FLOW: a plumber’s weblog

I like the ideas of reducing waste and saving money, but the refurb phone market has been a waste of time and money to me and I don’t see it getting better any time soon.

This began when I needed a laptop.  After doing some research, I decided that Back Market was doing the best job in this area, so I bought a Lenovo Thinkpad T480s from them and was absolutely delighted.  Understand, though, that Back Market is only an aggregator for merchandise sold by other suppliers.  They have an excellent website and they offer their own warranty on top of the supplier’s warranty, which assures your satisfaction.

Supposedly.

A few weeks later I needed to replace my wife’s mobile phone and went straight to Back Market and chose a Moto G.  It arrived late, even though it had been sent via FedEx’s “2 day” arrangement.  Once I got it open, I put a SIM card in and got a message saying something negative.  As it turned out, the phone’s IMEI number was blacklisted.  (Look it up.)  Back Market required me to send them a photograph of the error message and a screenshot of the IMEI checker site that revealed it to be blacklisted.  Finally satisfied, they sent me a shipping label so that I could return the unit to the supplier at no charge via UPS.

I was irked, so I immediately went to Amazon and ordered a similar refurb, knowing that Amazon had the clout to enforce their standards on any supplier.  The phone came right away.  It, too, was blacklisted.  I had taken the time before ordering it to check the supplier’s reviews.  Like the ones for the previous supplier, they were 80%-95% favorable.  But they shipped a blacklisted phone.

I had to drop the project for a couple of weeks, but when I resumed it, I did a little investigation of these suppliers and the industry generally.  All of the phone suppliers operate under aliases, it seems.  They’ll call themselves something like “Southwest Suppliers,” but no such business appears in general listings.  That name will have a one-page website saying “We do recycling” and provide a “contact form” you can write in if you wish — no phone number, no address.  The return shipping labels (three, in total, as you will read shortly) always have a name and address that are new to me.

I saw that I was at sea without a compass, since everyone from Back Market to Best Buy to Amazon Renewed to eBay Refurbished, with everyone between, markets phones from these same suppliers.  The suppliers, in turn, are doing so much business, they can have a 99.4% rating on, say, Amazon and yet you can look at the 0-1 star ratings and find the same stories over and over and over: shipped the wrong phone, advertised completely wrong description, different IMEIs on the box and phone, two numbers on the box, blacklisted phone, battery shot, phone locked.   Apparently their quality control is abysmal because they are making such astronomical gobs of money, they have no time to do a good job.

I decided to use Back Market again, since I’m buying from the same pool of suppliers no matter where I turn.  I chose a Moto G and carefully examined the reputation of the supplier.  They looked good, so I gave it a try.  They sent me a locked phone along with a computer printout from some test that certified that it was unlocked.  You can’t even trust a robot these days.

Back Market was quick to settle the matter and send me a shipping label, but there was a twist even in that.  Since my earlier experience, they have “improved” their contact system so that there’s no apparent way (and I searched for fifteen minutes) to write a message to anyone.  Everything has been changed to “options.”  What kind of problem are you having?  They give you five choices.  If none of them is true, you have to choose something false and hope to straighten it out down the line.  But it leads to another set of options more false than the first.  I lied my way through the tree until, when it was all over, they gave me a box in which I could add anything I wished to say.  There I revealed the real problem.

Then I went back to Amazon and ordered a NEW Moto G for $10 more than Back Market’s price.  I’m not saying that the specs are the same because, frankly, my wife uses her phone to place phone calls and to watch YouTube videos, so I pay no attention to the specs.  My point is, I would gladly have laid down an extra $20 to avoid having to return three refurbished phones down at the UPS Store.

Until somebody steps up and decides to make a name for themselves with ruthless quality control, the refurb market is unacceptable.  There’s a lot of good food in a garbage dump, but I wouldn’t go there to eat.

I’m writing to you. You’re suffering, you’re desperate or nearly so, you’re financially strapped, and you cannot sort out the chaos of advice on the Internet. I can help you. I fought the Battle of the Bugs at my own house, determined to do it without the help of a pest control technician. By doing so, I learned a lot.

First, Let Me Mention Four Negatives

1. Dust is too slow. It is true that you could, with enough time and diligence, rid your house of bed bugs using nothing but diatomaceous earth (DE). It is also true that you could mow your entire lawn on your knees with toenail clippers. Dust just isn’t a practical solution for you right now. It could require months and months.

2. Fogging doesn’t work. It sells because it looks like it ought to work “Gas ’em! Machine-gun ’em! Bring in the flame-throwers!” We love the idea of annihilating the wretched bloodsuckers with maximum violence, but it just doesn’t work. Bedbugs hide; the fog doesn’t get to them.

3. Some bed bugs are resistant to regular poison. Are yours? Have you asked them? Since you don’t know, you can’t afford to spend time and money experimenting with grocery store products.

4. Getting immediate relief, which I offer here, is not the same as solving the problem. If solving it were easy, everyone would just do it and there wouldn’t be such a truckload of contradictory advice on the Internet.

Your Best Hope for Immediate Relief

1. Get some good poison. See below for recommendations.

2. De-clutter and vacuum. To make it manageable, do one room at a time. If you have a great deal of clutter, you obviously aren’t capable of changing into another person and achieving zero clutter with a snap of the fingers. Just do what you can to reduce clutter and thoroughly vacuum everything within four feet of the bed, couch, easy chair, etc. Bed bugs usually set up harborage where people habitually sit or lie for a long time. Thoroughly probe every fold of upholstery. You want to suck up every bug you can find, so check the walls & ceiling. Vacuuming like this makes the whole job cleaner.

3. Launder the sheets, etc. Take the mattress and box springs off the bed. Keep vacuuming the bugs as you encounter them. Spray the bed frame, especially behind the headboard, giving careful attention to every crack and crevice. Spray the four bottom edges of the mattress. Spray the four sides of the box springs and its topside around the four edges, then tear the flimsy fabric cover off of the bottom and spray every joint and crevice inside. (Discard the flimsy fabric cover.)

4. Pull things away from the walls and vacuum and spray the baseboards, especially their top and bottom edges. Spray the backside of the end tables. Remove the drawers and spray into the space where they go.

These measures will probably reduce your bed bug problem by 90%, but the remaining bugs will certainly return and reconquer the territory unless you follow up with repeated treatments and more thorough inspections. Spray again in 21-28 days.

Choosing a Good Poison

Traditionally, before our age of mass third-world immigration, a man could wipe a house clean of bedbugs with a thorough application of a pyrethroid (“py-REE-throid”) insecticide. Today’s resistant bugs, though, have caused the chemists to add a second ingredient now called a neo-nicotinoid (or “neo-nic”), which attacks the nervous system. Hot Shot Pyrethroid-Resistant Bed Bug Killer has such a formula, but its residual power, an essential feature, can’t be examined. If you have time to wait for delivery, you can get the most popular product among professionals, Crossfire, which is available as an aerosol  or a concentrate . Another excellent choice is Doxem. For a concentrate, note that a 32oz spray bottle from any garden supply works as well as a pump-up spray rig.

