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.

Snow, smoke and sore muscles

 

A dusting of lake-effect snow while walking down the road

Smoke plume from a neighbor's outdoor boiler on a cold morning.

Snow squall, looking across my front yard.

Gym notes

I got to the gym today.

I successfully completed my maintenance routine: 135lb x 6 deadlifts, 185lb x 6 deadlifts, four sets of 205lb x 6 deadlifts.

The last lift was a grind but I made it.

Today, I kept the stop-watch running. I wear one to ensure that I take my entire five-minute recovery between each set. Without the stopwatch I get impatient and rush.

Five minutes between sets. Between 60 seconds and 75 seconds to grind out the six repetitions. Once I pick up the weight at the start of the set I do not release it until I lower it at the end of the set. 

I am going to be feeling some muscle soreness tomorrow and the day after, but it will be a good soreness.

Walking and "Weedy" and "Common" is good

I went for a three-mile walk today and a two-mile walk yesterday.

OK, maybe I am gilding the lily. I turned around 40 yards short of the stop-sign because the brush that was breaking the wind stopped.

14F actual. +1F if exposed to the wind (which I avoided).

I was wearing carpenter jeans (unlined), tee-shirt, Sherpa-lined and hooded overshirt, light work-coat, gloves. I also had a knit hat and was wearing socks and light hiking boots unlike savages in Alberta who stroll about Oddmanton in January wearing cargo-shorts, boonie-caps and crocs as they nibble on pickled eggs skewered upon their dirk.

God willing, I hope to lift tomorrow at the gym.

Neighbors

I ran across a neighbor while walking. I collected his phone number which could be handy in the future.

Weedy trees and trashy fish

I had a fellow kindly point out that Black Locust is considered a "weedy" tree in many locations.

The weedy trees to the left of the ditch are mulberry trees. China. Mulberry can be a very abuse tolerant species. Source of image

I am not going to disagree with him. Any species (plant or animal) that is described as "weedy" generally means that it thrives in the disturbances created by humans. I, for one, appreciate the over-achievers that increase in spite of our insults to the environment. Yes, orchids are beautiful but there is much to be said for mulberries, Black Locust, Box Elder, dandelions, blackberries, bullheads, Channel Cats, rabbits and starlings.

Even tomatoes can be weedy. I have seen a dense jungle of Yellow Pear tomatoes growing on a a sandbar in the Red Cedar River half a mile southwest of downtown East Lansing. Squash can be a weed in compost piles and grape vines along fences.

I sort of understand the mystique of exotics, but life is so, so very much easier if you invest the majority of your effort on boring, proven, robust crops and technologies:

• Potatoes
• Cabbage
• Corn
• Beans
• Squash 
• Tomatoes
• Peppers
• Garlic
• Cucumbers
• Turnips 
• 12 or 20 gauge shotguns
• .22LR rifles
• 9mm-to-.45 handguns
• .308 Winchester or 5.56 NATO rifles (or anything in between). Or if you have a source of ammo, 30-06, .303 Brit, 8mm Mauser, 7.62X39mm Ruskie.... 
• Lots of patches and ATF fluid or 0-20 synthetic motor oil for cleaning and lube
• Knives with full-tang, carbon-steel blades between 3" and 8" long
• Angus cross beef animals or Holstein or Jersey crossed with anything.
• Plymouth Rock or Rhode Island Red chickens 

Daniel Boone or Davey Crockett would have been thrilled to have any of those technologies available to them.

They are "common" to the point of forgettable for very good reasons. They work. 

The five-hundred pound gorilla in the room...

I am not going to write about that. Too much mud in the water. I would just be stirring it up since I have no unique insights nor have I been breathlessly following every pundit and new shred of evidence.

Nope. I am going to wait this one out. I have people working on it and I (mostly) trust them.

Recreational Plumbing

I have a leak beneath the faucet in our newly remodeled bathroom.

I turned off the valve and the leak continued, so it is not on the fixture side of the valve.

I felt the threaded joint between the 1/2" nipple and the valve and it does not seem to be coming from there.

