Eaton Rapids Joe

Medieval Japan was a feudal country. While a small amount of money changed hands, most of the economy was sustained by an elaborate system of "obligations" with "Loyalty" flowing up from the bottom and "Responsibilities" flowing down from the top.

This web of obligations was so comprehensive that it was virtually impossible for somebody who fell outside of the web to survive. That outsider had no legal right to collect firewood for cooking or to gather shellfish. They had no legal right to till and plant a field. They had no right to sleep under a roof. 

It worked in Japan for a long time. Japan had (and has) a homogeneous population with a shared history. Japan had little mobility, either in society or in terms of geography. Japan did not have an abundance of natural resources and could not afford to run experiments that would likely fail.

Samurai were warriors who had pledge their allegiance to the local Shogun or Warlord. The pledge was not lightly given and Samurai typically only gave it once in their lifetime.

47 Ronin

47 Ronin is a movie based on a fictionalized rewrite of a Japanese folk-story that is based on actual, historical events.

Plot: An honorable Shogun who had 47 Samurai was forced to take his own life through the manipulations of a dishonorable Shogun. The Samurai refused to switch their allegiance to the new, slimy Shogun and thus became Samurai who were not pledged to a Shogun, known as Ronin in the Japanese language, a virtual death sentence in medieval Japan. 

With honor gone and nothing else left to lose, the Ronin decide to avenge the honorable Shogun's death. 

Divorces

There are approximately 1,800,000 divorces in the United States. If you divide that by the number of seconds in a year (including nights, weekends and holidays) we average one divorce every 17.5 seconds.

If you do the math, that means that there are 47 newly divorced men every fifteen minutes. 

Every one of those divorced men have something in common with the Japanese Ronin. Typically, the courts kick them to the curb. They are turned into objects. They are piggy-banks to be drained. Much of society bought into "Always believe the woman". 

If 47 Ronin in feudal Japan were seen as an existential threat to the Empire, then why do so many people cheer on the women who file for divorce*? "You go, girl. Kick his ass!!!"  

47 new Ronin every fifteen minutes!!

It is something to ponder as the shredding of our society accelerates.

*4 out of every 5 divorces are initiated by the woman. 

I had the luxury of sleeping until 6:30 a.m. Monday morning.

The highest temperature I measured yesterday was 96.3F. 

I went for a 1.4 mile walk with no consequences. I took the precaution of taking a couple of ibuprofen an hour before I walked out the door. I picked a route where the 20 mph (sustained) winds were blocked. It was still cold.

I have a little bit of coughing. In the morning I had some lung-whistles upon exhaling but those went away as my lungs cleared. No headaches. No nausea.

My stomach shrank. A bagel fills me up. 

My little hobby is chugging along. I have a single-stage press and assembly is the slowest operation because there are multiple steps involved. I am averaging 5 units per minute. 

I am feeling house-bound. The weather look-ahead predicts cold, -19 F wind chill and -10 actual for early Saturday morning but Wednesday and Thursday look balmy.

This does not look like the dreaded H3N2 so your prayers for my health paid off. Thank-you all. 

"I have a dream that one day my children will be judged, not by the color of their skin, buy by their character within." Dr Martin Luther King

Powerful words.

Souls don't have color (as far as I know). We will all be judged, or so I believe as a Christian. 

We are all sinners. We all fall short.

But we don't have to wallow in our sinfulness like pigs joyfully wallowing in shit. 

Sample headline

Sample text (from 2020)

Fragmentation

We have entire stores in the US dedicated to selling baseball caps. We have stores that just sell sneakers. We have stores that sell tights, and only tights. We have stores that sell one brand of exclusive sweat-shirts. We have 60,000 square-foot stores selling mattresses and furniture.

In the United States people shop for recreation. Shopping scratches some kind of primal itch in people. Maybe it is the foraging gene. Maybe it is the delight in finding a novelty. We were once satisfied taking a walk in the closest city park. Constant stimulation now means that we need to go on an African safari to get the same gratification. 

Throw in the stimulation of shopping on-line and consumer oriented broadcast channels like HGTV and HSN. 

One of Kubota's friends had a girlfriend who ran up a $23k credit card bill in ONE NIGHT while watching Home Shopping Network.

Regression-to-the-mean

Regression-to-the-mean is a statistical concept. If you take a sample from a population and it happens to be an outlier...let's say we are measuring height and our dipper happens to collect Wilt Chamberlain...then our next sample is likely to be closer to the mean than the outlier was.

Ramifications of RttM are that as our sample size grows, the average will migrate toward the mean. This idea is captured Biblically in the directive to judge on the testimony of three sober men rather than just one. One man might have ulterior motives and give tainted testimony, or maybe their perspective did not allow them to see extenuating circumstances.

Building on the larger sample size ramification, longer periods of time resemble larger-sample-sizes and numbers like "Per capita retail square-footage" is likely to converge if there are not outside constraints separating them. 

