Perspective

The northeast corner of M-50 and Vermontville Highway in Eaton County, Michigan. A small, stuffed "Snoopie" figure, a balloon, a tiny baseball hat and a cross.

 

You don't need a college degree in Mechanical Engineering to figure out what happened. Somebody on Vermontville Highway who was heading east decided to blow-through the stop-sign. It is likely they slowed down a bit but did not stop. Whoever was traveling north on M-50 at 60mph T-boned them.

Prayers for the families involved. One family lost a son. Another family (likely) is bearing a heavy burden of guilt.

It makes my personal problems seem small.

Apples

Seven gallon tubs hold between 30 and 35 pounds of apples, which is enough to make ten quarts of apple sauce.

During Belladonna's senior year, at the Winter Sports Awards Banquet, her basketball coach had an epiphany while handing out the awards.

Bella didn't get a lot of playing time. The coach loved a certain type of player and Bella didn't match that cookie-cutter image.

Bella got play time every game but it came in dribs-and-drabs.

At the Banquet, the coach was clobbered between the eyes that on a per-minute basis, Belladonna was either her top, or second most productive player.

It didn't matter if she was outmatched for height or if they were playing a "fast" team or a "physical" team, Bella got results.

That doesn't just happen in high school basketball.

The apples in the seven gallon containers are a variety called Melrose. It is the Ohio State apple and is not fussy. It produces in good years and bad. It is not considered "scab-resistant" but the apples shown above were never sprayed.

It isn't a perfect apple. The taste is a little bit bland but there is nothing to really dislike about the apple. And this summer really accelerated the ripening cadence. Melrose is usually an October 1 apple in my area and I am picking them the first week of September because the Liberty I wanted to turn into applesauce are on the ground and rotting.

Melrose is not the first apple I would suggest for a "survival" orchard but it is a sleeper, sort of like Belladonna was in her senior year playing basketball.

Bees

I think I found out where the bee swarms were originating.

About twenty years ago I became interested in beekeeping. Heavy losses in the winter convinced me that it was not the hobby for me. While messing around with the hobby, I constructed several top-bar hives.

A swarm of bees found one of those old, top-bar hive bodies and decided to make it home.

I wonder how long they have been in it. It COULD be full of honey comb.

An Gratuitous Exercise in Math and Technology

This video has been making the rounds. It is presumably of Venezuelan gang-members running amok in an apartment building in Aurora, Colorado. You can see everything important in the first 15 seconds.

There are some quirky things about this video. For one thing, they push the door open and walk right in after making a phone call. Maybe the apartment is a retail outlet for an undocumented pharmaceutical distribution center? It is telling that that the door is opened from the inside for the thugs (10 second mark) and that (Pink Purse) is facing away from the people in the apartment three seconds after the door starts to open.

I sent this video to one of my friends who used to be in-the-business and he identified Pink Purse as the guy-in-charge based on the fact that the first people to show up were aimlessly milling around. Only Pink Purse moved with purpose.

He also noted that they didn't-have-a-clue. If they were actually entering hostile territory (i.e. another gang's dealer) that they would likely take several casualties. That is circumstantial evidence that they were entering "friendly" territory.

His "read" is that the second scenario (below) is what went down.

Four scenarios

• A visit to a "friendly" pharmaceutical distribution center by "management"
• A visit to a competitor's pharmaceutical distribution center. Dude on phone was pretending to arrange a buy to get the door open.
  
• A home invasion (which is how all of the news outlets are packaging it)
• Intentionally recorded for "recruiting purposes" by the "gang".

The scenario that the rest of this post considers is the third scenario, a home-invasion...even though I sincerely doubt this is what really happened.

Countermeasures

Lock your doors. Make them work to get inside of your home. Time is your friend.

Don't sell drugs

Drugs (and lots of cash) attract the kind of people you don't want to attract.

Technology

It is mathematically possible to have three cameras in the hallway and it is almost trivial for video-cards and software to precisely map, in 3D-space, the geometric centers of warm objects like faces.

Inside of the apartment, it is also trivial to mount an Infrared emitting LED near the front-sight of a firearm's barrel and use cameras to locate it in 3D-space.

(Assumptions about elevation can be made and to reduce the number of cameras...but why? They are cheap)

A gifted 7th grader can do the math to determine where lines originating from the LED on the barrel and terminating in the middle of the faces will intersect in the plane of the door-or-wall.

It is also fairly trivial to program a projection TV to paint 1" diameter dots (of various colors) on the plane of the door and/or wall and illustrate that intersection. Were a besieged home-owner to employ a semi-automatic rifle with the appropriate ammo, he/she could send 5 shots down-range in less than 2.5 seconds with a very-high probability of hitting each of the five potential assailants in their face.

Or, if you are worried about deflection due to the barrier posed by the wall or door, the software could specify an impact point on the target 300 millimeters below the center of the face. That would hit the target about 2" below their nipples which is a wider target and less subject to whipping around.

The lag-time between the actual location of the targets and the display would probably be about 1/15th of a second.

