I had originally planned on covering the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s (ODNI) assessment of Foreign Threats To the 2020 US Federal Elections on Tuesday night, but decided we needed something on the then just happened domestic terrorist attack in Atlanta. Yesterday, ODNI also released the executive summary from a recently completed threat assessment into domestic violent extremism. Given that the two assessments overlap in a key finding, I’ve decided to basically deal with them in one post. Especially because the assessment on foreign threats to the 2020 elections basically tracks with everything we covered here between my Black PSYOP series of posts beginning in October 2019 and Cheryl’s posts on the topic here and at her Nuclear Diner. In other words, between Cheryl and I, you all were getting pretty close to the same assessment that ODNI has put together. On behalf of Cheryl: we demand a raise!!!!
You can click across and read the whole assessment for yourself, but here’s the key findings:
You’ll notice that Key Judgement’s 2, 3, and 4 all track with what we’ve been discussing here since October 2019. In the Black PSYOP 1 and 2 posts we covered what misinformation and agitprop was being laundered, by whom, and why. Including this lovely little item dated May 2014, which I misdated to April 2014 in the post:
Anyone surprised by these findings, such as self declared information warfare expert Thomas Rid, quite simply, didn’t want to know about them because they had their own agendas. Specifically downplaying that anything that has actually been happening since at least 2014 if not 2011 in terms of Russian information warfare was actually happening. He’s suddenly surprised because he’s spent the past several years writing, publishing, and defending a book on information warfare that essentially denies it is actually occurring.
We also covered what Rudy Giuliani, Chanel Rian, and OAN News were doing to mule this Russian misinformation and agitprop to Trump, his surrogates in the House and the Senate, in the conservative movement, and in the conservative news media. As well as what Senators Johnson, Grassley, and Graham were doing with that material in the Black PSYOP Part X. And while it was reported at the time, in July 2020, we now have confirmation directly from Democratic members of Congress that Congressman Nunes received this fabricated material directly from Andreii Derkach. As in the Democrats actually have the delivery receipt!
The executive summary of the ODNI’s report on domestic violent extremism brings us to the overlap. Here are the findings:
(U) The IC assesses that domestic violent extremists (DVEs) who are motivated by a range of ideologies and galvanized by recent political and societal events in the United States pose an elevated threat to the Homeland in 2021. Enduring DVE motivations pertaining to biases against minority populations and perceived government overreach will almost certainly continue to drive DVE radicalization and mobilization to violence. Newer sociopolitical developments—such as narratives of fraud in the recent general election, the emboldening impact of the violent breach of the US Capitol, conditions related to the COVID-19 pandemic, and conspiracy theories promoting violence—will almost certainly spur some DVEs to try to engage in violence this year.
(U) The IC assesses that lone offenders or small cells of DVEs adhering to a diverse set of violent extremist ideologies are more likely to carry out violent attacks in the Homeland than organizations that allegedly advocate a DVE ideology. DVE attackers often radicalize independently by consuming violent extremist material online and mobilize without direction from a violent extremist organization, making detection and disruption difficult.
(U) The IC assesses that racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists (RMVEs) and militia violent extremists (MVEs) present the most lethal DVE threats, with RMVEs most likely to conduct mass-casualty attacks against civilians and MVEs typically targeting law enforcement and government personnel and facilities. The IC assesses that the MVE threat increased last year and that it will almost certainly continue to be elevated throughout 2021 because of contentious sociopolitical factors that motivate MVEs to commit violence.
(U) The IC assesses that US RMVEs who promote the superiority of the white race are the DVE actors with the most persistent and concerning transnational connections because individuals with similar ideological beliefs exist outside of the United States and these RMVEs frequently communicate with and seek to influence each other. We assess that a small number of US RMVEs have traveled abroad to network with like-minded individuals.
(U) The IC assesses that DVEs exploit a variety of popular social media platforms, smaller websites with targeted audiences, and encrypted chat applications to recruit new adherents, plan and rally support for in- person actions, and disseminate materials that contribute to radicalization and mobilization to violence.
