08:43 – It was 64.3F (18C) when I took Colin out at 0625, partly cloudy and calm.
More work on kit stuff all day today. We had seven orders from different customers yesterday, so things are starting to ramp up. Our busiest time is generally mid-August through mid-September, when we’ll be fully occupied just building kits from stockpiled sub-assemblies and getting those kits shipped. So we’ll spend the day building chemical bags for various kits.
We really need to spend some time getting the food room organized. I had a horrible dream the other night. I was about to transfer a bunch of canned meat to the downstairs refrigerator. When I opened the door, it was already packed full to overflowing with these #10 cans.
More than 60 cans of bamboo shoots? I knew immediately who was responsible, so I ran upstairs to the bedroom, where I found Mandy, Barbara’s small stuffed panda, looking innocent. When pressed, she said that if TSHTF small stuffed pandas have to eat, too.
The little Malamute has now officially been adopted. Barbara’s friend Joanne and her family went over to visit her at the shelter yesterday and decided to adopt her. Barbara offered them our crate, which Joanne and her son stopped over yesterday to pick up. They were out buying supplies for her: a leash and harness, a name/address tag for her collar, presumably toys, food, treats, and so on.
Joanne said they’re thinking of naming her Jaimie. The vet asked Barbara when she dropped her off if we’d named her. Barbara said we’d leave that up to whoever adopted her. They’re picking her up at 1000 this morning to take her home.
They have to take her back to be spayed in a couple of weeks. Joanne’s husband and son, Jeff and Colin, wanted to keep her intact in case they decided to breed Malamute puppies, but that’s a non-starter. Like all animal rescue organizations, this one insists on pets being neutered before they’ll adopt them out.
I keep reading articles from the left and right saying that North Korea is going to nuke us. There’s just no way that’s going to happen. The Norks have nuclear fission DEVICES. There’s a big difference between a device and a bomb, and an even bigger difference between a bomb and a warhead. In my estimation, the Norks are at least years and probably decades away from having a deliverable warhead, let alone the thermonuclear warhead that various news organizations who should know better are claiming that North Korea has.
The danger, and it is real, is not the the Norks will nuke us. It’s that we’ll nuke them, and thereby open a can of worms. China has already announced that in the event of conflict between the US and NK they’ll remain neutral UNLESS the US attacks first. In that case, all bets are off.
It’s not that I think there would be a nuclear war between the US and China. Saner heads in both the US and China would prevail, as they always have. The real danger is a localized war on the Korean peninsula that gets us into a real hot war, even a conventional one. If that happens and China, say, sinks a US carrier, things could rapidly spiral into the toilet. And there’s no doubt in my mind that China could sink a US carrier if they wanted to. China could easily overwhelm the defenses of even a carrier battle group. They’re on their home ground. And that would turn into a real mess very quickly.
The danger is not so much mushroom clouds and radiation as it is shutting down commerce. The US economy depends heavily on a continuing flow of cheap consumer and industrial goods from China and South Korea. Anything that interrupts that flow could be catastrophic for our economy.