For the Future

Once you have gained immediate relief, you are sleeping peacefully, and you are no longer half-insane, you can proceed to further measures to permanently solve your house’s problem.  Persistence is the key.  Don’t be misled by promises of a magic solution (in return for an outlay of big bucks).  Just keep vacuuming, laundering, and spraying, room by room.  Dust (DE) is needed for electrical outlets, but spraying will meet all other needs.  Inspect the closets and the hanging pictures.  Clean out the drawers.  Continue to de-clutter.

There is hope.  You can do this.

Technically, they did it yesterday and my birthday is today; but I’ll take it personally anyway, since the timing is suspicious.

In a 6-3 decision yesterday, the Supremes ruled in favor of birthright citizenship, the suicidal notion that non-Americans can invade the country illegally, give birth, and the child is just as much a citizen as is a descendant of George Washington.  Even if the baby is taken back out of the country immediately, grows up in another country, and joins an army there and fights against America in a war — he has all the rights of U. S. citizenship that I do. Why?  For the simple reason that his mother managed to get across the border in time for him to be born, probably at taxpayer expense.

This is a continuation of the suicidal impulse that motivates so much of modern America. “We’ve had this place long enough. We never should have been here anyway. Open all the gates and let the rest of the world come and take it.”

No one knows how many illegals are here now, but 80 million is a number that gets repeated a lot.  The fact that we have plenty of room for more people in, say, Nevada is not relevant. As Ann Coulter has insisted over the past decade, immigration is the preeminent issue because it determines who can vote.  What does the third world care about our Bill of Rights?  What does the second amendment mean to them? Her book was excellently titled ¡Adios, America! the Left’s plan to turn our country into a third world hellhole.

The U. S. Constitution’s 14th amendment does say that someone born here is a citizen. It was a Reconstruction measure to make sure that former slaves would have civil rights. Those who passed the measure never imagined that it would give the country to just anybody who could sneak in. And it happens to have the phrase in it “and subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” meaning it was to apply to persons born here and subject to U. S. jurisdiction. That is the opposite of an illegal alien.

There is talk in Washington about passing laws and amending the Constitution.  I’m not hopeful.  Like the War for Southern Independence, sometimes you just lose.

It was less than five years ago that the worst of all years, 2020, gave us the Summer of Floyd, when cities burned, historical monuments were destroyed, whites groveled by the thousands, and corporations shoveled billions of dollars to the rioting barbarians to help them.

This misbehavior was occasioned, ostensibly, by the death of George Floyd in police custody.  It was an ugly scene, recorded by the cell phones of the locals who surrounded and menaced the police.  Officer Derek Chauvin had Floyd pinned down by holding his knee on the back of Floyd’s neck, a hold taught to officers in their hand-to-hand training.  His fellow officers stood by in alert stances, keeping the crowd from rushing them and Chauvin — a very dangerous possibility.

The coroner’s report showed that Floyd died of a heart attack due to Fentanyl and exerting himself while resisting arrest.  There was no evidence of neck compression (for, indeed, that pinning technique does not apply pressure to the windpipe).  The crowd and the video, however, insisted otherwise because it looked like Chauvin choked poor old George to death. The coroner was threatened with the loss of his reputation, career, and peace if he didn’t change the report, so he went back and added “neck compression,” knowing full well that it wasn’t true, and sent Chauvin and the other three officers to prison.

This strange plague of cowardice and suicide on the part of white Americans still baffles me, but my point presently is to show that the Summer of Floyd hasn’t gone away. Its effects linger.

1. The Floyd Effect on Policing

A man here in town told me just a couple of weeks ago that he has a relative who is a patrolman, and the general attitude of the police now is that they will avoid all possible calls that could expose them to combat.  “I got two more years to retirement.  I ain’t goin’ to prison for some perp who’ll be bailed out and back on the street in an hour.”

2. The Effect on Police Recruiting

I asked a recently-retired police officer “What would you say to a guy who wants to become a policeman?” He responded, “I’d ask him, ‘Are you out of your mind?'”  News articles about the nationwide shortage of officers refer to numbers before and since “the Floyd killing.”  Well, yeah, call us killers a little more and maybe you can get us to work for you, ya reckon?

3. White Flight

This is actually the flight of anyone, whites and others, who has the wherewithal to relocate.  Nobody wants to live around people who won’t behave.  The exodus means that businesses close.  The utter decline of Selma is no accident.  Its experience has been repeated in countless major cities across America.

4. The Sanctification of Rioting

In 2020, day after day, whites watched TV and got madder and madder as they saw Minneapolis, Seattle, Portland (Oregon), Kenosha (Wisconsin), and other cities get set afire, looted, and “occupied” by anarchists and black activists surrounded by signs saying that white America was, well, unappreciated.  Nobody stopped them.  Nothing was done to them, for the most part.  In my opinion, this was the primary factor in the subsequent riot at the U. S. Capitol building in January of 2021.  Those who participated in that mob action had a deep-seated belief that nothing would happen to them because rioting was now legal in America.  The Summer of Floyd lowered the standards.

If things in our society are ever put to rights, it will be on a foundation of truth. The forces of destruction (the Left) live by lies and have been increasingly successful in destroying or muting those who remember the truth.  But they cannot change the facts.  It’s still the truth.

In my last post I explained why I thought that Trump would lose.  As it has turned out, he won bigly instead.

The English-speaking world is swarming presently with smart people’s attempts to explain this victory. That makes me feel a little better.  Since none of them agree, it means that all but one of them are wrong, and, entre nous, I have my doubts about that remaining one.

Personally I think that it came down to two things.  First, the economy and third-world migration had a broad impact on people’s dissatisfaction.  Second, Harris’s profound stupidity and repulsiveness were coupled with her identity as 50% of the team who caused this dissatisfaction.

I obviously misjudged these factors when I predicted a Trump loss.  I overlooked the last-mentioned factor, that voters tend to reject the party in power when things are looking bad.  I also wasn’t looking too much at the economy, which means the price of eggs. Also, I probably overestimated the attrition from earlier Trumpsters’ disappointment with his first tour of duty.  Be they as disappointed as I thought, they, like me, had little choice but to pull the lever once again.

The victory was clear enough to stifle any challenges, but it was still close enough to 50-50 to leave me thinking that it’s far too early to be singing “Happy Days Are Here Again.”  Trump’s recent appointment of Tom Homan as border czar (a title without definitions) is a good sign.

Perhaps the lawfare they’ve waged against him and the assassination attempts have beaten some resolve into him.

It’s a good thing that nobody reads what I write here. That headline would really torque a lot of people off.

There are three opinions about where we stand now, three days before D-Day:

1. Trump’s gonna win
2. Trump’s gonna lose
3. It’s too close to call

The variety of opinions shows that they aren’t based on objective data.  People are guessing.  So am I.