(U) The IC assesses that several factors could increase the likelihood or lethality of DVE attacks in 2021 and beyond, including escalating support from persons in the United States or abroad, growing perceptions of government overreach related to legal or policy changes and disruptions, and high-profile attacks spurring follow-on attacks and innovations in targeting and attack tactics.
(U) DVE lone offenders will continue to pose significant detection and disruption challenges because of their capacity for independent radicalization to violence, ability to mobilize discretely, and access to firearms.
And it is the last sentence of Key Judgement 2 regarding US officials and prominent Americans promoting the Russian misinformation and agitprop against Biden that was key to Putin’s efforts to effect the 2020 election outcome and the final sentence of the first finding on domestic violent extremism – narratives of fraud about the election, calling “patriots” and “real” American to the Capitol to stop the certification of the Electoral College votes, use of racial slurs when referring to COVID-19, etc – overlap. Because we’ve seen the same US officials and prominent Americans within the conservative movement and conservative news media promote Putin’s misinformation and agitprop and promote the conspiracy theories about the election being stolen, calling “patriots” and “real” Americans to action to do something about it, and using racial slurs to refer to COVID-19. Additionally, as in Key Judgement 2 and the fourth finding on domestic violent extremism, we see the connection to foreign actors promoting, facilitating, and encouraging Americans to act on either Russia’s misinformation and agitprop, a variety of conspiracy theories, and white Christian supremacy. It is well documented that the Russians have funded, supported, and manipulated American white supremacists, Christian supremacists, and anti-government extremists.
Do take the time to read both documents, neither is very long, and you’ll get both a real solid understanding of how the Intelligence Community understands these problem sets and an appreciation for having professional, mature leadership running the US Intelligence Community.
Open thread!
Adam L Silverman
I’m gonna go eat my now rested steak. Back in a bit!
Cheryl Rofer
Thanks for the credit, Adam. I agree that we deserve a raise!
I thought about digging into the ODNI report, but I have been reading the material the Biden administration has been making available on its foreign/ domestic policy, which everyone else has been ignoring. I have another post in progress, on relations with North Korea and Iran. In six months, I will write an “I told you so” piece.
The information is out there, and it’s accessible in these days of the internet. That’s what we’ve been doing. Part of the reason I haven’t dug into the ODNI report, aside from their being only 24 hours in a day, is that its conclusions seem so obvious. What we’ve been saying.
Those conclusions were obvious enough that even parts of the press speculated on Rudy’s being influenced by Russian propaganda.
And the danger of white nationalists has long been obvious. But we’re finally being allowed to talk about it, although we have some way to go. Wesley Lowery had a good thread about that a couple of days ago.
mali muso
I was reading a summary of this report today and thinking to myself “this isn’t news, this is exactly what Adam and Cheryl were posting about on BJ as it happened “. Talk about a full service blog. Tomorrow’s news delivered today!
BlueGuitarist
Thanks Adam and Cheryl for telling us and being awesome
debbie
That executive summary should have been dedicated to Janet Reno, who knew all along.
I just listened to Terri Gross’s interview with Jane Meyer about her New Yorker article on DA Vance’s investigation of T****. I’d bet he’s already packing a go bag.
Adam L Silverman
@Cheryl Rofer: You’re welcome!
Geoboy
Regarding the claim that most US wars are attempts to distract from banking system disasters, I don’t see where the two biggest wars – Civil War and World War II – fit this description very well.
Adam L Silverman
@mali muso: Or in October 2019!
MagdaInBlack
@Geoboy: I’m guessing that’s why the word “most” was used.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
I still say this is really dumb and short-sighted on these foreign actors’ parts. Catastrophic climate change requires collective action and destabilizing one of the world’s largest economies and contributors to the international scientific community isn’t going to do that. People like Putin lack vision and don’t give one damn about the future of human civilization. Yeah, I know he’s old and doesn’t give a fuck. Maybe he and others think they’ll come out on top. It’s still foolish. As it turns out, a KGB agent isn’t very well suited to building anything or having a positive outlook for the future. Who knew!
