Reality is a rare commodity in social media

As planned, I roto-tilled the corn patch yesterday.

It looked like hell before I roto-tilled it.

Now it looks like hell with ADA (American Disabilities Act) compliant aisle-ways.

No photos were taken. You will just have to use your imagination.

Collapse: Haiti vs Dominican Republic

Dominican Republic compared to Haiti

One key to wisdom is to make things a simple as possible, but no simpler. That is harder than it seems

Unfortunately, there is a temptation to take one bite of the meal and assume you experienced the entire meal. People remember the parts of a book or story that are in alignment with their beliefs and rapidly memory-hole the parts that conflict with those beliefs.

Haiti on left, DR on right

In the book Collapse, Diamond compares Haiti, which is a dystopian hell-hole, with the Dominican Republic which shares the island with Haiti. By comparison, DR is organized, law-respecting and avoided the worst of the environmental degradation that impacted Haiti.

The lesson the Political-Elites gleaned from this was that D-R's authoritarian policies worked. What they failed to comprehend was that the worst of the environmental degradation was avoided because the "strongman" supported the supply and distribution of LP gas (a petroleum product, GASP!) for rural cooking. Another factor that somehow eluded the Political-Elites is that the rule-of-law and clear property laws helped avert the tragedy-of-the-commons scenario in DR.

In Haiti, for instance, it is possible to have six families with a claim to a single parcel of land. When Port-au-Prince started to build a sewage treatment plant (paid for by foreign grants), construction kept getting held up as families kept popping up out of the woodwork with a deed to property they needed to continue construction. Undoubtedly, many of the claims were fraudulent but multiple claimants are so common that it was just easier to pay off the claims as they arose. Never-the-less, it did slow down construction.

From the perspective as a North American who identifies as a conservative, the one of the core messages is that dilution of property rights leads to chaos and destruction.

"Collapse" by Jared Diamond, a 40,000' flyover report

Jared Diamond published a book in 2005 titled Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. The book made such an impression on the Power-Elite* that it has its own Wikipedia page.

Diamond presents the book as a series of case studies where he explains how the following four factors interacted to cause certain societies first expand and then to collapse:

• Climate
• Interactions with neighbors including collapse of essential trading partners
  
• Environmental issues
• Society's response to external stresses

The centerpiece of the book is the discussion of the Norsemen who first settled Iceland and then Greenland.

Climate

The first successful settlements on Greenland coincided with a many hundred-year-period of historically much-warmer-than-average temperatures. Difficulties compounded when the temperatures reverted back to the mean.

Neighbors

The settlers were not self-sufficient. They traded narwhale tusks (ivory) for iron, wine and other items that were not economical for them to produce for themselves. To this day, there are no commercial vineyards on Greenland!

The Norsemen, Vikings, were pugnacious and did not have cordial relationships with the neighboring indigenous peoples. Diamond makes that point that since indigenous people lived there before the Norsemen and still had settlements on Greenland long afterward, albeit very small settlements and widely scattered, the Norsemen SHOULD have been able to hang on since they also had agriculture to supplement the hunter-fisher-gatherer technologies of the indigenous peoples.

Environmental issues

Trees grow very slowly in harsh climates and can easily be over-harvested for roofing beams and for firewood.

Responses to external stresses

The discovery of elephant tusks and the development of trade routes hugely reduced the demand (and prices) for narwhale ivory. Forays into the west (Labrador, Newfoundland, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, New England) for iron and berries suitable for making wine produced meager amounts of materials at the expense of exposing the men of the settlement to attacks by natives.

One response which remains baffling to anthropologists is that there is no (as in ZERO) evidence that the colonies consumed any seafood. Not a single fish scale or clam-shell. The North Atlantic around Greenland is one of the most productive fisheries in the world and (apparently) the Norsemen did not take advantage of that source of rich, oily fish.

Fast Forward to Today

Climate

Everything is all about the climate. You cannot escape it. "Man Made Climate Change" is going to make humans and all of the plants and animals on earth go extinct...or so we are led to believe.

Interactions with neighbors

Donald Trump pushes the Power-Elites' buttons. He is a Viking. He is pugnacious. He does not craft nice-nice, win-win, roll-over-and-wag-tail treaties with other countries. His default is to negotiate from strength.

