Weather, First Fish Fry, Spousal Privilege and WOKE judges

 

It looks like Tuesday will be a good day to drive across frozen mud to collect wood.

First Fish Fry of Lent

I went to the first fish fry hosted by our church.

Many customers showed up, especially considering that it is the first week of Lent as observed by the "western" church. Listening to the chatter, several of the attendees had called around to check the prices and menu and decided to drive all the way to Charlotte. 

Is this why LGBT pushed for "marriage"?

To the best of my knowledge, the courts in the US cannot "force" a spouse to testify against the accused. Nearly all other witnesses can be compelled via threat of "contempt of court" charges.

Maybe it is just me, but it seems like the headlines are filled with crimes where there is an accomplice and the "alleged" perps are over-represented by non-traditional married couples.

WOKE Judges

There were multiple causes of the Protestant Reformation. It was comparable to systemic organ failures due to sepsis.

One of the axis of failure (or one of the organs that ruptured) was the tension between "Predestination (the reformer's position)" versus "Free will" which was more the position of the Roman church. 

"Predestination" is based on the belief that God is all knowing. He knew us before he knit us together in our mother's womb. Since he "knows" what will happen in the future, then the future must be cast-in-stone and unchangeable. Therefore, even before we are born, God knows if we will go to heaven or go to hell. Ergo, our divine destinies are not under our control.

"Free will" is based on the idea that we have the choices on a minute-by-minute basis of whether we will follow God's commandments ("If you love me you will follow my commandments") or be selfish. On Judgement Day, we will be called to account for our choices and we will either be consigned to hell or go to heaven.

The argument still rages. Today it is seen in the criminal justice system where WOKE judges and prosecutors refuse to hold criminals accountable "because of their background". It is the secular version of sin, redemption and salvation. Their "logic" is that the violent person was doomed to be violent due to their gender, place of birth, poverty or the color of their skin and therefore they cannot be held responsible for "society's failings".

At this point, society's trajectory under the secular manifestation of "Predestination" is not very promising. 

News from Canada

Meta-analysis reveals that a significant portion of the violent crime in Canada is due to an extremely antisocial family from Sweden, the Gunpersons.

No tree work today

 

It rained last night.

No tree work today. 20mph sustained winds and 40mph gusts are predicted. 

Recommended by a reader (Michael)

The modern American Liberals' search for meaning 

All things are wearisome,
too wearisome for words.
The eye is not satisfied by seeing
nor has the ear enough of hearing.    Ecclesiastes 1:8

 

Grab bag, again

The last couple of days started with rain which cleared up around noon.

Yesterday, I got a call from the gentleman who does brush-hogging near the property. I went out there and we walked the area I wanted cleared.

He gave me a homework assignment. I am to clear out all of the brush over 3" in diameter. Between this, that and the other thing at the property, I spent three hours out there.

A hair rig using corn for bait

Today also started with rain. I made a light day of it. I fiddled around with assembling "hair rigs" with super-glue. The idea of a hair rig is to not bury the hook in the bait. That leaves the entire opening of the hook exposed to catch the lip of the sucker or carp or whatever fish inhales the corn. Carp fisherman use surprisingly small (to me) hooks when using hair rigs. Size six hooks are not uncommon.

#6 hooks are about perfect for crappie. The distance from the point of the hook to the shank is about 3/8" or 9mm.

Hair rigs are almost a necessity when catching sophisticated carp in Europe where they are a prized game-fish and each specimen is caught and released many times. Those fish get pretty smart.

The basic game plan is to wrap a ball of corn and biscuit mix around a rock and then freeze it. Later, chuck it into the water where you expect carp. The biscuit and corn and rock sink to the bottom and the ball of dough thaws thereby releasing "chum" into the water.

Toss your baited hook into the water near the chum and wait. Better yet, have two or three rods going with the chum/hooks far enough apart that they are unlikely to tangle if you hook a fish. Smart yet, put a worm on one line, corn on another and a doughball or cut bait on the third.

