Alexander Nevsky, the Battle on Ice scene by Sergei Eisenstein released in 1938 amid rising tensions in Europe between Stalin, Hitler and other leaders.
Two thousand heavily armed German invaders are defeated by irregular, local forces on April 5, 1242.
Run-time about 30 minutes.
Sports-ball
I think "Sports" are one of Western Civilization's greatest inventions. Rather than picking up torches and pitchforks and burning the next village over, we fill a bladder with air and try to throw it through a hoop or punch it into the end-zone.
People have a need to go-to-war. Rather than slitting throats and burning huts, Western Civilization allows them to compete by wearing unnatural shades of polyester and seeing who can have the most outrageous tailgate party.
H1-B visas
H1-B sound like a new kind of influenza.
Lifting straps
I misplaced my dead-lifting straps. I stitched together another pair. 1" webbing, 27" long with one-inch of overlap. Double-thread, #69 polyester thread waxed with bullet lube (45% beeswax, 45% cottonseed oil, 10% lanolin...hey, it is what I had on hand). I sewed these without a twist in the middle and they were no better and no worse than the pair that did have the single twist. Your mileage will vary based on the size of your wrists and hands.
Möbius's Theorem
Some stories don't have two sides to them.
Peaches
Suddenly, out of nowhere (or so it seems) I am getting questions like "How hard is it to grow peaches?"
Luscious, juicy, tangy and sweet. Unbeatable for eating fresh, pies or canning. Peaches are the queen of fruit.
Peaches: Live hard, die young and leave a good-looking corpse.
I have a couple of 30 year old trees and they look rough...really, really rough. A thirty year old peach tree in the mid-West is a woody Methuselah. Both are seedlings of an obsolete variety named "Madison". Somehow, perhaps by random chance, those two trees have not been leveled by canker, borers or bad-luck.
The way the winds are blowing, I will be grafting three seedlings to each of those ancient-ones and three to an old variety (1963) called Cresthaven.
The best time to plant a fruit tree is five years ago. The second best time is to plant a tree today.
The reason for the "...five years ago..." is that it takes most fruit trees five years to reach a size where they produce significant amounts of fruit.
If the economy or social-order goes into the septic-tank, it is unlikely that we will have five years to wait for our trees to reach full production.
That suggests two strategies. One strategy is to plant a few fruit trees every couple of years. That strategy falls apart if you have limited space to grow trees.
Another strategy is to find ways to compress the foot-print and to shrink five-year ramp-up time.
Small fruits might be what you are looking for!
Everbearing Strawberries treated as annuals
Huge potential yields...as much as 25 pounds per year per 32 square-feet (the size of a standard sheet of OSB or plywood). The yield is spread through the growing season requiring many pickings. The cost to establish is high. The longevity is low...it must be replanted every year.
Rhubarb
OK, not a fruit. If it bothers you then leave a comment that I will ignore.
Large potential yield of 12 pounds per SOP (sheet of plywood). It takes 24 months to really start cranking out the stalks. Cost to establish is not very high if you have a neighbor who will share divisions. Longevity is very high with fifty years being common.
High oxalate content makes this a poor choice for people susceptible to kidney stones. Often used as volume extender in pastries for more aromatic fruit like strawberries or peaches.
Grapes
10 pounds per SOP. 18 months to significant yield. Cost to establish is high since a trellis or support is required. Longevity of 30 years.
Strawberries, summer-bearing, matted row
5 pounds per SOP. 18 months to significant yield. Cost to establish is low. Longevity is three-to-seven years.
Blueberries
4 pounds per SOP. 30 months to significant yield. Demands low pH soils...low cost to establish if your soils are already low pH but very expensive if they are not. Longevity is 15 years.
Raspberries and Gooseberries and Currants
3 pounds per SOP. Some production in the first fall for some types of raspberries but typically 15 months for most plantings. Longevity is fifteen years in a favorable site.
Asparagus
2 pounds per SOP. 36 months for significant yields. Longevity is 20 years.
Minor small fruits
Aronia, blackberries, service berries, seaberries, beach plums, kiwi, autumn olive, elderberries, rose hips, daylilies....
Many of these species can survive neglect and challenging sites which makes them great choices for less intensively managed plots. Most of these species have "issues" like thorns or squishy fruit that make them non-commercial. Many of them have named cultivars that yield up to 3X times more fruit than random seedlings.
Is Absolute Fact more effective?
There are several "ideas" that can be demonstrated to be "False" but they still have value and should not be lightly dismissed.
The classic example is Aristotle's theory of "Spontaneous Generation" where vermin "spontaneously" arise from garbage or piles of rags. We learned in 7th grade biology that this was false. A pile of rags will remain free of mice unless a boy mouse gets "special feelings" for a girl mouse within that pile of rags.
The discussion comes full-circle if you study public health. There are ALWAYS romantic boy/girl mice and rats (and flies and mosquitoes and spirochete). That is not a "controllable" variable in urban and farm settings. Eliminating food sources and piles of rags IS a controllable variable and while it will not totally eliminate rodents, it makes a huge dent in the population.
So even though Aristotle's theory of Spontaneous Generation is easily proven to be false it still has tremendous utility in the real world.
Is Absolute Fact more cost effective?
"Pi" is not 3.14 and Pi/4* is not 0.8...but they are both less than 2% from actual and the computational efficiencies are useful for back-of-envelop doodling. (The cross-sectional area of a round bar or wire is Pi/4*(D^2).)
Is Absolute Fact tinsel for a drama queen?
Some people enjoy arguing (aka "Trolls"). They must like the attention. Maybe it makes them feel like they are alive. I don't care. I find people who love to argue to be tiresome. I subscribe to Dale Carnegie's contention that you can never WIN an argument. You may prevail in a very narrow sense of the word but it comes at a higher cost.
As part of an essay I might make the statement "The sun rises in the east" as a springboard for some point.
The drama-queen or the person with a high need for dominance will immediately launch into "That statement is demonstrably false. The sun only rises in the east two mornings a year between the Arctic and Antarctic Circles and it only rises in the south at the North Pole and in the north at the South Pole."
"Your entire essay is bullshit because I shredded one of your foundational premises."
Ok. Fine. Have it your way.
Entertainment value
I have a decided bias toward making my posts entertaining. A post that is entertaining will be remembered. Any information in the essay that is useful, even if it is not totally Factual, will be more accessible if the essay was entertaining.
If I have a reader who is 50:50 on a topic and, if after reading one of my post has three pertinent questions or if they shift to 60:40...or 40:60 then I think I did a decent job.
The Spanish Civil War was fought between 1936 and 1939. It was a test-bed for the rapidly evolving science of war and all major powers had "observers" reporting to their respective powers about what technologies worked and which did not.
The Germans were able to implement the lessons more rapidly than their counterparts and caught Central Europe, France and the British flat-footed with their ability to leverage mechanized and airborne resources to rapidly deploy forces.
The wars in Ukraine and the middle-East have a similar flavor to the Spanish Civil War. Drones, in particular, are saturating the hostile space and there is much experimentation in how to use them best. Most recently, North Korean forces under the direction of Russian officers were slaughtered like so many baby chicks when they used obsolete, Soviet battlefield doctrine.
Meanwhile, in the middle-East, Israel sits like a stationary, carrier-based battle-group. Many military thinkers are predicting the demise of the carrier-based battle-group due to rapidly evolving missile, drone and image processing technologies. And yet Israel is demonstrating that there are counter-strategies that are moderately-to-very effective against those offensive technologies. Unfortunately, every effective defense informs the designers of the offensive weapons.
Pray that these two wars are not the warm-up calisthenics before The Big Game.
This is how I read the tea-leaves:
Homan starts with the low-hanging fruit. He starts with the illegal immigrants who are already incarcerated. Stick their heads in a spit-bag, put a stamp on them and mail them back home.
Simultaneously, Homan sets up a rat-line for employees in non-cooperating jurisdictions to identify previously-identified illegal aliens being detained by local authorities. He has quick-reaction forces who can generate a warrant, swoop-in and collect the legally-involved illegal alien before the liberal judges can dump them back into the street. There will be no shortage of employees whose lives are endangered by having to repeatedly deal with violent, (previously) untouchable illegal-aliens.
Homan would be an idiot if he didn't ask NSA to monitor local law-enforcement databases and comb them for persona non grata getting checked into the gray-bar hotel.
Homan will have a bottleneck in terms of the number of marshals available to escort PNG felons back to their home countries. He might have six months where this process generates all of the volume he can safely repatriate to their home countries.
Homan will also need a plan to deal with PNG who return. I suggest that Trump strike a deal with Javier Milei of Argentina to provided vendored incarceration to the returning, legally-involved PNG. They can do it much less expensively than our Federal Country Clubs Prisons and it will be less pleasant for the returning PNGs.
Immigration is fundamentally broken
The Immigration system is fundamentally broken and both parties have had opportunities to fix it via legislation. The fact that neither party touched the issue suggests that the broken system is a great convenience to powerful people.
Who benefits?
If the stupid system is to be fixed, then those powerful people need to be "inconvenienced". Meat packing plants, landscaping crews and construction sites need to be audited by a trifecta of ICE, OSHA and EPA. Families and businesses employing illegals need to be squeezed for back-taxes they were legally obliged to withhold and so-on and so-forth.
The screaming by those political donors will motivate legislators to craft rational legislation.
A modest proposal
I propose a system where "tentative work visas" are granted to healthy-skilled applicants with the condition that they need to be employeed for a minimum of 1400* hours-per-year for every full year after the visa is granted. If they drop below 1400 hours then they are deported. If they are convicted of any activity that shows up on a ATF 4473 form then they are deported.
If the migrant is here for five years and can demonstrate his willingness to work, then he will be eligible for other types of visas.
*2000 hours-per-year is often used for back-of-envelop calculations for full-time employment. Obamacare defines "full time" as 28 hours-per-week which is 1400 if extended over 50 weeks.
I experienced a couple of "firsts" today.
I was the passenger in a truck when it drove by the Pfizer plant in Portage, Michigan where the infamous Covid-19 vaccine is made.
Then a bit later, I saw a woman with seven legs.
A Dining Room Table
Southern Belle found a dining-room table with two leaves. It is solid oak and it was in Portage, Michigan which is just a bit south of Kalamazoo.
Ron, the gentleman who was selling, cheerfully removed the five legs to make it easier to put on the trailer and for us to cover it with a tarp to protect it from the rain.
Ron is retired now, but back-in-the-day he was a professional hot-air balloon pilot. He gave rides. He trained people. We both knew Jeremy Droscha.
At the other end of the round-trip, Southern Belle (who usually only sports the two legs God gave her) insisted on carrying all five table legs in one go. Two-plus-five equals seven, even in states that sometimes vote blue.
My apologies for the title. I could not resist.
An exit ramp from compulsory education
John Wilder raised the following point in his recent essay Is the Bottom 20% Killing America?
Eliminating those disruptive “students” would allow the rest of the students to learn....and if the kid is booted from school, lift child labor laws and allow them to work 40 hours.
But what would we have them DO????
It doesn't matter what they do! One crew could be digging holes and a different crew could be filling them in the next day and it would still be a net-gain over the current system.
The educational detour doesn't need to be permanent. There can be a "losers bracket" similar to what is seen in double-elimination tournaments.
If nothing else, they can be put onto exercise bikes and used to generate electricity or pump water.
A million years ago, when computers were slow, internal memory was "ferrite-core" and data was stored on reels of tape, I had a job where one of my responsibilities involved analyzing "warranty data" generated by a large automobile manufacturer. It was not uncommon for a single family or product to sell over a million units a year.
It only took a little while to realize that LARGE data pulls took a long time to process. The up-side was that the results showed better stability.
Another thing I learned was to front-end-load the most aggressive filter. You see, our software was extremely primitive. It simply wrote selected records to another file as each criteria was sorted.
Suppose I was looking at warranty work on the interior door-panel for the front-left doors on specific colors of 1980-through-1983 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme sedans.
Using the specific warranty codes for interior door-panels as the first filter might eliminate 97% of all of the claims while choosing "Oldsmobile" as the first filter might only eliminate 75% of the claims while sorting first on interior colors might only eliminate 60% of the claims.
In the first case, the second "pass" would only have to process 3% of the original population while filtering first by "color" would result in the second pass having to process 40% of the original population.
That philosophy guides this discussion of "Efficient algorithms to find quality women"
Is the woman looking for a guy?
A quality woman who is actively looking for a guy is like a ripe banana on the grocery shelf. She won't be there for long.
If she has a guy and is looking for another, then she is a trader-upper and you are just a stepping-stone to greener pastures. If that is what you want...well, OK. But she doesn't meet my definition of a quality woman.