Environmental Issues

The Power-Elite pay lip-service to environmental issues like overuse of fertilizers and agricultural pesticides but pay poor-people to carpet-bomb their personal lawns and parks with toxic chemicals to make them story-book green and bug-free.  Of course, that poor dude who speaks Spanish is the guy who soaks in pesticides and fertilizer all day long.

Responses to Stresses

For whatever, irrational reasons the colonists of Greenland would not eat fish even though it was abundant, high-quality food. Those are the same reasons, word-for-word, that we are given for eating bugs.

Summary

The book Collapse by Jared Diamond looks a lot like the playbook used by the Power-Elite and probably provided some of the framework or paradigm for how they perceive how events interact and unfold.

*Power-Elite: If it helps to have a human face visualize Bill Gates and/or Mark Zuckerberg although much of the Power-Elite are anonymous bureaucrats.

Presented without comment

 

Guys being guys

Peak temperatures have been lower than expected. We topped out at 83 today vs. an expected high of about 90. We typically run 2 degrees F lower than the City of Eaton Rapids (chortle, city!) and 5-to-10 degrees below Lansing.

The dog-days of summer arrived a little bit early

The highest heat-index that I experienced while involved in prolonged, physical effort was a heat-index of 97. OK, I can hear the readers from Texas and Louisiana snorting in laughter. In my defense I was walking from Eaton Rapids to Indiana and knocked out 25 miles the first day and 26 the second. That was in July of 2018. So while the heat-index was not that impressive, the fact that I was out in it, walking for ten hours counts for something.

Garden

The tomatoes and cucumbers really like the heat.

Pleasant surprises

I got a text from my youngest brother who had started his new job a month ago. Today was the first day he was not scheduled to work. "Do you want to have lunch?" he asked.

His first free day in a month and he wants to eat lunch with me? Hell ya!

We ate at C&R Homestyle Cafe and our bill came to $22 (including drinks).

After lunch, we went out to the property I am managing and we took very dead woodchucks out of Conibear traps. Then we extended the height of the welded-wire mesh deer protection on some young orchard trees from 48" in height to 66" in height. We enhanced the protection of 11 young apple trees.

Once that stopped being fun, we drove over to where Shotgun was fishing and drank a beer or two, told a few lies and ate Shotgun's pretzels. Being a jerk, I caught the only fish, a 10" bullhead.

For the record, I used a strip of sunfish that I soaked in soy-sauce. To a fish in fresh-water, Salt + Protein = Edible. I think you could catch fish with the tongue of an old sneaker if you soaked it in soy-sauce.

Tomorrow's plans

God willing, I will run a mile and then brag about it.

I will plant some cabbage seedlings.

I will roto-till the corn-patch

Music, Covid vaccine and Radicals

Does music improve plant growth?

Link

Quote:

"Strangely, plants’ musical tastes show a remarkable congruence with those of the humans reporting them."

— Daniel Chamovitz

I would have expected "Rap" to excel seeing how it is pure fecal excrement.

Covid vaccine

5-way + Coronavirus. Canine Spectra 6 is a 5-way canine vaccine that includes protection against coronavirus. Canine Spectra 6 aids in the prevention of disease caused by canine distemper, adenovirus type 2, hepatitis, parainfluenza, updated parvovirus Type 2b, and coronavirus. Modified live plus killed coronavirus...

A traditional vaccine. Not intended for humans.

A list of radicals, naming names

OH-
NO3-
Cl-
NO3-
SO4--
CO3--
PO4---
H+
Na+
K+
NH4+
Ca++
Fe+++

I was looking at the stats for this blog and saw that it popped up on a Google search for "Radical+site+Blogger". This section is a deliberate "troll" for people who make those kinds of searches.

No Bag Limit (Cumberland Saga)

The supply truck had been staged a quarter-mile from the entrance to the driveway. It had backed into a two-track that was access to a wooded area. Lliam and Eddie had been busy. They had supplied four potential locations for the supply truck to loiter.

Four minutes after radio contact, Fred and the crew heard the truck turn into the drive a quarter mile to their east. As promised, the truck moved at a pace only slightly faster than a walk.

Approaching the gully, it braked and the driver flickered the high-beams three times before resuming forward motion.

Samson had chosen to put the roadblock at the gully because the drive barely had enough room on each side for someone to replace a flat tire. Then, to either side, the drive plunged steeply to the bottom where a culvert provided a path for run-off.

There was no possibility of turning a vehicle around nor was there much risk of a passenger bailing out and flanking defenders. Basically, a road-block would make the vehicle a sitting duck.

