Orlando and butshebites both asked me what a muskeg is.  It is subarctic wetland, but a few pictures are worth gazillions of words.

Muskeg in a dry year, May, 2003.

Muskeg in Alaska under smoky haze from forest fires in Siberia, May, 2003

Muskeg
in late breakup (late April, 2005), flooded from heavy spring runoff.

Flooded muskeg during thaw, with thin ice crust after nightly freeze -late April, 2005.

Flooded
muskeg, late April, 2005, mid-day, after ice crust from nightly freeze
has melted.

Ground-level
perspective, muskeg's edge just after last spring frost, mid-May,
2005.

Flooded
muskeg during wet spring, late May, 2005.

Muskeg,
June, 2005, with swamp grass just beginning to show above
surface.

Wet
muskeg, mid-July, 2005.

Winter muskeg at sunrise, February
2006.

Muskeg between freeze-up and
snowfall, Autumn, 2006.

Muskeg after first snow, Autumn,
2006.

I love my muskeg!

I'm answering this new subscriber's question here, because it seems to proceed from and fit into the recent series of strange, weird, paranormal and metaphysical topics.

Posted 4/8/2007 3:43 PM by FortheloveofEnglish:

I don't know your definition of "witch" but from what you wrote here I suppose that one or both of those people might have been some sort of witch.  However, that does not imply that either of them was "evil".  I sensed no "evil" in what they did, nor could I infer from what you wrote that they had any evil intentions, or that they caused you any harm.  Long before you reached that park, you had primed yourself for a terrifying experience, by setting up the expectation.

I think you happened upon a couple of campers who didn't want you around, who preferred to have the place to themselves just as you and your girlfriend would have preferred that.  As to the rest of what happened, it is open to interpretation.

The rain might have been a natural phenomenon.  It is not unusual for rain to fall in one area and not on adjacent ground.  I have stood in my yard and watched part of it get drenched while the rest stayed dry.  It is possible that there were clouds that you did not see there in the dark.

I know people with psychokinetic abilities who can manipulate clouds, make holes in them, move them around, clear small areas, or draw precipitation from clouds, but I have never seen anyone produce rain without first producing clouds.  Since you say there were no clouds for them to have manipulated, they might have been manipulating your minds, instead. 

Alcohol would make you easier to manipulate, and would also tend to make you more unwelcome around sensitive people.  Another factor that would have made them want you out of there was your fear and the anger and frustration you carried from the gas station incident.  You had to have been projecting your fear pretty strongly.

Alcohol is a central nervous system depressant.  At some stages of
intoxication it destroys one's higher reasoning powers and emphasizes
baser instincts and emotions.  The reputation alcohol has for making people courageous is undeserved.  In actuality, it tends to make them slow and dim-witted, uncoordinated, ill-tempered, irritable, aggressive, abusive, garrulous, and with an exaggerated sense of their own wit, until the drunk becomes sleepy and passes out.

Your words above express every level of fear from mild anxiety to stark terror.  I would be uneasy in your presence under those circumstances, and I would be trying to put distance between us.  I'm a relatively tolerant and considerate person, but others are not so.  If it was a situation where someone didn't want to leave, he or she might try to impel you to leave.  It is quite energy intensive to do something like that by rainmaking, so one might try to play on your fear and scare you away.

I was struck by your focusing on the woman's skirt and your judgment that it was inappropriate.  Up to a hundred years or so ago, women wore skirts everywhere.  If a woman climbed a mountain, she went in a skirt.  Even now there are some subcultures where women do not wear trousers, usually for religious reasons.  I'm just not clear on why that detail was so important to you.  It strikes me as irrelevant.

Another thing that struck me about what you have written is the number of internal contradictions, some of which I have highlighted in red.  You would have no way to know this about me, but in my professional capacity, I do not make predictions.  However, I will go out on a limb and predict that if you continue to act counter to your feelings and express things you do not feel, that the relationship with your fiancee will either disintegrate or turn very unhappy.  Healthy relationships require trust and trust requires honesty.

Oh... and, for the love of English, please learn to write in paragraphs.

How do you know that breakup is here, winter is finally over and it's really springtime in Alaska?

The Kobuk 440 is finished, of course.  The last big endurance sled dog race of the winter is run.  Martin Buser won.  Here's how it shook down, copied from dogsled.com, last updated yesterday:

We will be waiting for our final musher, Toleff Monson.  He is expected to
finish 3 or 4 AM. monday morning. 

Scratched:  Rick Swenson, Kelly Williams, Raymond Wood, Karlin Itchoak and Henry Horner

This morning Doug came in laughing after a trip to the outhouse.  I asked him to share the humor, and he said he had the thought, "It must have dropped below freezing last night," because he wasn't post-holing [breaking through the crust, leaving post holes in the slush] as he traversed the deep pile of packed snow off the roofs, between the trailer and cabin.

