Time to come to our senses.
Neil Irwin is the excellent economics correspondent of the New York Times.
Herewith my comment on his piece today on de-globalization:
Hopefully, history repeats.
Those opening lines of Shakespeare’s Richard III are the most elegant and complex ever penned in English. Replete with metaphor, pun, humor and egotism, they say everything about the speaker, the future Richard III of England, a murderous psychopath whose two year reign came to a sticky end at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485. That same battle saw the end of the Plantagenet and York dynasties.
America and the world is now confronted with a like psychopath and murderer, the abomination which occupies the Oval Office. The ‘T’ word, used in this household, is rewarded by a quick exit for the speaker, the front door shown with alacrity. Rather, the only acceptable usage is ‘Pig’, the preposition dropped as a nod to Pig’s appalling spouse, the Slovenian Slut, chest by Dow Chemical.
Why this mention of Richard III?
First, because hopefully history repeats and Pig gets his equivalent of Bosworth Field very soon. Richard’s dying cry of “My horse, my horse, my kingdom for a horse” will be equally apt in Pig language, with the sole change being that ‘horse’ is replaced with ‘lawyer’.
Second, because my son’s Shakespeare studies in his last semester as a senior at prep school are now focused on this finest of plays, one which reminds me of my teen years, for I am vicariously piggybacking on his work.
Those teen years saw me watching Laurence Olivier’s 1955 film of the same title, easily the most chilling performance committed to celluloid. And we will be watching it later this week, ever hopeful that Richard’s fall from his horse is emulated by Pig and his ‘dynasty’ of spawn:
You should watch it too.
A note to Pig voters: This blog is about Photographs, Photographers and Photography. It ordinarily eschews politics. However, at this time of national tragedy, a tragedy whose number of deaths has been compounded by a psychopath masquerading as President, it is every American’s duty to protest loudly and to work for regime change. If you voted for Pig last time and have come around to seeing the error of your ways, all well and good. We all make mistakes. However, if you still fall in the trap of believing that Pig is making America great again and propose voting for him again, not only are you emphatically not welcome here, your very presence disgusts me. Do the right thing. Go elsewhere with your stupidity, your ignorance and your bigotry.
Use the army.
The US Army comprises 1.3 million workers on the taxpayer’s tab. It costs $1 trillion (yes, that’s $1,000,000,000,000) annually and has not won a conflict in 75 years. Let’s get some value out of this otherwise useless labor.
Problem: Supermarkets are disease pits and the primary area for virus transmission. Unfortunately, they are essential to life and health. Most provide no protective clothing for employees and fail to even provide simple, inexpensive Lexan partitions between shopper and cashier. They must be closed and the model rethought.
Solution: Close all supermarkets, prohibit in-person shopping and require a ‘delivery only’ model for all US households.
Here are the statistics:
Households and available driver labor:
Households in US: 128mm
Soldiers in army: 1.3mm
Unemployed retail store workers: 500,000
Total available labor – using 80% of Army and all retail: 1,540,000
Vehicles available:
GM vehicle production 2019: 2,900,000
Ford vehicle production: 1,200,000
US army vehicles: 225,000
Conscript 3m of Ford and GM vehicle production: 1,025,000 available
Add US Army for a total of: 1,250,000 available vehicles
Unit data:
Workers per vehicle: 1.23
Put all supermarkets on a delivery only model, no customer visits to these disease pits permitted.
# of supermarkets in USA: 28,000
Drivers (army + retail) available to each supermarket: 55 drivers
Households per US supermarket: 4,570
Permitted weekly grocery orders per household: 1
Trips per driver per day: (4570/55/7) = 12
Conclusion:
By conscripting 80% of otherwise useless army labor (no cost increase – already paid for) and all laid off retail workers (to be paid by supermarkets – no cost to taxpayer) and dedicating these workers to driving delivery vehicles, the labor load per driver computes to just 12 deliveries per day to supply every household in the USA.
Interpersonal shopper:grocery store worker contact falls to zero. Drivers are tested for virus weekly, being the sole source of contact with shelf stackers, with body temperature checks daily. Drivers have zero contact with shoppers – ‘leave at door’.
Fire all cashiers, as stores are closed, and add them to the labor force too.
As for national defense, the last 75 years prove that the sole purpose of the US Army is offense, not defense, and it has had no successes in its offensive rôle. Under my model we still have 300,000 Army personnel left (not sure what they do, exactly) and the Navy and Air Force to deliver nukes if needed. And let’s recall that a nuclear submarine parked at the bottom of the Black Sea on Moscow’s doorstep is impregnable, and it carries 16 long range nukes.
T.
An update.
In 2012 I wrote of the first color picture, taken by James Clark Maxwell in 1861.
That information now appears incorrect, as this article explains. French scientist Edmond Becquerel appears to have beaten Maxwell to the punch, if you accept the below is a photograph – a stretch:
An all time classic.
This is one of an occasional series on cooking devices which make a difference. For an index of cooking articles on this blog click here.
The BMW airhead motorcycle first came to market in 1922. The Kitchenaid Artisan stand mixer beats it by 3 years, having first been sold in 1919. Unlike that wonderful bike engine, last made in 1997, the Kitchenaid mixer soldiers on to this day. If you make dough for bread or cakes, it’s the only way to go and, surprise!, it’s made in Ohio. That’s Ohio, USA not Ohio, Wuhan, China.
I do not have that many hours of use on mine but the gorgeous, classic design of this model dates from 1936. Forty years of happy mixing with no failures are routinely reported:
The mixer has a sterling reputation for reliability and longevity. Repair parts are easily available and the commutator brushes are simple to replace, located under the black screw plugs visible in the picture. The mixing tool’s motion is planetary, meaning the tool rotates one way and the mixing assembly the other, conferring the folding motion your grandma used to use while kicking the dog across the kitchen. Mine came with a J hook for heavy dough and a mixer paddle for light work. The latter is ineptly designed and you will want to replace it with the scraper design which looks like this:
There are all sorts of tools available and the circular chrome port on the top will accept lots of additional gadgets for pasta making and the like. I have never used that power take-off source as my main interests are making bread dough and saving my aging wrists.
That doyenne of America-French cooking, Julia Child, used one for ages and hers, along with her kitchen, appears in the Smithsonian. Only in America is this possible.
Kitchenaid has other designs, including rising column ones in lieu of the tilt feature. These are for those with no sense of history and even less taste, like owners of post 1997 BMW motorcycles. Stick with the original. And it really must be white, though about five million colors are now available. The machine is exceptionally heavy and if I have one complaint is that it tends to wander over my polished marble countertop at higher speeds with heavy doughs, so I have placed it on a rubber mat. Kitchenaid needs to add a weighted counterbalancer to cancel out the vibes.
Note that it’s really not a tool you want to hump in and out of storage. It’s simply too heavy.
If Child’s ‘Mastering the Art of French Cooking‘ should be in every kitchen, it needs to share shelf space with Carol Fields’s ‘The Italian Baker‘ which does for bread what Child does for everything else.
