Cuomo, reparations and Covid shutdowns

Cuomo: At least they were adults. Why the fuss now?

Reparations: If you never learned how to manage money you won't have any now and if somebody gave you a million dollars you won't have any of it 18 months from now.

Covid shutdown: 

Killed by "...an abundance of caution..."

Markle Malarkey: You can take the trash out of the trailer park but she is still trash. This is what happens when Kardashians retire. It is a pity Harry couldn't have scratched that itch by watching Jerry Springer reruns.

Remnant: One-in-four-hundred

The Seven-to-the-Seventh movement started out as research for a Doctoral thesis.

Xio Pei Lui, lately of Princeton but now seeking his Ph.D at Boston University needed to perform unique, ground-breaking research. Born in Harbin, China, his parents moved to the US when he was six. Unlike his father, he chose to study psychology.

It was an uphill slog. Very few professions are as resistant to outsiders as the social sciences and his professors could not envision him in clinical work (after all, how many poorly adjusted Asians do you see?) and they certainly did not want to have to contend with a flood of motivated Asians fighting for Professor track jobs.

Consequently, the guidance he received from his major professor-advisor was haphazard at best and deliberately misleading at worst. That is how Xio Pei found himself invested in a topic that was virtually guaranteed to spike his thesis: working title, “Quantifying the gullibility of Political Science, Criminal Justice and Social Sciences upper-classmen of Boston University”.

Mr Lui knew that the typical methods of extracting information had grave shortcomings. For one thing, participants will give the answers they think are expected rather than the answers that lie closest to their hearts. This has been know since the time of the Ford Edsel, a car designed based on the answers reported in formal surveys.

Mr Lui came up with a novel idea as befitted his native intelligence, his diligence and the needs of his thesis: He started a religion.

His plan was to start with credible pablum and to progressively layer on more-and-more outlandish claims. His metrics were the number of adherents and their “involvement” based on the amount of engagement in social media.

Spoiler: One line in the Abstract of his draft thesis read “Good faith efforts to plumb the depths of Boston University undergraduates' credulousness revealed that there is no line long enough to find the bottom.”

• Mr Lui posed as an exiled dissident from mainland China.
• Mr Lui claimed to have come from a remote, mountainous region of China.
• Mr Lui posed as a member of a repressed religious group.
• Then, like a skilled strip-teaser, Mr Lui gulled his audience into believing that he was the reincarnation of the group's spiritual leader and that the remote valley was the Asian, spiritual equivalent of Wakanda.

To Lui’s surprise, no claim was too extravagant. For every acolyte who left in disgust, eight more joined. Stephanie Stewart was one of those early joiners. 

The need to find ever-more unlikely and offensive-to-common-sense claims would have stumped a less gifted of a scholar than Mr Lui. But Mr Lui mined the electronic libraries of the world.

• He could communicate with his disciples through magic-mushroom enhanced visions
• Gaia was kind and benevolent and would cheerfully meet human needs if humans accepted Gaia’s place for us.
• Primitive cultures were highly advanced and had deep, deep knowledge of Gaia.
• People of primitive cultures could talk with animals just like in Disney animations
  
• Birds would pick prime fruit from the tops of trees when people were hungry and deposit it in their hands
• Lions and tigers and wolves were vegan and ate a special kind of grass that became rare after human population reached a certain level.
• The biggest whopper of all was that Gaia would be in balance in the Western Hemisphere when the population of the United States was reduced to the special number of 7^7, or Seven-to-the-Seventh Power; 823,543.
• His disciples (who of course would be that remnant of 0.25% or one-in-400) would have glorified bodies that would feel no pain or cold or heat and were immune to death.
• All they had to do was massacre 399 out of every 400 Americans.

None of his followers had the mental acuity to question why a demi-god who promised immortality had to be reincarnated.

As suddenly as the S2SP showed up, Mr Liu disappeared. The doctoral committee unanimously rejected his thesis and his research and informed him that he would have to start over.

Having wasted nearly three years of his life on his trashed doctoral research, Mr Lui abandoned his Ph.D., took out a loan from his father and opened an appliance store in Ashland, Ohio. Mr Liu joked that he went from a demi-god to a refrigerator magnate in the space of two weeks.