That wasn't the funny part.  What made him laugh was that his thought sang in his mind like a Broadway show tune.  He laughed again and sang out,"Breakup - the musical."  He had been listening during the night to the songs from Avenue Q.  He played them for me, then, and we laughed some more.  If the upcoming tour gets to Anchorage, we will try to go see it.

The debris you can see on that pile of slushy packed snow between the buildings includes some leaves, twigs and other wind-borne bits of trees, but most of the dirty-looking stuff is ash from the woodstove.  The ash that doesn't get scattered for traction on the path at the spring is spread on top of the snow here to absorb solar energy and hasten melting.

By the time I'd gotten dressed and out there with my camera, I was post-holing so I kept to the shoveled path and plowed roads.  I tuned my eyes to pick up GREEN, and went looking for signs of new growth.

The first green I spotted was a dyed feather from my crafts materials.  It probably broke off one of the jingle-bird toys I made for the cats.  The "dirty" bits there are just wind-blown debris.  The entire snow pack looks this way, up close.

The next green that caught my eye was the Talkeetna sticker on the back bumper of Lassie, the old AMC Eagle that served as Greyfox's roadside stand for several years.

There was the evergreen tip of a spruce bough, blown down in the recent windstorm...

...the yellow green of some moss just exposed by receding snow, and the fading green of clover leaves that have lain frozen under snow all winter and will turn brown as soon as they dry out.

Other than the green plaid flannel shirt I was wearing and the old green tarp partially covering what's left of the firewood Mitch helped us buy when we ran out mid-winter, the scenery was mostly monochromatic.

Earthtones were supplied by Granny Mousebreath [foreground] and Muffin in the rear here, but Max in the middle is as monochromatic as his surroundings.

All the sky I could see was various shades of gray, but there was a flash of blue through the trees from the old truck parked by the abandoned house where the feral cats take shelter.

I found some spring flowers.  No, this isn't the wrong caption for that picture, and those are flowers, really.  Pussywillows -- if you look closely -- are the catkin-flowers of the red willows, the nasty, fuzzy little pollen spreaders.  Hay fever always comes before spring, here.

This fault line extending across the road is a visible sign of the earthquake activity I've been feeling lately.  When the road grader goes by, it gets obscured, but it always shows up again in the same place.  Alaska has nothing even remotely resembling bedrock.  We are riding on crumbled chunks of crust at a plate boundary, with faults everywhere.  Behind me in this view, this one runs along the north side of our house.  Another bigger crack parallels the highway on its other side, and about a mile away is the HUGE Susitna Fault with high bluffs all along one edge showing where a chunk of crust is slipping under the adjacent one.

This big mass of snow marks the end of the plowed road where the track across the muskeg takes off toward the cul de sac turnaround.  Snowmobiles have packed a trail out that way, but I was post-holing too much to go very far out there today.

I saved the beauty shots for last.

Know what today is? 

It's the first Sunday after the first full ecclesiastical moon after the Vernal Equinox.  The celebration of resurrection isn't tied strictly to the calendar, nor to the lunar cycles, but to an arbitrary bastardization of the two.  How archaic is that?

It's not very archaic, as old things go.  The celebration of the Earth's resurrection from the dead of winter (in the Northern Hemisphere, anyhow -- we are such hemispherists in the Euro-American culture) is older than the Church, but not as old as the moon and stars.

The Archaic Revival has been on my mind a lot, lately.  Once upon a time, it was a big deal in our household, back when the resident shaman, my everlovin' Old Fart, thought that I was New Age and he was Archaic Revival, and that the two groups were discrete entities.  He said this morning that the two subcultures seem to be melding, but I suspect that's more a matter of his perception than of actual action.  His view of the world is not so black-and-white as it was once upon a time.

Recent entries here have triggered comments about druids, paganism, ancient secret societies, and other manifestations of the Archaic Revival, unless those things are simply nothing more than manifestations of the coming of a new age.  It could be that in order to get on with our transformation, some of us feel a need to go back and unravel some of the fabric of our past culture, to reweave it into today's reality -- something durable upon which to hang tomorrow.  That's not my style, though.  To me, it is all NOW -- at least insofar as I remain present.

The term, "Archaic Revival," was coined by Terence McKenna.

Oh, how that man could rant!  I don't know whether he had tunnel vision or whether he was simply targeting his message.  That's probably not important.  Someone needed to say what he was saying, and someone else (I suppose I'm it.) needs to say that's not the whole story.  Psilocybin is not the only road to ecstasy.  It's a fine and wonderful way, but if we're too avid in the collection of it and too liberal in consuming it, the 'shrooms will go the way that Vedic Soma has already gone and traditional medicinals such as ginseng and golden seal are rapidly going:  into extinction.

BTW that, "last sane time," to which he refers, the Paleolithic period of 15,000 years ago, was the Age of  Virgo.  Gaia's pulse and ours were in synch.

