Farming gets in your blood and calls you back.
My grandfather-with-a-secret-identity used to say, "I've milked enough cows to last a lifetime," because he was pretending that he'd grown up on a farm in upstate New York and not attending yeshiva in Manhattan.
I like to say, "Zero is a valid number to last a lifetime."
People who grew up on actual farms made fun of me because I never saw a living chicken until I was 15 or so.
My parents forbid me from detassling corn, which was very good money for kids. Like four kids who did it got leukemia.
Omg. That's awful. From the pesticides?
Nothing was proven. My parents didn't wait for the science to catch up. Only one kid died, because his parents were Jehovah's Witnesses.
Clusters do happen and some huge percentage of kids did that kind of work.
Let's bring back the Puritan tradition of funny compound names, like Praisegod Barebones or whatever, in this context. Then you could name your kid Docrimes Begay.
I have a lot to say about this, of course. The article is pretty good for what it is but it leaves out a lot of the larger context.
"Begay" means "son of" and it's by far the most common Navajo surname, as you might expect from that.
New Mexico is better than Arizona anyway.
So, the main thing the article leaves out is the economics of all this. Traditional Navajo sheep raising during the Reservation period wasn't primarily a subsistence activity but a market-oriented activity based on selling wool through the trading post system to global markets, despite being organized at the individual household level. Sort of like peasant cash-cropping in a lot of other parts of the world, although there was very little cash involved per se and it was mostly a credit system where traders would advance goods on credit against the wool harvest when shearing came. (There was a secondary market in lambs as well but wool was the primary commodity. Arts and crafts, including weaving as well as silversmithing, was a niche market that most traders did a little business in and a few built up as a specialty.)
This system worked very well during its heyday in the early- to mid-twentieth century, but starting in the '50s with the introduction of synthetic fabrics the global wool market slowly declined, accentuated in the '70s by an influx of cheap wool from Australia and New Zealand that collapsed the price of wool and really killed off the trading post system, which was already declining due to changes in Navajo society. (This article talks about the overall decline. I haven't found anything showing the collapse in the '70s; detailed price series I've found don't go back far enough. Consider that part oral history for now.)
So sheepherding is no longer really a realistic economic basis for Navajo society and hasn't been for a while. People have continued to do it for cultural reasons, but it becomes harder to maintain large herds on that basis especially with environmental changes leading to drier conditions, so people are shifting away from it. Additionally, ambitious men who want to remain in the rural livestock economy and make a profit have for decades been shifting to beef cattle ranching instead. Sheep are traditionally the property of the women of a household but cattle can be owned by men personally, so in addition to a stronger demand there's a sociocultural aspect to that change.
Anyway, like I said, the article is interesting, and basically accurate as far as it goes, but it neglects this context which I think is important for understanding the overall situation.
Lovely book:
https://uwapress.uw.edu/book/9780295991412/dreaming-of-sheep-in-navajo-country/
Lovely book:
https://uwapress.uw.edu/book/9780295991412/dreaming-of-sheep-in-navajo-country/
Anyway, adding to teo's point, there's also a very uncomfortable chapter of economic history in Navajo country: the Long Walk divided the Diné in many ways, including allowing some relatively affluent people to consolidate relatively huge herds and grazing lands when others were removed to the Bosque Redondo/Fort Sumner.
19: Yes, another aspect of this period was the development of extensive economic inequality within Navajo society. This was very much in tension with the Navajo tradition of social and political egalitarianism.
On the ecological issues and stock reduction, Richard White's The Roots of Dependency has a good section on this.
15: Were they ever able to build up a surplus in good times, or were they working off debt-bondage? An Amazon review for Roots of Dependency mentions liquor-on-credit as a tool of creating debt for the Choctaw.
22: I'm not sure, actually. I don't recall the Navajo part of Roots of Dependency mentioning debt-bondage as an issue the way it was for a lot of other groups in a similar situation. I think it probably was less of an issue in practice because most traders weren't really interested in using debt to acquire anything the Navajos had; reservation land was inalienable by this point, and while some traders did have their own sheep herds I'm not aware of any that used debt default to acquire sheep from customers.