Against my position one might argue:

1. Trump’s stunts are going over well (McDonald’s, the garbage truck, Joe Rogan, etc.)
2. Harris is even more repulsive than Hillary was.
3. A lot of people are waking up to the wokeism menace and migrant disaster.

I would reply, though, that the elderly have recognized wokeism easily.  They voted for Trump before.  Now they’re dead.  If enough new converts are minted to replace them, that will only leave us where we were in 2020.  And although Harris is profoundly, deeply repulsive, lefty voters know that she would be surrounded by others who do have a brain, so her incompetence would be reined in from doing much damage.   (Notice how Dotage Joe’s absence from the presidency has produced no noticeable change in anything.)

I’ve heard wide-eyed chirpings about how Trump is gaining black voters.  This won’t change anything.  He had a lot of black voters before.  Suppose he got 5% more this time.  Blacks are only 12% of the population.  What’s 5% of 12%? it’s 6/10ths of 1%.  And guess what?  Most blacks live in red states, so their votes neither help nor hurt the candidate.  In Tennessee the blacks could vote 100% for the Dim candidate without gaining one electoral vote.  The swing states are all that matter, and no matter how many blacks vote Republican, they are sure to be a tiny percentage of a small percentage of the voters.

The mainstream media is becoming more vicious by the day and I expect them to have some effect on swing voters.  Trump/Vance have missed a lot of opportunities to “play their hand” to greater advantage.  Their followers are devoted and excited. I just don’t think that there are enough of them.

This is easy for me to write.  I can’t lose.  If Trump loses, I look wise and keen.  If he wins, I get Trump for president.

At a campaign rally this past Saturday, as you may have heard, former President Trump was fired upon by a sniper. Two bystanders were wounded and a third, Corey Comperatore, died.

Sometimes bad things happen and there’s no one to blame. “Hey, we did our best, but the attacker managed to get a few shots off before we could stop him. These things happen, y’know.”

Such is not the case this time. They did not do their best. If they had, the director, Kim Cheatle, would not be lying.

In an interview with ABC News, she said that the roof used by the sniper was left unsecured because “That particular building has a sloped roof at its highest point” and, therefore, there would be a safety issue. She’s lying.

Dear reader, I am ignorant of nearly everything, but one thing I know intimately is the slope of a roof. Before my retirement, it is safe to say that I climbed up onto people’s roofs nearly every working day for thirty three years. Usually I took a heavy drain machine up with me. Some were so steep, I had to throw a rope over the house and tie it to a truck bumper so that I could hold onto it in order to keep myself from falling off as I worked. (You gotta be tough to be a sewer man.)

We’ve all seen the pictures of the roof the killer used. Yes, it is sloped “at its highest point.” It is sloped at its lowest point, too. It is sloped as gently as any roof I’ve ever gotten onto. It presents no safety concern whatsoever. Every sewer man knows this with certainty.

Do you want proof? Just look at the counter-snipers whose photos appear in just about every video about this attack. You see two officers on a roof with their rifles in tripods. The roof is sloped at its highest point. (Okay, I’m mocking her. All sloped roofs are sloped at their highest point; if it wasn’t the highest point, it wouldn’t be a sloped roof.) Those counter snipers are Secret Service agents. They work for Kim Cheatle. Did the Secret Service have a safety concern with that sloped roof? Of course not. And they had no such concern with the roof used by the killer. Cheatle is lying.

Many retired Secret Service agents have been located by local news teams and interviewed on camera in the last few days. The public wants to know how this happened. The answer isn’t clear yet (Thursday night). But the agents all speak the same language and aver that, when they secure a site properly, nobody is going to get on a roof 130 yards away and shoot the President.

This failure is comparable to a good ol’ boy driving a pickem-up truck to Fort Knox, loading it up with 300lbs of gold (roughly $11 million) and driving off before anybody could notice and stop him. You must admit, that would be some record-level incompetence there at Ft. Knox.

The Scopes trial ran from July 10th to the 21st, 1925.

For a long time I’ve enjoyed studying the Scopes trial, an event that saw a convergence of legal theory and practice, Southern culture, libertarianism, the history of the Fundamentalist movement, and scientism.  The preeminent attorney for the defense, Clarence Darrow, cared little for free speech and nothing for the defendant, John Scopes; his goal in taking the case for no fee was atheism.  The ACLU, bankrollers of the show trial, were founded by Roger Baldwin, whose most famous quotation is “Communism is the goal.”  The handful of civic leaders in Dayton, Tennessee who volunteered to host the show trial cared nothing for the Bible, science, Communism, or atheism; they just wanted “to put Dayton on the map.”  In that, they succeeded like pepperoni pizza.  I think that it took O. J. Simpson to knock the Scopes trial out of first place.

John Scopes never even taught evolution; he just agreed to lie and say he did so that a trial could occur.  He didn’t participate in the trial.  He later said that his contribution was to provide a warm body to sit in the defendant’s chair.

I enjoyed teaching it in my college course on American church history.  I made a grave error once, however.  To demonstrate the antichristian propaganda that now perverts the history of the event, I showed the class five minutes of the film “Inherit the Wind.”  One young lady, on the final exam, gave me the movie version instead of what I had taught.

It was the first trial to be broadcast live across the nation and it captured the nation’s attention.  Likewise, the ridicule heaped upon it by the eminently talented reporter H. L. Mencken also became part of the nation’s memory.

If today’s descriptions of the event aren’t grossly twisted, they still tend to miss the key dynamics that explain the actions of the characters.  This is the challenge of historiography: the writer has to choose, out of millions of data bits, the things which he believes explain the events and their aftermath.  In this case, if he doesn’t understand Fundamentalism, Marxism, scientism, atheism, and the South of 1925, he’s going to get it wrong.  Oh, they all THINK that they understand, but, as I said, that’s the cigar butt in the punch bowl of historiography.

I highly recommend Summer for the Gods by Edward Larson.  His mastery of the material is stellar.

The world stands agog in reaction to Joe Biden’s debate performance last week.  His senility was on full display.  I am baffled, though by two things.

First: the left-wing commentators (sometimes called “mainstream,” in case you wonder about my terminology) seem genuinely surprised at Biden’s mental disability.  How do these people find their own ways to the bathroom?  All of us have known that the guy was non compos mentis since the 2020 campaign.  YouTubers posted video clips without end depicting him, for instance, finishing a speech and staring blankly, not knowing what to do, and having his caretaker (wife) gently turn him in the right direction and walk him off the stage.  How can commentators not know this for four years?

Second: I’m shocked at how the lefties scattered like a flock of birds in response to the debacle.  Nearly everywhere I searched for the next twenty four hours they were frantically repeating the message that Biden was obviously incompetent and had to be replaced.   In other words, they were producing, on their own nickel, video material for the Trump campaign by the truckload.  These people are professional liars and gaslighters.  (As an example, see how they reported the communist attack on the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.)  How can people whose career advancement depends upon their coordinated parroting of the party line break ranks and run, rather than look steadily into the camera and say in unison “There’s nothing to see here.  He has a speech impediment, that’s all”?

