Should have worn a respirator

I took a look at a free-by-the-side-of-the-road upright bagless vacuum that I picked up a while back.

It had very weak suction, and with a little investigation it was easy to see why:  the filters were caked and choked with dust.  Someone decided to buy a new vacuum rather than spend a few minutes dealing with them.

The filters are washable, so I washed them, and they're drying now.  I think the belts are okay.

If it's good to go, this will be the basement vacuum.  My canister vacuum from a German manufacturer is about twelve years old, and still works fine.

I've gotten more interested in free appliances like this since I learned how much metal can be salvaged out of them.  And hardware.

________________________

There's a Popular Science book from the World War II years that I've been leafing through:  the "Second Giant Home Workshop Manual".  It's a frenetic mix of home science demonstrations, home improvement projects, and DIY wartime preparedness, punctuated by instructions on how to electroplate with various metals.

It reminds me in some ways of the early years of the pandemic.

George Floyd Square

I passed through George Floyd Square earlier this summer, serendipitously.  I didn't realize before that there isn't just the one Black power fist at the intersection, but also one in each of the neighboring intersections, which define the "Square".

It still looks a lot like the photo here.  You can drive through the Square, but the north-south traffic is squeezed over to accommodate the memorial.

The city wants the memorial out of the street.  The activists want to close off the street to traffic and build a memorial plaza.  Business owners have unsuccessfully sued the city for not providing law enforcement, and now are going to mediation.

When I was there, in the evening, there were only a few people around, and the mood was subdued, aside from someone yelling about a block away.

"The People's Way" former gas station across the street is--I think--where the city had their surveillance camera feed that the 911 dispatcher was watching in real time.

The general trend of the big cities going cashless has pushed many of the homeless out into the suburbs.  I saw a uniformed security guard at one of the mid-range grocery stores, and there were loiterers around the HarMar Mall last year and keycodes for the restrooms.

Walz off

I am not a fan of Tim Walz.   I went back and read from this blog's archives of the end of May 2020 into the following June...

...when he let the Twin Cities rioting get so bad that multi-county curfews had to be imposed...

...on and past my baby's due date.

My baby was smart and waited until well into June to be born; thankfully with no need for emergency transportation.

Many places that we had been to as a family over the years were looted and burned.  Several of those places were totally destroyed.  $500 million dollars damage in the Twin Cities.

I've also seen the ways Walz has been devastating Minnesota since then, which accelerated once the Democrats took control of the Legislature for the "trifecta".  

And it's not just Minnesota; Minnesota is now a destination state for abortions and gender transitions. 

Walz and Harris are centering their campaign around "joy".  Walz has a very convincing jolly warrior act, partly because he's had a lot of training.  He is probably not an organically-grown candidate at all; I think he may have an interesting history with the teachers' union.  He certainly favors them now, despite increasingly dismal education outcomes, which are both bad and barely above the national average.

A few years ago, Walz said something about how if Minnesotans don't like living with immigrants, they should leave.  I have not yet unearthed the exact quote.

Anyway, when I see Harris-Walz, I don't see joy.  I see fire, destruction, and death. 

Locally

Charges have been dropped against State Police Officer Ryan Londregan, who fatally shot black man Ricky Cobb II, as Cobb was driving away from an arrest while Londregan and another officer were leaning into the car.

I happened to be going into the Government Center for jury duty on a day that Londregan had a hearing, and I saw some of his supporters setting up in the atrium, but I didn't realize what they were there for until later.  There were also counter-protesters angrily shouting slogans like "No justice, no peace!" for a while.  

The atrium you can see in the picture in the article extends up the entire height of the building between the two towers of offices and courtrooms, and the protesting was very audible even on the top floor, which is where the jury office is now.  It used to be in the basement under the street that the building straddles.

I was surprised that protesting was being allowed inside the building.  There is a large paved space outdoors on the north side.

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

Closer to home, it is yard sale/estate sale/spring clean-up season, with two especially interesting finds.  The first is a pair of pliers used by cobblers, which incorporates a small, square hammer head, so leather can be pulled taut and nailed at the same time.  One of the handles is bent, so I'm going to have to figure out how to straighten it.  The other item looks a lot like a golf club, but it has a ridged horizontal metal blade, and is apparently an old-fashioned weed-whacker.  It has been very handy, as we have been getting a lot of rain and the weeds have been growing at high speed.

Addendum to The Fall of Minneapolis

Earlier post here.  [Edit:  I have added to it a bit.]

