Freeze, thaw, freeze, thaw....  Crisp nights and sunny days have put a crust on top of the snow.  For a few days or a week or so, it's one of my favorite times of year.  I can go places that are inaccessible at any other time.  When the snow is deep, and the crust is strong, I can walk along several feet off the ground.  I suited up early this morning and went out for a crust walk.

The driveway is showing effects of the freezing and thawing, with a thin layer of ice hanging above the surface, and the water that had supported it, when it formed last night, gone, soaked into the mud below.

 

I went up the berm on the far side of the road and through the trees along the snow ramp Doug and I built through the winter by dumping some of the snow from our driveway over there.  I was going fine as long as I was in the shade, but as soon as I stepped onto a spot the sun was hitting, I broke through the crust.

One foot on the crust, and the other knee-deep in the grainy snow, I tried pulling my foot out of the hole I'd just made.  Getting the foot out was no problem, but bringing the boot with it was impossible.  I had to sit down on the snow to pull the boot and sock loose.  While I was sitting there, I took a couple of shots from that perspective.

I hadn't gotten far enough through the trees for the clear shot of the muskeg I'd wanted, but I turned back and stepped cautiously into my outgoing footprints.  Once over the jumbled, icy berm, I turned toward the cul de sac.  Several cats went with me, but most were out ahead where the sun was blinding me and my camera.

On the sunny side of the street, mud was glistening...

...while in the shade, frost still ruled.

One big poplar has the hazy look that suggests leaf buds are forming.

There's no new growth on the evergreens yet --

...just last year's cones.

And from the other trees, last year's leaves on the ground,

along with a whole winter's worth of animal droppings emerging from the snow.

The muskeg is criss-crossed with snowmachine trails...

...and crossed by a single line of moose tracks.

I walked forty or fifty feet out toward the cul de sac, past the line of trees, to get the clear shot to southward that's up at the top of this entry.  I was walking in a packed snowmachine trail, and even it was getting a little slushy in the sunshine.

My plan for tomorrow is to be out there earlier, before things begin to thaw, and follow this snowmachine trail out to a part of the muskeg where I've never been.  If the trail goes that far and I don't run out of steam, I might get as far as the railroad tracks.  And, I might not go more than a few feet on that trail if I can't be sure it won't turn to slush behind me before I get back.  That snow pack is almost four feet deep, and under it the muskeg is full of even deeper holes.

msnbc.com news services
Mon., June 13, 2005

Click on any thumbnail below for a larger image.

Original caption: 10/27/1942:  "The dead bodies of two fourteen-year-old lynching victims, Charles Lang and Ernest Green, lie on the ground with ropes still tied around their necks."

Elias Clayton, Elmer Jackson, and Isaac McGhie, all in their early twenties, did manual labor for a traveling circus.  They were in Duluth, MN on June 14, 1920, for a one-night performance.  Irene Tusken, 19, and James Sullivan, 18, went to the circus. The next day it was alleged that six black circus workers had threatened them at gunpoint and raped Irene Tusken. With little to no evidence, Clayton, Jackson, McGhie, and three other black workers were arrested by the Duluth Police.

On the night of June 15, a mob of thousands formed. The police were ordered not to use force against them.  They stormed the jail and held a mock trial on the spot, declared the men guilty and took Clayton, Jackson, and McGhie one block, to the corner of First Street and Second Avenue East. A few people tried to dissuade the mob, but the three men were beaten and then hanged on a light pole. The police then intervened and saved the three other men.

(more at Minnesota Historical Society)

William Brown, lynched in Omaha, NE, 1919
Oxford African American Studies Center
Photo Essay Jim Crow Justice

Rubin Stacey, an African American man accused of "threatening and frightening a white woman," was lynched in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, on July 19, 1935. White children and adults observe his corpse hanging from a tree in this photograph.  Other photos of his lynching exist, showing different gawkers, and one shows a large mob evidently crowding around to see, presumably during the killing itself.

Tipton County, Tennessee Sheriff
W.J. Vaughn flashes light on lynching victim
Albert Gooden during early morning hours of
August 17, 1937.

