If dog breeds were human.
Belladonna introduced me to this series. This is Number Four.
The guy nailed our older German Shepherd. He sniffs us when we come home and gives us the evil-eye if we were within six feet of another dog.
***I checked out the other three. If you watch number four then you also saw the first three since he spliced the first three together to make #4***
Maslow's Hierarchy is a model proposed by Abraham Maslow in 1943 in an attempt to explain motivation in humans.
It is taught to every college student who takes Psychology 101.
College students, being in that idealistic time-of-life, might remember the basic physical needs look food but they ALWAYS remember "Self-Actualization".
Ferdinand Fourier in his book Coaching for Improved Work Performance is dismissive of Maslow's hierarchy as a tool for managing workers.
Some magnificent piano music to brighten your day. 26 minute play-time
Paraphrasing, Fourier's criticism is that Maslow's implicit basis is that humans are solely motivated by whichever one of these items it rests upon in the moment...or second. The mind flits from thought-to-thought like a pianist's fingers on the keyboard.
Evolved...
My beef with Maslow's Hierarchy is what it morphed into.
Invariably, students graduate with the subconscious belief that to "Self-actualize" is to be more evolved and more refined than the unwashed masses and their goal should be to remain unfettered by anything that will diminish that refinement.
Unfettered of commitments, children and any other attachments that might not continuously stimulate they embark upon an ever upward-arching trajectory of Self-Actualization.
By all means, get another advanced degree, take another cruise to Outer Elbownia, fly to Sydney OZ to have cocktails with your buddy, ski down Mt McKinley, skin-dive in Tabuan-Lasa. But never, never, never get locked into a commitment.
We are born ADHD and daffy. Socialization teaches us to shut gates, put things back, keep promises and all of those mundane things are not about "Self-actualization" but are all about not screwing the next guy who comes along.
My gut-feel is that Maslow's "Self-Actualization" was a hasty afterthought. I think he felt a need for a capstone and asked his associate "Livingstone...what do you do when you have met all of your commitments at the end of the month and cannot fall asleep?"
"Why, Doctor Maslow, I attempt to tie the perfect Royal Coachman fly on #18 Mustad nymph hook." Livingston replied.
"Why do you do that, Livingstone?" Maslow asked.
"Because it is the one thing I do by myself. I do it when everybody else is asleep. Tying flies is the hardest, most demanding thing I can do."
"Hmmm. I think I will call that 'Self-actualization'. Bully for you Livingstone. I think I can publish this paper, now."
It would not bother me in the least if they stopped teaching Maslow's Hierarchy of self-absorption in Universities. No, not the least little-bit.
“I thought you said you didn’t know how to shoot?” Jarrell accused Melody.
“I never said that” Melody said. “I said I would feel safe if you knew how to shoot.”
“What is the difference?” Jarrell asked.
“Nobody can stay awake all of the time. Nobody has eyes in the back of their head” Melody said. “It is as simple as that. ”
"Staying alive in combat is a team sport" she concluded.
"You sound just like your dad, sometimes" Jarrell said.
Melody responded with a small curtsy. "If you are going to steal, steal from the best."
Down at street level, Gary asked Mayor Wagner what he wanted done with the weedy, young man’s corpse and the truck.
The Mayor was struggling to keep his gorge from riding. He turned away so he did not have to look at the raggedy pile of clothing that just seconds ago had been a young man.
“Take the truck out to one of the oil-wells. Drain the gas and whatever other fluids you think are useful. Throw the body in the river on the north end of town” the Mayor said.
That made sense to Gary. The river flowed north out of town into a sprawling flood-plain where there were no houses.
“No problem” Gary said. “Turtles gotta eat, too.”
Gary had a couple of buddies throw the body in the back of the truck. Driving out East Street, it took thirty seconds to stop, drop the tailgate, drag out the body and then roll it down the bank.
The driver of the chase vehicle did not even need to get out and help.
The truck was high enough for them to slide a five-gallon can and a funnel beneath it.
Gary drove a screwdriver through the thin metal of the gas tank and they only harvested a couple of gallons of gas. It seem likely that the driver of the truck had been trusted with barely enough fuel to make a round trip from Lansing to Eaton Rapids.
Out on the Easter Egg honey-trap, business was brisk. Lena became increasingly agitated as not every truck turned up the drive, but a good many of them did.
About one in the afternoon, Lena asked Dar “How long is this going to go on?”
“Hard to know. There are a lot of people in Lansing and all of them are hungry” Dar admitted.
Fortunately, they had not two-fers to deal with. A truck would pull up the drive. The passenger would invariable get out and try to chase down the tethered hens.
