Fine Art Tuesday

 

Hans Andersen Brendekilde born in Denmark 1857. Died 1942.

Notable for being able to evoke "This too will pass" in these times of craziness.

This artist's work is worth looking at if you want a "window" to help put the spasms of today into a larger (or smaller) context.

Hat-tip Lucas

Voodoo

Voodoo in its various incarnations and spellings is a traditional, African religion that has the tenacity of cellulite.

Image from the Disney animated movie "Pocahontas"

Voodoo is "animist". People who practice Voodoo believe that objects like trees, animals, bones, rocks and objects touched by a human have a spirit, are alive and can harbor malice.

Image from Disney animated movie Mulan

Voodoo believes that the spirits of departed humans roam the earth and influence events for evil or for good. Voodoo believes that these spirits can be invoked to act as agents on behalf of the living.

Voodoo believes in multiple gods that are similar to the gods in Norse mythology. The gate-keeper god who must be appeased before any of the other gods can be asked to intervene is the god of chance and caprice, analogous to Loki.

The sea is a dangerous place where death can come unexpectedly so Loki's high position in the Viking pantheon is not surprising. So it should come as no surprise that a similar god holds a high place in Africa where death is never more than a heartbeat away. 

Voodoo altar with statues of Christian saints used (misused?) as fetishes

In some places, Voodoo has a veneer of Christianity, a white-wash if you want to think about it that way. Christian on Sunday, Voodoo the rest of the week.

Those syncretic religions are not Christian as they are polytheistic and if they have an economy-of-salvation it is tortured and convoluted. It also fails in that Christianity is "universal' (lower-case c "catholic) and applies to all humans while Voodoo claims to only be applicable to certain families, tribes or select few.

Furthermore, the Bible is full of admonitions to avoid dabbling in the occult.

From a practical standpoint, time and resources spent trying to influence events are not available for learning Newtonian physics, statistics or writing for comprehension. To believe in Voodoo is to always have an excuse for failure and a thousand reasons to give up.

Heller and Shannon: Delegating is an art

Agent McCafferty had been confident that a lead would pop up. That is what investigation was, relentlessly sifting through data until motive, opportunity and means presented themselves.

The phone data revealed two non-natives phones sat in the Turner driveway for exactly 63 seconds and then departed. One of those phones called 9-1-1 and the 9-1-1 logs verified time and GPS position. The caller declined to identify herself but that was of little consequence.
 

The FBI had the phone numbers and were rapidly vacuuming up their life histories: Encounters with law enforcement, social media posts (even the parts they might have deleted), call and texting history. Everything.

McCafferty was convinced they had the get-away driver. If McCafferty had not been a professional, he would have classified her as “typical, down-river trailer-park trash”, but that is not how he described her in the daily meeting. People can draw their own conclusions.

“The primary person-of-interest is a woman, age 23. No known employment history. Known to law-enforcement for shoplifting, driving with a suspended license and being disorderly in public. Latest address of record is in Ecorse, Michigan. Self-described as a 'party-girl' on her social media accounts.”

Ecorse was a rust-belt, poverty-blighted suburb wedged in the armpit between Detroit and the Detroit River. It was not an “aspirational” suburb.

“Our social media team is constructing a map of known associates.” 

 

"We haven't been able to locate either phone because they must have turned them off and then dumped them. We have warrants to bring them in for questioning.”

It felt good to be able to report some progress on the case!

***

Ken Aarons, Shannon and Heller’s lawyer sat in his minivan and had another meeting with Shannon. It was lunchtime and Shannon asked to meet him in the parking lot of a farm-supply store on the south side of Ionia, Michigan.

Normally, Aarons would not have inconvenienced himself but given the amount of money she was randomly throwing away, he would have driven to the North Pole if that is where she wanted to meet.

Aarons was taken off-balance by her request.

“Heller and I had a long discussion and we want to buy a business” is how Shannon started out.

“That sounds like a very practical thing. Of course I will be glad to help you with that” Aarons responded. Giving away millions of dollars wasn’t normal and he was glad to be returning to activities he was more familiar with.

“We then we want to give it back to the employees” Shannon continued.

