"How stupid are the people of Iowa? How stupid are the people of the country to believe this crap?"

Asks Donald Trump after a highly comical reenactment of Ben Carson's knife-and-belt story.

"He took a knife and he went after a friend and he lunged! He lunged that knife into the stomach of his friend!"

Trump demonstrates with his own belt, which bends this way and that — see? — and is hardly a shield against knifings. He actually says: "Anyone have a knife you want to try it on me?"

ADDED: I think we can picture what it will look like if and when Trump's numbers start failing and/or he loses couple caucuses/primaries. He'll tell us off, calling us stupid. He gave us a chance. It would have been great, America could have been great again, but we just didn't get it, and that's it, he's gone. He thought we were smart, but we were stupid.

"I knew this experiment wouldn’t make a profound difference for conservation, but I felt I should do it because I had no excuse not to...."

"I had to get creative. When a restaurant furnished a napkin-wrapped fork and knife, I asked the server to exchange them for cutlery without the napkin. I’d remember to say 'No straw!' after asking for water and to make sure the veggie burger I ordered didn’t come with a wooden pick holding it together. I tried to think ahead. I carried a fork, a spoon, a plate and a bowl everywhere I went, just in case a student event served food but provided only plastic to eat with. I did what I had to, and sometimes it was awkward. At a house party (where the red Solo cup is king), I’d saunter into the kitchen, use a glass from the cupboard, and then rinse it and put it back when I was done. Five months into the experiment, after some initial reservations, I gave up toilet paper. Now I do things the way hundreds of millions (including my extended family) in India do — with water and my left hand."

From "All my trash for a year fit into two plastic bags. Here’s how I did it./Giving up plastic forks, new clothes and even toilet paper for an exercise in conservation." By Darshan Karwat, "an AAAS science and technology policy fellow at the Department of Energy and a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Michigan." In The Washington Post.

I don't know what bothers me more, the idea of a man (it can't be a woman) out and about, using various bathrooms and somehow managing to wield water with his left hand or the idea of going into someone else's house, enjoying their hospitality, and when they're serving drinks in disposable cups, sneaking off into their kitchen, opening up their cupboards, choosing one of the glasses that were never offered to him, using it, and then cleaning it only by rinsing and putting it back in the cupboard (apparently) wet. Did he touch it only with his right hand?

"The monumental task of building California's bullet train will require punching 36 miles of tunnels through the geologically complex mountains north of Los Angeles."

"Crews will have to cross the tectonic boundary that separates the North American and Pacific plates, boring through a jumble of fractured rock formations and a maze of earthquake faults, some of which are not mapped. It will be the most ambitious tunneling project in the nation's history...."

"If it were one single mass of granite, it would be easy to drill through and provide structural support," said [Caltech geologist Leon] Silver, who trained the Apollo astronauts in lunar geology and pioneered the dating of the San Gabriel Mountains. "But everything in the arc has been bent, shoved, stretched, compressed and metamorphosed."

The mountain range lies in a giant crescent between two major faults, the San Gabriel and the San Andreas, which separates the Mojave Desert on the North American tectonic plate from the Los Angeles Basin on the Pacific plate. Between the two major faults are many secondary faults. Some are vertical strike-slip faults that move laterally, and some are thrust faults that move vertically. Some are horizontal, traveling through the ground at various depths....

The longest possible tunnel, described as one alternative in state documents, would stretch 13.8 miles under the Angeles National Forest. Assuming TBMs started at both ends and advanced at 20 feet a day for 261 days a year, the tunnel would take seven years to complete — finishing in 2026. At an advance rate of 10 feet a day, the time would double to 14 years....

"Nobody can sit here and tell you what something like this is going to cost over a 20-year period," [said Jeff Morales, the rail authority chief executive]. "Any big program like this is loaded with challenges. The day you hear me say I am comfortable is the day I am not telling you the truth or the day I have deluded myself."

That's at the L.A. Times, where the top-rated comments are: "Why is it that when we predicted this, we were callled [sic] flat Earth declinists, when were the right the whole time?" and "No one with a single brain cell ever thought this was rational. It is and has been a political boondoggle from day one. It's stunning to think environmentalists in CA would allow such a dangerous construction project."

Flashback to April 2009: "Obama unveils high-speed passenger rail plan... The president's plan identifies 10 potential high-speed intercity corridors for federal funding, including California, the Pacific Northwest, the Midwest, the Southeast, the Gulf Coast, Pennsylvania, Florida, New York and New England.... His plan would be funded in part through the recently passed $787 billion stimulus plan, which includes a total of $8 billion for improvements in rail service.... The city of Chicago, Illinois, would be the hub of the proposed Midwest Regional Rail System, which would stretch to Madison, Wisconsin, in the Northwest; St. Louis, Missouri, in the South; and Detroit, Michigan, in the East."

Wisconsin said no to that money. It was the single issue that caused me to vote for Scott Walker in 2010. Local media whined that we lost  $810 million, while California was "the big winner, with up to $624 million." California is now in the process of giving up hope that it can meet a $68 billion budget. The rail authority chief executive says it would be delusional even to believe you can project the ultimate cost.