They Clang!

I have been reluctant to share pictures of my lifting apparatus because, well, because it is so humble and home-spun.

Two bags of concrete, 1" black iron pipe ended up weighing 130 pounds.

The first ballasting was near the ends of the bars and added another twenty pounds.

Then I added a single ten-pound plate in the middle. Today I added a second, ten-pound plate in the middle for 170 pounds. Yes, Virginia, by the grace of God I was able to pump out four sets of ten dead-lifts.

Now for the fun part. The weights in the middle "Clang". I want those of you who know what a dead-lift "looks like" and to visualize WHERE they are when they clang.

I think this arrangement has commercial potential.

Poverty in Ireland one hundred years ago

Southern Belle, Quicksilver and I watched a short movie on Friday night.

Southern Belle picked it out. It was Angela's Christmas which is an animated short set in Limerick, Ireland circa 1910. The backdrop for the movie is a grinding poverty that we associate with places like Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

A few quick searches on the internet suggest that the poverty was not exaggerated. In fact, the rooms were probably much smaller, more crowded and less well lit than shown in the movie.

Just a very-quick comparison between Haiti and Limerick, Ireland before 1940. I apologize for not finding data that matches up exactly to the movie's time-frame but this is close and it is more recent so we can assume it was pretty bad twenty years earlier than the earliest data shown.

Haiti

According to the most recent estimates by UNFPA and partner UN agencies, a woman in Haiti has a one in 80 chance of dying due to pregnancy or child birth, compared to the region-wide risk of one in 510. The infant mortality rate is 59 deaths for every 1,000 live births, according to the country’s most recent demographic and health survey (DHS).   Source

 

Ireland

85 deaths per thousand births in Irish cities. That is one-in-twelve babies not seeing their first birthday. It is worth noting that the rate did not start coming down until 1946. Source

In the rural areas, the infant mortality rate was 30% lower than for urban areas.

 

Causes of infant deaths in Ireland.

The paper suggests that many deaths coded as "Congenital" issues were the result of in-utero and post-partum malnutrition. Convulsions were likely driven by fevers from infections, including gastroenteritis.

The up-spike during World War II was due to the Irish economy dying-on-the-vine. Even though Ireland declare itself neutral during WWII, the north-Atlantic blockade by Germany effectively shut off food and industrial materials shipped to Ireland. Furthermore, goods that would have been shipped to Ireland from Britain (like coal) were diverted to the war-effort.

One scene in the movie is telling. Angela's brother is running to the outhouse to relieve himself. There is no means of washing hands in the primitive facility. That means that soiled hands touch the door-handle and everybody who enters the house afterward is getting (potentially) contaminated fecal matter on their hands. The paper referenced earlier ties rapid spread of diarrhea (and other illnesses) to "shared facilities" that is, communal outhouses.

If you find yourself in a refugee camp, have every person in your tent wash their hands immediately after visiting the toilet before they enter the tent.

If Dr Theuth wath a Mathematithian

 

Those of us with little-ones in the house will appreciate this

It's the Economy, Stupid

But it is the economy that we live in, not the economy of cooked-numbers that mesmerize the policy makers.

Typically, inflation monkey-hammers folks on fixed incomes. That would be most people on pensions. 

This Bidinflation is a little different. It is also hammering people just starting out in their careers with the cost of housing taking a HUGE bite out of their income.

Historically, policy makers got their arms around inflation (too much money chasing too few goods) by destroying money via feathering the interest-rates upward. That cooled demand and the stars would come back into alignment.

Think of "borrowing" as spending money you haven't earned yet. Raising the interest rates reduces the amount of money people can borrow and that limits demand.

This time around inflation seems very resistant to raising interest rates, like a patient with Type I Diabetes suddenly becoming resistant to injected insulin and now is both a Type I and Type II Diabetic.

Just to throw a few items out there:

The Biden Administration continues to squander resources on wind and solar farms, gobbling up large amounts of raw materials.

The Biden Administration allowed somewhere between five-million and ten-million people across the border in the 2.5 years he has been in office. I am sure most of them are fine people BUT how does Biden propose that they can become productive workers? Or are they doomed to be leaches...shrinking the supply of goods that productive people could be buying. 

This is the leading example of stupid policy destroying per-capita-supply every bit as quickly (or perhaps more quickly) than rising interest rates is shrinking the money supply.

Housing: The cost of regulations adds over $90,000 to the cost of the average new house (Source). Since many of those costs are "fixed" there is relentless pressure for builders to make larger and more expensive houses to recoup those costs. That totally excludes most people under the age of 30 from home ownership. The non-value-added costs also shrinks the supply of housing coming onto the market.

The Biden Administration has been picking winners-and-losers. Keystone Pipeline: Loser. Burlington Northern Railroad and Warren Buffet (bigtime Biden donor): Winners. People who buy gasoline and truckers who buy diesel: Losers. "The Market" is awesome for efficiently allocating resources but Biden's team of social engineers insist on putting their thumbs on the scale.

Education: Human capital being squandered by diversion into horrible majors that will never be productive. DEA initiatives that take the educator's eye off the ball of teaching basic skills like reading and arithmetic and science.

Even though it is as plain as the nose on Biden's face, they cannot see it. They are too giddy playing God. I doubt that He is amused.

Treading water...

One marker of maturity is being surprised when things go according to plan.

I was not surprised.

I had planned to be hunting this morning but Southern Belle is feeling under the weather, perhaps she has a case of what afflicted Quicksilver.

SB is snug in bed sleeping off the bug while I watch the (apparently) healthy QS. Perhaps I will get out this afternoon.