The main kind of debt default that did happen was dead pawn, which some traders did sell for a substantial profit. This was very controversial though and was eventually banned.
Thinking about this a bit further, another characteristic of the Navajo trade that may have made kept it from resulting in debt-bondage: the individual posts were highly decentralized and independent, and there was a lot of competition. If people didn't like their local trader, they would just go to the next post, even if that was 100 miles away (as it often was). Navajos were and are very dispersed and mobile in lifestyle and not at all tied to trading at the closest store. This greatly reduced the leverage that an individual trader had to force his customers into any kind of subordinate relationship. If they ran up a huge tab then never brought in their wool to pay it off he didn't really have any options except to refuse to extend any more credit if they came in again. Unlike in a lot of colonial trading contexts, there was no hegemonic company that controlled all the posts and could set terms of trade. Some families, like mine, would end up owning several stores collectively over time, but any coordination would have been very rudimentary and informal and no one had a monopoly in any given area.
Most of the Navajo Reservation is in fact in Arizona.
My parents forbid me from detassling corn, which was very good money for kids. Like four kids who did it got leukemia.
I spent two summers detasseling corn and this is concerning to me.
They got leukemia as kids. Back during the Reagan administration.
Ok I don't think I was detasseling until George H. W. Bush.
A thing I worry about is that baby powder is apparently the thing to spray all over everyone to celebrate at high school football games, etc. I am very sure it's likely they buy the cheapest offbrand kind, and the company has not switched necessarily from talc to cornstarch, and they're all going to get meothelioma from the asbestos in it.
I wouldn't worry. The brain injury will catch up with them first.
You can get a good deal on Asbestos R Us brand baby powder down at the Dollar Store.
15 is interesting and sounds fascinatingly similar to the way the wool economy worked in the Scottish Highlands - except that the locals were, a lot of the time, processing the wool themselves as well and selling the yarn and the cloth, rather than just selling fleeces. And a similar thing has happened to the wool market in Scotland as well. Met some sheep farmers the other day who were burning their fleeces because they simply can't sell them - you still need to shear the sheep for their welfare, but no one wants to buy the fleece. Mostly people wear acrylic, or they get cheaper wool from abroad.
There was also an incredibly complex system of traders, bank credit notes etc, which is fascinating to read about, but that was for beef cattle droving, not for wool.
re: 35
I don't know much about the Scottish wool economy, but that all rings true from the tiny bit I'm familiar with.
I've actually been actively shopping for Scottish made* knitwear recently--winter is coming, and a lot of my jumpers are past their end of life, and I'd like to support the industry--and it's slightly frustrating, although the pricing is nowhere near as expensive as you might expect for some things if you aren't paying a designer premium.
* Scottish wool/yarn, and manufacture.
The modern wool economy is completely incomprehensible to me, based on my conversations with a) local sheep farmers who are literally unable to give their fleeces away and b) avid knitters in my family who are desperate for yarn and will pay through the nose for it. I feel there should be some way to make both these people happy!
The rough maths is, apparently, that you pay someone £2 to shear your sheep, and you can then sell the fleece (if at all) for £1 a kilo. A fleece would yield about 2kg of wool, and that can be spun into about 40 50g balls of yarn which sells for about £4 for a ball.
You see the problem.
Sorry, 20 balls of yarn per fleece. But still.
Looking at this, the problem seems to be that processing the wool is incredibly costly compared to the cost of the wool. About £60-70 per kilo. So a 2kg fleece would cost £120 to process and would yield wool worth £80...
At the Dalles the Wishrams and Wascos derived between 30 and 40 percent of their annual energy requirements from salmonDid PNW Native state formation occur that far inland? Sounds like an ideal environment.
60-70 per kilo seems bizarre. At those prices hand-spinning on wooden wheels seems profitable. ????