Not only are there other substances besides psilocybin that can allow us to break through the walls of ego and open the windows of infinity, some of those substances are produced in our own brains and can be generated through meditation, or archaic shamanic practices such as drumming, chanting and ecstatic dance, or with New Age tools such as psychotronic machines.

I recently learned, as I listened to the CD Robert Anton Wilson Explains Everything:  Or Old Bob Exposes His Ignorance, that in the 1980s and '90s, he and I were engaged in similar activity:  using a succession of black boxes, brain tuners, sound-and-light machines and the like, to enhance our minds.  He says he did so much of it, and without any scientific controls or record-keeping, that he has no idea what worked or what didn't.  That's how it was for me, too.  We both realize that something changed for us, we like the difference, and others noticed it, but neither of us was able to adequately describe or explain the change.

If you choose to go chasing rabbits down the electronic tunnels, there are many devices available.  Some of them won't do anything, but I have not found any credible reports of ones that do harm.  Effective ones do produce irreversible brain change, to which some people refer as brain damage.  It's a matter of perception, I suppose.

From my experience, who do I trust?  I don't know everyone in the field.  For audio/video, I trust Jeffrey Thompson, Brian Paulson and Dick Sutphen.  Since the 'eighties, I have used one of Bob Beck's electronic Brain Tuners.  I have recently learned that before his death he developed a treatment protocol for chronic fatigue syndrome, and I'm working on acquiring what I will need to try it.

If you go out looking on the web for psionic devices and information, you'll find everything from aluminum foil deflector beanies and psychalking to Uncle Chuckie's Mystical Wonders, in addition to a broad range of legitimate devices such as the Brain Gate, which allows quadriplegics to interact with their environment through brainwave sensors.  MKzine appears to be a reliable source of info, and technorati.com covers the subject, too.  Among suppliers,  Tools for Wellness has been around almost twenty years and I have had no complaints about their products or service.

The U. S. Psychotronics Association might be a useful resource.  I just found it and haven't had much time to check it out.  Investigate for yourself, and don't be put off by something just because it seems weird and improbable.  Remember what Marshall McLuhan said: 

BluePaNDoRa asked me to address three things:  Illuminati, The New World Order, and Bohemian Grove.  My first thought upon reading the list and seeing, "Illuminati", was "Which one?"  I hadn't heard of Bohemian Grove until she mentioned it, so I did some web searching for info.  I spent some time, read a lot, and let my thoughts percolate for a couple of days.  Then I asked Doug if he had any thoughts on the New World Order.  His immediate response was, "Which one?"  So we're agreed on that much:  maybe there is only the one Bohemian Grove, but there are more than one set of Illuminati, and more than one "New World Order."  Maybe.

Conspiracy theories abound.  Apparently at least a couple thousand Xangans believe that the U.S. government was behind the 9/11 attacks.  Do you recall how low dubya's approval ratings were in early September of 2001?  He was dealing with -- actually failing to deal with -- several touchy domestic issues.  On September eleventh, after his initial reactions to the news, when he'd had a few moments to absorb the reality of the collapsed towers, Greyfox said, "Bush senior must have called in some of his old IOUs from when he headed the CIA, to take the heat off his kid."  It's plausible, I suppose.  That's one of the problematic facets of conspiracy theories in general:  hearing them, we think, "yes, it must be... but, no, it can't be."  Such acts are audacious beyond credibility.

I suspect that BluePaNDoRa was hoping to get some psychic input on these matters from my special sources.  Since there's no little red light that goes on to alert me when I'm receiving psychic input, it's not always easy to attribute my brainstorms and flashes of insight to any specific source, but this thought just popped into my mind this morning, and when I ran it by Greyfox he said it made sense to him:  A lot of the insanely improbable nonsense that attaches to conspiracy theories is disinformation promulgated by the conspirators to cause the theorists to be dismissed as lunatics. 

Just because we're paranoid, doesn't mean they're not out to get us.  Greyfox, AKA ArmsMerchant, tells a story he read in a psych textbook in college, about a fire in a madhouse.  When smoke filled the building and alarms went off, there was a predictable amount of bedlam as the nuts reacted according to their individual forms of insanity.  The paranoids calmly rounded everyone up and led them to safety.  They had been expecting it.

The Bohemian Club is an exclusive men's club in San Francisco, founded in 1872 by five bored reporters from the San Francisco Examiner to promote good fellowship and "to help elevate journalism to that place in the popular estimation to which it is entitled."  The club began to change rapidly after membership was extended to entertainers.  Currently, reporters are barred from membership.  If a prospective member gets through the long waiting list, he is subject to strict screening and harsh interrogation before being allowed to pay his $2,500 initiation fee and $600 annual dues. (source: 4rie.com)

From its beginning, members of the club got out of the city in summer to camp in the woods and enjoy High Jinx (serious plays, especially Shakespearean) and, since 1924, Low Jinx (pantomime and burlesque), all parts performed, of course, by men, since women are not admitted.  After moving about for a few years from park to park, members began to acquire their own land, piece by piece. 

