"This has never been done before"

"During a Friday evening press conference at his Bedminster golf course, the esteemed President Donald J. Trump finally announced a momentous step in the sweeping healthcare reform plan he's been promising for years:

"Over the next two weeks I’ll be pursuing a major executive order requiring health insurance companies to cover all preexisting conditions for all companies. That's a big thing. I've always been very strongly in favor. We have to cover pre-existing conditions so we will be pursuing a major executive order requiring health insurance companies to cover all pre-existing conditions for all of its customers. This has never been done before."

The decade-old Affordable Care Act that already did this was not available for comment." 

From the POTUS who said "Nobody knew health care could be so complicated."  Text from BoingBoing.

2 shades of green

Seeking advice from knowledgeable gardeners out there.  This spring we purchased a couple flats of pepper plants from a local garden store, then potted them up in containers (because the soil under the lawn is a typical suburban clay-gravel mix under the decorative inch of topsoil).

But there was a glitch.  This year we bought some new pots and didn't notice that the new ones lacked drainage holes in the bottom.  After an initial watering and a week of recurrent rain, the seedlings in those pots were swimming in a soil/water soup that couldn't be poured out without losing the seedlings.  So we moved those pots under the screen porch where they wouldn't receive any more rain.

Somewhat surprisingly, most of the plants survived, and have wound up looking quite different.  The top photo shows the ones in full sun in the back yard (mulched with marsh hay).  The peppers are forming nicely and on schedule, but the leaves look rather pale green.

Here are the pots that have been sitting under the screen porch for the past couple months:

Some died off (drowned, apparently), but these others are maturing and seem to be a week or two "behind schedule" in flowering and fruiting.  But the curious feature is how much more deeply green their leaves are. (The photos may be slightly distorted because of the difference in ambient light, but the difference is real).

Why so different?  I don't know.  It seems statistically unlikely that the ones in the pots are from different flats/different strains of peppers.  My instinct tells me that pale leaves represent nutritional deficiency of some type, but those out in the yard were planted in Miracle-Gro potting mix, which should have a superabundance of minerals for these modest-sized plants.  Does repeated rain and watering wash out those additives from the potting mix when used outdoors?

Or are the under-deck dark-leaved plants intensifying their chlorophyll production because they are situated where they receive only indirect light?

Some reader out there may know.  I'm just an English major blundering through the practicalities of life.

50 shades of green

I have been authoring fewer posts for TYWKIWDBI in recent months, in part because surfing the internet has become so relentlessly depressing.  When I need therapy, I escape to the outdoors, and with travel options more limited, I've been spending more time at the University of Wisconsin arboretum.  This week instead of exploring the prairie or wildflower-rich areas, I headed to the evergreen collections.

I know there are some who feel that pines and other non-deciduous plants are not colorful enough.  To them I would offer the observation of that great philosopher, Lorne Malvo, who noted that the human eye can perceive more shades of green than any other color.

Whether that is true or not is irrelevant, because to my eye the beauty of evergreens lies not in their color, but in their remarkable variety of conformations and textures.  If I were entertaining a visually-impaired friend, this is the section of the arboretum that I would bring them to.

Having said that, I'll be quiet now and let you browse on your own through the following gallery:

As I left I saw these two sandhill cranes.  They were dancing and bumping chests, but as I drew nearer they reverted back to feeding.

Philanthropist shuns the "S.O.B.s"

A memorial obituary in today's New York Times is about Doris Buffett, who was entrusted with helping dispose of the enormous Buffett family fortune.

While he ran Berkshire Hathaway, the conglomerate that includes Dairy Queen, Duracell and Geico, Mr. Buffett entrusted his sister and a group of women she had recruited to sift the requests for financial help, assess their merits and monitor the impact of those that were granted.

In some cases they were sanctioned to satisfy more modest requests — for money to help pay for dental work, legal bills in custody cases, wheelchairs, automobile repairs, electric bills and the like.