The salmon spin the turbines. Everyone says it's the water flowing down that does, but it's not.
42: I agree! It is high, though not quite as high, in the US - first one I found https://www.blackberry-ridge.com/pricserv.htm
gives $5/lb for carding, $5/lb for washing, $12/lb for spinning - so total processing cost of $22/lb or £40/kg.
I switched to wool sweaters, but still there's no way I use a much wool as someone years ago who wore suits.
Thinking about it, that's a reasonably high difference. Unfortunately shipping costs and customs costs would probably eat most of it, so it wouldn't be worth outsourcing it to the US.
45: this is in fact the main problem. That and, apparently, the sort of person who would like to wear natural locally-produced clothing with no microplastics, and would pay a premium for it, is also, increasingly, a vegan, and so won't wear wool for that reason.
I'm not sure whether this can really be a major reason though. True, vegans are spindly, weak, anaemic creatures who will therefore be much more likely to need warm clothing, but there just aren't that many of them around.
re: 47
I wonder if fashion might be enough to drive it, a bit? But then again the sort of people who will spend £100-£150 for or a sweater are people like me, I expect, who like the idea of locally produced clothing, and paying garment workers a living wage, and are old enough to afford it, but maybe can't afford to buy that way for everything. People who are vastly outnumbered by the fast-fashion young--who buy a lot of units of clothing--or those who can't really afford to spend a lot on clothes (or who don't care).
anaemic creatures who will therefore be much more likely to need warm clothing
Climate change.
The Hudson Bay blanket we have must be the champion for using wool. It's too nice to not keep, but we've rarely used it because it's heavy and bulky.
48: I think fashion is driving a lot of it - and fashion in the broad sense, as in "overall patterns in what people are wearing" as well as "what is trendy right now, this month, among fashion-conscious people". Fifty years ago, for example, if you were just a normal middle-class middle-aged bloke, you'd have a woollen broadcloth suit - or several. You might well have one or several woollen or tweed jackets for casual wear. You'd have a woollen overcoat. You'd have woollen sweaters, woollen scarves, woollen gloves, woollen socks, maybe a felt hat or a tweed cap. You'd sleep under woollen blankets. If you worked in a uniformed job, anything from bus driver to army officer, that probably meant a woollen tunic.
All of that's pretty much gone now. You've maybe got one suit. Your cold-weather gear is artificial fibres and fleece, so is your uniform. You sleep under a duvet. Your casual clothing is cotton and artificial fibres and maybe a leather jacket.
I do have all of the wool clothing mentioned there except for the uniforms. Just not nearly as many as my father did at my age. Also, I don't wear some of them often, so they don't need replaced. My wool overcoats are 30 and 20 years old.
re: 51
Yeah. I probably have a bit more that's wool than that and not as much artificial fibres as some. Several sweaters, several base layers that are merino (which isn't going to help Scottish sheep farmers or woollen mills), tweedy sports coat/pea coat, etc.
But the broad thrust of what you're saying is right. There's still a lot more cotton and artificial fibres than there would have been fifty years ago, and much less wool, and much much less UK produced wool.
There's also down, which existed 50 years ago but wasn't socially acceptable for adults to wear in regular life. In real cold, it takes many pounds of wool to be as warm as with a down coat.
re: 55 The one really nice wool overcoat I had--Crombie cloth, made by some proper tailor that I bought in second hand, probably cost several week's wages when it was new--but I never wore it because unless it was well below freezing it was always too warm. The one advantage of down coats, for me anyway, is that they cover a much wider range of temperatures comfortably.
And you can shove the light ones in your bag if it gets warm.
The Hudson Bay blanket we have must be the champion for using wool. It's too nice to not keep, but we've rarely used it because it's heavy and bulky.
Weighted blankets - all-natural, no beads!
True, but also the house has to be about fifty degrees before you don't bake under it.
