The latter link also has a connection to a commenter here, but I'll let them self-identify if they choose.
Mongolia sounds like western Nebraska without the money.
I guess the summer is probably not wet enough there to cut hay.
That's not really letting somebody self identify.
And! And! Goddamn Mongolians everywhere.
||
"The farmers/herders crises will definitely fissile out as time goes. We are one Nigeria and we continue to be one Nigeria irrespective of whatever is happening now.You get typos, and then you get typos.
They say reindeer in the taiga. I had thought reindeer were herded on the tundra, like the Sami ?
I really enjoyed the articles; presenting 4 different ones on related topics was a great way to see the commonalities and control (a bit) against any one source's storyline.
Moby's 2 seems all too correct -- though the reinvention (or reuptake?) of co-ops does sound like a promising response to the various forces picking them off one by one.
12: All of the descriptions aligned with taiga (snowy forest). I wonder if it's modern borders contributing to the problem -- that they would take their reindeer north keeping them in the snow and ice fields, if they were allowed access to Siberian ranges.
Reindeer herding is typically a tundra thing, but it seems like this particular group does it (primarily?) in the taiga instead.
It could be a matter of modern border disrupting traditional mobility per 14, or it could just be a distinctive adaptation to a particular ecological niche.
From 9:
Mongolia's economy has grown rapidly since 1991, when the country ceased to be a satellite of the Soviet Union, with gross domestic product rising from $2.37 billion to $13.01 billion in 2018, according to the World Bank. Most of the growth has come from rising exports of coal and other minerals.
I think my deep thought about that is something like: yep. 14 underscores the fact that I haven't found a book with the content I crave about how nomadic groups in Siberia and Central Asia fared under Communism and after, or how the borders between the USSR and Mongolia were maintained, but wait I have a history of Mongolia in the other room. I think. Maybe it has answers. Also a novel in Czech about Mongolia that you guys have probably all read already (oh, now translated, I see).
Also, I can't get past the photo of the 8-year-old girl breaking down in tears because she misses her mother who's working at a factory in Japan (indefinitely). Poor kid, poor mom, poor animals, poor planet, fuck everything.
Just a feeler: is reading about this Amazon rainforest arson/planned genocide business hitting any of the rest of you this hard? Is there no fucking evil that will ever provoke an international response again? I can't really describe my reaction. There are no role models on earth.
I am a combination of horrified and in denial about how it can't really be that bad, can it? But it probably can.
2 links from a friend's Twitter quickly:
* What Bolsonaro said he'd do (Reuters, pre-election, October 2018)
* What he said he'd do in PowerPoint form! (in February? slightly lower confidence in veracity but pretty believable)
I mean, the second link is largely gibberish, but assuming the images are real, it's a striking glimpse of what the official mindset is. Nuclear fusion research! Brasil, Patria amada!
22: I'd never heard of this Triple-A thing, and wondered if it was a delusion, a Brazilian "the UN wants to take your guns away". But apparently not. Though the putative adversaries stealing Brazil's sovereignty would in fact be Colombia and Venezuela, which feels like a rather low-rent paranoia. Though I guess that's appropriate. Anyway, this adds to my growing sense that everything old is new again, where by old I mean Cold War High Modern nation-building-through-resource-extraction.
19: For me, is this a new low point against the standard background feeling of sick despair and freakout? I don't know. I'm scared of searching or comparing my feelings on any aspect of this era.
17: I don't know any of those answers, but this book on the great wall says among other things:
the Ordos played a very special strategic role in the steppe world. It was one of the handful of places dotted through that arid realm where lakes or rivers provided a water supply which made farming possible. [...] In fact, one can analyze the whole pattern of steppe warfare with reference to such places. Three of them, the Tarim, the Orkhon, and the Ordos, form the corners of a critical triangle. When nomads have waged war against one another in the steppes north of China, they have repeatedly sought to occupy these base areas and to deny them to their adversaries.Triangle. I note that only one of those corners is in modern Mongolia, and that the establishment of the PRC involved a joint campaign with the Soviets to destroy a nomad state in Xinjiang.
Though the putative adversaries stealing Brazil's sovereignty would in fact be Colombia and Venezuela
Yeah, but it's really enemies without and within, where without is specifically "globalist" -- my rough translation of the first, what-we're-up-against slide:
1. compromises? 2. author translates as "psychological oppression" but I think Op. must be short for operação
The focus on internal targets seems pretty overt, and it's the lede in the first article I linked too. (I know you know that; I'm just making it even more overtly overt.)
Also, the bizarro world freedom-of-government rhetoric is just wild. Rise up, Hobbes!
It isn't that bizarro. You lot were pretty miffed when the Russians psyoped you. (To what degree the targeted actors in the Amazon are actually being run by globalists I've no idea. I would guess small but non-zero.)
No, it just struck me that right-wingers in the U.S. would never type out the words "restricts the freedom of action of the government." They'd use some kind of metonym involving the American people or America or Americans or something. How can the government have, let alone deserve, freedom?
If there really are "globalists" manipulating things, I can only imagine that they're taking a huge loss on the investment of resources. But on the other hand... why wouldn't you go for broke at this point? It's looking pretty goddamned bad.
But I can get a soft yak wool sweater and hat now? Did I mention shopping for fashionable pollution masks? I figured this would be a growth industry and was vindicated. (This is not an immediate need, just thinking ahead.) Hard to choose! I must point out that those hummingbirds are obviously kingfishers.
Herding reindeer in the forests is a thing in winter. No one would spend winter on the bare mountains, and in the parts of northern Sweden where Ume and I go walking there are homesteads established on the yearly migration routes just where they cross the treeline. This is because the centuries of reindeer shit fertilised little patches of meadowland.
Thanks. So the Mongolians probably circulate south in summer.
When I was there one late September, the reindeer people who spent their summers near Hövsgöl Nuur had just taken themselves and their herds back over the mountains so they could get to their winter pastures. Our guide was pretty vague about where those were, but looking at the area on Google Maps (thank you 21st century!) it's all much more taiga than tundra.
17: For some of those things, you might like Reindeer People: Living with Animals and Spirits in Siberia, by Piers Vitebsky. Here's what I wrote when I read it back in 2006.
http://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2006/09/20/noted-with-pleasure-reindeer-people/
Speaking of 21st century, the combination of NPR and European GDPR means that I can either accept a squazillion cookies or access the text-only version of their page. Many organizations have figured out how to navigate the GDPR without being total dicks, but not NPR. Speaking of which, I was kinda interested in reading something from The Mary Sue, but when I went to jump through their GDPR hoop, I roughly counted how many cookies they thought it was appropriate to leave on my computer in exchange for my attention to one of their articles: upwards of 500. Not kidding in the least. I didn't read the article.
Last night, Kid Three was visibly worried and upset about the Amazon fires. "Why isn't anyone doing something?" I took the Reassuring Dad role, because honestly, nothing else would be appropriate. But I am not reassured.
Which would imply a bunch of reindeer transhumance on the southern taiga margin, but wiki knows only of Mongolia and the Amur basin.
(Which latter says herders moved freely over the PRC/USSR border pre-1969, which frankly I find hard to believe.)
Although actually the north edge of Mongolia plus the Amur is bloody vast so never mind.
This wiki bit implies that our guide was not just telling us tales to make the area more interesting. On the other hand, this article completely fails to mention either Isengard or Saruman, so again with wiki and reliability.
The Rohirrim are the the real Uruk-hai.
A couple days ago I ran across
some wonderful eleventh-century paintings of Khitan Tatars our hunting with their dogs and hawks, by a guy whose name is romanized Hugui or Hu Kuei and was supposedly of Tatar lineage himself.
Those are great. In this detail, both dog and horse have more personality than the rider http://www.dashi.cc/pic_content.aspx?id=4898
You can be of Tartar lineage if your mom had Tartar Sauce.
Going back to the OP:
A stunningly cold, snowy winter changed Oyutan's life forever. Several animals died every few days from starvation, illness and exposure to the elements. By May, he had lost 100 head of livestock -- and his entire livelihood.
Aren't you supposed to cull the weak and sick animals well before they die naturally to save forage for the stronger ones?
Maybe they cull in anticipation of a normal winter but not a dzud. And once the dzud hits maybe the animals serve as mutual insulation and heating, so you don't want to snuff them too hastily.
What used to be fatal for Swedish reindeer herders was too early a thaw: the snow would melt and expose the lichen; then, when freezing temperatures returned, a crust of ice would form above the rocks, which the reindeer could not break through and they'd starve.
Snow on its own they could quite easily dig through in a normal winter.
In any case, according to this book I bought by following Doug's links, the Lapps / Sami were not originally nomadic reindeer herders at all but settled hunters of wild reindeer. They were only pushed into nomadism on the tundra by the pressure of populations to their South.
read is Messily's brother? read Messily?
Your book recommendations seem to work. Do you have a newsletter?
|| In deer invasion news, the deer have now officially arrived in my neighborhood(Crestview area of Clintonville for the Columbus-savvy). I thought I saw a deer running across the street in my neighborhood a few weeks ago, but that was at night, and I thought I might have been dreaming or maybe it was a large dog. But this morning it was definitely a deer that I saw just down the street. ||
They don't respect real estate covenants.
50: Even worse, I have an eclectic web magazine. Er, blog.
http://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/
And I have co-conspirators!
Though I like the book less now that I am further into it. It could have done with a fiercer editor. That may well be the publisher's fault as much as the writer's.
Wait! I have just realised from googling him that I was on a jolly with the author once in a mansion in the Swedish countryside and disliked him intensely for his aggressive self-satisfaction and competitiveness.
And this review of one of his other books is illuminating
It's an autocorrect for "Taking part in a seminar of selected scholars and cultural critics arranged by a philanthropic foundation with a view to producing a volume of essays on the condition of Sweden"
57: I linked to notes on a book by Piers Vitebsky; the link in 57 is to a review of a book by Neil Kent.
Did I miss something?
61: no, a junket is a jelly, not a jolly.
57: ah, shite. You're right. I started looking for the Vitebski book but it's on order and I got the Kent book on Kindle in the same rush. My apologies.
68: No worries!
I think the next book I wrote about after Reindeer People was a one-volume overview of Baltic history. (Both acquired in Helsinki, thanks to a jolly junket.) That was nowhere near as bad as the Kent apparently was, but it was very old-school who-ruled-what-when style history. On the other hand, the author was (I think) about 80 when he wrote it, so we should all be doing as well with our eclectic web magazines when we reach that age.