They both occupy an inordinate amount of space in creepy Donald Trump’s brain.
His obsession with windmills is well known. For one, he thinks that that they kill birds in vast numbers. This has a superficial plausibility since some birds do die by hitting the blades. But that number is far fewer than the number killed by cats, power lines, or by flying into windows.
But bewilderingly, he also thinks that windmills kill whales in large numbers and that the sound of the windmills causes cancer.
So why does creepy Trump hate windmills so much to the point of delusion? Back in 2022, Philip Bump ventured an explanation.
The particular story of the wind turbines begins 16 years ago in Scotland. In 2006, Trump bought a large chunk of property on the country’s northeastern coast with the goal of turning it into a golf resort. Six years later, it opened as Trump International Golf Links.
…What Trump appears not to have known when he bought the land, though, is that three years prior a new offshore wind farm had been proposed. Following preparatory work, a formal application for construction was filed in 2011. And that’s when the war started.
…At the outset, Trump had only one concern: that the offshore turbines would ruin the view from his course.
…This was also the point at which Trump’s opposition to wind turbines became intermingled with politics. He began assailing Scottish officials on Twitter, including at least one official who had helped him overcome local opposition in the first place. He started tweeting regularly — hundreds of times — about the purported threats posed by wind turbines.
…In a familiar pattern, Trump took isolated anecdotes or unconfirmed accusations and elevated and exaggerated them to try to overpower his opponents.
…What is remarkable is that this particular thing has become so fixated in his patter. Before mentioning the subject on Hannity’s show in April, he did so in March and in January. He can’t resist it. It’s simply part of his political worldview, however mottled with error and despite the bizarre genesis of his obsession.
After a brief victory for Trump’s efforts to block the wind farm off the coast of Scotland, it was built and began operation in 2018. It has an installed capacity of 96.8 megawatts of energy, enough to power 80,000 homes. There are no reports of turbines collapsing and no known incidents of noise-related cancer.
With creepy Trump, even the most absurd link will be used to carry forward his obsessions. The latest inanity comes from his effort to complain about inflation. He seems particularly obsessed with the price of bacon and says that windmills have caused the price of bacon to shoot up astronomically.
“You take a look at bacon and some of these products – and some people don’t eat bacon any more,” Trump said. “We are going to get the energy prices down. When we get energy down, you know … this was caused by their horrible energy – wind. They want wind all over the place. But when it doesn’t blow, we have a little problem.”
When politicians try to convince people that inflation is hitting people hard, they usually focus on staples like bread, milk, eggs. Bacon, apart from not being particularly good for you, is hardly a necessity. But it seems like it forms a big part of his diet and thus his consciousness.
I doubt that creepy Trump has ever read Don Quixote but surely he must have heard of that famous fictional character and his obsession with windmills? Don Quixote believes that his fictional adventures involving windmills are real but everyone else laughs at him.
Don Quixote was a noble figure with delusions who is seeking to do good. Creepy Trump, on the other hand, is an idiot with delusions.
But?… bread and milk are?
I know cured meat is a modern thing for reasons of preservation, but bread and (domesticated animal) milk are things humans have only been consuming for on the order of 10,000 years. Pigs (and eggs) for on the order of a million.
The idea bread is, “the staff of life” was invented by (meat eating) wealthy people as propaganda to sell to the masses the idea that eating cheap processed crap was noble.
There’s a reason gluten intolerance is a thing, and lactose intolerance is a thing, but meat and eggs intolerance is not a thing (or extremely rare).
(None of this is defending Trump of course, I was just struck by the insinuation unnatural processed foods like bread and milk are more “staples” than meat.)
P.S. It’s supposedly the sulphites in bacon (from the curing process) that make it unhealthy. Not pork per se.
(The 20th century claim that “saturated” (animal) fat is “unhealthy” has been thoroughly debunked.)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9794145/
and that completes my trio of comments -- all of them off topic, lol. Sorry. X-D
huh, I thought one of the main issues with cured meats was the nitrates and nitrites used in the curing process…
on top of bacon also just being rather high in salt and fat, both of which typical Americans (self included) have far more in their diet than what is generally considered “healthy”…
on another note:
“noise-related cancer”
jeezusfuckingchrist, i don’t know if I could come up with a more absurd three-word combo
Trump is talking about bacon because bacon has been elevated to a cultural icon of American Manhood, which the loony right are saying is under attack by unmanly foreign multicultural cosmopolitans who want to sap our unique manhood and pollute our PBFs. Just another culture-war blither-point like bathroom-panic and CRT.
PS: how much of those wind-turbines can one actually see from Trump’s precious golf course?
@2 Mammalian meat allergy (alpha-gal syndrome) is a thing, though geographically restricted. Wikipedia tells me that egg allergies are fairly common (though less common than dairy) and that egg intolerance does exist.
Trump has been slipping into dotage for some time now. I find it hard to imagine him uttering anything coherent a couple of years from now.
So if there are enough gullible Americans to elect him in November, who are going to be the powers behind the throne? I suspect a bunch of creeps like the project 2025 dudes.
Would Vance be sayy, ruthless and connected enough to stick in the knife and use the 25th amendment to the US constitution to declare Trump “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office” and grab power himself?
These are worrysome things, and not only for the US.
