toucana

Yes that was him. I heard that creating this sculpture from the remains of the Cedar tree took the better part of six months back in 2016. There are some photos of the work in progress in this article: https://www.bristolcourses.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/The-Cedar.pdf

The Praetorian Guard was said to have been responsible for the overthrow, abandonment, or murder of 15 out of the first 48 Roman emperors who governed Rome between 27 BC and 305 AD. https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/article/the-praetorian-guard/ Originally adopted as the personal bodyguard of Emperor Augustus in 27 BC, they were finally disbanded by Constantine The Great in 312 AD who also destroyed their barracks at Castra Praetoria - the only military stronghold allowed south of the Rubicon on the road to Rome. During this period of influence, the Praetorians were directly responsible for murdering such notorious Roman emperors as Caligula (41 AD), Commodus (192 AD), and Elagabalus (222 AD) - said to have been the first openly transgender Roman emperor. After murdering the emperor Caligula in 41 AD, the Praetorians initiated the custom of usurping the authority of the Senate, and unilaterally proclaimed Claudius as the new emperor - a practice which continued for centuries. https://www.historyextra.com/period/roman/the-emperors-fatal-servants/

In 1906, an American writer and investigative journalist called Alfred Henry Lewis (1855-1914) said in an article printed in the March edition of the Cosmopolitan Magazine - “There are only nine meals between mankind and anarchy” https://barrypopik.com/blog/every_nation_is_about_nine_meals_away_from_a_revolution This mirrored a sentiment which originally appeared in an article printed in the Denver (CO) Post 17 October 1896 - “Further Facts in the Case of Mark Hanna,” pg. 6, cols. 6-7

Unfortunately Americans are not very good at writing amendments to the Constitution. https://cornerstonelaw.us/22nd-amendment-doesnt-say-think-says/ The 12th Amendment ratified in 1804 stated that no one who was “constitutionally ineligible” to *become* president should be elected as a Vice President. It doesn’t however explicitly say that a person who couldn’t lawfully be *elected* to the presidency cannot be elected to the vice-presidency either. (Constitutional eligibility only requires a person to be a natural born citizen and to have attained 35 years of age). https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artII-S1-C5-1/ALDE_00013692/ The text of the 22nd Amendment ratified in 1951 only bars a termed-out president from becoming president again in one particular way - by a presidential election. But that is only one of *four* different ways in which a US citizen can become President. The 25th Amendment ratified in 1967 stated that the Vice President becomes the acting President if the President is unable to continue their duties, resigns, or is removed from office. Taking all of these together - the problem is that the texts of the 12th and 22nd Amendments do not preclude the possibility of a person who has already served two terms as a President from becoming a Vice-President; and the 25th Amendment states that the Vice-President automatically becomes the acting president if the incumbent dies, or is removed from office, or is otherwise unable to discharge their duties. So there is in theory a path whereby one person could serve three terms as POTUS. After first serving two terms, they arrange to get themselves elected as Vice-President to a new POTUS, who then promptly resigns and lawfully hands the Presidency to their VP as a third term.

Members of Elon Musk’s DOGE team have exposed sensitive information about the NRO (National Reconnaissance Office) - a secretive US intelligence agency responsible for running America’s highly classified satellite reconnaissance system. https://www.yahoo.com/news/elon-musk-doge-shares-classified-215645625.html The new DOGE.gov website only went live on Wednesday claiming to give Americans the ability to “trace your tax dollars through the bureaucracy.” The website was supposed to exclude data from U.S. intelligence agencies, but has instead published highly classified information about the staff and resources of the NRO which DOGE should never have been able to access in the first place. Meanwhile, the Trump administration fired 300 staffers from the NNSA (National Nuclear Security Administration) without realising they were responsible for managing America’s strategic nuclear weapon stockpile. https://www.npr.org/2025/02/14/nx-s1-5298190/nuclear-agency-trump-firings-nnsa Finally - during a Tuesday ‘presser’ in the White House Oval Office, Elon Musk claimed that his DOGE team had found evidence of “150 year old people” receiving social security payments. A COBOL programmer subsequently made this comment on X:

You didn’t supply any scientific, clinical , or other medical evidence to support your own characterisation of ketamine as a “very helpful and viable treatment option for many millions of people”. Absent that, I would refer you to: https://www.oxfordhealth.nhs.uk/ips/ketamine-trd/risks-benefits/ Right up front this document says: It concludes: Under the sub-tab ‘Less Common side-effects' it lists: vivid dreams, hallucinations , and also adds this warning: Under 'Long Term Theoretical Risks' this paper lists: dependence, tolerance, bladder damage, cognitive impairment and personality change - all with reference to recreational nasal doses of over 1g daily. Given these caveats I don’t think I’m being remotely flippant or dismissive about the risks of self-medicating with ketamine - especially in the case of an absurdly wealthy and over-powerful oligarch like Elon Musk who has openly admitted that he is microdosing with ketamine to treat a significant personality disorder.

Elon Musk is a self-medicating lunatic who treats his bi-polar personality disorder by taking ketamine, a veterinary anaesthetic normally used for sedating horses, but also used in recent years as a recreational drug. Here is a CNN news report from March 2024 in which Elon Musk discussed his ketamine usage :https://edition.cnn.com/2024/03/18/tech/elon-musk-ketamine-use-don-lemon-interview/index.html And here is a blog post discussing his hypomania: https://gwern.net/note/elon-musk If you saw his recent 'presser' in the Oval Office at the White House, then you would probably hesitate to to describe him as any sort of 'thinker' at all - in the commonly understood sense of that word.

This is a real book incidentally. Each line of the 50 or so poems is carefully cross-referenced to a public utterance by the Poetaster-in-Chief.

There were a couple of thoughts behind my post. “The Coming Storm” was a popular catch phrase of the QAnon conspiracy theorists in USA, as documented in a book by British journalist Gabriel Gatehouse who was the former International Editor of the BBC Newsnight program. https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/453235/the-coming-storm-by-gatehouse-gabriel/9781785948152 But I was also thinking of another quotation attributed to the philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) who wrote ”This storm is what we call progress” when discussing Paul Klee’s ‘Angelus Novus’ (1920) - a haunting painting which Walter Benjamin owned - in his final essay “On the Concept of History” (1940) shortly before he committed suicide when facing capture by the Nazis. https://hyperallergic.com/829171/whats-behind-the-angel-of-history-annie-bourneuf-paul-klee-angelus-novus/ The phrase seemed to capture the nihilism of the current right-wing extremism at work in US politics, which having spent years decrying ‘The Deep State’ now seems determined to instantiate the profoundly undemocratic despotism it once pretended to denounce.

A 25 y/o member of Elon Musk’s DOGE team who had been given access to highly classified U.S Treasury payment systems has abruptly resigned Thursday after recently deleted social media posts were brought to light by The Wall Street Journal. His posts advocated the repeal of the Civil Rights Act, the adoption of a “eugenic immigration policy”, and the proud declaration: https://www.npr.org/2025/02/06/nx-s1-5289337/elon-musk-doge-treasury Elon Musk has subsequently denounced the public identification of his DOGE aides on X and by The Wire as a “criminal offence” before conceding that an unknown number of his DOGE appointees are software engineers associated with his companies X or SpaceX. So is exposing the identities and affiliations of these people Doxing, or the exercise of Free Speech ? https://www.forbes.com/sites/petersuciu/2025/02/04/doge-employees-identified-on-x--doxing-or-case-of-free-speech/ Meanwhile Pete Marocco the man recently put in charge of USAID by Secretary of State Marco Rubio has been identified as one of the rioters who stormed the Capitol in 2021. The USAID agency had previously been targeted on X by Elon Musk who declared it a “criminal organization”.

I use an iPhone and iMac. If you have managed to get a HIEC/PNG format photo off your iPhone and onto your iMac or MacBook, then open up the photo in Preview. and use the File—> Export menu options to export and resave the image on your desktop as a JPEG. Now reopen the JPEG version in Preview and this time use the Tools—>Adjust size menu options to open up a resizing dialog box. Click the Resolution down from the default 144 to 72, and set the Height to no more than 8 inches. Hint - then use the Tools—>Adjust Colour—> Sharpness slider menu options in Preview to resharpen the image and resave.

