Tab Clearing

Satire

My apologies to Phil B and others who commented on the Fake News Friday post. It was intended to be satire. Phil B does make a good point, though. In some jurisdictions prosecutors will use any detail to make their case; examples include the color of your gun, bumper stickers on your vehicle and your posts on social media. In other, saner jurisdictions (Polk County, Florida comes to mind), the prosecutor is more likely to stick with the demonstrable evidence immediately before and during the event.

Hate Crime in West Bloomfield, Michigan

It was reported that a truck "filled with explosives" rammed into a synagogue in West Bloomfield Township. The armed driver later died of a self-inflicted wound. Fortunately for his intended targets, the perp was unable to exit the vehicle due to the doors being wedged shut during the crash-entry.

The truck caught fire at some point which totally sucked for the driver...trapped in the cab with containers of liquid gasoline and explosives.

Kudos to the security team for keeping the perp too busy to figure out how to exit his vehicle through the side windows and continue his attack.

Kudos to the investigation team who traced back the purchase records on the explosives. 

A fragment of data on mutation rate of ancient, written texts

A reader who identified himself as Recent Lurker asked about drift in written text over time in the post about "Turn the other cheek".

This is one of those cases where looking at a work that is not the Bible is useful because it blanks-out the emotional energy in the question.

There has been peer-reviewed research on that very question on the works of Homer, The Iliad and The Odyssey. Like the Bible, it first propagated via oral tradition, then a combination of oral tradition supplemented by hand-transcribed written text and finally almost solely by written text.

The papyri reveal a transmissional watershed in the 2nd century B.C., a sort of textual standardization, delimiting the contours of the text inasmuch as it stabilized the number and sequence of verses and quite drastically cut down current variants. Just what kind of intervention this reflects is unclear. Thereafter the text continued to move in a constant state of flux, but a less volatile one; variants were multitudinous but minor, accretion was virtually confined to simple one-line additions, losses were strictly local and ephemeral. 

The text was much copied (the Iliad always more than the Odyssey) collation was fairly wide-spread (protecting against loss and disseminating accrual), and we have substantial pieces of manuscripts from every century down to the 7th: much activity, little change. Passage through the bottle-neck to the 9th and 10th centuries seems to have entailed overall relatively little loss of what had been current in the Roman period; the medieval tradition is a direct continuation of the ancient, inevitably attenuated but in its totality showing unusually good catchment of ancient readings (better for the Iliad than for the Odyssey),promiscuously distributed.

Before we proceed further with its shifting constitution, a few words are in order on the changing nature of its physical form. Modem readers, and even post-modern ones, read texts which present them with a succession of words and of sentences. Readers in the 3rd century B.C. faced merely a succession of letters, uninterrupted except by verse-termini   Source

For Leigh and her masonry stove

Source

I realize that people who post videos on Youtube "spin" the story to make it more entertaining or more "sticky".

However, this young lady in Ukraine appears to be very grateful for the "house" that her brothers built for her on the family compound and the wood-stove that one of them fabricated out of sheet metal and the masonry "mass" another one built to calm down the temperature swings.

In this video, the young lady is painting, free-hand, a design she saw on her phone (Pinterest?).  She is clearly looking at her phone for reference at the 2:35 mark. Nothing wrong with that.

If I had to guess, I would estimate that it has a footprint of about 12' wide by less than 15' long. 

Dire Straights (of Hormuz)

Overheard

I was at the Lenten Friday Fish  Fry yesterday and I overheard a woman insisting that Europe was going to weather the Straights of Hormuz situation better than the US because "They have so many more electric cars and have wisely invested in so much renewable energy." 

I clammed up. I was doubtful but until I see data my opinion is worth no more than anybody else's opinion.

A quick look around the world suggests that in decreasing order of impact the list of countries that will be injured by the stoppage of oil from the Persian Gulf are

1. Japan and Korea (about 70% of their oil is shipped through the Straights of Hormuz) 
2. India (between 50% and 90% of their oil imported from the Persian Gulf states). More critically, large numbers of Indians use bottled gas for cooking since electrification is sketchy in many areas.
3. China (40%-to-50% from the Persian Gulf) which is about 7% of their national energy use. Coal is going to save their bacon.
4. European Union (12%, less than I expected)
5. US (7%) 

Who benefits?

1. Russia
2. Kazakhstan  
3. Nigeria 
4. Norway
5. United Kingdom
6. Brazil 
7. United States
8. Egypt (fees associated with SUMED pipeline and increased Suez Canal shipping) 

Regarding the number of electric vehicles:

The EU has one electric vehicle for every 44 people while the US has approximately one electric vehicle for every 85. In neither case is that enough to sideline all of the IC vehicles and run the economy.

Kicking the can down the road

There is never an elegant time to stop kicking the can down the road. However, there are times when a confluence of events create an instant in time when it is less-worse to address a difficult issue than others.

Frankly, we have many issues we have been kicking-the-can on: Social Security, Demographic collapse, Erosion of educational standards, Ballooning screen-time and the attendant decline in physical health, Immigration, Election Integrity. Some are being addressed. Others are still in free-fall.