If she is a quality woman and recently ended a relationship, she might not be in the market...yet. Offer empathy. Be kind. It costs nothing. Don't push. You might have found your one-and-only before she is ready. Or maybe you will still be available.
It is likely that only 3% of the women you encounter are "actively looking" for a man at any one time. But don't fret if there is nobody in that 3% that tickles your fancy because that 3% has a high turn-over rate.
OK, I can already hear some of you grousing that the number is much, much higher than 3%, but how many of those girls are looking for a place-holder or an accessory and not a life-mate? They think they need a guy because all of their girlfriends seem to have one? Really, they are just another form of a trader-upper.
Those kinds of relationships do have a function. They give us a test-bed to convert hypotheticals to actual. How pretty does she actually have to be? Can you stand a younger brother who is a mooch? Do you really want a clinging-vine or a woman who wants to be in-control? Those "practice" relationships help us define the boundaries of the universe where the choices are acceptable.
Is she "Results Oriented" or "Process Oriented"?
Most of my readers are Results Oriented but I am not going to assume all of you are.
Some professions that are primarily RO are nurses, waitresses/cooks, business owners who make a profit, teachers who are pro-testing, cops, fire-fighters.
Some professions that are primarily PO are office workers, Human Resources, Social Workers, teachers who are anti-testing, public sector and businesses that are subsidized by outside funding (trust-fund babies).
It is worth noting that Results Oriented/Process Oriented is a spectrum. Even cops and nurses have standard processes and procedures (lists of questions to be asked in a specific order, flow-charts). The difference between an RO and a PO is that the RO OWNS the situation when it goes off-script. Arterial bleeding? The RO is not thinking about CYA. They are responding to the situation.
Hobbies that are RO are gardening, sports, running, hiking, fishing, fiber-arts, baking.
Hobbies that are PO are social media, social activism...
If you are strongly Results Oriented and your mate is strongly Process Oriented, there will be conflict. The primary motivator of the Results Oriented person is satisfying needs and what the job-site looks like after you clean up. The primary motivator of the Process Oriented person is to deflect potential responsibility blame. Those are two very different mindsets.
Attitudes about money
Most divorces are triggered by money, family priorities and sex in roughly that order.
All three are surrogates for control/dominance. All three share the characteristic that they are limited resources with many potential claims on them. Knowing a girl's attitudes about money gives you a pretty good handle on how they are likely to handle family and intimacy conflicts.
One way to get a feel for another person's attitudes about money is to ask "What would you do if you bought a lottery ticket and won a million dollars?"
If she isn't honest in her answer, then you are done with her.
If she says she will throw a huge party and post it on social media to impress people...you can do what you want but I would take a hard-pass.
If she is sophisticated enough to talk about splitting up the million dollars and putting a little here and a little there and maybe squirreling a little bit away just-in-case, then you probably have a keeper.
Summary:
Sort with most aggressive criteria first and I recommend "Is she looking for a long-term man" as the first sort.
Use "practice" relationships to learn your own, internal value map.
Results oriented/Process oriented is another early-sort.
Asking about a hypothetical lottery ticket is a non-threatening way to sound-out how sophisticated her thinking about money is and to learn about her need for approval from social-media.
Note to readers:
This post was going to be smooth and well honed but rabbit-holes emerged by the hundreds. So take it for what it is. It is a discussion about efficient search algorithms that uses "looking for a soul-mate" as a light-hearted example.
The Divine humor is that just after we get the tiniest bit good at looking for a gal, we get permanently taken off the market.
God willing*, I will be driving back from the gym after lifting weights by the time this post drops.
I am subject to lapses. Life happens. I am not always good about taking care of myself. One of the things I need to do to take care of myself is to stay physically active with a mix of cardio, strength and balance/flexibility exercises.
I am better about the cardio because walking is something I do with Mrs ERJ. The others are harder, especially in winter.
Monday I went to the gym early in the morning. The weight room was moderately crowded but the dead-lift platform was clear. I started with 6 reps of 2/3 my body weight. Then I added another 20% and did another 6 reps. Finally I added 10% and did two sets of 6 and I was done.
I was feeling my way along for the amount of weight because I haven't been "lifting" for at least three months. I didn't injure anything but the delayed muscle soreness was impressive.