Cutting scion

I cut pear, plum, walnut, chestnut and hazel scion today. It is light-duty work.

Seeing what is really there

Quicksilver gave me an education the other day. We were going to be out-and-about and I wanted to be sure that she could find me if we became separated.

I decided to wear a bright, orange hat to make myself easier to find

So I stood in front of Quicksilver and asked her "What color is my hat?" to ensure that she had it firmly planted in her memory.

She immediately responded "Green".

"Stop joking around" I told her. "What color is my hat?"

"Green" came the answer again.

That was disconcerting. She KNOWS her colors.

It took a couple of minutes to sort out the issue.

This is what she saw from her perspective. Yes, it is green.

A similar thing happened on the way to our "event".

I was stopped at a light and she said "Go".

I told her "I can't. The light is red."

To which she said "No, the light is yellow."

And, by golly, she was right. More than 90% of the area of the light is yellow. It is more "yellow" than "red".

I have been trained by countless repetitions to completely ignore the color the fixture is painted. 

Like an Easter Egg hunt every day

 

Source

The following is a transcript (auto translated) from one of the Ukrainian channels I am watching.

I made a video about watermelons and there were definitely, well, a fair amount of negative comments about me exploiting children and keeping them enslaved to work for me.

This is a completely stupid statement because in reality, as an adult it is much easier for me to work alone and get this job done than to coordinate the actions of a large group of children. And that is, what is their labor productivity?

I take them, firstly, it’s a joy to help work, to be together. That is, when a child is alone, he will not do anything (and be miserable), but when they are in a group, and they compete with each other, they study, they work, they try, for them, firstly, it is entertainment, and secondly for them, it is learning.

That is, everyone (in the family) takes them so that they learn to work, so that they develop harmoniously. Therefore I will mercilessly block people who write about the exploitation of children, because these are the most ridiculous fabrications, speculations, and are simply offensive.

I try to instill in children a love of work, to teach them so that they develop harmoniously, but people seem to insult me for this. That is to say, it is very stupid.

In one of his other videos, he mentioned that the steer they were slaughtering produced 200kg of meat. That looks optimistic to me since the animal in the pen looks like it weighs 800 pounds rather than 1250 pounds. It may be that he includes liver, heart, tripe, head-cheese and the bone-in in that weight. That 440 pounds was to be shared with 15 family members and it was expected to lasted 6 months. That works out to 2.5 ounces of meat per person per day.

They knew

Slowly, ever so slowly, it is starting to leak out that scientists and researchers knew back in 2020 before the vaccines were released that aspirin was the Covid super-drug. Yes, plain, old, garden-variety, low-dose aspirin.

If fact, they knew back in 2007 that aspirin was THE GO TO drug for SARS. SARS is also a corona virus and is a kissing-cousin to Covid-19. 

The power of "Big Data"

There is a type of human who is gifted at sifting through data and finding "A-Ha!" events. Sometimes they are hired by pharmaceutical companies hoping to find that their proprietary, very profitable drug has a legitimate off-label use. They have access to millions of "records" with billions of discrete history data points.

Armies of those data-sifters were doing exactly that during the early stages of Covid-19.

They quickly noticed that patients who were already on low-dose aspirin therapy were rarely (i.e. at statistically very significant levels) ending up in ICU for Covid complications.

Aspirin

It has been comment that aspirin would probably not be allowed as a drug if it was discovered today. It has too many side-effects. It is not a simple black-box drug where pushing button A fixes only symptom B.

For one thing, aspirin is an anti-inflammatory drug and one of the ways Covid killed is that it triggered cytokine storms that were a self-amplifying inflammation cycle.

For another thing, aspirin is also an anti-clotting drug. Many of the Covid deaths were due to lung embolisms (clots that end up in the lungs).

$37 will buy you five POUNDS of USP grade aspirin at Valley Vet. That is enough aspirin for 28,000 low-dose tablets.

