“The wisdom of Othin is not as kindly as the wisdom of Solomon.“

These words were used by Henry Goddard Leach in his book A Pageant of Old Scandinavia to describe the Hávamál. Let me take you on a journey to understand one of the richest texts in all Norse literature. The Hávamál has achieved a certain fame in modern times. Often billed as a “Viking code of ethics,” this description does little justice to the contents of the poem itself.

The Old Norse name Hávamál is a compound of Hávi, which is one of Odin's names ('High One'), and the plural noun mál (from older mǫ́l), and means 'Song (or Words) of the High One'. Listen to the following, which is a vocal rendition of Hávamál 156 by Heilung in their song “Othan”

The Overkill Hypothesis has been deboonked at this point, but it still holds a lot of real estate in the minds of the general public. First proposed by Paul S Martin in 1966 (think on that date), it was pushed hard for decades with pretty pathetic evidence The evidence is now becoming pretty robust that the end of the last ice age and the end of the megafauna was caused by a comet, or a series of comet impacts. But I’m not here to debate the details. I want to talk about why we still think humans killed off the megafauna

Thread of resources on the Frontier. This is not exhaustive but all of these are worth a place in your library.

What is a frontier collection without Fredrick Jackson Turner’s groundbreaking work, The Frontier in American History? This is required reading Also required reading, Walter Prescott Webb. Exceptional analysis on the frontier and how it shaped American institutions. He has a book about the Texas Rangers that is on my list to get

The Great Plains presented an obstacle to the pioneering American, an obstacle that threw his established methods of life into chaos. This obstacle demanded a radical set of changes in order for the American to subdue this vast frontier.

https://twitter.com/raven_brah/status/1661011720347987968

For the greater part of half a century, the frontier line was held stationary. Though we think of the American expansion to be a steady push West, settlement in fact happened around the frontier boundaries of the Great Plains.

The settling of the Great Plains ushered in a new chapter of the American’s conquest of the frontier. The conditions of the plains was wholly unique to the American, conditions that demanded a radical change to the ways in which he lived. Neither the American nor his ancestors from England or Northern Europe had ever lived in such a land of rolling grass hundreds of miles across, completely devoid of timber. These were a woodland people, and their institutions and instruments of life were designed for the forest

Many like to think about events such as the train derailment and the food processing plant fires being a part of some vast conspiracy. But there is a more simple, correct, and ultimately more dangerous explanation: deferred maintenance, shrinking of expertise, and incompetence When the vast infrastructure that we have built that underpins our entire existence starts to degrade due to lack of resources to repair it, lack of professional expertise to maintain it, and political expediency that ignores it, you will get more and more of this

At long last, the thread you have all been waiting for. The singular reason you follow this account. The most important thing you will read this year. I am going to lift the veil from your benighted eyes. I present: the difference between a raven and a crow To begin, the common raven is larger. A raven has a wingspan of up to 53 inches, while a crow measures in at 39. A raven’s beak is thicker, with nasal feathers extending further. A crow has a smaller, more pointed beak. Crows have fan shaped tails, ravens are wedge shaped