Sixteen tons

You load sixteen tons, and what do you get?

Another day older, and deeper in crap!

Hey liberals don't detain me 'cause I can't go

I can't even shovel my way out the door!

I don't have time for this crap, but someone has to say it...

 ...Knock. It. Off.

By the way, I was in far more physical danger during the Minneapolis/St. Paul riots--with the Twin Cities under curfews, and my midwife at risk of being pulled over on the drive to my house, where I was overdue to go into labor with a Baby of Unusual Size--than any member of Congress ever was during the January 6 "insurrection". 

If that link doesn't work, try my Locals.com Psalm73 community, which you can join for $2, I think (which goes to Locals, not to me). 

The simplest, most basic tests of who the true President is:  Does he like babies?  And do babies like him?

Biden has failed that first one already, starting with his own grandbaby that he wouldn't even acknowledge.  I don't even know if that baby is a boy or a girl! 

Slosh slosh squish slosh

Follow the money. 

 

But let none of you suffer as a murderer, or as a thief, or as an evildoer, or as a busybody in other men's matters.  -- I Peter 4:15 (KJV)

My turn, parts 2 - 94

A few years ago, I read a book called Everyday Racism, a thoroughly unscientific although commercially published book about a "study" that a professor did with black college students.  She asked them to tell her what the three most racist things that had ever happened to them were, and then she took their stories and wrote this book around them.

Reading it, I noticed two things:  first of all, the vast majority of these students' three worst victimizing racist incidents were in fact not all that bad.  Not really surprising, since both professor and students are from some college which I haven't bothered to remember the name of, that has a certain amount of Privilege attached to it.

The second thing I noticed is that very similar things have happened to me and my family.  And not just a few times; quite regularly.  And where they don't happen regularly, it's because I've been avoiding returning to the places where they did happen--shopping malls, for example.

I started listing these incidents out, and so far I am at 93 and counting.  Ninety-three little sob stories that would be marketable today, if only I were of some other race.

Well, that's not an insurmountable obstacle.  If the Black Like Me guy could travel around the South and "pass", I should be able (with a little work) to pass well enough for a couple of virtual book tours on Zoom over the next two or three years; everyone knows that COVID-19 is racist, just like everything else is....

The elite method, demonstrated so brilliantly by Christine Blasey-Ford, who didn't even need to resort to blackface, is to specifically blame whoever the Establishment is in need of demonizing at the moment, and to not worry too much about who was really present or not.  As long as the "feels" of the story are told in vivid enough detail that even the fictional elements are "brought to life", the hard facts of the matter can be left so hazy and nebulous that no one can disprove the story for certain.

The only real obstacle to this scheme is that I have a hard time writing in other styles without lapsing into parodying them.  But Sokal and others have blazed the trail there... I think the secret must be in the set of one's eyebrows; a sanctimonious posture must be a necessary precondition for sanctimonious writing.

Oh, and I better run my profile picture through MS Paint and add some Color.

Now what do we have here?

Mike Lindell has a new, long video out:  "Absolute Proof".  The beginning and the end are the most important parts; it is two hours long and far better than anything that's on TV.

Three of the players in the Antrim County Fake Election Saga appear as interviewees.

One question I have, now that I've seen most of the video is:  What else is in those terabytes of cyberattack tracking, if they were switching votes away from Trump by the tens of thousands so many times?  I mean, Trump only had so many votes to lose, for him to still come out with the unprecedented millions of votes that he did.  There must have been additions (and subtractions) for all of the candidates, and there must have been a lot of them.

Lindell didn't get into this in the video, but these operations required having Americans on the ground as election workers, to make sure that the paper ballots and other physical evidence more or less matched the net vote counts.

My other question based on the video:  Was the November 21, 2020 recount in Antrim County a hand recount, a machine recount, or both?  I've heard conflicting evidence there, but that would make sense if both a real election and a fake election happened in Antrim County, in parallel.

-------------------------

In coming attractions, besides the impeachment trial and the Trump campaign's upcoming Supreme Court case, and the March 4 Constitutional deadline for sorting out election disputes, and the Antrim County lawsuit being heard in early June, is that the Derek Chauvin trial is scheduled to begin on March 8.  Allow eight or ten weeks for the trial, and that sets up nicely for the George Floyd Memorial Rioting to get going around Memorial Day.  Instead of in the single-digit weather like we have had recently.