If I could, I’d sentence him to 2000 hours of viewing Star Trek: the Next Generation, with his eyelids duct taped open. Maybe he’d learn how to be a better person, then
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
I also don’t understand why Iran would be attacking us. Sure, they wanted Trump gone, but how would undermining confidence in elections processes and exacerbating societal tensions accomplish that? Wouldn’t that potentially created an opening for Trump to try to declare martial law and stay president?
Gin & Tonic
As Adam says, a lot of the ODNI report on election interference covers what the people who know, have been talking about for quite some time. Interestingly, the intelligence community – while it has its own sources – is not as clued in to the OSINT community as one might think.
But while appreciate this post and all the others of Adam’s, there is little “news” here.
Adam L Silverman
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): Putin’s vision is he and Russia will benefit from climate change as it will thaw Siberia allowing for it to be turned into a new agricultural breadbasket while the US agricultural belt is scorched by heat and drought. Thereby making Russia, along with Canada I guess, the world’s agricultural superpowers and forcing the US to come and beg him for food. A complete reversal of the Cold War agricultural reality and politics from the 1950s through the 1980s.
Adam L Silverman
@Gin & Tonic: And it is why OSINT specialists like myself, especially ones who are very senior in terms of experience and rank, can’t get hired to actually do this work.
Mike in NC
Still smiling over the mention in the previous thread about people punching a wax dummy of Trump. (How could they tell?)
Anyway, Putin clearly had his hands full with the pandemic ravishing Russia. Couldn’t spend the time and effort to rescue his biggest asset.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Adam L Silverman:
But that’s not how it would work though. The permafrost in Siberia would release massive amounts of methane into the atmosphere, worsening climate change. The soil wouldn’t be very fertile either. Much of the rest of the world would be uninhabitable, prompting massive migrations, eventually to places like Russia, and these people would be desperate and violent. I can’t imagine places like India being rendered uninhabitable would do wonders for the world’s economy or Russia’s for that matter, which is smaller than Italy’s. They’re delusional idiots when it comes to this stuff. Doesn’t mean they’re not dangerous, because they are. Putin and his allies are active threats to global civilization as far as I’m concerned. He doesn’t deserve the power he has imo
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Cheryl Rofer: As you can see in the post above, Cole’s in a good mood, time to hit him up to double your’s and Adam’s pay.
WaterGirl
I have been looking for a video of the Biden interview with George S. but all I find are clips of this or that. Is there a video of the whole thing on line somewhere?
WaterGirl
@?BillinGlendaleCA: Double is thinking too small.
Adam L Silverman
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): I didn’t say it was a good plan…
Gin & Tonic
@Adam L Silverman: Except, while the temperatures may become more conducive to agriculture, the soil won’t. You can’t grow much on Precambrian rock.
Dan B
@WaterGirl: I support a 10,000% increase in salaries for Adam and Cheryl!
(Now to see if I’m perma-banned from BJ…)
Adam L Silverman
@Gin & Tonic: Again, I didn’t say it was a good plan…
geg6
Adam, you and Cheryl told us every bit of this as it happened and all kudos to you both. As scared as it made me at times, I was thoroughly grateful to have people with great knowledge and insight to give me the unvarnished truth and the known unknowns. I always felt at least somewhat mentally and emotionally prepared for whatever might happen. So glad that the rest of the country and the world now has the same information we jackals have known for months.
Dan B
@Gin & Tonic: Also the transport becomes “challenging” when permafrost melts. The ice highways become slush and mud.
Mary G
@WaterGirl: Transcript put up by ABC News is here.
Gvg
@Geoboy: WW2 has always seemed to be about distracting from the Great Depression to me. It took longer than you might expect but the Germany and Italy seem obvious results. I don’t know pre war Japanese history at all well. And the communist Russia came out of the horrible Czarist regime, as a revolt against a terrible kind of capitalism plus nasty nobility.
