But still, they have provided not only a lot of entertainment for the masses – but also served science well. So how did a sulphur-crested cockatoo named Snowball get to be a main participant in a science research project?
It all began with a YouTube video of him boogieing to “Everybody (Back Street’s Back) by the Back Street Boys … I kid you not!
A colleague of Dr. Aniruddh Patel, then a neurobiologist at the Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla, CA, (now a professor at Tufts) asked him to watch the video of Snowball grooving, and Dr. Patel reports his reaction:
“I still remember it. I was staring at the screen and my jaw just hit the floor. I thought, ‘Is this real? Could this actually be happening?’ Within minutes I’d written Snowball’s owner.”
Snowball had been taken to a bird shelter in northern Indiana because the daughter, who was the primary caretaker, began college. The dad and daughter also provided Irena Schulz, director of the shelter, with a CD by the Back Street Boys, and told her to play it if Snowball looked bored.
One day Irena cranked up the CD and was astounded at what happened next. She immediately grabbed a video of Snowball’s strutting his moves on the back of a chair and submitted it to YouTube – where it almost immediately went viral!
A few months later she got a call from Dr. Patel who was astounded by the birds dancing. “Let’s design an experiment to see if this is real.” Ms. Schulz, who had previously worked as a molecular biologist, agreed: “Yeah, let’s do that!”
They made 11 different versions of “Everybody,” all at the same pitch, but changed the tempos from 2.5% to 20% faster and then slower than the original.
They played each version and videotaped Snowball’s response, and then analyzed each video frame by frame.
Snowball wasn’t perfect (and was actually pretty bad at the slower tempos). But he was on the beat at least 60% of the time – very much like a toddler when learning to dance to music. Statistical analysis of the data confirmed that Snowball was, in fact, dancing in time with the music.
To my mind, equally impressive is that Snowball had developed a repertoire of 14 distinct moves – none of which were taught to him. He created them on his own. To be tabulated as a distinct move it had to occur on two separate occasions. Let’s enjoy them:
At the same time Dr. Patel was studying Snowball, another research group at Harvard was studying Alex, an African grey parrot, who also danced. They also concluded that Alex’s movements were synchronized with the beat of the music, and did not occur merely by chance. They wondered what feature(s) these animals shared with humans that enabled them to dance.
One of the researchers, Adena Schachner (then a graduate student at Harvard) said: “It had recently been theorized that vocal mimicry (the ability to acquire sounds through learning) might be related to the ability to move to a beat. The particular theory was that natural selection for vocal mimicry resulted in a brain mechanism that was also needed for moving to a beat. This theory made a really specific prediction: Only animals that can mimic sound should be able to keep a beat.”
Schachner realized that since people loved posting videos of their critters “performing,” she decided YouTube would be a wonderfully unique research resource.
She collected over 5,000 YouTube videos of wildly different animals (dogs, cats, chimps, orangutans, horses, etc.) and analyzed them frame-by-frame to see it they were moving to the beat. She narrowed the “dancers” down to 39 animals. Twentynine of them were in the parrot family, comprised of 14 different species. The rest were Asian elephants.
The one feature that all animals who can dance share with humans is vocal mimicry or vocal learning. Surprisingly enough our closest relatives (apes and monkeys) lack this ability. While they can certainly learn from one another, they don’t mimic each other’s sounds. And Schachner found no videos showing they could inherently move to a beat.
I doubt Dr. Patel ever thought that YouTube, besides being entertaining, would prove that a bird’s variety of movements would indicate a type of cerebral flexibility that suggests his creative choreography is not simply “a brainstem reflex to sound. [But] actually a complex cognitive act that involves choosing among different types of possible movement options. It’s exactly how we think of human dancing.”
As always, the fun part of science is finding answers. So now, thanks to Patel’s new paper, we learned we are not the only ones dancing to the beat: “Spontaneity and diversity of movement to music are not uniquely human.”
And Snowball, who is only 25 years old, could be providing answers for another half-century since Cockatoos in captivity can live to be about 75.
I can’t help but wonder what Freddie Mercury would think if he knew that a cockatoo dancing to his signature song got over 8 MILLION clicks. So let’s let Snowball dance his way out to Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust”.
