The dangers of Trusk, casinos and politicising space exploration

22 February 2025

Somebody recently accused me of hating Donald Trump so I thought I should point out I don’t know the man so I can hate him?  I am, however, very nervous about what he’s been doing since he came to power, and what an unholy mess he’s creating for the next generation and their offspring.  I know he and I will both be dead before the full effects of his destruction can be seen but that doesn’t cheer me at all.

Nor do I hope for his death, though I wouldn’t be upset if he died;  as Clarence Darrow, the 19^th century lawyer, once said “I’ve never wished a man dead, but I have read some obituaries with great pleasure.”

Trump once wrote (ghost-wrote?) a book about deals but clearly hasn’t a clue about what a deal is.  For me, a good deal is when both sides are happy with the solution and are happy to work together from there on even if they didn’t get all they had asked for.  Trump’s idea of a deal seems to be to get an outsider to talk to one of the parties and then impose the ‘deal’ on the other party.

Remember this is the man who bankrupted a casino, which is pretty hard to do because the one thing known about casinos is that, in the long run, the house will always win.

It’s based on Bernoulli’s Law of Large Numbers.  In the case of the roulette wheel, this law says that, if each spin is random, there’s no way of knowing what number will come up next but, over (say) a million spins, all the money placed on about 27,000 of them will go straight to the house.  Now multiply that by the number of times each wheel spins in 24 hours (remember casinos don’t have clocks in them so there’s no way of knowing if it’s night or day and people just keep on playing); and again by how many wheels there are, then add in the ranks of one-arm bandits and blackjack tables and side entertainments.  That’s a lot of money, so it takes somebody really stupid to break a casino.

And this is the man, an American, who’s trying to decide with Vladimir Putin how to end Russia’s war on Ukraine and he expects Ukraine to accept whatever they agree.  Trump even said last week “[Ukraine] should never have started it”.  Since the second amendment to the American Constitution gives citizens (limited) powers to own guns (I paraphrase), this means that, if somebody goes into a neighbour’s house uninvited and shoots somebody, Trump will decree that the dead person’s family should never have started it.

Incidentally, his current wife was born in the part of Yugoslavia that is now Slovenia and is a naturalised American.  Do Trump’s new orders mean that their son Barron will be deported because Melania is an immigrant and her son therefore has no right of residency in the US?

Trump has also claimed Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s approval rating is only 4% in Ukraine but when has he ever let facts spoil a rant?  A February poll in Ukraine showed Zelenskyy is trusted by 57% of the population (so he’s supported by a lot more of his people than Trump is by his).

Trump’s even described Zelenskyy as “A Dictator without Elections”, something that he’d never dare say about Vladimir Putin, even though an anti-war singer, Vadim Stroykin, fell from a ninth-floor to his death during a recent visit from security services.  Rumour has it that defenestration is now rising up the charts of the most common causes of death in Russia.

Even Nigel Farage said “you shouldn’t always take things Donald Trump says absolutely literally… Let’s be clear, Zelenskyy is not a dictator”.

Trump’s psychopathy has a certain academic fascination and somebody recently suggested he’s not a narcissist but a solipsist, so he’s the only thing that is real and everything else is unreal and he can ignore the Constitution and laws of America because they only exist in his head.

This does seem a little extreme but so are his media posts:  after he’d cancelled Manhattan’s congestion charges, clearly a matter of huge concern to the entire world, he posted “CONGESTION PRICING IS DEAD. Manhattan, and all of New York, is SAVED. LONG LIVE THE KING!”  Whaaat!  Keep taking the pills Donnie boy, I think you’ve been forgetting them.

Another critic attributed his stupidity to the fragile ego of a sullen and resentful old man, which seems equally valid.

Meanwhile, with the other evil twin, he is selflessly cutting federal spending and Elon Musk’s new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE*) is closing government agencies and firing everyone who is still stupid enough to believe in democracy and the rule of law.  The compensation for what we would call the ‘unfair dismissal’ of these people could be astronomical.

Musk is open about suffering from Asperger’s and he shares Trump’s disconnect between the bits of his brain that think and those that speak:  he recently accused Joe Biden of abandoning two American astronauts at the International Space Station for “political reasons”.  Andy Mogensen, one of the astronauts, responded “What a lie …” so Musk called Mogensen “fully retarded” nyah nyah.  (Their return had been scheduled for February but was delayed till March because of delays in preparing the spacecraft by SpaceX).

But is Musk clever or just rich?  He thinks he’s clever, but he’s ‘worth’ $400bn and is 56.  This means that, if he lives to be 96, he can afford to spend $27,400,000 every day if he never receives another cent.  He can therefore throw unimaginable sums of money at his ideas, some of which are successful and bolster his reputation, like Tesla Inc (and SpaceX – see above), and some of which are stupid and forgotten.

However, while he is funding his ideas, he’s giving a lot of money to the people who work on them and supply their needs, from infrastructure to rocket engines, so it’s not all bad.

If only he’d devote as much money to slowing climate change …

*          Remember the Doges of Venice were the rulers of a city which is sinking slowly into the mud.

