About Last Week
Okay, so last week there was an election that Donald Trump won and may have shaken up the entire world order as we now know it.
Clearly, that was important.
And, no, the stories about how “election deniers” are now “election truthers” are not real. They may exist, but they are not real – people with concerns about the 2020 were not election deniers but instead had legitimate concerns about how that specific vote was conducted. All mail-in, rules changed in the last few weeks, drop boxes and ballot harvesting legalized, unprecedented halts in counting on election night, and etc. etc. all brought the conduct of the election in for appropriate questioning.
It is not that “this time their guy won so now everything is perfect and secure,” it’s “this time their guy won in what actually appeared to be a fully functioning relatively fair election.”
So let’s just stop that.
Separately on the election front, LA DA George Gascon – how to put this nicely – got his ass handed to him on a platter, losing to challenger Nathan Hochman 60 to 40%. Keeping with not unexpected but certainly unusual results from California, the woke DA in Oakland was recalled, the woke/corrupt mayor in Oakland was recalled, and San Francisco has its first mayor not produced by the city’s woke/corrupt/destructive political machine in a very long time (true, he owns a chunk of Levi’s and is a zillionaire, but at least he didn’t have to date Willie Brown to get the job.)
Oh, and with the passage of Prop 36, crime became illegal once again in California.
Note – Tuesday I will be posting a far more in-depth piece on the “California conundrum – why does the state as a whole vote relatively moderate but vote hard left for any race involving partisan labels and/or being in a district created by politicians.” Hint…well, you can probably guess why.
With all these facts out of the way, I thought it would be fun to share a few other surprising true things. Enough with politics for the day…
· Kamikaze pilots did on occasion return to base and their planes were not loaded with a half-tank of fuel. See this truly wonderful depiction of the process:
· The English word “news” comes, not from the very cool acronym of “North, East, West, South” – meaning “from everywhere” - but from simply pluralizing the word “new” because the information was new and there was typically more than one bit of information conveyed.
· I don’t speak ancient Greek or Hebrew of Aramaic or what have you, but as to the Bible these two things are true. First, a better translation of the Sixth Commandment would be (and actually is when referenced in other bits of the book) “Thou Shalt Not Murder.” Killing and murdering someone can be two very very different acts and the mistranslation (in the King James version, at least) has had very odd and sometimes terrible consequences all the way down to this day.
Second, the saying of Jesus that “it is easier for a rich man to pass through the eye of a needle than it is to get into get into heaven” is also a victim of mistranslation. The proper reading is “eye of THE needle,” which was the nickname of a gate into Jerusalem (pretty sure on that) and that changes everything. In the common reading, it means being rich and getting into heaven is impossible; change that to “eye of THE needle” and what you have is a very different picture. For a camel to get though that gate, it needed to be unburdened of its cargo and to bow its head deeply; the same would be for a rich man and heaven – stop being worried about worldly possessions and bow before your maker. Now, parable-wise, that makes a lot more sense.
· Dumpsters behind restaurants in big city alleys are not locked to prevent poor people from stealing leftovers, as has been often alleged. Taking stuff OUT of dumpsters is fine with a restaurant, as long as it’s done relatively neatly. They are locked to keep people from putting stuff into them because if the restaurant has to call for an extra pick-up that week it typically costs between $300 and $600 bucks.
· In Louisiana, you can get ten years in prison for stealing an alligator. Seems a bit odd, but with wide-spread alligator farming and the fact that they are no longer even close to being an endangered species anymore (the farming actually helped that along – there are at least 2 million wild and a million farm gators in the state now) there is significant value in an alligator. Depending upon size and pattern, etc., farm gators go for about $350 while wild caught – which can be bigger – can fetch up to about $30 bucks a foot. The skin is the most valuable part (luggage, belts, etc.) but – and I speak from personal experience – the meat is actually fantastic. Imagine a textural combination of a lean boneless pork chop and a nice piece of swordfish – and it doesn’t just “taste like chicken;” it has a distinct though light flavor.
· People really can tell if someone is staring at them…ish. It seems there is more than we know going on on quaint little brains and that prickly sense we get when we think we are being specifically looked at is real. But it may not be an ESP, the entire world is interconnected, quantum entanglement type thing – our brain may be alerting us to the bits of info it constantly processes but usually doesn’t bother to tell us. We hear more than we “hear” and we see more than we “see,” especially peripherally. This is all part of our being a social animal. Why we may think there is something ethereally else at play is due to confirmation bias, i.e. we think we are being looked at and we turn around and someone is looking at us, so score one on that side and if no one is it just turns into a “huh – oh well.” Personally, I’m not so sure of that – studies have shown it may be confirmation bias – i.e. you see what you were expecting – but I’m not sure that can be accurately figured out in a clinical setting when the test subject is “primed” for the question.
Today’s thank you epigram may very well be one. In (for me, oft-quoted) the tv show Archer, one character tells another to get a wooden stake to kill someone else.
“But we know he’s not a vampire now!” she says.
The response:
“It doesn’t matter to the stake.”
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