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.
...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!
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)
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.
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.
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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.
...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.
Think long and hard about how far the tentacles of achieving the Green New Deal can extend under the auspices of federal COVID-19 mitigation.
Remember, those who are working on this don’t care about the middle-class and they have not for decades. The visibility of the ‘rust belt’ is the reference. This is about government bureaucrats using their DC power-base to control trillions in economic value and sell their ability to influence the winners and losers to the highest foreign bidder.
Look at what blue states have already done to seize power and control. Now think about that same manipulative intent spread throughout the entire country by weaponizing federal agencies with advanced regulation.
That should start to frame the reference point going forward. Remember, within totalitarian states religion is a risk… the assembly for religious worship is always considered a risk to by those who demand control over free-thought and lives.
"There won't be a Shire, Pippin."
I'd rather be doing happy little homemaking projects right now, but that's not the only thing God made me for.
...from the book of Jeremiah, chapter 28, where the false prophet Hananiah not only made a false prophecy that the Babylonian captivity would end and not extend, and said that this message came from God, but he also claimed that it would happen within two years.
That seemed, and was, a very stupid thing to do*, but now I understand that Hananiah was trying to make it happen, through his words.
I can see the same sort of thing going on in at least four different places in politics today.
*God spoke back through the prophet Jeremiah, said no way, and predicted that Hananiah would die within one year, which he did.
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The truck driver who ended up right in the middle of a protest on the highway in Minneapolis in June, was arrested and then released without charges, has now been charged for not wanting to park in the middle of hundreds of protesters--some of whom were climbing on his truck and pulling the door open--and for being the nearest thing to a white supremacist that the authorities could find in or around the riots. The action happens starting at about 13 minutes, 30 seconds in the article's second video.
Not mentioned in the article is that the driver himself received minor injuries, when the protesters pulled him from his truck.
I watched the debate last night. To me, the most notable point was Biden lamenting the profiteering of the largest companies during the pandemic, doing an I-feel-your-pain with small businesses, and at the same time promising more shutdowns.
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Local bloggers brought up a change in how the Minnesota Department of Health reports coronavirus hospitalizations. It's a subtle but infuriating change. Up until September 24, they were reporting both cumulative hospital and ICU coronavirus admissions, and daily populations of each. They've changed the latter to report not populations, but new admissions only.
In the old version, you could see where the state stood with respect to hospital capacity. That was the whole reason for the Governor's lockdowns in the first place: to slow down the spread and not overwhelm the medical system. The graph became more and more embarrassing to him over time, as the ICU numbers stayed flat in the 200s. (In the spring, the state worked to expand ICU capacity from 200-odd beds to nearly 3,000). He has locked things down too hard and too long.
Neither version tells how long people are staying in the hospital and/or ICU.
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One thing I left out of yesterday's van carpet post was that we also had to replace some hardboard panels between the van's carpet and padding. These are to support the carpet over some depressions in the van floor. My husband took a sample of the old hardboard to the store, and found that the closest approximation in thickness and stiffness was super-cheap panelling.
Throughout history, one of the great sources of cultural achievement, both for groups and for nations and even civilizations, has been a borrowing of cultural features from others who happened to be more advanced in given fields at a given time....Exaggerated group "identity" makes copying others akin to treason.
If all differences between the earnings, occupations, and employment rates of different groups are simply defined as "discrimination," then it is circular reasoning to say that discrimination causes these differences, and compounded meaninglessness to quantify these "effects" of discrimination.
Government may use its power to forbid, coerce, confiscate, punish, or expel. Goals achievable by these means are well within the effective control of government. Goals which depend upon the creativity, skills, thrift, work habits, organizational abilities, and technological knowledge in the population at large are much less within the power of incumbent officials to achieve within a politically relevant time period.
