CZEdwards

Well, it was nice having raw vegetables while it lasted.

this is an elaboration of a Bluesky thread I wrote off the cuff yesterday. Here’s the original thread. I’m incorporating comments I made into the text.)

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/fda-food-safety-inspections-plans/

The FDA is ending routine food safety inspections, which means food poisoning outbreaks are going to be bigger, last longer, and go undetected longer than they were when we had routine random checks. Leaving it to state and local authorities means those agencies — which are already understaffed and under-funded where they are functional at all — will have to take on a complete federal agency’s responsibilities, with no additional money or staff, and without authority over other states. So if Arizona biffs a Romaine harvest with e coli, Kansas doesn’t have any way to pull that Arizona Romaine off the shelves. We federalized food safety for really good reasons.

Historically, the vegetables we’ve worried most about are romaine lettuce and leafy greens, especially in bagged salads. Romaine is a great crop for shipping, it’s really sturdy, it doesn’t crush and it remains fresh for a good long while, but it has one major flaw — it grows upright and with gaps between the leaves. Most e coli is spread by irrigation water, which is not tap water. It’s basically straight from the canal, which means if a cow shat in it 200 miles up the Colorado River — which cows do — that e coli will still be in the irrigation water.

Romaine, by the nature of its tulip shape, captures irrigation water as it grows, and if that water has e coli, that e coli gets a decent survival environment with recurring moisture and enough warmth. Washing in the field after harvest does help, but as the repeated recalls of salad greens and romaine have shown, it’s not perfect, and it doesn’t take a lot of missed e coli to make people very sick.

So my first inclination with the end of routine inspections is to get a lot pickier about what fresh vegetables come into my house. I am a full on convert to the Church of the Precautionary Principle, in that if there are ways to significantly reduce harm that only require minimal behavioral changes or inexpensive shifts, I will make them parts of my habit, such as masking in public places, or driving less. The way I approach the Precautionary Principle for food is knowing the most common vectors and minimizing my interactions with them, and knowing the most useful food prep processes.

Since bagged salad and Romaine are high potential vectors, my reasonable changes are to switch back to iceberg lettuce and other tight crisphead lettuces (which will mostly be farmer’s market items or from your own garden). Whole Iceberg is extremely unlikely to become contaminated because of the nature of its shape. Since its leaves overlap each other, that keeps water out of the main body of the head, meaning there’s no place for contaminated irrigation water to collect. In the field, when harvested, most of the outer leaves, which might have come in contact with e coli irrigation water, are left in the field to be plowed under, and we tend to remove the outer couple when we get iceberg home from the store, because those leaves are often bruised or limp. Iceberg becomes a potential vector when it’s chopped up and mixed with other lettuces in bagged mixes, especially with Romaine. Other greens like baby spinach, arugala, and kale have all had smaller scale salmonella and e coli recalls, so similar care should be taken with them. The baby versions are very tender, so they won’t stand up to much vigorous washing, but the adult versions can usually stand a good soak in sanitizer water. (See next paragraph)

Sanitizing water is one of our best tools for most vegetables. There are four main types, three can be easily made at home with household products, one requires sourcing a specialist product, and one requires buying a generator. The simplest is household, chlorine bleach. About 1 teaspoon per two liters of water makes a solid soak. Submerge your produce in it, wait five minutes, then drain and rinse. Second are the acids. Acids will break down the cell walls of bacteria, thereby killing them. (They’re not so good on viruses). The common household acids are white vinegar (acetic acid at 5% solution) and citric acid powder (lots of household uses, from dishwasher tabs to cleaning calcium from water kettles to fruit preserving). For vinegar, you use 1 part vinegar to 8 parts water (for ease of use, that’s 1 cup to 2 liters or 2 quarts) or 3 tablespoons of food grade citric acid powder per liter/quart of water. Soaking time is what does the sanitizing work; you have to let the sanitizer do its job. Five minutes is a minimum, ten or more is fine, too.

The harder to source version is peroxyacetic/peracetic acid, which is a mixture of hydrogen peroxide and acetic acid; it’s a professional sanitizer aimed at the food processing industry, and if you source it, follow the manufacturers instructions.

The one that requires a generator is hypochlorous acid (HOCL) and I’ll go into detail on that one near the end of this article.

Here is a complete list of sanitizing liquids. https://www.food-safety.com/articles/5323-clean-up-that-food-an-update-on-sanitizers-and-disinfectants

Bagged baby carrots have been another e coli vector, so my inclination would be to go back to cutting my own damn carrots. We’re all well aware now that “baby carrots” are actually fully grown carrots that were misshapen, that are peeled with high pressure water, then cut into appealing small sizes, right? (If you weren’t, well, now you do.) Instead of baby carrots, pick full sized carrots, scrub them well with running water, give them a 5 to 10 minute fully submerged soak in sanitizing water, rinse, then peel and cut into your preferred shape. Since you’re not going to get the perfect shapes baby carrots get, make that part of your plan and cut on an angle for carrot chips, or as sticks, or coins (not for small children!) or diced.

We also know that cantaloupe, by the nature of their netted rinds, can become an e coli vector. What happens is e coli gets on the rind, the rind retains some dirt, and then when we get the melon home and cut into it, the e coli on the rind gets on the knife and then transfers from the knife to the previously perfectly fine melon flesh. The strategy with all melons is to buy them whole (not precut at the store) wash the rind first, with soap and water, then rinse. If you’ve got sanitizer solution, let the melon rest in there for a few minutes, then rinse, then cut, and discard the rinds.

We’ve had smaller food borne illness outbreaks with other vegetables. The strategy with more sturdy vegetables, like broccoli, carrots, fresh green beans that you want to serve raw? Blanch them. This is bringing a big pot of water to a boil, then putting your raw vegetables in the water for at least 3 seconds, but usually 10-15, then immediately dunking the vegetables in ice water to stop the cooking. Since most food borne illnesses are on the surface of the food, boiling water will take care of that, but what we like about raw vegetables is the crispness and crunch. A short blanch will make broccoli more vividly green, will make it a little sweeter, and will handle any bacteria on the surface, while leaving it pretty crisp. And most of the sturdy vegetables that you blanch will be fine in the refrigerator for a week.

Blanching isn’t great for more delicate vegetables like greens or cucumbers or peppers. You can blanch tomatoes; the skins will slip off, so you only want to blanch right before serving. On the other hand, tomatoes and peppers of all sorts are a perfect candidate for sanitizing water, spray them down, wait a few minutes, and wipe them off. Their insides are fine, it’s just the surface that runs the risk of food-borne illness. With American waxed cucumbers, peel and slice, then store in lightly acidulated water (a teaspoon of citric acid powder or 2 of vinegar per liter). In this case, the acidulated water is to keep them crisp, not to sanitize. Hydroponic cucumbers — baby and English in the plastic wrapper — will be fine, you just need to rinse them like you would any produce. You should sanitizer soak snow and sugar snap peas you intend to be eaten raw if you don’t know if they’re hydroponic.

Cooked vegetables do make good salads, if handled well. Frozen vegetables, when steamed, will be food safe, without a problem. They can then be cooled and refrigerated (follow normal food safety procedures about getting temps down and into the fridge). Consider the wide range of chopped salads made all over the planet, from Fattoush and tabouli (parsley, cucumbers, tomatoes) to cold succotash (corn and beans), variations on Cobb salads, and Paul Newman’s Spoon Salad (https://www.eatingwell.com/recipe/252486/use-a-spoon-chopped-salad).

Consider mixing steamed or roasted butternut squash with lightly sautéed baby spinach, chopped apples and pecans in autumn. Your imagination is the limit here; cooked vegetables do play well with others.

Onions have been an e coli source — it’s the irrigation water problem — so plan to cook most, and what you have to have raw, slice/dice and soak in one of the acid-based sanitizer mixes. Onions can take on flavors very easily, so chlorine is not the best option, but also rinsing your onions reduces the unpleasant sharpness.

My next recommendation is grow your own greens. I’m a big fan of hydroponics; they’re not cheap to start, though there are DIY solutions that can get you going for under $50, but at that price, you’ll probably find a ready to use countertop system at various stores (use the shopping field on your favorite search engine).

Aerogardens ( https://aerogarden.com/gardens/farm-family/farm-12-xl.html) are the OG countertop hydroponics, and they’re excellent. They’re reliable, they last for years. The major problem is they’re small, second is they’re not inexpensive. A 6 spot Aerogarden will produce about enough lettuce for one person to continually harvest for one daily salad, starting on about the 20th day and lasting potentially as long as the 60th day. Plan on having one per person in your household, or going with a larger system like one of these from A Hope Garden (https://ahopegarden.com/products/44-seed-pods-vertical-hydroponic-garden)

With hydroponics, you do have to wait for about 20 days from seed starting to a harvestable crop, and they will be tender, baby greens, but you’ll also know exactly what went into them. I recommend the all in one units for people just starting with hydroponics because they’re intended as intro to hydro. You will need fertilizer for your hydroponic water because plants need potassium, nitrogen, and phosphate as well as some trace minerals; Schultz liquid plant food or Miracle Gro are actually perfectly fine.

With hydroponics you should also stagger your start dates. If you want continual lettuce from the 44 spot AHopeGarden up above, the first week, you plant 10 lettuces, the second week you plant another 10, and so on. When the first ten have been consumed, wash their net pots, compost the stuff you can’t eat, and start another 10 lettuces. You should plan to harvest and replace lettuces about every 35 days, because they get bitter once they hit about 40 days old. If you can set up a fan, or set up your system in a room with a ceiling fan, that helps, because lettuces prefer to be cool, and if they’re too warm, they go bitter quickly (because they think it’s high summer and time to flower and make seeds for next year’s lettuce).