WaterGirl
@Mary G: Thanks. For some reason, these days I seem to have more patience for things I can listen to than things I have to read. :-)
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Adam L Silverman:
True, you didn’t. I just wanted to point out it was a terrible plan because flexing on monsters like Putin is fun
Mallard Filmore
@Gin & Tonic:
I recall reading a few decades ago that the reason our great plains are so fertile is because glaciers came out of the north, grinding rocks into dust. Add in a subsequent period of mixing in organic material (weeds, animal waste and bodies) and you get good soil.
Jeffro
@Adam L Silverman:
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
I think Putin just wants to take America down, even if it costs Russia somewhat. They have little to lose at this point. It’s the international version of “as long as the guy in the cardboard box next to me doesn’t have a sparrow, or an old curtain rod to roast it on, I’m good”.
the guy is not a strategist, he just wants payback on the U.S.
Mallard Filmore
@Dan B:
International trade will have its own challenges when the ocean level goes up a few meters. Ports will flood out and the surrounding industries will need to relocate.
KrackenJack
Adam and Cheryl’s contributions are literally priceless. Perhaps Cole will consider a profit sharing slice of those pennies per thousand impression ads. They might end up owing money in that model.
I’m old enough to remember ABSCAM. I doubt that is Director Wray’s style. Yet another reason to get rid of him.
Bill Arnold
@debbie:
I’d bet he’s already packing a go bag.
I visually checked the status of Trump’s 757 last week (was curious). Trump Force One/N757AF/T-Bird, the Trump-org(one of them)-controlled 757, was still parked at New York Stewart International Airport, and was still missing (as of 12 Mar 2021 13:20 EST) the port engine (with opaque white plastic wrapped around where an engine should be mounted).
This makes me happy. He’ll have to use the “Cessna Citation X, a super-midsize business jet”:
Donald Trump’s Private Jet Downgrade Was Bigger Than You Think (Mar 10, 2021, Doug Gollan)
Until his assets are seized, if the deities (or judges) so decide. :-)
Dan B
@Mallard Filmore: The ice was 3,000 feet thick over Seattle. We have some of the poorest soil in the country. Our topsoil outside of river valleys is less than an inch. Conifer forests don’t build topsoil faster than an inch per ten thousand years. Oregon has great topsoil because if the Missoula floods. They washed the soil from Eastern Washington and the hydraulic damming at the bends in the Columbia River it backed up in the Tri-Cities and from Portland to Eugene.
Good soil us formed where there are deciduous forests and prarie grasses, perennial plants, and grazing animals. Perhaps if we brought giant Bison and Arctic Moose back we could grow wheat and rice on the tundra.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Bill Arnold: Your glee at this is awesome!
Dan B
@Mallard Filmore: It appears that the tundra will melt and northern forests burn before the ports, notable exception in Virginia, flood. I’m worried about major fures in Seattle and Portland that block egress. Seattle especially because of the narrow hourglass of land.
So many things to think about with Domestic Terrorists in the mix.
James E Powell
The House should censure Nunes for his refusal to answer those questions.
Bill Arnold
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
Cessna Citation X has has a widget that draws a range circle from a user-selected city. The range makes fleeing with it more difficult. New York to London is doable with a tailwind (almost always the case), but not the reverse. (I’m reading confirmations of this in pilot forums.)
Mary G
Teachers rarely get the praise they are do. This story is a happy weeper:
Medicine Man
@Adam L Silverman
Thanks for the narrated tour behind the curtain, Adam. You and Cheryl are a joy to read.
64K question: What can the government/citizenry do about any of this?
geg6
@WaterGirl:
I am having the same problem. Been that way since 11/16. I hope I get over it soon because I have a huge stack of books I really want to read, especially “Caste” and “The Splendid and the Vile.”
In the meantime, I recently discovered the My Favorite Murder podcast and have been working through the episodes starting from the very first one in 1/16. I am thoroughly enjoying every minute of it. If you like true crime stories with some humor and an endearing lack of intensive research, you’ll enjoy it, too.