Regression-to-the-mean suggests that the US has too much retail space. The build-out of retail space was a bubble driven by property value speculation, low interest rates and optimism.

People between fifteen and thirty-five are struggling financially. The cost of everything they don't need drops and the cost of what they need to stay alive keeps going up. The margin between what they earn and what they have left after paying their insurance, rent, food, day-care and other essentials is rapidly shrinking. The engines that drove the bubble in retail-space ran out of gas.

If the business models of Furniture Row, Lululemon, Lids, Sportsmans Warehouse and Aeropostal crash-and-burn, it is a kindness to let them dissolve and to let local real-estate rents rationalize. It is not a mercy to amputate a leg one inch at a time.

I woke up at 4:00 a.m. 

My temperature at 5:30 a.m. was 96.1 F. According to the internet, this means that I am not ovulating. Who am I to argue?

My temperature didn't hit 99F until about 10:30. First acetaminophen at noon.

I went for a twenty minute walk outside. A half-mile out and a half-mile back. The cold air was brutal to my nasal passages but other than that there were no complications.

An hour after my walk I got out of my recliner and said some bad words. A quick tour of the internet suggested that my right-side sciatica nerve was not happy. Suspecting inflammation, I took a couple of ibuprofen which is MUCH better than acetaminophen for inflammation.

I took a nap. The pain shooting down the back of my right leg was gone.

My nose is running. My cough is better. I was able to eat without feeling nausea.

Back in the day, there were many days when I went to work and put in a full day when I felt worse than this.

Mrs ERJ's symptoms seem to be lagging my by about 12 hours.

Posted for entertainment purposes (source)

• Blood type A: Overall has a great ability to generate a quick and substantial antibody response against influenza type A(H1N1) and especially A(H3N2). Their antibody response against influenza B is not quite as dramatic.
• Blood type AB: Relatively poor ability to generate high antibody levels against any of the influenza viruses.
• Blood type B: Reasonable, but not great ability to generate an antibody response against influenza A(H1N1). Slowest (it can take them 3-5 months) and weakest ability to generate antibodies against influenza A(H3N2) of any blood type. Against influenza B virus, blood type B has a significant advantage and responds differently from either blood group A or O. The blood type B immune response happens much earlier and persists longer.
• Blood type O: Relatively effective ability to generate antibody response against influenza A(H1N1) and A(H3N2) viruses. Antibody response against influenza B is not as dramatic as blood type B.

The reason that I label this "entertainment" is that influenza is constantly mutating. Even if good studies were performed and reached the conclusions shown above (and I did not look at the original sources), there is no guarantee that the next variant of H1N1, H3N2 or B will not have evolved beyond those defenses.

For the record, I am type O+. 

Tomorrow

We will not be watching Quicksilver tomorrow. Handsome Hombre is sick and he will be watching her. 

The most positive spin on my understanding is that somebody is holding the leash on the Sunni and Shia Muslims in Michigan. That proves it can be done. It also implies that the protests are the product of collusion and are not totally organic in their origins.

If you are extremely generous and naive, that can be seen as good news. 

Minnesota

Walz and Frey have no political future. Neither will ever win a fair, state-wide election. They have nothing to lose by betting every chip. 

California

Gavin Newsom has political ambition. If national news showed him unable to manage his own state, his chances of getting elected to POTUS or US Senator go in the toilet.

That doesn't necessarily mean that chaos isn't happening. It is possible/likely that the left-leaning media is leaving that footage on the cutting room floor. But the reality of citizen journalists forces him to keep a lid on things.

Michigan

Gretchen Whitmer probably has POTUS or VPOTUS aspirations. Dana Nestle (the Attorney General of Michigan) and Jocelyn Benson (S-o-S) are term-limiting out. Benson already announced that she is running for Governor.

Rashida Tliab is probably delusional enough to believe that she could win a state-wide election.

So they are all constrained the same way that Gavin Newsom in California is.

What nobody dares talk about is that Dearborn is a tinderbox of Shia (Iranian oriented Muslims) and Sunni (the rest of the world) tensions.

The Sunni contend that there are 73 branches of Islam and that the Quran tells them that there will be 72 false prophets and only one true torch of Islam. That "one true torch of Islam", according to the Sunni, are the Sunni (go figure). The followers of the 72 false prophets will spend eternity serving the Sunni in paradise.

The Shia, on the other hand, claim that the Sunni are following false prophets and that Shia are the chosen sect.

Shia is a minority in the world of Islam at about 25%. What makes it work is that for the most part, the two major sects self-segregated. Shia mostly in Iran, eastern Iraq and bits and drabs of the former Soviet 'stans.

Nearly everybody else are Sunni. 

Except for in Dearborn, Michigan. The largest mosque in Dearborn is a Shia mosque. Mosques of all flavors are sprinkled through the city like chocolate chips in a cookie.

Kudos to Whitmer and team

I don't give Whitmer and her team much appreciation, but in this case she is playing a bad hand as well as it can be played.