His twenty-thousand fanatical followers believed that he had transmorgified and moved on to another plane. They continued to trip on magic mushrooms (and LSD when it was cheaper) awaiting further direction.

That is when Evelyn Lovelace stumbled upon them. Twenty-thousand freaks primed and ready to slaughter 99.7% of the U.S. population in the name of “Gaia”. All they needed were the means.

It was trivial for Mrs Lovelace to have bags of Turkish ammonium nitrate rebagged as Turkish Portland cement powder, placed on pallets and then covered with legitimate bags of concrete. The Lovelace family had grown in power and influence during the Prohibition by smuggling booze. A few bags of “fake” cement powder was a piece of cake.

Once the Conex containers were state-side, they were shipped to a small facility for sorting. Heavy bags went back on pallets. Light bags went into the back of a pick-up truck with muddy license plants.

The difference between sand and quicksand is that quicksand sits atop a spring. The up-welling water lifts the sand and separates it. Sand is solid and unyielding. Quick-sand is in a flux and will conform to the shape of any form it is poured into.

Beyond ugly

In its most basic sense a business takes inputs like labor, raw materials, floor space and combines them in ways that create value. That is, the final products are worth more than the inputs.

A rancher takes tiny calves, grass, salt and water and grows them into 600 pounds of edible beef.

A farmer takes seeds and fertilizer and wear-and-tear on equipment and 18 hour work-days and produces 22 million Calories per acre.

A landlord takes credit and houses and a deep bench of support people and provides housing for people who need a place out-of-the-weather to sleep.

Nearly half of all businesses will cash in their chips by the end of April unless something exceptional happens.

That would not be a concern if we could eat grass or fertilizer. If we could all fix our own plumbing and roofs and pour our own concrete.

The cynics among us expect the powers-that-be will use the crisis to demand business owners bend their knees in fealty to the new order.

If you have family members who own a business, please understand they are under tremendous stress. If it is within your ability, offer any help you can...a few hours behind the counter or a few dollars of custom at their business or a sympathetic ear.

We are all in this together.

Stockpiled Pasture and Smart-donuts

 

For those of you who are connoisseurs of cow poop will recognize the high, fractured contour of cattle that have been eating overly-mature, high fiber forage.

I look at these cow-flops and can be assured that my new calves are collecting a substantial amount of their gut-fill by grazing. The cracked corn I am feeding them is not visible on the surface of the pat.

By mass, most of the forage that is still available is Tall Fescue (Festuca arundinacea). Tall Fescue is a bunch-type grass that can be crowded together to make a sod. In general, Tall Fescue is one of the less palatable pasture grasses but it does remain up-right and mold free through the winter and can provide enough nutrition to keep animals alive.

Smart-donuts

Belladonna is a very fine lass but sometimes she makes sport of us oldsters and our aversion to kid-technology. It is as annoying as the HP guys who claimed to be smarter than the students who used TI calculators. What is intuitive to one group is not intuitive to the other.

There she was talking about smartphones and smart-appliances and smart-this and smart-that.

I informed her that when I was growing up we had smart-donuts.

"?????" her face said.

So I punched her in the shoulder and asked, "Smarts, don't it?"

Remnant: Judge Victoria Davis

Victoria Davis had been a darling of the Progressives. She belonged to all of the right organizations. She participated. She was young and photogenic and very well-spoken. Her parents were College Professors and she had grown up in an uber-liberal suburb attached the University. Not only that, but her father was of Scot-Tamil extraction and her mother was Puerto Rican.

Supreme Court judges in Michigan are nominally nonpartisan be each election cycle the Progressives throw their muscle behind two candidates and the Conservatives back two other candidates.

Victoria knocked off a weak Conservative candidate to become Michigan’s first Sri Lankan/Puerto Rican State Supreme Court Justice at the age of 35. The Progressives were over-joyed because they assumed she was a “lifer”.

Their joy soured as she ruled against the Progressive “agenda”. She refused to “write law” from the bench. After being called-to-task by the leading Progressives in the state (perhaps not their wisest move), Victoria informed them that changing law from the bench was akin to rearranging the furniture in Hellen Keller’s living room. It might make perfect sense to the people moving the furniture but it was not a service to Ms Keller.