And now it is time to do it again. When I was "young", I only needed one day of recovery between long runs. Now I need at least two days of recovery. That is just part of growing older.
***Update***
-One set of six reps 135lb "raw".
-One set of 175 "raw".
-One set of 195 with straps
-Three sets of 205 with straps.
Five minute rest intervals except for the last set, I took seven minutes.
Shopping list for the trip home:
Bonus image
*James 4:15
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Andrei Nikolaevich Shilder born in Saint Petersburg in 1861 and died in 1918.
Painter of Russian landscapes.
His paintings appeal to me because we have similar landscapes in Michigan's Upper Peninsula which sits on the Canadian Shield and is rimmed by the Niagra Escarpment.
Shilder was a prolific painter and created many fine works of art.
-Until justice is blind to color, until education is unaware of race, until opportunity is unconcerned with the color of men's skins, emancipation will be a proclamation but not a fact.
-I'll tell you what's at the bottom of it. If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.
-I'll have those n**gers voting Democratic for the next 200 years.
-Yesterday is not ours to recover, but tomorrow is ours to win or lose.
-Lincoln was right about not fooling all the people all the time. But Republicans haven't given up trying.
-Doing the right thing is not the problem. Knowing what the right thing is, that's the challenge.
-Better to have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in.
-You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, "you are free to compete with all the others," and still justly believe that you have been completely fair. We seek not just legal equity but human ability, not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result.
-A rioter with a Molotov cocktail in his hands is not fighting for civil rights any more than a Klansman with a sheet on his back and mask on his face. They are both more or less what the law declares them: lawbreakers, destroyers of constitutional rights and liberties and ultimately destroyers of a free America.
-I want real loyalty. I want someone who will kiss my ass in Macy's window, and say it smells like roses.
-The guns and the bombs, the rockets and the warships, are all symbols of human failure.
-We can draw lessons from the past, but we cannot live in it.
-If two men agree on everything, you may be sure that one of them is doing the thinking.
-If one morning I walked on top of the water across the Potomac River, the headline that afternoon would read: 'President Can't Swim.'
-The Roman Empire controlled the world because it could build roads . . . the British Empire was dominant because it had ships. In the air age we were powerful because we had airplaines. Now the Communists have established a foothold in outer space.
-You aren't learning anything when you're talking.
-If we must disagree, let's disagree without being disagreeable.
-Education is the key to opportunity in our society, and the equality of educational opportunity must be the birthright of every citizen.
-Democracy is a constant tension between truth and half-truth and, in the arsenal of truth, there is no greater weapon than fact.
-You do not examine legislation in the light of the benefits it will convey if properly administered, but in the light of the wrongs it would do and the harms it would cause if improperly administered.
-Justice requires us to remember that when any citizen denies his fellow, saying, 'His color is not mine,' or 'His beliefs are strange and different,' in that moment he betrays America, though his forebears created this nation.
-I have learned that only two things are necessary to keep one's wife happy. First, let her think she's having her own way. And second, let her have it.
-Being president is like being a jackass in a hailstorm. There's nothing to do but
-There are no favorites in my office. I treat them all with the same general inconsideration.
-While you're saving your face, you're losing your ass.
-Never miss an opportunity to say a word of congratulation upon anyone's achievement.
-'If you let a bully come in and chase you out of your front yard, he'll be on your porch and the next day he'll rape your wife in your own bed.
-Evil acts of the past are never rectified by evil acts of the present.
-The CIA is made up of boys whose families sent them to Princeton but wouldn't let them into the family brokerage business.
-I want to make a policy statement. I am unabashedly in favor of women.
-Heck by the time a man scratches his behind, clears his throat, and tells me how smart he is, we've already wasted fifteen minutes
-All the historians are Harvard people. It just isn't fair. Poor old Hoover from West Branch, Iowa, had no chance with that crowd;nor did Andrew Jackson from Tennessee. Nor does Lyndon Johnson from Stonewall, Texas. It just isn't fair.
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| A "cup of brewed coffee" is typically listed as having 140mg of caffeine although it varies a great deal by strength and size of cup. |
One of the things I brought along on the endless expedition to pick up furniture was a pack of caffeinated gum. While it didn't taste that great (caffeine is bitter), it has its place in the scheme of things.