Chetan Murthy
@Gvg: Adam Tooze (Wages of Destruction) has the receipts: Hitler wanted a war to create for Germany what the USA had: a vast continental hinterland for German agriculture, to allow Germany to punch in the same class as the rising USA. He and the German leadership knew that with the USA rising, with the USSR recovering and rapidly industrializing, Germany had a small window in which the could succeed in creating their European Empire. Indeed, IIRC 1939 was pretty much the last possible viable date.
As it turned out, he was dead-wrong: it was too late already. But yeah, it had nothing to do with the Great Depression, and everything to do with creating a new German Empire.
Tooze has receipts.
Bill Arnold
@Dan B:
Well before that (within 10-20 years) frequent large scale nasty weather events will make agriculture increasingly unreliable. Farming is not possible without confidence that there is a high probability that it will rain at the right times to make crops succeed. This will also apply to any new/repurposed agricultural regions at more northern latitudes; the weather instability will not be conducive to farming. Maybe seasonal forecasts will be sufficiently better for planning, but probably not. (Ocean productivity will also decrease, a lot.)
30-40 years from now, elite assassination squads with broad support will be killing the extended families of those responsible. The next generations of humans will not look on the worst of our generations kindly.
Adam L Silverman
@Medicine Man: Make better decisions in regard to information sources. Promote more critical thinking. Elect better officials at all levels of government. Never watch Fox News. Never use Facebook. That would all be a good start.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@geg6: I liked The Splendid and the Vile. Caste is on my TBR pile too.
raven
@Dorothy A. Winsor: Someone recommend this and it came today. It looks good.
trollhattan
@Dan B:
Pronounced “skvirrel.”
Mike in NC
@geg6: Best book that I read in 2020 was “The Splenid and The Vile”.
geg6
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
I always devour Erik Larson books. And I loved “The Warmth of Other Suns,” so I’m really wanting to start “Caste.” But I don’t want to while I’m still in this muddled state. I really need to snap out of it.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@raven: That does sound good
Jackie
Adam, we are so fortunate to have you and Cheryl posting here!
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Adam L Silverman:
Otherwise, you might end up in a heated discussion on ISO invariance.
CarolPW
@geg6: Try reading Dorothy’s Wind Reader and Wysman. Those, plus two of TaMara’s, got me back to reading again.
Wapiti
@Dan B: The ice was 3,000 feet thick over Seattle.
What’s crazy to me is that there are rock outcrops near Bellingham (in road cuts on Chuckanut Drive) that have fossilized fern leaves, and that survived having a half-mile of ice grinding over the top of it.
trollhattan
@Wapiti:
Similarly, seabed fossils in the Sierra Nevada high peaks. Nature be crazy, yo.
gwangung
@trollhattan: Thrust faults and large scale orogeny for the win.
TomatoQueen
@raven: Looking forward to this, as I remember what a scandal Frances FitzGerald was at the time, along the lines of ‘how dare that girl write that book’…in the grand tradition of Dorothy Thompson and Martha Gellhorn and Clare Hollingworth and Ida B Wells and Dorothy Dix and Nellie Bly dogs bless ’em all.
Chris T.
Why, If you ask nicely, I bet they’d double your salary!
(ETA: Dan B beat me to it)
Dan B
@trollhattan: Gee thanks Boris!
Dan B
@Wapiti: 6,000 feet thick in Vancouver. At least a mile in Bellingham.
Dan B
@trollhattan: The highest road a passenger vehicle can navigate in WA is Slate Peak – 7,000 feet. There are fossils in that slate.
YY_Sima Qian
Not surprising that all of the Trump Administration’s and Republicans’ accusations of Chinese interference in the 2020 election were attempts at distraction from the Russian effort.
China and Russia indeed represent different challenges. China’s reemergence threatens the US’ decades long hegemony, and the post-WW II international order that systemically favored the West. China, unsurprisingly, seeks to modify that international order so that it more systematically favors China. The loss of hegemony and a favorable international order will indeed be painful, eliminating benefits that Americans have taken for granted. The “exorbitant privilege” of the dollar as global reserve currency is case in point. The US Fed could not have printed the trillions of dollars, and the US government implemented trillions in stimulus, in response to the Global Financial Crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic, without that privilege. The US could not have enacted such punishing sanctions on Russia, Iran, North Korea, and Chinese tech companies such as Huawei, and received compliance to such an extent from allies rivals alike, without its threatening access to dollar transactions.
