Musings of an anarchist misfit
Published at 07:37 on 13 February 2017
I lived in New Mexico as a teen, and learned early on that if there’s a spell of abnormally warm weather in the cooler months of the year, it typically ends abruptly. Two days ago, highs were in the 70s.
Flying back to the Pacific Northwest this afternoon.
Published at 16:31 on 3 January 2017
Something told me that I should go to the Grand Forest Hilltop and look at the Olympics this afternoon. I didn’t expect to see this cloud formation, but when I saw it it was no mystery why it is there, while the rest of the sky is cloudless under dry high pressure.
Were having cold outflow winds this week. As the dry interior air from the BC interior exits the Fraser Valley and crosses the Salish Sea, it picks up moisture from the relatively warm (about 50 °F) salt water. When that wind hits the Olympic Mountains, some of it is forced to rise and cool, causing the moisture to condense and form that cloud. Sometimes the effect is profound enough to cause an area of snow to fall on that region.
Published at 22:00 on 29 December 2016
This. (It’s not the best-designed web site. Click on the three dot-dash symbols at upper left if it seems to end mid-work without showing the whole thing.)
Yes, Derrick Jensen is something of an asshole (check out some of his rants about anarchists and transgendered people if you don’t believe me). No, I don’t buy his claim that the only viable alternative to civilization is stone-age tribalism.
But, that said, the guy (and his co-authors) does have some valid promises about this civilization being so destructive that it must be ended, the sooner the better, in part because the official mechanisms of power are pretty much useless for the purpose of arresting and reversing the destruction.
Update: Note that this endorsement of the book with the title Deep Green Resistance is not an endorsement of the organization by the same name. The latter appears to be dominated by a cult of personality around Derrick Jensen as much as the Revolutionary Communist Party is by a cult of personality around Bob Avakian.
Published at 11:44 on 9 December 2016
About three inches fell overnight before changing to rain and starting to melt. Judging by the extended forecast outlook, I may well see more scenes like one below in the coming weeks.
Published at 20:24 on 6 December 2016
The first snow of the season fell yesterday. Just a few flakes at the tail end of a band of showers that started as cold rain and changed to snow then ended. Didn’t even stick to the ground.
Now it looks like there’s a decent chance for more snow on Thursday, maybe as much as 7 inches. Which is an exciting possibility because it would be very big news if it comes to pass; snow is not very common here. We haven’t had 7 inches total in the three winters I’ve lived on the Island.
Extended forecasts are all generally hinting at below-normal temperatures with continued chances of lowland snow. Maybe this winter will make up for the past several ones, which have been unusually skimpy in the snow department. (There was no sticking snow at all last year. We don’t get much snow, but we do usually get at least one storm per year that turns the ground white.)
Published at 15:36 on 31 October 2016
I spend altogether too much time on You Tube and when I ran across a channel called The Texas Snake Hunter, naturally I thought the worst. Imagine my pleasant surprise when I discovered it’s exactly the opposite sort of channel I feared it was.
The truth about rattlesnakes is exactly as the linked video shows: they are by nature shy and unaggressive to humans. They are deadly hunters of rodents, but what is the point of a rattlesnake biting a human? That venom is metabolically very expensive to purchase, and a human (even if it dies from the bite, and odds are it won’t, most snake bites are not fatal) is way too large for even the largest rattler to swallow.
Biting and envenomating only makes sense for a snake (a) if the creature being bitten is small enough to be swallowed after it dies, or (b) as a last resort defense measure. As to (b) the snake is much better off if it can slither away and escape without biting; it keeps its precious venom and can use it to invest in a nutritious meal to further its growth.
That’s why rattlesnakes evolved rattles in the first place: to warn away large animals that might trample them before a situation degrades to the point where a bite in self-defense becomes necessary for survival.
I’ve been in rattlesnake country many times, and doubtless passed within feet of them dozens of times without my even noticing them. I’ve only actually seen a wild rattlesnake twice. Both times the snake was completely unaggressive and just wanted to be left alone.
Naturally I obliged, and thus was in no danger. The two most common causes of snake bite are:
Published at 19:15 on 14 October 2016
More precisely, back from a nearly 2-week road trip that went as far east as western Wyoming. It involved seeing a part of the country I had always wanted to see, revisiting the place I finished up my college degree, helping a friend collect environmental sensors from the field, a quick swing through Yellowstone National Park, seeing a significant chunk of Montana for the first time, and visiting some of my companion’s friends in rural Idaho.