"[About the same time as another lynching in Florida] "Tennesseeans were smugly telling themselves that it couldn't happen in Tennessee.  On July 19 [1937], Sheriff Vaughan outraced a mob that had formed to lynch Albert Gooden, charged with murder, and got his man to Memphis for safekeeping.  The state was getting credit for a prevented lynching when the Sheriff went to bring Gooden back to the Marion jail.  The Sheriff, it seems, brought the prisoner direct to the waiting mob and delivered him without any protest.  Something had happened in the meantime.  The sheriff had been put on the spot and did his level best to recapture his popular standing with the lynch-minded.  There were but six members in the mob that on August 17 took Gooden away from the peace officer, rushed him to a railroad trestle near Covington, hanged him, and riddled his body with bullets.  There were no arrests, no indictments, and, consequently, no convictions."
Judge Lynch, His First Hundred Years by Frank Shay, pages 248-249

Laura Nelson tried to stop a mob from lynching her son,
and was hanged beside him from a bridge.
May 25, 1911, Okemah, Oklahoma

District Judge Caruthers convened a grand jury in June 1911 to investigate the lynching of Laura Nelson and her son. In his instructions to the jury, he said, "The people of the state have said by recently adopted constitutional provision that the race to which the unfortunate victims belonged should in large measure be divorced from participation in our political contests, because of their known racial inferiority and their dependent credulity, which very characteristic made them the mere tool of the designing and cunning. It is well known that I heartily concur in this constitutional provision of the people's will. The more then does the duty devolve upon us of a superior race and of greater intelligence to protect this weaker race from unjustifiable and lawless attacks."

Postcard depicting the lynching of Lige Daniels, Center, Texas, USA, August 3, 1920. The back reads, "This was made in the court yard in Center, Texas. He is a 16 year old Black boy. He killed Earl's grandma. She was Florence's mother. Give this to Bud. From Aunt Myrtle."
National Great Blacks in Wax Museum

Many lynching victims' names have been forgotten or were never known to the public, or even to their killers.

dated:  1889

unnamed victim circa 1928
Oxford African American Studies Center
Photo Essay Jim Crow Justice

unknown body burned and hanged
Blog:  The Black History Audio Journal

3 unidentified victims
Habersham Co., GA, circa 1910

The reverse of this souvenir postcard reads:
"This is the Barbecue we had last night.  My picture is to the left with a cross over it your son, Joe."

Times have changed.  The numbers are way down, and there are now federal laws against such "hate crimes."  But, at least in Texas, lynching has carried over into the twenty-first century, only the perpetrators are being prosecuted and memorials are being erected to the victims.

Last night, I had switched to some fiction for lighter reading at bedtime, and encountered the passage above.  Thinking about those big animals of the past, and the even bigger megasaurians of a more distant past, I was reminded of several conversations Doug, Greyfox and I have had over monster movies.  Greyfox loves them, and willingly suspends his disbelief.  He knows about the square-cube law, and it doesn't blunt his pleasure in impossibly big insects or killer tomatoes, at all.

It occurred to me to wonder if, perhaps, one reason we don't have anything that big these days is because gravity then was not as strong a force as gravity is now.  A lot of what-ifs ran through my head.  I recalled that heavier bodies have stronger gravitational fields.  It is assumed that several different factors, such as climate change and human predation, killed off a lot of big animals at the end of the Pleistocene Era.  However, fossils show that surviving descendants of some of those big species are not as big as the ancestors were.

Then it occurred to me that geologists and paleontologists generally agree that the much earlier extinction of the dinosaurs, the K-T Extinction was precipitated by an asteroid impact off Yucatan.

The fossil record shows that the impact event caused a disproportionately high number of extinctions in North America.  In an article in the November 1996 issue of Geology, planetary geoscientist Peter H. Schultz of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, and paleooceanographer Steven D'Hondt of the University of Rhode Island:

...cite geological evidence that the asteroid or other object didn't strike the Yucatan head-on; rather, it approached from the southeast and hit at an angle, perhaps 20 to 30 degrees from the horizontal.

The impact forced the searing debris toward the northwest into a parabola-shaped kill zone over western and central North America. This "corridor of incineration," as Schultz and D'Hondt called it, may have ranged beyond the Pacific shore and the Appalachian Mountains, and possibly all the way to Siberia.

dinosauria.com

One alternative theory for the cause of the mass extinctions at the end of the Cretaceous period is a lengthy series of volcanic eruptions close to the plate boundary between India and Africa, that were ongoing at the time of the impact and continued afterward.

Enormous quantities of basalt flooded out over what is now the Deccan Plateau of western India to form huge lava beds called the Deccan Traps.

The possible results of the Deccan Traps eruptions include acid rain, ozone depletion, a greenhouse effect, a cooling effect, or any combination of the above: in other words, many of the same effects cited for an asteroid impact.

Richard Cowen, ucmp.berkeley.edu

I see no reason to doubt that both events could have contributed to the mass extinctions of megafauna.  I can even think of a plausible scenario or two in which these events could have been interrelated.  What if Earth was passing through a debris field and had experienced many smaller meteorite impacts, some of which had struck that plate boundary and triggered exceptional volcanic activity?  Or, what if the gravitational effects of approaching space debris contributed to the upwelling of that gigantic magma plume and/or its emergence between the plates?