You can also grow lettuces in container gardens, as simple as a bag of potting soil in a 5 gallon plastic bucket with a few holes and a quart of gravel at the bottom. Lettuce again loves cool weather, they like moisture, and they like part shade. If you have room and can build a cold frame (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_frame), you can grow lettuce outdoors most of the year. The principle of successive plantings also holds for container garden lettuce. It’s not going to be cheap to start, but lettuces are the easiest plants to grow at the baby greens level, and can be a big confidence booster for people with a historically black thumb.

These solutions? For the Attention Deficit, like me, hydroponics is the way to go. It’s easy to forget a pot on your back porch; much harder to neglect a blinking red light and a drooping, drama queen lettuce on your kitchen counter. Drama queen plants (the ones that wilt if you even speak the word dry) are EXCELLENT for ADHD because they’re very obvious, and also forgiving. Give them a drink and they perk right up. And lettuce is absolutely a drama queen.

You also have the option of microgreens, which are VERY baby greens grown on a mat of jute, coconut coir, or paper in a plastic or metal sieve tray with a water reservoir underneath For a starter kit, my best recommendation would be Garden Republic’s $30 kit (https://www.shopgardenrepublic.com/products/garden-republic-microgreens-growing-kit) and a packet of extra soil disks, but they are sold out as of this writing. (Put yourself on their waiting list.)

Second best would be most of the kits at True Leaf Market (https://trueleafmarket.com/collections/micro-green-kits),the one at your price point. For seed, Botanical Interests (https://www.botanicalinterests.com/search?q=microgreens&options%5Bprefix%5D=last”) is not the cheapest place to buy microgreens seeds, but they are very reliable and have a great selection, and good sized packets. (I really like their Umami mix). Pea shoots are also really excellent, and one of the most appealing microgreens for kids. They’re sweet!

And of course, there are kits on ‘zon, but I don’t recommend ‘zon unless there’s no other option. But “microgreens kits” will bring up a large assortment at many prices.

You harvest microgreens at about 10 days old, usually just as they’re getting their first adult leaves, and you just snip them off right about the substrate. They’re very reliable for even novices, and microgreens have a lot of nutrients. And they’re a quick payoff. They just need light, from a sunny kitchen window or a set of under-cabinet lights.

And then there’s shop local and seasonal — find a CSA or a local farmer’s market/farm stand, and only buy your lettuce there, and only buy the lettuce grown locally. Smaller farms are far less likely to have e coli breakouts. When in doubt, skip it and have a wedge salad week. (https://www.marthastewart.com/8128457/perfect-wedge-salad-how-to>wedge salad)

Is this all a burden? Yes, 100%, and it sucks! This is going to be hell for people with disabilities and very tight time constraints, because we’ve gotten used to paying someone else to take these steps. If you have someone in your life who is independent but their independence requires bagged salads and pre-cut fruit, your mutual aid task for them is to figure out how you can be their sous chef, as well as your own, because you’re going to have to do this for your household, so you might as well do it for one additional person and drop off the prepped stuff for them. Be honest and open and have the discussions about mutual aid.

Families are going to have to make a sous chef prep part of their weekly chores, and everybody who can is going to have to participate. A five year old can crank a rotary grater (https://www.macys.com/shop/product/nutrislicer-3-in-1-spinning-rotating-mandoline-countertop-food-slicer-grater?ID=11345817) or push the plunger on a safety mandoline (https://verniershop.com/products/mandoline-slicer?_pos=1&_sid=e81ea66f2&_ss=r?variant=42276821499974) safety mandoline, a ten year old can be in charge of monitoring the sanitizer soaks and bagging/boxing up food to go in the fridge. Teenagers can stand at a stove and blanch broccoli or brussels sprouts or carrots. I cannot tell you how your family will organize it, but I can tell you the more honest communication and the more urgency you can convey as the project manager, the more your kids and spouse are likely to understand this is part of their responsibility, and the alternative is completely unpleasant — no more fresh vegetables or fruit (and no ultra-processed food replacing it, just canned and frozen fruits and vegetables.)

If you’re completely on your own, my recommendation is it’s time to switch entirely to frozen vegetables with exceptions only for hydroponic vegetables, like the expensive plastic containers of lettuce from Kalera and English/baby cucumbers. Once frozen vegetables are cooked, those will be safe, they can portion to single servings easily, and they can be rinsed after cooking in cool water and become a salad.

This sucks, no doubt, and it’s eugenicist and ableist, but protecting ourselves from eugenics and ableism is our first defense against their malice. Fuck you, I won’t die like you want is incredibly powerful.

If your community has a food handler’s certification course or ServSafe class, go get certified. There will be probably a low fee — $15-30 is the usual. It’s often a very short class, sometimes only a “read this book, take a multiple choice test”. There’s a good chance it will feel minimal or even useless, especially in the red states that do have the requirement because they’re not doing it in the interest of food safety, they use it as gate-keeping to keep immigrants from food handling jobs because too often, those tests are only in English. (Arizona, I might be looking at you in the 1990s. Assholes.)

However, the course, or this set of documents from the USDA (https://www.fsis.usda.gov/food-safety/safe-food-handling-and-preparation), is an excellent refresher for food temps, hold times, and produce prep, and that’s what we need right now. If you’re using the documents, make sure you download them, since we can’t be sure how long they’ll be available.

Meat will also become more dangerous. While meat inspections are partly USDA and partly FDA, both groups are being gutted. Meat’s dangers are e coli, but also salmonella in poultry and beef, and listeria in raw and prepared meats.

Fortunately, all three can be killed by cooking the meat to 165° F for 3 seconds. That means for deli meat sandwiches, your meat has to go on a plate and into the microwave to cook until it steams before you make a sandwich with it. If you have a sous vide set up, you could seal your deli meat in a sous vide bag and pasteurize for an hour and a half at 140° F (for all three — listeria is a tough bastard), then chill in an ice bath and put in the refrigerator for later use. (For more details on sous vide pasteurization, Anova has a great chart here. (https://anovaculinary.com/pages/sous-vide-pasteurization-guide)

Ground meat especially needs to be cooked to 165, and I wouldn’t recommend it for sous vide pasteurization. E coli is still a surface problem in meat, but once ground, all the outside, contaminated surfaces are now inside surfaces. Thus why when we have a bad e coli outbreak in meat, it’s almost always ground beef.

Steaks are where things get dicey. If your steak is an unadulterated, unpenetrated chunk of cow muscle, then you can eat it rare, because the surface of the meat where the e coli is will be heated well beyond 165° and killed. The problem is our technology lets us make very tender steaks out of tough chunks of meat by running them through industrial tenderizers (https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/magazine/2013/06/has-your-steak-been-mechanically-tenderized/index.htm). They’re motorized pokers that run the meat through some disks or needles to break up the tough muscle fibers, and in doing so, force surface contamination down into the interior, while leaving the surface looking absolutely intact.

We also have meat glue, which allows us to selectively bind protein fibers together. This means we can take very thin sheets or scraps of beef and roll them into pinwheels to make seemingly solid pieces of meat (See: the bacon-wrapped “filet mignons” that go for $3-6 each at the grocery store), but it also brings former surface into the inside. On Precautionary Principle, it’s risky. (Note: Meat glue isn’t BAD, it definitely lets us use the maximum meat we can so we’re not wasting the very expensive and environmentally costly animals, but it comes with risks that are best mitigated by fully cooking the product.)

So: if you are certain your chunk of cow is fully intact — which probably means you bought it from an independent butcher, not a grocery store, or you bought only flank or filet from Costco — you can have it as bloody as you want as long as you exposed it to fire or a griddle for long enough to brown. (With Costco, you CAN and should ask the meat manager if any specific package is blade tenderized. They will know and will tell you. It’s supposed to be on the label if it is, but that’s Costco policy, not everywhere.) From regular grocery stores, and at lower price steak houses like Outback and Golden Corral or fast casual sit down like Chilis and Applebees? Be less forgiving and have the chicken, the fajitas, or the prime rib instead. When shopping, if it says Blade Tenderized, fully cook it, or plan to sous vide pasteurize it. If it doesn’t say, ask a lot of questions of the meat department manager.

Are tenderized steaks a common vector of e coli? It has happened several times, though far less commonly than ground beef. Capitalism is ALWAYS a case of, “when the Federal Cat’s been fired, the mice get up to gross shenanigans.” We do know ground beef has been a major vector, and the difference between tenderized and ground beef is more a matter of degree than difference.

Chicken and turkey’s bigger issue is Salmonella, the non-typhoid version of Salmonella. They HAVE to be cooked to 165 or sous vide per the Anova chart above. Nobody wants chicken breast tartare anyway, so that helps, but the danger with chicken and turkey is contaminating your kitchen before you cook it.

(Typhoid fever, which is a different species of Salmonella and the one Mary Mallon carried, can be vaccinated against for travelers. Typhii salmonella IS NOT endemic in the US — we have under 500 reported cases a year, mostly travelers coming home with it, and probably no more than 5000 total cases, including undiagnosed, unreported ones. If Typhii goes endemic in the US again, we have bigger problems than just food safety — it means our water sanitization system has broken down entirely. If you want to get typhoid fever vaccinations, feel free, but be aware you’ll probably have to pay for them, you’ll need to re-up every 5 years, and they’re effective against severe illness and death, but there’s still a chance you might get a milder case if you’re overseas where it’s endemic. And it won’t protect you from the salmonella common to poultry and reptiles.)

The most common way a kitchen gets contaminated is washing meat. When you run cold water over raw meat of any type, that cold water does not make anything infectious go away, but it does distribute it all over your sink, and possibly your countertops. DON’T WASH YOUR MEAT. () So don’t wash meat. You’re just making a bigger salmonella contamination zone, and your vegetables or pasta could easily come in contact with the wider contamination, thus giving you a case of Salmonella despite fully cooking your bird.

