Video from Eastern Europe review

 

I usually don't start off with the "negatives" of a video but will make an exception for this one.

If you ever feel compelled to post a video to social media, don't make your 15 year-old granddaughter the star. Don't include businesses with their phone-number on the buildings in the background. Don't take footage of unique memorials* that nerds can track down to exact GPS location.

Another thing about this channel is my perception that the grandmother (76 years-old) is profoundly unhealthy. Maybe readers who specialize in geriatric patients can tell me I am wrong, but she looks like she suffers from water-retention issues (congestive heart failure/kidney failure/high blood pressure/obesity) and might have a couple more years left on her clock...maybe.

Finally, the dog. The girl seems to be a recent addition to the farm. Perhaps she was in a city getting bombed or was closer to the front. She brought her dog with her, probably for emotional support. An elderly, morbidly-obese Chihuahua is not a great fit for a farm-dog in a snowy environment.

On to the good stuff

The farm equipment works around the islands with the trees.

In this video the young woman and the grandmother collect walnuts and chestnuts from local trees. Presumably, a third person is running the camera, perhaps the young woman's mother.

In Michigan, this would be happening about October 1. 

What I like about this video is that in the US we take great pains to NOT plant "messy" trees like fruit trees and nut trees. They are seen as a liability in terms of labor required to clean-up and the potential for litigation due to slips-and-falls and the potential for attracting stinging insects. That is the attitude of a wealthy country.

In a poor country, every item in the farm-yard is expected to contribute to the family economy.

As an aside, "economy", "ecology" and "ecosystem" share the same Greek root-word, "Oikos" (οἶκος) which means "home". The term "Home economics" is redundant.

Depending on the species, trees can be sources of:

• Food
• Protein (nuts)
• Fats (nuts)
• Carbohydrates (fruit trees, sap/syrup)
• Edible leaves (mulberry, linden)
• Bee forage (linden, fruit trees) 
• Material for smoking/preserving foods (twigs, bark, husks from nuts)
• Shelter from the wind
• Shelter from sun
• Shelter from wintertime, nighttime low temperatures 
• Fencing/hedging/thorny barriers 
• Privacy
• Cordage (bast from linden, mulberry, withes from willow)
• Construction materials, low-value (poles, stakes)
• Construction materials, high-value (timber, lumber)
• Construction materials, very high value (tools/weapons)
• Emergency forage for domestic animals 
• Fix nitrogen
• Deep roots can mine water that is deeply underground 
• Fuel
• Property markers
• Attract game (if you want a crop of nuts you WILL be harvesting squirrels...lots and lots of squirrels)
• Medicinal
• Tar, gum, turpentine/spirits (birch, spruce, pine and other softwoods)

This list kind of list is never complete. I listed the uses in roughly in the order of the "value" to a near-subsistence Oikos. Obviously, the order will vary depending on local circumstances.

If I compare the typical species found in a suburban, Michigan yard against the list of potential benefits:

• Honey Locust (Pollen for bees. Shade. A few sticks for fires. Might fix nitrogen)
• Blue Spruce (Fire hazard. Short life. Gum, windbreak)
• Chanticleer Flowering Pear (attracts bees in spring and birds in the winter. Sticks to burn).
• Prairiefire Crabapple (same as Chanticleer)

Nuts

What is most intriguing about this video is that they collect the nuts to sell in town. That is, the nuts are a cash crop.

Later in the video, the young woman cracks walnuts for a dessert. If you look closely you will see that she is cracking the "seconds", that is, the nuts with the stained shells. They sold the bright "#1s" and kept the "#2" for personal use. That makes sense since the buyer was probably paying four times as much per kilo for the #1s.

The young woman is very practical. She uses the money from selling the nuts to purchase a pair of winter boots and to buy a pole and line for fishing.

Transportation

The family relies very heavily on a repurposed roto-tiller as a source of traction. That seems silly to me as a guy who thinks it is trivial to move 80 pounds of cargo in a wheelbarrow. Key point, I am a guy and the two characters in this video are not.

This is not a very efficient or stable means of transportation but it is a case of working with what you have. I suspect that the "tractor" is newly purchased, perhaps with funds from the Youtube channel.

The motor on the unit is identified as a "Bizon 170F". The internet seems to think that is a 211cc, 7hp gasoline engine manufactured in China.