If Progressives wanted laws changed or tweaked, they needed to do it through the legislative process so ALL people impacted by the change had a chance to weigh in. The fact that the legislative process is not as “responsive” as writing law from the bench was a feature, not a bug. Just ask Ms Keller.

Judge Davis cared about people, not causes.

Meghan agonized over sharing her father’s recording of the conversation with Boo Steezey and Ben Chode. In the end, she did share it.

Justice Davis was conditioned to absorb mountains of information. It was the curse of technology. Since it was the source of the curse, she had no qualms about using it to make life easier. She had software that compressed video and audio without distorting the sound quality. The two minute video played in thirty seconds.

Justice Davis shot Meghan a quick email. “Looks like your dad is handling it. Keep me informed.”

*

Jarrell and Jim made good time. West on M-50 to I-69, then I-69 to Indy.

Just short of Indy, they stopped to get fuel and chatted it up with the middle-Eastern gentleman behind the counter. He advised that they avoid Indy if they could. Gangs had been shutting down the freeway, beating the occupants of vehicles and stealing everything.

That put the men onto secondary roads. And it seemed prudent to stay on them if they were going to get off the freeway at every major city.

They topped off the tank every time it dropped to ¾. They still made good time. The twelve-hour trip took fifteen-hours. They sacked-out in the cab of the truck at the address where the generator head was stored. It took about ten minutes to load and then they were on their way back, 36 hours from Danny’s place to KC and back.

* 

 

Stephanie Stewart uploaded the video footage of the device she and Ted had used to deploy the jellyfish that hammered the Pennsylvania power plants. She included parts lists, dimensions...everything domestic terrorists would need to replicate the device.

Stephanie uploaded it to a private hosting service and to several of the mainstream video hosting sites.

*

The pressure in the natural gas lines continued to drop.

In several major cities, the pressure dropped below what is required to keep pilot flames lit. While few furnaces still relied on the ancient technology SOME of them did.

The utility companies followed their emergency plan books and turned off the distribution to those branches. Predictably, residents immediately started plugging in their space heaters and the electrical grid staggered under the load and the rolling blackouts went to plain-old-blackout.

The tensions that had been building because of the pandemic and shattered economy erupted into flames and outright street-to-street fighting between competing gangs.

A Primer on Primers

 

I was reading the comments at Joel's blog The Ultimate Answer to Kings and somebody mentioned a site which educates people on how to reload Boxer primers.

Down the rabbit hole I went.

Scanning microscope image of diatomaceous earth.

So many choices. Incidentally, if I were to pick a recipe that used ground nitrocellulose and ground glass, I do believe I would use Win PB (or Vectan GM-3) as either would be easy to grind and I would look at using diatomaceous earth instead of ground glass.

Remnant: A Phone Call

Photo credit Grace Grogan

---Obligatory reminder: This is fiction---

Mayor Wagner was at his regular post beneath the clock outside City Hall when his phone rang.

Looking at the number he deduced that it was from a State assigned cell-phone. He took the precaution of turning on an app he had recently added to his phone.

He had never had to multi-task the way he did now. Everybody looked to him no mater how much he tried to delegate. Every little squabble came to him as the tie-breaker.

He just couldn’t keep up. He couldn’t keep the facts and particulars straight especially when the spats were about things so inconsequential. It seemed that the more trivial the stakes of the disagreement, the more unbending the participants were in their respective positions.

Mayor Wagner’s wife suggested that he add a voice recorder to his smart phone. Of course, he always asked their permission before recording.

Not only did it help him keep track but a surprising number of people decided they did NOT want him “helping” when he was capturing a permanent record of their petty beef.

Since the party on the other end was calling him, he decided to not inform them that he was using the memory aid.

“Hello. Eaton Rapids’ Mayor Wagner on the line. How may I help you today?” the Mayor answered his phone.

“Hello Mayor Wagner. My name is ‘Boo’ Steezey and I am an aide to the Michigan Attorney General.” *

The call sounded hollow and echo-y.

