@eyo
Quality Management System as a moniker for some haulage company? Somehow can't connect it with Quicksilver Messenger Service

Thanks for Mr. Stills!

Thanks QMS. Is QMS a TLA? I see it every day on our dawg walk now. Before the prison crew left, they dragged all the brush to an open area next to the path and now there is a big recycle container #31. I guess they are going to chip it up.

Couldn't take any more local news, meh. So I looked up the history of Mary Lincoln why not. oops
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Mary-Todd-Lincoln

Happy and energetic in her youth, she suffered subsequent ill health and personal tragedies and behaved erratically in her later years.
...
As the widow of an assassinated president—the first in the nation’s history—she received public sympathy, and in 1870 Congress responded by granting her an annual pension of $3,000, raising it to $5,000 in 1881. She considered the sum inadequate, however, and continued to believe that she was poor.

huh one of those days

To Mama From Christopher And The Old Man

eat the bear

@enhydra lutris
As for polishing, it started with a thought about the 'civil' war. A regional organization (the confederate) leaving the northern region (the union). Then the train of thought ran down the valley of geographical and cultural differences. Was supposed to cross the bridge to future segmenting of the north American continent into manageable zones. Rather than one central nexus (DC). But somehow got lost in the verbiage woods. Envisioning again a southern region, with it's own culture and commerce, a hub in Atlanta. A northeastern section NYC based, midwestern with Chicago, Pacific zone, mountain section and plains. DC could still be it's own little fiefdom, but would lose power control over other regions. Texas will stay a republic. This could be the settlement of a modern civil war. Commerce can still cross pollinate, though terms are negotiated inter-regionally.

Subgroups would naturally evolve within each region, but the fracture of national control would encourage sub-regional treaties. That was where the thought train was headed, but getting from our perception of the last 'civil' war to the next one required a a bigger jump than expressed.

A penny for your thoughts.

fully awake yet. I, for one, got nuthin' to say about ol' Abe at this stage of the morning, maybe much later.

I never got on the Hair bandwagon, never saw of it, and found many of its lyrics annoying, but that was me. The "when?" of it popped up above, so, briefly:

After an off-Broadway debut on October 17, 1967, at Joseph Papp's Public Theater and a subsequent run at the Cheetah nightclub from December 1967 through January 1968, the show opened on Broadway in April 1968 and ran for 1,750 performances. - Wikipedia

As a thesis,

It seems like regional authority has the geographically local communities best interests in heart.

needs a lot of polishing up. It presumes that the governments or other authorities and controlling interests of those areas have the communities' best interests at heart. I find that to be highly questionable, and not only because of the South and Jim Crow, racism, segregation and all that.

We don't have a functioning democracy, and those in power do not appear to have the best interests of the people in mind or in heart. It is a bit tricky, but throughout our history, on pretty much all levels, the oligarchs, plutocrats, rentiers, speculators and corporates hit the ground running and got off to a good head start. That has enabled them to control and manipulate the economy, the political system, and, through the media, our thoughts, viewpoints and emotions.

There is a bizarre disconnect in that a nation which claims to be the pinnacle of "democracy" takes as implicit and determining the adherence to an economic system that is not only anti-democratic, but severely so.

There is a cultural and ideological conflict played out on this continent and in this nation as to who best can understand, see, and promote the maximum welfare of the people, who should chose, decide and plan. Is it the great unwashed, the poorly educated, unschooled and semi-impecunious masses? Is it instead a well-meaning aggregation of their more and better educated intellectual superiors? Does that second group, as there defined, even fucking exist? Question 3 is largely unaddressed. Mass popular culture is contemptuous of "eggheads", why is this so, who benefits and is it justifiable? Though this whole miasma is seldom forthrightly addressed, we can look around and see what we have, and who is in charge, and discern their goals and purposes as well as their massive failings. Technocrats and oligarchs have replaced priests and kings, well, not so much priests, but Diderot was still more or less on the money. A cheap shot empirical test is whether the "sagebrush rebellion" made things better or worse, and whether, if more successful and more fully implemented, would it be that much better or that much worse. I say worse on both counts.

It's Darwin Day.