Now that they’ve had a few days to consult with one another, they’ve settled on the new message: the only problem was the failure of the CNN moderator to interrupt and argue with Trump.  Of course, that’s the responsibility of the debate opponent, but the lefties are counting on their audience’s biases to override any critical thinking impulses that might try to surface.  “Shame on the moderator for expecting Dementia Joe to frame a coherent answer.”

One thing I might agree with the lefties on is their insistence that Biden’s inability to finish a sentence won’t affect the election.  It seems certain that he wouldn’t lose the yellow-dog Democrat vote, because the alternative would be Trump, which is unthinkable.  The undecideds, though, are another story.  They all know now, if they, bless their hearts, hadn’t figured it out already, that Biden’s mind is gone and Kamala Harris would take his office almost immediately, and her own mind is hardly an improvement over Grandpa’s.  But, on the other hand, nobody has recommended Trump for the Mensa Society, either; so they might consider it a wash either way.

So here we sit, the greatest nation in history, trying to decide which morons to put in office.  The Dims are in quite a quandary since replacing Biden would entail replacing Harris, and she’s in line to be the first mulatta president in history.  So they’d be catching it in the shorts to try that.  They can’t nominate Harris in Biden’s place and then import Michelle Obama or Hillary Clinton, since a two-woman ticket has the chance of a snowball in Hattiesburg.  Gavin Newsom is getting mentioned a lot, but the nation has been ridiculing California for years now, so if Newsom became the candidate, well, the jokes write themselves.

In my opinion, the Dims just need to reboot and run two nice, nondescript functionaries — sort of like Mike Pence or Mitt Romney, people who don’t at all represent the wild-eyed lunacy that the Dim Party is known for; people who excite and inspire nobody.  That would be all it takes to defeat Trump.

A recent article at Ars Technica highlights the utter foolishness of trying to make living spaces for humans in outer space to address terrestrial overcrowding and population growth.  The article is about leaks that are developing in the International Space Station, and how impossible it is to correct them.

Plumbers know these things already.  In fact, mankind generally knows that things go wrong and you have to watch what you’re doing, lest you get into trouble.  Children learn this by playing outdoors.

It takes a lot of work to build something that will hold up. After that, it takes a fair amount of attention to maintain a living space.  You need trained technicians and a support system of roads, utilities, manufacturers, and logistics for getting the replacement part (or whatever is needed) into the hand of the worker who will fix the problem.  The weather has to cooperate to one degree or another.  You need a communication system and personnel management to handle things if the worker suddenly falls ill.

Stuff goes wrong; that is the way of the world.  You don’t install something in such a way that, when things go south, the damage is disastrous.

And that’s just here on earth, the place God designed exquisitely to be inhabited by man.

Trying to replicate that on, say, the moon, where the temperature varies from 200 degrees below zero to 200 above, is inconceivable.  A leak will occur.  When you can’t fix it, what will you do with that population you shipped up there, ostensibly to help the situation down here?  How many, you say?  You shipped two billion people to the moon to relieve overcrowding and food shortages on earth?  Dear, dear, dear . . . .

Oh, but maybe you won’t ship billions up there in hundreds of millions of space flights. Maybe you’ll just send work crews to mine precious minerals. On the moon, the minerals seem to be at the poles, where the temperatures are even more extreme.  So you’ll build a bubble and then scratch in the ground beneath the bubble, maybe?  After, of course, you’ve filled the bubble with air from a tank?  You’re gonna need a lot of air, y’know.

It’s hard to keep things going down here.  It’s unthinkable that it could be done in outer space. Enough already!  Put the money into highway maintenance.

It’s a little awe-inspiring to see how Trump vanquished his opposition in the Republican primary. One might think that he had lost his credibility with his meekly-conservative presidency and his total abandonment of the J6 prisoners.  But the voters have gone for him in droves in the primaries, and here we are.

One theory, and it convinces me, is that the Republicans are angry over the lawfare being waged against Trump, so they’re supporting him in reaction.  If true, it doesn’t speak well of the MAGA voters.  But when has anyone spoken well of them?

DeSantis’s positions were at least as good as Trump’s (from a MAGA perspective), but he could gain no momentum.  Trump generates enthusiasm.  It was when I saw the rallies in 2016 that I decided that he could very well beat Hillary, despite her 98% favorable rating in the polls.  I said to myself and a couple of friends, “They’re not telling us the truth.” But as I wrote earlier, Trump squeaked to a victory by carrying some blue-collar districts that normally went Democrat.  I’d say he captured their imagination.

Trump wins through gasbaggery.  Someone in the New York scene said back in 2016, paraphrasing an old piece of sales advice, that Trump would sell the sizzle when he didn’t even have any steak!  He hammered his “build a wall and make Mexico pay for it” at every single rally he he held.  Ted Cruz warned us that he didn’t mean it and wasn’t going to do it. [Cruz speaks generally on Trump’s pathological lying here.]

Those who remember the 2016 campaign can listen to Trump give a speech now and hear the same old gasbaggery, one promise after another about things he could have done the first time.  And, for what it’s worth, we hear the same enthusiastic responses from the audience, whose shortness of memory is a thing to behold.  Still, it isn’t the ten thousand in the audience who will decide which way the election goes. A huge rally represents only a tiny percentage of the voters.

The Dims seem intent, kamikaze-like, to ride the Biden-Harris ticket all the way down.  That’s got to help Trump.  Now RFK, Jr. is in the race with a running mate who offers everything Biden-Harris can’t, so he’s bound to hurt Biden, which will help Trump.

But I think, personally, that Trump can’t generate the former enthusiasm again.  Multitudes of his first voters who were elderly are now dead, and there’s little indication that he’s picked up many of the new ones who have reached voting age.  Another big chunk of his former voters are now singing “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” He barely had enough in 2016; he doesn’t have as many now.

The 2020 election was rigged — not in the 2,000 Mules way, but through collusion between the mass media and social media to violate free speech standards and to lie about it the whole time, which qualifies de facto as election interference.  They can do it again, and I expect that they will.

These things combined give me little hope that Trump can overthrow the Dims.

As I was leaving Walmart with a small bag of purchases, a polite young woman in a blue apron was waiting at the exit door, trying to reduce shoplifting.  I met her eyes and looked expectantly with a friendly expression on my face, waiting for some word from her.

(Please understand, I seldom patronize Walmart, so I don’t automatically know the rituals.)

She said something, but I couldn’t make it out.  I kept walking toward her, assuming that I’d be close enough when she repeated herself in response to my raised eyebrows.  Then I heard her say “C.R.E.C.”

I knew that I must have misunderstood, so I was now in her presence and apologetically begged “I’m sorry, what was that?”

