Fine Art Tuesday

 

Louis Remy Minho was born in the United States in 1831 and died in 1870 of small pox.

He was one of the members of the Hudson River School of painting of grand and imposing landscapes with the humans, if any, being shown as insignificantly small.

 

A balanced diet of news sources

From Gary in the comments: "...we've heard your criticism, what's your prescription?" (to correct the bias in MSM news)

This may come across as a backhanded compliment, but my prescription is to do what Gary is doing.

Based on Gary's comments, it is reasonable to assume that Gary is a defender of "curated and vetted", corporate news. The point is that he is still out there reading sources like my blog even though it sometimes makes him uncomfortable/angry. 

To generalize, my prescription is that if you are a large consumer of "curated and vetted" corporate news:

Suggestion One

That you also add one or two sources of contrasting viewpoints. Frankly, I don't think my blog is one of the better ones for that. The content is not very focused and much of the content is not of global interest.

Al Jazeera is recommended by a surprisingly wide spectrum of hard-core political wanks for perspective.

New York Post is among the first to break stories that challenge the Deep State. They have been running stories on the fraudulent daycares in Minnesota for a week and, until 9 hours ago, crickets from MSM except for Fox.

Daily Mail is a pretty good source if you skip over the celebrity news gack. I was worried that Mrs ERJ would object to my reading it because they post dozens of pictures of scantily clad, female "celebrities" in every issue. Still a good source of breaking news in the US.

ZeroHedge or Epoch Times push back against the Deep State 

Burning Platform isn't a newspaper. It is a blog that posts two or three essays a day from various contributors.

Commenters, please add to this list. I am sure that I am missing MANY good sources of information to counterbalance the inherent bias in "curated, vetted, corporate" news (Henceforth to be called CVC news) 

Suggestion Two

Read books. If "Wisdom is knowledge that does not come with a "best-by" date", then books are high signal-to-noise sources of wisdom. That is because books are more permanent than the words coming out of Rachel Maddow's or Whoopie Goldberg's mouth on any given CVC news segment. The author of the book knows that his words will face critical scrutiny for decades.

Yes, books can represent a big time commitment...but just starting a book can make you a hellova lot smarter than you were. Not every book is like a mystery where you have to finish it to get a grasp of how it goes together.

Or you can cherry-pick chapters out of a book. You don't have to read the entire Bible to get value out of it. Some books/chapters stand alone better than others. Sirach, Proverbs, Wisdom, Timothy 1 & 2, James are examples of where you won't feel like you stepped into the middle of a story.

A few authors to consider:

• Friedrich Hayek
• Eric Hoffer
• Charles Hugh Smith 
• James Howard Kunstler 

Commenters, please add to this list, particularly any good history books.

When the grasshoppers say "I am coming to your house"

High winds and blowing snow created white-out conditions and icy roads today.

Mrs ERJ and I stuck close to the hacienda.

So...you don't get prime content. You get a rehash of classics. 

"I am coming to your house when the SHTF"

This is a recurring issue in the preparedness community. You are the ant. You prepare. You forgo exotic vacations to places like Whitehall, Michigan and Angola, Indiana. You invest in infrastructure.

And then your cousin Jacqui-from-the-East-Coast, a grasshopper, informs you "When the Shiitake Mushrooms hit the fan, I am coming to your house."

This topic was explored in detail on James Wesley, Rawles's Survival Blog about twenty years ago. The solution that he and his readers hammered out was to have a "ticket" or a "boarding pass" to ensure a berth on the equivalent of Noah's Ark or the last flight out of Saigon.

It was interesting to watch the evolution of the concept because as the list of "gear" grew it quickly became apparent that nobody was going to be able to show up in the 11th hour with two semi-loads of cargo in-tow.

