negative accelerations in Earth's climate

CAGW is certainly a least a little bit exaggerated.

A large consensus claims CO2 will cause the Earth to warm, at some climate sensitivity. A smaller consensus also claims positive accelerations will increase this effect, namely: polar amplification,  humidity, and methane release.

Less often spoken of are the negative accelerations. I have collected here a few hypotheses.

This first group is for housekeeping.

thermodynamics

• logarithmic property of radiative transfer
• increased absorption rate of CO2 into oceans (greater percentage, extra heat, extra air pressure due to CO2 being heaver than oxygen)
• thermal expansion of troposphere 1 
• UV breakdown in the stratosphere of C02 at a greater rate

Now the true negative accelerations:

basic life

• more plants because of more CO2, humidity, and warmth
• CO2-fixing coccolithophores 
• methane-fixing bugs in the tiaga

complex synergies

• increased CLAW production (by pelagibacterales) of dimethyl sulfide on ocean surface (creating more cloud albedo)   
• extra CLAW in the Arctic (directly working opposite of polar amplification)
• tropical cyclones (causing more water to fall onto plants than usual)
• ocean rise increasing volume of water exchanged with the  sill-protected Arctic (creating more open water, increasing lake-effect NH snowfall,  slowing NH glacier melt (Ewing, Donn, 1956) leading to deceleration of ice albedo loss)
• heavier atmosphere will lead to enhanced rock weathering when rain hits the rock (some chemical reaction I do not understand).

notes

1. or is this counteracted because CO2 is heaver than O which it displaces?

What Esker and Noel have in common: planetary formation/buoyancy/atmospheric loss/surface expansion

For years, occasionally I mused on the  'expanding Earth hypothesis' (EEH), as an amateur. It is a fringe idea.

One reason was the continents do seem to fit together as the cover of a smaller Earth. A geologist  a hundred years before had blown up a balloon to illustrate the idea, but in the age of computers cartoonist Neal Adams has done the service of animating it.

 Don't be hung up that the continental shelves are not in the video (too much too explain).

The alternative, supercontinent theory, is seemingly ad hoc.  Having just one that broke up (called Pangaea)  did not do the trick. Apparently based on the need explain data like matching geologies on the parts of Antarctica to the otherwise-wrong places, there had to have been 5 or 6 super-continents that contorted themselves on the ocean (imagine a teenager making a snow angel and sliding on the snow as well).

part 2

There were dual questions involving dinosaurs ...

• how could they have done the impossible and moved around?
• why did they became extinct?

For this reason, most EEHs held that an increase in mass can happen at the center of  planets!

But it seemed to  most there was no reasonable way the Earth could have been gaining mass.

part 3

In this part I mention two more fringe theories.

Davie Esker's has a seemingly bizarre buoyancy hypothesis about the dinosaurs:

1. 250 millions years ago Earth's atmosphere density was 2/3 that of water, and big animals just sort of floated around.
2. that the thinning of the atmosphere caused the extinction of the dinosaurs (as well as the huge insects)

J Marvin Herndon's even-the-sun-was-a-gas-giant hypothesis (criticism)

• the Sun and all four inner planets were gas giants,
• the sun exploded and blew the atmospheres off the four inner planets

part 4

All this was why last week I blogged about David Noel's fringe mega-theory, including a EEH. opinion. He hypothesized that - among other things  - Earth's atmosphere then was like Venus' is now, (inter alia 90 times as dense).  It has virtues the other EEHs do not:

• the inner planets don't have to be gas giants, they can be gas normals
• no sun explosion is necessary, simply atmospheric bleed off (and accepted geology has the creation of the moon that could have triggered it)
• no weird addition of mass at the center of the Earth
• no need for the Earth to be expanding much at all now, a  natural end to expansion
• two sources for EEH, atmospheric bleedoff, and growing tidal motions, putting lateral stress on the surface
• minor expansion cracks on the moon due to it only having its bled over atmosphere for a while

part 5

Googling, I ran across this article about the same topic as this blog post from 18 months ago. This guy agrees there a problem with the mainstream but thinks along gravity/cosmology lines (sort of like I  used to), not realizing that recently discovered exoplanets have probably  busted the textbootk 'cold line' theory of planetary formation (gas giants have been spotted closer to stars than Earth is to the sun), probably leaving planetary formation up for grabs.

part 6 

Mars has expansionesque cracks, probably (that could be an other post), but no moon remotely big enough to explain atmospheric bleedoff...Not that I know anything ....  a NASA spacecraft did detect debris around Mars two tiny moons ... the asteroid belt is nearby .. maybe Mars small size meant its gas atmosphere was a) less dense b) doomed (especially with big asteroids flying by on a regular basis) leading to a bit of expansion, but not so much as bigger Earth with the thicker atmospheric, bleedoff and tidal rocking

part 7

One could, I suppose, look at this videocapture, which is someone rotating  the planet  on Google Earth using a Geology overlay showing the age of the crust.

He claims floods - you can turn down the sound.

part 8

back to Noel and Esker (remember them?) comparing the two air density claims:

• buoyancy hypothesis:  an ancient air density about 520 times higher than now 
• Noel EEH: an ancient air density 90 times higher than now

Was the Earth-moon barycenter once outside the Earth?

I recently read another 'expanding Earth' hypothesis. Again, from an Australian.:)

Anyway, this one is the most sensible so far.

From memory, with some garnish.

part one

The core hypothesis is that Venus is the norm for terrestrial planets, and that Earth billions of years ago was similar, namely thick atmosphere, very high in CO2, extreme barometric pressure (~90 times Earth), and basically no atmospheric oxygen.

Then the normative freak collision, a huge celestial object (that itself broke up) plowed through the atmosphere and got a big chunk of crust, too. Thus creating a vast halo of particulates which accreted into a moon.

Anyway here is where it gets interesting, with some of Noel's timing being uncertain (maybe because it is impossible).

The moon back then was closer (scientists agree), and if the Earth was also sufficiently smaller than it is now then the barycenter of the moon-Earth together would have been outside the Earth! Meaning as a pair they would technically have been dual planets.

But because Earth had an atmosphere, there would have been (for at least hundreds of millions of years) a shared gravity well, and the Earth's atmosphere would have bled over to the moon's.

Meanwhile the moon, being too small to retain lighter gases, would then have bled gas to outer space.

part two

Since the Earth would be slowly losing atmosphere, the barometric pressure at the surface would be constantly dropping. This would allow the gravity-compressed Earth to begin to expand. Cracks would form in the crust, destined to become oceans (inter alia: why current ocean floors are so young).

Noel does not say this, but maybe something about the special situation allowed edge-of-space micro-rain.

As I read it, this hypothesis holds the lowering surface barometric pressure allowed the creation of anaerobic life similar to coccolithophores. Namely protozoa that fixed CO2 with calcium (on the ground) into calcium carbonate.

This early life - Noel suggests - isolated oxygen. Which did not get a chance to all float into space ...

part three

Meanwhile the moon is still moving away. And the Earth is bigger. So eventually, the barycenter moves inside the Earth,  meaning the gravity well disappears, there is no more atmospheric bleed-over, and the planet has a true moon.

Thanks to new atmosphere, oxygen-based life appears, which fixes even more CO2 out of the air. 

Now here we are, hypothetically, on a planet that once had maybe as much as 95% CO2 in its atmosphere, but is now a trace gas.

notes

• I guess since CO2 is heavier than N or O, the surface barometric pressure would have continued to drop? Thus, even after the moon became a true moon, there would have been expansion, albeit at a a slower rate
• re: micro-rain: the hydrogen for the water apparently from outer space (too light to be atmospheric), combining with the oxygen (freed up by the protozoa) only the H adding to Earth's mass, thus about 0.01% not 0.02%
• in this Earth Expansion hypothesis (EEH) the expansion has a natural cessation point
• the lithosphere being real, the loosest bit nearest the equator would move away the fastest, centrifugal force, hence the Himalayas -- the first EEH that is satisfying on this point
• the onset (which the planet is still in) of glaciation not just because of the position of Antarctica but because of all the CO2 fixing?
• All the changes guaranteed periodic mass extinctions. Poor Barney.
• the planet has a vast amount of limestone. That from CO2 permanently fixed out of the atmosphere, the #volcanoes adding CO2 during the billions of year is unknown, ASFAIK

ADDED 2016-04-25

In 2013 famous NASA Venusian & Earth climatologist James Hansen clarified his remarks about Earth's potential future. Because his opinion is strikingly like an opposite of Noel's (and because, frankly, he is the type of negativist who sometimes turns out to be an opposite indicator) I will quote a big bit.

“I get questions from the public about the Venus Syndrome: is there a danger of
'runaway' greenhouse warming on Earth leading to Venus-like conditions?”

then

“Venus today has a surface pressure of about 90 bars, compared with 1 bar on Earth. The Venus atmosphere is mostly CO2. The huge atmospheric depth and CO2 amount are the reason Venus has a surface temperature of nearly 500°C.”

“Venus and Earth probably had similar early atmospheric compositions, but on Earth the carbon is mostly in Earth's crust, not in the atmosphere. As long as Earth has an ocean most of the carbon will continue to be in the crust, because, although volcanoes inject crustal carbon into the atmosphere as CO2, the weathering process removes CO2 from the air and deposits it on the ocean floor as carbonates. Venus once had an ocean, but being closer to the Sun, its atmosphere became hot enough that hydrogen could escape from the upper atmosphere, as confirmed today by the extreme depletion on Venus of normal hydrogen relative to heavy hydrogen (deuterium), the lighter hydrogen being able to escape the gravitational field of Venus more readily.”

“Earth can "achieve" Venus-like conditions, in the sense of ~90 bar surface pressure, only after first getting rid of its ocean via escape of hydrogen to space”

As an amateur I am skeptical.

Note the 'similar early atmospheric compositions' bit. Hansen does not say what those are, precisely. (Noel has more guts). Then he changes tenses very quickly. He seems to want Earth as the more archetypal, with a kind of preCopernican feel.

NASA surprised to find stretch marks on the moon

Here. The moon is not dead!

Last August I posted about the surface of Mars, about a photo then in the news. Following this (seemingly crazy idea) I suggested the lines -supposedly from water- were stretch marks, that the moon had them, too.

A photo from the moon showed up since then:

Of course, astronomers do not consider the moon might be growing.

Note the article includes this depiction of a graben

The likely way the earths's oceans formed, according to a few renegade scientists. Too bad the majority cannot emotionally handle the idea.

inner life (photo)

[from STATIC]

3 big photos featuring sky, and their effect

They are all newly on Flickr.

'flying over the rainbow'

'Strawbales Under a Stormy Sky'

'Train at Egbert Crossing'

Since each photo includes sky, each has at least an implied horizon.
In the first photo the horizon is below the image.
In the third photo, note the train's DRL is almost exactly at the camera lens' subjective horizon.¹

Which brings me to the energetic, usually-friendly photo technique called OOB ( meaning 'out of bounds'). Of the whole OOB gallery, the best one happens to feature two good-looking women:


Notice how this image has two implied horizons:

1. in the virtual space the 3D embedded photo is floating in


2. in the embedded photo, which alludes to its own horizon just beyond the edge of the water.

It's soothing, right? And not just the women?

In my opinion² horizons help human beings emotionally, and since this image has two, it is extra-soothing.

--notes--
1 -- about the train photo, I checked and Ohio has no special rule mandating headlights on trains in the daytime (Cf).

2-- I have given my opinion of DRLs already. I used a lot of words and didn't get to my good points until halfway through. It's a horizon-related issue, I claim, a collective paranoia.

modified 2006-12-07, then 2007-01-01 a bit more

'airline ticket global warming tax' proposed

Excess CO² causes global warming. Knowing this, years ago someone (Lester Thurow?) suggested a fund could be set up, paying Brazil for their rainforest (because plants convert the gas back to oxygen + water). Under the proposal, each acre that Brazil allowed to disappear would mean less money for them.
[this was suggested as a way of applying the rules of the marketplace to the problem].

People were willing, at least to some degree. In 1999, a professor from Minnesota noted:

“Environmental economists recently conducted a survey of Americans to determine how much (in a one-time payment) they would be willing to pay to permanently protect 10% of the world's tropical forests (Kramer and Mercer 1997). They found that Americans are willing to pay about $21 to $31 per household, about $3 billion total, or $110 to $230 per hectare of rainforest.”

But basically nothing was done.

In the interim the concept has reappeared, now being called 'carbon balancing'.
[People are using the phrase 'carbon footprint'
and now jet travel is finally being added to the topic.

For instance, from a SF Chronicle article:

An explosion in commercial air traffic may be triggering formation of high-altitude clouds that trap heat and could worsen global warming.

And the problem is expected to get much worse: Global aircraft emissions should increase sixfold by the time today's college students are ready for retirement, experts say.

The menace comes in a beautiful form: cirrus clouds that resemble silver, windblown beards and float at 20,000- to 50,000-feet high.

Not as mainstream is a overview from George Monbiot:

“It's not just that aviation represents the world's fastest growing source of carbon dioxide emissions. The burning of aircraft fuel has a "radiative forcing ratio" of around 2.7. What this means is that the total warming effect of aircraft emissions is 2.7 times as great as the effect of the carbon dioxide alone.”

For these reasons, I propose the world agree by treaty to a 'airline ticket global warning tax', much as there is now a 'airline ticket terrorism security' tax.

By formula, the money collected should be paid to whichever nations do the most re-conversion of carbon-dioxide back to oxygen. Whether their carbon-balancing is via a rainforest or whatever.


[see also Dean Baker in Harper's: 'Insurance by the Mile']

car headlights and the implied horizon (long)

I have a long list of modern-world-anthropology topics that I want to get to. This post is about fear and about how our experience of daytime itself is changing.

Here in the USA, many people are now driving with their headlights on in the daytime, even if it is sunny. They call what they are doing 'daytime running lights' (DRL). They say what they are doing is safer. Others doubt the cited research. I summarize the arguments I have seen about this new instrusive part of the American landscape:

against:

1. the DRL studies were largely done in countries close to the Arctic, countries with different daytime light conditions than the USA, and too much reliance is placed one one study done in the USA decades ago


2. if most vehicles have DRLs, it's harder to spot those who do not. Not to mention the pedestrians!¹

for:

1. DRLers say the single study done in the USA is enough evidence for them


2. some DRLers want what they call a 'DRL mandate' - a law which would make it illegal to drive in the daytime without your headlights on

the DRLers
There is unquestionably more going on than driving-safety concerns. Before getting into the cultural issues I will highlight the key question of headlight type. I would have thought this would be an obvious talking-point.

Years ago most cars were equipped with what were just called 'running lights'. These were used to make the vehicle more visible in bad light conditions like fog, dusk, and dawn. They did not illuminate forwards, and were almost always amber. The lack of projection and the color was designed to ease the eyestrain on the oncoming drivers.

DRLers do not seem to be very interested in seeing if the old-style running-lights would produce the same safety statistics found for DRLs in far Northern countries (and yes, maybe in the USA too). This is not very scientific of them, and it's a clear indication that driving safety is not their only concern.

Following DRL logic to its end, switching the amber brake-lights on the backs of their cars to high-beams would make sense. Maybe a study in Siberia could be done showing this reduced rear-end collisions! [sarcasm]

Just look at the extreme DRL trends. Some drivers add extra banks of headlights which they use in the daytime. Some even drive with their brights (high beam headlights) on all the time.

There are sufficient numbers of these true-believers that Honda apparently will be selling 2006 Civic and Accord models whose high-beams go on when the engine is turned on. Or you can buy a kit for this purpose.

DRLs can be annoying

An opponent of DRLing writes:

“Good bloody hell, so (most of) you're the murderous scum using headlights during the day. The idea is simple, make sure that YOU are seen but in the process make it harder for anyone else to be. Just part of the reinforcement of the concept that it's a right, not a privilege, to drive--drunk, drugged, blind, or extremely stupid. "Put your headlights on and you can safely make it home from the bar." ... I consider Charles Manson a saint compared to you evil pea-brains.”  [ellipted]  from 'putrid'

But people have always been selfish², so the trend cannot just be about selfishness any more than it can be just be about driving-safety³. This is clear from the timing of the trend in the USA (right after the 9-11 attacks here).

it's about the horizon
In my opinion DRLers are trying to communicate to others that they do not feel safe, and they want the others not to feel safe either. It's an unconscious political movement, designed to increase the collective protection against all dangers.

I believe they are trying to hide the implied horizon.⁴ Simply by the act of driving back from the shopping mall the DRLers are wiping out the implied daytime horizon for everyone.

What I do not get at all, is why progressives do not oppose DRLs with all their might.

Over millions of years 'nothing from here to horizon' has been felt as meaning 'all is safe'. And much of the USA is flat. When driving thru these parts (in the daytime), the sky itself might make a driver feel relaxed and safe.

It's not that DRLers specifically want to eliminate this natural nurturance - it's just that they want .. something. Something done by collective will that will result in themselves feeling safer.

Which means .. goodbye to the pleasure of experiencing the daytime sky.

other wild possibilities
Before I decided this I considered a lot of other possibilities. The DRLers postition seemed that irrational to me. Among the idea I considered:

• with so many working two jobs the USA no longer is so much a dayime-working culture. Could that be related?
• do DRLers feel their headlights give them power in a God-like kind of way?
• is it that they don't want to be so visible thru their windshields?
• is it like a moth thing (with tranference), because they are lonely?
• Could be related to the Rapture movement ('end times') .. DRLs do produce a kind of antiChrist ambience, right?

this is serious, folks
Even if half of this is wrong - even if driving safety is all DRLers are looking for - the use of these daytime headlights is profoundly changing the culture. In my opinion.

And not a value-free change, either. DRLs produce a daytime experience that meshes with authoritarian ways. Seriously. Think of the the cliché of baving a bright light on you as you are questioned by sinister police, or the cliché of having a bright light on you as you are trying to escape from prison. These are veridical, they are about fundamentals in human experience.

Or -to go on a tangent- think about the late Johnny Carson, 20th century America's most popular late night talk show host. Carson grew up in Nebraska and had a sunny dispostion characteristic of many from the region then. My claim is his friendliness in part came from being nurtured day after day as a child by the then-magnificent Nebraska sky and clear horizon. My claim is even that Carson transfered this sky-nurturance to the nightime 'airwaves' when his show was on. People felt safe when they watched his show.

If we allow DRLs as they are now it means no more Johnny Carsons. That's my opinion.

about the progressives (lwers)
What I do not get at all, is why progressives do not oppose DRLs with all their might. Popular progressive bloggers understand the relationship between collective fear⁵ and the popularity of authoritarian govts. The entire lw spectrum in America sees a cultural, authoritarian abyss opening up under their feet. So why don't they get the relationship between fear and DRLs?⁵

DRLs threaten the day itself, guys!

If you agree with what FDR said, that 'the only thing we have to fear is fear itself⁶- then logic impels you to be afraid of DRLs, if you also think DRLer's driving-safety fears have merged with other fears they have.

other relationships
That is pretty much what I have to say on this in basic terms. The rest is more abstract. Right now I am confident that:

• DRLs are somewhat for the same reason they have been a tradition for funerals: someone is dead / people are reminded of their mortality / they want to remind other poeple of their mortality



• the DRLer subset of the populartion has some interesting correlations that we don't know about since academics are not bothering to check .. Easy would be the prediction that DRLers roughly consist of some of the same people that believe SUVs are safer. The craziest correlation I will predict is that DRLers might roughly be those adults who did not ever try marijuana



• the Rapture movement religous belief originated in places that had too much visible horizon relative to real dangers [Crime and empty landscapes is a weird combination]. Look at it this way: heaven-arriving formally matches horizon-arriving in the form of daytime headlights. . It is possible 'end times' operates at a cognitive level, a concept born from attempts by the animal to balance out the information coming in in terms of light itself [see also my post about Don McLean's famous song]

More could be said, but that will have to wait for another day.

the extended notes

1. Not just the pedestrian statistics - accidents not involving DRLs (but possibly because of them) do not get recorded that way. An account of a car accident in North Carolina in 2004(?)
   “I *think* I'm OK, but was in a pretty serious car accident this morning.
   
   I was on my way to meet my wife at our son's new pre-school, was traveling about 40 mph down a hill in an area where I had unquestioned right of way. There was no traffic light, no yield, I was simply on a straightaway. There were several pickup trucks stopped at a stop sign ahead of me and to my right. They had been sitting there as I came down the hill, and all of a sudden as I got close, the lead truck pulled out to turn left in front of me (crossing in front of me to turn into the opposite lane). I *could not* believe it, I was going, as I said, 40 mph and was at this point *very* close to him. I have no idea what he was thinking. Anyway, I slammed on my horn, my brakes and tried to swerve around his backside to miss him... and I did. However, the pickup truck who had been waiting *behind* this genius at the stop sign decided to ALSO pull out in front of me to turn left into the lane opposite mine - he followed the original pickup so closely and without hesitation that it was almost as if he thought he was at a light and it had turned green.
   
   I slammed further on my brakes, but there was no where left to attempt to steer to to miss him - I hit him head on, perpendicular to him, in the bed area of his pickup. In the second before the impact, I thought 'Oh God, this is going to be realllllllly BAD.
   
   BOOM! The hood in front of me collapsed like an accordian, and both airbags deployed, and the windshield was cracked, but no blood, no cuts - my legs were not crushed as I expected them to be. ... The doctors think I have a concussion, but I feel ok so far.”  [heavily ellipted]
   The driver did not associate his mysterious invisibility on the road with his not having his headlights on. I remember someone asked him this later on and he said he did not have them on.



2. Some people argue that selfishness has been increasing since the Reagan years.In my opinion even if this were true it would still not be enough to suddenly blossom into banks of high-beam headlights in the daytime



3. Not to mention the complexity how people displace risk has never been widely understood. Properly understood, this also works against the use of DRLs. See the discussion of 'risk compensation' here or read this:
   “The key principle is that any safety feature will produce changes in behaviour: most people, as natural risk managers will barter some of the increased safety with perfomance enhancement, thus either negating the safety benefits or transfering the increased danger to other players.”
   From memory, one of just many instances of this was when NYC mandated its taxis get airlock brakes and accident rates went down -but only for a few months (eventually the drivers drove faster, since they felt safer with their new brakes). This effect is seen universally and will apply to DRLs.



4. the implied horizon: In my opinion, when there are visual obstacles to the horizon modern humans make up an implied horizon, where it would be if the obstacles were not there. I am no expert but I think we feel comforted by a vista even while standing in a small town in the Midwest (minus the headlights). Even though there are buildings, the implied horizon is there as a universal comforter. This is why I inlude the 'implied'.
   
   Also I do not know if the symbol is at all passed from generations. ASFAIK for some of the ancient past humans lived on the savannah. During those epochs safety consisted of scanning the horizon for predators. This line in the distance -by my amateurish guess- has been internalized. Over millions of years 'nothing from here to horizon' is felt by us as meaning 'all is safe'. I do not know if each generation entirely relearns this.



5. historical note: FDR said this on March 4 1933 on the radio, in his 1st inaugural address. I have seen it written that FDR said this two days after Pearl Harbor was bombed. But it is not in a transcript of his 12/9/1941 radio speech. So it does not seem FDR repeated himself. In 1933 was FDR talking in coded terms about authoritarianism? ..Read up on the period and make up your own mind.



6. Nurturance is not political-spectrum neutral. And most progressives believe this. Often mentioned a semi-famous academic paper by George Lakoff, comparing the liberal 'Nurturant Parent' model to the 'Strict Father' model.

[modified]

dig in (long)

This week is Thanksgiving holiday in the USA.

It may be our most natural holiday. Daylight hours are getting shorter, it's getting colder, and now we celebrate a sharing of food. Most people even get the day off. The Thursday(!) national holiday is on the short list of things that keeps the USA sane (without also damaging it in some other way).

The holiday is about a lot of things. I am going to try to circle around the topic by writing about these:

• a popular tech site called digg
• In the UK a chef recently recieved complaints for slicing a living lamb's throat on TV.  The lw and rw UK tabloids spun the story the same way
• video of a Christmas lights display on a residential house, set to music (heavily blogged)
• recent Rolling Stone profile of one of the US capitol's most efficient behind-the-scenes warmongers, with a significant clothing description:
  “At fifty-six, Rendon wears owlish glasses and combs his thick mane of silver-gray hair to the side, Kennedy-style. He heads to work each morning clad in a custom-made shirt with his monogram on the right cuff and a sharply tailored blue blazer that hangs loose around his bulky frame.”
• a man just rowed across the Pacific Ocean! w photo of boat

These are examples of people trying to relate to nature, and to others. Their attempts are themselves related to each other. They are peripherally about what Thanksgiving is peripherally about. It's a cluster of meaning coming to focus at this time of year in the Northern hemishere.

we dig

Around 1970, the most most wildly-admired musical group wrote two songs with the word 'dig' in the title.

The entire lyrics of Dig It:

'Like a rolling stone // like a rolling stone // Like the FBI and the CIA // And the BBC… // BB king, And Doris Day, Matt Busby. // Dig it, dig it, dig it, Dig it, dig it, dig it, dig it, dig it, dig it, dig it, dig it.'

Some of the lyrics of 'I dig a pony':

"I dug a pony // Well you can syndicate any boat you row // Yes you can syndicate any boat you row"

To use dig the way John Lennon and millions of other did means more than enjoy. It means more than enjoy naturally. At the risk of sounding banal or ridiculous, to say 'I dig it' means:

'I am for the planet converting to a settler/agricultural culture (away from a hunter-gatherer culture), and what you are doing (and my experience of what you are doing) is part of the positive, natural trend'.

the crux of the matter

I myself dig. I am a digger. I want humanity to make the transition (and I believe many political conflicts will resolve themselves in the wake of the change).

In a way, the modern world is about the watershed decision to 'dig' or not. These centuries ARE resolving the conflict between vegetarians and gun-owners. And this IS the context for Thankgiving.

chew on this

But the holiday is intended to demonstrate metaphoricaly an extremely important political point - that this conflict is never, ever a crisis.

[Our teeth exemplify this. We have sets to chew meat and a different set to chew vegetables. Both the holiday and our pearly whites say humanity can -if it wants to- transit from a hunter modality to an agricultural one. Or not. {Human beings once lived in the rain forest, but also for past epochs the species lived on the savannah.}]

'dig to plant' / 'dig to bury'

Dig refers to both uses. As such it is linked not just to the concept of food, but also the concept of heaven.

[Death is both too boring and too scary to take part in metaphors that exist in our imagination. Its conversion into heaven in our culture (our shared imaginations made real) is helped by our pre-conscious (constantly projecting the rainforest part of ourselves into a vague hypothetical future).]

veggies -eat that turkey!

I am vegetarian who eats meat that other people prepare. This is the natural way. For you vegans out there, I want to stress this. Because archetypally my friends might be hunter-gatherers, even as I identify with the plant-farmers.

[I have no dispute with the chef that cut that lamb's throat on TV ( And neither did most right-wing groups, and neither did PETA).]

cooked on a fire

The growing trend in the USA for extravagent Christmas displays is the modern equivalent of the ancient sharing of the campfire. It proves people naturally want to share a campfire. So much so they are willing to spend time and money for the electric, colored, heatless fire where they now live.

These displays, btw, utterly refute the thesis of history displayed in Quest for Fire. This famous movie isn't just profoundly unThanksgivingish, its basic premise is false [long story - basically, people probably gave away flaming twigs].

Dress-up, but not like Ranford

Do dress up, but don't wear anything like what the warmonger wears. He is a professional whose job it is to push the hunter/gun culture [which nowadays seems to means a war culture. There arent a lot of forests around]. This man must wear the appropriate iconography.

His sartorial problems are that he must wear cloth from ... gasp! .. plants. And that he is fat from eating a lot of food he does not hunt for.

His solution is elabarate tailoring to mask his desk existence, monograms to simulate hunter/gathering clothing, a mane of hair, and glasses-frames that simulate wood.

I repeat, do not dress like this for Thanksgiving. Wear your granny glasses instead and cheerfully chew that meat!

row row row the boat

I mean, the gravy boat.