Binder Park Zoo and too much editorializing

Southern Belle called an "audible".

She had planned on going to the Ingham County Fair on Thursday but looked at the weather. She called me late Tuesday and asked if I would rather go to Binder Park Zoo near Battle Creek today or Ingham County Fair tomorrow (Wednesday).

I opted for the zoo.

We were there for three hours and the heat index was in the low 90s (Fahrenheit, not Canadian). We walked to the African Adventure exhibit. Southern Belle asked a staff-member how far it was and we were told "It is a one-mile walk".

After walking it, SB said..."I don't think so".

Indeed, it is a one-mile round-trip. I think the staff intentionally discourages visitors from making the walk because they undoubtedly have to rescue people who get pooped out. Or, the visitor calls 9-1-1 and the park has to shut-down when the EMTs show up to cart the optimistic walker to the ER.

Quicksilver walked two of the three miles we walked. SB brought a wagon because the plan was to get QS pooped-out. It worked.

The other clientele was a mix of young mothers, kids of various ages, a few grannies, and one old dude on a scooter and a group of cognitively-impaired kids from a group-home with one adult "minder" per kid.

One of the adults had an enormous camera and he was able to get his "charge" to behave by making a big show of pointing his camera at the miscreant. I hope it is a cheap camera because I bet in the next couple of months it will get stomped on.

Measuring physical fitness

"To measure is to manage" attributed to William Thomson, First Baron of Kelvin.

Have you ever been at a traffic light and looked over at the vehicle next to you and wondered "I wonder what it could do if the driver floored it?"

Maybe it was a heap from the golden years of heavy, Detroit iron. Maybe it was a pony car or a "sleeper' with a lumpy-sounding cam. Maybe it was a wannabe with lots of decals and moldings.

I watch people and wonder the same thing. Could they perform physical work (or walk) for 30 minutes? An hour? Two hours? Four hours? Eight hours? Sixteen hours?

How many days-in-a-row can they work that long? Can they work five days in a row and fully recover in two?

Work-hardening is a real thing. Some people work-harden faster than others. People blessed with youth and with testosterone work-harden faster than older people and people with lower testosterone (the original anabolic steroid).

There is a time when the gains plateau. Once again, the plateau is higher for younger people and for men.

At this point in the summer, I am probably good for four hours of moderately hard work a day (stocking shelves, walking, gardening). I could probably wring out eight-hours-a-day but would not have much left over when I got home.

"Joe, why does it matter to you? You sound judging and hateful"

"Culture" captures adaptive responses to stressors that occur along time-horizons that are beyond what most humans can grasp.

Our Western culture values individual responsibility/accountability, freedom/independence, ruggedness, adaptability, civic-mindedness/charity in roughly that order. Those values were diluted by wealth and popular culture and are considered obsolete or liabilities in about half of our population.

The problem with counting on wealth or "the social contract" to overcome the stressors alluded to in the first paragraph of this section is that wealth is perishable and "the social contract" is constantly being rewritten.

Humor me for a minute. Imagine that you are in your sixties, seventies or eighties and your backup plan for when you cannot manage at home is to move into a nursing home. Maybe you and your spouse gained a few pounds over the years. Maybe you don't move as much as you used to because you didn't replace the pooch when she died. The doctor said you could exercise and change your diet to get your blood chemistry right or you could gobble little pills and keep eating crap and watching The View on NBC. It is not a big deal, Shady-Rest Old Folks Home always has open beds becoming available. Right?

Now, picture in your head a walking tour of Shady-Rest. Suppose that every Latina working there (25% of the care-staff) are clones of AOC. Suppose the African-Americans (50% of the care-staff) are clones of Ilhan Omar and the remaining staff are clones of Bernie Sanders.

How long do you think you will have to wait to have your Depends changed? Will that lower or raise your quality-of-life? Will sitting in your own waste until shift-change increase your life-span or decrease it?

Bonus Link

Web-cam, Boardwalk, Ocean City, Maryland

Basically, Americans gain one pound a year from age 20 onward. Watch the people walk. Watch how many of them lurch from side-to-side as they move forward.

Yeah, I know some of this is because they are wearing flip-flops. But it hurts to watch. It IS possible to walk smoothly while wearing flip-flops but it means a mid or forward foot-strike stride.