She didn’t slow down, but she increased her volume a little and said a third time “C.R.E.C.”

Then it clicked in my mind.  “Oh!  May I see your receipt, please?  Certainly!  Certainly!” and I handed it to her.

I’m sure that she was glad to get that over with, but I doubt that she got a blog post out of it.

My wife was under the care of a local hospital for about eighty hours at the end of April. We walked out at 2:00 a.m. on a Monday because the new floor we’d been moved to happened to have a staff that declined our request for pain management, stonewalled, lied, and delayed until bringing us yet another ineffective dose of Tylenol, expecting us to just shut up and behave. We went home and I nursed her back to health.

Our particular complaint isn’t the subject of this essay, though. Sick people usually complain, and that will tempt any nursing staff to dismiss complaints. It is the prerogative of the patient, though, to decide whether or not he will submit to the judgment of the medical attendants, so this essay applies to all patients.

Although walking out was frightening to my wife (who is quite obedient to authority), it was a tremendous relief to us both to be back home. We used leftover oxycodone and experimented with the dosage (as we have through earlier surgical recoveries) according to her pain levels and durations. She slept in her own bed, chose her own diet, used her own toilet, wore a nightgown that wasn’t degrading, and was at peace. Her original ailment was kidney malfunction due to dehydration; but that had passed and she was in recovery, so going home was not dangerous.

The nursing staff (on the previous floor) had botched an IV and a calcium drip had extravasated into her arm. Calcium is quite an irritant over time and it became very painful as the night progressed; hence our complaints to the deaf ears of the affirmative-action caregivers we last encountered.

At home we were responsible for ourselves and to ourselves, meaning that, although we were willing to take the blame if we failed, we at least had the dignity of not being yanked around as though we were in prison.

The emergency room staff had probably saved my wife’s life with their swift diagnosis of kidney failure (which was merely temporary) and their administration of various infusions to remediate the potassium, acid, and calcium levels. I give them full credit with gratitude.

It makes little sense to blame a hospital for the failure of an IV insertion on an elderly patient with dilapidated veins, so I had no hesitation in returning to the same institution when my wife’s arm wasn’t healing properly at the end of May. Obviously our earlier dissatisfaction was prominently displayed in her record, for we got the royal treatment at every turn. They treated her with antibiotics and she’s now (another month later) under the care of a wound specialist, with yet another month to go.

Most of this information is to give context for you, the reader, to understand my stance on leaving the hospital Against Medical Advice. Don’t hesitate much to do it if you wish to. You have available a limitless number of providers of medical services, but you have only one soul.

The second verse of Isacc Watts’s “When I Can Read My Title Clear” says:

Should earth against my soul engage
And hellish darts be hurl’d
Then I can smile at Satan’s rage
And face a frowning world

A judicious person would automatically expect himself to be the inferior of Isaac Watts when it comes to hymn versification. Such persons, though, are not in charge of publishing hymnals. Almost universally now you will find the expression changed to “fiery darts,” as if Watts didn’t know what he was doing, or didn’t know that Eph. 6:17 of the Authorized Version of the English Bible used the wording “fiery darts.” This changed version can be found in songbooks 200 years old, so hymn improvers have a rich heritage.

Very good people desecrate hymns. They, like toddlers, think that they are helping. Often they mangle a hymn to make it, supposedly, more suitable for the current year. They are quite incapable of writing a hymn with lines like:

Great Father of glory, pure Father of light
Thine angels adore Thee, all veiling their sight
All laud we would render, Oh, help us to see
‘Tis only the splendor of light hideth Thee

Yet, like the aforementioned toddlers, they take their wax crayon and scrawl “praise” over the word “laud.” Why? They think that they’re helping.

One of my favorite lines in all of hymnody is “Heaven and earth may fade and flee, firstborn light in gloom decline, . . .” It is well-wrought poetry, as is most of the rest of “I Am His and He Is Mine.” (On the other hand, I could do without the third of four verses, which begins “Things that once were wild alarms.”) In some ill-fated hymnals, an improved version reads “Heaven and earth may pass away, sun and stars in gloom decline.” I suppose the reviser was trying to help.

“Guide Me, O Thou Great Jehovah” is among the greatest of English hymns. But like pigeons who see a statue of a great man, the desecrators cannot leave it alone. Commonly these days, the classic final verse,

When I tread the verge of Jordan
Bid my anxious fears subside
Death of death, and Hell’s destruction,
Land me safe on Canaan’s side

will be changed to say “bear me through the swelling current, land me safe on Canaan’s side.” The earlier words would teach the singers, with some instruction from their ministers, the doctrine of the Harrowing of Hell. The more recent, altered version happens to be truer to the original Welsh, but it is still a step down.

Charles Wesley knew his Bible, his Greek, and the history of theology thoroughly. Those who think that they can correct him need to realize that they are stepping into the boxing ring with a heavyweight champion. When he wrote

He left his Father’s throne above
So free, so infinite his grace
Emptied Himself of all but love
And bled for Adam’s helpless race

he captured the meaning of Philippians 2:7 accurately and beautifully. Let the correctors bring their studies of the doctrine of kenosis and lay them out for the rest of us to see. They might merit display on their mothers’ refrigerator doors for a few days — if they could be found at all.

“Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing” has been disgraced more than most. The well-crafted line “Here I raise mine Ebenezer, hither by thy help I’m come” is easy enough to explain to someone unfamiliar with the Bible. A monument called “Ebenezer” was raised in 1 Samuel 7. The word means “stone of help” and Israel marked the occasion by saying “hitherto hath the Lord helped us.” American Christians are not stupid. They don’t need a children’s version of the hymn that takes out the hard words. The prize, however, goes to that dear saint who changed “And I hope, by thy good pleasure, safely to arrive at home” into “And I know, by thy good pleasure, safely to arrive at home.” This corrector, bless God, had a know-so salvation and had no room in his thinking for a Bible word like “hope,” even if changing it made grammatical hash out of a formerly beautiful song.

A particularly egregious instance of effrontery is the change (within the last forty years, as I recall) of Charles Wesley’s “My God is reconciled” to “I now am reconciled.” It is true that, in the New Testament, “reconciliation” is used only of the sinner being reconciled to God, and not God being reconciled to the sinner. Well and good. But does it ever occur to the corrector that Charles Wesley might actually have known that just as well, or better, than he? Apparently not. Like a halfback who has been passed the football, looks for an opening in the line of scrimmage, and “runs for daylight,” the corrector’s only goal is to employ his superiority to Wesley in God’s service.

The line in question occurs in the last stanza of “Arise, My Soul, Arise.” The five verses of the song form one coherent whole; they relate to one another. Monkeying with the fifth verse throws it out of kilter with the previous four, and it makes the fifth verse itself internally incoherent. A common worshipper will probably never see the problem with the altered line. A hymn corrector could easily see it if he weren’t a barbarian.

