Author: Muttrox

The most interesting revelations from Michael Wolf’s book (Fire and Fury) about Trump are about his mental fitness.

Besides the constant (and well-deserved) speculation and pushes for impeachment ever since the inauguration, there is another path to remove Trump from power. The idea that a president is not mentally competent to do the job has been around for a while (the latter years of the Wilson administration were run by surrogates after a stroke), and passed into constitutional law as the 25th Amendment after the Kennedy assassination.

Section 4
Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.

Everyone can see that Trump is mentally unfit. Everyone has known this for a long time. And that is just the problem. Over 60,000,000 people voted for him with full knowledge of who he was. How can you remove the President for being unfit when the majority of the country saw the same thing and decided he was fit enough? It’s not enough. What you need is something that shows that (a) the problem has gotten worse, or (b) the problem is so bad that the will of the country needs to be set aside. Option (b) is the most thought about, unlikely as it is that the cabinet and Pence would turn against Trump.

Wolff’s revelations put option A back on the table.

Everybody was painfully aware of the increasing pace of his repetitions. It used to be inside of 30 minutes he’d repeat, word-for-word and expression-for-expression, the same three stories — now it was within 10 minutes. Indeed, many of his tweets were the product of his repetitions — he just couldn’t stop saying something.

Hoping for the best, with their personal futures as well as the country’s future depending on it, my indelible impression of talking to them and observing them through much of the first year of his presidency, is that they all — 100 percent — came to believe [my emphasis] he was incapable of functioning in his job.

At Mar-a-Lago, just before the new year, a heavily made-up Trump failed to recognize a succession of old friends.

Is it true? We don’t know. But if so, it clearly shows Trumps mental state degrading further since he came into office. To whatever degree this book serves at evidence, it further demonstrates Trump is “manifestly unfit”.

Update: A very balanced editorial in the New York Times today, which references this interview with one of the original authors of this amendment. A good case for why I am completlely wrong!

Update: Fun with copy and paste, this has been slightly updated and given a new headline.

I annoy my wife with these quizzes. You’ll get the idea pretty quick.

1. She can wound with her eyes. How can she kill?
2. Where did she take the midnight train to?
3. Where did he take the midnight train to?
4. How do I feel about your ability to find a better mate?
5. Who rings like a bell through the night?
6. Where was a woman’s soul made?
7. When is she stealing my heart, my soul.
8. What could a hundred men do?
9. What percentage of people danced to the jailhouse rock?
10. Once I begin, how often will I cease?

Look for more of these…

The music is nice, and lyrics are even better. I rarely pay much attention to the words, but these are a cut above. This is a view of marriage that is much more mature than your typical love song. I have a feeling we’ll be playing this at our anniversaries for a while.

We’ve all been following the Comey/Mueller investigation. What will come of it? Here are my predictions.

• Trump did not collude. (I’m using the term collusion loosely, including conspiracy and such.)
• Some folks within the Trump camp, including family members and higherups aligned themselves with the Russians, knowingly. They are guilty, and are traitors.
• Other higherups within the Trump camp would have no part of it (Sessions).
• Trump himself never did an actual quid pro quo. He is a dupe, an idiot, a wannabe authoritarian getting played by Russia, but not an actual traitor.
• After the fact, Trump obstructed justice multiple times in multiple ways.

The aftermath:

• The traitors within the Trump will be thrown to the wind, and downplayed as bad actors, Trump will not accept any responsibility for their acts or what his campaign did.
• He will simultaneously claim that it was no big deal and pardon some of them.
• Congressional Republicans will say that he may have done some bad things, but the Trump coverup is not high crimes and misdemeanors, and will refuse to let impeachment proceedings proceed.

And then the 2018 midterms. Buckle up, it’s going to be a heck of a ride.

Back in 2015, I wrote a little piece ripping apart an editorial from William Cohan. Lo and Behold, Paul Krugman also lit into him, independently. Always good to have a Nobel Prize winner on your side.

Ever seen this? The toilet paper holder has two rolls. Its easier to keep toilet paper in the stall if one roll is completed all the way, so this sticker is placed on a random roll.

That’s the seemingly logical explanation. But the true explanation is that one roll has mutated, and by chance has generated this sticker. The sticker will extend its life at the expense of its compatriot, giving it more time to reproduce and pass on this beneficial mutation. Natural selection at work.

This is ridiculous.

;

“When I go to heaven, I’m gonna have my own waterpark for my backyard.”
“Me too! We can all have waterparks!”
“But you have to ask to go, you don’t always get it, because it’s heaven.”
“Or you could have a warm comfy bed to snuggle in!”
You have a comfy bed all the time in your waterpark, you go down the slide on it!

That does sound kind of awesome.

Cyclone, the wooden roller coaster at Six Flags over Georgia is closed down forever. Presumably it will be replaced by something more modern.

Notice the estimated wait time. Over 60 minutes. This is true, the actual wait time is hundreds of thousands of minutes.

It isn’t easy to improve on The Beatles. It takes some giant grapes to say you can do their song better than they did.

Like many Motown artists, Stevie Wonder was a Beatles fan—of sorts. “Stevie loved the Beatles, mostly Lennon and McCartney for their writing,” Wonder’s childhood best friend John Glover says in Mark Ribowsky’s Stevie biography Signed, Sealed, and Delivered. “That was where he saw their genius, not their performing—in fact, he didn’t think they performed some of their songs as well as he could do it.” That’s a sentiment that requires a lot of chutzpah, but Wonder backed it up on 1970’s “We Can Work It Out,” a track that so thoroughly reimagines the Lennon–McCartney classic that it feels like an entirely new piece of music.

Stevie delivers.

 

I don’t understand how Bernoulli’s theorem works with airplane wings.

The top of the wing is curved. Therefore, the air going past the top has a longer path to travel. Which means that it is moving faster than the air going past the bottom of the wing. Which, by the theorem, means it is lower pressure. Which means that the pressure differential pushes the wing upwards.

But why does having a longer path imply greater speed? Why does the air that is going over the top of the wing need to end up at the back of the wing in the same time as the air traveling over the bottom of the wing? Why doesn’t it all travel at the same speed with no differential in pressure? This inquiring mind wants to know.

Late update: A knowledgeable friend said that Bernoulli is part of it, but there are other effects in play, particularly at the edge and tips of the wing. If it was just Bernoulli, there would be no need to taper the wings as you move to their tips, or angle them towards the back of the plane.

And hey, XKCD also says it’s more complicated! So maybe this blog post is just knowledge dropping…

Me, telling a blonde joke: How many blondes does it take to change a lightbulb?
Child 1: Two.
Child 2: No, three.
Me: Um. It takes four. One to hold the lightbulb, three to turn the ladder. Get it?
Child 2: I was closer!
Me: That’s not the point!
Child 1: Why does it take 3 to turn the ladder? It should only take one.

That’s a good excuse to reference my favorite scene from Raising Arizona:

* or Poles, MSU grads, whatever…