The tract where they now hold their annual midsummer encampments is 2437 acres of prime old growth redwoods, give or take a few hundred acres, with a dozen or so separate "camps" at intervals along the road that winds through the forest.  Reports I read suggest that there are cliques and classes within the Bohemian Club that are reflected in those camps.

I found a lot of articles online that were critical of the Bohemian Club.  Apparently, many people fear and hate the organization.  It is widely believed to be a part of the Shadow Government, a secret conspiracy of rich and powerful men.  I found nothing that attempted to justify or defend the club or Bohemian Grove.  That's understandable if they are as secret and powerful as their detractors say they are.  They would be arrogant enough to feel no need for public relations, nor would they have any desire for public debate.

I'm sure there's some conspiring that goes on when those old boys get together, even if they aren't supposed to be doing it.  Their motto, "Weaving spiders come not here," a quote from Shakespeare, is supposed to mean that the camps are just for relaxation, not for wheeling and dealing.  As for secret conspiring, maybe it takes a while for the details to become known, but they usually do.  Shakespeare also said, "truth will out."  In this world, in this time, it gets harder and harder to keep secrets.

I think it would be erroneous to assume that every Boho is a nefarious schemer, and I know that it would be dangerous to assume that none of them is.  It would be downright stupid, knowing who some of the members are, to assume that when they come together they are not scheming how to maneuver, manipulate and consoldiate their power and wealth.  But most of them are there mostly to congratulate themselves that they have the money and clout to belong there.  They are also there to impress each other, to get away from their usual routines and their usual associates, to eat, drink, dress up in women's clothes and have fun.

The following description of festivities at one of the early Boho camps is from The Virtual Museum of the City of San Francisco:

National Geographic Magazine published the image and caption below:

Power Party
Photograph by Gabriel Moulin, 1915
To purge himself of worldly concerns, a member of the elite Bohemian Club participated in a 1915 Cremation of Care ceremony -- complete with candles and a robed and hooded comrade to guide him. This private club of influential men still meets annually north of San Francisco and uses this symbolic ritual to kick off its summer retreat. But today the ceremony involves burning a mummy-like effigy named Care at the foot of the group's mascot: a 40-foot-tall (12-meter-tall) concrete owl.

Filmmaker Alex Jones infiltrated a summer encampment in the 1990s and captured this image:

Since women are not allowed in the camps, and these men have lots of
money, prostitution has long thrived in Sonoma County and the little
nearby town of Monte Rio.  Thirty years or so ago, a crackdown by a new
sheriff cut down on it and probably hurt the local economy.  There are
credible recent reports of busloads of prostitutes, both male and female,
being brought in from San Francisco.

There have been rumors of human sacrifices, disappearances and murders
associated with the summer encampments in recent decades.  Police
investigations turned up nothing, which does not necessarily mean that
murder didn't happen there.  To find more dirt than you'd probably want
to bother to read, from the perspective of some of their neighbors,
check out The Sonoma County Free Press and sacredsonoma.com.  An article at prisonplanet.com goes into the symbolic and ritual aspects of the summer festivities.  Of all the web references I found, probably the most informative comes from "Who Rules America" at ucsc.edu.

If that doesn't satisfy your curiosity, check out this photo gallery.  You know those guys, here, don't you?  I found their pic in that gallery.

If the old guy on the right did conspire to destroy the World Trade Center because he wanted to boost the popularity of the vapid one on the left, his success was only temporary.  Dubya's ratings are down.  On the other hand, if the unknown conspirators of 9/11 wanted to increase the value of Halliburton stock, it worked. 

Imagine the life of someone who is seriously trying to wheel and deal, maneuver and manipulate in secret, someone who has to go off to a gated and guarded Old Boys' Camp so he can escape from his burden of care.  He has fully bought into the us versus them mentality, has no awareness of the Oneness of All.  He has to be security conscious.  He lives in fear and paranoia, so his inner life is not significantly different from that of the raggedy ranting street corner conspiracy nut.  The fat cat silverback Boho's life, both inner and outer, isn't all that different from that of a drug lord.

What about the New World Order(s) and the Illuminati?  And what about the Skull and Bones Society?  While we're at it, what about the Church(es)?  No matter what any outsider believes, the insiders believe that they are doing the RIGHT thing, and that they are carrying massive burdens of responsibility, making huge personal sacrifices to do so.  That facility with which people have been able to remain content and complacent in such beliefs is a big reason why I'm happy to see the end of the Piscean Age.