In the novel, Don Quixote--as a result of a lifetime reading too much--believed all the chivalrous stories of knights and feats of derring-do and thought it was his duty to behave like those knights in the stories he loved. In his mind, the windmills were giants and had to be stopped. His tenant became in his mind his servant, and a peasant took on the role of his great Lady Love, to be woo’d chastely from afar. But most importantly, Don Quixote is a fictional character, and in real life, if people were to start acting like this, they’d be considered demented.
Donald is just a malignant narcissist, and once their minds fixate on an enemy, they never let go of that enemy.
As for food sensitivities; the alpha-gal syndrome is the result of infection from the bite of a particular tick, just like Lyme disease is from the bite of another species of tick. If the rate of infection is growing, it’s because ticks are increasing and spreading across the country. People can be sensitive to eggs or milk, but that tends to be by location, as well. People whose ancestors didn’t drink milk after weaning are more likely to be lactose intolerant than people whose ancestors drank a lot of milk. People can be sensitive to peanuts, strawberries, apples, and roses, too (that one is linked: I once worked with someone who was very strongly allergic to both).
Does anyone think Donald buys his own food at the grocery store? No, he’s ranting about it because someone told him it would work. Food prices are up for a lot of reasons including price gouging, avian flu requiring entire flocks to be destroyed, earlier supply chain issues, food recalls (a current one is listeria in a particular brand of lunchmeat because of lax sanitation at the processing plant), and general inflation.
And then there’s a perception that some things should be cheap or free. Before the pandemic, I was at the farm where I buy my meat, dairy, and eggs. Someone came in wearing a designer purse, holding a big whipped cream-on-top caramel-drizzled coffee drink in one hand, the latest iPhone in the other…and complained about the eggs being $4/dozen. The hens are pastured and fed a supplemental diet that’s soy-free (safe for people with allergy to legumes and hard to find because soy is a cheap filler in everything) and organic. The farmer pointed out that the coffee-candy drink was $6 and provided nothing but sugar and caffeine, while a dozen eggs makes at least six meals and provides actual nutrition.
I don’t think people realize how dangerous windmills, well wind turbines, are! Wind Turbine Syndrome: A Communicated Disease
Research indicates that wind turbines are much more dangerous to English speakers than other linguistic groups though they are not good for sheep either. I am not sure f the sheep were English speaking.
Wind turbines are dangerous for bats. More so than for birds.
And this reminds me of the term “batshit-crazy” as caves are full of fungi spores due to the bat guano. People ingesting these spores may get parasitical fungi in the brain, getting distinctly Trump-like.
Raging Bee @ # 5: … bacon has been elevated to a cultural icon of American Manhood…
You and several others here date back on FtB to several years ago when a bacon fetish raged persistently across the comment sections. It bothered me a bit that so many purported skeptics succumbed to what I guessed was a television-advertising push (or something similar excluded from my media diet), but I tried to ignore it.
Obviously, it stuck in my mind anyway. WTF, people?
Pierce R. Butler @ 12
The bacon-related item O can recommend is the film Canadian Bacon, whose premise looked absurd at the time (those were innocent times).
#12 Pierce
I’ve been here more than ‘several’ years yet I seem to have missed this alleged bacon fetish. What on Earth was that?
[OT]
Holms, early Pharyngula.
Just after the the drift towards social consciousness there instigated by the likes SC and Caine and other women, in the early, heady, wild west days of yore, but before the correctness ethos set it.
This is the etiolated resurrected version of an example post towards the very end of that phase: https://www.scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/07/19/must-i-be-better-than-phil-pla
I remember it all.
Why was bacon a thing? Why was avocado toast a thing? Why was chipotle a thing? Why were smoothies a thing? Why is pumpkin spice a thing? Why have I seen a dozen commercials today for super-beets?
My guess: fads. Things rotate in and out of public interest. Sometimes additional meanings are put on them--e.g. “All the BEST people love kale smoothies!” and “Real men eat bacon!”
Holms @ # 14 -- John Morales has part of the story right, but I think the bacon-mania went on for years, until maybe a decade ago.
PZ Myers’s vegetarian lifestyle change may have helped extirpate the trope.
John M’s recollection of “consciousness” and “correctness” is, well, his recollection.
Someone less ego-driven than Trump would be happy to name the golf course something appropriate and maximize the fun and human interest of golfing on a beautiful coastline with wind turbines in view.
Call it the “Miguel de Cervantes Memorial La Manchan Links” and add a few other items of visual interest to supplement the windmills. Have some fun with it. Sure, it would be an expensive bit of fun exclusive to rich people, but that’s also true with Giraffe Manor, (in Nairobi). The manor and its visitors manage to have some fun with what was originally a problem with keeping wildlife away from guests at other hotels. That became the inspiration for dropping a hotel in the middle of a wildlife sanctuary and seeing how things worked out. How it worked out is famously.
Trump’s bugbears show how little imagination and flexibility the man has. In his mind there’s only one way to build a golf course, and all the best ones share identical personalities. There’s no room in his brain for someone who wants to play a serious round of golf sometimes and at others use golf as an excuse to have a good conversation and a few laughs with friends while wandering around the local coastline.
This fixative way of thinking, of course, makes him terribly ill suited for leading any nation’s policy apparatuses — especially its foreign policy apparatus. But Trump being unqualified is no news, so I think I’ll end this comment here.
Oh, the Bacon number fad (and note also the capitalised B, Pierce), yeah that takes me back.