Becoming a President Not Intelligence Proof of Is

I first learned about the very existence of Mango Mussolini when he decided to run for the office of POTUS at the end of Obama’s second term. Until that time, I had no idea who he was or that he existed at all. Although I had read Terry Pratchett’s Going Postal several times at that time. It took a while, but I did eventually realize that Reacher Gilt is his parody, albeit with one difference – Reacher is intelligent and well informed, albeit ruthless and manipulative.

Trump has none of Reacher’s good qualities, only the bad ones.

I listened to some of his speeches at the beginning of his political career, and frankly, I was appalled at their quality, or more precisely, their lack thereof. From the very beginning, he demonstrated profound ignorance about history, current politics, law, economics, and indeed about how the world works in general. I became very quickly convinced that he is an idiot, and the only reason why he is neither in jail nor without a penny to his name is that he was born to riches and that has always shielded him from the most egregious negative consequences of his actions.

But although I was unimpressed with the content of his speeches from the very start, he was at least speaking coherently and staying on topic back then. It went downhill from that time on; his speeches deteriorated both in quality with regard to content, as well as regarding the execution. Nowadays, he trips over words, is unable to follow a coherent thought to the end, and rehashes old grievances all the time, all signs of dementia.

So IMO, he was always a fool, and now he is a demented fool. Yet he won the presidency twice, and just barely lost once. And to this day, many people keep saying that this is proof that he is neither demented nor a fool, but actually intelligent and a masterful manipulator. I disagree for several reasons.

Mainly, he did not actually have to manipulate the American public to vote for him. A sizable portion of said public was always racist, bigoted, ignorant, and resentful, and these “qualities” were nurtured and elevated as virtues by the USA right-wing pseudonews apparatus for decades prior to his entering the political arena. A self-feeding loop was thus created just prior to 9/11, and it has fed on itself ever since, culminating in the rise of the Tangerine Tyrant. He was at the exact cross of a crass, boorish, racist, ignorant, and resentful asshole and a dude whose riches served as an easy-to-understand shorthand for competence for the voter base to look up to. Because actual competence requires effort to recognize.

He was just lucky to be the exact guy that the already pre-manipulated masses of hateful peabrained bigots wanted. He did not win their vote because he was intelligent; he won it because he fit the mold of hate that was formed in their minds through decades of propaganda.

That he became president is not proof of his intelligence, knowledge, or competence. It is proof of a profound lack of all those qualities in the American public.

The Greater Gardening of 2026 – Part 29 – Pretty Polinators

I realized that I have a pretty expensive camera, but I haven’t been using it for a long time except for photographing my mother’s gingerbread creations. So this morning I took a break from heavy lifting, and I took the camera to take some pretty-ish pictures of the pollinators that like to visit my oregano patch. I did not manage to make very many because I did not have the battery fully charged prior to this spur-of-the-moment action, but I did get some. And I did not bother with the macro lens.

Butterflies do not have a long life, but some manage to have it pretty rough and survive even so, as this specimen proves. Faded colors, chewed-up wing edges, yet still it flies.

Peacock butterflies are probably the prettiest butterflies that live around here. They look drab, almost coal-black with their wings folded, but stunningly beautiful when they flash their eyes from time to time to scare off or confuse predators.

There were multiple bee species present, but they were turning their hairy butts towards me and generally being uncooperative and blurry.

And of course several bee-mimicking hoverfly species were also present, being just as uncooperative as bees.

Bees and butterflies get all the press when it comes to pollination, but some beetle species are important in this regard too. And they are often very tiny.

There were also smaller butterfly species there, and I did not manage to capture all those present by far.

The Greater Gardening of 2026 – Part 28 – Bee Busy

All the assorted pumpkins are growing and flowering, but only the butternut and partypants look promising.

I have five butternuts that are now about 1 kg and still growing.

Almost daily, I get new butternut flowers, and I do my best to pollinate them manually. In two cases, those attempts failed already, because there were no really fresh male flowers open at the same time. But mostly, the plants still progress, and the number of fruits should still go up for at least a few weeks.