By the process of elimination I deduced that I have a flaw in the 1/4 valve. I purchased a replacement this morning and as soon as I feel motivated I will replace the valve and see if good things happen. That will probably happen AFTER Mrs ERJ takes her shower. Dumping the water pressure as she is stepping into the shower is likely not make me popular.

Power outages and emergency lighting

Mrs ERJ was talking with her sister on the phone last night. My S-i-L expressed a concern about power-outages. S-i-L eyesight isn't the greatest even in good light, so she was fretting about being able to find a flashlight and even being able to find and manipulate the on-off button.

Source.  14 hours of light (each) on three AA batteries.

Mrs ERJ mentioned that we have a "Pull open to turn on" lantern in every bedroom.

Roasting a chicken

The plan is to roast a chicken today. Mrs ERJ told me that we have a lid for the dutch-oven in the pantry...I went looking and she was right. I think her sense of aesthetics were offended when I used a cast-iron skillet as a lid.

Having messed around with meat birds, the heavier birds are almost always male and have a better meat-to-bone ratio. The birds at the grocery store varied between 4.7 pounds (dressed) to 5.9 pounds. Since they are all slaughtered at the same age, that means that the 5.9 pound carcass came from a boy bird. 

Property values in Minneapolis

Median house price in Minneapolis. Summer of George Floyd circled in red. Source

 

Affordability index. Higher numbers are more affordable. Something happened near the time of the yellow line to cause a step-function in affordability

I was looking at the housing market in Minneapolis to see if the recent unrest was impacting the housing market.

The short answer is "Not Yet".

I was surprised by how little the unrest around George Floyd's death impacted the housing market. It was nothing like the Detroit race riots.

The Detroit race riots marked a secular shift in the demographics of the region. The Minneapolis market shrugging off the GF riots might be evidence that people recognized it was "business as usual".

Hard to say with any kind of certainty. 

From my brother (worth sharing)

He knows about my housebound situation and has been sending me things to read.

‘Personal finance is never really about the money,’ says CFP Akeiva Ellis at The Bemused.

“I wish I had known sooner that while financial literacy and knowledge are important, personal finance is never really about the money. Though I had a lot to learn, not knowing was never my biggest obstacle to progress; doing was.

Real progress started when I finally asked myself, ‘Why am I like this?’ when it came to money management and began unpacking the hidden beliefs and narratives I carried about money. Those often unexamined stories act like a bossy backseat driver, influencing decisions without you even realizing it. Once you address that part, the tactics finally stick.”

Source

Many successful dieters say that they cannot keep weight off until the understand and reconcile the relationship they have with food.

I am pretty sure it is the same thing with money.

Margin Retreat

"Margin Retreat" is when an enterprise drop simple, less profitable products/services and "retreats" to the high-end of the market because their costs have gone up and they lose money on the cheaper products.

Trucks and cars and snowmobiles and ATVs became bigger, faster and loaded with more "mandatory" features due to margin retreat.

A base S-10 pickup truck cost $12,600 in 1999 (and you could usually pick one up even cheaper at model close-out). Today, a Colorado work-truck has an MSRP of $36k or 3X as much. The annualized, compound interest of 4.3% in price doesn't seem outrageous but the official CPI numbers are a 93% increase and an "official" rate of inflation of 2.6%.

Fast food

The fast food industry shows how the market creates a conveyor-belt that pushes enterprises into margin retreat.

McDonalds opened a drive-in restaurant but didn't make a lot of money, so they famously decided to only prepare and serve those items they made money on. They got rid of the girls on roller skates and the fancy glasses. Hamburgers, fries and soft-drinks all served in paper. They printed money.

The idea caught on. Thousands of me-toos sprang up.

Competitors offered bigger burgers. McDonalds matched them. Competitors offered fish sandwiches. McDonalds matched them. Menu complexity grew.

Real-estate agents became adept at sniffing out where McDonalds was shopping for new locations. The asking prices went up.

Civic leaders started leaning on McDonalds to "contribute to the community" as if providing thousands of kids their first employment experience was not enough.

Customers started suing McDonalds, not because McDonalds is bad but because they have money.

Stockholders expected dividends. 

Staffing became a challenge.