A cursory reading makes plain that the song is about the sinner’s fears that he might die eternally under the righteous wrath of God, but “the bleeding sacrifice” appears before the judgment bar of God. Christ, the sacrifice, prays and pleads that the ransomed sinner might be forgiven. Then, the work is done! God’s wrath is satisfied, the sinner is pardoned, and he can now draw nigh to God confidently and cry “Abba, Father.”

Is this scriptural? Certainly (unless you hold some esoteric doctrine that the elect, from birth until conversion, are never under the wrath of God). Psalm 7:11 says that God is angry with the wicked every day. If this be so, and if God stops being angry when a sinner repents and receives salvation, saying that God is reconciled is altogether correct.

In contrast, suddenly changing the subject and announcing “I now am reconciled” (I’m no longer a rebel against God) is literary barbarism. That wasn’t the topic under discussion in the first four stanzas and it doesn’t fit with the remainder of the fifth stanza (see above).

In conclusion . . .

Sometimes a hymn may legitimately need correcting. The poetry can be clumsy or the imagery may be unsuitable for the congregation’s culture. An Arminian line may be unsingable in a Calvinist church, or vice versa. Such things are matters of necessity and might be agreed upon by all people of good will. The correctors and desecrators, on the other hand, display an arrogance, a carelessness, and a level of ignorance which bodes ill for the future of Christianity since it reveals the decline of Christian culture not only on the part of the barbarians, but more alarmingly on the part of those who publish their barbarisms.

Nothing lasts forever. I’ve had one Internet router for fourteen years. In computer years, that’s, like, forever.

This thing had good reviews and a good price, so I bought it and it worked wonderfully.

Lately, however, it’s been showing its age. My Internet speeds would slow to a crawl and I found that I could reboot the router and get back to normal. (Little did I know how pathetic my “normal” had become.) In the last week or two, even rebooting didn’t help.

Yesterday, in desperation, I bought a replacement at Best Buy.

I paid the same price as I’d paid fourteen years ago. It had good reviews and was nearly the cheapest one in stock.

According to speedtest.net, performance is thirty-to-ninety times better, depending upon where I’m sitting when I run the test.

So, gentle reader, cable your laptop directly into your router and run a speed test. Then run the same test over wi-fi and compare the numbers.
You, too, might be a candidate for a life changing router replacement.

Anger over COVID Mandates

I recently contracted some kind of flu-like bug. My head got stuffy overnight and I woke up with severe vertigo. I slept about three extra hours and the vertigo went away. I stayed home from work the next day and slept another three extra hours. That was pretty much the long and short of my symptoms.

Immediately I encountered a chorus of “You need to get tested.” When I asked why, the response was some form of “it will help others.” And I asked in return, “How do you know that me getting tested and having my life shut down in quarantine would benefit others?”

This masquerade has been dragging on for twenty months now. There are a lot of statistics and graphs and history now. There have been draconian clampdowns and mask mandates and distant socializing. There have been places where the tyranny was relatively benign and there have been societies where there was high compliance with stringent mandates.

One thing is overwhelmingly documented in all of this: there is no correlation between the mandates and the spread of COVID-19. There are places that do very little and the virus behaves a certain way and it is all recorded and graphed out where anyone can see it. Then there are the draconian tyrannies where nothing is allowed and the public complies and everyone wears a mask and isolates himself — and the virus does exactly as it did in the places that were one tenth as restrictive. There are places with high rates of vaccination and their graphs look just like the places where there are low vaccination rates.

The data have been covered here for a long time.

The majority of people, it would appear, have been tamed by the tyrants. They just obey and get on with their lives. That hasn’t been the case with me.

I’ve seen people driving their cars with their masks on. Alone, windows rolled up, and a mask on. Ask them what it’s for. They don’t know.

A friend of mine went out of town to visit his daughter and son-in-law. When he came downstairs one morning, he found the son-in-law sitting alone in his own living room, wearing a mask.

In my neighborhood, kids get off the school bus and walk two or three blocks to their homes in small groups, talking to their friends. Most of them still have their masks on.

Very few fast food joints have opened their dining rooms around here yet. When I can get inside to use the restroom, signs are everywhere about wearing a mask and keeping your distance. Then there may be no soap at the lavatory sink.

Presumably vaccines are beneficial, but it has been firmly established that (1) it won’t keep you from getting the disease and (2) it won’t keep you from spreading the disease. Those two facts should be enough to stop the tyrants from requiring the Mark Of The Vaccine to buy or sell. But, of course, it doesn’t.

People die of COVID every day. (Other people die of cars every day.) But nearly everyone below 80 years of age survives COVID. It may be that some who have died would have survived if they had been vaccinated; we can’t really know. Probably some who have died in car wrecks would be alive if they had never gotten into cars.

Life comes with risks. Humanist governments offer security: “Huddle together under this tyranny and we will protect you.” But some of us would prefer to die on our feet than live on our knees.

This article is a copy & paste from the Daily Memphian, 10/15/21. Check them out and consider subscribing at https://dailymemphian.com .

Back in the day — hot days after school in the spring — we played left field ball in a vacant lot on Poplar Avenue.

If you’re wondering what lot, it was across Poplar from the street where Laura Lewis lived. She was in my class at White Station. She had twin little brothers. Big sister named Tancie. Remember? Yeah, that was the lot.

If you’re wondering what left field ball is, it’s baseball when you don’t have enough guys for a whole game, or enough room for a whole game, or a tree in center field, so you play where you can with what you have. Yeah, it was a lot like that and lots of afternoons like that.

Back in the day.

One out. The Poindexter brothers were up next, Chris batting followed by Duke on deck. The Lewis twins — Harris and Lawrence, just freshmen — some glove, not much bat — were on that side. I’m playing between second and third — sort of a combo shortstop and third baseman. Chip Jenkins is behind me — the whole outfield. Pete Bale is pitching.

We will get these guys out. Because it’s getting late. Because it’s hotter than the hinges on the gates of h—. Because my mouth is full of cotton and I, and everybody else, needs a drink of water. Not water we bought. Not from a plastic bottle. We need a drink of water from the hose on the side of that house right over there.

We didn’t know whose house it was, but we knew they wouldn’t mind if we used the hose.

Not when I was growing up. Not from the hose on a hundred houses. Unless they had a fence and a dog. And the hose and the dog were behind that fence. The only dogs behind fences when I was growing up were the kind who would mind if you climbed that fence and headed for the hose.

Back in the day.

We’d turn it on after the game, let it run a bit until it goes from hot to cold, then we’d all fill up, and run some over our face, maybe spray each other a bit, and all pile into a couple of cars and go home. Along with a couple of our dogs. Maybe in Duke’s Nova, or Chip’s electric blue Super Sport, or my mama’s convertible. The twins would ride their bikes home. I don’t remember, but probably followed by a dog.

All full of some of the best water in the world. All at the end of another very East Memphis afternoon.

All evidently come to an end.