Ms. Buffett’s own Sunshine Lady Foundation, which she founded in 1996, and, more recently, The Letters Foundation, which she and her brother founded, have focused tens of millions of dollars in large and small donations on individuals and organizations committed to educating prison inmates, battered women and low-income teenagers, and to improving the lives of the mentally ill while also easing the burden on their caregivers.

Ms. Buffett shunned what she called “the S.O.B.’s” — symphonies, operas and ballets — as recipients of largesse and instead concentrated on the underprivileged, as she did with The Letters Foundation.

“I rounded up a bunch of ladies, and we started reading letters,” she recalled. “Some of them were nutty, but most of them were from people who were genuinely desperate and just needed a little help” — “decent people who just didn’t have the breaks somebody else did.”..

Warren Buffett recalled in an interview that his sister, who was three years his senior, was always a “doer.”

“She would talk to every one of these people; she didn’t just write a check,” he said. “She was enormously empathetic and did something about it.”..

She, like him, wanted most of her fortune to be spent on solving problems in her lifetime.

“She really wanted her last check to bounce,” Mr. Buffett said.

Þrídrangaviti lighthouse

Construction completed in 1942.  Now equipped with a helipad and powered by solar energy.  Video of helicopter approach.  More info.

A post of interest only to golfers

Golf magazine asks the question: "Are trees in the fairway — fair? This Minnesota muni shows how to do it right (and wrong)."

Those interested in the topic can read the commentary at the source.  Images cropped for size.

"Republicans don't really care about the upcoming election"

Excerpts from an interesting op-ed piece in The Soapbox.

The unseriousness of the Republican response to the coronavirus has had commentators asking from the outset whether the party understands that there’s an election coming up, one now less than a hundred days away...  

 ...while President Trump and a few Republican incumbents seem to be in genuine trouble, the vast majority of Republicans in Congress are certain to keep their jobs. In the Senate, most Republicans aren’t up for reelection, and most of those who are aren’t facing particularly competitive races...  

Republican politicians are answerable primarily to conservative voters in the least populous portions of the country and the conservative outlets and institutions that shape their thinking. This has allowed most to stand proudly opposite public opinion on everything from health care to climate change without fear of electoral consequence...  

One might object that even safe Republicans presumably want the party as a whole to keep the Senate and the White House and prevent Democrats from taking power. But the notion that most Republicans care about the party’s fortunes as much or more than their own careers seems dubious.. what many still don’t realize is that the Republican Party has no real legislative agenda of any kind at all—not even a conservative one...  

All told, if it seems like Republicans are acting as though the election doesn’t matter, one should consider the many ways it actually doesn’t for them. Moreover, it’s conceivable that many Republicans are quietly hoping for a loss at the top of the ticket. A Trump defeat might repair the GOP’s standing with key constituencies Trump has driven away and will almost certainly encourage the political media to craft a redemption narrative for the party. Pundits and Fox News favorites on the Hill will attract attention and campaign donors drumming up rage at what Biden and Democrats in Congress are up to. Ambitious post-Trump populists and Trump critics who’ve been biding their time are both spoiling for a fight over the future of the party, which is to say a fight over the future of their respective careers. None of this should console Trump and the most embattled Republican candidates. But unless Democrats get serious about disempowering it for good, the Republican Party can’t really lose.

"We will vote" video

YouTube link

Another Lincoln Project production.

The explosive material from the Beirut disaster

Top photo: storage in Beirut warehouse before the explosion (cropped for size).

Next: Oklahoma City damage from 2.5 tons of similar material.

Last: Beirut damage from estimated 2,750 tons of it.

The bottom image is a screenshot from video at the Guardian link.  Note the first two links have informed discussions re storage and ignition of this fertilizer.  I'll put a couple video links in the next gif-fest.

Addendum:  This informative comment from a reader:

It's not "Ammonium nitrate fertilizer", it's ammonium nitrate mixed with a fuel oil, usually diesel fuel, which combines to form Ammonium Nitrate Fuel Oil, or "ANFO" which is the designation used to differentiate it from the common fertilizer. The bags in the picture are clearly marked NITROPRILL which is just one of many brands of ANFO produced worldwide by many explosives manufacturers.

