Some morbid data

 

Crude death rates for pneumonia + flu for the years 2018, 2019, 2022 and 2023 combined. Values vary from 8.1/100 in Colorado to 26.8/100 in West Virginia

Key for the state-level data. Requested by a reader.

At the county level

A weird pattern

Key for data at the county level

Deaths by month. Most of the deaths are "Pneumonia"

For what it is worth, I touched bases with one of my "sources" and he said that he has not diagnosed significantly more cases of pneumonia this December to expects cases to increase in January.

Any information from readers with boots-on-the-ground? I am pretty sure I have at least a couple of readers who work in Emergency Rooms.

An hour in the woods is better than an hour in the gym

 

Picture of a dead ash that was blown across Mills Highway west of Eaton Rapids. Picture taken early December 29, 2025.

It was windy yesterday. I did not venture into the woods.

It was not windy today.

About an hour's worth of effort.  Five, 8' posts and seven, 4' "fatties". There are two more 8' posts still in the woods.

 

About 100 pounds of wood and my tools set for the 250 yard drag back to the house. I stopped a couple of times on the way back to catch my breath.

Earlier today I cut some White Pine I had culled from the windbreak west of the house. I got six, 4' fatties. They are much lighter than the Black Locust.

I keep seeing more and more dead trees as I spend more time in the woods. Standing, dead-trees (aka, "snags") are not necessarily a bad thing but I don't want to be near them when it is windy. 

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 tip of the old fedora to the usual suspect

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.

Geography is destiny

Frequent commenter Michael commented that the supply chain is vulnerable to cities-as-choke-points.

While I am not going to dispute that point, I want to demonstrate that the funnel or choke-point effect is highly dependent on geography.

First, some maps

Columbus, Ohio is in the middle of Ohio and the topography is relatively flat. I-70 is a major artery for commerce and it runs pretty much through the center of Columbus from East-to-West.

Later build-out of the Interstate plan has a "ring" around Columbus with a minimum "radius" to downtown of five miles. Then, minor Interstates and state highways act as spokes radiating out from the downtown area.

From a logistical and supply-chain perspective, this looks pretty robust to me.

This is another map of Columbus and it shows the location of all of the Walmarts. Most of them are located close to an intersection of a "spoke" and the ring-Interstate. You can trash-talk Walmart all you want, but they are really sharp when it comes to logistics.

A map of Indianapolis, Indiana. It is not as busy as Columbus but it follows the same general plan. You might notice that the ring is lopsided. If civil disorder snips the ring at the closest point (five miles from downtown) then they would have to project their force almost four times farther to snip it at the northernmost stretch.

St Louis, Missouri is a little more complicated. The Mississippi and Missouri rivers come into play but there is still a generous ring around the core-city.

Even small cities with relatively little strategic importance like Lansing, Michigan have this "ring" structure. Traffic from Chicago-to-Canada bypasses Lansing by taking the west, then northern legs around the city.

One thing that all of these cities share is that they sit on relatively flat land.

Blue line approximates I-70. Green line approximates I-76. Plum-colored lines approximate other Interstates

That all falls apart when you get to hilly terrain. Pittsburgh was built in hilly terrain at a time when water transportation was strategically significant.

While the Pittsburgh area is laced with many roads, the wrinkles and folds of the landscape makes them a nightmare to bypass. That kind of landscape favors the resistance and potentially handicaps the wheels of commerce.

Topography of southern New England and eastern New York

Many of the "classic" cities in New England and New York are compressed in the east-west direction because they are shoe-horned into the Connecticut and Hudson river valleys due to water power and transportation. That makes the lazy-ring + bicycle spoke arrangement uneconomical.

Springfield, Massachusetts. Blue lines approximate interstates. 5-mile measurement bar added for scale.

 

A sobering assessment of land warfare

The rise of long-range strike, drones, and cyber means that the old (safe) rear area is no more. Supply lines are now a front-line fight from start to finish. (Factories) Supply depots, railheads, ports, repair facilities, and fuel infrastructure are all high-priority targets. If an enemy cannot stop forward brigades, it will attempt to starve them. Analyses of modern logistics under fire emphasize that industrial capacity and resilient supply networks—not efficiency—determine strategic endurance.