But I digress.  My point was that it is not only possible but probable verging on inevitable that the earth has grown heavier, and continues to do so, due to the addition of material from space.  How significant would that be in terms of increased gravitational pull?  How critical would a slight increase be to a big animal?  I was looking for answers to these questions and more when I started my web search today.

I was immediately pleased to find that someone had preceded me in speculating about the effects of attenuated gravity on megafauna... until I read the material I found.  Ted Holden's website apparently no longer exists, but I was able to bring it back with the help of the Wayback Machine.  He is a creationist whose ideas are broadly lampooned.  The man himself is called, variously, a bat, and a loon.  From what I've read, I'd say that's insulting to small flying mammals and weird-sounding waterfowl.  There's even a web quiz that will help you find out if you are Ted Holden.  I'm not.

As far as creationism goes, I'm willing to accept that this finite observable universe and its evolving systems might have been set up by some being or force that transcends the finite and observable, but I don't think it then stuck around to micromanage all the fiddly bits.  My theoretical god knows how to delegate authority.

As a pleasant addition to a day of megafaunal research, quitchick dropped in with a link for me, about a man, Chris Gallucci, who loves elephants.  He works at Tippi Hedren's Shambala Preserve in California.  I suppose there are many women who won't see him as I do, but to me that is one helluva beautiful man.

Playwright Thornton Wilder ( Our Town ),

Discordian non prophet Kerry Thornley,

Anarchist publisher (of Liberty magazine) Benjamin R. Tucker,

...and my mother, were all born on April 17.  My mother would have been 98 today, if she was still alive.  It is probably better that she is not.  She had already had both knees and hips replaced in the decade before she died (in '86 at the age of 75) and I had not seen her truly happy, for more than a brief span of hope at the start of each new relationship, since the early 1950s.

Other notable events on April 17 include the miraculously successful return to earth of the Apollo 13 spacecraft after its having been disabled by a ruptured oxygen tank, and the disastrously unsuccessful Bay of Pigs Invasion in 1961, when a group of CIA-financed and -trained Cuban refugees landed in Cuba with the aim of ousting Fidel Castro.

Now Fidel's brother Raul is expressing willingness to discuss improving relations between the U.S. and Cuba, following some moves in that direction by the Obama administration.

When I write about politics and such, I might seem angry.  I used to be angry a lot.  Very angry, very much of the time.  Injustice infuriated me.  Abuse and discrimination made me want to take up armed resistance.

I guess, "want to," is the relevant part of that statement.  I didn't go postal.  I went within.  I got mellow.  I let myself be taught to cycle from positive to neutral and back.  Then I largely quit thinking about "positive" versus the opposite, or "right", or "good."  I began focusing on details, on what was going on, and I quit trying to judge it.

This has probably worked to everyone's advantage.  I haven't blown any people away or blown any cranial arteries.  I haven't needed to retreat into a fantasy world to escape harsh reality.  Things are just as they are, and what is, IS.  And I am as interested as ever in observing what is, and more capable than ever of understanding it.

Lately, I have been focused on Social Darwinism.  The topic has come up frequently in blogs and news media.  Several times when I encountered it, it has been associated with Ayn Rand, of all people.  Rand's heirs and followers are quick to protest against that spurious connection.  Rand called her philosophy. "Objectivism," and in both her wooden fiction and preachy non-fiction seems oblivious to the subjectivity of her own views.  In their application to social problems and cultural mores,  Social Darwinism and Objectivism might have similarities, but although she was probably influenced by it, Ayn Rand was not the mother of the former.  Social Darwinism was the brainchild of Herbert Spencer (1820-1903).

I don't know why, but that made me think of Puritanism, Cotton Mather (above), and Richard Baxter (below).

"If God shows you a way in which you lawfully get more than in another way (without wrong to your soul, or to any other), if you refuse this, and choose the less gainful way, you cross one of the ends of your calling, and you refuse to be God’s steward." [Baxter]

Why were the Puritans so sure that money was a good thing? Chiefly because they believed that money and wealth were gifts from God...
[and] they decisively dissociated it from the idea of human merit. If it is a gift, how can it be earned? Not only does human effort not guarantee success; even if God blesses work with prosperity, it is God’s grace and not human merit that produces the blessing.

Cotton Mather asserted, "in our occupation we spread our nets; but it is God that brings unto our nets all that comes to them." "If goods be gotten by industry, providence, and skill," wrote John Robinson, "it is God’s blessing that both gives the faculty, and the use of it, and the success unto it." The Puritan ethic is an ethic of grace, not of human merit.