I own one of these beauties https://arthurbeale.co.uk/collections/beerenberg-pullovers, and it is ideal for the cold weather, but I appreciate that the chainmail-like weight, intense scratchiness and distinct sheepy odour may not be ideal for everyone.
Down is great, as long as you keep it dry - if it gets soaked, it's useless, while wool will keep you warm-ish as it dries on you.
Synthetic insulation is better than wool for that. But mostly I don't wear a down coat if it is above freezing.
I do have a 100% wool rain coat. It's woven very tightly and not treated with a waterproofing chemical. It mostly works as advertised.
Synthetic insulation is better than wool for that.
True, alas. The Buffalo jacket and its successors are great.
I need cozy sweaters that don't make you overheat when it's 80 degrees out and you just really want to wear a sweater.
I found a Rab belay jacket for $50 that is now my backpacking layer for moderate cold. For when I'm stopped, not while moving.
(Actually, my secret is to get open stitch sweaters or summer-weight sweaters. It just helps it feel more like fall and winter.)
I bought this cashmere sweater in the discounted part of the Johnston's of Elgin factory store when we went on a tour (for like £120 discounted from £300+). At the time I was very torn about it being expensive, but it very quickly became one of my favorite items of clothing, and now I wish I'd looked for more things. Works at a wide range of cold-ish temperatures and lets me travel without a down coat often (especially because I always have a light rain jacket, and light rain jacket over a sweater works instead of a winter coat in a pinch).
How do you get down off a Scot anyway?
the Long Walk divided the Diné in many ways, including allowing some relatively affluent people to consolidate relatively huge herds and grazing lands when others were removed to the Bosque Redondo/Fort Sumner.
Displacing the poorer and marginalised members of a relatively egalitarian clan-based society, allowing the powerful ones to consolidate their holdings into huge sheep farms, sounds extremely Highland Clearances-ish. (I'd never heard of the Long Walk.)
51: also, better insulation and central heating. But wool is great. I had a thrifted wool sweater with some loud pattern that I used a a ski mid layer, but only on the coldest of days. I'd overheat otherwise.
These parallels to Scotland are indeed fascinating.
Did PNW Native state formation occur that far inland? Sounds like an ideal environment.
"State formation" isn't quite right; the PNW is better thought of as a region of highly complex but non-state societies. But yes, the general culture area did extend that far inland, although it starts to grade into the Plateau cultures around there.
71: I hadn't rally thought of the economic differentiation as associated with the Long Walk specifically, but it's definitely true that some of the wealthiest families were in remote areas like southern Utah where people were able to hide out in the canyons and avoid being rounded up.
AIUI sheep breeders are re-introducing wild sheep fleeces, the ones that fall off themselves, because of the shift in what's saleable.
I know some fibershed people but it doesn't make a *lot* of sense to me; 20,000 years of clothing fiber being excellently tradeable, as Wayland Barber said. OTOH "maximize utility of resilience-maximizing mixed agriculture" really doesn't market itself.
clew!!
76.1: As in the sheep whose main use is now meat?
Minivet!
I assume! Though cheese can be profitable apparently.
Also considered, wool for building insulation, etc. But that's likely to be even less per pound.
The link in 15 talks about some interesting experimental work on alternative uses for wool. Apparently the dirty wool from the tail etc. makes good fertilizer!
Except when a giant sturgeon jammed the machine and its smashed and torn body had to be removed manually, the slaughter was purely mechanical.
There's a Heinrich Böll short story in which the former Nazi tyrant of a small town turns up as a salesman in a factory that makes pretty much that machine. He's very keen on jumping into the blades to impress the prospects.
The social organization of Indians was not reducible to control of the rapids or access to salmon; there were no recorded "tribal" conflicts over resources or territory.But why? Why not prestige goods bought with fish? Why not monopolize fishing spots and portages (often at the same places)? Why not enclosure of fishing grounds for elite accumulation? Why not warfare and slaving upstream and down?
[...]