The list grew something like this:

• One year's worth of food for each person: minimum of 400 pounds per person.
• Four seasons worth of clothing for the climate: 14 pairs of socks, 10 sets of underwear, five pairs of jeans, five shirts, five quilted over-shirts, two work coats, one parka, snow boots, work boots, two sets of running shoes, sandals, hats, five pairs of work gloves, two pairs of cold-weather gloves, one pair of heavy mittens, scarves, three knit caps, two baseball hats.
• One CONEX container for every four people. Gutter to collect rainwater and two IBCs to store water.
• One water pump
• One UTV for mobility.
• 50 gallons of gasoline or diesel
• A 2000 Watt inverter generator 
• Hand-held radios for communication 
• Garden seeds, fertilizer, pesticides, fencing, hoes, shovels, grain mill
• LP stove and five, 20lb LP pigs that are full 
• A 30,000BTU/hr wood-stove and 12 feet of triple-wall stove pipe 
• Two firearms per person and 200 rounds of ammo for each shotgun, 600 rounds of ammo for each high-powered rifle, 2000 for each handgun and 10,000 for each rimfire.
• A year's supply of vitamins and medications and water treatment chemicals.
• and on, and on, and on.... 

Yeah, that and a family of four isn't going to fit into a Toyota RAV4 and drive from Potomac, Maryland to Eaton County, Michigan. Not even in the best of times. Nearly all of that gear was going to have to be pre-positioned before the shiitakes hit the fan.

Suddenly, Jacqui-from-the-East-Coast decided it wasn't as much fun to needle you about your preoccupation for preparing or about showing up 30 seconds before midnight.

Viewed from a different perspective

Cousin Jacqui will be in denial until it is too late. She will dismiss the storm clouds of chaos looming on the horizon until her liquor store runs out of Chardonnay...and Sauvignon Blanc and Chenin Blanc, and Tito's Vodka.

Her window-of-opportunity closed about three weeks before she even considered the possibility of imposing on my hospitality. 

And she isn't going to walk 600 miles through the hillbillies of Pennsylvania and the oafs of Ohio to barely "survive" in the Michigan wilderness. Physically, she is holding a hand of twos, threes and a four when she needs eights-and-above to have a reasonable chance of surviving the journey.

The iron law of supply and demand 

Between Mrs ERJ and myself, there are more than 60 people with claims on my charity as good or better than cousin Jacqui-from-the-East-Coast. Most of them don't have her need-for-dominance. Most of them know that sometimes they will draw the dirty end of the stick in terms of tasks.

Even if cousin Jacqui-from-the-East-Coast showed up at the end of my driveway, all of the berths will have already been filled.

She will say "You don't have the balls or the heart to throw me into the street."

That is an easy one. I will turn to the three families who are on the bubble. I will say, "If I let cousin Jacqui-from-the-East-Coast in, then I will have draw straws to see which of your families are tossed out of the life-boat and into the street."

"Unless, of course, you toss Jacqui-from-the-East-Coast into the street and convince her that she does not want to live here. Then it becomes a non-issue for me."

Problem handled by letting the people with the most skin-in-the-game sort things out. I don't think Jacqui-from-the-East-Coast is going to win.

"Curated and vetted" news sources

AI generated video content

"We live on the cusp of history" sounds overly dramatic, but I believe it is warranted with regard to the overwhelming amounts of "fabricated" video content polluting streaming platforms.

Who benefits?

Potentially, the legacy media outlets benefit because they can market themselves as only broadcasting "curated, vetted content". The problem with that is that the legacy networks have a history of creating (i.e. "fabricating") stories either for sensationalism or to forward an agenda.

One of the earliest documented cases involved a "hit-piece" on General Motors pickup trucks in 1992. Unlike earlier victims of hit-journalism, GM had the will and the resources to "push back".

The morning after the piece ran to a national audience, GM Legal called NBC and demanded to know where the pickup truck was so they could run their own forensic analysis. NBC told them "It has already been crushed."

That answer seemed too pat and too quick, so GM sent a team of crash investigators to the location where the "test" had been run and started visiting scrap-yards. The found the "crushed" pickup in one of the scrapyards about five miles away. It had not been crushed. They purchased the vehicle, put it on a flat-bed and transported it back to the GM Tech Center in Warren, Michigan.

They found out that the gas cap was not the factory-original cap but was some random, undersized cap that almost fit. It is not know if the producers had replaced the factory cap with one that guaranteed spillage. Regardless, that event is one of the reasons why gas-caps are now tethered to the vehicle. You cannot accidentally drive away from the gas station without it.