And a flotilla of bare-bones burger-joints opened up that undercut the bottom end of McDonalds menu; competitors with names like In-and-out Burger, Just-a-Burger. In time, if they are successful, they will acquire the non-business costs that accreted on McDonalds, like so many layers of water depositing calcium carbonate on a stalagmite. A company that was once agile and nimble is now cemented to the floor by costs.

Margin retreat is everywhere

You see it in the cost of housing.

Builders say they lose money on stick-built houses smaller than 2000 square-feet.  That is sad because two empty-nesters don't need 2000 square-feet and many of us don't want to live in apartments.

Lots, utility hook-ups or on-site wells/drainfields, driveways, garages, worker rules, waste disposal rules, ever-advancing insulation and electrical codes...all add to the cost of the building and don't add a single, salable square-foot. In fact, the insulation requirements reduce the usable, interior room.

Getting back to trucks

Back in the 1990s, it became fashionable for ranchers and people who grazed animals to leave their $35k pickup parked in the driveway and use a simple UTV + trailer to do fence maintenance. Why use a vehicle that can go 90mph and carry 2000 pounds of cargo when you needed a vehicle that could go six mph over rough ground or maybe 35 mph on gravel roads while carrying (or towing) 300 pounds of fencing tools and supplies?

Maybe you had a way to carry a light varmint rifle or a shotgun for targets-of-opportunity but the that was the extent of the frivolity.

At that time, UTVs like the 400cc Yamaha Kodiac/Grizzly seemed to hit the sweet-spot. MSRP of about $6000.

Today, the smallest engine that ride comes with is a 700cc motor and the MSRP plus mandatory destination charges will cost you $11k. 

And, just as sure as God made little-green-apples, there are competitors flooding into the space the big names abandoned.

Civil relations requires concessions from all parties

An Indian couple was awarded $200k in a court case when a college told them to stop using the microwave ovens to heat their curry sauce. Other students/employees complained about the smell and the mess.

I expect that in very short order, large numbers of students and employees will be firing up their George Foreman grills and filling the air with the sweet smells of barbecuing beef.

It is hard to imagine that any judge could rule AGAINST beef-eaters for cooking the traditional foods of their peoples even if it makes other employees retch.

For the record, I once worked in a factory that forbid the cooking or reheating bacon in the break-rooms. I wonder why. 

I went to the gym today

I had low expectations. I was not disappointed.

I was not able to complete my maintenance goals of warm-up and then four sets of six reps of dead-lifting my bodyweight.

The warm-ups went OK. My warm-up isn't very scientific. It is six reps of 135lbs (the bar + a 45 pound plate on each end) then six reps of 185 (the bar + a 45 and a 20 pound plate on each end).

I managed one set of six reps of my bodyweight and my glutes and hamstrings said "Enough".

I don't think the flu made me weak. I think the inactivity that went along with the flu did.f

I expect the stamina to come back quickly if I lift once every three days and walk on the other two days. 

Cold is better than ice

Eaton Rapids is usually placed in USDA zone 6A  (predicted annual low of -10 F)

 It was -16 F, actual, when I looked at the thermometer this morning.

We tend to be warmer than some of our neighbors because our house is on a knoll and we have tree cover. Cold air is dense and runs downhill and puddles-up in the hollows.

A dense tree-cover is helpful in terms of softening temperature extremes at ground-level. "Cold" is partially the result of the heat-energy stored in items on the ground radiating through the atmosphere to deep-space. Clouds help retain over-night heat. Branches over-head also help reflect some of that heat back.

A secondary effect of heavy tree cover is that the sap and the buds freezing release heat and cause a very localized rise in temperature. Multiply that slight rise a million times and it makes a difference.

Shallow, snow-covered bowls with no vegetation or strctures emerging above the snow are the worst-case scenario for low temperatures. They are parabolic mirrors aimed at deep-space and have no other thermal mass than the human stupid enough to choose to bivouac or have their snow-machine founder there.