The caloric energy of fish was the great wealth of the fishing places, but it could not readily be translated into other forms of wealth with higher prestige value. Food had a different social meaning than did slaves, dentalium shells, or canoes.
[...]
And because the fish had expended some of their fat in reaching the Dalles, salmon dried there had a lower oil content and would keep better than fish caught lower down. This was prime dried salmon and would be traded, usually for other types of food, up and down the river.
[...]
And fish, in any case, had little to do with the competitive social rankings of people and villages apparent in ceremonies such as the potlatch. It was wealth in scarce and valuable goods--in slaves from more distant peoples or dentalium shells or trade goods--that buttressed such rankings. Food, usually abundant and of lesser prestige, could not normally obtain such things. The Dalles and Celilo, the great fisheries and site of this exchange of wealth, thus ranked below the winter towns and villages lower down the Columbia. The winter villages of the lower river where related males lived were the sites of riskier and higher-prestige activities: slave raids, warfare, and religious performances.
there is an understandable tendency to romanticize and even invent pasts in which the planet was nurturing and humans simply accepting and grateful. And the Colombia, with the annual passage of millions of fish, invites such images.Except, apparently, to this twisted mind.
I find salmon prestigious. But they didn't have bagels or cream cheese.
there is an understandable tendency to romanticize and even invent pasts in which the planet was nurturing and humans simply accepting and grateful.
OTOH if the planet had been a bit less nurturing and these guys had had to work a bit harder to survive, they might have had less time for slave raids.
Or more incentives to raid for slaves.
I can't eat a real bagel right now. The dentist said I could eat a bagel if it was soft. This is my first gentile dentist in a couple of decades and I feel like she doesn't understand eating. Uneasy lies the head that wears a temporary crown.
More slaves -> more dried fish -> longer raiding range -> more slaves.
Maybe the bears would eat therm if they didn't leave enough fish?
Them. Anyway, before guns, the woods must have been a very different experience in terms of bears.
I don't mean different if you carry a gun. I mean bears have had a long time to learn that avoiding people is good.
Or more incentives to raid for slaves.
This actually made me think a bit, but I think it's wrong; slaves are a luxury good. If you are living right on the marginal edge of survival, then one man-day of work produces one man-day worth of bare minimum subsistence. If you add a slave, you're adding someone who is inherently less productive of subsistence than yourself (because he's a slave), but who also requires one man-day worth of bare minimum subsistence, and you'll have spent several man-days of unproductive time on the slave raid that brought him back.
But people in places where a slave or serf would consume 90% of the food they produced did capture slaves and conquer lands with serfs.
93-4:
"die operator hardly ever dips his nett without taking one and sometimes two Salmon, so that I call it speaking within bounds when I say that an experienced hand would by assiduity catch at least 500 daily."And then there's processing and drying.
But people in places where a slave or serf would consume 90% of the food they produced did capture slaves and conquer lands with serfs.
Thinking about it, the Allen ratio is about households, not individuals. So you could have a situation where slavery made sense even in ratio 1 circumstances, because you could add one or two more productive members to a household, to help support the useless mouths (children, the elderly).
Also there is a big difference between 90% and 100%. If it's 90%, then an enslaver can live a life of ease with just 10 slaves.
But, I think, slavery makes a lot more sense in richer environments.
If you consume 90% of what you produce, and slaves are just as productive as free men, getting a slave takes you from 1.1 subsistence to 1.2, and you're working almost as hard as ever. If you consume 10% of what you produce, then getting a slave means you don't have to work at all, and you've doubled your disposable income.
This is just speculation, though, and if there's work been done on the point in 94 I'd love to see it.
I think, also, there is a distinction to be made in 94 between slave raiding and capturing lands with serfs. In slave raiding you're bringing the slave home with you to work on your land - if your land's poor, then the point about consumption vs production arises. In feudal conquest the serfs stay where they are, and by capturing their land you're really just winning a fight with their previous overlord over who gets their surplus production.