“Well, that would be your choice” Aarons said. “It is your company. You can do what you want with it.”

“You might want to consider the tax implications, though. The IRS will consider it ordinary income and you will create tax liabilities that will force the employees to sell their stock at a loss to pay those liabilities.” Aarons said. Any lawyer would have.

“I didn’t think of that” Shannon admitted.

“Another thing you need to consider is who will actually own the business before you give it to the employees: You? LR? Split it 51%-49%?” Aarons said. “Life is more complicated because you two are not married.”

The expression on Shannon’s face indicated that she had not thought of that, either.

“The other condition is that we want to be completely anonymous” Shannon said.

“Tough, but doable” Aarons said confidently.

“Do you have a business in mind or do you want me to help you find one?” Aarons asked. He had lots of connections in the Detroit area that would be very helpful in the search.

“Oh, we have one picked out” Shannon said. “Whelen Sporting Goods.”

It took Ken Aarons’ mind a second to whir-and-click into place. The scope of what Shannon was proposing was...breathtaking.

“Are you sure you have enough money?” Aarons ventured at last.

“Well, that depends on how good of a negotiator you are, doesn’t it?” Shannon responded. “They are in Chapter 11 and it isn’t going well for anybody. Their most senior bonds are trading for about forty cents on the dollar and they really porked up on debt at the end...that junior debt is running a bit over a penny on the dollar.”

The young lady continued to amaze Aarons. Just when he started thinking of her as young and naive, she started spitting statistics like a Wallstreet Analyst.

Aarons started to backpedal. “THAT will be a lot, lot tougher” he confided.

“There will be a lot of scrutiny from the courts and even more from the banks” Aarons said.

“Federal law requires that banks report large cash transactions. It is part of the war-on-terrorism and the war-on-drugs. You can’t just give them a pile of money and expect to remain anonymous” Aarons said.

“You know, it is probably time for me to give you the standard talk on MY legal obligations” Aarons said.

“I am an agent-of-the-court. You can ask me if something is a crime and I will tell you if it is or it isn’t. But if you TELL me you are going to commit a crime then I have an obligation, as agent-of-the-court, to stop you” Aarons said.

“Another thing is that if you TELL me that the money we are moving around is the fruit of illegal activity, then I cannot help you although I can still represent you should you find yourself being criminally prosecuted” Aarons said. “If you DON’T TELL me that it is the proceeds of illegal activities, then I will assume that the money is not tainted and we can continue to do business.”

“So are you telling me that we cannot buy Whelens or that we can buy Whelens?” Shannon asked.

“I am telling you that it will be impossible to buy it and turn around and immediately give it to the employees while remaining anonymous” Aarons said.

“Immediately…?” Shannon said.

“You can hire me to create a series of off-shore, shell corporations and we can bounce the money around between them several times, then one of the shell-corporations can make a White-Knight offer for Whelens” Aarons said. “Run it for ten years and make stock-options a substantial part of the employee pay. Then after ten years offer the remainder of the company to the employees.”

“Own and run Whelens...while working as a bank teller...for ten years. Sure, why not” Shannon said.

“I have the money in three crypto accounts. Let me hand you the thumb-drives” Shannon said. Having a pro run the money through off-shore, shell corporations sounded like a good way to make the money less traceable. Mostly, she just wanted the monkey-off-her-back.

“Don’t you want a contract?” Aarons asked, surprised.

“No. Pay yourself what you are worth plus 20%. And about those off-shore accounts, why don’t you pick countries you and your wife want to visit. Its not like Heller and I will be visiting them.”

 

Note from author: I was blessed to have a top-notch lawyer help me with this passage. I will gladly identify him if he gives me permission. All errors are mine.

 

If you need a lawyer, don't rely on fiction. Get a lawyer.

Phone update

Mrs ERJ got a text while we were in church. Somebody found my phone in the gravel parking lot behind the Quality Dairy in Eaton Rapids.

We retrieved it. It had 7% charge left.

I am in the process of emailing my contacts to my account. That is what I would miss the most.