The second most common way is sharing utensils — especially cutting boards — between raw meat and food that will not be cooked or is ready to be served. Ideally, you have a set of plastic cutting boards and knives that are only EVER used for raw meat (includes deli meat), and a set of boards and knives used for everything else. If you used tongs to handle your raw meat (including putting it on the grill and turning it over on the grill) use clean tongs to remove and serve it.

If you don’t like touching raw meat or find it unpleasant to touch it before washing, instead of washing, please use gloves and remove them properly () or consider reducing your meat consumption, or transferring your consumption to pre-cooked meats (canned and ready to eat frozen). Those are all better mechanisms to avoid food borne illness than washing meat.

If you ever worked in fast food, then you remember the santizer spray we used on trays, tables, and counters. It’s just water with a few drops of household bleach, and it works very well to sanitize solid surfaces. Get a spray bottle to keep on your counter and swab the counter down between tasks. Spray it on, wait a couple minutes (the wait time is when it does the work!) and wipe dry.

You also remember that we used cloths, not sponges. Sponges become a bacterial harbor basically the first day they’re used, and all of the dishwasher or microwaving in the world isn’t really going to stop that, it just slows it down. Better option is to use dish cloths or Swedish dish cloths, which are a heavy paper that can be washed several times in the washing machine before it disintegrates. Let them dry completely and put them in the laundry basket when they get dirty.

If you’re sensitive to bleach, the best alternative is hypochlorous acid, which is a body safe, skin safe acid that humans actually produce as part of our immune and healing response. If you’ve had a tattoo or piercing and gotten a bottle of cleansing liquid, it’s highly likely to have been hypochlorous acid. It’s also incredibly effective at killing bacteria and viruses. When we saw video of the Chinese fogging streets and apartments as part of their Covid Zero work? They were using hypochlorous acid. It’s safe to drink, and it is an alternative to bleach for sanitizing vegetables, too.

The downside to hypochlorous, and the reason it’s not in everything, is until the past couple years, it just wasn’t stable enough to bottle. (We’ve figured out the technique now.) It would deteriorate back to water, salt and a little acid within hours or a day, so to have a supply, you needed to keep a generator on hand.

The household sized ones are not the cheapest appliance you’ll buy, but they’re in line with a cheap vacuum or an Instant Pot. They run about $150. The one I have, a prior generation Eco One, is available here (https://hyposource.com/products/ecoloxtech-eco-one-hypochlorous-acid-generator) and it is reliable. I use a teaspoon of salt, a teaspoon of white vinegar, and liter of water to make 400 ppm hypochlorous on most days. I do recommend getting chlorine test strips (the same ones used for pool management) and some litmus paper to make sure you’re producing the acid. After you run your generator, the water that was testing 0 or very low on chlorine will be up near 200 or 400, depending on the length of cycle, and the ph will have dropped to around 5, so a mild acid. Here’s a good tutorial on testing efficacy of your generator. (https://www.libertysprayers.com/blogs/news/about-hypochlorous-acid-hocl-anf-hypochlorous-acid-generators)

There are, apparently, tutorials for DIYing a generator, you’re free to look that up on your own, but personally, I don’t have a lot of faith in DIYing with water and electricity, even very low voltage electricity. If you’re going to go DIY, definitely make sure you have chlorine test strips and litmus paper and know how to use them, and be vigilant.

The better bet would be, instead of DIYing, search for a “disinfectant generator”. They’re $12-20 USB devices you plop into a liter of salted water which electrolyzes the water and re-arranges the electrons. Let me let Neal Stephenson explain, quoting from his book, Zodiac (page 136 of the paperback).

Ionic chlorine’s easy to get. It’s in seawater, […]. But if you want to manufacture a whole stinking catalog of industrial chemicals, you have to convert ionic chlorine into the covalent variety. You do that by subtracting an electron. And it’s just about that simple. You take a tank of seawater and you put a couple bare wires into it. You hook a source of electrical power between the wires, and current — a stream of electrons — flows through the water. The molecules get rearranged. The ionic chlorine turns into the covalent kind, which is what you want. The sodium joins up with fractured water molecules to form sodium hydroxide. Or lye, or alkali, depending on how educated you are. This process is called Chloralkali.”

(You should read the book, if you haven’t. Especially now. The book is 30 years old and extraordinarily relevant. And it’s from when Stephenson was being edited so it has an ENDING!)

At household levels, chloralkalai is perfectly safe. (When you do it at industrial levels is when you start making toxic waste.) The little USB devices do exactly what happened using Niagra Falls’ enormous power supply, but at tiny scale. So those make bleach. But when you add acid to the salt water, it makes hypochlorous, so use the 1 teaspoon vinegar with the 1 teaspoon of salt per liter of water, and you’ve made hypochlorous.

Technology for stabilizing HOCL (hypochlorous acid) has improved, so it is now possible to buy it bottled, if you want to test it out without buying a generator. Just keep the opaque bottle closed and it’ll stay effective for a while. HOCL has a very faint chlorine odor.

Order of preparation of food matters a lot. When you’re sous chef’ing, cut all of your vegetables first, with onions and tomatoes last (onions because everything will taste of onion if you do them first, and tomatoes because they’re significantly more juicy than everything else). Clean your countertop, switch out your cutting board or wash it if you only have one, then cut proteins, and don’t use that cutting board again for vegetables.

Also, think like you don’t have a refrigerator. We know that acids will kill bacteria, so use that to your advantage. Shredded daikon and carrot salad, with rice vinegar, chili and sugar? From Vietnamese cooking? Marinating vegetables in vinegar limits their bacterial load. Same for marinated cucumber salads — there are literally thousands of these recipes, from every cuisine that has ever used a cucumber. And same for pickles. Sauerkraut is a vegetable, if you like it, it counts. Yes, pickles ARE vegetables, and they count as vegetables. Whoever told you they weren’t was full of shit.

This is US guidance, because our government is full of homicidal, eugenicist nitwits and outliving them is the best fuck you we have. If you’re not eating US produce, you don’t have to follow this. Extra food safety won’t hurt you, but if you don’t have to, please enjoy trusting your government for us.

I Appear To Have Blown Up My Twitter

I don’t think I’m banned, I don’t think I’m in jail. They sure haven’t sent me any email telling me I was naughty. I updated my email address and… well…

I can like stuff. I can post from my alt accounts. Just not post from main. So… we’ll see if it resolves over the next couple days.

Until then, here’s my alt: @Galantier1

That one is private, and has spoilers for Rebellion. Of course, the whole of Rebellion has been out for 2 years as of December, and you can buy the whole series for under $8.

May I offer escapist fun? https://www.smashwords.com/books/byseries/35988

‪Here’s why I’m shifting to Biden.

(Originally a twitter thread:

Here’s why I’m shifting to Biden:

At this point, I care WAY more about Congress, state and local elections. We can’t afford to lose any seats, and we have to flip state houses & governors. We’ve got redistricting coming up. We can’t afford a midterm slump in 2022, either.

1/?

— CZEdwards (time for Truth & Reconciliation) (@CZEdwards) March 5, 2020

)

‪At this point, I care WAY more about Congress, state and local elections. We can’t afford to lose any seats, and we have to flip state houses & governors. We’ve got redistricting coming up. We can’t afford a midterm slump in 2022, either.‬

‪That means we need to have someone good at coalition building, who gets the 50 state strategy. Team player. And that has never been Bernie, not once in his life. It’s not how he works, not how he views politics.‬

‪Bernie’s a bomb thrower. He’s most effective when he’s on the outside, holding ground for the left flank of the Overton window. He’s only got a 20% pass rate on his legislative amendments, and his amendments were the first to get cut. Doesn’t make him a bad man, just an outsider.‬ (And we need this push from the outside.)

‪Historically, and internationally, outsider candidates don’t make good executives, because they’ve spent so much of their time being against the machine, they’ve never learned to operate the machine. And government is an enormous machine that kills when not run well.‬

‪We have lost ground, in terms of rights and civil liberties; in international standing; in our very sense of security. What we all want, at least at an emotional level, is to not have to worry about how our government is fucking over someone. ‬ ‪We’re never getting that back.‬

‪In geriatrics care, the goal when someone checks into a hospital or rehab unit is for the patient to leave with the same level of function.‬ ‪That goal is aspirational. Most people do lose some muscle mass, cognitive function, or both. ‬ ‪We’ve been in the hospital for 37 months. ‬

‪I wish we could pick back up where we were on January 16, 2017, but there’s a whack of a lot of legislation we have to unpick; we have a massive legislative task in that we have to codify all of the norms we just took for granted.‬ ‪And a gigantic criminal investigation.‬ ‪And overlapping infrastructure problems.‬

‪We have lost function, and we have to rebuild it, not just leap over it. We are traumatized. All of us.‬ ‪One of the steps for recovery will be if we see justice done, and that’s got to be the biggest question going forward for both candidates.‬ ‪We need Truth & Reconciliation, not pretending it didn’t happen.‬

‪Neither Biden nor Sanders have made strong stands on this, and I don’t actually trust either one to manage it well. Biden’s been mushy, and Bernie is laser focused on pushing onwards.‬ ‪But ask anyone who ever tried to push through an injury how that worked.‬

‪It’s like we’re on a remote trail together, us and Bernie & Joe. We rolled our ankle. Bernie keeps telling us there’s a great water fall and first aid station just two hills over; Joe didn’t see us stumble so he’s oblivious. ‬ ‪Neither of these are ideal.‬

‪Bernie’s not wrong — we can’t stay on the trail while we wait for an ankle to heal. We have to go forward to the waterfall & first aid. But we can’t go in the condition we’re in. And it won’t get better pretending it didn’t happen. ‬

‪But there is an option. There’s a big machine by the side of the trail. Think janky old bulldozer or snowcat, something that Monkeywrenchers have Molotov cocktailed. It’s not in good shape, and Bernie admits that he might know something about those Molotov cocktails.‬ (I’m very specifically talking about Bernie’s antipathy towards the Democratic Party, and my uncertainty of his position on the concept of whether federal law is a ceiling or a floor, and where states and sovereigns come into that.)