My sources tell me that these guys live in their own self-created hell.  If you allow fear of them, their insanity, and their power to influence your behavior, then you've created your own hell.  If you think something needs to be done about this, figure out what to do and then do it.  The transition away from everyone's being able to make up whatever
serves his own selfish interest and then believe in it, toward all of us
working to know the real truth and live up to it, isn't peaceful or easy, but it is happening and it can be fun at times.

UPDATE:

OMG, look at my Footprints.  They're watching me!

District of Columbia

/582391334/conspiracies... Weblogs

4/7/2007 6:25 PM

District of Columbia

/582391334/conspiracies... Weblogs

4/7/2007 6:40 PM

District of Columbia

/SuSu/582391334/conspir... Weblogs

4/7/2007 9:23 PM

He said:

I'll be back.

Snorri23
 pointed out that former president Eisenhower was also a prophet:

I do think, really I do.  Sometimes I even slow my thoughts down sufficiently to do a quick job of translating and put them into words -- or, to be accurate, to put some of my thoughts into words.  I do not always think in words, and I often think thoughts for which I have no verbal referents.  I have been working my entire life to develop as broad a vocabulary as possible, have even added a few original words of my own to the lexicon, but still do not have enough words.

(Of course, if you're a sensitive telepath and have been paying attention to me, you already knew that about me.)  If I limited myself to the verbal level of thinking, nobody ever would have accused me of being, "psychic," and I might never have found my vocation in this life.  ...Hmmm... maybe there's something in that thought, something that I can generalize.  Perhaps it is in the process of becoming verbal that most people's nonverbal intuition becomes suppressed in childhood...??  That will bear more thought.

And that's how I think:  from one thought to the next, branching out, usually in a coherent chain that I can stop and trace back, but not always.  Sometimes new thoughts pop into my mind, and sometimes I don't know where they come from.  My mentor, Dick Sutphen, says, "There is no little red light that goes off in your brain to tell you when you are receiving psychic impressions."  It took years for me even to become aware that not all my thoughts were my own. 

Then, it took more years for me to get used to that idea, and develop a habit of checking my thoughts and feelings (sort of a mental form of feeling around checking for injuries after taking a serious fall) to determine if they're actually my own feelings if, for example, I start feeling unaccountably fearful or tense.  People tend to project strong emotions most forcefully.  My job is (and I really owe it to myself and those close to me) to understand whether a given emotional response was triggered by a life event, electrochemical states in my body, or somebody else's thoughts impinging on my own.

As Dick said, there isn't any little red light to alert me when I'm receiving, but there is a definite and discernible, "Aha! Yes." sensation or reaction when, at some point in that checkup process, I figure out what's going on in my mind.  Fun with neuroelectrochemistry... and that's how I think.

This chain of thought about thinking was started this morning by this comment on yesterday's shamans-and-witches entry:

My immediate response when I read that:  "Oh, shit!  *cringe*  Not again."  Okay, maybe I overreacted, but yesterday's entry had not mentioned the word, "paganism", and there's a backstory that explains that reaction of mine.

The next thought after the cringe was, "I'm not interested in paganism."  Then came, "Wait a bit--I'm interested in everything, and especially in metaphysics, religion, spirituality and all that jazz."  Then I took a moment to sort out my reactions, recall that backstory that explains my reaction to unwarranted references to paganism, and revise that hasty, "...not interested..." thought into something more accurate.

Paganism simply means all religion not of the BIG 3:  Christianity, Islam, and Judaism.  Despite centuries of missionary efforts in Asia, Africa, the Americas and elsewhere, I think the majority of the world's believers are pagan by the dictionary definition.  Pagans with a small p are not to be confused with the Neo-Pagans, who almost universally tend to drop the "neo" and call themselves Pagans wit a capital P.

Despite all my best efforts to transcend every little knee-jerk bit of my own intolerance, I am far more tolerant of any pagan believer in an aboriginal religion than I am of the believers in the Big 3, or of the Neo-Pagans.  My intolerance is not a matter of conflicting beliefs.  By that, I mean that I am not intolerant of them because I hold beliefs that are different from theirs.  It is because I find it easier to understand how, for example, Buddhists, Taoists and other religious adherents can accept the tenets of their religions as truth.  I find it relatively difficult to believe that anyone can blindly swallow the internally-inconsistent dogmas inscribed in the holy books of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic faiths, dogmas based on fear and denial.

Most difficult of all for me to understand is how Neo-Pagans manage to overlook or deny the all too evident twentieth century origins of their religion and persist in calling it the Old Religion.  I am totally unlikely to let my lack of understanding lead to any sort of overt persecution, but I appear to be simply incapable of stifling all the incredulity I feel.  Sometimes my incredulity seems, to those who hold Neo-Pagan beliefs, indistinguishable from ridicule.  So be it.  There it is.