An army for the future must be able to fight under conditions of intermittent resupply, contested and damaged infrastructure, disrupted and overloaded communications, and near-constant threats to supply lines. Planning and organization must prioritize resilience, redundancy, and regeneration rather than peacetime efficiency and timeliness.

Land warfare (now) favors armies that can fight dispersed but connected, decentralized but coordinated. Small units must be able to operate at will even when isolated or cut off. Junior leaders must be able to act without micromanagement. Commanders must know their communications will be lost and they must be able to exercise control while that loss is happening. Contemporary doctrinal analysis underscores exactly this requirement for decentralized command in contested environments.

This is a question of more than new radios or drones. It is...a cultural issue. The instinct for centralization, risk aversion, and procedural control stems from the experience of peacekeeping and counterinsurgency missions, not from the needs of a high-tech, fully contested battlespace.   -Source 

The way I read this is that when the US goes into its next "hot" war, the battlefield will extend from the front-lines to the transformer sitting on the power-pole outside your house or apartment block.

It will extend to the bridges crossing our rivers and the pipelines and refineries that refine and move oil and natural gas. The cell and fiber-optic networks will come under attack. Our marine ports and air transportation systems will come under attack.

Car-bombs and drive-by shootings will happen on a daily basis as high-value human targets are identified and "taken out". D.C. and Silicon Valley and Houston will become Moscow on steroids.

Today, if you don't know how to turn nutrient-dense ingredients like flour, lard, sugar, dried spaghetti rice and beans into edible food, you still have time to learn. When the supply chain takes a beating, among of the first things to fall off the back of the wagon will be bags-of-air (Doritos, potato chip, popped popcorn, breakfast cereals) and highly processed foods like hot-pockets, frozen pizzas and Jimmy Dean's sausage-egg croissants. I would also plan on bottled water imported from out-of-town soda-pop and iceberg lettuce to become rare/expensive. Plan accordingly.

Christmas: A Season of Bravery

If you are a believer, then you probably believe that Mary and Joseph were devout Jews who practiced their religion with correctness.

I want to look at what they risked by agreeing to be the parents of Jesus.

Mary

Mary risked being rejected by Joseph, the man she was engaged to. Joseph knew that they had not had intercourse so Mary knew that there was a very high probability that Joseph would terminate the engagement and expose her as a fornicator. There was even the potential that Mary could have been stoned for committing the act of adultery.

At another level, Mary's family was very highly regarded. Her brother-in-law was one of the priests allowed into the sanctuary of the temple. Being pregnant before she was supposed to be would bring dishonor upon her whole family. Likely, she would have been disowned. 

Joseph

Joseph was a tradesman. Traditionally, his profession has been translated as "carpenter" but some scholars think it he could have been a brick maker or a potter or some other building trade. Their reasoning is that wood is scarce in the Holy Land and having one person working solely with wood seemed unlikely in a village.

It is almost a certainty that the crones would count the months from when Joseph took Mary into his house and when Jesus was born. They would look at his size when he was born and they would quickly figure out that Mary had conceived before they were married.

This will seem like a very, very small thing to many modern people...but it was a very big deal not so long ago.

The people in the village (many of them family members) would conclude that Joseph did not follow the rules, that he cut corners and "cheated". Not a very good look for a tradesman whose reputation pays his wages.

That would have been a cruel, hard blow to an upright man who took pride in his strict compliance to Mosaic Law. 

Flight to Egypt

Shortly after Jesus was born in Bethlehem, Joseph, Mary and Jesus fled to Egypt to evade King Herrod's massacre of the infants. In some ways this is a repeat of the Jews fleeing to Egypt to evade the famine during the time of Joseph, son of Jacob.

In this case, Mary's time with Elizabeth, Jesus's birth in Bethlehem (not Nazareth) and the subsequent flight to Egypt stymied the old hags who would have counted the months and then wagged their tongues.

The message for us in 2025/26

Mary and Joseph followed the mission that God gave them. They knew the risks and did the right thing anyway. They had no way of knowing that other things would happen that would short-circuit the likely outcomes.