Gordian Knots

Gordian Knots (not to be confused with Don Knotts) 

The Phrygians had no king, but an oracle at Telmissus (the ancient capital of Lycia) decreed that the next man to enter the city driving an ox-cart should become king. A peasant farmer named Gordias drove into town on an ox-cart and was immediately declared king. Out of gratitude, his son Midas dedicated the ox-cart to the Phrygian god Sabazios  and tied it to a post with an intricate knot ...comprising "several knots all so tightly entangled that it was impossible to see how they were fastened"

The ox-cart still stood in the palace when Alexander the Great arrived. An oracle had declared that any man who could unravel its elaborate knots was destined to rule over all of Asia. Alexander the Great wanted to untie the knot but struggled to do so before reasoning that it would make no difference how the knot was loosed. Alexander the Great drew his sword and sliced it in half with a single stroke.   -Adapted from Wikipedia

Rules

I want to blather a bit about "rules".

I believe that reality is filled with chaos and turbulence and unpredictable events. It may be predictable for short intervals but things fall apart as scales increase.

This causes us, as humans, endless intellectual anguish. We spend our childhood forming mental-maps and yarn-balls of if-then-else logic. It is a universal conceit to think that our mental models accurately and comprehensively map the world.

It is pretty easy to demonstrate that it doesn't, though. Maybe there is a rule that says "Don't go into that bar!" or "Don't walk through that neighborhood after dark". The reason for those "Don't go" rules is that the operative rule-sets we are carrying in our heads fails (often catastrophically) in those environments.

Declaring "That is against the rules" is not a viable defense against a mugger or rapist. 

Trump 

The main reason progressives HATE Trump is because he doesn't honor the rule-sets in their heads. This is an unprecedented (in our lifetime) event. 

For example, the head of NATO reportedly told Trump that if the United States is attacked, that no European country will assist us in defending our nation. Four generations ago the US initiated the Lend-Lease program and the support has flowed and the defense umbrella stood without a hiccup since. 

Intelligent people are unable to perceive how distorted and self-serving their mental models became over decades of self-referential evolution. Julian and Fatou sets are a mathematical example of how simple rules applied over many iterations can produce bizarre and complex outcomes.

The Euros are outraged when Trump demands that the Europeans reciprocate in any way. In the experience of every living European, American generosity has been akin to gravity: Reliable, always there, a force of nature that you don't have to pay for.

Other Gordian Knots

The war-gaming guys have the same blind-spots as everybody else.

Who says China will not use nukes to seize Taiwan? If they did, how certain are we that the US would retaliate with nukes? Isn't that what the Slotkin/Kelly insurrectionists were prepping the troops for? "Disregard your superiors when they tell you to launch nukes?"

HOT!!! Boomer Babes of Minneapolis! Candid photos of protesters

 

Level with me. What did you expect when you popped this post open?

Videos can be a productive way to pass time

Since I have been "house bound" for much of the past week, I have a lot of empathy for the people south of me will be enduring, both during and after the huge ice-and-snow storm that will be hammering them Friday, Saturday and during the clean-up.

One of the distractions that help me retain my sanity was.....Youtube!

Youtube is a tool. Youtube is like a chainsaw. You can be the master of the tool or the tool can be your master. Trust me, it is better to be the master.

Proactively "seeding" your algorithm (or feed) is a smart move.

Here are a few channels that held my interest.

Serenity

Life is good when listening to piano concertos while installing primers into brass cups. I confess to a fondness for compositions by Sergei Rachmaninoff and Camille Saint-Saens. The Youtube video linked above is almost five hours long so you will not have to keep interacting with your device while listening.

Social commentary

Andre Williams

This guy's channel helps certain mysteries snap into focus.

For various personal reasons, I have a vested interest in understanding how I can help individuals of the African-American community be as successful as possible.

His language is edgy.

Relationships

Jimmy on Relationships. Look through his videos and click on something that you are interested in. Or not. I don't get a commission.

Conflictish. Look through his videos.... Pretty chill dude. Easy to listen to.

Understanding women

Yeah, right. Impossible, but I never saw that stop any man from trying.

EmilyWKing, Look through her videos...

 

Jedediah Bila: Look through...

The audio is garbled at the start of this video. "Cinderella took off her shoe and found love. You (modern women) took off all of your clothes and couldn't find love."

For the Francophones

 

Passe-moi les jumelles

Or, if you cannot understand French, you can turn on auto-subtitles after clicking on the gear icon in the lower, right corner of the screen. Then you can click on the gear icon again and activate auto-translate to English or any other language that they offer.

Not a French channel but Swiss.

