I would like to heartily thank the Anonymous who had liked my previous post – it was the first like this blog has received and made my morning!
Author: PlanktonPunkt
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Meat with Cabbage
Today’s survivalism tip – how to prepare meat and cabbage. People think survivalism as some sort of rugged post-apocalyptic adventure, but most of the prepping is for everyday hardships like unemployment or other forms of poverty. Ability to make food cheaply is very important for modern survival.
The potatoes in the picture are not involved.
Ingredients:
meat about 1lb
or
meat with bones about 2lbmedium sized cabbage (about 4lb)
water about 1qt
beef bouillon (Herb ox) 3 or 4 cubes
salt heaping teaspoon
nice to add:
whole yellow or white onion(s)
ground black pepperFirst, buy the ingredients.
Meat: I prefer lamb’s neck bones for taste and collagen and they make a good cooking timer, but most of the time they are sold out in a nearby market, so the second choice would be lamb shoulder chops fortified with one lamb round bone chop. Beef will also work, I prefer fattier meats like chuck roast or boneless rib. London broil is a bit dry for my taste. If the cuts include bone, the weight should be increased to get approximately 1lb of meats. Lamb’s neck bones are typically cheaper than meatier parts, beef chuck is typically cheaper than lamb shoulder chops. 10$ is a good current price for meats.
Cabbage: I prefer to buy the cheapest, usually white cabbage but sometimes cauliflower is on sale. They taste about the same, but behave slightly differently while cooking (cauliflower is slower to compress). I have not tried the more exotic varieties. Cabbage typically currently varies between about $0.80 and $1.40 so this would cost somewhere around 4 or 5 dollars.
Water: I prefer bought water to avoid chloramines. The latest water was $1.49 per gallon + crv.
Beef bouillon: Herb ox is my favorite, and typically goes 1 cube per mug of water. This is cheap, a can of few dollars lasts over multiple soups. This also stores well for a Doomsday larder.
Salt: I like cheap iodized salt, but about any other salt will do. This is not some weird ritual.
Optional onion: yellow or white, whichever is on sale. One is enough, but if you like onions, go for it. Onion soups can be tasty, too.
Optional black pepper: I prefer freshly ground for the taste, others prefer whole peppers, while some prefer no peppers.
Cooking:
0. Take a really big pot with a lid and pour a quart of water in it. Add the bouillon cubes
1a. Green cabbage: Take the cabbage and peel the wilting and or dirty surface leaves and toss them to garbage, rip the remaining leaves into the pot with water and bouillon cubes, tear the soft part of the core into the pot and toss the hard stem into garbage. The pot should be mostly full of cabbage with water in the bottom.
or:
1b. Cauliflower: I prefer the ones that come in plastic bags, but event those should be rinsed for dirt and other nasties. Check the florets for possible wilting or moldy bits and toss those into garbage, toss the good florets into the pot with water and bouillon cubes, tear the soft part of the core into the pot and toss the hard stem into garbage.
(2a. If you are adding onion(s), peel them, toss the wilting and or dirty outer peels into garbage and cut the fresh parts into the pot. Not the hard stem, which goes to garbage.)
2. Rinse the meat (with or without bones) and put it into the pot. It can stay on the top of the cabbages at the beginning.
3. Sprinkle a heaping teaspoonful of salt onto the meat and cabbages.
(3b. Grind the black pepper on the meat and cabbages or drop a few peppercorns in the mix.)
4. Cover with the lid and bring the pot to boil. Remember that only the water, somewhere below the cabbages and meat, boils.
5. Let the soup simmer at low heat until cabbages compress to the water level, mix the meat with the cabbages and continue slow boil until the meat separates from bones and can be eaten with spoon. Remember to keep the lid on! If you use lamb’s necks, the soup is ready when the vertebrae separate from each other. This will usually take a couple of hours which can be spent doing something else.
6, When the bones separate, turn the heat off, allow the pot to cool and enjoy the soup. If you kept the lid on, the water did not evaporate burning the soup.