‪But the machine will run. It’s not going to be easy, and it’s going to be dangerous. We need it to do things it wasn’t intended to do, things it couldn’t do before the damage. Joe’s pretty sure he can get it running, and has driven one before. ‬

‪(Personally, I want any of the people with the first aid kits, but y’all have been voting them off the island.)‬ ‪So the question is: we have this machine. It will not run right, not right now. It’s been badly damaged, too.‬ ‪Who is better at driving it?‬

‪At this point, I think that’s Joe. I’m not happy about it, and we will ALL have to hold him in the fire until he promises (and follows through with) criminal investigations, but we know we can get that from him, because now’s he’s got an M4A plan. It’s not great, but it’s better than it was.‬ He can be moved.

‪Bernie, on the other hand? It’s taken 4.5 years to get him to make a mealy mouthed reprimand of his supporters. He’s never apologized for the rape fantasy article. (That needs to happen.) He sees race & misogyny as offshoots of class warfare, & so minimizes them, because he’s never experienced them.‬ (And his failure to reprimand his supporters is strategic — please see this article that explains the 30% strategy. https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/3/5/1924709/-Bernie-s-grievance-politics-consolidated-the-left-to-a-30-losing-minority)

‪And recently? His attacks on the media can be sung to the Fake News tune. The automated, small dollar donations are a big problem. The not a PAC but acts like a PAC (Our Revolution) is a big problem. And the fact that Russia sees him as a chaos agent & Trump wants to run against him... Big problems.‬

‪Simple rule of thumb here: if Trump wants it, it’s probably bad for democracy and everyone who isn’t named Trump.‬ ‪More importantly: I’m not seeing local & state election coat tails with Bernie. His movement isn’t paying attention to District Attorney elections or State house reps.‬

‪And his supporters are not voting in down ballot races — we saw this in 2016, where a county would have 500K presidential votes and 150K for County Board of Supervisors. There was a correlation. (If you need to understand why County government matters — please go watch Trials of Gabriel Fernandez.)‬

‪Local government matters WAY, WAY, WAY more to daily quality of life and your access to your civil rights. Your county clerk determines if, how & where you vote. Your County Sheriff sets policing policy & culture, because most cops get their first job at the county level. (See: Joe Arpaio & Maricopa County)‬

‪Gentrification? That’s your town & county giving incentives & declaring blight. Churches proselytizing to your kids at school? That’s your school board. Potholes? City Council. Access to vaccines without insurance? County Public Health department. This stuff matters. ‬

‪And down ballot often means voting for someone who is kinda moderate. Local elections are not the place to trot out your purity pony, because seriously, whooping cough doesn’t give a single fuck about IMF policy, weed legalization, or even property tax structure.

Bernie would have been okay in 2016, because we were in a better place then. The fact that he hasn’t recognized how much damage we’ve taken since then is one reason he’s never been my candidate. Joe does realize it, and that knowledge is unspeakably valuable.

‪I might change my mind, but here’s what it would take:‬ ‪Bernie takes a strong stand on his supporters being abusive. He would need to get very granular – knock it off with the snakes, for example. ‪Bring Warren — and her plans — on board. Because Bernie has ideas, not plans.‬ He needs a detail person. More listening, less shouting. That last? I should also ask for a pony.

‪Really: I want to hate #GoT for being way the fuck off book. ‬

‪AND YET? I’m okay with it.‬

‪Maybe because I bounced SO HARD off ASoIaF so many times. I tried to get past chapter 3 of AGoT for years. (Mine’s a 3rd printing paperback copy, so... 96/97?)‬

‪I fucking HATED Viserys.‬

‪Like throwing the book hated. I didn’t finally manage it until... I’m gonna bet late 2014, when HBONow became an option. The 4 hour investment was worth it, and also by then, I knew he was going to die.‬

‪GoT gave me enough of a roadmap (and some fixfic) that I could power through the parts I hated.‬ ‪This is probably a good thing, over all, because having written (and actually finished) an epic fantasy cycle, I think I might have gotten discouraged if I hadn’t bounced.‬

‪(I needed 18 years to write mine.) ‬

‪This stuff is hard, and it’s really easy to write yourself into a corner. It gets even easier to write into a corner when you’re overdue, and your editor is mostly concerned with sending it to press with minimal typos because YOU’RE OVERDUE.‬

‪Your editor has to eat, too, after all, and publishing houses run on tight budgets, because the other imprints insist on giving outsized advances to politicians & pundits who write books that are relevant for oh, 1 election cycle, while the midlist keeps the lights on.‬

‪(Who, me? Skeptical of how romance, fantasy & SF are treated? Tired of hearing old white dudes, who have spent their lives writing nothing more complex than their masturbation fodder, pretend they know how to write genre? Gee, whatever gave you that impression?) ‬

‪(I truly do hate the Iron Islands contracture and the Dorne slaughter. Those stories are incredibly badly served and they deserve a strong reading. Also, to be retconned someday.) ‬

‪I want to hate Sansa in Winterfell with TortureMcTorture, and I can think of half a dozen ways to do it better, but OTOH, I now want the Queens of the North: Yara/Asha, Lyanna & Sansa. A generation of the three of them... breaks patriarchy in the north.‬

‪Because that’s what keeps me coming back: this is a world. Visually & narratively. It helps that it’s populated by people who didn’t make CHARISMA their dump stat, and they all do seem to genuinely care about what they’re doing. But it’s the worldbuilding that brings me back.‬

‪Separate art forms. It’s like cover versions: Trent Reznor gave Johnny Cash moral rights to Hurt, because JC’s version is that good. Jimi Hendrix’s Watchtower beats Dylan’s. (Actually, I’d say EVERY Dylan cover beats Dylan, but I hate his voice, so YMMV.)‬

‪There’s an audio side to this, too. Roy Dotrice was a fine reader, but was not good at women’s voices, and whoever directed him chose to use querulous crone voices for young women. It sounds misogynist, like he was making fun of the female characters.‬

‪Now, with a new reader needed for Winds of Winter, would be a good time to invest a lot of money in at least a 2 reader (male & female voices) or Focal Character read, for the whole series. (Or get really fancy & go full cast.) ‬

‪Marshall McCluhan was making a point: The medium at very minimum strongly affects the message, and often makes the message. (And also the medium, in the sense of culture medium, like you use to grow bacteria in the lab. GoT resonates when we’re enduring King Joffrey the Septuagenarian.)‬

‪I know, from the literature crit side, why I should absolutely despise this end stage soap opera. I know there are problems. And I know some of them are getting wound up in too-neat packages. ‬ ‪And I’m not being handwavey. I’m still okay with alterations to the story form to fit the medium. ‬

Lemon Cake, not a recipe, because I don’t do those, and this is not baking 101. I assume you have an idea what you’re doing.

You’re gonna need at least 3 lemons, something like buttermilk (I suggest substitutes), powdered sugar, butter, a baking pan of your choice, knife skills. Plus whatever is needed for your cake base.

Start with a white or yellow cake (unbaked) of your choice. It can be a box mix, or a recipe. I have used all of these as a base (and Betty Crocker Butter Cake box mix, too).

One egg cake: http://www.dinnerwithjulie.com/2017/03/20/one-egg-cake/ Almond flour pound cake: https://mygluten-freekitchen.com/cream-cheese-almond-pound-cake-gluten-free/ (GF, can be low carb) Lemon-poppy seed cake https://alldayidreamaboutfood.com/lemon-poppyseed-bundt-cake-low-carb-and-gluten-free/

You also need 3 lemons (at least.) You want the peel, as well as the fruit. Wash those babies well. First up: slice one whole lemon as thinly as you can. Dump the slices into a small saucepan with 1 cup water and ½ cup sugar. Set it to boil, give it 1 minute at a boil, then turn off the burner & remove the pan from heat. These are the pretty lemon slices for decoration. (You can skip this.)

Take a vegetable peeler and get the yellow zest off the remaining two, with as little pith as possible. Once you’ve got the zest, cut them in half & juice them, removing seeds. If you have a yucky dishwasher or garbage disposal, put the remainder of the lemons either down the hole or impale on the tines in the upper & lower racks. (You’ll throw them away after this.)

Chop that zest as fine as you can.

Now, we mix up the cake, using either box directions or the recipe, and using melted butter instead of oil, and substituting 2/3 buttermilk for water and 1/3 lemon juice. (If you don’t want to have a quart of buttermilk for one recipe, you can mix 1/3 sour cream & 2/3 water. If you don’t do dairy milk, soy yogurt works here, at same ratio, plus 1 extra tablespoon of lemon juice.) Add the zest to the batter.

At the bottom of whatever greased pan you’re using (Bundt, cupcake tin, 9” springform, 9x13 casserole, loaf) lay those sugared lemon slices out so they’re pretty. Then pour in the batter, and bake pre instructions.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, you’re making this sugar bomb worse. You should still have some lemon juice left, probably around ¼ cup. If not, add bottled lemon juice or juice another lemon. Take a stick of butter (½ cup) & melt it in the microwave (or stovetop, if you’re old school). When it’s liquid, add the lemon juice and stir, then add 1 cup of powdered sugar. Which will dissolve into a pretty glazey syrupy stuff. If you have leftover zest, add it, but don’t feel bad if you don’t.

Now, time has magically fast forwarded and the cake is done. While it’s hot, turn it out onto something that’s got edges (tray, sheet pan), so the pretty lemon slices are up. Before it cools a lot, poke it full of holes with a skewer or toothpick, and pour the lemon-butter glaze over it. Pour slow, so it has time to absorb and doesn’t run all over the kitchen, because slippery & sticky are a terrible combination to have to mop up.