If you tried using that stuff as an agricultural fertilizer you would contaminate the soil, kill any existing crops and create a hazardous waste site. Forget the fertilizer component, it would be like spraying your fields and crops with diesel fuel and you would likely be shut down by the Environmental Protection Agency.

You learn something every day.  Thank you to this reader. 

Coronavirus epidemiology in a nutshell

Via

That's a heckuva muskie !! - updated x2

Found floating dead in Lake Mille Lacs.

A 59 1/2-inch muskie — a rare specimen that likely would have set a state record had it been caught alive... The current Minnesota record for a catch-and-release muskie is 56 7/8 inches, a fish caught by Andrew Slette of Hawley on Pelican Lake in Otter Tail County in June 2016...

Today, a catch-and-release ethic pervades muskie angling, especially in Minnesota. Muskie anglers successfully lobbied lawmakers in 2014 to increase the minimum length for keeping a fish to 54 inches. As such, many anglers believe Lyons’ record has been “broken” numerous times, but the fish were released and never weighed. It’s conceivable that a record-breaking fish could be caught but that it would be illegal to keep it...

Scientifically speaking, length is probably a more valuable measure than weight, since an individual fish’s weight varies throughout a single season as it produces eggs (all monster muskies are females), suffers through stressful periods and gorges itself in the fall on fatty prey. But it doesn’t shrink in length. While growth slows tremendously for muskies as they reach old age, they aren’t believed to actually stop growing...

Gilbert said he had no reason to keep the fish. “After I held it up for a photo, I just dropped it back in,” he said. “I figured that was the way to show some respect for the fish. It still smelled up my boat for two weeks.”

Based on a clipped fin, this one was estimated to be 25 years old.

Posted for fellow Minnesotans and others who have spent long hot summer afternoons trolling with a lure as big as the fish you usually catch...

Addendum: Here's another one:

Caught with a 12-inch, black-and-gold crankbait lure.  Kudos to the couple for this:

“Our main concern was ‘Let’s get that fish back in the water,’ ” Derek Poshusta said. He estimates the fish was out of the water for less than a minute.

That's the proper attitude for a sportsman not fishing for an evening meal.

And finally a muskie chomping on a full-grown northern. (screencap from video):

Reposted from 2017 to add this distressing report at Vice that gives new meaning to the old phrase "the muskies are biting today":

"Terry Driver and his wife Kim were relaxing with a group of friends on the beach at North Star Village along the Winnipeg River near Minaki, Ontario, about a three-hour drive east from Winnipeg, around 4 p.m. that day when Kim, standing in chest-deep water, let out a scream.  

“All of a sudden she just said, ‘Someone’s got my leg,’ and then started screaming and her arms went up, and she went underwater and we all kind of stood there in complete disbelief and didn’t know what was going on,” Terry recalled. 

It turned out the culprit was a muskellunge, or muskie, a fish that’s highly sought out because of its rarity and size...  

“As soon as we saw the wound and the blood we knew it was a muskie, because we’re all fishermen out there. Nobody’s ever seen one do that before. Nobody’s ever seen one T-bone someone’s calves.”  

Thankfully, the couple’s beach crew included nurses and Ontario Provincial Police officers, who administered first aid while they told Terry to get his truck and rush her to a hospital in Kenora. .. 

“I looked down and I saw the fish’s head, which looked like an alligator, and it just grabbed it and it moved me from side to side and then it pulled me under,” she told Global. "

Video interview at Global News.

Related:  The "Muskie Fever" of 1955.

Looks perfectly safe to me

One comment at the discussion thread suggests that there may be rebar drilled into the mountainside to provide added stability.

Two Brits offer their views of Donald Trump

The first from News Break and journal of a grumpy old man, via London Daily:

"Trump lacks certain qualities which the British traditionally esteem. For instance, he has no class, no charm, no coolness, no credibility, no compassion, no wit, no warmth, no wisdom, no subtlety, no sensitivity, no self-awareness, no humility, no honour and no grace– all qualities, funnily enough, with which his predecessor Mr. Obama was generously blessed. So for us, the stark contrast does rather throw Trump’s limitations into embarrassingly sharp relief. 