Of course, if you dump five gang-dudes in five shots you need to de-camp pronto and become invisible. You also need to contact your lawyer NOT USING YOUR CELL PHONE so he/she can run interference with the "justice" monopoly. Getting sucked into the system would expose you to incarceration and retribution from other gang-members.

Closing observation

Is it possible that the media is about to toss the Dems beneath the bus?

I know this flies in the face of everything EVERYBODY know, but is it possible that the mainstream media suddenly realized that the Democrat's main offering is not a choice bit of sizzling filet mignon but is a steaming pile of dog feces? Maybe they realize that if the Second Amendment is optional, then so is the First Amendment.

This would have been a very easy video to "disappear". But they didn't disappear it. That is puzzling. Everybody loves to bet on the winning pony.

September 2 Property Walk

Mrs ERJ and I made a trip out to the property.

We walked around and removed "unauthorized" tree stands. The owner of the property informed all of the deer-hunters who had hunted the property in previous years to remove their tree-stands. That was six months ago and makes all of the ones that remain on the property "unclaimed property".

We found six and removed three of them. Two of them were on the property line and feelers were put out to the party that hunts the adjacent parcel. The other stand was lag-bolted into the tree and I didn't have tools to remove it.

The stands were in two Black Walnuts, one Shagbark Hickory, one Silver Maple, one White Oak and the one shown above was in a Northern Red Oak. One stand in a Black Walnut and the one in the White Oak were attached to the tree with lag-bolts into the trees.

Then Mrs ERJ mowed grass while I marked trees for cutting and turning over some sod for spring 2025 tree planting. I also cleared and reset the traps.

My best guess is that there are 25 "holes" in the apple orchard, 30 "holes" in the new orchard and eleven + eight holes on the steepest part of the slope.

The owner wants apples replanted where the apples were and is OK with Asian Pears replacing the holes in the new orchard. Chestnuts and a couple of pecan trees will be planted on the steepest slopes.

Fortunately, the landlord has budget for making those kinds of improvements...maybe from selling tree-stands 8-).

Fruit is ripening way ahead of schedule

Most of the Liberty are already on the ground.

I need to pick fruit and get it squirreled away in the shade to process later.

The economy

I am starting to see more "toys" beside the road with "For Sale" signs on them.

This and that

I saw a plant that I didn't recognize and it keyed out to Ageratina altissima also known as White Snakeroot. Pollinators seemed to like it although Goldenrod is in full bloom almost everywhere it is sunny so it has a lot of competition.

Lobelia was also spotted in a damp spot and it is a lovely shade of blue.

I also saw three more Basswood on the property.

Early Goose Season

September 1 was the start of early goose season in Michigan.

Kubota and three of his buddies harvested 23 birds yesterday. Amazed at the shear sheer number of the wary birds they shot, I asked what kind of camo they had been wearing.

"Plaid" is what Kubota responded. "And next time we are renting a golf cart because those birds are heavy!"

And that explains why their "bird dog" is a Border Collie.

Labor Day

Labor Day is slightly misnamed. It's origins were in the ORGANIZED LABOR movement so it would be more accurate to call it Union Day.

Approximately 6% of the workers in the private sector were unionized in 2023. Approximately 32% of the public sector workers are unionized. (Source)

Union organizers love to say that everybody could be "middle-class" if the entire economy was unionized.

Unfortunately, economists disagree. Unions typically increase the wages of one sector of the economy without increasing productivity. More typically, unions reduce productivity by fragmenting tasks so three different "trades" need to be called in to fix minor issues. One guy digs the hole. Another guy splices the hose. The third guy signs off on the "safety punch-list" while a fourth guy is a spotter for traffic.

So John, who works in a union shop and makes $33/hour can "buy" three hours of unskilled time to cut his lawn at $11/hour. If the people who did landscaping were unionized and commanded $33/hour, then he could only "buy" one-hour (less taxes) with one hour of his labor.

Unions don't create wealth. They distort the flow of resources through the system and create the illusion of wealth.

Unions do more than just negotiate wages. They also represent workers when there is a dispute between the worker and his supervision.

Perhaps the most compelling argument that "Government" is not inherently benevolent is that Government Workers don't trust their supervisors who are fellow Government Workers. In fact, they find them five times less trustworthy than their private-sector counterparts if you use union membership as a yardstick.

From a time when hearing other opinions didn't trigger people

 

Run-time of two minutes.

There was a time when people could disagree and discuss their views without having to water-down their arguments for "feelings".

For the younger readers, this clip is COMEDY.

It boggles the mind that people who can listen to rap and WAP are offended by content like the above.

We have Crime. Harris wants us to have Joy

From September 1, 2024 Daily Mail. Happened in broad daylight.

From September 1, 2024 Daily Mail. Happened in broad daylight.

From September 1, 2024 Daily Mail

San Francisco and Minneapolis claim Kamala Harris and Tim Walz as their daughter and son. Both cities are Deep Blue. What are the odds of the first two headlines of out-of-control crime were in those paragons of Progressive values?

The last image happened near San Antonio, Texas. Bexar County is Deep Blue. Biden carried it by 20 percentage points in 2020.