I picked some up because one of the vloggers who posts videos about the Camino de Santiago frequently moans about the lack of availability of coffee in small villages before 8:00AM.
Ten kinds of women to avoid
Commenter Steve Sky posted a link to the Ten Kinds of Women to Avoid.
I wrote a post in response but then deleted the post when I realized the post I wrote was BS. I don't have the background to make any authoritative statements about the issue.
While I HAVE run into some of those kinds of women, I also ran into many women who I would consider exceptions to those characterizations. They might not be the majority, but easily a third of the women out there would buck the characterization that they accumulate body-count like stray tom-cats.
Back in the day, I divided women into two camps. One camp was looking for a fantasy who did not exist outside of television shows or the pages of romance novels. The other camp realized that nobody is perfect and the key to happiness is to find somebody whose flaws do not insult your values.
The "older" women were far more likely to have their heads screwed on straight regarding realistic expectations. Many of them had followed some passion through their early twenties (hiking, teaching, art, classifying species of lichens...whatever) and made a calm, rational choice that they needed one good man to spend the rest of their life with.
Made me feel good
I really wasn't trying to eves-drop, but I happened to overhear Handsome Hombre tell Mrs ERJ that I had been a great help in picking up the furniture and "He is very strong!"
You wanna make a guy feel great? Tell his wife he is a splendid specimen of MANhood. It is the equivalent of thanking the boss for something an underling did. It counts for extra, double-bonus points...'cause how else with the boss hear good stuff about you?
Christian Nationalism
One of the local churches is on a busy street and invests far more effort displaying the vapid slogan du jour than in evangelizing Christianity.
One of the recent banners read "Christian Nationalism is NOT Christian".
My response:
O thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand
Between their loved homes and the war's desolation
Blest with vict'ry and peace, may the Heav'n rescued land
Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation!
Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just
And this be our motto: 'In God is our trust.'
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave! -Fourth verse of The Star Spangled Banner (link to a performance on Youtube)
I have seen Him in the watch fires of a hundred circling camps
They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps;
I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps;
His day is marching on.
I have read a fiery Gospel writ in burnished rows of steel;
“As ye deal with My contemners, so with you My grace shall deal”;
Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with His heel,
Since God is marching on
In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me:
As He died to make men holy, let us live to make men free;
[originally …let us die to make men free]
While God is marching on. -2nd, 3rd and 5th verses Battle Hymn of the Republic
I know when to steal from the best.
The media is in love with the word "manifesto".
The definition of the word is "A public declaration of principles, policies, or intentions, especially of a political nature."
Most recent "manifesto"s, like the transgender who killed several young girls at the Christian School in Nashville looked like private doodling on a spiral notebook. That would be an unusual medium for something intended to be seen by the public.
The alleged "manifesto" of the Madison shooter looked like "journaling", a method recommended by some counselors to help patients with self-awareness and can provide "closure".
Speaking of manifestos and self-awareness
I can see why the mainstream media erected Jurassic-Park quality fences around Ted Kaczynski's 1995 essay Industrial Society and its Future.
Kaczynski is RELENTLESS in his criticism of the Leftist/Elitist movement. Since the mainstream media is largely an organ of Leftist policy, they never, ever, ever want you to read the essay.
I am in the process of skimming through the 34 page document and intend to reread it more thoroughly later. I figured that I am already on a list (we all are) and if somebody wanted to convict me of hate-crimes, they can go trawling through the four million words published on this blog and I am sure they can find some awkward wording that can be taken out of context.
Two things jumped out at me:
Kaczynski claimed that shame is the primary emotion used by Leftist to control others.
Kaczynski claimed that most Leftists are over-socialized.
Shame
Shame is the internalized threat of abandonment. The threat is usually a veiled threat but it can be overt. (ERJ definition)
Shame is devastating to a child because abandonment is death. It is the nuclear option in parenting. It is especially effective on a child being raised by a single-parents because the child doesn't have the option of getting emotional support from the other parent. Since shame works so well and since single-parents are often overwhelmed, it is very tempting to use "shame" liberally.
It is devastating to the child's ability to develop the capability for emotional commitment later in life. Only those who are close to you can hurt you via abandonment.
Every effort to hammer out differences in an adult relationship reflects back to the shamed child as a threat of abandonment.
Some of children become hyper-sensitive to threats of abandonment and go into the equivalent of anaphylactic shock. "You must accept me as a furry and not mock me by meowing or I will kill you".