Bob Dylan reimagined, Donald Trump for real, and the climate crisis

25 January 2025

On Sunday, I went to the cinema and saw a film nominated for 8 Oscars, loosely based on Bob Dylan’s early life, ‘A Complete Unknown’ (words taken from Like a Rolling Stone).  It’s not biographical but it’s a representation of his early life as a chancer up to when he appeared at the Newport Folk Festival with an electric band.

All the real-life characters are brilliantly cast although Dylan asked that Suze (pronounced ‘Suzie’) Rotolo’s name didn’t appear.  She was an established artist and a political activist with her own ambitions and ultimately escaped to Italy to make her own life because she didn’t want to be known as Dylan’s muse.  In her memoir ‘The Freewheelin’ Years’ she comes over as a lovely, independent and talented person who deserved, and got, better than Dylan.  In the film, she’s sort of represented by a character called Sylvie Russo but ‘Sylvie’ seems feeble and more compliant than Suze.

Monica Barbaro plays Joan Baez, whom he treated just as badly (listen to Baez’s later song Diamonds and Rust), and Barbaro gives an very good impression of her voice;  Edward Norton is sensitively avuncular as the folk purist Pete Seeger and Boyd Holbrook plays a small role as Johnny Cash, lightly revealing the problems he had with alcohol.  Dylan is rarely seen without a cigarette in his hand but references to his use of other drugs are played down.

Even with such strong support, the film belongs to Timothée Chalamet’s as Dylan, performing all the songs himself.  He gives a subtle but totally believable interpretation of the Dylan who was becoming famous and moving towards the first of many new directions he was to take in later years, not really caring about other people who had helped him on the way, like Seeger and Baez (who says to Dylan “You’re really kind of an asshole”).

Dylan himself approved the script but didn’t influence the final cut, probably because he doesn’t care what people think about him and was happy to see the legend further confused.  There’s a lot of online discussion about whether he suffers from Aspergers and has no way of knowing how other people are feeling, which would be consistent with some of the casual cruelty the Dylan character shows in the film.

Scenes from his life are mixed up and conflated – the cry of “Judas” was actually recorded in Manchester on his British tour but was put into the film’s Newport concert.  Although it now grieves me to admit it, I felt similarly betrayed at his London concert on that tour and by hearing for the first time some of the electric songs in the second half, which seemed particularly shocking after the acoustic first half he had just played. 

But I got used to them and now accept his broken voice doing little more speaking the words, backed by a piano, a cello and some subdued percussion, and I’m happy to accept a recent song whose title he borrowed from Walt Whitman:  “I contain multitudes”.

Other news this week included Donald Trump on Monday, with his left hand on a Bible, saying “I do solemnly swear that I will … preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States”.

Within hours, he had forgotten his oath and pardoned 1,500 violent criminals who had been properly convicted for their parts in the 6 January 2021 insurrection that Trump himself had encouraged by telling them to “fight like hell”.  In doing this, he described attacks on police officers as “very minor incidents”, even though hundreds of police officers were injured in the attack on the Capitol Building and nine people, including police officers, died as a result of the attack.

Pamela Hemphill, 71, refused to accept the pardon, saying it was an insult to the police officers who she credits with saving her life after she’d been knocked over and trampled on.

Trump then signed various racist (second-generation birthrights given by the Constitution), isolationist (Mexico and WHO), transphobic (only two genders), dangerous (climate crisis denial) and other executive orders that descended to the ridiculous (renaming the Gulf of Mexico and an Alaskan mountain).

Shortly before this, JD Vance, a former Marine who had accused Trump of being a white supremacist and compared him to Hitler but changed his tune when he saw his own future at stake, was sworn in as Vice-President.  And Pete Hegseth, who believes government should be subordinate to Old Testament laws, was made Defense Secretary.  (I thought the OT was originally Jewish and adopted by Christianity but Hegseth is obviously closer to God than I am.)

I’m also beginning to wonder if Melania has hidden shallows.  No normal FLOTUS-to-be would have dressed for a funeral and worn a hat that prevented her husband kissing her at his inauguration.

Trump obviously wasn’t affected by a recent study at the Woodwell Climate Research Center, published in Nature Climate Change, which had measured changes in 200 sites between 1990 and 2020. Too many long words perhaps.

The study showed how Arctic forests, wetlands and tundra are being transformed by the planet’s rapid warming.  Since before the last ice-age, these ecosystems have held immeasurable amounts of carbon in the permafrost but, as temperatures rise and ice sheets melt, tundras unfreeze and more CO₂ is released into the atmosphere.

Their analysis shows that 30% of these lands are now releasing the carbon they’ve been storing for tens of thousands of years which is, in an understatement by the lead researcher, “a pretty big deal”.

GBNews has quoted the Telegraph’s report that “an Israeli official close to the negotiations” had said that “if Hamas adhered to all the rules set out in the new deal, Israel would leave the strip”.  I wonder if they should have said “ … what’s left of the strip” because Gazans returning to the devastation will be left to guess where their house was and where some of their missing relatives probably still are.