But that doesn't explain why I cringe when someone suggests that I'm interested in paganism, does it?  It's really a long story, but it boils down to this:  I have been unjustly accused of being a pagan.  During the years that I publicly advertised my psychic services and then while I was helping Greyfox edit his newsletter The Shaman Papers, on numerous occasions pagans would mistake my psychic counseling and/or my shamanic practice for evidence of pagan beliefs.

It is nonsense, I know.  My counseling practice has nothing to do with religion.  It has everything to do with psychology, even though the majority of mainstream psychologists deny that.  Likewise, shamanic practice is not a religious act, even though many pagan religious practices involve a shamanic altered state of consciousness.  The latter half of this lifetime of mine has been spent in freeing myself of dogmas, transcending religious belief and all other false and limiting beliefs.

For a time, I used to resent it when someone would mistakenly assume that I shared his or her belief system (BS, for short), but over the past few years I have succeeded in liberating myself from resentment.  I'm still working on some of those old knee-jerk reactions, though.

So, in answer to that question from adifferentkindofbeautiful, I guess I'll just say, "How did you know I was interested in paganism?  I hadn't mentioned it.  You must be psychic."

By the way, if I hadn't already noticed that I've been on a blogroll here lately, it would have been obvious yesterday when I got two messages from separate Xangans suggesting topics for me to address.  I have added druidry and global conspiracies to my list of proposed topics.  I can handle about two more topics before I'll need to find another scrap of paper on which to note them.

Stumble It!

This is another item I can now cross off my little list of blogging to do.  Of course the race was over a couple of weeks ago when Ellen Halverson got to Nome with the Red Lantern, but then there was the Mushers' Awards Banquet, and there has been continuing media coverage of the conflicting reports of Ramy Brooks's dog abuse.  Here's the latest on Ramy:

Hmmm... d'ya think?!

As various members of the Trail Committee try in their various ways to deal with the issue, Ramy, on his website, has taken down all the pages that formerly pictured him and his dogs, all the archives of his mom Roxy's reports from the trail, his awards, and various promotional materials.  In their place is a single page with a brief statement and some links to news releases and a vet's report.

The veterinarian, Arleigh Reynolds, who examined Ramy's team on March 17, the day Ramy was disqualified, reported:

All dogs were in very good physical condition with shiny coats and no evidence of bruising or hemorrhage or on their conjunctiva or gums. I found no bruises or sore spots on their skin and no cuts or abrasions on their face head, neck, torso, limbs, or abdomen. Three of the dogs had minor frost burn on their sheath or prepuce, one had a small frost burn on the inside aspect of her tragus (ear flap). None of these lesions were greater than 3 mm in diameter. Considering the wind and rough trail conditions experienced this year I am surprised not to see more severe frost burn or even frost bite and at least some scrapes or contusions.

The dogs body condition score, on a scale of 1-10 (1 being emaciated and 10 being grossly obese), ranged from 3.75-4.5 which I, as a nutritionist and veterinarian with 20 years of experience specializing in sled dogs, would consider normal for endurance racing dogs. I found no physical evidence of abuse or neglect in any of the dogs I examined.

full report

On Ramy's website, it says:

Brooks regretfully acknowledges this unfortunate incident and accepts
the disqualification decision of the judges. Brooks is passionate about
his love for his dogs and Native heritage as an Alaskan.

I won't hazard a guess as to whose words those are.  Maybe I'm misinterpreting it, but if he's playing the race card there, I'm questioning the wisdom and appropriateness of that. 

Brooks is heir to one of the greatest sled-dog traditions in the state. His mother, Roxy Wright, is the first woman to have won the Anchorage Fur Rendezvous World Championship Sled Dog Race. His grandfather, Gareth Wright, won the Fur Rondy, too, but is best known as one of the leaders in breeding and developing the modern Alaska racing husky.

Ramy Brooks' great-grandfather, Arthur Wright, traveled with and served as an Athabascan interpreter for Hudson Stuck, the Episcopalian Archdeacon of the Yukon.

In his 1914 book -- "Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled'' -- Stuck might have been the first to call for better dog treatment in the state.

"There is a great deal of cruelty and brutality amongst dog drivers in Alaska," he wrote. "At times, it is true, most dogs need some punishment ... but a very slight punishment ... will usually suffice just as well as a severe one, and the main source of brutality in the punishment of dogs is sheer bad temper on the part of the driver."

Several modern Alaska mushers have said there is no longer a place for people with that bad temper in the sport. Willow musher Lynda Plettner, a 12-time Iditarod finisher, said Friday that in all her races she never had to do more to discipline a dog than slap it with a thickly padded, cold-weather mitten.

"I didn't have to hit them to get in the top 20," she added. Plettner said she is offended if anyone thinks beating dogs is the way to Iditarod success.

"That is kind of the old-time way," said Will Forsberg, a past winner of the Copper Basin 300 Sled Dog Race and one of the founders of PRIDE, an organization to dedicated to better care of Alaska sled dogs. "It might even work a little bit."