This recipe has typically given me three or four meals. Unless I forget to eat it before it went bad.
The cost estimate for a potful is about 15 – 20$ depending on the price of meat and cabbages and if the other ingredients were already at hand or needed to be obtained or replenished (the biggest initial investment is the pot with a lid, but that can be used for other recipes, as can be the water, salt, peppers and bouillon.)
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Jigsaw Puzzles – 4
I noticed there were too few pictures in my recent posts, so here are three free jigsaw puzzles, thanks to https://www.jigsawexplorer.com.
Speed
Taken from my uncle’s car in Finland, February 2025. (The default 108 pieces can be changed from the jigsaw puzzle settings.)
Bark
Older trees have interesting textures. Photo taken in Berkeley. (The default 48 pieces can be changed from the jigsaw puzzle settings.)
California poppies
California poppies in bloom (March 2025, probably cultivated). The poppies’ flowers are open during sunny days, but close for night or bad weather. (The default 80 pieces can be changed from the jigsaw puzzle settings.)
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How Many People Are There in China?
Sometimes, the conspiracies of the West like chemtrails or other forms of weather modification and QAnon become boring and it is fun to look at the conspiracies in the East.
One of the more intriguing conspiracy theories (to me) is the claim that China has way fewer people than the official 1.4 billion.
I first encountered this claim some years ago, but did not pay much attention to it. The message sounded too crazy and was promoted by Falun Gong, which has a real reason for a grudge against the CCP government. I am also pretty convinced that part of the anti-China messaging is or was funded by US government as a psy-op against a competing power.
However, while the figures as low as 300 to 400 million Chinese left (in the Peoples Republic of) seem extreme, I can believe fewer than 1.4 billion, probably no more than 1.2 billion, possibly below 1 billion.
My reasoning being:
1) There are government tendencies for inflating population numbers. In places like Nigeria, where the funds from central government are allocated partially based on provincial populations, and corruption is common, local leaders have a pressure to report their populations generously. I suspect Nigeria does not actually have over 200 million people. So many of their princes have died, that the mortality among the peasants must be horrendous. Ahem.
Similarly, in United States, we do not know the population even at the accuracy of million, which I suspect in part resulting from allocating federal resources like Congress seats based on state population.
Also, having a large (potential) labor force is believed to improve the economy numbers (although not universally), which is why many Western countries have been importing people en masse.
2) Related to governmental pressures is the individual financial fraud. Duplicate (or multiplicate) social security accounts have in abounded, at least in earlier times, whereas 100 billion in social security payments have apparently been paid to people with temporary or no social security numbers, maybe half of it obvious fraud. Since China has in recent years implemented a Draconian social credit system, I don’t know how much an individual can bilk the government there by double IDs though private sector frauds are too prevalent to list here.
3) Mass immigration has generated a global population of hundreds of millions.Many of these individuals are undocumented, which I presume are still in citizenship lists of their home countries while being part of the head count in their current locations. I remember an apocryphal story in Europe about people getting paid social security by two countries, presumably being counted as part of the population in both. I do not know if this inaccuracy includes dual citizens or just undocumented migrants. In case of China, I think their hukou system is pretty water tight within China’s borders, but I also think that millions, maybe tens of millions of Chinese have slipped over the borders, all over the world. These Chinese exist, but reduce the population at home.
4) Chinese population policies have been a demographic disaster. One Child Policy meant that many of the Gen-X were not allowed to be born, reducing the population growth rate. Now there are too few Millenials and even fewer Gen Z and the young people are too stressed to reproduce. Yet, China’s population was supposed to have grown during the 1970s – 2010s, though at least the recent year’s have officially had negative population growth.
Therefore, even if we don’t go with the active depopulation hypotheses,
I don’t think the current global population exceeds 7.5 billion, and would not be hugely surprised if it were as low as 7 billion people.