Owen would take one and Dar the other. They kept Lena back for runners.
Then they would drag out the driver and toss him and the passenger into the back and drove the truck around back out-of-sight.
They were going to need a new parking lot pretty soon. They had seven vehicles and they were coming steady.
“Whaddya say I run back to my place and fix you guys some lunch?” Lena asked.
That sounded pretty good to the boys.
An hour later Lena was back, just madder than hell.
At least one of those raiders had hit Lena’s place in her absence.
“Probably a good thing you where here” Dar tried to calm her down. “Every damned one of them has been armed.”
Lena had opened up the coops and pushed the remaining hens out to free range. At least they would have a fighting chance of surviving longer than if they could just be chased down and their necks wrung.
As she fretted, she asked, “Whadda we gonna do if this goes on for weeks. We can’t just sit here.”
“You have a real good point” Dar admitted. “I haven’t been thinking that far ahead. I pretty much got all of my friends into the mix.”
“Maybe you know some people who can relieve us so we can flip on the high-beams and think a little bit longer term” Dar said.
“I don’t know that many people any more. Most the people I know are old, like me. But I can call Haley and maybe she can find us some help” Lena said.
Owen cocked an eyebrow. “Who is Haley?”
“Haley is my granddaughter” Lena said, proudly. “She is seventeen.”
Similar conversations were taking place in town.
Jarrell hated being pinned in one place, even if it was the top of the Red Star and he was with Melody. It felt too much like being a deer in the headlights.
“Hey, Melody” he said.
“What?”
“Can you handle things for a half an hour? I want to find the Mayor and see what is up” Jarrell said.
“Sure, no problem” Melody said.
Jarrell called the Mayor on his phone and requested a few minutes of face-time.
The Mayor replied “I don’t have a time slot until after dinner.”
“I guess that will have to do” Jarrell said.
I finally had Millie (the calf with the poop-ring on her tail) in a paddock with running water and had help lined up to cut the poop-ball off Millie's tail.
At two this afternoon we trooped out there and tried to wheedle and sweet talk Millie into getting close enough to slip a loop around her. Belladonna had a bottle and I had a bucket of corn. All the other calves said "Pick me! Pick me!"
Millie flipped us the bird. She knew something was up.
Then I chased Millie around the paddock until she was too exhausted to run any more. Then I knocked her down like a cowboy. In this case, a heiferboy. Chasing a sick animal is not best practice but I didn't see that I had any other options.
I kept my weight on Milie's front end and contemplated what a nice sofa her hide would make while Bella walked up to the house and turned on the water.
Then Bella fed Millie the bottle of milk replacer while I worked on the poop-ball. It took about ten minutes of whittling to shave/peel/chip the ball off. My guess is that it weighed about 24 ounces.
It was in layers like a dipped candle, which I guess makes sense.
I am not sure we got it off soon enough. Fortunately, there appeared to be good blood flow to the tail and it never went completely anaerobic. The fact that the tail was tender was also a good sign.
As we walked back up to the house, Bella filled in for the absent Mrs ERJ "Clothes in the washer. HOT water and a dab of bleach. Then YOU go into the shower and wash with HOT water." It was in her Not-Messing-Around voice. I wonder where she got that?
Things look promising. As we walked away, Millie showed her appreciation by pooping. She was able to lift her tail and none of the poop hit it.
The other bright spot is that if she continues to show appreciation for the bottle, it will be an easy way to accurately dose her and the meds will go much farther. The little critter can use a few bonus calories in her.
And now I intend to make the rest of the Sabbath a day of rest.
What do hallucinogenic-drugs, mass-hysteria, systemic-racism and space-aliens and magic have in common?
The explain EVERYTHING and predict nothing.
That is why airplanes are held together with spars and rivets rather than magical incantations.
Do drugs, hysteria, racism, aliens and magic exist? Certainly there is evidence of them.
Yeah, probably so. But the fact that they are "rear-view mirror" explanations severely limits their utility, especially when they blind decision-makers to ways of looking at the worlds that have predictive capability and give the decision-maker a much, much higher degree of control of the outcome.
Systemic-racism can be used to explain every booboo, injustice and stroke of misfortune that ever befell a person-of-color.
Systemic-racism can be used to explain much higher rates of maternal mortality (for instance).
But the screed of systemic-racism will not FIX hard issues like maternal mortality and, in fact, will prevent those issues from being solved.
Hard question must be asked. Some of them look into genetic predisposition and others examine sacred cows like Medicaid and the lack of monetary disincentive to blowing-off appointments.
So forgive me if I do not bow to the alters of magic mushrooms, rave parties, BLM/Systemic-racism, space-aliens and bigfoot.