Forsberg added, however, that he thought five-time Iditarod champ Rick Swenson of Two Rivers, four-time Iditarod champ Susan Butcher of Fairbanks and a host of multiple champs who followed them demonstrated that a dog that wants to run will triumph over one made to run every time.

Forsberg, Plettner and others said they don't know enough about Brooks' case to pass judgment, but if someone involved with Alaska sled dog racing is making a practice of pounding on dogs, they should be sanctioned.

adn.com-3/31/07

On the other hand, Jennifer O'Connor of PETA is pounding on Ramy Brooks, the Iditarod Trail Committee, race veterinarians and the Alaska State Troopers.  There is so much slanted news on all sides of this story, I'm surprised it doesn't slide off the pages.

---

On a happier note, or maybe a bittersweet one, this duo, Dave and Tekla Monson, showed up at the Awards Banquet in Nome at the end of their 700 mile dogsled tour celebrating the life of Dave's late wife and Tekla's mother, Susan Butcher, who died last year of leukemia.

They visited some trail checkpoints and villages where Susan was known.  People shared their memories, photos they had taken of Susan, or little remembrances she had left along the way.

Due out later this year is the book, Granite, co-written by Susan, about her great lead dog.

The photo at right shows Susan with Granite while he was in his prime.

The next shot shows Granite not looking so prime, at seventeen years of age.  You wouldn't be looking too good either at that age -- it's about 120 in dog years.

You have left me a marvelous mixed bag of comments on my recent "taboo" entries.  I would probably want to write more on the topic even if you hadn't been giving me additional food for thought.  Last night, Doug and I were discussing which of our fifteen or so cats (The "dozen or so" population diminished by one during the winter when the beat-up old stray, Potemkin, stopped coming around.  Then it rose by four when Doug and I found semi-feral Alice's new litter nestled in fiberglas insulation, and brought them all in.) ...we were discussing which of our cats we would slaughter first to feed to the rest of them if we became unable to sustain them otherwise.

Given that we are surrounded here by nature's bounty, it is a far-fetched scenario, similar to the "lifeboat" or "fallout shelter" exercises teachers of philosophy use to demonstrate cultural bias and unconscious stereotypes to undergrad students.  We don't hunt or trap, but we have eaten road kill and fed it to our pets.  I would fish if supermarket provisions were not available, and I would probably trap or snare small game in preference to hunting moose or bear, if those were my only options.  Doug lacks the patience to stand on a riverbank and wait for a fish to strike, or to stalk a land animal, but he might resort to netting fish or snaring hares if he was hungry enough.  If he was hungry, and a moose walked through the yard, he'd shoot it, no doubt.

After his experience with butchering the moose in our front yard, his only such experience, Doug thinks he would probably feel squeamish even about gutting a fish or a hare.  He would have no problem with killing a wild animal for meat.  It's the messy part, the skinning, gutting, and butchering that he doesn't like.  He will also generally snack on a carrot even though he'd prefer a steak, if he'd have to cook the steak himself.  Maybe this is a male/female thing.  Cooking is enjoyable to me, and I don't mind the mucking about in gore and guts, but I don't like killing.  I can do it, but I have to force myself, and I can force myself because I think that any carnivorous person who is unwilling to kill for meat is a hypocrite.

I hesitate to make assumptions and generalizations about my readers, but if in the aggregate you represent a cross-section of the technologically advanced cultures, most of you probably never have gone hungry.  Most of you never have raised your own livestock nor stalked your own game, much less slaughtered and butchered the animals you have eaten.  The farmers, ranchers, feedlot crews, slaughterhouse workers and meat packers who feed the rest of us are a small minority.  In the entire civilized world, the vast majority of people are so insulated from the sources of their food that they gag at the smell of entrails or faint at the sight of blood.  Most would not salivate at the thought of fresh milk still foamy and warm from the udder, the way I do.

Like many people of my generation, my consciousness of the growing shortages of water and farmland, the unwholesomeness of feedlot beef, and the waste of resources in its production, was raised by reading Diet for a Small Planet  by Francis Moore Lappe and her World Hunger: Twelve Myths.  Through the 1970s and '80s,  I read Mother Earth News and became part of the back-to-the-land movement.  I would still be subsisting largely on grains if I had not learned that a high-carbohydrate diet was damaging my health, and I would still be engaged in the work-intensive farming and foraging lifestyle if I were healthy enough to do it.  But to me, "if onlys" are not any more helpful than "shoulds."