Real bees do like the flowers too, as does an assortment of beetles. And occasionally slugs. Luckily, the slugs prefer wilted flowers over fresh ones, so once old flowers start to drop off, the slugs leave the freshly open ones alone.

I mostly do not bother manually pollinating the other pumpkins, because I do not have very many healthy flowers for it to be worth the bother. Luckily, insects bother even so, so I should get at least my work’s and the seed packet’s worth out of most of them. Although the bulk of the assorted failures will be compensated by the butternut plants.

The loofahs are flowering, but still only male flowers. Several of the female flower buds stopped developing and eventually wilted away. I have no clue what the cause of this is. Maybe the weather is too cold – after the heatwave that started the summer, we have now had several weeks of the same weather that we had at the end of May. Nighttime outdoor temps have even dropped below 10°C for three days in a row now. This also means that outdoor tomatoes are not doing particularly swell.

The bell peppers are really puny so far, and the plants grow at a snail’s pace. I probably won’t bother overwintering these the next winter, and I will try to grow new pepper plants of a different variety. I also won’t grow them directly in the soil in the greenhouse the next year, but in large containers. That way, I can move them to a sunnier place when the weather is really warm – my greenhouse is in partial shade. Tomatoes do not mind, but peppers apparently do.

The potatoes Agrie are indeed an indeterminate variety, since they keep flowering even on plants that already did so. In the meantime, the Bellarosa variety began to wilt (as it should), and it might be ready for harvest sometime next week or so.

I harvested more oregano than I can use in a year, so I left the rest of the plants to flower as much as they want. They attract a lot of pollinators – bees, bumblebees, and butterflies. None of which I managed to take a picture of.

Pollinating a few pumpkin flowers every day is not much work, but I have been extremely busy even so – I have ordered circa 7 metric tonnes of wood scraps for winter fuel, and I need to bag, weigh, and store it all for winter. That is a lot of work, and I have to insert rest days into it every few days; otherwise my hands would probably fall off at the shoulders. Each of these bags weighs 20 kg. I would prefer smaller, 10 kg bags. They are much easier to handle, but they are not sold in a UV-hardened variant, so I am stuck with these behemoths. And filling these only 50% is not a financially wise option, since they are quite expensive. The smaller bags are cheaper, but since they are not hardened, they tend to disintegrate after a year or two. And it is not fun when a bag decides to fall apart at the exact moment one carries it down wet stairs in freezing winter.

And lastly, there will be a series of knife-related posts again on my knife blogge. I got a small commission for a santoku akin to the one with an olive wood handle that I made a few years ago. And there will also be a series of knife-related posts on Affinity, because I will recycle the blade in the picture above. I found it in the pile of wood scraps. It was probably used by the sawmill workers to cut packing straps and other heavy-duty work. It was badly mishandled (evidently) and really badly sharpened. It was also a bad design even when it was brand new – this type of integrated bolster not only adds a lot of completely unnecessary weight to the blade (which might be considered just an opinion), but it also objectively makes it more difficult to maintain a sharp edge and to sharpen it properly when blunted. I will write a bit more about that knife-design trivia too.

Once repurposed, I will decide what to do with the blade. I will probably just give it away to someone.

The Greater Gardening of 2026 – Part 27 – Squashes Start

Hokkaido, zucchini, marrow, and pattypans do not look promising, although I should get some, at least of the last sort. The butternut squashes, on the other hand, have grown like mad, and they were completely unaffected by the slugs. And today…

… I got the first three female flowers. I hope my attempts at manual pollination worked, because unfortunately, there weren’t very many male flowers open at the same time, and some were already closing.

However, this is really promising. I got the first female flower full seven weeks earlier than last year, so even if we get the first frost at the average time (end of September), I could look at a substantial amount of fully ripe fruit. I do not want to get my hopes up; that’s usually a surefire recipe for disappointment, but there are plenty more buds in the making and the vines are still growing in length by about 5-10 cm a day, with some reaching the very top of the trellises already.

I only wish the loofahs were flowering too. They are not; the vines still only grow in length, even though they have reached the roof of the greenhouse already.

The Greater Gardening of 2026 – Part 26 – Lots of Legumes

Let’s talk legumes, baby!

