When he was 8 years old,, left home alone, the young Abe Lincoln saw wild turkeys outside his family's cabin. Painstakingly, he loaded his father's musket & shot one. No doubt he had provided a family dinner, but the death throes of the turkey awakened something in Abe. Henceforth he abjured hunting as a pastime, and even tried to persuade his friends to abandon it also. The Party of Lincoln departed a long ago from his legacy.

Matthew Yglesias applies a dirty word to Trump: Mercantilist

AFAIK, Mercantilism is a zero-sum game where one country dominates trade is all sectors it engages in.

So Trump see Europe as a foe, but Russia as a competitor in one area only: fossil fuel. Hence he is infuriated when a NATO country like Germany buys fossil fuel from Russia. The Nord Stream pipeline was the only area where he seemed to differ from Putin.

So Trumpism is "Hell, what do we care what they do, as long as they make up rich". Let Russia dominate Europe, and China dominate Asia, as long as they all buy American. Very 18th & early 19th Century. The British did not care who ruled China as long as they bought opium. Trump cannot firmly oppose Putin because he thinks Putin's way is the way to conduct domestic and foreign relations.

https://www.vox.com/2018/7/16/17576716/trump-puti...

Quite. I was being facetious about the orcs. The villain who is too clever by half is an old trope, let us hope ir comes to pass.

At the start of Lord of the Rings, Saruman/ Trump betrays his allies and joins Sauron/ Putin. In the film, he embarks on a policy of systematically trashing the local, beautifully wooded environment to facilitate rapid industrial development and jobs for his orcs.

Syukuo Manabe deserves a mention - 50 years ago he and Richard Wetherald published the first "climate model" for the earth's atmosphere that covered conduction and radiation. In videos of Hansen before the Senate, Manabe is visible seated near Hansen. In any other area of physics, Manabe might be in line for a Nobel Prize recognizing a major groundbreaking contribution, but too many see climate science as "overly political".

https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2017...

One could write a program that could take any number and (a) say if it was the sum of consecutive numbers, and (b) if it was, give them all.

Got the second one.

First one I did by brute force ... it is easy to get all the consecutive sums into a spreadsheet ... start with (1+2), then increment each by 1, and it is obvious all odd numbers will be the sum of consecutive digits. Continue for 1 2 3, 1 2 3 4 etc until you have all the numbers up to 200 ... it took 19 columns and 100 rows. Eliminate numbers less that 100 and greater than 200, and you are left with ~240 numbers with a lot of duplicates ... after that a visual search or something more fancy will turn up candidate numbers.

It works but an error in my spreadsheet prevented me getting the right answer! Sad :( Thanks for the challenge!

Made the same tour a couple of years ago & got the same emotional punch. Felt privileged to hear The Last Post sounded at the Omaha Beach cemetery. That was the high point, but the museum at Utah Beach was memorable also.

We did a bus tour from Paris, mainly geared for Americans (so not much mention of Canadians or British) but there were two bum notes.

- One of the tour guides put a very pro-Hitler spin on WWII, even soft-pedalling anti-Semitism. We (my brother and I) had to call him out on some of his "facts" - one memorable one was that "Hitler did not write Mein Kampf, it was Hess". There was a running argument (not unfriendly, I must add) all through the tour and back to Paris. We warned the other tour guide (an American married to a Frenchman & doing a doctorate) about the spin given by her partner. She defended him, but promised to be vigilant. I fear the male guide tended to the French right.
- The tour occurred between the Brexit vote and US Prez election, and Trump's candidacy was a running topic. Some of the older members of the tour seemed to me to be angry old guys, that the US has expended blood and treasure but only gets disrespected. Real Trump fodder, but maybe that is judgmental. I made a point of thanking a couple of ex-servicemen, but I am not sure if it did much good! I did ask the young American guide if she thought it had all been worthwhile, and she gave a convincing "Yes!". She said most of her US friends would say the same.

A wonderful day, and I echo and applaud the sentiments of the post. But I had a foreboding that the sense of D-Day's common purpose was under threat, on both sides of the Atlantic

PS Just noticed it was an old post. I was there 3 months after you.

I forgot about Callaghan, I thought Harold Wilson was the answer.

In the TV and now Social Media era, there is probably emphasis on the Party Leader for better or worse. There is soundbite politics, the tendency to oversimplify and personify issues.

Powell served as Unionist MP for South Down (Northern Ireland) from 1974 to 1987, when he lost to an Irish Nationalist, and to de-gerrymandered constituency boundaries. In that election, he advised the British to vote Labour. This suggests a journey to the extremes, both political (for a Tory) and geographical (for an Englishman)