Three of you, soul_survivor, lupa, and nessi1, picked up on the "should" issue, and wixer's comment about "ought to" impelled me to edit that bit out of the entry.  The pop-psych shibboleth about the harmfulness of "shoulding all over oneself" or the inadvisability of "shoulding" on other people seems to have been gaining great currency.  A google search for, "should all over yourself," brought 105,000 results.  I had never heard the phrase until one day recently at AA meeting.  It's another of those pithy little sayings that help us convey how the programs work, such as, "We're only as sick as our secrets," which encourages openness, or "the yets" that can lead to risky self-congratulatory complacency.  The yets are the things that a given addict might not yet have done, such as going to prison or contracting HIV, but, "You're Eligible, Too."

Regarding taboos, Orlando said, "People get all confused and caught up in their emotions about stuff like this...." and mentioned Mondo Cane, "dog's world" or "dog's life," the seminal shocksploitation film that spawned everything from Fear Factor and Jackass to Faces of Death, and killed innovative artist Yves Klein when he saw what use the filmmakers had made of the artwork they commissioned from him.  People do indeed get all emotional about the breaking of their personal taboos.  Knowing this helps me appreciate the attitudes and experiences that have served to free me from the taboos into which I had been enculturated.

Something else Orlando said makes a lot of sense to me:  "Truth is that your beliefs and values tend to change in desparate and life threatning situations."  This is probably why I am so relatively free of common squeamishness and have such low regard for obeying common but pointless taboos.  My life has been pared down to the bare necessities.  I have scant time and no patience for nonsense, and I have had a lot of time (in prison and in my sickbed) to think about what has real meaning and what does not.  I haven't gotten rid of every one of my hot emotional buttons, but I'm working on it.  I keep working on it because each success is so rewarding.  The freer I get, the freer I am, and freedom is what it is all about.

I am all for freedom of speech, even for someone who often just uses it to express ignorance, bias, or moralistic judgments.  I think there can be great things accomplished when people are allowed to let their stupidity show.  It gives other people an opportunity to helpfully inform and/or lovingly enlighten them.  If ignorant, narrow-minded people were required to keep their mouths shut it would cut down on both conflict and noise pollution in our society, but it would do nothing to raise the collective level of consciousness.  So, please, everyone, feel free to leave your frank and uncensored comments on my blog.  I will endeavor to do my best to respond to them as I see fit.

Here is part of a comment I received on my recent taboo-or-not-taboo entry:

This is the comment that followed that one:

"^ 'Should'?  'Never'?  Still more
evidence that the less one believes, the better off one is, since ALL
beliefs are limiting beliefs.

When one is in tune with the universe, living in hozho (as the Dine
put it), living in a state of grace, in other words--there are NO
LIMITS."

I can find nothing in that second comment with which I would disagree.  The first one, however, has pushed even more of my buttons than it apparently pushed on the writer of the second one.

I make an effort never to say, "never," because I live in a world of infinite possibilities and follow a strict code of situational ethics.  I also try to avoid shoulding all over myself and others.  That word, "should," is often problematical unless it is used to express likelihood, probability, or consequences, or as a synonym for "would".  The problem is that in its most common usage, it is used to lay expectations or demands on people.

should CORE MEANING: modal verb indicating that something is the right thing for somebody to do You should get more exercise. I should have told her I was leaving. The report recommended that children should be tested regularly.

encarta

People use it to beat up on themselves and others for doing or not doing things they believe that they or those others have some compelling responsibility to do or not to do.  People who go through life shoulding on everyone are generally dictatorial, judgmental, egotistical and moralistic.  Those are not traits I generally admire in a person.

But that's not the only objectionable part of that brief pronouncement, in my opinion.  There is also that bit of sloppy semantics posing as political correctness:  "companion animals."  For starters, the context suggests that the writer did not mean that phrase in its narrow, exact sense, of trained animal helpers for handicapped or disabled persons.  I mean, who is going to go to all the trouble of training an animal helper and then eat it?  No, I'm pretty sure she has the PC plague.

As it's nonsensical to chow down on highly trained and useful non-human assistants (except, of course, in situations of dire starvation), it also seems to me to be nonsensical to use six syllables to replace a perfectly serviceable single syllable:  pets.  "Pet" is a word that's about as warm and fuzzy as words can be.

1. animal kept at home: an animal kept for companionship, interest, or amusement

2. favorite person: an indulged or pampered person

3. loved person: somebody whom others find lovable

encarta

I love my pets.  I prefer their company to that of many humans of my acquaintance.  They are my pampered, indulged, beloved pets, truly.  I won't diminish our relationship with mealy-mouthed, albeit trendy, pseudo-euphemisms.

I am at a considerable disadvantage in responding to someone who says my views or my actions are wrong or "not right."  I can't say that the other person is wrong.  I'm working as hard to eliminate dualistic thinking and moralistic bullshit from my mind and my vocabulary as I am in my endeavor to transcend all beliefs.  I suppose, under the circumstances, I've said enough.

[Edit:  responding to http://www.xanga.com/wixer's comment, I changed the wording of the 'graph that begins, "People use it to..." and eliminated the phrase, "ought to."]