Well, maybe I got my wires crossed a bit there, but legumes are important in the garden, and I have a lot of them around, so I think they do deserve some attention.

Nothing to see here, because this is a freshly tilled patch where green peas were. I harvested about 2 kg of peas from 250 g of seed, which is not very impressive tbh. If I were growing peas to save money, it would not be very efficient. But I am mostly growing peas to improve the soil, which is why I immediately sowed this patch with peas again, this time with yellow peas. Those won’t be harvested at all; they will be tilled in green as a fertilizer sometime in August/September, after which this patch will be sown with durum wheat to test if I can grow it here.

Yellow peas started to swell up, so I do hope to get my own seed for the future to compensate for the very disappointing germination rate of bought seed. However, this probably won’t be impressive either, because many pods are attacked by pea weevil Bruchus pisorum. This pest is a problem in my garden, and there is not really a good solution.

Leftover green pea seeds from last year had a nearly 100% germination rate, and it looks like I might get a 1000% dividend. I am letting the whole patch fully ripen to get my own seeds. This variety grows extremely fast, so it is eminently suitable as a green fertilizer both in the spring before other crops, as well as in the fall after the main season. And the green peas are very tasty too. But the seeds are fairly expensive, thus the effort to grow my own.

White runner beans are starting to bloom. But surprisingly, some plants have red blossoms, so there was some cross-pollination with the red runner beans. Which is annoying; I wanted to get a pure white strain, and I am getting red blossoms from white beans. The hybrids will be perfectly edible, but…

Various bush beans are starting to look less pathetic, and first flower buds are showing up too. I do hope to get my own seeds for the next season; buying bean seeds over the last few years has been very frustrating and disappointing.

Alfalfa is now knee-high and flowering. I won’t mow it; I will let it grow until the end of August, then I will mow it and till it in. A lot of weeds sprouted in the alfalfa patch, whose seeds were suppressed in the lawn. That will be a bit of a problem the next year, when I want to grow spelt here.

And now let’s switch to native legumes that are important in my garden.

I did mention already that I wish to gather seeds of the bush vetch Vicia sepum to propagate it more around my garden for the future. But that is not the only native legume for which I have plans.

White clover Trifolium repens grows anywhere on the walk paths, and I intend to encourage it to do so by not mowing it too short. It is a pesky weed in a vegetable patch, but a valuable asset elsewhere due to its ability to resist being trodden on and to alleviate soil compaction.

Bird vetch Vicia cracca grows in the meadows outside my garden, and I found a plant in an area where it was not mown when making hay. I will harvest its seeds, and I hope to propagate it in my garden too. Fast-growing, local nitrogen fixer, excellent for composting. And when it sprouts as a weed in a vegetable patch, it does not compete much with anything and is easy to manage, remove, or simply leave to be.

Several patches of red clover Trifolium pratense appeared in my front yard. I have mown the lawn around them so the heads ripen. I want to harvest the seeds too. It is an excellent nitrogen fixer; in my area it grows better than alfalfa, and bumblebees love it.

And the last legume whose seeds I wish to propagate around my garden is bird’s foot trefoil, Lotus corniculatus. It is not as fast-growing and big as others, but it is pretty, pollinators of all kinds love it, and it is reasonably drought-resistant. Thus, another good local alternative to alfalfa.

The main downside to all these native plants is the same one that alfalfa has – the seeds are teeny tiny and fairly difficult to harvest. We shall see whether I succeed or not.

For many of these, to my surprise, it is also possible to buy seeds – they are sold by a shop selling beekeepers’ equipment and accessories. Although I would prefer to get seeds from local plants. These are uncultivated wildflowers, and thus they should be pretty genetically diverse across CZ, and indeed the whole of Europe. With seeds from local plants, I have a guarantee that they are genetically adapted to the local environment. Seeds from plants that were, most probably, grown in a warmer climate and better soil at lower elevations might not do as well here.

I am still really seriously considering buying a packet of seeds of each in the spring, mix them up, till the poorest soil in my garden (my front yard), and sow the mix there to see if something comes of it. The seeds are not that expensive, and it might be worth it even if they have a poor germination rate.

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