That lot, and that house behind it all became Bud Davis Cadillac, and that became Cadillac of Memphis. The house on the opposite corner from that lot is now the Blue Plate.

And water these days has become a luxury item like those Cadillacs.

I was thinking about all of that, remembering that, as I strolled through the water showroom at Kroger for a look at the latest models and to kick the tires. Water in the front and at the back. Water stacked in the end aisle displays. Pallets of shrink-wrapped cases of bottled water on the floor, 50 feet of bottled water on shelves. Water with names evoking mountain streams, sunsets by springs, sunrises in orchards, and health and fortunes and life itself improved.

One can get lucky right here in aisle 20, male or female, after just one sip of this water and one wink. One can throw one’s cane aside and run from here to frozen foods after just one swallow. One needs a sommelier to sort the subtle fruit enhancements, the nuance of peppermint or chocolate or cinnamon, domestic or foreign.

One brand is even called Smart Water and can be yours for three dollars for 30 ounces.

I’ll refer you to a meme I saw about that recently: “If you’re paying three dollars for a bottle of Smart Water, it’s not working.”

On this particular day, Smart Water was on special for a buck fifty.

I’ll refer you to the definition of that in the Urban Dictionary: “a buck fifty” – to the point: straight forward.

Here it is in usage: I’ll go a buck fifty with you; we’re not drinking from the hose anymore, we’re getting hosed.

These days.

For a couple of millennia, water below Memphis has not only been good enough to drink, it’s been good enough to become known as the Memphis Aquifer, good enough to be known around the world as some of the best water in the whole world, good enough to be the envy of the world … even the envy of Mississippi, who is trying to go all the way to the Supreme Court to steal it, or to make Memphis pay Mississippi to use water from the Memphis Aquifer.

I mean, really, could I even make that last part up?

Even still, our cavalier and careless attitude about our water, our lack of understanding about the value and fragility of it, almost allowed TVA to tap into our aquifer and take millions upon millions of gallons of it to cool a power plant — wasting a bezillion gallons of our “drinking” water when a bezillion gallons of the Mississippi roll by every second.

If it hadn’t been for my friend Ward Archer and others who started Protect Our Aquifer, TVA would have done just that.

And if it hadn’t been for Protect Our Aquifer and concerned citizens of Memphis and people in threatened neighborhoods, an oil pipeline would have been built right over the aquifer. It wasn’t and it won’t be.

Something as seemingly ordinary as water is the stuff of life, something as extraordinary as ours demands vigilance.

Memphis water ­— right out of your hose, right out of your tap— is already better than 99% of all of that bottled water in Kroger. I only say 99% instead of 100%, because some of that coconut or mandarin orange stuff is OK, but not one drop of any of it is worth what you’re paying for it. Here’s the complicated formula:

Bottled water — costs more than just something, as in a rip.

Memphis water — costs close to nothing, right out of the tap.

And there’s this, that bottled water is, well, bottled.

The water that supposedly comes from cold mountain streams or tree-shaded springs? Bottled in plastic, shrink-wrapped in plastic. Processed and manufactured in plants, stored in warehouses, stacked on loading docks, shipped in trains and trucks. And if it’s supposedly from Alpine meltwater or some other exotic source faraway? Add ocean shipping, customs, and waiting in sweltering rail containers in shipyards.

And those plastic bottles and packaging in our landfills and rivers, lakes, and oceans? Thrown out our car windows, gathered in our parking lots and yards and streets, along our curbs and trails in the woods?

Even recycled, it all comes back to haunt us again and again.

Even the plastic bottles that claim to be “biodegradable even the caps” are pouring water down your leg and telling you it’s raining. If Cro-Magnon man threw one of those out of the cave 35,000 years ago, it might just now be disappearing, if a Mastodon stomped on one or a whale shark spit one out 10,000 years ago, you might just now not be able to read the sell-by date.

These days.

Every year, Americans are swallowing about 45 gallons of water per capita from either plastic or glass bottles. That means folks around here, people literally sitting on top of famed Memphis water, are getting soaked by paying for about 54,240,000 gallons of bottled water a year.

At the price of Smart Water — 10¢ an ounce times 128 fluid ounces times 54,240,000 — that’s $694,272,000 every year. Even if you buy Smart Water on special at half that, or water of reasonable intelligence at half that, it’s still hundreds of millions of dollars. I’ll go a buck fifty with you again, that’s stupid money in a town that doesn’t have a lot of it.

Put another way, a family of four is spending from $1,152 to $2,304 a year on bottled water.

These days.

Kids aren’t playing left field ball where I grew up on Highland Street or on Perkins Road or anywhere that I know of, or much of anything else for that matter outside of the watchful eyes of organized sports and activities, outside of the circle of their parents and their SUVs, outside of fear of the world and its consequences. Maybe that’s safer, maybe its worth the loss of kids learning how to take care of themselves, how to explore and discover on their own. Maybe so. We’ll see.

When kids aren’t going anywhere on their own, their dogs aren’t going anywhere either. Not outside a fence. Not without a lease. Certainly not in neighborhood packs. But they’re not fighting either, or biting either, or dying in the street like several of my dogs did. That’s definitely better.

As much as I write about not trying go back, about memories as treasures not destinations, Memphis water is an exception. Try some.

Instead of throwing away that plastic water bottle, start a recycling program of your own — fill it from the tap. Turn on the hose, let it run a bit to cool off and lose the taste of hose, and then take a pull of one of our city’s great assets.

Then spray a little on each other. On the kids. On the dogs.

While the taste of Memphis water will take some of us back, it will win some of us over.

I’m a Memphian, and some of what that means is in the water.

–Dan Conaway, https://dailymemphian.com

I met Nicky in the fall of 1974 when I attended an audition for his summer drama ministry. He had launched the Academy of Arts in 1971 after earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees at BJU, but I knew nothing about him. I went to the audition on a whim, having heard about it from my college friend Alan Behn, who also was auditioning. Somehow I was chosen for the team. Alan wasn’t. I know that Nicky regretted his decision occasionally, but he never said so. Despite my immaturity and “wild and crazy guy” posture, he saw something in me that he wanted.

I toured with the drama team in the summers of ’75 and ’77. At other times Nicky would routinely call me to come help him on some project, usually as a voice actor. One time he recruited me to fly up to Louisville, Ky. to retrieve a van that a team had left for repairs. I’m not sure that he realized this, but his operating principle was “You do everything you can for me and I will do everything I can for you.” That could result in misunderstandings or disappointments. Various people parted from him over the years, finding the arrangement intolerable. Others stayed. The ministry flourished.

Once I finally grew up, we had an unusual consonance of outlook. There was probably no one whose views about the root causes of things impressed me more than his did. Likewise he expressed profound appreciation for the analyses I offered on the basis of my scholarly attainments. He told me that he wanted me to come and teach at his ministry for a week some time, but that never materialized; he was largely retired by then.

