I have been following the American mid-term elections with a great deal of interest and we are now in a situation where these critical elections are only three and a half weeks away – because of wide spread postal voting, many Americans will already have voted. What caught my attention this morning was some video clip of Donald Trump being repeatedly heckled at an election rally in Texas. Trump has visited this one time deep red (= Republican) state and it could be that the Democrats could even win the state. According to some polls, which may be quite unreliable, the Republicans seem to be trailing the Democrats by about 4 percentage points in the race to the Senate. Now Texas is such an iconic state that its loss would be almost inconceivable to the Republicans. We are also hearing similar reports about Kansas, a state that was last held by the Democrats some 94 years ago. The Kansas race for the Senate is very interesting because the Democrat candidate used to be an independent who has only recently joined the Democrats and is a pastor. These last two factors alone might help wavering Republican voters to vote Democrat and the latest opinion polls put the race on a knife-edge with the two candidates tied at about 45% each. The critical factor seems to be the massive unpopularity of Donald Trump, reinforced by higher prices and the price of ‘gas’ (= petrol) at the pumps which shows no sign of abating. The Democrats are convinced, and not without reason, that Trump will every conceivable trick to attempt to nullify the election races that he will probably lose. All kinds of conspiracy theories abound but the most prominent is that Trump will declare that every election that he loses to be the result of ‘fraud’ and will challenge the result either in the courts or by using presidential orders. So we may have a situation in which the USA as a whole becomes almost ungovernable if the Republicans lose heavily but then refuse to accept or endorse the result. It is certainly the case that the whole of the US government has been energised to try every ploy possible to deny the Democrats victory and the groundwork has already been done in several Republican states who have redrawn their electoral districts in order to maximise the Republican vote and to deny the Democrats victory. The Democrats may have little option in the last analysis but to take to the streets in protest which will then be met with the forces of the state and chaos may well ensue. It is in the nature of the electoral cycle that mid-term elections generally go against the party that happens to be in power (as happens with by-elections in the UK) but we are now in a situation where Donald Trump completely ignores the rule of law and the courts may be powerless having been ignored so many times by the Trump regime over the past few months. As followers of the Epstein files scandal will know, courts have repeatedly asked the FBI to release documents including one that we know that exists that accuses Donald Trump of the rape of a 14-15 year old and the FBI have taken every step of obfuscation known to man to prevent the release of these documents, even though we know that they exist.
After my Tai Chi class this morning, I walked into town with three fellow class members to whom I have introduced the delights of the horse sanctuary coffee shop which I frequent once per week – we enjoy this experience because it is not like a normal coffee house and we are always greeted like long-lost friends. After I pleasant chat, we all went our separate ways and I popped into the large Asda superstore because I wanted to buy some dried milk to put into my coffee and there are certain items that Aldi just does not sell. I got home and had a brief chat with my neighbour whilst we were busy retrieving our wheelie bins from the kerbside after the weekly emptying and then I made myself quite a delayed lunch of quiche and cabbage. To make the cabbage a little more interesting, I mashed it with some butter, a dash of hot chilli sauce and some of the excess oil from some dried peppers and tomatoes which I was serving up for myself as a little side dish. This little experiment worked quite well and I might make an even more experimental mixture the next time I try this combination. Probably because of my new found interest in things culinary, YouTube has refined its algorithms and every so often makes some food preparation part of the offerings it made for me. Today’s video was quite an eye opener as it explained in some detail why people nearly cook mushrooms in entirely the wrong way. After the video presentation, I am going to try and put the lessons learnt into effect which is to cook the mushrooms dry and whole in a chopped pan and add a modicum of soy sauce and a little oil only at the very end of the cooking process. As the nights are drawing in and there is a bit of a cold snap at the moment, then mushrooms on toast are quite a tempting evening supper so I might indulge myself in a few days time. I cannot fail but to notice that I all of these cookery programs, the chefs inevitably use a very broad bladed kitchen knife which also comes in useful, because of its width, as a way of transferring the prepared vegetables into the cooking pan. So I thought I would treat myself to a broad-bladed chef’s knife as I am preparing vegetables nearly every day and all the supermarkets have removed knives from their displays lest they fall into the hands of errant teenagers. Selecting the knife which comes in its own self-sharpening case seemed the easy part but now we fall foul of the regulations regarding the sale of knives which evidently applies to online outlets as well. The age verification system needed to take a selfie pf my face and then both the front and back of my driving licence which was fiddly in the extreme as it was not immediately evident how this was to be done and it took more than one attempt. But eventually, I was successful and the knife should arrive tomorrow, to be financed largely by the refund of a payment for some glass storage jars that failed to arrive even though the tracking system reported that they had been delivered. The joys of online shopping but these little hiccups occur on occasion.