Over-socialized
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| Leftist logic: Since you are not allowed to have a "self", you cannot have rights |
The over-socialized individual is incapable of identifying "self" and is, consequently, profoundly crippled in their capacity to obtain self-awareness.
That might explain the Leftist's breathtaking ability for "projection".
Without self-awareness the Leftist cannot recognize when they are tired, low blood-sugar, hungry, thirsty, disappointed, off-their-meds or "needy" in any other way. Unable to see it in themselves, they cannot see it in others. They might say "Maybe this isn't a good time to discuss..." by rote, but it isn't empathy.
The inescapable allure of "digital content" only makes it harder to maintain self-awareness even when we are motivated to take care of ourselves. Digital content is almost everywhere.
Without those internal signposts, they can be easily convinced to accept skin-color, gender or head-covering
Hither
First we went to Saint Clair Shores the extreme northeast Detroit suburb to pick up a dishwasher.
Thither
Then we went to a suburb of Pontiac to pick up a sofa.
Yon
Then we dropped off the sofa at the home of the college buddy who had brokered the arrangement with Southern Belle. That was ten miles, round-trip.
Back to Thither
Then we went back to Thither to load up on household goods.
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| Looking off the terrace of the "cabin" across the lake |
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| Some other "cabins" to the west of where we were collecting furniture |
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| Even the high-rent districts have some commercial properties that have been long vacant. The sun-faded sign says "IGA" if you look hard enough. |
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| The 18' trailer. Southern Belle drove. God-bless country-girls! |
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| Parked beneath the deck of SB and HH's new home. |
We left at 8AM and I was dropped off at 5:00PM. The kids are driving to Corunna to pick up a bedframe while Mrs ERJ and I unwind by watching Quicksilver.
The concept of Six Degrees of Separation has its origins in an experiment run by a professor on the east coast of the US. The professor picked out random names from the Omaha, Nebraska phone-book (remember phone books?).
The professor gave each student in the classroom the person's name and address with the instructions "The rules are that you must pass this to somebody that you know and they, in turn, can only pass it to somebody they know. The goal is to get this into the hands of the person listed at the top of the page. Each person in the chain is to write their name on the sheet."
The median number of hand-offs was six. Some were less. For example, a student might hand the envelop to Jim Footballfan who they know from the dorm. Jim Footballfan might know Bob Mailman in Omaha who they met at a Cornhuskers' Tailgate party. Bob Mailman knows all of the Mailmen in Omaha. BOOM! Done.
Thus the idea that there is about six-degrees of separation between you and even the most remote, random person in the United States.
Southern Belle
Southern Belle is milking her connections.
A friend from college has a shirt-tail in-law who acquired a property filled with furniture. They want to get rid of all that dusty, old furniture and fill it with trendy, modern stuff that appeals to renters.
My mission, should I choose to accept it, is to ride with SB and Handsome Hombre to Pontiac, Michigan and help load a truck and a trailer with home furnishings. This sounds like it is going to be a four-ibuprofen day.
My information is that the owners just want the stuff GONE. What a great use of connections on SB's part.
Continuation by Other Memes blog is gone.
Does anybody have any information?
I came down with the cold that has been working its way through our house.
So, instead of finely honed argument and social commentary, you get some photos.
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| Lactus biennis. These are an honest 10' tall from ground to top of the raceme |
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| Rosa canina |
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| Rose Rosette Disease virus (tentative ID) |
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| Buck was here. Stem that he polished was 3" diameter willow. |
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| Hawthorn (Crataegus), species unknown. |
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| You can click on the image to embiggen it. |
Rows of trees marked by a cover-crop/food-plot of kale, turnip and radish as well as tall, annual grasses. Notable for how the tops of the rows (best seen in the middle row) show much better growth than bottoms of rows. The two tree trunks that frame the image are Black Walnut.
The bones of an old pear tree that was infected with fire blight is near the upper-right corner of the image.
At the top of the frame is the Old Orchard.
The ground looks mighty green for the middle of December.
A very good post
"How being frugal can save a Marriage"
If you only read one thing from this blog this week, jump over to Rural Revolution and read this post.
Some people deal well with change. Others do not. Life can be bumpy and filled with unexpected and unwanted changes.
Frugality is like having an exceptionally buoyant boat as you float down a rushing river. It eases you over rocks and sandbars. You can sustain water sloshing in, over the gunwales. You can even pull drowning people out-of-the-drink IF you have that extremely buoyant boat.
Lack of frugality is like having a kayak with 300 pounds of bricks stacked on the deck. It might be OK in still-water but will be a disaster if anything unexpected happens.
Famous for painting realistic rural scenes, primarily of his native Switzerland.
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| A cow eats its body-weight in green forage every 10 days. It is more economical to walk the cow to the forage than to cut and carry the forage to the cow. |
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| Putting up hay for winter |
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| Cattle were primarily traction animals before the time of tractors. Milk was secondary with meat and leather tertiary products. |
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| If you wanted meat, you poached ;-) |
Vocabulary
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| Vocabulary (lemmas) on the horizontal axis, verbal IQ on the vertical |
Your verbal IQ goes up one point for every 450 new "lemmas" or headwords you learn.
Often, we will encounter a word that we know but it is dressed up in prefixes or suffixes that disguise that word. So having a firm grasp of prefixes and suffixes is fundamental to being able to peel a newly-encountered word down and decoding it.
Let's take the word "Investiture" for example.
The prefix "in..." is more complicated than most. It can mean "in, on, onto" or "not" depending on the context.
The suffix "...ture" is from Latin and is used to form a noun indicating state, status, condition or quality.
If you guessed that "In..." + "...vest..." + "...ture" has something to do with a change of status related an article of clothing being placed onto an individual, you would be exactly right. The ceremony of putting the robe on a newly minted clergyman or judge and thereby confirming their new authority is called...you guessed it... an investiture ceremony.
From a practical standpoint, if you know 30 prefixes, 100 lemmas and 30 suffixes you have 90,000 functional "words" on-tap. If you learn one more prefix or suffix, it adds 3000 more "words" to your functional vocabulary. There is a lot of leverage there!
The factorial nature of language
Language is how most people think. We have voices in our heads and we process information by transforming it into language and then manipulating (comparing, sorting, combining, assigning value) those verbal representations.
The "combining" part is particularly rich and complex.
Combinations can be described mathematically with "factorials".
Imagine two kids walking to the lunch-line at school. There are two ways they can order themselves. Suzy first and then Mary or Mary first then Suzy.
Now imagine Roger joins them. We have the possibility of Suzy, Mary, Roger or Roger, Suzy, Mary or Mary, Suzy, Roger or Roger, Suzy, Mary or Suzy, Roger, Mary or Mary, Roger, Suzy for a total of SIX different configurations.
The number-of-combinations is mathematically described with factorials.
The symbol for the factorial described above is 3! and it is calculated as 1 * 2 * 3 *....* (total number of elements).
As demonstrated above, 3! equals 6.
4!= 24. 5!=120. 6!=720. 7!=5040. 8!=40,320.
They escalate quickly! Maybe that is why they chose the exclamation point to represent factorials.
Invention
The growth in the physical culture can also be described in terms of factorials. New inventions are typically combinations of preinvented elements. A video-game or other electronic devices is an assembly of various cards and discretes and modules of software.
A person who fiddled with hot-rods in the 1930s understood about carburetors and venturii. Consequently, he had an instinctive grasp of how the shape of airplane wings created lift. He also knew about linkages and bell-cranks and wire clips and a host of other mechanicals. When presented with a novel problem, like how to fire a M-2 remotely, he had a mental parts-kit of gizmos he could tinker-toy together to create several workable solutions.
Had that exact, identical fellow been born in 1770 or a contemporary culture without carburetors it is highly unlikely that he would be able to synthesize a solution because "he lacked the intelligence".
The break-out effect
Since the rate of invention explodes due to the ability to integrate pre-invented components, it is possible for cultures with very similar resources to exist at very different levels of wealth. The wealthier culture either started inventing first or invention was more geographically concentrated so new-inventions were rapidly communicated to other inventors who could then implement them in their gadgets.
The Flynn Effect
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| Image from Wikipedia |
One possible reason is that we are now immersed in language (both written and oral) and that we have a wealth of "gizmos" to play with. The kid taking the IQ test in 1932 (often in the military) did not have the level of exposure to language and the written word that somebody living in a world where there is a TV or computer in every room is soaking in.