I am not ready to say we are all doomed, but if the Elites have a stated goal of eliminating 90% of the population, there are a LOT of people who are volunteering to help them make that goal.

"Battle Axes"

Once again, I apologize for any readers who are expecting a post about superannuated political figures.

This post is about battle axes as used on the battlefield in the era before gunpowder.

It was inspired by a couple of posts that TB has over on his blog.

Rumor has it that the gentleman in the lower-right frame is none-other than Old NFO

Notice how thin and lightly constructed the blade and handle are.

To a fellow who has experience with an ax used to cut and split wood, the portion of the blade's edge coming back to user's hands seems fanciful and woefully unsupported by the connection to the handle.

Additionally, the risk of getting the blade hung-up in an opponent's rib-cage is a liability on a battlefield with a large number of opponents.

But nearly all battle-axes seem to have that feature and there must be a reason beyond "looks cool".

A possible evolutionary path

Suppose Thog and Yon go into battle and Thog uses an ax designed for cutting wood while Yon uses a much lighter ax with a thinner blade used for butchering game. All other things being equal, who will win the match-up: Brute strength or much faster speed?

Like all things, it depends.

If Thog has the presence of mind to catch the shaft of Yon's ax with his hand, then he can disarm Yon and part him out like a lobster at his leisure. If not, then Yon is more likely to administer a disabling blow more quickly and then prevail over Thog.

So how would one catch the handle of an incoming axe? One would have to catch it near the center of gravity, just below the head of the axe.  Can you see where this is going?

That dainty, knifey thing projecting approximately 5" (125mm) back toward the user's hand is not intended to crack skulls or lop through clavicles or chop through the humerus. Nope. All it needs to be able to cut through is the web and bone at the base of your opponent's thumb. If he is grabbing the handle closer to your hands, the head will rotate around his hand and you will still strike his body with enough force to take him out of the fight. 

Oh, and if you lop off his thumb but miss his body...your opponent now only has one functioning hand which offers you a distinct advantage.

"Doddering Old Fool"

Sorry to disappoint the politically inclined, this is not about any particular politician. It is about the plant "dodder".

Today was a work-day at the property. Kubota joined me. His job (construction) is slowing down and his crew had two days off last week. He had today off and asked if he could join me.

Mrs ERJ is leery of my using a chainsaw alone. At one level, I am touched. At the other level, chainsaw accidents happen so fast that having a second person is of marginal value although I supposed if I got clobbered on the head by a falling limb and was knocked silly MAYBE a second person would be helpful.

So...with Kubota there, I was taking out dead and "dotty" trees. The image below is one that I used as a boundary sample. If the tree was worse than this one, it is coming down and being replaced.

Pretty rough looking tree. I will probably take this out AFTER we harvest the apples.

While working in the orchard I saw one patch of dodder.

The first patch I found was in the orchard. The dodder is the yellow-orange patch in the lower-left quadrant of the image.

Dodder is a parasitic, seed-bearing plant. It looks like yellow spaghetti drizzled over the canopy of the plants it is sucking the life from.

"Dodder" means to bob or wobble back-and-forth, to tremble and shake. Since that kind of head-motion is sometimes associated with strokes, Parkinson's Disease and other neurological issues, it is often accompanied by verbal impairment and sometimes cognitive impairment. Those neurological issues are much more common in older people than people in their hale youth.

So it almost inevitable that "doddering", "old" and "fool" would get linked together so frequently as to be almost inseparable.

The second patch was in a stand of Goldenrod (Solidago). Looking through lists of preferred host plants, this might be Cuscuta coryli

And, for the record, dodder not only looks like cooked spaghetti, it is also limp and floppy and simply sprawls over its hosts. The ends of the strands (which seem to grow very, very quickly) bob in the slightest of breeze.

I found the second stand when I was spraying some patches of goldenrod for future planting.

Part of where I went was along the path I had trampled through the goldenrod dragging brush and making a brush-pile. What was notable is that deer are already using it as evidenced by the amount of deer crap in the 150 feet that went through the goldenrod. Even the tiny reduction in effort of walking along a trampled path vs. walking through standing goldenrod was enough to funnel deer traffic. 

That could be very useful in terms of guiding deer to places where you can get a better "look" at them or to a place where you have a more favorable shot. Example: If you can shift deer traffic so instead of passing 50 yards from a deer stand it passes 25 yards from it, then the stand suddenly becomes much more useful for bow hunting.