 

*I originally thought this was from the Ukraine but now think it is from Russia or Belarus. There is a very short sequence where a bust of Lenin is visible in a small, roadside park and there is a War Memorial park with static displays of a T-34 and a MiG-21.

Random fact: At one time, if you had $200k USD and the proper permissions you could purchase your very own, private MiG-21 

A good omen

I have a sister who considers herself "fey" in the sense that she is aware of beings on the other side of the veil. She will chide them when she is looking for a lost object. After scolding them for their unwanted playfulness, she will often find the object she is looking for right beneath her hand.

I do not judge. I have always been an insensitive clod. Maybe they try to talk to me and I am too thick to hear them. Frankly, one of my superpowers as a parent was selective loss-of-hearing. Sometimes things work much more smoothly if your hearing, as a parent, is not too good.

Canary in the coal-mine

I consider small raptors to be an excellent indicator species. They are near the top of the food chain so toxins bio-accumulate and local issues are magnified. Their range is not large enough for surrounding areas with better environmental health to mask your parcel's deficiencies.

If you have an abundance of small owls, kestrels, Accipiters, swallows, swifts and bats then you are probably doing a lot of things right. I am particularly fond of owls and bats. They are working while I am sleeping.

Today I was walking in the Eaton Rapids orchard with Zeus when I looked over and saw this girl/guy perched in a hazelnut bush.

Tentatively identified as an Eastern Screech Owl by Tireless Machias.

 

I was probably five feet away from her and it was in broad daylight. She let me pull out my phone and take a couple of pictures.

Winning the lottery could not make me any happier. 

Can we learn anything from Eastern Europe?

Humans are funny creatures. We see patterns everywhere, even when there is no pattern.

That human tendency gives rise to sayings like "Technical analysts predicted 23 of the last two recessions." Technical analysts are people who study stock and commodity prices and look for patterns.

"Village life" videos 

I have been watching "village life" videos. I find them informative and entertaining. If you want to learn an efficient way to do something, watch somebody who does it every day and who relies on what she does to put food on the table. "Hobby" farmers usually have a lot of hidden subsidies so their (my?) methods are suspect.

Many of those "village life" videos are recorded in Eastern Europe. There are several reasons for that.

Eastern European nations are poor

The economy left them behind. A typical per-capita GDP for an Eastern European country might be $25k while western countries are twice to four times that.

Eastern European countries are rural and low-tech

While under the Soviet umbrella, industry was not encouraged,M lest they challenge the might of the Soviet empire. The satellite countries supplied food, raw materials and soldiers for the empire. Industries were starved of capital improvements and cannot compete with Asian imports.

Eastern European countries are starved of manpower

Working-age men leave for western cities where there are good-paying jobs in factories. Many of the women follow them. The pensioners and some of the (very few) kids stay behind.

Many houses, even entire villages are abandoned and rapidly collapsing.

Making video content is one of the cash-generating "industries" that is within the capability of the people left behind.

Is this our future? 

While you can argue that places like Michigan, Indiana, Tennessee and New Hampshire are NOTHING like Bulgaria, Ukraine or Albania, there are similarities.

The laws of thermodynamics still hold. If you put too much into a process relative to what comes out, you will go broke (or starve).

Communism is being touted as the solution to every problem. Government kleptocrats are running amok at every level.

Younger people are attracted to cities and what they see as urban economic advantages. 

The US birthrate is below replacement and the Baby Boom pig-in-the-python is nearing the tail.

The water is back on!

The water is back on. The plumber showed up and we were good-to-go by 1:00 p.m. yesterday.

Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's

The 1/4-turn valve for the cold water on one of the basins in our new bathroom started leaking.

I put a square bucket under it to catch the drips. It needed to be emptied every 12 hours.

Yesterday, I prepared to fix it. I had the parts. I was ready to rock-and-roll.

I dropped the power to the well and bled off the water pressure.

I disconnected the braided hose to the faucet handle and then put a wrench on the hex feature where the valve was threaded on to the 1/2" nipple.

No-go. It would not budge with the amount of force I was willing to apply. Time to call the plumber.

I reconnected the braided hose and turned the well back on. I reinspected the valve...and now it was emitting a stream of water at 330 degrees from horizontal. No more drip....drip....drip....

I threw open all the taps in the bathroom and then hastened speedy-quick back to the breaker-box in the basement and dumped the power to the well.

