"Ghetto Culture" and A re-post from July 6, 2020

Cultures do not evolve in a vacuum. Their characteristics evolve as solutions to environmental challenges and to scarce resources.

"Ghetto Culture" did not evolve in a vacuum. The environment is one that has a shortage of "net primary producers" and is heavily invested in the predator economy.

The reason I bring this up is that the environment Xavier tells us about is one that is no longer just an inner-city thing. It is in the stands of the high schools your grandkids attend. It is in the grocery stores and parking lots. It is walking down the street in front of your house. It is delivering the Amazon packages.

So you can stick your nose in the air and pretend that "all of those people are trash". Or you can study what they are doing, why they are doing it and decide how you can do it even better. Because at some time in the near future, if you cannot deliver loud, convincing performative outrage at the drop of the hat then you will be volunteering to be a victim.

From a practical standpoint, if you have to escalate to the kinetic level, you want lots of noise to indicate that you attempted to escalate with words before you had to employ a kinetic solution. 

The following is the 2020 post, in its entirety:

 

***START***

A classic post (2006) from Xavier Thoughts

Xavier was a traveling nurse who provided hospice care to cancer patients in inner-cities. He carried potent narcotics and was exposed to criminals who wanted to steal what they knew he was carrying.

That forced him to be a keen observer of human nature and to learn to deal with the criminals.

Unfortunately, I cannot direct you to a link that shows just that post. Rather, it is embedded within a month of posts so you have to dig to get to it. Xavier, please forgive me if I violate "fair use".

Xavier Thoughts, March 2006, Recognizing Threats, Selection

The criminal, once he has observed a potential victim, will send out some test runs to determine if the person is indeed prey, or predator. These tests may be asking for a match, the time, or change. The initial tests all have one thing in common. They violate boundaries, and determine if the selected person will allow their space and generosity to be violated.

This is the single best time to opt-out of the victim-selection process. Sometimes a Big Noise and a Big Show are appropriate. Predators do not want attention. A very loud "Fnck OFF!" and a vigorous shove are called for. It sends the message "I will not go passively to the fate you choose for me. YOU will get hurt."

One great thing about being intelligent is that we can learn from idiots. We can even learn from Whoopie Goldberg. The over-the-top reactions that are inappropriate in civilized settings where people attend to nuance can be very appropriate on the city streets where subtlety and nuance are washed away but the bustle and noise.

The predator is mimicking a common panhandler to get in close, test the waters and position himself for attack. All of these persons are easily recognized by their inappropriate behavior and boundary violations. Like the fish who fails to recognize the moray eel on the reef, the person who fumbles for change with a predator has sealed their fate. The ruses are many and varied. I have seen crackheads target tourists and ask to get their pictures taken. I have seen balloon ladies that had accomplices working in the shadows. I have seen young women toss out lewd comments as their male accomplices tried to blend into the landscape. I have seen kids sitting on trash cans in housing projects while older gang members waited around the corner. I have even seen one teen lay on the side of the road in the projects waiting for a good Samaritan as his accomplices hid behind a dumpster. Like the anglerfish, these predators actively dangle lures to allow them to catch prey. To be seen as a potentially superior predator, one must simply recognize the threat, refuse to engage, and continue without alarm.

Does this process sound anything like Seattle's CHAZ experiment and Mayor Jenny Durkin's non-response? Durkin failed the victim selection tests.

If the predator is engaged, a request for change quickly becomes a demand for a dollar, then a twenty, then a blow to the head as soon as the victim refuses. This kind of escalation is common with young gangs who quickly befuddle their prey with unrelated questions and demands from all directions. As the victim struggles with the insistent demands and questions, the gang will begin positioning itself for attack. These criminals work like sharks, first brushing their victim, then bumping it, and finally going after the victim is a swirl of blood and gore as others also jump in.

Somebody is in the background running the theater. It is not the guy unlocking the gate into the gated community. It is not the young men at the front of the mob throwing rocks. The hand-in-the-puppet is in the middle of, or near the back of the mob. He is directing probes and watching responses.

It would be instructive to watch drone footage to see if the HITP can be identified the way Mazer Rackham identified the mother-ship in Ender's Game.

The most feared predator is the one who uses the silent selection process. This criminal watches the parade of people passing by, while trying to blend into the scenery. He wants to be neither seen or remembered. Once he recognizes and selects a victim, he knows he needs the right time and place to launch his attack. He may follow his selected victim to a more promising location. If he follows his victim, he knows that he must go unrecognized as a predator. He is the tiger in the jungle, relying on stealth to get close enough to quickly subdue his prey. Like the tiger, he leaves his lair to hunt. He may stalk his victim for long periods of time. He may lose interest in a selected victim that never knew he was there. He may follow the victim until the victim enters an area where an attack can be successful. If the time and place are already in his favor when the victim is selected, however, the victim will be like the fly who fails to recognize the chameleon among the leaves. Thankfully, these predators who use the silent selection process are not as common as other predators. They are, however, highly effective, giving the victim very little warning. The key to recognizing them is the last chance of conflict avoidance.