For the record, Kubota worked his butt off mowing. There were a couple of times he launched off the lawn tractor when he got buzzed by a bumblebee. Given what happened a few days ago, I understand that. Not only did he insist that I not pay him, but during a break he borrowed the truck and drove into town to get a can of Kodiac. He brought me back a 24 oz can of cold beer.

Also for the record, there are "holes" in the upper-orchard for 16 replacement trees. When fully populated, the upper orchard has room for four rows of thirteen trees planted on 15' by 25' centers.

Price of home mortgages since Democrats were sworn into the Oval Office

30 year mortgage rate when Democrats installed in Jan 20, 2021 was 2.77%. After sending hundreds of billions of dollars to Ukraine, it is now 6.78%.

A 30-year mortgage payment of $2000/month in January 2021 morphed into a payment of almost $5000/month due to interest rates ballooning.

That explosion in interest rates is directly due to US involvement in Ukraine.

There are only so many dollars out there, looking to be invested. If the government is vacuuming them up, then Heather and Brett will have to bid higher (i.e. pay more interest) to get some of what is left-over after the biggest pigs feed from the trough.

"But the government can just print the money, right?"

There is a feedback loop on that, too. As the government conjures up money out of thin-air, it lowers the credit rating of the government just like too much credit-card debt lowers your Experian score. Borrowers demand higher interest rates to dilute the effect of anticipated inflation. Since you are also borrowing "dollars", the higher interest rate impacts your loans as well.

The party of Pelosi, Schumer, Biden and Kamala Harris OWN the war in Ukraine. They talk a good story about caring for Americans, but when it comes down to brass-tacks, they will support Ukraine over all of the 25-through-40 year-old Americans who want to buy their first home.

That age-group may find Trump's personality confrontational and repugnant. But at least you had a snowball's chance of owning your own home under "America First" policies.

Fine Art Tuesday

 

Can you see the ghost? Click on the thumbnail to embiggen the image if you cannot.

Henryk Bonawentura Kazimierz Weyssenhoff born 1859 in Lithuania near the border with Latvia, died 1922 in Warsaw.

At the age of 4, he was exiled to the Ural Mountains in eastern Russia with his mother while his father was imprisoned in Siberia. Eleven years later his father was pardoned but still not allowed to return to his estates so the family settled in Warsaw.

An avid hunter, many of his paintings include hunting scenes.

Looks like Northern Michigan to me.

You can only be insulted if you give the other person permission*

There I was in the small, local grocery store wearing my MAGA hat, fluorecent yellow T-shirt, baggy camo-shorts, calf-length crew-sox and battered running shoes.

I passed a young waif of indeterminable sex and she(?) looked down her nose at me and muttered "What an ASS!".

I spun around and said "Thanks for noticing. I think it is because of the weights I have been dead-lifting" I slapped my right butt-cheek and commented "Hard as a rock!" and left her sputtering as I walked away.

*A variation of the quote attributed to Eleanore Roosevelt "No one can make you feel inferior without your consent."

Figured out the image problem

 

The Creek Chub I caught the other day

 Ad-Blocker extension was killing the Blogger image loading function.

Belladonna went fishing with her buddy Tommy and they caught a few Chinook just to show-up the old man.

Vance, Comments, Ecosystems and Persuasive Argument

J.D. Vance is getting a lot of flack

Must mean that he is over the target. Schumer offered Trump some advice "Dump Vance".

How odd that Schumer would, out of the goodness of his shriveled heart, offered Trump advice on what he needs to do to win his election.

The brouhaha over the wine-drinking, childless, cat-ladies is humorous. Those ladies take themselves VERY SERIOUSLY. They are also prime constituents of the "I need to leave a legacy. I need to coach some autistic kid to cut off his dick." crowd. How very brave of them!

Comments

Other than spam, I think I deleted fewer than 10 comments in the eleven years I have been blogging.

I get that many of you have high-stress jobs. Some of you work third-shift. Some of you work in Emergency Rooms or in Law-Enforcement. I am not going to be a woke-scold and lecture people who may have found a human-head in a motorcycle helmet after a traffic accident or admitted a close family member into ER six hours before they read one of my posts and comment.

I get much more enjoyment out of creating content than in editing my own work. Why would I get any joy out of editing or monitoring content created by other people (that is, the comments)?