I don't know of any, but Unmitigated Pedantry has lots of stuff on supporting an army moving on foot through agricultural land that has me thinking about how much you can steal from a peasant. You can indeed steal lots more in an area with high food production.
Unmitigated Pedantry is great. It's made me want to design a fantasy wargame focussed entirely on logistics. The battles happen somewhere off screen while you're wrestling with prioritising the cartloads of pegasus fodder vs the cartloads of replacement scrying crystals, and casting spells like Summon Greater Demon With Very Large Wheelbarrow and Enhanced Zone of Mechanical Reliability.
Alt-Wellington: all you can count on the pegasuses to do is to gallop MUCH too far MUCH too fast!
Less
"The dark fire shall not avail you, flame of Udun! Go back to the shadows! You shall not pass!"
and more
"Hey, you! That's right, you stupid Kraut bastards! That's right! Say hello to Ford! And General fucking Motors! You stupid fascist pigs, look at you! You have horses! What were you thinking?"
Devereaux is great. "The tyranny of the wagon equation" made these issues clear. Stealing from peasants ahoy.
77, 78: I think we're going to see a rise in sheep and goat value for their grazing capacity and ability to keep landscape fuel loads low without much human labor.
In the sense that goats are very good desertification engines, and deserts have very low fuel loads.
That's a depressingly plausible accidental effect. Possibly better than letting the fires switch us to a desert ecology by themselves.
83, 93: this is largely from reading all the little museum plaques in youth, but I don't believe the Salish Sea inhabitants were living a subsistence life, and probably not the people along the Columbia River either. It wasn't a fully marketized life but there was food without anything like fulltime endeavor getting it; plenty of time for art and raiding. But the little museum plaques are very silent on what the slaves did, or why the population didn't grow to exceed even the lavish natural resources. teofilo, MC, recommendations?
If properly managed, as Dr. Whoops has been doing for the last few years, a herd of goats can do a nice job of transforming scrubby underbrush to something more like parkland -- short grass with big trees at intervals. The transformation in the 50 acres she moved onto with a bunch of goats about four or five years back has been astonishing.
This is just speculation, though, and if there's work been done on the point in 94 I'd love to see it.
There is indeed a very large literature on the productivity of slavery and related issues, of which I have read only a very small amount. It's largely focused on Africa, which has a complex and fascinating history of internal slavery in addition to its role in various external slave trades. I'll see if I can dig up some references.
(Back to the OP, however, it's notable that some of the wealthy herding families VW mentioned also acquired slaves, who fit very awkwardly into traditionally egalitarian Navajo society. The institution didn't last long but it's remarkable that it existed at all.)
this is largely from reading all the little museum plaques in youth, but I don't believe the Salish Sea inhabitants were living a subsistence life, and probably not the people along the Columbia River either. It wasn't a fully marketized life but there was food without anything like fulltime endeavor getting it; plenty of time for art and raiding. But the little museum plaques are very silent on what the slaves did, or why the population didn't grow to exceed even the lavish natural resources. teofilo, MC, recommendations?
There's also a large literature on this and I'll look for some references. This characterization is basically correct, and the PNW societies are famous as complex hunter-gatherers with a considerable surplus that allowed a range of non-subsistence activities but for whatever reason didn't result in a transition into higher levels of sociopolitical complexity. The slaves largely did tedious craft work to make high-prestige goods for long-distance trade (e.g., jade axes and dentalium beads).
Jade seems like a stupid thing to make an axe from.
The actual pronunciation of Squamish (or how Wikipedia renders it in IPA, at least) is pretty intimidating: sqʷχʷoʔməʃ.
114: As words in PNW languages go that one is actually pretty easy. Two whole vowels and only two or three guttural consonants!
I am enjoying the dynamic where we simply shout queries at teo and he meekly agrees to go off and find reading lists, but I think it only fair to offer to do the same, if he (or indeed i) can think of anything I might know anything about.
I'll come up with the lists eventually! There's just been a lot of snow and stuff lately.
I assume he's just working from the top of his head.