There were no trees of sufficient girth and mass in the middle of the stretch of drive across the gully but the clump of basswood trees would work just fine.

After the truck had passed Fred’s crew, Fred asked Lliam to hold his light while he started cutting the stem he had selected. The key would be to leave a strap that connected the stem to the stump. Then, even if the returning truck tried to push the stem out of the way it would likely damage the grill and radiator of the truck.

After cutting ¾ the way through the stem and vigorously applying sledge to wedges, the basswood stem groaned and shook and finally toppled.

Shortly afterward, Samson and the other raiders with military experience showed up. They tapped the “lumberjacks” out of their positions and suggested that they sack-out while they could. They had done their part for the night.

Samson wanted the fewest eyewitnesses for what was likely to happen next.

One nice thing about an enemy who you know will be arriving in a vehicle is that you don’t need to exercise strict noise discipline. The men were able to chat with each other and keep each other awake.

After about a half hour, Samson called Lliam and Eddie. “What do you guys think of making breakfast for the crew in the morning?” Samson’s watch told him it was about fifteen minutes after midnight. He needed to make sure that most of the crew got at least four hours of sleep. He would sleep in the morning.

Lliam said “I would but we are about out of grub.”

“I reckon Miss Shannon has got plenty of supplies. I want you and Eddie to head up to the house and rack-out for the rest of the night. Make sure you give a hollar when you get within 100 yards. I’ll let them know that you are coming.”

“Sure. Sounds like a plan” Lliam said with a big yawn. The idea of sleeping inside a house suddenly had an irresistible appeal.

Ten minutes before 1:00 AM, a truck pulled into the drive and started toward the roadblock. Due to minor snaking of the drive and ups-and-downs, the driver was not able to see the fallen tree until he had started across the causeway that spanned the gully.

The truck slowed as it approached it and then stopped.

Samson could see the occupants of the front seat clearly in the glow of the instrument panel.

The engine idled while the passenger and the driver argued. Apparently, the driver won the argument because the passenger got out of the truck and was cussing up a storm. He walked over to the trunk and gave an unimpressive “push” against it to move it.

Samson heard the power window lowered and the driver yelled “Ya gotta push harder than that!”

“Fuck you!” the passenger screamed back. “You think you can do better, you get out and help.”

Neither man seemed to think the fallen tree was unusual. Sudden storms were not uncommon in eastern Tennessee and due to the mountains, some of them were very local.

The driver made no move to get out of the truck. On the other hand, he also didn't send anybody to help which led Samson to believe that they were only dealing with the two of them.

Shooting through windshields is tricky business. It tends to deflect bullets upward and there is always the risk of the bullets hitting the steel insert inside of the rim of the steering wheel.

The proper response is to use a larger caliber firearm if it is available. If the only firearm is 5.56mm NATO, then the proper response is to use enhanced penetrating rounds like military surplus M-855 and to do a mag-dump.

As Samson was servicing the driver, the other two former-military hosed the passenger. It was slaughter, pure and simple.

The two bodies were tossed on top of the booty from the night’s raid.

Samson had to beat a peep-hole through the windshield with the hammer. The impact of the bullets had broken the safety-glass of the windshield into thousands of tiny pebbles that were held together by the plastic film between the two sheets, rendering the windshield opaque.
 

One of the other team members cut through the strap of wood holding the tree-trunk to the stump and then topped out the tree. He sent a runner to get the supply truck. With a tow strap, they were able to pull the log off of the drive and Samson got the job of driving the looter’s truck up to Miss Shannon’s house.

They opened the garage door. There was nobody in the garage. After turning off Miss Shannon’s vehicle and letting the garage air out for ten minutes, they turned on the lights and much of the merchandise that could probably be identified by its rightful owners was thrown into the bed of the truck. Then Billy and Billy’s girlfriend’s bodies were tossed in. It was a very full load.

Finally, Samson spray-painted “LOOTERS” in white, 10” tall letters on one side of the truck-box. On the other side of the truck he wrote “OPEN SEASON ON LOOTERS” and "NO BAG LIMIT". Due to lack of planning he had to make the letters smaller as he got close to the end.

Since the back of his jacket was already blood-soaked, Samson drove the truck to where Chapel Road “Y”ed off of Hendon Road. He made sure that he positioned the truck so every person traveling southeast on Hendon got a very good look at the signage.

Then Samson loped back toward Miss Shannon’s house.