As 2020 drew to a close, the thought often came to me that I needed to visit Nicky again. Finally I decided in February to take a road trip and head to Greenville to see if I could scare up him or some other friends. (As it turned out, I encountered there the aforementioned Alan Behn, whom I hadn’t seen for forty years — but that’s another story.) Much to my surprise, I found Nicky on his death bed, failing with liver disease. His condition was no secret to his supporters across the nation, but it hadn’t been mentioned in the emails I received from the ministry, so I was unaware.

Quite a few friends and admirers visited him in those final months, so I was little more than a paragraph in that day’s page; and every day was a new page filled with visitors, cards, and well wishes. We weren’t able to converse like old times, due to the presence of others, but we still shared a laugh when I reminded him of our first meeting at the audition and he couldn’t imagine why he would choose me over Alan (who later served for years as an important staff member of the ministry). I hadn’t a clue, either.

He saw something in me, and it made a real difference in my life to have him in my corner. He mentored thousands through the summer teams, the Christian School Drama Seminars, his pastorate and school and conservatory, and his plays, songs, and books. I’m like a dwarf in comparison, and grateful to have been his friend.

In the spring of 2002, two musicians, Larkin and her husband, Andy Cohen, encountered me in the bicycle co-op in the basement of a Midtown church. The kid who was teaching me how to build a bicycle, Anthony Siracusa, introduced me to them and told them that I did a lot of plumbing for the church. A few days later I got a phone call: “This is Andy Cohen, the Yodeling Jew. We’d like to have you look at a few things at our house.”

When I entered the venerable grotto at 95 N. Evergreen a few days later to do some work on a ninety-year-old toilet, only Larkin was present. (Andy was often off touring somewhere.) We immediately began talking about the power of music to touch hearts and she set up her hammer dulcimer near the bathroom to demonstrate what she meant. Like everyone else, I was entranced by her playing. Thus began an intense friendship that continued through our last visit together this past Sunday afternoon. Brain cancer killed her three days later.

Larkin got me interested in folk music. I bought a McSpadden dulcimer from her Riverlark business. She sold me her old Dana Hamilton hammer dulcimer. Andy taught me the rudiments of clawhammer banjo and, while on tour in Utah, procured a 19th century instrument for me from Intermountain Guitar & Banjo. Larkin got me started on autoharp and on sacred harp singing. These instruments and the old time music I learned to play have probably been the greatest influences in my life for the past twenty years.

Larkin wrote the book on mountain dulcimer in 1982. It has been common through the years to see knowledgeable people refer to it as the standard against which other books should be measured. She was a highly-sought-after teacher at the major festivals. For years here in Memphis she held the nation’s preeminent dulcimer festival annually, attracting the finest teachers and players. Her CD Lark in the Twilight is a masterpiece.

I sort of worshipped her. At festivals or other performance venues I would attend to her like a bond slave: meeting her in the parking lot and carrying her instruments, setting them up, fetching whatever or whomever she needed, helping her pack up, and then sitting with her luggage for upwards of an hour sometimes, alone in an empty hall, waiting for her to finish talking to all of her other admirers so that I could escort her and her stuff safely to the parking lot.

Anywhere I went in the old time music world, if I were a complete unknown, all I’d have to do was explain “I’m Larkin Bryant’s plumber” and I’d gain instant prestige.

I summoned the utmost intensity when I watched her perform. Afterwards I’d talk to her about the fine details in what she had done. Several times she replied with some combination of wonder and thankfulness, “Kevan, you’re the only person who hears these things and understands.” If that was true, it was because I realized what a treasure she was and I paid more attention than some casual listener might have. Everyone wants to be understood.

For all that, I was never really her confidant. There was much of her present and past life that she chose not to share with me, although she spoke freely of those things to other friends. We were quite different in some ways.

Her brain was only barely working during my visit with her this past Sunday. Our last conversation, such as it was, had been on Easter Sunday. I sat with her at her piano, trying to get her to play something simple, but she just couldn’t get her hands to obey, nor could she maintain a line of thought for long. Her condition was reminiscent of a person who hadn’t completely awakened from sleep.

After an hour, I rose to go and bent over to put one arm around her bony shoulders and give her a gentle hug. Always underweight, she was becoming literally skin and bones. My head was down by her chest and she managed to bring her two hands up from her lap so that her forearms could curl against my head in a feeble hug. Her voice swelled with emotion as she uttered, “Oh, Kevan, if I could only express . . . .” Her power of speech was also limited by the brain disease and she could say no more.

But she didn’t have to.

I understood.

Election violations are always occurring, roughly comparable to traffic violations. The question with both is, “How much and how important?” I’ve seen minor violations at polling places where I’ve voted, both deliberate flaunting of the laws and inadvertent violations through carelessness or ignorance. In no cases did those violations affect the outcomes of the elections. The deliberate flaunting could have contributed to long-range erosion of respect for the laws, but the same could be said for traffic violations–and I am very sure that traffic violations have not increased since I began driving in 1971, so the likelihood is faint.

The president’s legal team, represented by Rudy Giuliani and Mrs. Sidney Powell, are alleging that, to use Tucker Carlson’s words, “the single greatest crime in American history” took place during this recent presidential election. Tucker has complained that they have offered no evidence, and that has gotten him roasted by partisans who point out that Powell has an impeccable record.

As much as I hope that something can keep Harris from becoming president, I am highly skeptical of Powell’s claims.

First, she offers no proof; she just claims that it’s on the way. If she had the kind of evidence of which she boasts, it would be a small matter to list a few things. I’ve seen a whistle blower affidavit that said little more than that the irregularities of our vote counting were eerily similar to what he claims to have seen in Venezuela years ago. That’s very flimsy. Why hasn’t she produced something more substantial?

Second, she’s alleging something that is unbelievably large. It reminds me of the allegations that the moon landing was faked–as though hundreds of participants from the astronauts to the film crews all lied in unison and kept the secret with no leaks for fifty years.

Third, things just don’t add up. The Dims were claiming they’d have a landslide. Instead, the popular vote was a squeaker. They really needed the Senate if they were to implement their revolution, pack the SCOTUS, etc., and their chance of getting that is very thin. The results of the House races were very disappointing to them. Is it really that hard to flip a few more votes in machines being controlled from somebody’s laptop in Dominion Voting System’s offices? Powell is saying that Trump’s votes were so overwhelming, it crashed the nefarious software and the count had to be stopped until it could be remedied. Gimme a honkin’ break!

With all that said, I also observe that a lot of serious fraud was observed and a lot of gaslighting from the mainstream media poured forth in response. It is claimed now that Harris/Biden got more votes than Obama did in 2008. That’s preposterous because nobody was excited over Biden, but all the nation was ga-ga over ushering in a nonwhite. Some of the most damning evidence lies in the actual numbers. Engineers and other mathematicians have demonstrated to one another’s satisfaction that many numbers and statistics are falling out in impossible distributions, which indicates fraud.

We shall see.