I have no intention of starting.

The blog-o-sphere as an ecosystem

Mature ecosystems self-regulate as a general rule. The populations of specific species will fluctuate based on variation in flow of energy and other resources and due to internal dynamics/harmonics. But in general, most of them are stable-within-bounds as long as enough niches are filled and there are enough species to buffer the system as it experiences internal and external shocks.

Thank-you to all of the commenters who fill those various niches. You make my life easy.

Persuasive Argument

One of the cornerstones of persuasive argument is to start with premises (often several premises to get them in the habit of nodding their head and agreeing with the sales-person) that the prospective buyer agrees with.

If you are trying to "sell" your opinion or perhaps move somebody who is undecided to your position, you need to read the audience and start out with statements that they will agree with without hesitation.

"Know your audience? Whaddya mean, Joe"

Suppose you pop-open an article and the first line reads:

• "Diversity is our greatest strength" or
  
• "Cases of Hantavirus tripled in the last year because of Global Warming" or
• "Failing to start a conversation with your pronouns is an act of violence" or
• "It is impossible to see systemic racism if you are white"

Most of my readers are likely to discount everything else the author tries to communicate (even if those statements lend credibility and gravitas among the author's core audience).

So if you find yourself attempting to persuade somebody, you are almost always better served to start out with observations that your audience will agree with and then expand from there.

Examples: 

• "Food prices everywhere...grocery stores, fast-food, gas-stations...are going up and packages are shrinking"
• "My kid makes $20 an hour and cannot afford healthcare insurance"
• "All of my kids refuse to consider living in Lansing due to the rising crime-rate"
• "Advancement based on anything other than demonstrated-ability always hurts the clients and disadvantages those who are passed-over for promotion. It also destroys moral"
• "Mentoring is fine as long as it isn't a pretext for quid pro quo"

Documentation of assets

As long as I am sending out friendly reminders, this is a good time to start printing monthly paper-copies of your assets (IRA, 401-k for example). Any documentation is a million times better than no documentation after inexplicable soft-ware glitches happen.

Put the paper copies in a folder in the most fire-proof and flood-proof place you have handy. Use good, acid-free paper.

Albizia

Last week I had to run into Lansing to pick up Quicksilver. Southern Belle had taken her to the dentist and then had other commitments for the rest of the day. I had agreed to collect QS and watch her the rest of the day.

While driving to the location of the "hand-off" I saw a mature Mimosa tree (Albizia julibrissin) in full bloom growing in a crowded neighborhood. The houses were built circa 1910-1920 and even in 1975 it was filled with "economically disadvantaged" people.

Range Map

Lansing is WAY north of its usual range in North America. The last one I saw in Michigan was beside the train-tracks in Lake Odessa. The owner used to work on the railroad and brought the seedling home from the Illinois Ozarks.

What is notable about this species is that it is one of the few that might grow in Handsome Hombre's home country and grow in mid-Michigan.

Albizia are not native to North America. They were introduced and in some places are considered invasive and border-line, trailer-park trashy. The common Mimosa tree is not a good stick-of-timber but it has a couple of cousin, Albizia lebbeck and Albizia odoratissima that are.

Ammo availability

If you have a few extra dollars in your piggy-bank, you might consider purchasing some ammo.

Availability is pretty good. Prices aren't so bad. On sale, a brick of Armsco .22LR goes for $24.99 at Dunham's a local sporting goods chain store.

As we get closer to the election other shooters might panic and start buying. The shelves can empty in eight hours. We have seen it before.

Beat the rush. Buy now. Use cash.

Guess how far a duck can migrate in one day

I was chatting with my buddy Lucas. Lucas is gifted at quickly finding arcane information. Not just gifted...divinely gifted.

While arguing about minor issues to pass the time, I asked "How far can a duck migrate in a day?"

My guess was about 350 miles.

Lucas pushed a few buttons and then showed me this.

Make your guess and then check below the break.

Odds and ends

The motherswort plant in the northeast corner of the (Eaton Rapids) orchard is still attracting bees but it is getting pretty tired looking. I posted video-footage on June 16 of the same plant, so that is over a month of feeding bees, parasitoid wasps and butterflies. That is a darned good run for a single plant.

Garden news

Not a great year for gardening for me. Some of the missteps have been identified and won't be repeated.

