Fake News Friday: Hottest item in Haiti, Mail-order brides from the US

 

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Fake News Friday: Biden and RFK Junior Reconcile

In a major shift in the relationship between the two men, Joe Biden now says that he will do everything possible to help Robert F. Kennedy Jr achieve the "most desirable possible outcome" in his bid as an Independent candidate for 2024 President of the United States.

As proof of his support, Biden insists that Kennedy use his 1967 Corvette convertible while campaigning in Dallas, Texas.

Amira (Cumberland Saga)

The onslaught of springtime work caused dinner-time to shift to where it was nipping the heels of the ever-later sunset. Consequently, nearly everybody was sitting down to dinner when the dogs started baying.

Not expecting visitors, Roger and Alice, Sig and Ellie, Gregor, and Blain and Lliam were all armed and waiting when the dogs redoubled their howling.

Nobody was prepared for the lithe, somewhat older woman who emerged into the clearing. Her hair was the color of steel-wool and was a very practical short-cut and tightly permed. She was wearing a bright, polyester fleece jacket, charcoal-gray jogging tights and Nobull, gum-soled trainers.

On her back was a small backpack with a water-bottle nestled in a mesh pocket on the side. A can of pepper-spray was velcroed to her left wrist.

She moved along the rough two-track with the very slightest swagger. It wasn’t anything overt but it radiated the impression that she had taken the measure of herself and not found it wanting. Or if it had been found wanting, the shortcomings had been immediately and aggressively corrected.

She would have been totally invisible on any college campus in America but was as out-of-place on a two-track in rural Tennessee as a tropical fish.

She bee-lined directly to Sig and stopped six feet in front of him.

“I am Amira. I am Walter’s wife” she announced. Her voice had inflections that were similar to Sig’s but not identical. Blain deduced that she was originally from Europe.

“I know who you are” Sig scowled.

“I need to have somebody move the rock in the driveway so I can drive up here” she demanded. If she noticed the prominently display of firearms she didn’t seem bothered by them.

“You are not welcome here” Sig replied.

Blain’s eyebrows rose. He assumed that Walter was one of the far-flung sons of Copperhead Cove who they had been busting their humps to welcome.

“Your Christian Bible says that even Pagans take care of family” Amira responded.

“It does” Sig admitted.

“You say you are Christian and you would do less?” Amira challenged. Clearly, she had prepared for the less-than-warm welcome.

A tension-filled pause followed.

“You can carry your things up here, then” Sig finally grunted, gracelessly.

“Walter is not feeling well. I don’t think he is up to walking” Amira said.

Sig chewed on that for a few seconds. Then, turning he said to Gregor “Can you run your truck down to the road and pick up your Uncle Walter?”

Gregor nodded. “I am on it.”

Blain heard Sarah muttering under her breath….”Amira. Walter. They live in Missouri….”

Amira turned and started walking back down the two-track to her vehicle. Gregor followed in his truck a few minutes later.

Gregor came back with one passenger. Walter looked like Sig but was tall and gaunt. He seemed lethargic and unable to focus.

Fifteen minutes later, Amira came marching up the drive. She was carrying two suitcases. She walked up to Blain and Sarah and asked “Sarah, may we stay with you tonight? We can sleep on the floor but we need four places.”

It was Sarah’s turn to be confused. “Four?”

“My two sons did not want to leave the car. When they get cold enough, or they get hungry enough, they will join us” Amira said.

Blain noticed that she was relatively short although the way she carried herself made her seem at least six inches taller.

Blain, confused, asked “Why didn’t you just throw the suitcases into the back of Gregor’s truck?”

Amira said “Sig is an asshole. I refuse to give him anything to complain about. He told Gregor to bring back Walther, nobody or nothing else.”

Blain was instinctively wary of Amira. Every college town had a double-handful of her type: Women who seemed to hear and see everything. Women of formidable intelligence and will, steel-backbones and unbending self-discipline. 

Dangerous women. Very dangerous women for the kind of man he had been before Copperhead Cove.

What was she doing here?

“Who is Walter?” Blain asked.

“Walter is Sig’s older brother. They have not been on speaking terms since Walter married me” Amira informed him.

Blain was having a hard time reconciling Sig with the man Amira was describing. Sure, Sig was a hard man but he had always been more than fair...in the long run.

“Why would that be?” Blain asked.

“Because I am a Bosniak” Amira informed him.

“I don’t know what a ‘Bosniak’ is” Blain admitted with a shrug.

“I am a Muslim” Amira said. "I was born in Bosnia."

***

A tip-of-the-hat to Jen at Alive gym in Charlotte. She coached me on what a woman like Amira would be wearing. When in doubt, consult an expert!