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Slight Delay in My Plans
I had planned on designing physical jigsaw puzzles for sale. I had been selecting pictures and making test designs and was preparing to order some samples, when the new tariffs came in power. The print-on-demand company I had been planning to use is based in Hong Kong. While we need to in-shore industries, finding a place that prints double-sided postcard jigsaw puzzles and is located in US will take a bit time. Looks like I’ll need to look a bit more and think about my options, maybe rethink my strategy.
Meanwhile, I have been looking for interesting things to post and writing fiction. The current job market is a horror show, but unfortunately that is not fiction.
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Death Spiral
How do you kill a city?
So many people complain about the homeless problem (which is very visible in many California cities), but these people and their plight are a symptom of a deeper malaise.
It is claimed that people are homeless because they cannot afford an apartment. Actually, many of the homeless are homeless, because they get kicked out of any normal apartment due to mental illness, drug habit or just for being nasty neighbors and tenants. Poverty is a common companion of mental illnesses, drug habit and antisocial behavior. Supportive housing rarely works, the restrictions to their lifestyle are considered intolerable and most of the hardcore homeless prefer their freedoms. Which in California are accommodated. Not saying that freedoms are intrinsically wrong, I just would weigh them against infringement of other people’s rights for safe enjoyment of parks and other public places.
In any case, California has some freedoms not available in other states, such as freedom to use cannabis products and the de facto freedom to shoplift wherever and, in many cities, to camp on sidewalks. This has led to an exploitable situation as the fuming taxpayers are told that the reason the sidewalks are choked by drugged out homeless that support their habit by shoplifting because there is not enough affordable housing. Let’s collect a new tax or municipal bond (funded by taxes) to build affordable housing to homeless.
Homeless advocacy organizations mobilize for this initiative, after all someone must administer the funds to the indigents. Signature collectors are hired to ask good citizens (“are you a registered voter here?” to sign a petition for the tax / bond initiative. Politicians speak warmly for (or rarely against) the initiative. There may be an advertisement campaign, at which point a thinking voter should get alarmed – why would anyone pay for an advertisement campaign when hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars are proposed to be raised for ‘common good’?
Nevertheless, many voters will back an initiative that sounds good without thinking about the long term effects. Once the initiative passes, property or sales taxes are raised, and now the small property owners and small retail businesses are in trouble. The property owners increase the rents making both apartments and small businesses renting their spaces less affordable, Poorer tenants fall behind and get evicted or move somewhere cheaper. The business owners may hang on a bit longer, raising their prices until the customers disappear, and they, too disappear. With loss of tenants, the properties will undergo distressed sales. Which was the purpose of the original initiative.
A property developer (with sufficient contacts to the municipal bureaucracy and politics to smooth the permitting) will buy the distressed property cheaply and develop it into ‘affordable’ housing. Which somehow does not reduce the swarms of homeless camping on the sidewalks, possibly because they are still free to camp there and the homeless advocacy organizations are flush with funds to use on homeless services.
Meanwhile, the older residents are losing their homes and the main streets are becoming ghost towns of shuttered and graffitied empty shopfronts. The city is hemorrhaging jobs and residents, with homeless numbers increasing, despite well-funded homelessness services and more affordable housing being built.
The solution is obvious – let’s raise the taxes to deal with the homelessness and lack of affordable housing! Or maybe, stop using the homeless to exploit the tax payers to enrich the local moneyed interests.
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Jigsaw Puzzles – 3
Finland in February
Birch trees can have surprisingly colorful bark.
Otherwise the color scale tends to be a bit narrow, unless sun shines and gives hue to the frost, landscape and sky.
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Hot Statistics
Everyone knows the Hockey Stick model of global temperature changes in our measurement record. Late 20th and early 21st century average temperatures have increased in a worrisome manner resulting in many UN climate summits and VIPs flying around in their private jets. Now, according to a recent Freedom of Information request to UK’s Met Office, over 100 of the 302 weather stations listed as supplying temperature averages do not exist. The Met Office declined to tell “how or where the alleged ‘data’ were derived” for these over 100 sites that do not exist.
