monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

We need to look at the bright side of Donald Trump’s border wall fixation.

Sure, he’s shut down the government and thrown the nation into chaos. But it could be worse. He could be demanding a fiery moat between us and Canada. Or building a 36,000-foot-deep barrier across the Pacific Ocean to drive home his commitment to tariffs.

See? There’s always a silver lining.

Trump wants a $5.7 billion down payment to build a wall along the Mexican border to protect us from caravans of terrorists and drug dealers. We hadn’t heard a lot about the caravan menace since the midterm elections, but the president brought it back on Wednesday. This was shortly before he walked out of a meeting with Democratic leaders about the government shutdown.

The two sides disagreed on who caused the talks to collapse. Obviously, it was something about the you-know-what. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer claimed that when the wall came up, Trump “sort of slammed the table … and said we have nothing to discuss.” Republican leaders tried to pin all the blame on obdurate Democrats.

“I said bye-bye,” tweeted the president.

O.K., this one is pretty clear. The meeting was brief. After only about 30 minutes, he who says “bye-bye” is the culprit. Even if, as House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy claimed, Trump “brought a little candy for everybody.”

Maybe all this wall obsessing makes Trump tired. He certainly seemed low-energy during his Oval Office address. “He makes Jeb Bush look like a combination of Mighty Mouse and Bruce Springsteen,” a friend of mine said after the president finished his nine-minute speech to the American people.

For every viewer whose response to the talk was “Wow, we should do something about immigration!” there must have been a hundred whose first reaction was “Why does this man keep sniffing?” Deviated septum? Nasal polyps? Trump’s breathing has actually sounded strange for a long time, but most of us have chosen to ignore it rather than engage in a national conversation about the president’s nose.

If you watched the address — and really, you could have, it was only about as long as it takes to microwave popcorn — you saw a 72-year-old guy squinting at the teleprompter and making rather alarming breathing sounds while reading a speech about how we need a wall to protect women who are “sexually assaulted on the dangerous trek up through Mexico.”

This is not a man who should wrap his arguments around the idea of protecting women from sexual assault. But also, gee, he sounded like Uncle Fred who you haven’t seen for a while and suddenly he shows up for Thanksgiving with weird colored hair and vacant eyes and he’s talking into his mashed potatoes.

We need to look at the bright side of Donald Trump’s border wall fixation.

Sure, he’s shut down the government and thrown the nation into chaos. But it could be worse. He could be demanding a fiery moat between us and Canada. Or building a 36,000-foot-deep barrier across the Pacific Ocean to drive home his commitment to tariffs.

See? There’s always a silver lining.

Trump wants a $5.7 billion down payment to build a wall along the Mexican border to protect us from caravans of terrorists and drug dealers. We hadn’t heard a lot about the caravan menace since the midterm elections, but the president brought it back on Wednesday. This was shortly before he walked out of a meeting with Democratic leaders about the government shutdown.

The two sides disagreed on who caused the talks to collapse. Obviously, it was something about the you-know-what. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer claimed that when the wall came up, Trump “sort of slammed the table … and said we have nothing to discuss.” Republican leaders tried to pin all the blame on obdurate Democrats.

“I said bye-bye,” tweeted the president.

O.K., this one is pretty clear. The meeting was brief. After only about 30 minutes, he who says “bye-bye” is the culprit. Even if, as House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy claimed, Trump “brought a little candy for everybody.”

Maybe all this wall obsessing makes Trump tired. He certainly seemed low-energy during his Oval Office address. “He makes Jeb Bush look like a combination of Mighty Mouse and Bruce Springsteen,” a friend of mine said after the president finished his nine-minute speech to the American people.

For every viewer whose response to the talk was “Wow, we should do something about immigration!” there must have been a hundred whose first reaction was “Why does this man keep sniffing?” Deviated septum? Nasal polyps? Trump’s breathing has actually sounded strange for a long time, but most of us have chosen to ignore it rather than engage in a national conversation about the president’s nose.

If you watched the address — and really, you could have, it was only about as long as it takes to microwave popcorn — you saw a 72-year-old guy squinting at the teleprompter and making rather alarming breathing sounds while reading a speech about how we need a wall to protect women who are “sexually assaulted on the dangerous trek up through Mexico.”

This is not a man who should wrap his arguments around the idea of protecting women from sexual assault. But also, gee, he sounded like Uncle Fred who you haven’t seen for a while and suddenly he shows up for Thanksgiving with weird colored hair and vacant eyes and he’s talking into his mashed potatoes.

setting up a united states of Africa including 57 nations with a unified and gold-backed currency.

See if you can find out what is really unique and different about that place and bring evidence, descriptions, images etc. back for us to examine and possibly copy and/or improve on.

A male flame bowerbird is a creature of incandescent beauty. The hue of his plumage transitions seamlessly from molten red to sunshine yellow. But that radiance is not enough to attract a mate. When males of most bowerbird species are ready to begin courting, they set about building the structure for which they are named: an assemblage of twigs shaped into a spire, corridor or hut. They decorate their bowers with scores of colorful objects, like flowers, berries, snail shells or, if they are near an urban area, bottle caps and plastic cutlery. Some bowerbirds even arrange the items in their collection from smallest to largest, forming a walkway that makes themselves and their trinkets all the more striking to a female — an optical illusion known as forced perspective that humans did not perfect until the 15th century.

Yet even this remarkable exhibition is not sufficient to satisfy a female flame bowerbird. Should a female show initial interest, the male must react immediately. Staring at the female, his pupils swelling and shrinking like a heartbeat, he begins a dance best described as psychotically sultry. He bobs, flutters, puffs his chest. He crouches low and rises slowly, brandishing one wing in front of his head like a magician’s cape. Suddenly his whole body convulses like a windup alarm clock. If the female approves, she will copulate with him for two or three seconds. They will never meet again.

Kind of like the Borg in StarTrek..