Derek Chauvin's wife Kellie entered (and won) the Mrs. Minnesota America pageant in 2018 with the encouragement of her friend and earlier Mrs. Minnesota Andrea Bennett Xiong, whose husband was Tou Ger Xiong, Twin Cities Hmong celebrity.

It has been reported that Tou Ger Xiong was kidnapped, stabbed a dozen times, and thrown down a hill in Columbia; multiple Minnesota Congresspersons have issued statements.

It's very odd that this came only a few weeks after Derek Chauvin was stabbed in prison.

The Fall of Minneapolis

An alt-news documentary on George Floyd's death and its aftermath is out now:  The Fall of Minneapolis.  It blows the mainstream narrative right out of the water.

Many of the places in it are recognizable.  Fortunately--or Providentially--we moved out of the Third Precinct before 2020 hit.  The government center where Chauvin's trial was, was where I had had jury duty years earlier.  I've been to the bookstore where Keith Ellison found the Antifa handbook.

The documentary is missing some important context:  most importantly, a disclosure that the producer and host, Liz Collin, is married to Bob Kroll, who was head of the Minneapolis police union in 2020.  The protest led by John Thompson that is shown was outside their house.  [Edit:  Thompson's son Derek crashed into and killed a carload of Somali young women earlier this year.]

The portrayal of the police is very positive, but you can see that there is long-standing antagonism between the police and multiple segments of the city's population.

Also there is no city surveillance video from across the street, which was visible in real time to the 911 dispatcher; the camera was at the gas station I guess.  That business with Floyd being kneeled on for 7 minutes 46 seconds, then 8 minutes 46 seconds, and then 9 minutes 29 seconds, was caused by the City of Minneapolis sitting on that video good and hard until Chauvin's trial the following year, and it has never been released to the public.

Later on, after that gas station was closed down, a kidnapped guy was held there for a night or two, in between being driven around to ATMs to withdraw cash.  I'm not sure how to correlate that against the protest/occupation activity in that area.  There's a Minneapolis teacher who has been very dedicated to being right there and being seen and heard.  [Edit:  Marcia Howard]

Darnella Frazier, the black teenager standing on the sidewalk taking the video of Floyd, received a special Pulitzer prize for it.  Later on, her uncle got killed in someone else's police chase while sitting in his car.  As far as I know, that was an accident.

George Floyd's girlfriend worked at the school Daunte Wright attended, and she was back in the media after he was accidentally shot and killed by police.

George Floyd's family, including his mother Larcenia and brother Philonise, received a $27 million settlement from the City of Minneapolis, but for some reason Floyd's roommates were saying months later that his family never came over to get his Bible or other belongings.  [Edit:  I believe Floyd's aunt lives or lived in the Twin Cities metro area.] 

Chauvin's mother Carolyn Pawlenty is a cousin-in-law of former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty.  Chauvin's now ex-wife Kelly was a Mrs. Minnesota beauty pageant winner.  [Edit:  a little more about that here, including death of Tou Ger Xiong] Chauvin and Floyd used to work security at the same club, which burned down in the riots.

John Thompson's son was recently in big trouble for fleeing police at high speeds in a rented car and T-boning a car full of Somali young women, killing them all.

Liz Collin was interviewed by Candace Owen after being fired from the local CBS station, I think that was later in 2020.

Umbrella Man, who kicked off the window-smashing at the Autozone (more-or-less kitty-corner from the 3rd Precinct police station) was at one point identified as a white supremacist who had previously been in a group harassing a Muslim convert in nearby tourist destination Stillwater, but I haven't heard that he was ever arrested.

Donald Williams, visible among the bystanders on the sidewalk with the boxing club hoodie, was caught on video hitting a police car with a shopping cart, I think it was, during the rioting at the St. Paul Midway Target store.  He's been in legal trouble a couple of times since then:  alleged domestic violence against his girlfriend near the Minnesota State Fair, and recently a disturbance at a suburban school when they wouldn't let him come inside to pick up his kid.

A timely table

I have been thinking for a long time about replacing our kitchen table with a larger, less decrepit, and more washable one, and I had gotten so far as to reject the idea of building a table, and to save up funds for a new used table, and even to write a time to go shopping for it on the calendar.

Then we all got sick, and there were a lot of church activities and things going on, and around the time we were mostly recovered, my husband called and said his boss had a table he was giving away.

He gave me the measurements over the phone, and it was just the size I was looking for.

After various exertions, he got it home and we got it into the house.  The chairs came with it, but they are definitely oversize for the room and I am mostly using our old chairs with it.  