For example, the pickling cucumber seed I found was Boston Pickle. The leaves all turned yellow just as the first cucumbers were the size of baby gherkins. Obviously lacking disease resistance although the issue was exacerbated by an exceptionally rainy summer for us.

There have been some successes. Carlton komatsuna is the clear winner (so far) in the mustard greens race. Everything else except the Red Russian kale is bolting. Musica pole bean is the clear winner for vigor and getting ahead of the rabbits. Another success is Mrs ERJ's garden...the one with the fence around it.

The big news is that Mrs ERJ is encouraging me to put a fence around the garden just east of our "serious" orchard. Even though deer can easily sail over a 4' fence, they are lazy critters and will walk extra feet to avoid the effort. Since there is a lot of browse outside of the fence, MOST of the time they should leave the fenced in area alone.

Google decided that I am autistic

Probably based on one of my recent posts where noted that one of my workers suggested that I am autistic. My Youtube feed has been clogged with videos titled like "How to tell if you are autistic".

Perhaps the main point should be that algorithms and "A.I." are weighing every word we type and say. Voice-to-text is a mature technology. Computers are dirt cheap. Why wouldn't Microsoft/Google/Apple/cell-provider do it?

I did pop open one video to see what it was like. Based on the fact that I don't like people on my lawn and sometimes I wish Mrs ERJ would be a little faster to getting to the point of the story that she is sharing with me...according the the criteria of the video I am definitely autistic. However, according to one psychiatrist I know, the fact that value the emotions/opinion of ANYBODY negates those superficial traits. 

A person who is comically bad at reading other people's emotions is not on-the-spectrum. The fact that they even CARE about other people's emotions makes their being-on-the-spectrum a non-starter.

Mirages within illusions

The legacy media rakes in huge amounts of advertising dollars during the election cycle. Sometimes it seems as if half of the TV content is commercials.

If the media reported that a certain match-up was "no contest", then neither side would throw money at the race and donors would not contribute. So it is in media's best interest to keep showing polls that show the race see-sawing back-and-forth right down to the wire. As long as they keep it a nail-biter, then dump-trucks filled with bales of $100 bills keep backing up to their bank and dumping loads of money on them.

Three hours at The Property

Staking out where replacement trees will be planted. Spraying herbicide. Dragging brush. Resetting traps (I heard one go off 45 minutes after setting it. I got to set that one twice). The squirrels are "cutting" the pears and eating just the seeds.  حرامزاده

I did get to fish a small stream 0.7 miles away and managed to get one, 7" long Creek Chub to dry land. The others (mostly 4" long) grabbed the bait and would let go when they were 2' above the water.

I was using a cane pole, 4# line, a #10 hook at a bit of worm. I think I need to use smaller bait, maybe wax-worms or mousies. Bonus Link.

Creek Chubs make very fine bait for Northern Pike.

It has been a very, very good day!

Curators of Hate and Blood-lust

Video Link on X

The pet Orcs need their ration of blood. Hence the tolerance for the Orcs' misbehavior. Feral animals have no loyalty. They wander off and do not come when their masters call if too long of a period goes by without their ration of flesh-and-blood.

Napoleon famously prescribed "A whiff of grape-shot" as the cure.

Lost tools and Legacies

I walked out into the orchard where I had been working last night and found the hand-pruners I had laid down in about fifteen seconds. That was after looking for them for fifteen minutes last night. The light was at exactly the right angle to highlight them this morning. OH HAPPY DAY! I am a simple fellow and easy to please.

Last night I used the nippers to cut some Poison Ivy stems climbing up a pear tree, laid down the nippers, picked up the sprayer and soused the cut ends. Then I put down the sprayer and the nippers were gone.

I got a rake. I raked the entire area. Nothing. The tool had evaporated!

It isn't that the nippers are expensive, but I have to get better at keeping track of them. I could just see hitting them with the mower...not good.

This morning I was carrying my tools in a fanny-pack with the pack in front. I don't think this is a viable long-term solution because the fanny-pack is not very sturdy.

The bottom line is that I need to make a tool apron part of my normal orchard attire.

Legacies

Maybe I am reading this all wrong, but I think the hard-left turn many churches are experiencing are driven by people who don't have kids and are "aging out". Staring their own, earthly mortality in the face, they have a sudden desire to leave a legacy.