Apples

Cummins Nursery

None of their videos go over two minutes, which is not an overwhelming amount of information.

The narrator taste-tests many unusual varieties. I watched their video on Ashmead's Kernal, Black Oxford, Boskoop and Zabergau Reinette.

You have to go to the videos page to see all of their content.

Do any of my readers want to recommend any video channels to those poor folks who might find themselves snowed/iced in?
 

Last day of flu reports

I found a weak spot in our preps. We ran out of dog-treats.

It is possible that our enforced "in house" conditions may have increased the number of treats Zeus got. He manfully consumed the extra treats without complaint.

Worst Storm Evah!

Inches of freezing rain predicted for the coming storm

It looks particularly bad for the band where freezing rain will exceed 1/2".

Power outages kill. Downed power lines kill. Carbon monoxide from improperly used generators kill. Hypothermia from furnaces that won't run without electricity kills. 1/2" of an inch of freezing rain is considered catastrophic and power outages are a near certainty.

Southern Arkansas is predicted to get over an inch of ice. So is a band from Atlanta, Georgia to Virginia's Dismal Swamp which includes the entire state of North Carolina.

Glare ice is almost impossible to walk on without crampons or without sprinkling some kind of grit on the surface. As a last resort you can vacuum your carpets and sprinkle the dust the vacuum collects on those surfaces you must walk on.

Snow can collapse roofs and is messy. If you have to drive in it then you can get stuck or have an accident. But it is the ice that is the big killer.

Be safe out there, y'all.

 

Paid protesters refuse to report for early shift

 

 

45 second run time.

I guess all of the quality people already have jobs. 

King-makers

This essay will be a quick look at what I see as the leverage-mechanism that allows a small number of people to have outsized influence on "who will be our kings".

One proposal (not mine) to address the issue is presented at the end of the essay.

*** 

It costs about $3.0 million to run a viable campaign for US House of Representatives. That is an average of $3.0 million for both sides. In "safe" districts, it will be substantially less. The losing side will establish a presence but aren't going to invest huge amounts on a sinking ship. The dominant party in the "safe" district doesn't need to spend $3.0 million to win.

Contested districts might see twice the average invested.

That money does not come from within the district. It come, mostly, through fund-raising mechanisms that are party specific. That means that if you, as a candidate, want money from WinRed or ActBlue you MUST dance to the tune they call. You must vote straight party lines and not what you perceive is the desire of your constituents nor what your conscience tells you to vote for.

It is just one more example of J.P. Morgan's Golden Rule, "The man with the gold makes the rules."

That leads to the capture of the party platforms/planks by the fanatical, one-issue voters: "I will eat nothing but BarS hotdogs, canned beans and instant rice for the next six months so I can send another $1000 to fund ProLife (or save the whales or advance LGBT rights or...) candidates.

The incredible price of the elections is primarily driven by the cost of media advertising. I suspect that many mainstream media outlets would go bankrupt without the huge influx of advertising dollars from political campaigns.

Viable solutions are tough to come by 

One proposal that was offered by people interested in campaign reform is to have the media outlets NOT CHARGE for political advertising. Let's say they have to sacrifice the minutes-per-day that are purchased by the industry that currently buys the largest share of advertising...say Pharma...and they have to give the same number of minutes/day to political candidates in October and early November.

That proposal died before it was born. The media corporations puked all over it. Financially, legacy media is furiously dog-paddling to keep their financial nose above the water due to competition from the internet. Pulling revenue from political advertising would be the equivalent of thumping the dog in the head with an oar.

Another issue involved the constitutionality of not funding minor parties. Would you force every station to host every whacka-doodle party equally?

If you only fund the advertising for some minor parties then you create some very strange dynamics. Suppose you ran a "primary" election for the minor parties at the same time you ran the Big-Two primary and the top one or two minor parties gets free advertising.

Furthermore, let's pretend that the top-two minor parties in Eaton County are the Green-Eggs-and-Ham party and the Whackum-and-Stackum party.

If you gave free advertising to the Green-Eggs-and-Ham party then the Republicans will win because the GE&H party drained the fringe voters who would have normally voted for the Democratic candidate. Similarly, if you funded the W&S party, the Democrats will win because the traditional Republican base was split. That is the opposite of what should have happened if we expect the representatives to be a "representative sample" of their constituency.