I had always wanted to see the Malheur basin ever since the area caught my eye on highway maps as a teen. Alas, it’s been a dry year, and the Federal government is still (understandably) jittery that right-wing extremists will try re-occupying the refuge headquarters, which meant that:
Before we got there, I was studying the DeLorme Atlas of Oregon while my companion drove and noticed a place called Glass Butte that our route would soon skirt. I surmised (correctly) that the name alluded to obsidian deposits, so an impromptu side-trip was scheduled in the hopes that it might prove to be the place where one can find the rare red-and-black obsidian I’ve seen in collections from Oregon (as opposed to the more common plain black kind). Indeed it was.
I did then visit a real oasis in the desert: the Cache Valley of northern Utah and southern Idaho. It’s an area I’m very familiar with, having attended Utah State University for two years. It was a nice surprise that the valley was still very much rural and had not filled in with houses. The extensive wetlands in its bottom were, in contrast to the mostly dried-out ones at Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, very lush and green.
The college campus had of course changed a lot since I had visited, but I chose to focus on what had not changed. The administration has done a good job of preserving the integrity of the more historical parts of campus, focusing on putting the new buildings where large parking lots used to be, so many campus views were precisely as I had remembered them.
It’s little-known except by locals, but that region also has some of the most spectacular fall colors in all of North America: in the surrounding mountains, the red and oranges of maples and the clear gold of the aspens contrast with the sombre green of firs. Nowhere else I can think of has all three elements (northern New England comes close, but doesn’t have the large numbers of aspens). Alas, it’s a short display that comes early, and true to form a storm and cold spell the week before had already left the trees mostly bare and blasted, despite it being the first week of October.
Then it was on to western Wyoming to collect the data loggers. That’s a place I visited a few times on day trips in my college years, so I got to see what Kemmerer (not much different) and Jackson (lots of new construction) looked like after about thirty years. That involved learning the hard way that my partner will call just about anything a “pretty good road,” even a rough track only suitable for four-wheel drive vehicles (my truck is only two-wheel drive and not suited for such routes). No lasting harm was done, and he did readily agree to cover the resulting towing bill. The weather was cold with snow flurries.
Then a short trip through Yellowstone. We spent a day watching geysers and saw about ten different ones erupt. They were all frequent performers. I can’t really be disappointed that it fell short of what I saw thirty years ago. That involved a simultaneous display of four major geysers (including Giantess, which erupts only irregularly) jetting hundreds of feet into the air.
I wish I had studied the maps more on the following day. Had I known we were going to pass through Butte, I would have scheduled a detour to some labor history sites, including the grave of Frank Little. My efforts at trying to do something impromptu were frustrated by it being both a Monday and a holiday; both the visitor information center and the labor history museum were closed.
We camped just east of Lolo Pass and that night were treated to the heaviest snowfall of the trip. That may sound dramatic, but even that just amounted to a light dusting. There was actually more snow at our campsite than there was at the summit of the pass! Highway 12 west of the pass has to be one of the loneliest highways in the lower 48 states; we drove for hours through forested mountains before we finally reached the small town of Lowell. Traffic was very light, maybe one vehicle every five minutes.
After spending the night with my travel partner’s friends near Riggins, we resumed driving west. It was a relief to see the sign welcoming us back to Washington as we crossed the bridge from Lewiston to Clarkston, even though it was the opposite side of the state and many more hours of driving lay ahead. It was nice to see things get progressively greener and greener with each passing mile from The Dalles to Cascade Locks.
My travel partner lives in Portland, where I had planned to spend the night. After hearing about the series of storms due to hit (high winds, heavy rain) I changed those plans and decided to rest a few hours then press on and try to beat the worst of the weather. I’ve been unpacking and tidying up since and after spending over a day doing so, it was time to type in this post.
It was fun, but it was also time to end when it did.
Published at 08:09 on 29 August 2016
Wishes like this are just plain stupid:
But Lord Rees added that there is also cause for optimism. “Human societies could navigate these threats, achieve a sustainable future, and inaugurate eras of post-human evolution even more marvellous than what’s led to us. The dawn of the Anthropocene epoch would then mark a one-off transformation from a natural world to one where humans jumpstart the transition to electronic (and potentially immortal) entities, that transcend our limitations and eventually spread their influence far beyond the Earth.”
This is the case for a variety of reasons. Here’s a few: