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| Waste-water monitoring for A-strain Seasonal flu. Looks like we are nearing the peak. |
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| Case loading by state. Not so good for Michigan |
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| Flu strains in 2024/2025 US cases that have been "fingerprinted" |
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Flu strains that WHO recommended for Northern Hemisphere. Recent research suggests that re-immunizing with identical strain "blunts" body's immune response. |
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| Avian flu (H5) detected in wastewater monitoring. Purple dots are "Positive" |
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| Picture on the left taken five years ago, just before the wedding. Picture on the right of the same person after popping out three kids. |
Hank parked his Yukon in the street in front of the vacant lot next to the bungalow where Gwain and Jana were staying. He had called to make an appointment and learned that Gwain had completed teaching his classes for the week and the only way to talk to him, face-to-face, would be off-site.
Fortunately, the house was barely 20 minutes away, a hop-skip-and-jump by Texas standards.
Walking up to the house, Hank saw two women sitting on the porch to the left of the front door and Gwain sitting on a wicker chair to the right. Gwain gestured to a folding metal chair for Hank to sit on “I apologize for the inconvenience. We haven’t had much time to set up house-keeping.”
Hank shook Gwain’s hand. “My name is Hank Lewis and I have been retained by Olivia Benavidez as her personal representative.”
Hank got the impression that Gwain's handshake that he was frail. Even though Gwain had long fingers, they seem insubstantial and is hand felt almost bird-like.
Gwain gave a noncommittal “Hmmm”.
“Do you mind if I ask a few questions?” Hank started out.
“Are you asking to be neighborly or in your professional capacity?” the old white woman asked. She was wearing a silk scarf wound around her head and clearly had almost no hair. Chemo?
“I am here in a professional capacity” Hank admitted.
“In that case, you won’t mind showing us proof that you really ARE Miss Benavidez’s representative and not a reporter” Gwain said.
Hank, in spite of himself, was impressed. There was no rancor, just a fellow professional who insisted on dotting-every-i-and-crossing-every-t.
Sitting down in the folding chair, Hank opened up his briefcase and found the appropriate folder and extracted the “Retainer of Services” form that Olivia Benavidez had signed.
“ID?” Gwain asked.
Wordlessly, Hank pulled out his wallet and extracted his Driver’s License. “I will need both of those back” Hank said.
“Of course” Gwain said, absentmindedly as he studied them. Then he handed both documents to Jana for her to look at. Jana inspected them and handed them back to Gwain who passed them back to Hank who carefully refiled them in their respective places.
“How can I help you?” Gwain asked.
“Were you a witness to any events involving Miss Olivia Benavidez yesterday? If you were, can you tell me what you observed?” Hank asked.
“Yes” Gwain answered.
Gwain had just started on his narrative when Hank abruptly interrupted him. “Wait. I heard you say that you didn't just witness this but that you were also trapped in the office?”
“Yes” Gwain answered.
“So you were with her the whole time?” Hank asked.
“I was with Miss Benavidez from 2:15 PM until 6:45 PM when I left her at the Student Health Services medical facility where she was being held for observation” Gwain replied.
“Who do you think did this to you?” Hank asked.
“Cole Neidermeyer and one of his buddies” Gwain responded without hesitation.
“How certain are you that this Cole Neidermeyer did this?” Hank pressed.
“I am 100% certain. I know his voice and he had motive...I had just given him an F on a paper and I told him that if he cheated on his next paper I would have him expelled from the University” Gwain said.
Then Scarlett piped up on Hank’s ear-bud “Cole Neidermeyer graduated with a 3.1/4.0 GPH from RW Private Academy and scored 17 on both attempts at the ACT and 990 Composite SAT which puts him at 45 percentile. That might explain why he isn't going to school in Austin" Scarlett added, archly.
"His parents live in the Rollingwood Neighborhood of Austin and the median property value is $2.8 million” she concluded.
“Who do you think the other person was?” Hank asked.
“Almost certainly it was one of the other Frat members” Gwain said.
This was looking better by the minute. Predatory “Frat boys” don’t play well in front of Texas juries, not when they are harassing young, Hispanic women. Nor do millionaires.
Jana asked “Which fraternity?”
“Gamma-Gamma-Psi” Gwain said.
“Oh my God!” Jana said, rolling her eyes. “Don’t tell me that they are in Texas, too.”
Catching Hank’s quizzical expression, Gwain said “Some fraternities have a reputation.”
Diane was absorbing all of this new information, not saying a word.
“Anyway” Hank said, “tell me what happened as best you remember it from the beginning…”
It took Gwain almost twenty minutes to recount the ordeal. When Hank started to scribble down the name of the maintenance man, Gwain said “You don’t need to do that. Miss Benavidez already wrote down that information. She wrote down the times, too.”
Brows furrowed in consternation “And when would she have had time to do that?” Hank asked.
“I told her to write everything down as it happened” Gwain said, apologetically. “It seemed like the only way to keep her from panicking.”
Hank folded his hands and put them in his lap. “She wrote down everything as it happened?”
“Yes” Gwain said.
Handel’s Messiah’s refrain was singing in Hank Lewis’s head as he asked “And this is something that you have a copy of?”
“I have the original locked in my file cabinet, but I can give you a scanned copy from the University’s shared-drive. I took the liberty of accepting what she wrote as a class assignment” Gwain said.
Hank licked his lips. “How long would it take for you to email me that copy?”
“I don’t know. Maybe five minutes. My laptop is old and is a little slow to boot-up. That, and I have to find it” Gwain said.
“Its underneath your new book on the Civil War” Jana informed him.
Three minutes later, Hank’s laptop pinged, informing him that he had a new email.
Opening the attachment and starting to read, the first thing Hank asked “How accurate are these times?”
“I really don’t know” Gwain admitted. “Miss Benavidez could see the screen of my desktop computer, so I imagine they are not more than a minute off.”
“Do you want me to mail you the original?” Gwain asked.
“Nope. You hang onto it until the police ask for it. Keep it locked in your files. It is a chain-of-custody nightmare if I touch the original” Hank told Gwain.
Hank thanked Gwain profusely for his help and he advised Gwain (and Jana and Diane) to not talk about his visit.
Jana assured Hank that College Professors are often privy to privileged information and knew that bringing the perpetrators to justice would be easier if they were not alerted.
Diane vigorously shook her head in the negative. “I didn’t hear nothin’. I wasn’t even here.”
The last thing Hank asked for was Violet's number. If he was lucky he could catch her before she went home.
Gwain informed Hank that the door to his office had already been replaced. Hank wanted to pass word to the University maintenance department to not throw away the door. It was looking more and more like it was evidence to a crime.
(C) 2025 Eaton Rapids Joe, All Rights Reserved
I am getting antsy. I have stuff to do outside but the ground is frozen.
So I go to the gym. That way I will have stamina when the balloon goes up and I can start digging holes.
For now, the "right" amount of running seems to be one minute at 6.0mph followed by two minutes of walking at 3.0mph. Lather, rinse, repeat. That works out to twenty minutes (2.0 miles) at 6.0mph and 40 minutes (2.0 miles) in an hour.
Twenty minutes into the workout my pulse rate was 145-to-147 half-way through the 2 minute walking/recovery periods. I kept checking to see if it would creep up toward the end of the work-out but it didn't. Opinions vary, but I believe that bpms in the 140-150 region are high enough to be useful and low enough to be safe for 65 year-old, chubby mid-Western men like me.
I think that I am looking at two weeks of every-other-day to build cardiac/lung capacity and some skeletal muscle. Then I will start slowly decreasing the length of the 3.0 mph recovery periods or alternating one-minute and two-minute recovery periods.
6.0 mph seems to be a "smooth" speed on my preferred treadmill. It may have something to do with the springiness of the treadmill's bed and rubber-bumpers and my weight.
Notable for his paintings of cavalry battles and the intricate workings of day-to-day operations of horseback mounted warfare.
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| Return from Vienna. |
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| A Cossack "flirting" with a very young girl. "Cossacks" came from the the areas in and around the country now known as Kazakhstan (go figure) |
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| Lots of war is far from glorious. |
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| Battle standards were the "hand-held radio" of the horse era. It was how command-and-control functioned. Capturing flags cut the head off of the snake. |
I don't want to make this seem like I am totally invested in this, so let's characterize what I write in this post as "recreational argument".
Furthermore, let me preface my remarks by stating that it is very common for decision-makers to substitute various proxies for the variables that are really of interest. The variables that are of the most interest are rarely presented in their explicit form.
For example, a timber-buyer might make a bid on a stand of timber based the three most marketable species in a stand and use the median diameter at breast-height, the stem-count-per-acre-per-species and typical number-of-logs to the closest 4-feet as the basis for his bid.
So even if a stand have significant amounts of Red Oak and Black Cherry, he might not consider it in his bid if he only had reliable, high-volume markets for White Oak, Black Walnut and Tulip Poplar.
Is it fair? Maybe. Maybe not. But it is efficient. He makes his bid based on the number of board feet he KNOWS he can mill from the standing timber of the species he KNOWS he can sell. In a glut market, he might only break-even selling "minor" species to people making pallets.
Quantifying culture
Culture is a hard thing to measure but we all know that when push-comes-to-shove culture might be the determining factor in whether the typical resident survives or not.
It begs the question "Are there any reasonable proxies for measuring the parts of culture that are most critical to surviving the apocalypse?"
Pestilence
If one looks at historical data for the body-counts of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, one must be impressed by the death-toll for pestilence (and communicable diseases, dysentery, infections and the like) even though those deaths are largely controllable through simple sanitation.
Sanitation is a "culture" thing. So any proxy that stands-in for culture-impacting-survival must comprehend "sanitation". The proxy must "reward" OCD behaviors and penalize "opportunistic" corner-cutting behaviors.
Impulse-control
One other factor that will be HUGE will be if the members of the community will regularly sabotage your efforts to survive. Will they cut down your orchard for firewood because it is close to their wood-stove? Will they butcher your milk-cow for the back-straps?
Let's look at the extremes. On one hand you have sailors in a submarine or soldiers in a forward-operating-base. It has been drilled into them that if anybody fails, they all fail.
The other end of the spectrum is embodied by the person who throws Molotov Cocktails and burns down his apartment complex, the store where he buys his food and his employer's place of business.
In the first group, it would be difficult to fail. In the second group, it would be almost impossible to survive.
Sexually Transmitted Diseases as a Primary sort criterion
STIs are a mandatory reporting event. It is a fairly solid number reported at relatively high degrees of granularity like the county level.
Chlymidia is the most common STI so if you were going to track a single metric, this would be the one.
STIs are a DIRECT measure of the vulnerability of various communities/cultures to communicable diseases.
STIs are an indirect measure of a community's mores and norms with regard to impulse control and resistance to opportunistic "expedient" actions.
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| Chlamydia rate data fro selected Michigan counties |
The spread is very large. Detroit (city) has 1400 cases per 100k population per year while Lapeer County has only 121 cases per 100k per year.
My county, Eaton, is highlighted in yellow. The three counties marked with red lines are adjacent to each other. Genesee county (604/100k) is home to the intersection of I-69 (stop snickering guys) and I-75 while Lapeer (121/100k) and Shiawassee county (161/100k) are bisected by only I-69.
If you didn't know a bunch of submariners who would be willing to take you into their fold and you had absolutely no other information, would you rather bunker-up in Lapeer County or Genessee county? Detroit (1400/100k) or Livingston County (129/100k)
I submit that STI rates per 100k are among the best proxies for a community's resilience in the face of "pestilence" and for as a measure of Impulse-control.
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