More recently, researches discovered that Acetylsalicylic acid disrupts SARS-CoV-2 spike protein glycosylation and selectively impairs binding to ACE2

The "problem" is that aspirin is a commodity with very, very low profit margins. 

The other "problem" was that emergency certification of vaccines are not allowed if there are other approved therapies. Powerful people had patents for modified-RNA based vaccines. It was in their economic best-interest to squash alternative therapies. It is also likely that they enjoyed basking in the glory of being called "Savior".

This is one of the reasons why I have a very low level of trust in the Deep State. 

Scouting out fishing spots

 

Unusual bark on this tree

OH!!! These are Kentucky Coffee Trees (Gymnocladus dioicus). Folk wisdom is that Native Americans used the large seeds for a betting game and inadvertently spread this species when they lost the seeds.

Hmmm! I might need to cut a few branches so my cast doesn't get caught.

Viewed from left-to-right, looking downstream

Looking straight out

Looking upstream

The current is closer to the other side. I think these are "shallows" in front of me and probably get very weedy in the summer. Still, a fine place to fish in the spring.

Grab bag

The REAL Woodpilereport.com can be access through the Wayback Machine website. You may have to fiddle with it to find what you are looking for. There are no new postings since Remus slipped his mortal coil.

My crystal ball informs me that sometimes-commenter Gary has skills in this area. Maybe he can direct us to a more elegant way of accessing the old postings.

One example.

Fence posts

Grab-bag of interesting vegetables and apple cultivars

Mangels (giant beets)

Daikon radishes

Black winter radishes 

Rutabagas

Lehigh potato 

Mt Brushy Limbertwig apple 

King David apple

Golden Russet apple 

Little Ice Age, the growth of cities

One unexpected outcome of the famines of 1816-1820 were the fact that rioting in cities due to bread prices caused fearful governments to subsidize the cost of bread in the cities and only in the cities. That resulted in a depopulation of the countryside as people fled to where "services" were available.

That famine was short-lived because it was caused by the eruption of Mount Tambora. One has to speculate that if the root-cause resulted in a longer disruption of grain production that perhaps the rush to the cities would result in them being death-traps. 

Sirach

Sirach is one of the books that is included in the Roman Catholic Bible as "Divinely Inspired and Unerring word of God". During the Protestant Reformation, it was consigned by the reformers to an appendix called The Apocrypha which are books that the early reformers considered "Holy but not Divinely Inspired and Unerring". 

Which books that were to be tossed and which were to be kept was an intense debate. For instance, some reformers wanted to remove the Book of James but their arguments did not carry the day.

Sirach is very similar to the Books of Wisdom and Proverbs. It is filled with many short, high-impact quotes that have high signal-to-noise ratios.

Some of my favorites are:

Touch pitch and you blacken your hand; associate with scoundrels and you learn their ways.

Do not lift a weight too heavy for you, or associate with anyone wealthier than you. How can the clay pot go with the metal cauldron? When they knock together, the pot will be smashed:

The rich do wrong and boast of it, while the poor are wronged and beg forgiveness.   From Sirach 13

Those are timeless. Given social media and today's culture and its worship of celebrities, athletes, and "influencers", those words are as fresh today as the day they were first written.

If you choose you can keep the commandments, they will save you;
if you trust in God, you too shall live;
he has set before you fire and water
to whichever you choose, stretch forth your hand.
Before man are life and death, good and evil,
whichever he chooses shall be given him.   From Sirach 15

My son, be steadfast in honoring your father; do not grieve him as long as he lives.

Even if his mind fails, be considerate of him; do not revile him because you are in your prime. Kindness to a father will not be forgotten;

A stubborn heart will have many a hurt; adding sin to sin is madness.

When the proud are afflicted, there is no cure; for they are offshoots of an evil plant.

The mind of the wise appreciates proverbs, and the ear that listens to wisdom rejoices.   From Sirach 3