I waste a lot of time on reddit often just doing that, answering people's questions that they could have looked up themselves, because I find it fun. Mostly questions about maps, and mostly answered more glibly than teo who is a lot more responsible than I am about only talking about things he understands well.
118: I am, which is why I'm not able to provide specific citations on request.
The citations are all there somewhere in my master list, but teasing them out by subject takes some work.
Ahah! Searching in teo's list:
Salish only gets linguistic references
Northwest: aha!
Ames, Kenneth M.
2001. Slaves, Chiefs and Labour on the Northern Northwest Coast. World Archaeology 33: 1-17.
Ames, Kenneth M., and Herbert D. G. Maschner
1999. Peoples of the Northwest Coast: Their Archaeology and Prehistory. New York: Thames and Hudson.
I mean, that sounds like plenty for a tyro to start with.
thank you teo!
122: Thanks! And yeah, the Ames and Maschner book would be the place I'd suggest starting. It's very much an archaeological take so it can get a bit dry and technical but still a good start.
117 makes me feel even guiltier because now I imagine him staggering through endless blizzards, nunataks, williwaws, gendarmes, nunataks and terminal moraines in order to reach the bibliography hut.
Drucker, Philip
1939. Rank, Wealth, and Kinship in Northwest Coast Society. American Anthropologist (n. s.) 41: 55-65.
Hall, Roberta L., and Don Alan Hall
1991. The Village at the Mouth of the Coquille River: Historical Questions of Who, When, and Where. Pacific Northwest Quarterly 82: 101-108.
... Man, *such* a pity that Covid and everything put such a kibosh on home entertaining, because a subscription to _Pacific Northwest Quarterly_ would be such a move in a particular game of coffee-table-upmanship.
Now that you can buy plastic eggs that open easily, I don't see the point.
the shelf stable powdered eggs that are, in fact, reasonably egg-like, too
Real eggs stay on shelves if you put little holes in the shelves.
117 makes me feel even guiltier because now I imagine him staggering through endless blizzards, nunataks, williwaws, gendarmes, nunataks and terminal moraines in order to reach the bibliography hut.
Pretty much, yeah! But nevertheless I persevere.
I just pushed the walk button for three Orthodox boys crossing the street. One said "thanks." So, I'm like Wendy Bell bringing hope, except without being near a Cheesecake Factory.
||
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/ukraine-establishes-several-bridgeheads-eastern-bank-dnipro-military-2023-11-17/
Maybe just news cycle. But, still.
|>
That's good news, there's been a lot of successful AFU activity on and across the Dnipro in Kherson during this counteroffensive that's been severely underreported. It's just so disappointing that their main thrust in Zaporizhzhia has been a failure but there will be others. Also unfortunate that the world's attention is focused elsewhere and that the Biden administration has undermined their international rules based order rhetoric with their backing of war crimes by Israel in Gaza many of which are the same they've rightly condemned Russia for committing. This has not gone unnoticed in the rest of the world. And now coincidentally I'm off to a conference by institution is hosting where this will be a major topic of discussion.
Why they scheduled a two day conference to start on the weekend here is beyond me.
I'm fully expecting to get some flack for supporting the defense of Ukraine but we'll see.
Because people will argue that Israel is bad, and the US is supporting Israel, therefore the US is bad, and the US is also supporting Ukraine, therefore Ukraine must be bad? Good grief.
||
May December is pretty good, despite being incredibly heavy-handed.
|>
In a sense the Columbia River dams made the Pacific Northwest a region. The lines of the Bonneville Power Administration marked the region's boundaries.
136 with the one egregiously stupid exception the papers and discussion has been surprisingly good. I refrained from saying anything in that Q&A but I'm about to give that one guy who ascribed the unprovoked Russian attack on Ukraine to a "media narrative" a piece of my mind.
Fish that spawned above the Grand Coulee were trapped at the Rock Island Dam and carried in specially designed fish trucks to Icicle Creek. They were held in ponds designed "to duplicate as nearly as possible a natural environment." When their eggs ripened, they were artificially spawned. Their bodies were dehydrated, ground up, and fed to their own young.