Chauvin is very likely to be acquitted of the second-degree murder charge, because I don't see how they can prove that without showing some real connections between Chauvin and Floyd when they both worked at that nightclub--which conveniently burned during the riots, as did the 3rd Precinct police station where evidence might have been kept.  But this is a prediction that I have to hedge; a blogger who is a very thorough researcher said at one point last year that there were aspects of this case that he didn't dare touch even with a ten-foot-pole.  He went on later to go and meet with various members of CONgress and federal agencies in person, so it must be something very big and very bad, to scare him away.

If you can read this, you can do your own taxes.

I have before a prominently-placed advertisement from a local tax service, promising the "best" rates for tax preparation.  Rate for Form 1040 starts at a bit more than $200; Earned Income Credit form in the tens of dollars, $20+ dollars to use their software for e-filing from home, if you prepare your own taxes.  Audit defense services in the hundreds of dollars.

That's ridiculous.  If  my family outsourced our tax preparation to this firm, it would increase our income tax costs by roughly one-third, and only save a few hours of my time.

The worst part of the work in tax preparation is in gathering the information that you need, and in organizing it for easy reference.  I always make a one-page summary of the most important information, and I pull out the previous year's tax return for comparison. Once you've done that, you might as well do the easier part yourself.

Now, let's get back to the ad:  the IRS has e-file options, some of them free.

The Earned Income Credit form is simple, you just have to follow the logic through one step at a time.

Here is Form 1040.  And the Form 1040 Instructions.  Again, the secret is to go Line by Line, following the logic through. When in doubt, take the instructions as literally as a computer would; the first "computers" were people.

I always use paper wherever possible, because the entire process was designed to be done on paper.  Paper also provides greater privacy, which is particularly useful when you are working with intermediate rather than final numbers.

I usually do two full passes through the 1040 and associated forms; the first pass is to "trailblaze" my way through, note any changes compared to the previous year, and make sure that I have all the forms and information that I need.  I do my writing for this on separate sheets of paper, not on the actual forms.

That sets me up for a smooth second pass, where I figure the actual numbers, etc., that I will be entering on the forms.

Finally, I go through and fill out all the forms, make copies, and mail.

If you want to keep your income taxes and life simple, then be conservative in the deductions that you claim, and base them on very solid and ethically sound numbers.  You'll sleep better at night, and if you are audited, you will able to go in with confidence.

As the steward of your income, it is very important that you understand which deductions are available to you, and how to claim them.  That is something that you cannot outsource every single year, because it can affect so many other decisions that you make.  All those convolutions of the tax code were designed to be incentives, in one way or another.

The IRS doesn't care at all if you claim too few deductions or credits, or pay too much in income tax.

And if you make a minor mistake, all they will do is send you a letter and tell you.*

 

----------------------------------

* Subject to change under the Biden administration.

My turn, part 1

My turn to haul out the sob stories, I mean.  Aren't we all a bit tired of hearing them from the left for the past four years, and also the eight years before that, and the eight before that as well....

There was something in the newspaper from a week ago Sunday that set me off a bit.  A Hmong woman was telling about how when her mother was admitted to the hospital for COVID, for her first meal the nurses ordered a special meal for her that is the first meal that they serve to Hmong women after they give birth.  After that. her family brought in "culturally-appropriate" meals for her every day.

When I transferred to the hospital with my first baby, after giving birth at home, it was in the wee hours of the morning.  The baby needed some medical observation, nothing too worrisome, and I had lost somewhat more than the usual blood loss--but not so seriously as to need to go to the hospital by myself.

I may or may not have been given a breakfast that morning in the obstetric ward, after being up all night, but at lunch time I was given a tray, and I also had a bunch of doctors coming in and out, and I didn't feel comfortable eating in front of them.  When the tray-collector came around, I told her I wasn't finished with it.  Which you can take as meaning that I had had practically no free time for eating at all, because I'm not a slow eater.

When time was coming on for supper, I remember remarking to the nurses about 6:30 pm that I was looking forward to dinner, because by then I was quite hungry.  Two or three hours later, a nurse came in, found me slumped down (with baby safely tucked in at my side) and despondent, and asked, "What's wrong?"

"Starving," I murmured.  Supper had never arrived, and my blood sugar was falling.  My husband had been away dealing with home and things, so I had been alone in the hospital for several hours at least, and not wanting to bother the nurses.