 ***END***

 

A red-headed teen-ager in the orchard. What could go wrong?

Yesterday's work-tickets

The great news is that my volunteer-help yesterday was able to fix the lawn tractor that was in the pole barn at the Upper and Hill Orchards.

I asked him what he did to fix it and he shrugged his shoulders. He had done a handful of things and wasn't sure which one(s) had resolved the issue. He did caution me that there were likely to be mice nests in the shroud that directed cooling air from the fan and I needed to clean those out or I could warp the cylinders if I ran it for extended periods.

We spent the next two hours moving wood from piles in the orchard to the property line where the neighbor would claim it for firewood.

Near the end of the two hours, the generous neighbor lady (not the wood burner) who has been letting me use her hose brought over her niece and asked for a tour of the orchard.

I can be awkward around people until I "calibrate". It takes me longer to calibrate around women then around men. It takes me longer to calibrate around teenagers than around adults or children. It takes me longer to calibrate around red-heads than around brunettes.

Yes, her niece was a gangly, red-headed teen-ager. She looked like a colt whose body parts were at different stages of a violent growth-spurt. For all that, she comported herself with poise and grace. Gymnastics is a wonderful activity, I am thinking. 

Her parents had tried to grow fruit trees but their site was too shady, had too many squirrels and too much deer pressure. It was a bust.

The home-run was when I learned she was from Illinois "Born and bred...", I took her to an Illinois Everbearing Mulberry. She was impressed. She ate a handful and picked a handful for her aunt who had elected to drop out of the tour early.

From the comments

Anon @ 8:51 PM yesterday asked "Would you mind posting some of the sources for your knowledge?" 

The most concise answer I can give is that I used to be a member of an email list called NAFEX-L. NAFEX stands for North American Fruit EXplorers.

Very early in the days of the internet, it was a "thing" for people interested in arcane topics to join email lists where people discussed various problems and opportunities. At one time I was a member of SHEEP-L, GRAZE-L and NAFEX-L.

The members of NAFEX-L included giants in the field like Ed Fackler (Southern Indiana), Lon Rombaugh (Western Oregon), Lucky Pittman (Western Kentucky), Bob Purvis (Alaska, Minnesota, Idaho), Bernie Nikolia (Alberta) and hosts of others from Maine to Florida to Alaska to California.

NAFEX still exists and publishes four magazines (called Pomona) a year. It is organized around interest groups. Each interest group has a leader and members are encouraged to join various interest groups.

The common denominator in these groups are that most of the members are interested in growing fruit in areas that are not currently centers of commercial production. They are home fruit growers and holders of small orchards. They are people who push the boundaries.

Back to LIST format

I think the LIST format was one of the high-points of the internet. Most of the questions were well posed and the answers were well thought out and presented. The format encouraged dialogue. Threads were durable and could be referenced later on. The readership was large enough to have a wide range of expertise but small enough that trolls were rare. The topics tended to be quite focused. Most of the contributors were genuinely motivated by a desire to help their fellow man.

By contrast, today's social media is "open" to the general public. Any idiot can comment. Trolls abound. Forums get flooded with random, tangential off-topic threads. In many cases, contributors are instant-experts and mindlessly parrot the summary from the first line of a Google search as deep-truth.

Presented without comment

 

Things might not be what they first appear

 

One minute run-time.

My original reaction to this short video was the predictable one: How could she not know the card was "empty". My original impression was that the customer was trying to scam Walmart by bluffing/intimidating her way through.

A bit later it occurred to me that the woman working the cash register didn't say "the balance was zero" but that "the transaction was declined" which really means that there are insufficient funds to cover the amount requested.

So what if this was the last week before her balance is refreshed and she is trying to buy the same items in the same amounts that she has for the last two years? What if she has done this 24 times (24 months) before and there has always been enough money to make it to the next month? 

She doesn't have to do math because she solved this math problem two years ago. She "knows" there is plenty of money in the balance because she has 104 pieces of data (104 weeks in two years) that what is in her shopping cart SHOULD be covered.

If she was knowingly trying to scam the store, she would have used self-checkout. Nobody would have challenged her if she mis-scanned some items.  

What happens when the food prices go up but the deposits made in her SNAP account don't? 

You can tell by the reactions of the woman working the cash register and the manager that this event is not rare. Neither of them batted an eye and the woman's lack-of-funds.

So maybe this video is not about "ghetto culture" but about rising food prices surprising everybody.