Now DON’T TOUCH IT UNTIL IT’S COOL. Not even a nibble.

Rien’s Rebellion Master List o’ Links

Here be spoilers in the synopses. Stop if you want to be completely unspoiled. Go here, to the series page, and buy them all. https://www.smashwords.com/books/byseries/35988

Book I Rien’s Rebellion: Kingdom https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/891406 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07GTSXB4P

Once upon a time, a nation’s fate depended on an informant, a lawyer, and a warrior. They all lived under a good Monarch’s leadership. Until he was assassinated.

Galantier’s politics can be vicious, corrupt, and unfair, but not deadly. They’ve got a war they can’t win and dare not lose on their border. Everything depends on a practical, cooperative government, including a smooth succession. Vohan made that easy. For 25 years, he’s been a steady, reasonable monarch and leader. He raised his daughter, Cazerien, to serve Galanteran justice. His nephew, Laarens, leads in the Galanteran army. He did everything in his considerable power to ensure they would follow him. Now Vohan is dead, and Galanteran politics have turned bloody. Nothing will ever be the same. Cazerien believes in the law — not just as her profession, but as a faith and the wisdom that allows her people to thrive. She knows Galantier’s game, and she plays it well. Laarens believes in Cazerien and the arts of war. Their adversary doesn’t follow their rules. And someone knows what their adversary must keep secret. A nation struggles to be born from the ashes of the kingdom Vohan left.

Book II Rien’s Rebellion: Repudiation & Refuge https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/891507 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07GTQFDGW

Razin Vohan’s death should have put his daughter, Cazerien, on the throne of Galantier. He spent her entire life preparing her for the day she would become Razia. Some on the Prava had other plans. Instead of approving the succession, they chose her half-cousin, Savrin sator Lethis, a priest of the god of death. Galantier is fracturing under the weight of old enmities and rivalries. The world Rien’s father built for her is crumbling.

Book III Rien’s Rebellion: The Committed Ones https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/896721 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07HHYK1CB

Laarens is alone in the world. Rien is dead, Savrin has become fully Mathes’ puppet. Laarens may be the only remaining Ascendar, but he knows his life is cheap and getting cheaper. At least, that’s what Rien needs Laarens to believe. She’s gambling both their lives on the lie that the two bodies found in her burnt office were Avah’s and her own. Avah is dead, but Rien has barely escaped with her life. Nine years before, at Rien’s Elevation, Quin Tiwendar swore his life to Rien’s service, then vanished. Now, reluctantly reunited with his liege, Quin and his partners offer Rien temporary shelter. But if Galantier is to survive, everyone must understand the commitments they have made to one another and the land of their birth.

Book IV Rien’s Rebellion: Wisdom’s Fire https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/902092 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07JKJ1NH4

The House of Galene shall fall, and with it, the legacy of Galantier. The late Razin’s daughter was declared illegitimate and then died. His elder nephew has been sordidly, brutally murdered in the border zone. Only the unreliable, weak, celibate Razin Savrin remains. Not for much longer if Laarens and Rien have anything to say about the matter. Rien continues to gather her army in the far north, while Laarens brings his own skills and talents, and an entire people, the Comitae, to resist the end of their world. But the idea of war and the practice of it are as different as the idea of justice and the practice of law. Mending a broken state starts with mending broken lives.

Book V Rien’s Rebellion: Redemption & Revolution https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/906905 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07KJF2JPH

However badly Savrin governs Galantier, he is the last of Galene’s line and Galantier’s Prava lacks the will to challenge him. As the kingdom loses its direction and purpose, Rien and Laarens build the army to restore the legacy and administer the promise their ancestors made to Galantier’s refugee founders and a new generation of asylum-seekers. Rien barely survived the fire at Watable, but with Comitae assistance, she and Laarens have come to understand some of the damage done to them in childhood was not merely abuse, but intentional malice. Quin must reconcile his own history with his father’s decisions, and Bran must rebuild his sense of self to encompass his awakening Ingeniae. As they gather their army of outcasts and exiles, can they build the tools to preserve Galantier, though war will tear them apart?

Book VI Rien’s Rebellion: Foundation https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/911201 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07L5BLJCZ

Rien’s Rebels gather as Savrin’s Galantier begins to fray. Without Prenceps Mathes and Teregenitor Tiwendar, Savrin seems adrift, and Rien will take advantage of that. Galantier faces a battle for its future: If Savrin defeats Rien, the Dissolution comes and Galantier as it has been for a thousand years will cease. If Rien claims victory, Galantier will be reborn. No matter who wins, nothing will ever be the same.

Time is short.

Counterfeiting

A short THREAD on counterfeiting in the 1830s & 1840s. A cul de sac off last night’s case study.

Also an object lesson on the problems with private currencies.

In 1815, 200 private banks & corps were authorized to print notes. 400+ by 1840. Plus foreign currency. BIG MESS.

Once upon a time, a guy who lived in upstate New York processed the zeitgeist of his time through his brain. He tinker-toyed it into a religion, and convinced a bunch of other people he was right.

That’s a WAY condensed foundation narrative of the LDS.

The guy started moving his followers west, in the years before the Civil War. Events often got weird, dangerous, or deadly.

One of the reasons for that was... counterfeiting. See? The US allowed banks to print their own banknotes.

Worst Idea Ever.

Some of these notes were awesome, but if you’ve got a talented engraver and a printing press?

The temptation to run off forgeries got really high.

I’m not saying all printers in the Mississippi watershed were printing notes from 50+ miles away... but it happened. A LOT.

The unspoken deal was you only printed the money of the rivals.

If you broke your enemy’s bank with bad paper, well fuck those guys.

Massive interstate problems in the 1830s & 1840s. This is the era of Bleeding Kansas & Free vs Slave states.

The Mississippi watershed was ground zero.

Enter: Mormons, who didn’t quite play by the deal. After being massacred &driven out of Missouri, they kinda considered everyone not them an enemy. They tolerated counterfeiters if the notes went outward. They were NOT behaving significantly differently from anyone else, but they’d also collected diverse professions within their community, so they were actually close to self-sufficiency in terms of material goods.

They weren’t spending much money at all in neighboring communities.

And passed bad notes, just like everyone else.

This tends to make neighbors hostile.

Your neighbors may gossip about you if you’re having outside sexy-times without telling your wife.

If you’re a good neighbor, you’ll probably get away with it.

But cheating on your wife AND your neighbors?

Moral: 1 dick move at a time.

(Also, Joseph Smith was far more egalitarian & abolitionist than Mormondom became. Brigham Young was the racist shitbag who cheered on the Confederacy. If Smith lived, Mormondom would have probably been no more racist than most sects who emerged from 19th C. New England. ...Black and mixed race people were baptized into the Church and allowed into the priesthood while Joseph Smith lived. This didn’t go over well in southern Illinois & Missouri.

http://theconversation.com/mormons-confront-a-history-of-church-racism-95328

End of this digression.)

All of this HOA drama & bad money & repeated abuse of law came to a bloody conclusion in 1844.

Joseph was 1) mayor of Nauvoo 2) head of the Nauvoo Legion (militia), which was about 2500 troops. (Note: US Army at same time was 8500.) 3) leading his church 4) running for Prez

Someone (definitely dissenters) wrote a newspaper that exposed Mormon polygamy and also exaltation (which reads like polytheism for many people.)

This was secret stuff, even from a lot of Mormons. Embarrassing.

Joseph ordered the destruction of that printing press.

Today? The equivalent would be trying to turn off the internet in a town. The right to print was taken incredibly seriously. People rioted. So... Joseph, who had an army, declared martial law in his city.

Bad decisions, those. But power corrupts.

Those decisions led to Joseph Smith’s arrest, then to his murder by a mob. Mormons see this as a martyrdom. And yes, he didn’t deserve to die without trial.

Historians say it’s a lot more complex than just martyrdom.

But Mormondom wouldn’t exist without that event.

After that? Mormondom underwent its first schism. Most decided to follow Brigham Young into the far reaches of North America, past what the United States claimed at the time. They considered the US to have betrayed them multiple times, and were leaving. Some stayed & rebuilt an egalitarian, just church around the mythos of the Book of Mormon, but without polygamy & coercive control (& counterfeiting.)

I just condensed about 2 years of vitriol into 2 tweets.

But yes, money, counterfeiting & printing are in Mormondom’s DNA. ~End

Citations: Stephen Mihm, A Nation of Counterfeiters. https://books.google.com/books?id=g-KQ_GyFr5UC&pg=PA200&lpg=PA200&dq=counterfeiting+in+1840s&source=bl&ots=fBY9WR5f_-&sig=ACfU3U3gOHQIYoSjjGGILESoXR7K9dHERw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjggay8htDgAhVE94MKHbD-DJsQ6AEwCHoECAkQAQ#v=onepage&q=counterfeiting%20in%201840s&f=false

And this online exhibit: Capitalism by Gaslight: The Shadow Economies of 19th Century America, curated by Wendy Woloson http://librarycompany.org/shadoweconomy/index.htm http://librarycompany.org/shadoweconomy/section6.htm

A case study in a vertically integrated #MoneyLaundry

The Kingstons, the polygamists that Big Love toned down to make them believeable for TV. Also featuring Turkish and Russian costars.

Terminology note: when I refer to the established Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, I use “LDS Church”. When I refer to members of that church, I use “LDS”. When I refer to the shared mythology group that includes LDS, LDS before 1890, fundamentalist FLDS, & other polygamist groups, I’ll use “Mormon” or “Mormondom.” For each individual splinter group, I’ll use their name.

Mormon:LDS::Christian:Protestant (or Catholic, or Baptist, or Jehovah’s Witness) LDS and LDS Chruch try very hard to deny that they share holy texts & mythology, but they’re all related, from the same foundation.