[EDITOR”S NOTE: While I don’t think this posting is “Fun” in the usual sense – I do think it has some satisfying qualities.]
WOW! This week has been one revelation after another documenting what we all knew all along: Trump is Batsh!t Crazy Demagogue! However, it’s hard to believe that Donnie’s final days as Oval Office occupier were far worse than we ever imagined!
One book after another has come out to show just how unhinged Donnie was during his final days. Starting with “I Alone Can Fix It” by Pulitzer Prize-winning reporters Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker. From it we learn that Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley and his allies were so distraught about Donnie spreading the Big Lie about the election that they thought there was a distinct possibility that he might try a coup when he lost. As a precaution to save the country they devised contingency plans to prevent any Trump illegal power grab.
One was that they would all sequentially resign, one after the other, rather than carry out a clearly unconstitutional order from The Former Guy. Sort of like Richard Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre – but in reverse.
Gen. Milley shared his concerns about a possible coup with his military colleagues, legislators and friends:
General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, likened Donald Trump’s effort to hold on to power after the 2020 election to Adolf Hitler, saying the president was preaching “the gospel of the Führer” with his lies about the election being stolen.
“They may try, but they’re not going to f\/cking succeed,” Milley told his officers. “You can’t do this without the military. You can’t do this without the CIA and the FBI. We’re the guys with the guns.”
Milley was disturbed by the sight of Trump supporters rallying to his cause in November, calling them “Brownshirts in the streets….” Milley “believed Trump was stoking unrest, possibly in hopes of an excuse to invoke the Insurrection Act and call out the military.” The general likened the U.S. to Germany’s fragile Weimar Republic in the early 1930s. “This is a Reichstag moment,” he said, referring to the arson attack on Germany’s Parliament that Hitler used as a pretext to assume absolute power and destroy democracy.
But what I find fascinating is The Former Guy’s inability to just keep his yap shut, let things settle down and NOT make matters worse.
But no – he always has to have the last word. And so we now have what will be two of his Top Ten Punchlines: “If I Was Going To Do a Coup …”and“I’m Not Into Coups”
It comes from a statement he released on 7/15/21:
Despite massive Voter Fraud and Irregularities during the 2020 Presidential Election Scam, that we are now seeing play out in very big and important States, I never threatened, or spoke about, to anyone, a coup of our Government. So ridiculous! Sorry to inform you, but an Election is my form of “coup,” and if I was [sic] going to do a coup, one of the last people I would want to do it with is General Mark Milley.
[NOTE: It would be too time-consuming to markup all his juvenile random capitalizations and insertion of commas haphazardly. But one of my pet peeves is using “were” when writing in the subjunctive mood – and his was an appalling abrogation of the subjunctive. It should be: “If I WERE going to do a coup.”
[Here endeth today’s pedantic grammar lesson.]
The Former Guy trying to deny he would ever do a coup (but failing) is the exact same defense he used in trying to deny his sexual assault of E. Jean Carroll by claiming “She’s not my type.”
But let’s note that Trump did NOT say “I would never have raped Ms. Carroll because I think it’s a despicable act, and I’m opposed to all violence against women.” It was simply “She’s not my type.”
So he virtually confesses that he would have raped her … IF she were his type. So he would have led a coup … IF he were able to find someone other than Gen. Milley. Damned by his own words.
And of course the Twitterverse was not going to pass on the chance to weigh-in on Former Guy’s “confession”.
Former Guy’s actions since his loss on 11/3/2020 were actually all part of a multi-faceted Coup attempt:
1. Lost the election by a pretty sizable margin despite efforts to sabotage the USPS 2. Spent the time between election and certification trying to strongarm officials into changing the vote totals 3. Tried to recruit "alternate" electors to override the states' votes https://t.co/Xrx7G4o6T1
4. Installed loyalists at DOD and State 5. Filed all manner of absurd lawsuits hoping that judges he appointed would award him the election in return 6. Called on his supporters to go to DC on 1/6 to urge Congress to throw out the votes
It wasn't just 1/6. It never was. And it wasn't just Trump. It was the entire GOP. Why do you think so many were hesitant to say Biden won? Because they wanted to see if Trump's coup attempt was successful.