After some consultation with a friend, I did some looking and determined that I can turn off the water at the water softener so we still have two taps of unsoftened, well-water that I can use to get water for flushing toilets. It means I will be humping water in buckets but that is OK.

The good news is that we have lots of potable water in the pantry and I LIKE the taste of our unsoftened water.

***

I could have kept fighting with the valve but there is a time to call in the professionals. I don't enjoy doing plumbing, especially OLD plumbing. I never know what collateral damages I will inflict while "fixing" something. 

Fish, Cormorants and the Danube Delta

My eyes are starved for green.

Various species of carp, pike, wels catfish and zander are the most common catches in this video.

The Danube Delta is approximately 2200 square-miles (580,000ha) and is one of the largest, contiguous wetlands in Europe. There are approximately 7 nesting-pairs (plus nestlings) per square mile of common cormorants and another two nesting-pairs of pygmy cormorants as well as hundreds of pelicans and herons.

In total, the birds eat an estimated 7 million kg of fish per year and have driven aqua-culture operations out of business. Romanians eat about 8kg of fish per capita per year. 7 million kg of fish is enough fish to supply a million Romanians and it is in their own backyard.

The photosynthesis rates and overall fertility of the Danube Delta has increased since the 1940s due to fertilizer and waste-water adding phosphorus and nitrogen to the water. Commercial fishing is hampered by low wholesale prices and issues with reliable transportation.

This video is notable for three generations of women living under one roof and they get along fabulously. The one man in the household spends a lot of his time fishing.

Also notable for the older people having exceptionally good teeth.
 

Bonus academic paper

FISHERY AND PISCIVOROUS BIRDS FORCED TO SUSTAIN TOGETHER IN DANUBE DELTA, ROMANIA  

Bonus waltz 

And, as long as we are talking about the Danube....a waltz by Strauss The Blue Danube
 

Slogging....

Slogging my way through a bit of a creative dry spell, doing the things that I know help...exercise, sunshine, decent food.

On yesterday's walk, it was cloudy when I started out. A half mile down the road was sunshine. Mike was bringing out his trash at the top of the hill and I had a chance to chat with him. Mike is in his mid-70s and was in Vietnam. He "walked point" and saw action. At the start of his deployment he was mocked for being short. Nobody mocked him after the first in-theater dust-up. After coming back home he had many health issues due to Agent Orange.

He is a cheerful fellow in spite of all that.

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder

Psychology is a "science" where information has a five-year half-life. By the time a researcher gets his Ph.D. and starts teaching students, 3/4 of what he "discovered" is considered B.S.

That rapid turnover means that even GOOD research gets ignored if it is old.

Here is some research from 2006 that is primarily about PTSD but it also applies to victims of Criminal Sexual Assault, Aggravated Assault and Child Abuse.

Structural and Functional Brain Changes in Posttraumatic Stress Disorder

10% reduction in Hippocampal volume in women who experienced Criminal Sexual Assault as children

Relationship in verbal processing ability and hippocampal volume. Red regression line added by me, ERJ. 50% reduction in verbal processing ability is suggested.

The medial prefrontal cortex modulates cognitive con-
trol of the anxiety response and is probably essential
for habituation in normative stress reactions. ...as stress
or anxiety increase, this mechanism may become impaired,
resulting in unmodified limbic activity and thus exagger-
ated responses

Further dyscontrol may result from stress-induced brain
damage. Studies in animal models of stress suggest that
experimentally induced stressors result in structural and
functional damage to brain regions, including the hip-
pocampus. It has been postulated that hippocampal dam-
age disrupts the normal negative feedback of the HPA axis,
resulting in excessive exposure to cortisol and related cel-
lular toxicity. These hypotheses are as yet unproven (in humans as-of 2006)

Stress has permanent, negative impacts on the control and emotional regulation circuits in our brain.

Think about some kid 100,000 years ago hearing a rustling of the leaves, a snake striking out and killing members of his family. His brain rewires. The rustling of leaves bypasses slow, modulated, thoughtful responses and he simply levitates away from the sound.

Our brains are still running the same operating system that we evolved with.

High cortisol levels and extended periods of high emotional "jags" are not your brain's friend.

The repeated confrontations of agitators with ICE agents is turning some of the agent's control and emotional regulation circuits to rubble. Those auditory attacks are reducing the agents ability to hear and process verbal commands from their supervision. 

I believe that is intentional on the part of the agitators. Their handlers want dead bodies for the news and they don't care whose bodies they were.