Fake News Friday

Discount shooting supplies outlet, MiddlewayUSA announced that they contracted with Starliner Brass for a run of custom-headstamped 9mm Luger brass.

The vanity headstamp, FAFO, sold out within the first 48 hours. Apparently, it has been very popular with various Law Enforcement Agencies (Fine Action lead to Fine Outcomes).

Please send MiddlewayUSA an email to get on their waiting list for the next run. The more orders they have, the sooner they will make the second run.

Home-schooling with Grandpa: Day 147

 

Practice with caps and det-cord. Her blouse reads "Made of Sparkle" which seems particularly appropriate.

Grandma thinks we will be making bird-nests with Play-Doh next week. Little does she know that it is actually a class in the fundamentals of shaped-charges with additional classes on the use of mass-tamping to enhance yield.

...turn the other cheek...

I dislike presenting half-baked blog-posts but I don't have anything better than this today. So bear with me. I might never get a full resolution on this issue.

Matthew 5:38,39 reads

“You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, offer no resistance to one who is evil. When someone strikes you on [your] right cheek, turn the other one to him as well.

As a modern man reading this in 2026, it seems so very wrong. As a parent who has had to display "tough love" at times, it seems very wrong.

I read some commentaries. I read Chapter 5 several times for context and am still working to reconcile this quote with what I believe about humans.

Commentary

The most commentary by assorted preachers is that "slap" is to be interpreted as "an insult to our dignity or honor" similar to Black culture's "I have been disrespected". Their take on the verse is that Jesus is telling us to not escalate conflict but to ignore the insult.

Context, Part I 

That is very consistent with the vignettes that are immediately before this verse. All of them are some version of slippery-slope situations with the possibility where escalation is a natural and logical consequence. Jesus is telling us that are morally liable when we start down those paths.

That interpretation is also diametrically opposed to the interpretation of the radical pacifists who say this verse tells us that we must passively submit to evil and let God sort it all out on Judgement Day. We know from history that refusal to confront institutionalized evil allows it to flourish. That is the opposite of the meta-message about natural and logical outcomes.

Context, Part II

I think there is much value in thinking about the audience Jesus was speaking to. He was in Galilee which was a rural backwater.

Towns, such as there were, were tiny.

Archeological digs determined that the Nazareth of Jesus's day consisted of fifty foundations, not all of which were used for human habitation. Estimates in the 1800's was a population of 2000-to-2500. That has since been revised downward to 200-to-480.

Having seem images of the foundations of Roman era Capernum in Israel and measured them using Google Earth, it is hard to imaging 10 people living in a one-room house that measures 12'-by-8' so my gut-feel is that the number is closer to 200 than the 480 number.

Given the populations of those towns and the extreme lack of social mobility, i.e. they couldn't just let their lease lapse and move to L.A., the impact of people with Narcissistic and Borderline Personality Disorders would be enormous because it would be impossible to escape them. A typical town of 200 people would have three of these toxic people since the base-rate is about 1.5% of the population.

If you were to ask nearly any of the people in the audience listening to Jesus at the time "Can you name one person who is 'Evil'?" they would almost certainly name one of those three people in their village (maybe all three!). They would be unlikely to mention Harod the Great, Pontius Pilate, Tiberius Caesar or Donald J. Trump. Those people were as far removed from their daily lives as mythical creatures like mermaids.

Those people thrive on the energy they "create" through digs and insults. They crave it. They cannot live without it. If you feed the troll, the troll gets bigger and more powerful. If you ignore them they are diminished.

If you "feed" them, they will torment you. 

In today's society

It is my belief that the base-rate of Cluster B Personality Disorders is increasing rapidly. Our brains are very plastic and respond to our environments. The internet and social media rewards the trolls. It feeds them. They reproduced like mosquitoes after a hurricane.

Summary

My relationship with these Bible verses continues to evolve. My current stance on them is that Jesus is telling me to shun people who act in toxic ways when I am present. My interacting with them is harmful to me and it is harmful to them.

It does not mean that Jesus is telling me that I cannot exercise "tough love". It does not mean that I cannot respond with force to evil people who threaten life-and-limb. It does not mean that I must vote for judges and prosecutors who refuse to exercise legitimate, legal penalties against people who earned them.

Asking for a friend

So, do all of those women who took hormone therapy and had their plumbing rearranged have to sign up for Selective Service? They claim they are now "men".

Are they in arrears if they are over 18 and younger than 26 and their names aren't on the rolls? 

The spring-peepers are peeping away

The spring peepers are peeping. The violets are blooming. The filbert catkins are extending. The box-elder bugs are everywhere. The moths are flying by night.

That will all change tomorrow. We are expecting cold-front to push our warm air down into Indiana and generate some interesting weather in the process.

In a stunning stroke of good fortune, the rain we had this morning was a passing sprinkle. The sun broke through the clouds and I judge it to be dry enough to run the tiller over the potato patch where Kubota has flattened the weeds.

The weed stalks were crispy-dry and snapped into short pieces which mixed in with the dirt.

My goal in the first tilling is not to beat the dirt down to the molecular level but to mix the surface trash and the soil. Weed stalks rot very quickly when in contact with the soil and I am suddenly two full weeks ahead of my schedule for getting the potato patch ready for May 1 planting.