Weather

If the weather-guessers have their act together, we will have a string of three days without rain. That means that by Tuesday afternoon, the garden MIGHT be dry enough for a first-pass with the tiller AND I can plant some onions and Super Sugar Snap peas.

Today was also a good day to get out and do a little bit of cutting.

I found a seedling plum tree in the southwest corner of my property. The only plum seeds I remember planting back there were Waneta X Elephant Heart. I eliminated cottonwoods, sumac and willow that was shading the tree because I want to ensure the tree gets ample sunlight. I hope to catch it in bloom so I can provide a bouquet of P. americana for pollination. I am very curious to sample the quality of this survivor plum.

WOKE! and WWJD

It is not uncommon for "Woke" people to lecture practicing Christians on how they think Jesus would respond to their Woke dogma.

Their onslaught can be disconcerting and it can be hard to think in the moment. So, it can be useful to have a few go-to Bible passages that we can use to test the Woke dogma.

White-guilt

This is really a trash-can of related ideas. Male-guilt. Reparations. Non-LGBT-guilt and so on.

One passage is John 9:1-3

As he passed by he (Jesus) saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Jesus answered, “Neither he nor his parents sinned; it is so that the works of God might be made visible through him.

This passage addresses Old Testament ideas of "Generational Guilt" where misfortune will follow the sinner's family for seven generations. Jesus responds that the guilt of previous generations is not the cause of misfortune and not what we should be focusing on. Rather, we should be attempting to discern and bring to reality how God can be made visible through our lives.

A second passage is Mark 7:18-22

He (Jesus) said to them, “Are even you likewise without understanding? Do you not realize that everything that goes into a person from outside cannot defile, since it enters not the heart but the stomach and passes out into the latrine?” (Thus he declared all foods clean.) “But what comes out of a person, that is what defiles. From within people, from their hearts, come evil thoughts, unchastity, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, licentiousness, envy, blasphemy, arrogance, folly.

So the egg and the sperm that combined to make a white, cis-male cannot be a cause of guilt because they came from outside that person.

Intentions matter more than outcomes

Another pillar of Woke thought is that intentions matter more than outcomes and that the giver's resulting sense of altruism and self-righteousness is the ultimate metric of the purity of their intention.

James 2:15-17

If a brother or sister has nothing to wear and has no food for the day, and one of you says to them, “Go in peace, keep warm, and eat well,” but you do not give them the necessities of the body, what good is it? So also faith of itself, if it does not have works, is dead.

I think this verse speaks directly to the Woke idiots who feelz so good about encouraging grade-school kids to cut off their junk and take hormones.

Another passage that speaks to this is in Luke 9.

“Two people went up to the temple area to pray;
one was a Pharisee and the other was a tax collector.
The Pharisee took up his position and spoke this prayer to himself,
‘O God, I thank you that I am not like the rest of humanity —
greedy, dishonest, adulterous — or even like this tax collector.
I fast twice a week,
and I pay tithes on my whole income.’
But the tax collector stood off at a distance
and would not even raise his eyes to heaven
but beat his breast and prayed,
‘O God, be merciful to me a sinner.’
I tell you, the latter went home justified, not the former;
for everyone who exalts himself will be humbled,
and the one who humbles himself will be exalted.”

Some "pretty good" music for Sunday

 

This will move some people. It might leave others cold.

Suggested by Southern Belle, who currently hails from Miami but (with God's help) is planning to move her family closer to Eaton Rapids. 

Notable for being recorded in Miami and the exceptional quality of the sound.

The intersection of adult-type humor and innocent Six-year-olds

"Were you in the military?" one of the dads from yesterday asked me.

"No. I never had the honor. Why do you ask?" I said.

"It was one of the jokes you told" he said.

Given the age of the kids and the fact that I was helping a Christian organization my joking around was edited a little bit.

It had to be the exchange that happened after I told one of the six-year-olds (a fact that he proudly shared with me) that the screwdriver he was using was magnetized.

He had to check it out and the fact that it held the Philips screw in position all-by-its-self was a great delight to him.

Then he asked "Is the hammer magnetized?"

I told him "Only tack-hammers are magnetized."

Him: "What is a tack-hammer?"

I told him "An A-10."