Puritans saw an inverse relationship between wealth and godliness. It did not have to turn out this way, but in their view it usually did. "Remember that riches do make it harder for a man to be saved," warned Richard Baxter

source:  Leland Ryken

It is liberating to realize that I do not need to pass judgment on the beliefs of those long-dead men.  I am free to wonder just how much they actually believed that stuff themselves, and how much of it was hypocritical self-serving bullshit.  Their beliefs, whether stated or not, are no more my concern than anyone else's beliefs.  I know that the external world in which I live is shaped by other people's beliefs, but I take that as a challenge, not a problem.  If you don't already know where I stand on the subject of "belief," it's just because you haven't gotten to know me.

Have you gotten to know this man yet?

He is Rahm Emanuel, Pres. Obama's Chief of Staff, author of a quotation you might have heard and probably will hear more than once:  "Never let a serious crisis go to waste."  I think I know what he meant, but I don't think he really knew what he was saying, if you know what I mean.

I have frittered away my morning watering flowers in Fairyland and looking up material in encyclopedia articles and primary sources.  Now I have a few hours to read and digest it all and produce a blog entry before my son takes over the computer for his D&D session.  I think I can.

Is that true?  I was changing all along, even before I gained any self-acceptance.  Now that I have learned to accept myself, what is true is that I have more control over the direction of some of my changes.  Some, but not all -- I continue to change in ways I haven't anticipated or intended, too.

Is anything said in words really true?  ...when words mean whatever anybody says they mean?

Take, for example, "justice," "the maintenance or administration of what is just."

So unjust laws and extralegal justice may or may not be real and true, oxymoronic, or paradoxical, depending on how one feels about the words involved.

But, jumping back to Carl Rogers, would we have to accept things outside ourselves "as they are" before we can change them?  I suppose that a large number of "us" or one or two of the very powerful or influential ones among us would have to accept that "things" need to be changed, before such change would be initiated, unless things just accidentally change by themselves.

Things do change.  That would be a comforting thought if things always changed in ways that I desire for them to change.  That's not the way it goes.

Jumping back to "justice," which was what I had on my mind when I started this little rant today, life isn't fair -- but "life" and happenstance are a lot more fair, just, and impartial than people are.  Natural systems and events are less likely to favor rich white people than, for example, the U.S. criminal justice system is.

That is a demonstrable, documented fact.  I won't argue it, and I have a damned hard time accepting it, but I certainly would like to see it change.  How do we change it?  It's hard to achieve meaningful change there, especially when most of the judges and justices in the system are rich white men.

Criminal justice is only one of the matters on my mind.  There is also social justice.  Is it fair that a few people have ridiculously extravagant luxury while many people lack even life's necessities?  If that's not fair, then would it be more effective to tax the rich and restrict a few of their luxuries to provide some necessities for a lot of little people, or would it be more effective to arm the little people and train them in guerilla tactics?

I dunno.  What do you think?

It's not exactly a new book.  It was acquired by the library of University of Alaska Southeast, in Juneau, in January, 2006.  But I'm the first person to check it out, and its condition is pristine.

The author is an anthropologist.  He made a point of saying that this work was written at the end of a long career, and that it synthesizes and supplements two previous books.

Anthropology was my first major in college, and my greatest academic hero is Gregory Bateson, an anthropologist but so much more than just an anthropologist.

I have read the introduction and first chapter, and was impressed with the author's depth, his readable style, and his familiarity with both the history of his field and its current directions.

I will be able to tell you more when I've finished reading it.  I'm only about a tenth of the way through it. 

Bit of background for those out of the loop:

We do not have running water, but we do have indoor plumbing, the standard stuff that comes in trailers mobile homes trailers.  Fresh water comes in from the spring in jugs and buckets.  Gray water goes out either down the drain to the drain field out back or into the "slop bucket" to be dumped by hand out by the compost pile. 

In winter, drains freeze and everything goes into the slop bucket.  This time of year, sometimes the drains actually drain.  We got faked out recently, after a brief thaw.  A load of dishwater dumped from the dishpan stayed in the sink, and got pretty rank from some stuff sucked out of the trap as I  unsuccessfully wielded the plunger.

I'm the "mom."  The "kid" isn't one... but he is, if you know what I mean.

Well, it wasn't then, but now, a few hours later, the gunk is gone.

This week's subject is suggested by Gitarezan --
 

Go ahead and guess... or just tell me if you know what it is.  One of these things, I haven't a clue what it is.  Another, just a little clue is all I have.  I'm guessing that each object is not quite complete or functional as is.

Everyone is welcome to join in. All you have to do is post one or more photos regarding this subject on your site and comment HERE that you have posted, so we can all come by and have a look.  The photo challenge is not a contest. It's not about who comes up with the best photo or who has the most expensive equipment. It is about people from all over the world who love taking pictures.