A second tip-of-the-hat to "Teal" at the 24hourcampfire forum for recommending a woman who survived the Siege of Sarajevo as a worthy inclusion to the cast of characters at Copperhead Cove.

Fake News Friday: Monsieur François Bonnet

 

In 1854 during the early-April offensive of the Crimean War, an innovation in the Russian artillery shells resulted in a vast increase in the mangled limbs of the Ottoman, British and French soldiers fighting them.

Medic, nurse, humanitarian, priest and inventor François Bonnet distracted the patients in the infirmary by first donning a bright pick rabbit suit during their amputations. He chose pink so the red blood stains would not be visible and frighten the young men...boys, really.

The wounds were so grievous and the pain so overwhelming that Bonnet realized that he needed to do more to relieve the pain and fear. He soon became a leading figure in the rapidly advancing science of anesthesia.

Monsieur Bonnet was so successful in his efforts that the Crimean Catholic Church recognized him as a local saint pending confirmation by the Vatican. Quick to recognize his contributions, Anesthesiologist now recognize him as their official Patron Saint and the west generally celebrates his feast day in late-March or early-April.

You have probably heard of him by the Anglicised version of his name. He is also known as the Ether Bunny.

Doors

Yesterday's work took a lot out of me.

To give you a sense of context, saying that I was "Installing amenities inside of a safe-room" will be accurate enough for you to have a picture in your head.

8" thick, steel-reinforced concrete walls and ceiling. It was an impressive structure.

The only weak-point that I could see were the doors.

One issue with doors for safe-rooms involves conflicting scenarios. Historically, the most likely scenario in Michigan involves tornadoes. They pick up heavy trash and skip it along the ground. The main challenge to the structure is not the wind but the hammering from the trash. Imagine an 8" round of solid oak firewood hitting the door, dead-center, at 100mph. The tornado in Oklahoma City in 1999 mowed the interstate guardrail off at ground level.

The ideal door for that situation would open outward and would have a lip or a sill on all four edges that it engaged.

A second scenario that merits consideration involves home-invaders. There are people alive in Israel today who waited out the incursion from Gaza in their safe-rooms. Bonus link.

There are two issues with that kind of door. One is that doors that open outward have hinges that are exposed to the outside so they are not secure against humans. They can simply pop the hinge-pins out and pull the door open. The other issue is that drifts of trash can wedge the door closed. The family could survive the storm but then must rely on rescuers to free them.

It is conceivable that structures outside of the safe-room could serve as trash-catchers; structures like large urns or soil-filled planters have the potential to slow or stop trash. Walls that turn a right-angle have the same potential.

The solution that I think this family will choose will be to have the entry to the safe-room face a load-bearing wall and to have the garage door (most likely direction of a structural breach) towards the rear of the safe-room. It is not a highly engineered solution but it is economical and provides a bit of additional security.

Great Chinese Famine. Will it happen here?

 

Demographic pyramid for ComChina. If you look at the branches for sixty-year-old you will see that those branches are much shorter. That corresponds people born around 1960.

A closer look. Each vertical line is one million people. Yellow shaded area approximates years of Great Chinese Famine. Missing people were either infant mortality, aborted, miscarried or parents unable-to-conceive.

The death-toll due to the Great Chinese Famine (1959-1961) is estimated to be 15 million to 55 million. Given that there are still approximately 15 million missing from the cohort who would have been born in that time-frame I  strongly advocate for the larger estimate.

Causes of the Great Chinese Famine

The primary cause of the Great Chinese Famine was that politicians dictated agricultural decisions. They dictated the number of seeds that were planted per acre (6X historic rates). They dictated how deeply the soil must be plowed (4X historic rates). They dictated the how the fields would be organized (no more private property). They dictated how much grain was to be retained at the local level (zero).

The death rate was exacerbated by local officials being afraid to communicate with their superiors. Very optimistic "theoretical yields" were not achieved after ideologically driven, and very stupid, decisions were made but officials were afraid to tell their superiors that they had been wrong. The local officials shipped grain out of production areas at levels that were consistent with the phantom surplus. In fact, there was no surplus but a significant shortage of grain production. Peasants starved.

This pattern lasted for three years.

Distilling the event into a single sentence: "The Great Chinese Famine was primarily caused by people in political power being unable or unwilling to accept data that was contrary to their expectations due to pride and/or fear of loss-of-face."

Today in the US

We have whack-a-doodles making crazy decisions about agricultural practices ranging from "the need to be carbon-neutral" to abandoning fossil fuels to curtailing the use of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides.

Cynics will point out that reducing the population is not a bug but a feature for those who identify as our Political Masters and Elites.

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