The biology says that they cannot make their own children so that means they have to leave their finger-prints on other people's kids. There is a large moral-hazard with this arrangement. It is like spending other people's money. "Unique" and "Cool" are vastly more important to the person seeking to leave a legacy than "Sound" and "Prudent"...at least it is when they are mucking with other people's kids.

This is not a new problem. The Bible lists in multiple places that those who teach will be judged more harshly and that a very hot place in Hell is reserved for the "shepherds" who betray their flock and God's teachings.

I don't have much patience for the entire "Legacy" thing. Every person who wants to leave a legacy wants to start new programs at the cost of starving the maintenance of existing, proven programs. Somehow, they have it in their head that new programs throw longer-shadows. They must also think that "their" program will be able to run without ongoing funding and maintenance because, sure-as-shinola, it will be defunded thirty seconds after they are buried.

I think old people looking in the rear-view mirror and seeing that they left no legacy is a big reason they want to import people from illiberal cultures. 

"Their ancestors will thank me!!!"

No, Buffy. They will not thank you. They will not think of you. Not ever.

Or they want to provide "safe spaces" for kids to research cutting off important parts of their bodies without their parents knowing.

Maybe the translation of the Bible sitting in their pews is different than the one in mine. "Honor your mother and father" is listed in at least three places (Exodus, Deuterotomy and Ephesians) in the translation our church uses.

A Rabbinical scholar might also point out parallels between Adultery and Genital Mutilation and Chemical Castration. Adultery is a sin against God, Tribe and Family because it "Adulterates" the family line. Gender tinkering cynically ENDS the family line and God's plan for that family.

If you think the Bible is neutral on this kind of topic, take the time to read Matt 18:2-6

So what should you do if you want to leave a legacy? If you like your church then treat them like the child you never had and leave them some money WITH NO STRINGS ATTACHED. You wouldn't reach up out of the grave and try to control your kid (if you had one), would you? They why do you trust your church (or gun range or flying club or youth organization) so much less?

Fake News Friday: Harris explains "...unburdened by what has been"

When pressed by Ben Shapiro, presumed Presidential candidate Kamala Harris explained:

""What can be, unburdened by what has been" is a line I lifted from Modern Monetary Theory. It means that nobody has to pay back any of their loans because loan-payments are a burden and and the money was borrowed in the past." Harris explained in a moment of surprising lucidity.

Punctuating her explanation with a cackle, Harris continued "Everybody thinks I am saying that you can flunk out of high school and still be a brain surgeon at Walter Reed. Not so" she cautioned.

"I mean, I am open to them being surgeons at the other Veteran Hospitals but not Walter Reed."

"What I am really saying is that paying back loans is totally optional if you signed the contract sometime in the past which is the opposite of signing it in the future or signing it right now."

In other news, bond-values crashed across the globe as spooked investors dumped US bonds in the belief that the front-running Democratic candidate for POTUS intends to default on US denominated debt.

Fake News Friday: Olive Oyl files Gender-Affirming Care lawsuit

A group of former waitresses who used to work at Hooters recently filed a class-action suit against the State of Michigan.

The lawsuit states that the State's refusal to enforce laws that requires insurance companies to pay for "gender affirming care" resulted in their claims for reimbursement for breast enlargement surgeries being denied.

"I was a large-breasted woman trapped in the body of an IBTC girl" Dolly Bomshellicious, lead-plaintiff told the press. "Not only was the denial of gender-affirming care a violation of Federal laws prohibiting discrimination based on sex, but it was also a violation of the American Disabilities Act which considers mental illness to be on par with physical illnesses."

Ken Aarons, the lead attorney in the suit told the press "We are not going after the insurance companies because we understand they have to stay solvent and because they dance to the tune played by State Regulators and the State Attorney General."

Aarons continued "The pressure-points are at the Regulator and State Attorney General level. The actual language of the Michigan law does not specify that Quote -- Gender-affirming care is only available to the opposite gender -- Unquote because that would be nonsensical. How can changing something to its opposite be affirming?"

"And what could be more affirming of a woman's femininity than to bless a women with an Olive Oyl endowment with Rubensque bosoms?" Aarons concluded.

The ERJ blog reached out to Attorney General Dana Nessel and to the Michigan Insurance Commission but did not received a reply.

Presented without comment