Because people will argue that Israel is bad, and the US is supporting Israel, therefore the US is bad, and the US is also supporting Ukraine, therefore Ukraine must be bad?
Opposing US policy across the board is overly broad but at least has some logical reasoning behind it. This is in contrast to US Republicans, who will boast about their support for Israel but also support Russia because Trump supports Russia.
Don't bother with "Dream Scenario". Nice idea, poor execution.
140 I've paddle-boarded on Icicle Creek. Then beer and brats in Leavenworth.
So we watched the first 2 episodes of the new season of The Crown.
That the world was not destroyed by hellfire and brimstone following the events depicted there is conclusive evidence that there's no God.
So the White Columbia book is interesting but also platitudinous. I found the latter outweighed the former, but I know almost nothing about the Columbia.
Lot of water, lot of elevation drop. Resource extraction -- trees and minerals -- has led to a lot of degradation.
Maybe read up on the Kootenay (that's the Canadian spelling) and Nez Perce people.
You can listen to some Woody Guthrie. Here's something newer, even if not new: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sf8iaOyewCs
109: Surprisingly, no. Mostly they just hang out.
108: There are folks around here who rent out there goats for clearing underbrush/invasive plants.
If you ask how much for the goats to wear stockings, they hang up.
Finished this installment of The Crown. After playing Chas pretty unfavorably, they let him be the only one in the whole gang who understands the thing.
The reviews make interesting reading. https://amp.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2023/nov/16/the-crown-season-6-review-so-bad-its-like-an-out-of-body-experience-netflix
150: Nah, they promote safe sex by putting a red ribbon on the ones that kick.
While the North Pacific has often been depicted, like the South, as a location of stunning ecological abundance, resources are often concentrated and highly seasonal, and therefore contested and fiercely protected.30 The difficulty of finding labour to process the sudden but temporary influxes of salmon, for example, may have been a primary motive for slave raids and the captive workers they provided on the Northwest Coast.Citing Leland Donald, Aboriginal Slavery on the Northwest Coast of North America (Berkeley 1997)
I think Amazon wants to get holiday workers that way too.
155: By putting a red ribbon on the ones that kick?
152 I agree about the ghost thing. I find it easy to buy the victim-of-the-papparazzi storyline, but the victim of the Fayeds story depends on some pretty big leaps regarding her own motivations. The Fayed scheme, as presented, is basically insane. Maybe it's more or less valid; I don't have to care because none of these people are any more real to me than Romeo, Falstaff, or Hamlet. The show should be approached as a historical fiction soap opera. Whether one character muttered to another at a particular point (as opposed to saying the same thing behind closed doors, or probably just thinking it) isn't important: this is not a documentary.
If it's true that Chas wasn't really any more aware of how D's death would affect the population than anyone else, it's an interesting narrative choice to make the change. Maybe we'll see him, in the next tranche of the thing, continuing at a different level of awareness than the rest of the gang, or at least being way less insufferable than he's been up to now.
It reads like the writers cared a gread deal about making it plausible for Mohamed Al-Fayed to reasonably but incorrectly believe her death was a big conspiracy against him (the dropped call, etc.).
A far better explanation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Irvuafg5GM
The 1806 joint Russian/American/Aleut/ Alutiq/Hawaiian discovery of Humboldt Bay, California, commemorated its beach crossing with a slaughter of the local Indians, who were intent on protecting their marine resources from these unknown invaders.
After 1990 these trans-Pacific connections stimulated in the Siberian Yup'ik a cultural rebirth, as their American relatives on St Lawrence Island taught them the Yup'ik language and instructed them in traditional hunting skills lost for a generation under Soviet power.
However, torso sex toys have no limbs and usually no head. It only has sex holes (vagina and anus), penis, breasts, etc.
It's those extra 0.4lbs that really show you care.