She went away, and came back with a skimpy little sandwich, and an apple.  There may have been a little juice as well.  But that was it--no tray, and no dinner.

I called my husband after I had perked up a little, and told him to BRING REAL FOOD.  He eventually showed up, bringing me a meal from Wendy's--Wendy's, after being up all night and all day giving birth and then being in the hospital.

It may be of interest to some readers to know that my hemoglobin level was 7, and all they did for it was give me some iron pills.

I think we were able to go home the next day, but before that they did a jaundice test on the baby, which led to us returning to the hospital the following day for an even bigger s***show.

This time, the baby was an official patient, as I was not, but they gave me a room to sleep in, and the baby went to the nursery.  We got there in the evening, having had to drive very slowly through crowds from a sporting event who were unsportingly blocking the streets to the hospital, and who may have received some unsporting hand gestures in return. I sat up the whole first night with the baby; apparently one of the effects of higher blood loss while giving birth is that the post-birthing hormones are concentrated within a smaller blood volume, so I felt that this was within my capability, and I wanted to stay with my baby, and bond.  At 6:30 am, however, I was very tired, and went to bed.  At 7 am, while I was still awake, a very loud noise started up outside the window, my boarded-up window.  On a Saturday.  The hospital was building an addition, and just had to have the Giant Jackhammer going right outside what should have been my window, for several hours.  I don't even know when I was able to go to sleep.  I hadn't slept much the night before, either.

As a non-patient, the hospital was not even pretending to feed me, but my husband brought me little meals from the cafeteria, mostly hard-boiled eggs and hot dogs, and at some point my mother-in-law brought in two or three meals' worth of chicken stew, which I was able to refrigerate and microwave.

The baby's medical treatment was an additional s***show, and so was dealing with the rest of the dozen obstacles to breastfeeding that I haven't yet described, but we were able to go home again toward the very end of the third day.

So maybe you can understand now why I am triggered by that newspaper article.  It's no use complaining to the hospital I was at; it closed a couple of years ago.

Interesting

I have a cohort of Minecraft players myself, and there is a lot of realism to the game.  But I understand that Mojang was bought out by Microsoft; I'd advise them to not muck about with changing the game much.  Anyone with the persistence and skill to play through Minecraft on Survival Mode and kill the Ender Dragon is going to be a force to be reckoned with, when they grow up a little more.

A correction...

...has been made to this post (2nd post before this one). 

And I have to say, some of the links that I saw when I was trying to find an answer were rather confusing:  Nitrates in preserved meats are carcinogens, but nitrates in beans and in vegetables of the Brassica family are considered very beneficial, and you should eat them every day, because they have a "vasodilatory" effect?

These are the exact same nitrates chemically, as far as I know.  Or at least, I think they are in terms of what gets released from them into the body.  I could be wrong!

But I think the answer might lie in how these foods are eaten.  Traditionally, a high-nitrate plant food is eaten with a very moderate amount of meat, which was probably preserved by salting, drying, smoking, and/or some other traditional method.  In modern times, the meats have been increasingly preserved using nitrates--even the "low-nitrate" products typically use extracts from high-nitrate plants for preservation.

So if you eat a meal of say, regular bacon, beans, and collard greens, then you're getting a "triple dose" of nitrates.  That must be a shock to the body's systems, although perhaps the bacon fat slows down the nitrate uptake.  If you replace the bacon with something like a bean-based "meat substitute", then you still are in the same place...unless it is low fat!--in that case, you get the full nitrate load all at once.  This may explain much of the physical weakness and ill-health among some of the country's most careful eaters, as well as some of the country's most careless.

This merits further investigation, but before you go off and experiment on yourself, consider the tragic example of Seth Roberts, who I would call one of the greats of self-experimentation; I used to read his blog daily.  He died suddenly of something that was more or less a heart attack, while out hiking (in several ways it was very similar to the death of George Floyd, now that I think of it:  clogged arteries plus enlarged heart plus significant exertion), in the middle of a self-experiment that involved eating a diet that was very high in butter.

The way to do this more safely is to make a small change--such as taking a few small bites of a food--then wait for it to take effect, observe the results, and only then decide whether to take another small step in that direction, or to back off.  We are far too ungentle with our bodies in this culture.