President Trump outlined his vision of of the future of the Middle East yesterday after a White House meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. https://edition.cnn.com/2025/02/05/middleeast/takeaways-trump-gaza-proposal-intl-hnk/index.html Leaving aside the little matter that this plan would amount to the wholly illegal ethnic cleansing of nearly 2 million Palestinians who would be forcibly evicted at gunpoint by US forces to Egypt and Jordan (once the US has finished occupying and subduing Panama, Greenland, Mexico and Canada) - you have to wonder what muslim voters in such places as Dearborn Michigan USA will make of it all ? https://www.thejc.com/news/usa/trump-voting-muslim-leaders-in-us-disappointed-by-his-pro-israel-cabinet-choices-fe0x4jbs Muslim leaders like Abed Hammoud who lives in Dearborn (the largest majority Arab American city in the US) lobbied ferociously against Kamala Harris in the Presidential election last November, and successfully delivered the key swing state of Michigan which had previously been a Democratic stronghold to Donald Trump with 47% of the vote - compared with 28% for Harris and 22% for Jill Stein the Green Party candidate. These same muslim leaders were subsequently left aghast when Trump nominated Mike Huckabee the former Governor of Arkansas as Ambassador to Israel - a man who once said “there’s really no such thing as a Palestinian”. Rather plaintively, some muslim leaders in Dearborn have recently said “President Trump, remember that you have a contract with us!”. Seems like someone forgot to remind them that Trump always stiffs his contractors. As for the cost of creating this Gaza Riviera, complete with golf courses and Trump hotels - presumably the Gazans will pay for it all ?

I found an amusing video where a guy asked DeepSeek R1 to solve Lagarias’s Elementary Version of the Riemann Hypothesis - one the seven unsolved Millenium Prize Problems - which the Clay Mathematics Institute offered a prize of one million dollars for a solution to, back in the year 2000. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQsQaORVhfA

A new Chinese AI app called ‘DeepSeek R1’ (深度求索 - shēndù qiúsuǒ ) has roiled the AI stockmarket sector to the tune of $1 Trillion, and has taken the #1 position in Apple’s App Store, ahead of ChatGPT and other competing AI products. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/jan/27/tech-shares-asia-europe-fall-china-ai-deepseek What has attracted so much attention from analysts and investors is that the Hangzhou-based startup who created DeepSeek claim to have spent little more than $6 Million in developing the product, and they did so without the help of Nvidia’s most advanced H100 chips which have been banned by USA from export to China since September 2022. DeepSeek was created using the less powerful H800 chips developed by Nvidia for the Chinese market (which were subsequently also banned from export to China last October).

I should perhaps have mentioned the astonishing ‘auto-tables’ or automatic Riichi Mahjong playing tables which became very popular in Japan from 1988 onwards and feature extensively in the Saki anime series. These contraptions will delight and bemuse any mechanical engineer trying to figure out exactly how they work. (Hint - optical sensors, beam counters, logic circuits, and magnets embedded in tiles). They are not cheap - deluxe tables from the principal Japanese manufacturer AMOS can cost up to $4000. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmDNvqS9QPk

One reason is because of some extreme failings in the American education system. A particularly good example is the almost total absence of Geography as an academic discipline or curruclum subject within American schools and universities. It is usually lumped in together with History in a package called ’Social Studies’ in many US schools. The American author Ambrose Bierce who was himself a military cartographer once joked that “War is God’s way of teaching Americans Geography”. The stunning ignorance that has ensued was epitomised by anecdotal accounts of educational surveys which found that some 40% of students questioned couldn’t accurately locate either the Canadian or Mexican borders on a map of North America. Others couldn’t even locate the USA on a world map. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/geography-survey-illiteracy Other academic disciplines that might promote critical thinking such as Philosophy fare equally badly in the American educational system. Philosophy degrees in the USA for example are not only comparatively expensive, but the salaries that students are likely to receive on graduation are about 6% below average compared to other undergraduate degrees. https://www.careerexplorer.com/degrees/philosophy-degree/tuition/ Back in November 2015 Senator Marco Rubio (who has recently been appointed Secretary of State) said during a Presidential debate on Fox News that “Welders make more money than philosophers; we need more welders and less (sic) philosophers”: https://theweek.com/speedreads/588149/marco-rubio-wants-more-welders-less-philosophers Which rather epitomises the problem.