The cheap ink used to print information on the outside of the rocket cases had transferred to the modeling clay used to hold them in place. The printing was still legible.

The found evidence that three Estes Rocket Motors had been affixed to the frame of the pickup with modeling clay and duct-tape. The rocket motors had been ignited shortly before the collision to ensure that any gas that spilled was ignited.

The producers of the segment over-filled the gas tank, literally filling it until gas was spilling out of the filler tube. 

Finally, GM obtained video footage from the fire department that had been hired to perform Safety Over-watch during the taping of the event. I assume that the over-watch was required by the film crew's insurance carrier.

The fire department recording, when played at full speed showed that the entire flame-event lasting for five seconds with the big fire-ball lasting about 1.5 seconds. If you watched the NBC footage, you might have noticed that they went to slow-motion to prolong the fireball and then cut the feed as it started to die down. Then they kept replaying the short-lived gout of flame from other angles leading the viewer to believe that the fire lasted much, much longer than it did.

The Mainstream Media coverage of the January 6 demonstration ("insurrection") used the same video techniques to make the entry of the demonstrators into the Capital look like Santa Anna's 6000 Mexican soldiers storming the Alamo. 

Not just NBC

It isn't just second-rate news sources like NBC that have been "nipped".

No less than National Geographic and BBC have been implicated in "pressuring" characters in the reality series "Life Below Zero" to perform dangerous stunts to increase viewership. Sue Aiken has been the most vocal about the pressure but Glen Villeneuve was also goaded into potentially life threatening situations. For example, Villeneuve was "coached" to swim a snow-melt fed river from inside-of-bend to outside-of-bend for drama. He almost didn't make it. 

For those who are not in-the-know, find a wide spot in the river on a straight stretch. Wide means shallow. WADE across the river keeping your core body dry. Outsides of bends are treacherous for three reasons. The current will pull your lower body down due to the fluid dynamics, the bottom and shore are usually very steep AND finally, there are often tree roots and trash sticking out of the bottom that will snag your clothing or legs.

Summary

History suggests that the legacy media will not neutrally "curate and vet" content. They have their own biases and their profit incentives are not transparent.

For those of you in the Northeast who are digging out AGAIN...

 

 

According to some of the people who live in places where "snow machines" are a necessity, they all use "sleds" as multiplier in terms of cargo and they say modern, entry-level machines are "more than plenty". My contacts thought the two-stroke, air-cooled engines with 400cc were the sweet-spot in terms of low-maintenance and plenty of low-end grunt. Of course, they were not trying to go 120mph on their sleds, so there is that.

Sadly, the air-cooled motors seem to be extinct although you can still find machines with two-stroke Rotax engines.

Wood: Cleaning up the mess I made

There is not a lot to report today.

I spent a couple of hours yesterday in the woods. Most of the time was spent cutting "usable" sized chunks of firewood out of the Black Locust I dropped earlier this year. Due to how they leaned, most of the canopies fell into the pasture. Then I carried the chunks and tossed them into pile for later transport.

I will bend over to pick up and carry a stick that weighs 5 pounds. I am reluctant to pick up and carry a log weighing seventy pounds over rough ground. 96" poles between 3" and 5" diameter make good fence posts. Hence the color coding of the table.

Approximate weights of "logs" @ 60lb/cubic-foot.

I want to get the brush dragged back into the "woods" and re-erect the fence. Pastures that are not used revert back to brush.

I also dropped four more Black Locust trees but these were on the back-corner of the property.

Rain is expected all day today and high winds are expected tomorrow so I will not be back out into the woods until Tuesday. 

The load I brought in on Christmas day. The largest chunk is 8" diameter and most are in the 6-1/2" class.

I also brought in four poles that are suitable for fence posts. I did not cut those into 4' long bolts but leaned them up against a tree to dry and to keep them out of the way.

My firearms are LGB, Polyamorous and BIFOC

 

My weapons are breech-loaders that joyfully accept many types of ammunition and have blued-steel.