You might say "fund both of them", but what if the top two minor parties are Green-Eggs-and-Ham and Juan-for-the-Money parties and both robbed voters from the Democratic party. That would result in the "wrong" major party winning.

Cap spending?

Maybe the answer is to cap spending the way major sports leagues cap payroll. It would force the parties to become much more focused on their messaging and potentially give locals much more leverage since most volunteers for door-to-door work are local.

Flu Report: Day Four

"G' morning, Kubota. What's up?" I answered the phone call.

 "Is a temperature of 101.9 considered a fever?" Kubota asked me.

"Yes, Kubota. Yes it is" I replied. I was impressed that he had a thermometer.

At noon, I sallied forth with a stupid face mask* on and purchased blue-gatorade (I don't think anybody knows the actual flavor), two gallons of spring water, ramen noodle soup, minestrone soup, mucus-thinner and elderberry syrup.

Upon re-entering the minivan I goobered all over my hands with hand sanitizer and waited ten seconds before touching any of the interior. 

He was at the doctor's office when I dropped them off at his bachelor-pad.

Trimming trees

I installed a fresh battery into my electric pole saw and carried a 1/4 mile to the back of  the property. My goal was to trim a grafted chestnut tree back to the branch that was grafted.

It took me about two seconds to realize that somebody had installed the chain on the bar backwards.

I trudged back to the house. Used the Allen wrench and flipped it around.

Then I tried again. It cut much better when the sharp end of the teeth were hitting the wood.

I whittled the chestnut tree down to the grafted branch. Then I trimmed another chestnut tree. Then I limbed two oak trees up as high as I could reach.

God told me it was time to stop by putting some sawdust in my left eye. 

Quicksilver detail

I am recovering more quickly than Mrs ERJ.

The tentative plan is to have me go over to Southern Belle's house on Thursday to watch Quicksilver so Mrs ERJ can continue to recover.

Handsome Hombre still has the crud, so he will be watching Quicksliver tomorrow. Or at least that is the plan. 

NCAA Football National Championship

I like it that at the start of the season that the National Champion could be almost any Division I team. Who would have picked Indiana in mid-August?

While the years of "Will it be Georgia, Alabama or Clemson" were great for those programs, it did little to excite nation-wide interest through the entire season.

The fact that Indiana was able to transform from Big-10 boat-anchor to National Champion in two-years is because of the portal and transfer rules.

Let's be real. Sports-ball is entertainment. It is an escape from sometimes crappy lives. If Name-and-Likeness and portals increase the chances of Eastern South Dakota University  playing against Cal-State, Needles...then I think those are good ideas.

*Yes, I know that virus are very, very small. I believe that most virus are distributed in droplets of mucus and saliva. I KNOW the mask stops them. Masks, wearing or not-wearing is not a hill I will die on....unless I am working in a factory 50 feet away from other people and the temperature of the air is 104 F.

The case AGAINST term-limits

I assume that most of my readers lean toward the conservative end of the political spectrum so I will write this post with that with that in mind.

Take a minute and think of two or three nominally-conservative politicians who you feel have betrayed the cause in the last thirty years or so.  

***

Fine Art Tuesday

 

Emil Zschimmer (1842-1917)

"I wouldn't dream of hiding the sympathy I feel for trees, nor the admiration I've long held for them. Some time ago, I was on a plane. An industrialist sat next to me, [...] this man said something I've never forgotten:

"Whatever your profession, at some point you'll wonder if you're wasting your time, even if your work isn't harmful. You can be a merchant, an archbishop, a fisherman, a musician, or a doctor; sooner or later you'll feel like you're wasting your time. There's only one exception: if you plant trees, you can be sure that what you're doing is good." I really liked what he said."

~Francis Hallé , 'Trees', "Les petites conférences" (2011)

Benjamin Williams Leader (British, 1831-1923)

 

Bernhard Mühlig (German, 1829-1910)

Martín Rico (Spanish, 1833-1908

James Thomas Linnell (British, 1820-1905)

Michael Reilly

Alan B Hayman

And a thousand thanks to the tireless Lucas Machias

 

Presented without comment

 

47 new Ronin every fifteen minutes

Medieval Japan was a feudal country. While a small amount of money changed hands, most of the economy was sustained by an elaborate system of "obligations" with "Loyalty" flowing up from the bottom and "Responsibilities" flowing down from the top.