And while it might sound like I am virtuous, it is cold outside and I can look out my window. Maybe a thurdy-point buck will want to commit Suicide by ERJ.

Presented without comment

 

Random observations

I parked near an old foundation when I was hunting yesterday. The owner started building and then contacted the county for a permit. The county took a dim view of the liberties he took (no perkable land for a drainfield, for instance) and refused to issue the permit until he presented documentation that he had permission to pump his septic to a perkable site or had installed a suitable mound above grade-level.

The builder abandoned the site.

Next to the abandoned, three-hole, 8" cinderblock foundation is a Bitternut Hickory tree, Carya cordifomis. It looks like it was a banner year for production.

I saw three red squirrels playing on the foundation. It got me to thinking that the perforations in the cinderblocks might have been acceptable to the squirrels for cacheing mast. That is something to think about. Concrete blocks are not that expensive and are easy to find.

Hope

Hope is the antidote to fear.

While I was in the deer blind I noticed that I had left a Bible in it. The year had not been kind to it. Paper, moisture, time....

I asked Belladonna if there was such a thing as "weatherproof Bibles"?

Funny thing, if you ask the right questions, you get interesting answers.

Waterproof Bibles, printed on polymer pages. Sorted by Customer Reviews.

They aren't cheap unless you amortize them by the number of minutes of counseling $60 can buy.

Battered and beaten (and then deep-fat fried with hush-puppies)

Between the dead-lifting program, isometrics in the deer-blind to forestall hypothermia and life in general, I feel battered and beaten.

MTV, one of my high-school friends, informed me that you have to lean into the soreness. Most people stop and wait for the soreness to go away. Bad decision.

It never will. If you are not sore from working out then you will be sore from not-working-out.

You can either be sore due to reasons you can identify and have the solace of imagining that the shoulders of your shirts are getting tight. Or you can roll over and die with a whimper-and-whine before your time.

I tried to do some lifting during Quicksilver's outdoor time. I was able to get four reps in before she disappeared from sight. Once I got in six reps but I was going too fast to have good form.

I don't know how many reps/sets I got in but I was able to squeeze in two honest sets of ten reps later in the day. 

And this too will pass.

Agility

Handsome Hombre's work trip was extended and his return has been delayed until early next week.

Mrs ERJ is still on track to return late this weekend but due to the timing of the flights she will be jet-lagged and need time to recover.

And this too will pass.

Trail-cams

I installed a sensor at the end of our driveway to inform me of when HH pulled in to drop off QS.

It went off multiple times in quick succession in the wee-hours and I was curious as to what manner of beast or spirit was traversing our driveway. So I purchased a cheap ($40) trail-cam.

It is a cat with a tail striped like a raccoon.

Who could have guessed?

Radiation

I have a brother who used to be a fire-fighter. At some point in his career he was assigned a specialty. Every fire-fighter wants to specialize in extrication because it is the glamor specialty. Unfortunately, my brother drew one of the short straws and got Toxic Spills.

He informed me that at least nine-times-out-of-ten the correct decision is to tell residents to shelter-in-place. Usually, they will be told to seal their windows-and-doors to the best of their abilities and to relocate to the highest floor in their domiciles. He also said they will be told to turn off their clothes drier (which actively pulls in outside-air) and switch off their furnace.

It is a very hard pill for most Americans to swallow, to hunker down and let ventilation, sunshine and biological agents to detoxify the environment. We are conditioned to DO SOMETHING, to DO ANYTHING!!!

Sheltering in place is pretty much the order of the day for nuclear fallout. Stuff plastic grocery bags into air-leaks around your windows (butter knives and pizza cutters work a treat on this job), fill all of your empty containers with water (you are likely to lose pressure) and depending on the nature of the detonation, either camp-out on the second floor of your house or in your basement with as much concrete between you and the ambient environment as you can manage.

People in high-rises are actually in pretty good shape (as long as their city was not the target). Particulate and water-soluble radio-active isotopes will be mostly at ground level. The danger will be in people going nuts and the urge to evacuate and thereby expose one's self to said dangerous people.

If you are one of "those" people who likes to be prepared, then have a plan to hermetically seal your house (duct tape, plastic and so-on) AND landscape the area +6' from your foundations to aggressively kick any rain run-off away from your house. Many of the elements that a designer of a dirty-bomb might salt the device with produce to produce biologically active, radio-active compounds  are water soluble (sulfur and phosphorous and iodine). 

Storm-tracks are moderately predictable at certain times of the year. From one perspective it makes sense to use that tracking information to deliver the fallout. For example, tropical storms tend to track up the eastern US coast in September and October. If this were a game of Clue, I would bet on dirty-bomb in Del-Mar-Va or No-Fulk, Va in October in a hollowed-out pallet of gypsum-board in a CONEX container from Algeria.

Slug Guns

My nephew has a very fine, 20 gauge shotgun with rifled barrel. It is his primary deer hunting gun.

With the recent changes in Michigan firearm hunting regulations, it is a dinosaur. He had a hard time finding ammo.

I COULD help him reload a life-time supply of ammo. Or, since it is an NEF single-shot, help him find a 45-70 barrel for it.

The 45-70 case is too long to qualify under Michigan regulations but the brass can be trimmed back to 1.75" and to qualify. If push came to shove, the .45-70 could be reloaded with home-made blackpowder, slugs cast from sinkers and wheel-weights and lubricated with lard.

For a little bit more money, he can purchase a Savage Axis or Mossberg Patriot in .450 Bushmaster or .350 Legend.

For a bit less money he can buy an insert and change his 20 gauge into a .44 Rem or .357 Magnum.

Decisions, decisions, decisions.