The table itself is just about as big as will fit there.  When fully opened, the fridge door comes within an inch of the table. I am not above taking my drawknife and shaving some wood off the table legs and the bench I made before, to gain an inch or two. The fridge could be moved back a couple of inches also.  Happily, none of those things are necessary.

Theoretically, we can all squeeze in around it, if enough of the smaller children sit on the bench--which hasn't happened yet.  

Another thing I did recently was to unravel a finger-crocheted chenille scarf that I had been given some years back, and re-crochet it into a little mat for a chair seat.  The colors go well with our living room, and it is good to have the scarf being used more.

I have been somewhat surprised to notice that I have not been doing much crafting at all during this sabbatical.  Just more music, more puzzles, and more reading.  I did get a bunch of mending done as I've been watching movies with the elder children.

At one of the church activities, I was talking with an older couple from another church, and it turns out that they were homeschoolers back in the Eighties, before homeschooling was explicitly allowed by law in Minnesota.  They said they had to keep a low profile, and that friends of theirs were investigated by the state.  Later on, one of the larger homeschool co-ops started up, and they were involved in that.  

Numbers

 Minnesota gubernatorial election results by city and township.

I looked at a couple of the first-ring suburbs, and only around 15% of their voting-age population put in a vote for the Republican candidate.  I don't think that was the case in 2018. 

For comparison, Minneapolis was at about 5%.

The incumbent does have a more executive-type temperament--which he used during the pandemic to efficiently be highly troublesome and ineffective.  The challenger has far better principles, and got in some very good hits in the debates, but is much milder-mannered.

The DFL has captured control of the Legislature, and they have big plans.

Xcel Energy seeking to raise electricity rates...retroactively

They are seeking about a 12% increase for 2022, beginning January 1, 2022, and then additional increases over 4% for both 2023 and 2024.  

Altogether, the increase comes out over 22%.

Hopefully their regulator will yield to good sense and public pressure, and not give them everything they are asking for.  Many people would have made different consumption choices over the past nine and a half months, if they knew they would be paying more for it later on.

We're already paying extra for their supposed transition to carbon-free energy.

In other news, we picked apples at a small orchard, several bushels' worth, and I've been slowly working through them.  Mostly making applesauce and apple pie filling in the oven, plus I've sliced up several batches for the dehydrator.  We've been too wiped out by one thing and another to run any through the juicer yet.

The car registration came due, and for some reason the value basis for our vehicle is more than double the amount that the insurance company was going to give us when they wanted to total it last summer.  I didn't write about that saga at the time. What happened was that the vehicle was sideswiped while parked, and then the insurance company and the body shop postured their way through nearly two months of kabuki theater before finally fixing the dent and the side mirror and giving it back to us.

Too little, too late

By far, the most-viewed post on this blog is my Health Insurance post.  Mostly viewed by bots, I presume, but still.

Biden and Obama just had their little Obamacare celebration at the White House, which I saw variously described beforehand as "promoting" and "pushing" the Affordable Care Act, which is an odd way to talk about an epic piece of legislation that was passed en masse twelve years ago, and that supposedly is very popular, and that is also supposedly politically impossible to repeal.

There have been a number of articles recently about finally doing something about the "family glitch" that I described--where health insurance is deemed affordable if the cost of employer-based coverage for a single worker is within 9.5% of their income, and never mind if they are buying family coverage also--because they are not eligible to purchase coverage on the exchanges at all, on account of the coverage available through the employer.

Apparently Biden is about to solve this problem by executive order [Edit: here], and there may be legislative action later on. 

From what I've seen so far, the executive order would allow family members affected by the glitch to buy subsidized insurance on the exchanges, beginning with January 2023 coverage.  They anticipate that about one million of the several million glitched families would do so, along with maybe 200,000 people who are presently uninsured.

I'm sure that the administration will manage to mess up the implementation of this somehow.  This is especially likely when calculating subsidy amounts, since the exact amount ought to depend on how much the breadwinner is paying through their employer in premiums--which can change mid-year as the employee hits a birthday and moves up a price bracket. 

One feature of our present coverage is that after we pay the premiums for the first three children, the rest are included at no additional cost.  This has been the case across various plans from various insurance companies, but I don't know where it came from and I don't believe that it will necessarily be the case with the plans on the exchanges.

I'm not very happy about the idea of having different health insurance for different family members, and having to learn to deal with the exchange, and then perhaps actually having to do so.  It is complex enough when everyone is on the same plan, and when the employer's HR drone is handling the annual health plan shopping and application process.