This web of obligations was so comprehensive that it was virtually impossible for somebody who fell outside of the web to survive. That outsider had no legal right to collect firewood for cooking or to gather shellfish. They had no legal right to till and plant a field. They had no right to sleep under a roof. 

It worked in Japan for a long time. Japan had (and has) a homogeneous population with a shared history. Japan had little mobility, either in society or in terms of geography. Japan did not have an abundance of natural resources and could not afford to run experiments that would likely fail.

Samurai were warriors who had pledge their allegiance to the local Shogun or Warlord. The pledge was not lightly given and Samurai typically only gave it once in their lifetime.

47 Ronin

47 Ronin is a movie based on a fictionalized rewrite of a Japanese folk-story that is based on actual, historical events.

Plot: An honorable Shogun who had 47 Samurai was forced to take his own life through the manipulations of a dishonorable Shogun. The Samurai refused to switch their allegiance to the new, slimy Shogun and thus became Samurai who were not pledged to a Shogun, known as Ronin in the Japanese language, a virtual death sentence in medieval Japan. 

With honor gone and nothing else left to lose, the Ronin decide to avenge the honorable Shogun's death. 

Divorces

There are approximately 1,800,000 divorces in the United States. If you divide that by the number of seconds in a year (including nights, weekends and holidays) we average one divorce every 17.5 seconds.

If you do the math, that means that there are 47 newly divorced men every fifteen minutes. 

Every one of those divorced men have something in common with the Japanese Ronin. Typically, the courts kick them to the curb. They are turned into objects. They are piggy-banks to be drained. Much of society bought into "Always believe the woman". 

If 47 Ronin in feudal Japan were seen as an existential threat to the Empire, then why do so many people cheer on the women who file for divorce*? "You go, girl. Kick his ass!!!"  

47 new Ronin every fifteen minutes!!

It is something to ponder as the shredding of our society accelerates.

*4 out of every 5 divorces are initiated by the woman. 

Flu report: Day Three

I had the luxury of sleeping until 6:30 a.m. Monday morning.

The highest temperature I measured yesterday was 96.3F. 

I went for a 1.4 mile walk with no consequences. I took the precaution of taking a couple of ibuprofen an hour before I walked out the door. I picked a route where the 20 mph (sustained) winds were blocked. It was still cold.

I have a little bit of coughing. In the morning I had some lung-whistles upon exhaling but those went away as my lungs cleared. No headaches. No nausea.

My stomach shrank. A bagel fills me up. 

My little hobby is chugging along. I have a single-stage press and assembly is the slowest operation because there are multiple steps involved. I am averaging 5 units per minute. 

I am feeling house-bound. The weather look-ahead predicts cold, -19 F wind chill and -10 actual for early Saturday morning but Wednesday and Thursday look balmy.

This does not look like the dreaded H3N2 so your prayers for my health paid off. Thank-you all. 

...judge by their character within

"I have a dream that one day my children will be judged, not by the color of their skin, buy by their character within." Dr Martin Luther King

Powerful words.

Souls don't have color (as far as I know). We will all be judged, or so I believe as a Christian. 

We are all sinners. We all fall short.

But we don't have to wallow in our sinfulness like pigs joyfully wallowing in shit. 

Bubbles pop

Sample headline

Sample text (from 2020)

In a global ranking of real estate per person, the United States is No. 1, and not in a good way. The consultancy PwC did an analysis last year of per capita leasable shopping center space in countries around the world. For places like France, Germany, the United Kingdom and Japan, average retail space was less than 5 square feet per person. In the U.S., that number is more than 23.

“We are clearly overretailed in America,” says Byron Carlock, head of PwC’s U.S. real estate practice. “Suburban sprawl created a situation where we just believed that every time there was a new intersection with four corners we needed to put up four strip centers.    Source

Fragmentation

We have entire stores in the US dedicated to selling baseball caps. We have stores that just sell sneakers. We have stores that sell tights, and only tights. We have stores that sell one brand of exclusive sweat-shirts. We have 60,000 square-foot stores selling mattresses and furniture.