This is not just UK issue, NOAA has been claimed to fabricate data for over 30% of their reporting sites by taking the averages of the surrounding stations to represent a defunct, or a ‘ghost’ station, although the numbers at least are labeled as estimates. In UK, some closed weather stations ‘continue’ with similar reported estimated monthly data.
Unreliable measurements from the actually existing weather stations are another large problem. Nearly 8 out of 10 Met Office sites are rated in junk classes with error margins ranging from 2C to up to 5C, or unsuitable for climate data reporting. The default classification for Met Office weather stations is 1, “unless manually adjusted” so there may be more unreliable data sources.
The disproportionate closure of rural weather stations compared to the urban ones has further skewed the average temperatures, because urban environments tend to generate heat islands, so loss of rural stations will increase the average temperature of the remaining measurements.
While unreliability of measurement data was discussed in terms of Net Zero in The Daily Sceptic, I wonder about its effects on near term weather forecasts. Maybe the invented data is also being fed into models predicting daily weather?
Muhos, Finland, in February
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Termites Farting Around
Termite farting has been studied for quite a long time.
A Nature paper by Ito (2023) estimates the global termite methane production 2020 as 14.8 +- 6.7 Tg per year from estimated 122.3 Tg termites (dry weight). Termite biomass estimates range from 40 – 200 Tg (dry weight), and their methane emission estimates vary even more, but by Ito’s estimate, termites produce about 2% of global methane.
The global annual methane production is estimated by IEA to be about 580 metric tons, and Ito’s maybe ~15 metric tons would be on the ballpark of 2.6% of that.These farts are actually produced by termites’ gut symbionts, complex communities of microbes that help termites to digest lignocellulose and contribute to nitrogen metabolism.
Termites evolved some time during Mesozoic from gregarious cockroaches that ate rotting wood with changes in gut symbiont microbiota, diets and eusociality. Today, termites are important in carbon cycle (and other nutrient cycles).
There is some uncertainty about the fate of the termite farts (such as how large fraction of them even make it out of the termite hive or gets absorbed into surrounding terrain). For example, some termite hives can survive tens of thousands of years and may accumulate carbon in the mounds, and affect soil and ground water carbon sequestration.
I was trying to find some papers on their role in Phanerozoic carbon cycles but with poor success, though it could be said that termites (plus their gut symbionts) are currently quite significant decomposers of plant cellulose, and there apparently has been enough of them already 150 million years ago that a mammal species had evolved to eat them.In other words, there is still a niche for people researching the effect of termite farts on global climate – past, present and future. Assuming the atmospheric carbon question remains politically and culturally relevant (for dissenting voices, see, e.g., these articles in Science of Climate Change and The Daily Sceptic).
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The Problem with Burping Reindeer
“It became necessary to destroy the village in order to save it”, (said during Vietnam War, where the United States went to help French with their Indochina, ending with Vietnamese eventually kicking out France, USA and China.)
To me, the modern environmentalism increasingly resembles this insane sentiment.
Last year, there was an uproar, when Reinhardswald in Germany was slated to make room for wind turbines ‘necessary’ for Energiewende.
How much of this was hype and how much was counterhype, I don’t know (though I suspect my search engines show me very biased results.) On my recent trip to Finland I saw the changes in the countryside, big wind turbines can cause. It takes lots of land and removal of trees or elimination of agricultural fields to build a wind park.
In reality, it may be environmentally less harmful to build nuclear reactors than wind turbines (depending on how you calculate EROI – my Google searches were inconclusive because the studies were either old or seemed to be shilling for one form of energy or another), and they kill fewer people (not to mention them having smaller radiation plume) than coal plants.) While there remains need for petroleum, its increasingly difficult extraction reduces its EROI, which means that in future it will probably remain as a raw material for industrial processes, maybe special fuel for internal combustion engines.