People have been complaining a lot about the recent inflation, but the truth is that there is still a lot of slack in most people's finances that goes to things beyond the austere basics.  The Biden administration has to deal with the family glitch soon, though, because many of these families have had much less slack for almost seven years now.  The increases in the standard deduction and in child tax credits have only partially offset the premium costs in absolute terms, and the uneven distribution of subsidies created a substantial relative differential in disposable income.

Finally, this fix to the family glitch would only return our out-of-pocket premium costs to roughly the pre-Affordable Care Act level.  Obama promised that premiums would be lower by $2500 per year, remember?

Well???

There are ways that could be accomplished, but you can be sure that that is how it will not be done.

Alternatively

The claim here is that major food shortages in 2022 are likely to be limited to urban areas.

In 2020, the pattern was often that rural stores were last to be stocked; the trucks were sent out from the cities to the nearest stores first.

And the likelihood is that if food becomes very scarce, it will be used to keep order in the metropolitan areas.

Ghost bush

I took the last of the spray paint and primer that I had been using in our previous house to repaint the toilet seat, and used it to paint a dead bush in the yard.

The paint makes the bush look silver, not white.  It's in a very dry part of the yard, so if we replaced it with something living, we would have to water it frequently.

In other news, I added a possible correction to the second post before this one, here.  There is a lot that we still don't know.

The truth remains

 

The above is from the "Analysis of the Antrim County, Michigan November 2020 Election Incident" report by J. Alex Halderman, a computer science professor at the University of Michigan with an interest in election security.

He was asked by the Secretary of State to analyze the Antrim County election to explain the errors and discrepancies.  He found over twenty, some of which are still not fully resolved.  The reader is referred to the full report for the amusing details; it is practically a textbook for how to mess with an election without getting prosecuted for election fraud.

The caption and the following text in the image above are, however, inaccurate in and of themselves.  The log file excerpt does not show "several ballots being processed."

It shows a single ballot being processed several times.  

"Ballot 1107" is the ID of a distinct ballot, as Halderman must very well know from digging through the log file.  Notice the error messages that say "Ballot format or id is unrecognizable"; each ballot has a serial number on it that the scanner tries to read in.

The Dominion software is perfectly happy to read and count Ballot 1107 repeatedly, and only complains when it is shoved into the machine crooked.

And when the ballot was reversed here, it was not "returned to the voter", but to an election worker--look at the time stamps.

Halderman even miscounted the lines:  there are 12 lines of errors in 26 lines, for an "error rate" of almost 50%.

It is interesting that he chose this particular section of the log file, which happens to show only one ballot ID number.  Supposedly Central Lake Township had 1222 ballot reverses out of 1491 ballots total, so he could have taken his excerpt from almost anywhere in the log file.

The lawsuit in Antrim County over the retail marijuana initiative that was either won by a single vote or lost with a tied vote, is ongoing.  I continue to assert that this lawsuit has the potential to change the world; it could and should blow the entire election fraud machine wide open.

 

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

 

EDITED TO ADD:  I've been told that the ballot number is actually the ballot design number, as in for a particular precinct, but I haven't seen a source for that.

Quiet

Apparently not much happened around here after the verdicts were announced.  There were preparations made though in case things did start happening:  pictures here.

"White supremacists" strike again

Last night was apparently somewhat lively again, despite a four-county (!) 7 pm (!) curfew, but not near where we are.  

There has been a lot of helicopter activity.

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)

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.

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.

Acceleration

The past few weeks have been educational in many ways.  Just yesterday, I learned that 3 tablespoons of the liquid from a can of garbanzo beans (chickpeas) can be used as a substitute for an egg in baking.  I knew about the substitution using soy flour and water, and I guessed that grinding up dried beans and adding a little water would work about the same way, but using canned bean liquid--that was new to me.  It worked just fine in the corn bread, though, and I've been told (but have not yet confirmed myself) that chickpeas have much lower levels of nitrates than other beans, for those who need to avoid them.

[ EDITED TO ADD:  I believe now that I was mistaken above, and that it is black-eyed peas that are low in nitrates, but I have not been able to confirm that yet.]

I've also come across references to chokeberries and aronia, which I hope to look into in more depth later, and a very interesting (and probably out of print) book called Curious Customs, which gives a wry and educated look at many of the traditional American customs that underlie our modern culture. 

I've also uncovered some small modifications to my eating habits which seem to be producing good results, but really, it is basically the same as someone else's "Eat food, but not too much."  I'd add, "And not too quickly,"  especially in respect to fluids and carbs.