Glaciers at 27N?

I have been watching videos taken in East Nepal at approximately 27 degrees North and 5000 feet of elevation.

Knowing a little bit more than the typical layman about soil formation and soil profiles, I am immensely baffled by the deep soils on the steep slopes. I am also baffled by the heterogeneous nature of the soil with regard to particle size...from clay to heads-sized rock.

Just eyeballing it, 12' wide paddies and 18" of rise is a 15 degree slope.

There were multiple sequences of village people hacking out rice paddies on slopes of 10' of rise in 100' of horizontal or more.

The typical theories of soil formation are that soil is created out of native rock via thermal-cycle cracking or by erosion/abrasion. Thermal-cycle cracking occurs where freeze-thaw cycles occur or where there is significant day-night temperature differences, typically in areas with low cloud-cover and on slopes facing the equator. The depth of soils created by thermal-cycling are self-limiting as the cycles attenuate with depth.

An atypical source of soil is volcanic ash.

The native rock is angular and blocky

Much gravel in that soil

Soil that has been modified by water-based erosion is often highly stratified by particle size. Also, that soil tends to end up in the bottoms of valleys and not stay thickly trowelled onto the sides of the slopes.

Glaciated soils

Glaciers are bulldozers and mixers while water is OCD and sorts.

Valleys formed by glaciers tend to be "U" shaped while valleys formed by water tend to be "V" shaped.

There is more than a little bit of evidence (soil profile and depth) that 27N at 5000 feet of elevation was probably covered by glaciers at one time. In fact, thick soil is the result of retreating glaciers edging forward in the winter and retreating in the summer with each cycle leaving a ripple of thick soil.

That is mind-boggling. 27 degrees north is about the same latitude as Tampa, Florida. 5000 feet of elevation is not trivial. That might make a 20 degree F difference vs. Tampa. But still, glaciers!

One must surmise that those glaciers retreated long before humans were the dominant species on the planet...long before.

I wonder if any of my readers are geologists who would be willing to point out the errors in my thinking. 

---Added after sleeping on it: It occurred to me that the depth of the soil could be due to land-slides. The soil forms at higher elevations via normal weathering processes. An exceptionally dry year or series of dry years might allow fires to burn off the vegetation. Roots decay in thee soil and cannot hold it together. Rains come. The entire horizon of soil slides down the slope, mixing as it goes.

Nepal is also very active from the standpoint of earthquakes. You have to wonder how stable the saturated soil beneath the paddies will be with minimal roots stitching it together.---

Garden Party position on Criminal Justice

Prosecutors and judges who deviate from commonly accepted standards of prosecution and sentencing are guilty of depriving citizens of their civil rights when the criminals who were granted leniency commit violent crimes afterward.

The culpability shifts to the prosecutors and judges when criminals re-offend. They cannot cower behind "indemnity" because indemnification is really the mechanism that protects the collective wisdom embodied in commonly accepted policies, procedures and standards. The prosecutors and judges who venture out from beneath the umbrella of those commonly accepted standards is no longer protected by that umbrella.

In effect, the prosecutors and judges selected to implement those standards and to protect the community became complicit in the civil rights violations perpetrated by violent criminals when those prosecutors and judges opted to deviate from those standards. They own the consequences. Their nonfeasance makes them accessories to the future crimes committed by those criminals.

It is worth noting that poor women and children, often women-and-children-of-color bear consequences of the vast majority of the crime committed by criminals whose behaviors were not addressed by WOKE prosecutors and judges.

The Garden Party's position is that the Department of Justice shall initiate Violation of Civil Rights investigations, prosecution and sentencing of those prosecutors and judges who:

• Publicly announced their intentions to deviate from commonly accepted standards of prosecution and sentencing
• Oversee areas with greater crime rates than the national average

Garden Party position on the Military

I have a friend (MTV) who was the Chief Financial Officer for two Initial Public Offerings and three "turn-around" situations.

Paraphrasing, it was MTV's opinion that the turn-arounds were "easy". They were very broken and broken in obvious ways. Fixing them was easy.

In most cases, their downward trajectory was caused by "Sacred-cows". In one case, their most prestigious customer never made a dime for them. The customer's business model was to demand services and prices that (sequentially) put their suppliers out of business. As long as there were other suppliers who craved the volume the customer has nothing to lose.

My CFO friend caused many soiled shorts when he very publicly "fired" that customer. He knew that it would take them 9 months to move their tooling* out of his company's plants. He knew that they could fill that floor-space with customers that were willing to pay viable prices.

Never-the-less, it caused near-heart attacks when MTV told their "best" customer to go pound sand. "Best", in the eyes of the Board of Directors was the customer with the greatest name recognition and the greatest market share.

MTV has a very simple flow-chart to turn-around money-losing companies.

• Stop the bleeding.
• Take inventory.
• Maximize Profit (not revenue).
• FOCUS.

The Garden Party's position on the Military follows those steps

• Dial-back operations. Our military are beating themselves to pieces.
  
• Step-up maintenance with a glide-path to be fully compliant with plans in four years
• Take inventory of parts needed for maintenance and to close-up the drift caused by pencil-whipping. Inventory documentation to be spot-audited and excessive deviations (of indicated inventory-to-audit) to be remedied with prejudice. Expedited purchases made to rectify shortfalls.
  
• Cross-train officers. Real warfare causes casualties. Officers must be trained to step into the openings, even if it is not their primary area of responsibility.
• All promotions will be based solely on demonstrated competence at tasks directly connected to operations of war: Leadership, strategy, tactics, logistics, training...
  
• Purge academies and brass of politically motivated USA-haters
• Every activity that does not increase the number of ass-kickers who can be deployed or increases their field-effectiveness is to be ceased
• Promises made to former military must be honored. Soldiers and Marines and Sailors do not attack machine-gun emplacements for money. They do it out of honor. Honor is the currency of the battlefield.
• All less-than-honorable discharges due to Covid will be rescinded
• Military personnel who do not "meet or exceed standard" will be separated from their service after a short grace period that will allow them one more chance to pass the standard.

*In the manufacturing world "tools" are part-specific equipment and are usually equipment that "touches" the parts (dies, molds, grippers, racks) being manufactured while capital-equipment is the equipment holding the tools (die-casting machines, robots, generic welders, fork-trucks).

Moving tools from one facility to another requires a run-ahead at premium dollars (usually weekend work) to build a buffer of parts. It takes time to uninstall the molds/dies, truck them, reinstall them and then to validate that the product conforms to specifications at the new facility.

Garden Party position on Reparations

The word "Reparations" has the word "repair" as its root.

In popular usage, "Reparations" has become synonymous with "cash payout'. Any thinking person must be mystified as to how this will "repair" the damages done to the Black community in the United States. Every study that compares people cursed by "found money" with people who must trudge of to work on a daily basis to earn their daily bread finds that the metronome and esteem of "work" improves nearly every mental-health metric.

A million words could be written about those damages done to the Black community and it would only be a start. But if one were to sift through the stories and look for patterns, the systematic destruction of the Black family would play a pivotal role in most of those stories. It is the fulcrum that moved the universe, the pivot the tragedy orbits about.

The Garden Party's position on "Reparations" for the Black community is Repair the culture by stopping the attacks on the institution of Marriage of all races. It is to give more than lip-service to the importance of fathers living with their wife...the mother of their children. "Institutional racism" isn't the KKK. It is the self-serving institutions that financially penalize married couples, that deny opportunities and benefits to intact families.

We get more of what we subsidize. Children who grow up with their mothers and have no access to their father are needlessly handicapped in the tumultuous contest that is life.

Today in the garden

First Japanese Beetles sighted today on grape vines.

Flour corn

The flour corn is 5' tall. In two more days I will not be able to run the impulse sprinkler I have mounted on a "T" post in the middle of the patch. If I need to supplement with water I will have to use sprinklers outside the patch and drop water in like mortar rounds.

The sweet corn is not-quite-knee-high.

Rain

This was from a few days ago. We got zero rain.

Earlier today, Richard Tease promised us almost an inch-and-a-half of rain.

 

A few hours later Richard Tease downgraded the prediction to 0.14". <font-family: sarc> I bet he is very popular with the ladies </sarc>

Beets and Daikon radishes planted. The garden is now officially 100% planted and further planting will be "double-crop" opportunities.
 

Random pictures

If I had any pride I would be embarrassed by how excited I get by these things. This is a bud pushing from an Oswego pecan graft. It is an approach graft which accounts for the twig behind the green bud. That is the root-stock.

Oswego graft #2 pushing a bud

I transplanted three, grafted Lehman's Delight persimmons last fall. They did not leaf out this spring. But now there is a bud pushing.

Lon Rombough, a great plant grower, once observed that we should never assume a tree we planted is dead until it has been "dead" for more than 12 months. Here is a different Lehman's Delight starting to push its first bud.

Illinois Everbearing Mulberry air-layer. Roots visible through the Gatorade bottle.

Presented without comment

 

Garden Party position on Immigration

The fact of the matter is that the career politicians and the Administrative state have a vested interest in NOT solving the issues with immigration and visas. Grid-lock allows them to have their cake and eat it too...at the expense of both citizens and immigrants.

The system is so now complex that it is bypassed. Ergo, there is no functioning system in place.

The Garden Party position is to use Executive Orders to streamline the process and to skim out the 25% who are least compatible with our culture and least likely to be productive and send them back to their country of origin. If they refuse to specify their country of origin then they will be deported to the Ushuaia – Malvinas International Airport.

An incomplete list of requirements might include:

• The ability for all post-pubescent immigrant wannabes (biological definition of adult, no documentation required) to read at the 6th grade or higher level in English or Spanish.
• No "gang" tatts
• Ability to score at least 50th percentile on the age/gender adjusted Cooper Fitness Standards. Gender used in the sense of XX or XY.
• Up-to-date on vaccinations (not including Covid).

Remain-in-Mexico

Remain-in-Mexico policy worked. There is no reason to reinvent it. Wannabe immigrants become self-organizing after they realized that there was no point in burning money in Mexico because US would not let them in.

Restrictions issued by the Courts

Noted legal scholar Alexandria Occasional-Cortex noted that the President is given "broad discretion" in the execution of Executive duties. For example, she contends that Biden can totally ignore recent Supreme Court rulings that might cramp his agenda.

Swords cut both ways.

Summary

Most developed countries are facing demographic crashes as our legacy population ages.

We can roll-over like a female collie and except the heat-death-of-the-universe ending of our population (like Japan appears to have done).

We can close our eyes and passively get dry-holed by ravening hordes of third-world opportunists.

Or we can manage our situation.

The Garden Party advocates the third, pragmatic solution.