Nevertheless, EU (including Germany) is dedicated to net zero project, which increasingly begins to seem like some weird suicide / flagellant cult with reduction in living standards (rationing energy by rising costs, attacking food production, limiting transportation and movement, and increasing housing density) and reduction in human-accessible territory.
All these projects, while openly posted on-line, are presented so that opposing voices are portrayed as conspiracy theorists and antienvironmentalists. But is it a conspiracy theory if they themselves tell everyone their plans, or worse, their actions?
At least the most fanatical theses from the now destroyed Georgia Guidestones are not openly touted. There are people, other than just me, who would consider the reduction of world human population to 500 million from (official) 8 billion or by over 93% rather genocidal.
But the Green New Leap is not just for UK, Germany, Netherlands or Ireland. Finland, too, is planning ambitious net zero targets, and I mean really ambitious, as in lauded by WEF.
Most of Finland is above 60° latitude, about the same level as Alaska or south end of Greenland, mostly more north than Yakutsk in Siberia. Energy is of utmost importance there. Roughly speaking, a person can survive a few minutes without air, a few hours without heating, a few days without water and a few weeks without food.
Finns have survived without fossil fuels for centuries, but that was by burning wood, which is also not OK with the eurocrats – small particle pollution will kill! Presumably freezing to death is more efficient and environmental. At least the official media reassures the Finns that saunas are safe from this regulation. For now. Anyways, the war against Russia and certain realities of energy production have resulted in complications in banning wood in energy production.
Meanwhile in China, 2024 began to build 94.5 GW worth of coal power plants and resumed 3.3 GW of suspended projects according to two think tanks. Only 2.5 GW of old capacity was closed 2024. (Side note: with China’s economy tanking and exports faltering, what do they need this new energy capacity for?)
But what about the reindeer burps?
Indeed, according to our reliable news media, a study was published that Lapland will not be able to meet its greenhouse targets by 2035 because of the large emissions from its agriculture, namely the reindeer. Which as ruminants are burping too much methane, which is a greenhouse gas. Unfortunately, I could not find a link to the original study to check the claims, and to see if the researchers were in earnest or if this was some sort of reductio ad absurdum-document to demonstrate the futility of the Net Zero targets.
However, assuming the reporting is true, reindeer are part of the Arctic ecosystem, and even if the semidomesticated populations in Lapland were counted as human livestock, those globalist net zero plans that would involve reducing the number of large ruminants, such as grazing cows and sheep, come dangerously close to messing the ecosystems by removing large herbivore guild from the food network. While I can see the point in reducing the use of feedlots and grain / soybean based fodder in ranching, eliminating free-range foraging herbivores is IMHO insane.
Ironically, the climate war against cattle (products) is not fully compatible with the idea of rewilding the land, which presumably involves switching domesticated large herbivores with wild large herbivores to the net zero effect on burps per acre in case of free grazing animals. Large scale rewilding is currently hypothetical rather than practical, as the numbers of large wild herbivores are insufficient for the switch. Humans and their cattle, pets and pests account for about 96% of terrestrial mammal biomass. The remaining about 4% is everything else from Etruscan shrew to elephant. Cows alone are ~40% of Earth’s land mammal biomass, meaning there are no replacement herbivores. And without ungulates, the grassland ecosystems will collapse.
But back to the reindeer burps.
When it comes to climate, worrying about the relative inputs of reindeer burps vs the rest of the nature makes even less sense. In Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai eruption January 2022 estimated 146 million cubic meters of Pacific salt water causing a couple of years of cooling with effects possibly lasting for the rest of the decade. The atmospheric CO2 concentration near Australia and New Zealand increased from the expected 412 ppm to 414 ppm, about the size of interannual fluctuation on those parts.
When we consider this and other volcanoes, and the coal plants of China and the rest of the world (not to mention everything else that produces greenhouse gases, such as termites), how much effect would it have on the atmospheric chemistry and global climate change if all the reindeer in Lapland stopped burping?
PlanktonPunkt 