And yes, Mormons are Christians. Christianity doesn’t require Trinitarianism, it doesn’t define texts (there are text conflicts between Protestants, Catholics & Orthodox), or define ritual behaviors. Get people wet in Jesus’ name? You’re Christian.

~~~~~~~

You’ve probably heard of the FLDS, the group that is currently being dismantled after their prophet, Warren Jeffs, was convicted of child rape. Also money laundering. Welfare fraud. Labor law fuckery. But financially? FLDS were small. Flashy, no substance.

The financial power of the polygamous splinter groups is the Kingston Group, also known as the Davis County Cooperative Society. They’re a multigenerational polygamous family who started in the 1930s with a dairy farm, a potato-wheat farm and a small coal mine.

It can be hard to explain to people who didn’t grow up in the Mormon Corridor (a rectangle roughly from Idaho to Arizona, Continental Divide to Donner Pass in the US, with groups in Alberta and in Mexico) how pervasive Mormondom’s culture is.

It’s not just like saying Evangelicals are an influence on Georgia. Yeah, they’re AN influence. But they’re a lot of separate influences who move in the same direction. They’re more or less independent at the congregational level. They often disagree and switch congregations.

It’s the difference between being a queen in Westeros, and being THE Queen of Westeros.

Obedience and cheerful acquiescence are primary virtues for Mormondom, and while they discarded most Calvinism, they instill a strong work ethic, paired with a deep commitment to the survival of the community. They fall in line, more often than not.

Examples: In LDS practice, you’re assigned to a ward (local congregation) by your address. You attend that ward, even if you’d rather attend the ward you grew up in. No exceptions if you work night shifts and the ward near your job is a better fit. Your individual will shouldn’t matter.

Not even if you were assaulted by an elder or bullied by the head of the Relief Society (women’s group) or an older kid is abusing your younger one. (Exceptions can be granted by going WAY high up, but hard to get.) This is normal within the established LDS Church.

There are no professional clergy in any of Mormondom. Mormon Studies exist as a major at BYU, it’s far more historical than theological or ministerial, and it’s a not a route to the ministry or leadership. The leadership is all male. All functions are volunteer in the sense of “you have been volunteered”.

Refusing to take up a responsibility when the leadership says God told them you’re going to do it... is almost not done. And it means the next job you’re told to do will be worse. Pay 10% of your income or you don’t get access to rituals.

Everyone is both encouraged to pray for direct guidance from God, and receive prophecy, but the only prophecy comes through the established Prophet, who heads the Church. If you get a prophecy that contradicts the Prophet? Well, you’re wrong, or you start a schism. This is the established church.

The splinter groups turn these expectations of obedience to eleventy-twenty. But people don’t stick with ANYTHING if they’re not getting more out of it than they put in. That’s elementary human behavior, and emotional satisfaction is a strong motivator.

The specific emotional satisfactions common to Mormondom are built into Mormondom from infancy: a sense that they are a chosen, superior people; that only through their actions is salvation possible; that discontent or doubt is active defiance of God, and itself a sin. (Sure, a lot of Christendom uses a similar, unspoken formula, but it’s actively voiced in most of Mormondom.)

Oh, and they’re big on prosperity as a sign of God’s favor. Not exactly Prosperity Gospel, but preserving & growing capital within the community.

There’s always been a thread of internal communalism within Mormondom. Even before the mass migration in 1846-7, Mormons shared amongst themselves. For example: The Word of Wisdom, the doctrine that forbids tea, coffee, tobacco & booze.

You’ll rarely get a practicing LDS to admit this, because most don’t have much historical education, and they’ve been told all their lives that it was a voluntary rejection, not economic.

However, that doctrine was written in 1833, when the Mormons were trying to settle in Missouri. They didn’t have their own trade network established for material goods, and they didn’t have much money. Buying tea, coffee and tobacco deprived the community of cash, and gave money to hostile neighbors. The situation in Missouri was going bad; 20 Mormon men and boys were massacred 5 months later.

Also, Joseph Smith didn’t like tobacco smoke, and Emma Smith didn’t like cleaning spit off her floors. Which are both reasonable. However, skip ahead to the 1850s. Deseret built a distillery & brewery, because weak beer was safer than water, while whiskey had medicinal & surgical uses, plus trade value. And the discussion of that time frame makes it clear that even the Prophet, Brigham Young, found consumption to excess to be the problem, not having a beer.

You can apply this economic principle to a lot of Mormondom behavior. Early on in what’s now Utah, it was necessary. They had to be self-sufficient because there were no railroads yet and they were in the middle of nowhere.

There was some burning loathing, too.

Before the 1950s Red Scare, when Cleon Skousen grafted Birchers & Mormondom, the idea of collective action for better labor, better living conditions or to build a group service (like rural electric & telephone cooperatives) was normal in the US, and Mormondom. Thus, when the Kingstons established their cooperative, it was mostly family, but not exclusively. They were willing to bring in fellow travelers who were willing to work and share equally. It was the Depression. Cooperatives meant survival, especially for the excommunicated.

By 1950, and the transition from the founding prophet to the 2nd, the Kingstons had established their habits. They’d been excommunicated for 20 years, had built their own priesthood & their own prophecy, and mostly rejected the other two major polygamist groups.

They’d also started expanding their business portfolio, but like most businesses in the 1950s, they were primarily cash oriented. Which they exploited for tax avoidance. Because... there’s a thread of anarcho-capitalism that runs through Mormondom. (Loathing part!)

It’s not just in the schisms, though they’re the reservoir. Collectively, Mormondom has never forgotten that the state of Missouri let them be murdered en masse, then used the militia against them in 1838, & Illinois failed to protect Joseph Smith from the mob who murdered him in 1844.

(There’s another legacy of counterfeiting, which was common the Mississippi watershed during Bleeding Kansas era. Communities did use their printing presses to fuck over their neighbors, and yes, the early Mormons were doing it too, but that’s on the 1840s, not the Mormons.)

Mormondom remembers that the Federal government, as Martin Van Buren, would not protect the early Mormons’ rights to property and security. Those who went to what became Salt Lake City in 1847 intended to leave the United States forever. They did, in fact, leave.

They couldn’t know that the Mexican-American War would end in 1848 with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which transferred a big whack of the American West to the United States.

But mostly? The US left the Deseret (Utah) Mormons alone until after the Civil War. The time and distance gave them space to evolve. They spend most of the 1850s having something that’s generously called a Reformation (and looks more like an Inquisition). They established their hierarchies, instituted white supremacy, and considered themselves a mostly separate Theocratic state.

The United States could not leave them alone on polygamy. In the 1830s, most states had laws against bigamy on the books, but the federal code did not, until 1862, when the Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act outlawed it in federal territories, including Utah. Mormondom took it personally, as an attempt at genocide.

You can see the LDS reaction in the settlement patterns of the Mormon Corridor. There’s a good chance any Corridor town founded 1862-1880 was Mormon polygamist diaspora. That chance goes up the whiter the town is now, compared to the demographics of the rest of the state.

Mormons were trying to claim territory where they wouldn’t be bothered, could make a living, could practice what they believed was necessary for salvation. The more the Feds tried to outlaw it, the more defensive Mormondom became, even as fewer practiced polygamy. Further laws passed by Congress (Edmunds Act, 1882; Edmunds-Tucker, in 1890) were intended to eradicate polygamy, but instead turned it into civil disobedience & resistance.

Then came the 1890 Woodruff Manifesto. This document causes almost all Mormondom schisms.

The Manifesto banned the practice of polygamy in the established LDS church. Most members of the time mostly approved it. Most were not practicing polygamists. But it also looked like compromise to get Utah statehood, which was desperately needed.

For the previous 50 years, almost all major Mormon internal regulation came as prophecy, most of which are recorded in the Doctrine & Covenants (one of 3 sacred texts for Mormondom) or in Brigham Young’s preaching and writing. That’s how Mormondom was accustomed to seeing their self-regulation change.

The Manifesto was explicitly NOT a prophecy, but policy.

Polygamy went on the down low. People who were already in plural marriages maintained them with varying degrees of secrecy, but no future plural marriages were allowed.

Economically? 1890-1915 were incredibly bad years in the West. Silver panics, locusts, drought.

The LDS Church lost almost all of its property before the Manifesto – an early form of civil asset forfeiture. The intermountain West is HARD to farm. Water control alone has been a century of “oh shit” patching. Mining was always exploitative, and LDS did not treat non-LDS miners as equals. There were many strikes, and often riots.

But... by the 1920s, a little relative prosperity gave financial breathing room for a resurgence of polygamy, and the relative social approval of some forms of socialism & communal action allowed the first generation of post-Manifesto schisms to flourish.

Charles Kingston was never a practicing polygamist, but he came to believe in the principle of it. It got him excommunicated in 1929. At first, his wife Vesta thought he was cheating on her, but he convinced her, and their children. Their firstborn, Elden, was then 20 years old when his father was excommunicated. He was always in fragile health, and he was about to marry himself.

Elden became the Kingstons’ first prophet. He was a good organizer, and had a high degree of both emotional intelligence and general empathy, so what established had the the potential to be a kind, generally benign, rather welcoming splinter group that practiced group communalism, maybe even eventually group marriage. He died in 1948, with 5 wives, having established the early aspects of the cult: that all material wealth was held in common in the Cooperative Society; that clothes & food & shelter were identical and not worldly and shared equally. He was definitely a product of his time, of the Depression and World War II’s rationing.

