How to start smoking pipe: a review

Full disclaimer: I did not get paid to write this. I did not even get a discount on the pipe or anything, since nobody had any idea that I would be reviewing it. I decided to review it when it arrived.

This is the long-overdue review of Kade's Small German Clay Pipe-Green Bit. I ordered one of these a few weeks ago, and it shipped a lot sooner than I expected, which is always nice. Please find below a picture of the product, with a zippo for scale:

As advertised on the website, it is a compact pipe design that fits into basically every pocket. The bowl is also small, lending itself to quicker smokes. So far so good. But how does it smoke?

It is at this point that I must preface that I am a beginner to the fine art of the pipe, and to smoking in general. I picked up my first pack of American Spirits three months ago, and this is the first dedicated pipe that I have ever owned. The reason I feel qualified to review the pipe is that Kade describes it as "perfect for beginners". I am as beginner as it gets, and I will not write how many times I had to re-light this tiny bowl, because the number is shameful.

The pipe smokes well. I used some lousy tobacco that I bummed off of my roommate for free, but I still enjoyed the smoke. It's easy to operate, but still pleasant to smoke. That being said, I have had more pleasant smokes with nicer tobacco out of nicer pipes. To Kade's great credit, he does not pretend that this is a fancy pipe. It is exactly what he says it is: a beginner's pipe, good for quick smokes and trying new tobaccos, since the clay does not retain flavor.

Therefore, I recommend that anyone trying to get into pipes buy one of these. If you are already into pipes, consider getting one anyway, since they are cheap and they can be used to try new tobaccos without risking the retention of a lousy flavour in one of your fancy pipes. I for one will definitely keep it around, first to practice my technique, then to try new tobaccos.

Out of five stars, I give this pipe all five. Not because it will blow your mind, but because it is exactly what it purports to be, and a good deal to boot. Show our man Kade some love!

Staffing the next system

 As most of you will know, a lot of people are choosing something right now that will kill some of them [1]. You also know that this excess mortality might be intentional, somewhere on the chain of causality. Let us assume that it is intented to work as it apparently does, for a thought experiment.

If you've ever created anything, you understand that certain specialist skills are required.

Would you like to make a website?
Someone has to code that.

Care for central heating?
A whole lot of people need to build that system.

How about a functioning war machine?
Add several orders of magnitude more infrastructure.

As the storms in Jacksonville shows, complex systems will collapse simply by people taking a day off [2]. It gets considerably worse when the specialists in question are six feet under, as the bad weather brigade can be convinced to come back and eventually train the next generation, whereas a bunch of rotting corpses cannot.

Consider also this historical precedent [3]. Stalin's ballistic implementation of cancel culture did not take out nearly as many people as the famines or the war did; he only caused the execution of various paper-pushers that had fallen out of favour in Moscow. Nevertheless, the combined loss of talent and experience destroyed the Red Army in 1941, to the tune of 4 million men lost in 6 months [4]. It can be concluded that whoever decided to push some random poison knows perfectly well that you can't just take out the talent and expect to run anything. Hence the question:

How will the next system be staffed?

There are two answers I can think of.

First option: certain groups of people and their families are getting their "Your papers, please" without the associated Faucian Roulette needles. It would also explain Newsom's odd behaviour; maybe his daughter did not make the list and is earmarked for the aforementioned Faucian Roulette [5]. This would leave the required staff alive and well for the next system to run reasonably smoothly.

Second option: they don't care. Everyone gets the same mixture of God-knows-what. Since the Prince of this World is hardly fond of human life, maybe system-wide collapse and mass slaughter is the actual top-level plan.

Personally, I am torn between the two, because option one is something already explored in popular media [6], whereas option two makes perfect sense in the supernatural analysis.