In the United States people shop for recreation. Shopping scratches some kind of primal itch in people. Maybe it is the foraging gene. Maybe it is the delight in finding a novelty. We were once satisfied taking a walk in the closest city park. Constant stimulation now means that we need to go on an African safari to get the same gratification. 

Throw in the stimulation of shopping on-line and consumer oriented broadcast channels like HGTV and HSN. 

One of Kubota's friends had a girlfriend who ran up a $23k credit card bill in ONE NIGHT while watching Home Shopping Network.

Regression-to-the-mean

Regression-to-the-mean is a statistical concept. If you take a sample from a population and it happens to be an outlier...let's say we are measuring height and our dipper happens to collect Wilt Chamberlain...then our next sample is likely to be closer to the mean than the outlier was.

Ramifications of RttM are that as our sample size grows, the average will migrate toward the mean. This idea is captured Biblically in the directive to judge on the testimony of three sober men rather than just one. One man might have ulterior motives and give tainted testimony, or maybe their perspective did not allow them to see extenuating circumstances.

Building on the larger sample size ramification, longer periods of time resemble larger-sample-sizes and numbers like "Per capita retail square-footage" is likely to converge if there are not outside constraints separating them. 

Regression-to-the-mean suggests that the US has too much retail space. The build-out of retail space was a bubble driven by property value speculation, low interest rates and optimism.

People between fifteen and thirty-five are struggling financially. The cost of everything they don't need drops and the cost of what they need to stay alive keeps going up. The margin between what they earn and what they have left after paying their insurance, rent, food, day-care and other essentials is rapidly shrinking. The engines that drove the bubble in retail-space ran out of gas.

If the business models of Furniture Row, Lululemon, Lids, Sportsmans Warehouse and Aeropostal crash-and-burn, it is a kindness to let them dissolve and to let local real-estate rents rationalize. It is not a mercy to amputate a leg one inch at a time.

Flu report: Day Two

I woke up at 4:00 a.m. 

My temperature at 5:30 a.m. was 96.1 F. According to the internet, this means that I am not ovulating. Who am I to argue?

My temperature didn't hit 99F until about 10:30. First acetaminophen at noon.

I went for a twenty minute walk outside. A half-mile out and a half-mile back. The cold air was brutal to my nasal passages but other than that there were no complications.

An hour after my walk I got out of my recliner and said some bad words. A quick tour of the internet suggested that my right-side sciatica nerve was not happy. Suspecting inflammation, I took a couple of ibuprofen which is MUCH better than acetaminophen for inflammation.

I took a nap. The pain shooting down the back of my right leg was gone.

My nose is running. My cough is better. I was able to eat without feeling nausea.

Back in the day, there were many days when I went to work and put in a full day when I felt worse than this.

Mrs ERJ's symptoms seem to be lagging my by about 12 hours.

Posted for entertainment purposes (source)

• Blood type A: Overall has a great ability to generate a quick and substantial antibody response against influenza type A(H1N1) and especially A(H3N2). Their antibody response against influenza B is not quite as dramatic.
• Blood type AB: Relatively poor ability to generate high antibody levels against any of the influenza viruses.
• Blood type B: Reasonable, but not great ability to generate an antibody response against influenza A(H1N1). Slowest (it can take them 3-5 months) and weakest ability to generate antibodies against influenza A(H3N2) of any blood type. Against influenza B virus, blood type B has a significant advantage and responds differently from either blood group A or O. The blood type B immune response happens much earlier and persists longer.
• Blood type O: Relatively effective ability to generate antibody response against influenza A(H1N1) and A(H3N2) viruses. Antibody response against influenza B is not as dramatic as blood type B.

The reason that I label this "entertainment" is that influenza is constantly mutating. Even if good studies were performed and reached the conclusions shown above (and I did not look at the original sources), there is no guarantee that the next variant of H1N1, H3N2 or B will not have evolved beyond those defenses.

For the record, I am type O+. 

Tomorrow

We will not be watching Quicksilver tomorrow. Handsome Hombre is sick and he will be watching her.