My Two-Cents on the Clancy hung-jury

Would the jury have convicted Lindsay Clancy of First Degree Murder if she had methodically killed anybody else's three children? I suspect that there is a 99.9% chance that the jury would have turned in a unanimous "Guilty" verdict for Murder in the First Degree after 10 minutes of deliberation if she had killed her next-door neighbor's kids (for instance) and no other circumstance had been changed.

Why is viciously killing her own children not murder? Weren't they unlawfully deprived of their futures? Why is she held to a much lower standard for caring for her own children than for the children of random strangers?

The law is not based on Empathy. It is based on facts that can be generated. 

DARVO as a style of "communication"

One of my commentors used the acronym "DARVO". Being a curious person, I looked into it.

DARVO stands for a style of argument:

Deny: Deny everything even when it is a demonstrable, provable fact. "I never said that." "I did not do that."

Attack:  Attack the other party. It does not matter WHAT you attack him with. If it is not related to the argument then it will take him off-balance. "You are such a slob, leaving your things everywhere". "You are always imagining things". "You are stupid and can't keep facts straight".

Reverse Victim and Oppressor*: Suppose you were shoplifting and were just detained by "Loss Control". After Denial and Attack, switch to "You followed me because I am an Old, White, cis-Hetero Man and you are oppressing me!!!" That deflects the attention back onto the other person and makes something that was objective, clear and cut-and-dried into a situation that is framed in relative terms which makes it ambiguous and emotional.

Why do people use this tactic?

The tactic works great for short-term gains but comes with very high mid-term and long-term costs. 

If you are a psychopath or a sociopath or a narcissist, then the cost those tactics will have in your relationship are (essentially) invisible to you. You just don't care. 

If you are ADHD and/or extremely stupid, then you are time-blind and "long term" does not exist, so the tactic appears to be essentially free.

If you grew up in a household, perhaps a single-parent one, and your mother used this tactic then this method is your "normal". You might not be a narcissist or have ADHD or be time-blind or be as dumb as a rock, buy you have seen this tactic work over-and-over-and-over again and because of your family-culture, you think it is an appropriate way to get what you want.

In theory, the last category can be trained to not use DARVO as their go-to preference for interpersonal relationships. That is the good news.

The bad news is that more kids are being raised in family environments where DARVO is the default mode of arguing, i.e. communicating. 

DARVO is particularly attractive to people who feel relatively powerless and have little to lose by going scorched-earth. It is also attractive to people whose inner-lives are littered with mental chaos. DARVO levels the playing field for them. An example would be a single-parent who has serial relationships and is struggling economically and is facing food and housing insecurity. 

*Original text erroneously used the word "Oppressed" rather than "Oppressor". A kind reader pointed out my error in comments.

Fine Art Tuesday

 

Nicolai Alexandrovich Sergeev was born in Russia in 1855 and died in 1919.

 Hat-tip to:

 

Another new neighbor and work-tickets

We have a feral cat in the area. This is what he looks like. I don't know if he has mange around his mouth or if he just had breakfast.

Work-ticket report

 

My volunteer actually showed up. He picked four boxes of apples. I paid him a tiny sum to make up for the fact that he was battling wasps, bald-faced hornets and yellow-jackets the entire time. 

No, he did not get stung. I suggested that he not wrap his hand around the apple when picking them but to grip the silhouette with his finger-tips, touching the apple only where he could see. We are usually stung by the wasps we did not see.

I also told him to not reach out for apples. It is time to move the ladder when you find yourself stretching to get the last few apples. The apple that makes us fall out of the tree is the one we can ALMOST reach. 

On my side of the work-tickets, I bought 12 more T-posts and carried them from the road to the satellite orchards, I finished framing in the deer-blind on the south side, I mowed for an hour on a riding mower and I pushed a mower for another hour. Not exactly what was on the work-ticket list, but close.

Lifting

Yesterday was supposed to be a lifting day but the grass was dry and needed cutting. The apples needed picking and I had a volunteer. I was moping around about missing the lifting-day when Mrs ERJ reminded me that the gym was closed yesterday, anyway.

Today is supposed to be a running day. Yippie (in sarcastic font). 

I intend to go on another news-fast

Passive infanticide of baby girls is common in India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and China. The culture of those countries place a very high premium on boys; the first three because "Dowry" is a crippling expense for aging parents and the last because of the desire to continue the family name.

Canada has seen a huge influx of immigrants from all four countries. I have to wonder if their lenient penalties are a concession to "diversity" even though it comes at a very high price to women.

I want to write this down before I forget

One of the best things about cooler weather is the fact that nobody really cares if your socks don't match when you are wearing long slacks.

It needed to be said. 

Work proceeds apace

Yesterday, I was pounding posts into the ground.

The goldenrod is in full bloom. It was filled with pollinating insects gorging themselves on the nectar. I did not get stung. The bugs were too intent on filling their gullets and hives.

As Old NFO commented on the previous post, no plan survives the first encounter. My first issue was that the farm store ran out of 6' T-posts. On Friday, somebody bought 300 fence posts and nearly wiped out their inventory. The clerk and I poked around the corners and behind the racks and found 13. At home, I found another 5 in "inventory". That left me 12 short of the thirty I would need for the two satellite orchards I want to plant.

Approximate locations of the two orchard sites. Standard NESW orientation. Road to the east. The lower site is the first one I put in, the upper is the second.

 The second reality check is that the first site is constrained by a steep valley and trees in the east-west direction. There was only room for two rows of trees. Right off the bat, I had to change three-rows-of-five to two-rows-of-seven.