I have a life to live and real problems to solve.
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| My target day for planting the potatoes was May 1 but I would have been equally thrilled if they had gotten in the ground within a week on either side of that date. |
I got the potatoes planted today.
The rows started bellying out to the left and then hooking back to the right. I was in a hurry and did not stretch a line. These rows are also longer than my usual garden row. They are 100 feet long, give or take a bit.
The problem, I deduced, was that the gas tank is biased to the right of the center line of my rototiller. I was visually sighting over the center of my gas-tank which first caused me to list to the port and then as I neared the far marker I corrected to the starboard.
I think I need to install gunsights on the tiller if I continue to favor long rows.
I am tuckered out. I put in 100 ft of Yukon Gold, 100 ft of Megachip, 100 ft of Kennabec, and 300 ft of "Rescued" feral potatoes from last year. I pulled the rescues from assorted patches where I had previously grown potatoes.
According to Michigan State University field trials, if you do everything right (enough nitrogen, irrigate, quick foliage canopy, control potato beetles, plant virus free seed) you can reasonably expect to harvest one pound of potatoes per square foot of potato patch.
In today's cosmetic world, a significant percentage of them cannot be sold as Grade A. Some will be too big or too small or too lumpy. But if you are hungry I don't know how worried you will be about cosmetics.
Because of the width of my tiller, I plant rows that are 42" apart. Roughly speaking, if everything goes peachy I might have to dig up 1800 pounds of potatoes. Experience tells me that digging potatoes is much, much heavier work than planting them.
I am an old man. Planting 600 feet of garden was enough for one day. I am recovering by sipping on a spring tonic that is a tincture of spearmint shoots and assorted carbohydrates as is traditional for the day the Kentucky Derby runs.
A few photos
A couple of shots showing the degree of leafing out of deciduous trees. I saw my second swallow today but in a different neighborhood.
I was at Mom's Thursday and Friday.
She wanted to show me this picture of her mother's family. There was a bit of speculation regarding which of these fine looking, young ladies is my mother's mother. My money is on the one behind the patriarch's right shoulder.
Weeds never sleep.
This is a photo of where I cut multiflora rose bushes. You can see where I missed one on the extreme right side of the photo. It is the ball of bright, spring-green.
Weed control is endless. It is a leaky process. As futile as controlling weeds seems to be, the only thing a hundred times worse than attempting to control weeds are the results you will get if you don't try to keep a lid on them.
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| Data from the CDC for 2015-2019 |
Senator Tim Scott dragged the leftist-narrative that America is besieged by "Systemic Racism" out into the sunlight.
One of the talking heads pointed to the difference in health outcomes between Blacks and Whites and said it was evidence of "Systemic Racism". He claimed that Black women are five-to-six times more likely to die as a result of pregnancy.
According to the CDC, he exaggerated a little bit but there is a marked difference in mortality rates.
Digging a little bit deeper
The two biggest causes of death during pregnancy (of the mothers, not the fathers) are related to sudden-onset high blood pressure and due to blood clots, specifically lung embolisms.
Blacks have a higher rate of both high blood pressure AND blood clots in veins. There is no consensus regarding root-causes. Diet, genetics and life-style choices are often proposed as potential contributors.
Since high blood pressure is often free of external symptoms, it is imperative that pregnant women keep their pre-natal appointments.
It is within the bounds of the imagination that Black women, who are more likely to be single mothers, might have difficulty getting time off work or finding somebody to watch their other children so they can make their appointments. It would be interesting to see if there are any racial disparities in rates of missed pre-natal appointments.
Deep vein thrombosis is a typical source of the clots that break loose and cause lung embolisms, heart attacks and strokes. Again, there is no consensus on the reasons for racial disparities but genetics, sedentary lifestyles, obesity and going meds-noncompliant might be players.
Aspirin?
Aspirin binds to proteins in the blood and its anticoagulant effect throws a long shadow.
It would be interesting to see the effect of putting Black women on a regimen of one, low-dose (81mg) aspirin every-other day starting week 15 to prophylactically treat DVT.
There are two reasons why this will probably never happen.
There is no money in it for Big Pharma so nobody will fund the study (which would be dirt-cheap to run)
Blacks are historically distrustful of the medical establishment. Whenever that distrust starts to wane, somebody drags out the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment as "proof" that doctors cannot be trusted.
Summary
"Systemic racism" is a self-perpetuating meme. Belief in "systemic racism" causes Black people to be distrustful of medical people and, presumably, be more resistant to advice and treatment.
If "Systemic racism" exists in the United States it is because hustlers and the naive keep saying there is.