Rep. Sarah McBride the first transgender Congresswoman made this very point after Trump announced his anti-transgender executive order on Tuesday evening. Legally speaking, Trump has just declared everyone in the USA - including himself and his own sons - to be female. Yes folks, the ‘Proud Boys’ are now all ‘Proud Girls’ ! https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/sarah-mcbride-trump-executive-order-trans-b2683936.html A more charitable explanation is that this order was written with the help of AI.

If you are interested in the gender distribution of recent Congressional committee appointments then you might want to check out the stats listed here: https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/republican-women-chosen-lead-house-committees-time-decades/story?id=116764680 According to this, Virginia Foxx (R-NC) aged 81 is the only woman to be named by House Speaker Mike Johnson to lead a House Committee in the 119th Congress, as the chairwoman of the powerful House Rules Committee. The chairs of another 17 standing committees announced so far are entirely populated by white men. https://scalise.house.gov/press-releases/Scalise-Applauds-Committee-Chairs-for-119th-Congress As Swansont pointed out, Trump isn’t directly responsible for any of these appointments, but House Speaker Mike Johnson who does make these decisions is basically a ventriloquist’s dummy who enacts Trump’s will at every turn - case in point - last week when Mike Johnson dismissed the widely respected Republican Mike Turner (R-Ohio) from his position atop the House Intelligence Committee - and did so directly on orders from Mar-a-Lago according to multiple sources. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mike-johnson-removes-mike-turner-house-intelligence-chairman/ Trump has a long history of demonstrating extreme hostility towards empowered and intelligent women, especially if they dare to criticise or contradict him. This was seen on the Inauguration day earlier this week when Trump had a meltdown after hearing a sermon by the female Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde at the National Cathedral Prayer service in which she called on him to have mercy on transgender children and immigrant families. https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5099730-donald-trump-criticizes-bishop-transgender-migrants/ You can read Trump’s subsequent tirade against her on his Truth Social platform here: https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/113870397327465225 Trump is a malignant narcissist and conceited fool who cannot withstand the slightest scrutiny or contradiction from anyone - especially women - which de facto makes him a misogynist - “a person who dislikes, despises, or is strongly prejudiced against women” (NOA Dictionary)

Every new US president since Harry Truman in 1945 has faced an unforeseen crisis during their inaugural term which tested their abilities to the limit - and beyond in the cases of Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter. Trump’s first presidency was ended by the abject failure and utter imbecility of his administration’s response to the global COVID pandemic. What will it be this time I wonder ? The San Andreas fault shifting ? Another INES Level 7 nuclear accident like Chernobyl or Fukushima? Or perhaps the collapse of the United States into anarchy and civil war - if Trump tries to order the US military into California or New York to carry out his mass deportation program against the will of the state Governors. As a footnote: The 14 year reign of the Roman emperor Nero came to an abrupt end when he committed suicide in 68 AD. According to the Roman historian Suetonius, Nero deliberately started the Great Fire of Rome in 64 AD in order to clear land for his pet ‘Golden House’ palace project (another property developer) and subsequently blamed and persecuted the Christians for the destruction that ensued. His avarice, cruelty, and high taxation policies finally provoked the aristocracy into rebellion against a man they already despised as a panem et circenses (‘bread and circuses’) crowd pleaser, and malignant narcissist.

Andrew Coyne a columnist for leading Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail had this to say on the eve of Donald Trump’s second presidential inauguration - (quoted in full because of a paywall): https://www.theglobeandmail.com/.../article-trumps.../