This battle station is not yet fully operational

What is already examined can always be re-examined

With many people still watching cautiously as election ballots are tallied and final results are arrived at, there’s an obscure provision in the constitution which is being overlooked by much of the mainstream media and most social media poll watchers as well. It’s weird that it’s been so overlooked because the founders intended it for exactly the scenario we are in right now, and the wording is seemingly spot on for our current times.

The relevant section is in Article VII of the document and reads as follows: “In an election year occurring during a leap year ending in zero; where the currently incumbent president has nominated and seen confirmed in the thirty days prior to an election a Supreme Court justice nominally of his own party; when also there is a general background clamor in society over the broad health and vigor of the republic; then the president may declare a status of ‘flipsy mipsy’ around the tallying of votes within 7 days of the final vote being cast. In this case every vote previously in favor of a candidate shall instead count as a vote against that candidate, and the gentleman with the least re-summed votes against them shall be deemed the winner”.

We’ll have to forgive them their numerology (the leap year thing is weird, but in addition to being deists many of the founders were also obsessed with astrology and numerology) and their gendered pronouns given the time they were living in, but the overall structure here has a pretty plain present-day interpretation. Watch out for someone on the president’s legal team to publicly suggest this strategy be used in the next few days.

The prejudice came in twenty eight waves

Sometimes when you’re out and about and need to use the bathroom you will find yourself without any available public facilities nearby. In the absence of a restaurant or cyber-café you may sometimes resort to using a gas station or other fast service business and ask to use their bathroom. Most of them are generous and will say yes, but as a security measure they will hand you a key with a large stick attached to it via a chain. I think this is done partially so that you won’t steal their bathroom key, and partially to make it harder to accidentally misplace the bathroom key.

One nice way to spice up your house is to install bathroom door locks with dead bolts on them and then somewhere in your kitchen put up a hanging board with a few nails on it and drape some keys chained to wooden objects on them, just like they do in gas stations. If you want you can even embrace a rustic style of board to give your bathroom key holding thing a quaint old timey feel.

Not only will this look nice for you every day of the year, but when you have company over it will impress them too! They’ll be reminded of all those times they were on long nighttime drives and had to stop by random gas stations to use their restrooms, and the sense of gratitude and relief they felt towards the gas station person when they handed them a large stick with a key on it.

We didn’t have a real name for it so we made one up

When learning to operate a motor vehicle one must learn some basics of how a car works and how to steer it and interact with others in traffic in order to succeed. Beyond that, there is a school of thought and training known as “defensive driving” where you move beyond just the basics of operation and into more nuanced strategies and tactics that attempt to constantly minimize the risk of collision from the mistakes of others, the weather, your own cars behavior, etc.

The general spirit of this system is to do things like control your speed, always be alert, anticipate changes and things come up on the route, be prepared to react to other drivers and pedestrians, and so on. There are proper schools which train this style of driving, and sometimes certificates or other completion status that can lead to lower insurance rates for certified people.

I’d like to see some “defensive”-style techniques applied to other activities beyond just driving. For example, every day in America 3 people on average sustain an injury requiring hospitalization just from brushing their teeth. If we were to increase the knowledge of defensive tooth brushing among the population I suppose this number could be made lower, or even eliminated. You’d want to anticipate the existence of other teeth beyond the ones you were currently brushing; replace your toothbrush when it became ineffective; make sure you have toothpaste and not an empty tube; swish your mouth; etc.

I could also see something like buttoning up your shirt being relevant to a defensive-minded approach. For example, maybe as your first move you still button the top-most button — but then instead of buttoning the second-most button you go and button the bottom-most button next, to maximize the staying-on-your-body ability of the shirt in the event of a big gust of wind. Perhaps there are even innovations to be made in the cuff link buttons?