Finally, a bit of background info: The annual inflation in food prices in Ukraine has been running between 20% and 25% a year since 2022. At 25%, because of the compounding effect, the price of food doubles every three years. 

Fertilizing fruit trees (in the North) and plum pollination woes

Random thought

The stone from plucked from the bottom of the wadi and used by David to kill Goliath is still out there, somewhere in the Valley of Elah. It may be entombed in concrete or in a road-bed...but it is probably still be out there.

While I have never read of it occurring, I assumed that hundreds of crusaders were sold "the stone that killed Goliath" by enterprising locals. Those crusaders carted off stones and random bones by the bushel-basket to take back home and to be displayed as Holy Relics. There have been mystery stories published that used the market for Medieval Relics as a backdrop.

Rain

The inch of rain that was promised has been down-graded to 0.25 inches. I will be lugging more water today.

Fertilizer and trees

Winter hardiness is a factor in northern climates. That would be USDA Zone 5 and lower. I am right on the edge between 5 and 6.

Bud on the tree that are richly endowed with carbohydrates (various types of sugar) are cold-hardy. Buds that are poorly endowed with carbohydrates are NOT cold-hardy.

It is usually not an issue of the leaves not photosynthesizing enough carbs although that can happen if insects or a wandering moose eat the leaves or if the tree is defoliated by disease. It is more often a consequence of how trees budget where the carbs go.

Developing seeds and fruit get first dibs on carbs. That is one reason why letting your tree over-bear is bad for the tree.

Actively growing shoots get second dibs. 

Last on the list are roots and buds.

In a perfect world, the tree would get a dose of nutrients and water early in the season. That would quickly fill the canopy with enough leaves to capture all of the sunlight that hits the tree. Additionally, it would be enough nutrients (primarily nitrogen) to hit the management's targets for shoot-extension. 

After the shoots had extended to the desired length, the nutrients would be shifted from high N to low-N and high-K to encourage the formation of a terminal bud on the shoot. The growing tips would no longer be "sinks" for carbohydrates and they could start accumulating in the buds. Additionally, the higher carb level helps the buds to "decide" to be fruiting buds rather than vegetative buds.

Since I don't have the power to instantly switch-off the nitrogen levels in the soil, that means I need to lead-the-duck and stop applying nitrogen before I want the shoots to stop growing. My best guess is that August 1 should be that date. That is when the supplemental water I am giving the newest trees should stop being supplemented with 300 PPM of nitrogen. I will use the last of the water I have premixed today and then will just water with simple well water.

The trees should coast through August and have set terminal buds by Labor Day. At least, that is the plan.

Hydroponics and organic fertilizers

Growers who use hydroponics do have almost absolute control over the nutrients available to their plants. I don't know of any hydroponics orchards but trees on sand (like stabilized dunes) are pretty darned close.

The downside of hydroponics is that if you screw up there is no forgiveness. If you don't put it in the irrigation water, Mother Nature isn't going to help you out.

Organic growers have a different problem. Most organic fertilizers like composted manure have a long, slow release. The traditional wisdom is to apply your compost early in the spring but then to not add any more. It isn't that a flush of growth is bad in July. The problem is that a flush of growth at the end of August can be catastrophic.

Plum pollination

Plums can present a lot of issues with pollination.

For one thing, there are two very different types of plums and they don't cross-pollinate.

European plums are hexaploids (six sets of chromosomes) and will not pollinate Japanese or wild American type plums.

Within the European plums there is a range of bloom times with the earliest ones having little overlap with the latest ones. 

Some European plums are at least partially self-fertile. Identifying and finding them is where the internet can be your friend.

The Japanese type plums are diploid (two sets of chromosomes). Burbank created the modern Japanese plum by crossing it with other species of diploid plums. Neils Hansen and breeders in the upper mid-west and in Canada crossed Japanese plums with the American plum and the Canadian Black plum to create hybrids that can resist the winter cold.

That ended up creating a dogs-breakfast of genetics all swept into one pile.

Unfortunately, most of the hardy hybrids (Waneta, Superior, Toka, Underwood) produce flowers that are not attractive to bees AND have very little viable pollen. HOWEVER, wild plums in the mid-west and Canada (P. americana and P. nigra) have large amounts of viable pollen. The challenge is getting the bees to fly the distance between the wild trees/bushes and the hybrid trees in your orchard; remember, bees are not attracted to the hybrid blossoms.

The textbook answer, if they are not already growing in the fence-row beside you orchard, is to plant a wild tree in your orchard or use them for rootstock and to allow one root-sucker to grown into a mini-tree large enough to produce blossoms. Problem solved.

A more labor intensive solution is to graft a branch from a wild tree into each hybrid tree. A word of caution is in order here. It is a near certainty that you will prune out that odd looking branch unless you mark it in some permanent and visually arresting way.