To me it is a message of "Do the right thing. Be merciful. Pray. Let the chips fall where they may." Don't be enslaved by the bad decisions we may have made in the past. This is what we signed-on for.

"The father shall be divided against the son, and the son against the father; the mother against the daughter, and the daughter against the mother; the mother in law against her daughter in law, and the daughter in law against her mother in law."  Luke 12:53 KJV

Another Christmas Party After-Action-Report

The immediate ERJ Family Christmas celebration is in-the-bag for 2025.

Mrs ERJ and I will attend Mass tomorrow morning, but all of the heavy-lifting (socially) is done. 

Highlights

We have been enjoying beautiful sunrises.

Most of the high-calorie treats were sent home with the kids (Yeah!!!)

Our new son-in-law made the salad and we kept that here (Double Yeah!!!)

The presents were modest and everybody seemed grateful. Even the gag-gifts were well received.

I learned that my regular attire is now considered fashionable. The family fashionista informed me that New Balance shoes are retro-cool. And in the summer, so is wearing calf-height crew socks AND sandals. Ironically, the last combination was once known as "Senior Citizen birth-control" since it would NOT get you any dates. 

Nobody unearthed sensitive, unpleasant events from the past. We did talk about some times that were unpleasant but those were times when the family pulled-together and got through it; no victims but plenty of heroes.

Belladonna was dragged out to the swing set by Quicksilver. I learned that they both share a dislike of snakes.

This guy was pretty lively for an air temperature of 40F.  He keyed out as Heterodon platirhinos 

White Oak leaf included in the frame to provide a size reference.

"No fangs, none for me today" You can kind-of see the "hog-nose" that gives this snake its common name "Hognose Snake". One of his defenses is to spoof being a venomous snake.

I was assigned the job of relocating Heterodon.

Posted for future reference

 

A Youtube short of about a minute.

The speaker says his piece and gets booed.

Paraphrasing (because I know some people dislike Youtube) 

Men: Do you live a life that demonstrates enough virtue that a rational woman will be comfortable submitting to your authority?

When you are probing unknown territory, do you squash down your ego and ask for guidance? Do you ask HER? That is what mature authority looks like; using the best information to make the best decisions.

Women: Do you demonstrate enough virtue that a rational man will be willing to risk dying to protect you? 

This is what "Women, submit to your husbands and men, love your wife the way Christ loved his church"means. 

What we call "Mental Illness" can be a positive adapation for certain environmental stresses

Is it possible that there are situations where "symptoms of mental illness" are positive adaptations?

Anxiety and Depression 

The two largest categories of mental illness in terms of number of diagnoses are Anxiety and Depression.

Anxiety: May I suggest that the ant in the story "The Ant and the Grasshopper" was driven by anxiety to store provisions for the winter?

Mass grave of Medieval famine victims

Getting ready for winter was not a trivial task in medieval Europe. The days of summer were long in terms of number of sunlight hours due to the high latitude. Peasants had to work as if the hounds-of-hell were chasing them every daylight hour. The name of that hound? "Anxiety".

Peasants who were not anxious starved to death before the next harvest.

Incidentally, people who are anxious tend to be great planners. They constantly play "What if..." in their minds and make plans to remediate those issues. Modern society sits on a foundation of What-if plans. 

Depression: Conversely, being able to sleep for 20 hours a day during the winter was an energy conservation strategy. Put the entire family into bed and throw all of the clothing and blankets over them and let the cooking fire drop to a slow-smolder. Relatively little energy was expended. 

If you charted the energy expenditures it would look like the flight of a woodpecker. A burst of beating wings and then a ballistic free-flight that was as long or longer than the burst of wings beating.

Not wanting to socialize was also a benefit. Lice spread typhus and those beds got lousy because boiling all of the bedding and then drying it all-in-one-go was beyond the means of most families. Socializing meant sharing lice with other families...lice which might bring typhus into your family. 

ADHD

It is notable that the surge in diagnosed cases of Attention Deficit, Hyperactive Disorder(ADHD) in boys approximately aligns with the removal of gym classes and recess from elementary schools? It also coincides with the time when kids transitioned from walking to-and-from school with busing being the predominant mode of getting to-and-from school.