“Are you on speaker phone?” Mayor Wagner asked. The Mayor had an instinctive dislike for people, educated-professional-people, who used pet baby-names. He also considered the callers' not announcing that they were on speaker-phone to be a grave faux-pas of phone etiquette.

“Oh, I should have mentioned that. And there is another person in the room with me.” ‘Boo’ said.

“Hello, Mayor. My name is Ben Chode and I work for the Governor” a male voice informed him.

The mayor didn’t ask if there was anybody else in the room. He just assumed there was.

“So, I have a lot on my plate. What do you want?” the mayor asked again.

“Well, Mr. Mayor, you have not been very cooperative at the meetings with the Governor and her plan to bring energy back on-line. We are doing follow-up on that” Mr. Chode said.

“Follow-up? What do you need to know?” Wagner asked. He had to wave away a couple of residents who were approaching him.

“We don’t have any record of the guns that were confiscated and from what houses, nor the addresses where breakers were pulled” ‘Boo’ informed him.

“And you aren’t going to get any” Wagner informed them. “I conferred with our city attorney and he informed me that it was a clear violation of the Second Amendment.”

“That is all well and good” ‘Boo’ said, “but this is an emergency and none of the other mayors or utilities seem to have any issues with it.”

“We pay the city attorney damned good money to give us legal advice. Why wouldn’t I follow it?” Wagner said. “He said that Dearborn Edison and Galloping-Consumption Energy are corporations and not government entities. They are not making laws or ‘infringing’ on the Second Amendment. Our utility IS an organ of the Eaton Rapids City government and the Second Amendment very directly applies to us.”

“I am sure you see...” ‘Boo’ started out.

“Let me interrupt” Wagner said. “I am sure you didn’t cook this call up on your own, right? So you are just the delivery boy-and-girl.”

“Those are not terms I would use...” Chode objected.

“Let's cut to the chase. I either dance to the governor’s tune or else….what?” Wagner asked.

“We will cut off your natural gas supply” ‘Boo’ said.

Wagner gave a short laugh. “Seems like those terrorists are beating you to it.”

“But it will come back on-line a little at a time” ‘Boo’ said. “And we will make sure Eaton Rapids is the VERY last town to come back on-line.”

“Tell you what. Send me an email outlining exactlywhat I need to to make the governor happy and outline the consequences if I don't” Wagner said.

“You know we can’t do that” ‘Boo’ said.

“Why not?” Wagner asked. “You threatened me over the phone. Why not in an email?”

“You know why” Chode said.

“Maybe because using State authority to punish political opponents is illegal? Because threatening to hurt the innocent residents of Eaton Rapids to kick somebody you don’t like in the nuts has poor optics? Or maybe it is both?” Wagner said.

Silence from the other end.

“I don’t hear a denial so I will assume I hit the nail on the head” Wagner said.

“You tell the Governor to get her nose out of my business. I have contracts with the utilities to deliver natural gas. If the line pressure is one pound less than the pressure in Charlotte or Mason, I will take suitable action” Wagner said.

“Good-bye.” and then Wagner hung up on them. He was breathing hard and his heart rate was through the roof.

Twenty miles away, the Attorney General gave ‘Boo’ a pat on the back and said, “Good job. We gave him a chance and he didn’t take it. Now we give it to him hard.”

Actually, they would have stuck it into Wagner and broken it off, even if he had capitulated. The only thing that gave the governor more satisfaction than being vindictive was whipping a cringing dog.

Wagner distractedly walked up to his office. He downloaded the recording to his office computer and listened to it to verify that it captured the entire conversation.

Then he pulled up the State of Michigan Employee directory. He addressed an email to Susan Steezey (the only Steezey on the list) and Benjamin Chode and included their immediate supervisors. After a few seconds thought, he also included a Courtesy Copy to M.Hanson@MichiganSupremeCourt.gov

His daughter Meghan worked for Justice Victoria Davis, scourge of Michigan Progressives.



*A reader of one of my earlier posts asked where I come up with the names of my characters. In the case of Boo and Ben, I recycled Arabic and Hindi arch-characters that capture their personalities. It is a bit of an inside joke as the three-or-four readers who are conversant in Arabic or Hindi/Urdu will get a chuckle.