One further Mormondom cultural quirk: Mormondom generally considers the US Constitution & Bill of Rights as nearly holy documents, inspired by God. But the further amendments? Not so much. The Will of the People doesn’t apply to taxation & universal suffrage.

Now, back to the 1950s. We’ve got a mostly cash economy which enabled a large degree of tax evasion, the early Red Scare, Cleon Skousen and the Birchers of Doom, and the disastrous 1953 Short Creek raid, which tried (and failed) to enforce anti-bigamy laws.

Up on the north side of Salt Lake City, the Davis County Cooperative Society was well into the third generation, and this is where it gets hinky. Their 2nd prophet decided they had a special bloodline that needed to be cultivated, and started using his cattle breeding techniques on his own family. Also brainwashing. What’s better than a crime family? A crime family incest cult.

1930s-60s Kingston men and boys wore self-made coveralls without pockets, no shoes or hats. Women wore identical blue dresses without pockets. Religiously? Because nothing in this world was worth keeping. But behaviorally? It’s hard to walk away without shoes. No pockets? Makes it hard to squirrel away escape money.

Keeping marriages between cousins kept the capital in the family. They stopped bringing in outsiders. Nobody in the family got paid, so they couldn’t easily leave anyway. Without labor expenses, the businesses were and are nearly all profit, which they turn back into more wealth.

(This is that point about Mormondom’s behavioral controls: they’re always framed as religious and virtuous, but they’re always in the financial interest of the organization.)

Like much of Mormondom, the Kingstons, even at this time, were not interested in evidence-based medicine. To be fair, mid-century medicine didn’t have a lot to offer, other than antibiotics and some vaccinations, and could often be harsh and feel futile. Further, there’s a religious belief that there’s a plant for every condition, but avoiding doctors also works as community control: if you don’t take people to the hospital, nobody notices how many babies, or who is sick.

They did keep their children in public schools, but that was a fairly easy dodge back then. Mothers were almost exclusively active in their children’s school, and it’s easy enough to say their fathers were at work. The Kingstons now use the charter/private school Not For Profit foundation scam, which is a convenient adjunct to money laundering.

A commonality in crime families, regardless of location or culture, is a preference for cash businesses as the primary income. Cash used to be far easier to use for most transactions – even up to real estate. (The Kingstons also have mining claims, which could plausibly turn up gold.)

But the dodge couldn’t last forever. The IRS got smarter, so did the Department of Justice and the State of Utah. It eventually became impossible to buy any real estate for literal cash, and most vehicles. The Kingstons had to start issuing W-2s and using SSNs.

Which meant the Kingstons needed some verticality. Just because they were technically paying salaries doesn’t mean anyone got money. They turned their paychecks over to the cooperative or church, got scrip they could spend at family businesses, the money stayed inside.

Following is a partial list of known Kingston Group businesses, sorted by primary function. Remember that they’ve had almost a century of keeping all of their capital in the family, and keeping everything in the family is not only good criminal sense, it’s a religious duty.

(Thanks to Amy K Osmond, who wrote her dissertation on the organizational structure of the Kingstons https://collections.lib.utah.edu/dl_files/7b/ad/7bad8b47ae9de48b984099deda07cd54d0ab867f.pdf

This is TIGHT vertical integration of money laundering. The point is to under-report the cash income at level 1 so L1 businesses barely break even. What the L1s must buy comes from & through level 2 businesses (which puts that money into laundry). L2s also barely break even.

The excess cash from the L1s gets used for local petty cash expenses (food, clothing, fuel) or turned into cash resale items (everything from eBay clearance arbitrage to flea markets) or just stashed. This is where the church is useful: collection plate deposits.

L2s contract their services with each other and the L1 & L3s. This produces the churn that cleans the money to be used at L3. The point is to minimize the tax burden at all levels, and zero out as much profit as possible with accounting, while making the untaxed, cash income as available as possible.

There is loss in the system, but less than in most laundry operations. The risk, though, is that everything’s integrated. One thing breaks or gets busted? It can bring the whole system down.

Level 1 (L1) The high cash businesses where the laundry starts and where money comes in from the outside Vending machines Advance Vending Mountain Coin Machine Distribution Premier Vending Best Distributing Amusement Games A&E Amusement

Bail & Pawn Bail Bond Specialists Shoppers Pawn Shop Sportsmans Pawn Shop Sportsmans Bail Bond Specialists Sportsmans Fast Cash AAA Sportsmans Bail Bonds Information Recovery A+ Sportsman’s Bail Bonds

Gyms Fountain of Youth Health & Athletic Club Perpetual Youth Inc Retail East Side Market Family Stores Tru Value Shoppers Boot Corral Standard Restaurant Supply/International Gourmet Michael’s Shoe Repair & Men’s Stores The Car Store Sales & Leasing (also mid-level) Mountain Gold Entertainment Lake Elsinore Casino/Card House

Service providers (Level 2 / L2) The L1s contract with L2 service providers. On paper? It all looks like business as usual. For example: Make fictitious records of extra garbage runs. They look like real ones, but the money spent & received in those records is clean.

AAA Security A-1 Disposal Gabriel Construction Spiffy Ice Able Distributing CTC Trucking Associated Trucking Kingston Trucking Club 48 Managment American Federal Corp Kingston Produce (Pineapple, Potatoes & Onions) (also a 1 since they sell legit vegetables & 3, as real estate)

L3 Laundry (Finance, Investment, Real Estate) Takes funds from levels 1-2, invests in transferable property, lends at interest, buys & maintains property for rental income. These are the stores of wealth & the final cleaning. When you rent/sell a house bought with fraudulent funds, you get clean money back.

Arrow Real Estate Kearns Property CO Fidelity Funding/Fidelity Factoring (not THE Fidelity. This is a pawn shop/payday loan for business clients) El Cid Financial Kingston Investments Bear Mining Company COB/COP Coal Development CW Mining Company A-Fab Engineering Co-op Mining Company Hiawatha Coal HK Engineering

Not For Profits – can take cash from any level without reporting it; can spend at any level with minimal oversight. Latter Day Church of Christ Ensign Academy Little Red House Montessori

And AT LEAST 60 more businesses, LLCs and DBAs that are far more opaque. Consulting, Enterprises, anonymous corps and LLCs. The Kingstons are known to control at LEAST $300 Million, but twice? Thrice? Easily possible. Some estimates say $10B.

Yes, they own a casino, too. It’s a small one, and that’s one of their better geniuses: they’re not ostentatious. Casual and semi-pro poker players aren’t enthusiastic about their card rooms, but being rude to the casual rubes while maintaining a good invitation-only back room is great camouflage.

This organizational infrastructure is interesting right now because when a crime family is doing laundry for itself, it’s also worth doing some other laundry. They have the infrastructure built, after all. If they can pull 25-40% off someone else’s money, that’s just more for them.

The Kingstons launder via loans. (Which is what got them in trouble this time.) They lend some of their money through the pawn shops or the Fidelity short term business loan shop. This is a double laundry, since it can clean their own money & other people’s.

This was a Manafort dodge, remember: he’d buy a property with illicit funds from an off-shore account, then get a mortgage on the property from a US bank so he had the cash.

Recall: money laundering always LOSES money; it’s the opposite of actual good business.

But it’s not possible to launder all the money, because then they’d just be legit. So they sometimes get stuck with $5M in gold sitting in a closet, which someone steals and someone else kills to get back... little problems like that. Yep, happened. https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/inside-the-order-one-mormon-cults-secret-empire-244969/

The Kingstons have been under scrutiny before. Usually for child abuse and neglect, and because of incestuous intermarriage/rape. But also for financial malfeasance, welfare fraud and tax evasion. https://archive.sltrib.com/story.php?ref=/news/ci_4540197

And hate: https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2017/blood-cult

The Kingstons, unlike the FLDS, abandoned their distinctive clothing a couple generations ago, and they blend in. Big Love (HBO series) used some known aspects of the Kingstons as their model. Though they had to tone it down, because fiction requires plausibility. https://www.sltrib.com/news/polygamy/2018/08/04/girls-polygamous-kingston/

But like most of the polygamous groups, living well is for the Prophet and his favorites. Many women and children live in crowded, poorly maintained houses, scrounging for sufficient work and food and clothing. It prompts a few neglect complaints, but not enough.

Some boys are discarded, though the advantage of the Kingstons’ extremely diverse internal economy is they usually need labor, and they can keep dangling the hope of an aunt-cousin marriage while the boys are too naïve to call bullshit.

The boys who are cast off from the Kingstons are usually a lot closer to SLC, and thus jobs, than the FLDS boys, who got dropped in the high desert to hitchhike out on I-40 or I-15. If you have to be kicked out of your cult...

Let me be clear: this is multigenerational abuse. There is no consent possible because these children are raised without the idea that another way of life is possible. The best possible end is the one playing out now, where the Feds confiscate the wealth, leaving no reason to stay.

Three years ago, some Kingston businesses were raided. It looks like they may have been tipped off, because there were a lot of missing & blank hard drives. Former employees who would talk to the media (and the Feds) provided documents and context. https://www.sltrib.com/news/politics/2018/09/10/strange-winding-fraud/

Last year, the first indictments from that raid came down: Isaiah and Jacob, sons of the current Prophet, John Daniel. They’re the CFO and CEO of Washakie Renewable Energy. (WRE). Which has looked like a Utah success story... https://www.standard.net/police-fire/washakie-ceo-kingston-offers-to-put-up-m-to-ensure/article_1472a88d-f5ea-59ad-beaa-0a96b4c24db1.html