A "good student" is one who sits passively and "doesn't make trouble".

There was a time when every person in the family had to contribute to the household economy. Those little boys would scour the area for twigs and sticks to cook the daily porridge. They would trap sparrows and catch minnows for the stew-pot. The child who sat passively and "didn't make trouble" was an economic dead-weight in terms of the family economy in a subsistence environment.

In older people, having a certain percentage of the population with ADHD meant that nearby tribes could not sneak up on your tribe. Nor were flash-floods and sudden wildfires likely to catch the tribe unaware if Billy was relentlessly scanning 360 degrees of the compass.

Finally, I had a conversation with a doctor who claimed to have ADHD.  His intellect was impressive as he quickly leapt from topic-to-topic. It is my impression that he was probably very good at diagnosing issues because he didn't get trapped or "overly-invested" in any one possibility. 

I have seen trouble-shooters in the factory get bogged down when they are "absolutely sure" they know the cause of a problem and then they try to bend the symptoms to match the illness. They would have been far more effective if they considered the four most likely diagnosis consistent with the main complaint and then looked for the best fit. 

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder

PTSD comes in a lot of flavors, but in some cases it keeps people alive on the battlefield. There are situations where actions must happen faster than conscious thought. Obviously, I am not talking about the PTSD where the person goes catatonic. I mean the PTSD where the patient explodes out of bed 210% awake and sprinting at the sound of whistling or a "pop". Maybe they smash the face of the person who is too close to them.

Summary 

Are these behaviors anomalies or is our current environment a transient anomaly? The subsistence agriculture in Europe lasted for roughly 3000 years. Warfare has been around longer than that. Industrialized education, depending on how you want to define it, has been around for fifty-to-one-hundred years.

Genetic Drift

An earlier post asked "Are there more crazy people now?" and the body of the text focused on how the pressures of environmental "triggers" have increased for most causes.

The genetic portion which is responsible for 60%-to-85% of the cases was not discussed in that post.

Are more people carrying "crazy-genes" then they did in the past?

The short answer is "yes".

Life was a constant struggle for sane, well adjusted people in the slums of Limerick, Liverpool and Hamburg. It was fatal for crazy-people.

As recently as 1900 in developed countries like Ireland, England and Germany, if your mother was crazy you were probably not going to live to see your first birthday.

Infant mortality in Ireland starting in 1930 at 85/1000 live births in urban areas.

 

Infant mortality in Ireland 1960-2020 ending up at about 3/1000 live births.

If you were a crazy-woman, your best chance of getting married was to get pregnant and "trap" an impulsive man. There was  a pretty good chance he was also crazy or was an alcoholic.

As her child, your best hope for survival was to be placed in an orphanage, which in turn greatly reduced your chances of marrying and producing children.

In total, crazy-genes had a high probability of "dead-ending". In those days the pool of crazy people resulted from random meetings of recessive genes or in new mutations.

Flash-forward to the permissive, Welfare-State

Anecdotally, one of our local characters who was called "Homeless Girl" had five children before age 25 and they were all removed by Child Protective Services because: 

• She was homeless
• She was addicted to drugs and could not care for them

Eventually, she O.D.ed in the bathroom of a fast-food restaurant.

The average woman in the United States has her first child at age 27-1/2 years.

That means that this crazy-woman had FIVE children before the average, not-crazy woman had her first. And all of the crazy-woman's children survived.

This is happening (with minor variations in the details) all over the United States and Europe. 

Numerically, that means that back when "crazy-genes" self-extinguished we experienced a rate of approximately 5% seriously crazy people. Now the crazy-people genes are subsidized rather than exposed to Darwinian selection and the numbers are growing much faster (due to high risk behaviors) than the numbers of not-crazy people. 

Fine Art Tuesday

 

 "The Ramp Grove is a secluded old growth forest remnant along the Middle Fork of the Snoqualmie River in Washington State. We identified it on satellite images. We named it the Ramp Grove because it is an unusual ramp-like geologic formation with cliffs above and below. It starts at 1500 feet and tops out at 2000 feet."
Too isolated to log economically.

Hat-tip to Lucas Machias