Plus, we like a laugh. And while Trump may be laughable, he has never once said anything wry, witty or even faintly amusing – not once, ever. I don’t say that rhetorically, I mean it quite literally: not once, not ever. And that fact is particularly disturbing to the British sensibility – for us, to lack humour is almost inhuman. But with Trump, it’s a fact. He doesn’t even seem to understand what a joke is – his idea of a joke is a crass comment, an illiterate insult, a casual act of cruelty... 

And worse, he is that most unforgivable of all things to the British: a bully. That is, except when he is among bullies; then he suddenly transforms into a snivelling sidekick instead. There are unspoken rules to this stuff – the Queensberry rules of basic decency – and he breaks them all. He punches downwards – which a gentleman should, would, could never do – and every blow he aims is below the belt. He particularly likes to kick the vulnerable or voiceless – and he kicks them when they are down..."

More at the link.  

The second comes from Markus, a reader of TYWKIWDBI.  He offered these thoughts in the Comment section below, but I've boosted them up here to the body of the post for wider viewing.

"Here in the UK, politics is less polarised than in the US. My wife and I have voted for all three major parties over the years. We sometimes vote against each other. We even know people who think Brexit was a good idea. And, whilst it may spark discussion, it never causes a rift.

But no one in the UK or anywhere else outside America has ever said a good word to me about Donald Trump. No one. Not one word. Ever. Even the famously impartial BBC now routinely uses phrases such as "claimed, without supplying evidence, that", or quotes him and then flat-out contradicts him in the next sentence. The three subjects on which the BBC is not strictly impartial are climate-change denial, Covid-19 misinformation, and the utterances of Donald Trump -- all of them toxic.

The man is a jaw-dropping catastrophe. He's too stupid to know he's stupid. He listens to no one, understands nothing, tells transparent lies, and believes them himself. He's the Dunning-Kruger effect on legs. He's a blundering, racist, misogynistic bully. Every decision he makes is more damaging than the last. Walking away from the Paris agreement in the middle of a climate crisis? Defunding the WHO amid the worst pandemic in a century? *Really,* Mr President? And all that imbecilic name-calling! What is he, six years old?

Hear me well: Donald Trump is a worldwide laughing-stock. He is America's humiliation. He has destroyed your reputation, your moral leadership and your credibility. He squanders your allies' goodwill. His capriciousness makes him difficult and dangerous to deal with.

And, since he always craves worldwide attention, Trump sets a bad example of what leadership ought to be. The UK wouldn't have tolerated a Prime Minister so temperamentally unsuitable, as given to lying, gaffes, abuse of power and serial infidelity, as Boris Johnson, if Trump hadn't inured us to such appalling behaviour. Don't get me wrong -- I'd rather have Boris for a year than Trump for a day -- but no previous PM in my long lifetime has behaved the way Boris does, or would have got away with it.

Making America great again after Donald Trump will take decades, but it can be done. Start by booting out Trump as quickly as possible, by any legal means: in November if you must, earlier if you can. Tackle the partisanship that sees people shouting past each other, assuming the worst of each other, and treating even life-or-death decisions as political footballs. Slowly, with the right leadership, you'll regain your moral authority and your dignity, and the world will learn to trust you again."

Workplace hygiene guideline is subject to misinterpretation

Do some birdseed mixes include grit ?

Pictured above are the end-contents of a large bag of birdseed.   In addition to the mixture of seeds there is a handful of hard gritty material.  When I was adding to the feeder from the top of the bag, the inorganic stuff wasn't evident, but as I reach the bottom, it's quite obvious.

The birdseed was a low-cost, generic mixture sold as the store's brand (Farm and Fleet).   I can see where grit might be a logical offering to make to birds, but my family members with Audubon affiliations consider it doubtful that it was intentionally added.  OTOH, I'm not sure how it could accidentally become a contaminant in the seed harvest, mixing, or distribution process.

I'm curious if anyone else has encountered a similar situation.