Other minor inconveniences included dense thickets of blackberries and the compass on my smartphone giving me wonky direction. There are also some small Black Walnut trees at the first location that I will need to deal with.

In spite of the difficulties, I got 18 T-posts slammed into the ground. I left out every-other post so I defined the full foot-prints of the two orchards. I sprayed 6' diameter patches where the trees will go, pacing to estimate the locations where I did not have T-posts. With a 6' diameter patch I don't need sub-millimeter precision.

I used my best judgement to NOT put them on the prime building sites on the parcels. The first site is a wee-bit north of the prime location and the second site is a wee-bit south of that parcel's prime location.

Both footprints start a tiny bit more than 100 feet from the edge of the road.

Apple crop report

Generally, very disappointing.

There are some Liberty still hanging in the Upper Orchard. There is a good crop of what keys out as Jonafree. One tree of Gloster 69 overcropped on one side so those apples are runted. It has almost no apples on the other side. There was almost no fruit-set on the Empire trees.

The two Melrose trees have over 80 pounds each but they will not be ready to pick until Oct 1. 

Today's work-ticket

Pick apples. My goal is to pick 80 pounds. That is enough for 28 quarts of apple sauce. I have a volunteer to help me so that is a blessing.

Work on the deer stand

Buy 12 more T-posts.

Install the belt that powers the mower-deck on the Eaton Rapids riding mower. 

Some thoughts on Contingency Plans

Running notes

3.2 miles in 42 minutes.

Some pictures

Dinner. Frozen pizza embellished with home-grown onions and sweet pepper slices.

First egg from our new Khaki Campbells.

"Charlotte, is that you?"

It is a big year for puffball mushrooms. Deer trail running from bottom of photo to top slightly to the left of center.

 

Satellite Orchards

A million years ago, I attended a weekend seminar on Project Management. The instructor was a professor from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and he understood the attraction rabbit-holes hold for the engineering mind.

Some of his pearls-of-wisdom were:

"Don't measure a pile of shit with a micrometer"

"Field-orders are a reality, budget 25% for it unless you have historical data"

"You need contingency plans for events along the critical path, but you only need ONE plan for each node." 

He elaborated on each point, of course, but the one I want to write about is the last one.

He told a story from his own past. He was the head of a team designing and building a working model of an alternate energy propulsion vehicle. Seeing this as a way to demonstrate their engineering skills, the team embarked on an ambitious project involving a custom-built, carbon-fiber body, solar panel covered electric vehicle with custom high-pressure-low-rolling-resistance motorcycle tires.

The winner of the competition, which was held at a Big-Three proving grounds was a five-year-old, carburated, Ford Pinto pulling a trailer that carried a 100 pound LP pig.

Bottomline: Your backup plan must be dirt-simple, quick-to-execute and extremely robust. That almost always means grabbing off-the-shelf solutions (when they exist) even when they are overkill or "wrong" or grossly inelegant. One of those kinds of plans is worth more than 100 complex, slow-to-execute "elegant" plans.

Dacha orchards

The property that the Upper and Hill Orchards is located on is also managed for field crops (which takes care of itself) and conservation. 

The portion that is being managed for conservation could, conceivably, be broken into parcels for "dachas" or economic lifeboats.

Ukraine and Russia have already been there and done that. Their economies were in a steep, downward glide-path through the mid-1970s until about ten years after the break-up of the USSR. Now they are struggling again due to the Uke-Rus war.

The dacha, their gardens and orchards are prime infrastructure keeping millions of them alive. So are the "commons" where they can graze farm animals and gather firewood, mushrooms, wild fruit and game.

If I were forced to parachute into an undeveloped property with the clothes-on-my-back, finding a small, producing orchard and berry patch already there could be a life-saver. Even if the varieties were not ones I would choose.

Given that the implosion of the US economy at the magnitude of the Great Depression or the dissolution of the USSR is probably a low probability event*, I don't want to throw money at these orchards.

However, I have a small nursery that I can move trees from and suckers from existing berry bushes. It is not that these are the BEST choices. It is that these choices are the ones that are off-the-shelf.

At this snap-shot-in-time

Three rows of five trees planted 16' within the rows and 24' between rows. Trees on semi-dwarf type roots. 15 trees. Seven species. Four genus.

I am not saying this is a great plan. I am saying this is a functional orchard that I can execute with a minimal outlay of additional money. I can buy peach and cherry rootstocks (about $6 each). I can purchase plum and cherry scionwood (I have sources of peach scion/budwood)

---Added after posting: Apparently St Julien plum rootstock is also compatible with peaches. That will save me a few dollars--- 

Ripening sequence

Mulberry: Late-June-through-mid-August

Cherries: Late-June-through-mid-July (Danube and WhiteGold cv)

Peaches: August (Contender or Cresthaven)

Plum: Late-August...Brooks European plum for canning and drying

Pear: HS, early-mid Sept. KG October

Apples: October. Tolman Sweet, Golden Russet, King David

Obviously, if somebody had the skills they could graft the trees over to the varieties they wanted. If they pruned judiciously, the trees would keep producing modest amounts of fruit as they switched the trees over.

The next step

Pound "T" posts into the ground to mark where each tree goes. Then spray 8' diameter patches of herbicide to kill the current vegetation.

 

*The real reason I do this kind of thing is because I enjoy it. Do I think it will happen? I hope not. For the time being, planting trees is a more productive and cheaper way to spend my time than drinking beer and chasing floozies in bars. I might never eat a single apple or cherry from these orchards but I find it is a great way to reduce my stress levels.