WRE claimed to produce 10 million gallons of biodiesel per month from waste oil. They absolutely did spend money on facilities, and a PR budget, and a lot of positive media. They made it all look really, really good. https://www.standard.net/news/business/government-moves-to-seize-washakie-renewable-energy-plant-kingston-land/article_01e29553-9137-5cc4-9f00-1cbf2298a7ce.html

Biodiesel is not quite fully profitable yet, but we need to grow the infrastructure, so there’s a federal $1/gal tax credit for biofuel producers. And we’ve got cult members who believe Bleeding the Beast (aka tax fraud & evasion) is a religious duty. https://kutv.com/news/local/inside-the-kingston-kingdom-former-employee-reveals-clans-secrets

There’s a good chance that WRE can’t produce anywhere near the capacity they claim. They may not be producing ANY B99 at all. But there were tax credits! The Kingstons bought biodiesel from others, claimed it as their own, filed for the credits.

$511 Million worth of tax credits. They’d loop those same gallons through shells 5-6 times, claiming the credit every time. It’s an amazing scam. The Kingstons claim they’re totally innocent. This is a conspiracy against them. Mom & a wife are up on forgery charges, too. https://www.sltrib.com/news/2019/01/22/wife-mother-latest-be/

They will moan and whine about how they were honest, just trying to make a better fuel, and didn’t mean harm! And oh, I have cancer but no actual diagnosis because I don’t go to doctors. You gotta let me out Where I’m gonna run as fast as I can to Turkey, where I’ve stashed $950M. https://www.standard.net/police-fire/washakie-ceo-kingston-offers-to-put-up-m-to-ensure/article_1472a88d-f5ea-59ad-beaa-0a96b4c24db1.html

That’s where this gets complicated. (Oh, just now??) The Kingstons launder via loans. Some of the tax credit scam money got loaned to a Russian/SoCal real estate investor & fuel company guy named Lev Aslan Dermen (AKA Levon Termendzhyan. I’ll call him Lev.) https://www.propublica.org/article/robert-mueller-subpoenas-associate-man-hired-michael-flynn-lobbyist

Jacob Kingston & Lev have been in bed as SBK Holdings USA since 2013 when they established it. SBK Holdings is associated with SBK Holding in Turkey, which is run by Sezgin Baran Korkmaz, and it’s mostly Russian energy sector money. Awkward, what with sanctions and all. (credit to Louise Neufeld in this medium thread: https://medium.com/@ninaandtito/a-511m-fuel-tax-credit-fraud-indictment-in-utah-connects-a-polygamous-mormon-cult-to-mike-flynn-402e1f7a0fb5 )

(The Turkish SBK Holding is not apparently associated with the UAE SBK Holdings, which is primarily the personal property of the Sultan bin Kafayiah, though it too appears to have significant shenanigans... and theft... to their credit. And also Real Estate.)

Korkmaz is besties and biz-besties with Ekim Alptekin... who hired Michael Flynn to be the lobbyist for Turkey. It’s true: the energy sector is a small town, but a small town that includes a tightly integrated vertical money laundering operation run by polygamist cultists? https://www.sltrib.com/news/politics/2018/10/22/polygamous-sect-members/

Somehow I don’t think this was coincidence at all. Because the money laundry had mob ties in the 80s, when they were providing coin op machines to the mob. These ties stick and get passed down. The Kingstons were reliable with their criminal & political partners. Noting here that the Rocky Mountain News produced excellent jouralism, but their archives only exist as reprints. The article is a reprint from RMN. https://culteducation.com/group/1099-polygamist-groups/16619-polygamy-and-profit.html

The Kingstons with checkbooks (which is only the upper 1%) all maxed out their political donations to the Utah GOP & Utah GOP candidates for years. Yes, Mitt always took a big donation. So did Mia Love. And Hatch. And Chaffetz. But a large single donation usually means there was more money going to SuperPACs and other dark money instruments. That’s the Post-Citizens United World.

Also, likely the governors, Attorney Generals, and local officials. Those donations are harder to find and trace because Utah’s campaign finance system is less than sufficiently transparent, but this stuff is pretty obvious. Kingstons have been allowed to get away with this, because campaign cash is an easy way to get regulators to look elsewhere.

In 2017, Lev’s former partner & legal counsel for SBK Holdings USA said that LEV had been indicted for money laundering & tax evasion & stolen petroleum. /shocked face... but it gets even more interesting, because Lev’s got another legal case on his ass. https://therealdeal.com/la/2017/10/05/beverly-hills-real-estate-attorney-hit-with-lawsuit-as-drama-engulfs-his-former-company/

Last summer, an ICE agent was convicted of one count of human trafficking, specifically of smuggling a Mexican national into the United States. The person he smuggled turned state’s evidence against the ICE agent, who turned on the guy bribing him to smuggle people. https://www.justice.gov/usao-cdca/pr/federal-law-enforcement-agent-convicted-criminal-charges-related-helping-mexican

The Confidential Source was a petroleum industry worker who had blown his green card due to felony convictions. Somehow I doubt this was the first time the ICE agent bent rules. Because...

See, SBK/Noil Energy (both are Lev) sponsored this lovely event for Hispanic Cops. This is the politest possible form of bribery. http://hapcoa.org/templates/files/hapcoa-2016-aguila-awards-press-release-2.docx

(WRE and the Kingstons do it, too — they’ve been all over Salt Lake City cultural & charity events for the past 5 years. Until this little arrest problem...)

And also, there are planes. Specifically, a low cost Turkish regional airline, Borajet. Which is apparently where at least some of the $950M that the Kingstons are supposed to have in Turkey went. And also more than a couple private jets. http://lawzilla.com/blog/sbk-holdings-usa-inc-vs-edgar-sargsyan/

And that matters, because about 7 years ago, before the Iran deal, there was a sudden and dramatic increase in the amount of gold going into Dubai from Turkey. Reuters noticed it. There was even a Gold Bank, backed by the UAE sultan (the OTHER SBK). Which failed. http://www.reuters.com/article/us-emirates-iran-gold-idUSBRE89M0SW20121023

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/unitedarabemirates/7720491/The-ATM-that-dispenses-gold-bars.html

The minority shareholders noticed an irregularity, then suddenly the majority holders were unavailable, and the gold (and the investments) all went... somewhere. (But the majority shareholders were the Sheikh? Shh.)

But there was still a lot of gold moving from Turkey to Dubai... And then where? Iran is a good possibility. But it’s the Middle East, and in 2012-2015? It could be anyone in the region, including Russia and Ukraine.

Remember the Kingstons’ known businesses? They mostly mine coal, but they have gold claims. (The Wasatch Range aren’t really gold/silver mountains, but there’s some.) And they have pawnshops. And retail gold establishments.

That anarcho-capitalist strain in Mormondom means that there are a lot of gold-bugs in the intermountain west. They’re not big on jewelry, because excessive jewelery immodest for women and Mormon men limit themselves to a wedding ring and a tie clip. They don’t much go for coins, either, because governments issue those. But ingots? Gold-bugs like LEGO bricks of gold.

But there is a lot of gold in the area, and it comes into pawn shops. The Kingstons have sufficient cash on hand to go buy from other pawn brokers. The retail end of any money laundry requires B2B cash exchanges.

It’s not something they mention often in PawnStarsWars reality shows, but pawn shops have cash flow issues, too. They don’t tend to borrow from local competitors, but it’s completely reasonable for someone in Denver to network with people in Santa Fe and Salt Lake City.

This is just... basic business. Close enough to be allies, far enough away that they’re not competition. If everyone knows that there’s the one guy in SLC who will always buy gold (though at a discount), that knowledge will get used. When Santa Fe has an excess of second thought engagement rings, SLC will buy.

SLC doesn’t have labor costs, so breaking down jewelry into stones and metals is also No Big Deal. The Kingstons have just enough metals mining production – at least production they claim on paper – to justify a small smelter. They can crank out ingots as long as they can recycle, and there’s so much jewelry.

Then it’s just a matter of getting the gold and the stones out of the country. Minor logistics, actually, once you’ve got the connections and cover. Sell the junk stones on eBay. Put the good stuff in a bag, in a big Suburban full of kids. Take the kids to the beach, hand off the bag. It’s on a private jet leaving Orange County by sunset.

Because the one laundry service the Kingstons can provide that almost no other crime family has? They’re ostentatiously white Americans.

Their wives and daughters are usually petite blondes who don’t look out of place going shopping in Las Vegas or LA, racking up tens of thousands at Prada, Hermès, or Louboutin. Even if they’re paying in cash. Shopping is also a form of Laundry, since there’s the secondary market, and that shopping gets luxury goods into places where sanctions forbid it. White women can get away with things that would make a clerk call the cops on someone brown.

Kingston men look like respectable Mormon men. They wear polos and dockers, and sometimes a nice, but by no means excessive suit. They’re sober, they don’t even swear. Hell, they don’t even speed, even when driving a Bugatti.

It’s their camouflage. It’s how they’ve gotten away with not paying taxes for decades, and with abusing their children, and incest, and not paying their own family.

It’s why nobody questioned that a single biodiesel site was outperforming everyone else in the country.

At least, not often enough. This time? The upper part of the family is likely going to federal prison for a long time. They’ve lost most of their Congressional protection: Love is gone, Chaffetz is gone, Hatch is gone. Mitt doesn’t need them – he’s got his own scams.

I doubt Jacob & Isaiah & Sally & Rachel will trust the second string members of the family with the account codes and passphrases, at least not while they think they can play innocent. After conviction? Well... There’s gonna be a lot of civil asset forfeiture.

And just as Gold Bank suddenly lost the deposits of its minority shareholders, I think there’s a good chance that anyone in Turkey or UAE or Cyprus will have no idea about Kingston family money.

Never heard of it. Oh, weren’t they on a reality show? Who? No idea.

While Warren Jeffs went to prison for rape & sexual assault, what’s keeping him there, and many of the other upper FLDS, are the financial crimes – stealing from the school district, child labor, real estate fraud.

That will break the Kingstons, too. /end

Deleted post. As planned.

A Potential Oddity

I have a thing for old sewing machines. I like straight stitch Singer 66s and 99s. I like ones that can be put in a treadle base.

Came across one today. The cabinet is excellent, but it’s mid-century modern. It’s an electrified version. But...

That serial is strange.

It’s in good shape. If I can figure out that serial weirdness...