Russia, on the other hand, seems to be trying sow chaotic and re-establish its hegemony (at least regionally) over the ashes. To that end, it has been working to exploit the social and political divisions around the world and undermine the government institutions.
The response to the China challenge is to domestic renewal, which enhances American power in negotiation or confrontation, and enhances the desirability of American hegemony and its espoused values and system of government to the rest of the world. At the same time, make adjustments to the international order that still protects US/western interests and constrains China, before China becomes too powerful to constrain, all the while hopefully avoid the Thucydides Trap (which means the adjusted order needs to accommodate some of Chinese core interests). Now, execution is extremely difficult, or history would not be littered with wars between incumbent and rising powers.
Interestingly, think tanks and commentators in the US seem particularly animated by the Chinese challenge than the Russian ones, despite the Russian one being more pernicious IMO. There are many real vulnerabilities and tensions in western polities for Russia to exploit. If the domestic social cohesion and political order is badly damaged, the international influence and the favorable international order ultimately does, as well.
KrackenJack
@Chetan Murthy: Probably too late to a dead thread, but Ring of Steel by Watson describes the exact same fear prior to WWI. Germany and Austria-Hungary felt beset by Russia and the French-English-etc alliance. The lessons the Germans learned about using propaganda and stoking ethnic hatred to maintain the war effort were refined for the sequel.
A similar dynamic drove Japan in WW2. Both Germany and Japan rose from the ashes with significant help from their enemies. Hard to say where’d they be economically today if the World Wars hadn’t happened at all.
Cheryl Rofer
Something that might be worth digging into the ODNI report for is to try to identify the Republicans who helped the Russian narrative and exactly what they did. What was that late-night Devin Nunes run to the White House about?
And the eternal question of fellow travelers or just useful idiots.
Nettoyeur
@Adam L Silverman: I am not so sure what happens when Siberia thaws. The parts of that region that regularly thaw turn into mosquito infested swamps that swallow what buildings were built on the permafrost. I guess we will find out.
Nettoyeur
@YY_Sima Qian: Remember that Russia has some demographic issues. The white Christian population is declining, while the Islamic and Asian populations are growing. The peopel in the central Asian republics were bound together by the USSR and the Russian language as a lingua franca, but those ties are getting thinner. The areas of Russia near the Chinese border are sparsely populated, and China has plenty of people on its side of the border. Russian ethnic nationalism is a strong force on both the right (Putin) and left (Navalny), a sign of growing uneasiness about the Russian empire.
Humanities Prof
@Gvg: Ooo, ooo, I can do this one!
If you wanted to make the case that pre-World War II Japan was driven by economic considerations, I’d say that wasn’t completely wrong, but from the perspective of the Japanese, it was mostly about natural resources (not exactly the same thing).
The Japanese had taken some lessons from World War I, in which they’d played a small but significant role. They’d concluded that any future conflicts would be “total wars,” requiring the complete mobilization of societies to support the war effort, and that therefore countries with the most resources would have the best chances of winning.
The Japanese Home Islands are very resource-poor. In everything except human resources, Japan would be operating at a major disadvantage. So the Japanese military (by the 1930s, the terms “Japanese government” and “Japanese military” were basically synonymous, for reasons having to do with the nature of the Meiji Constitution) began trying to expand their colonial empire–they’d already annexed Korea, but the real prize would be China. So they seized the region of Manchuria in 1931, and then in 1937 launched a full-scale invasion of China itself. Japan would benefit economically if they’d been able to pull this off, but the underlying motivation, in Japan’s case, was mostly to make sure that the country would be better equipped to wage future wars.
Uncle Cosmo
@Nettoyeur: And not just skeeters, but BIG MOFO’N MOSQUITOS! Seems to be a law of nature – shorter the growing & mating season, bigger the bugs.
In its first years, the Houston Colt .45s franchise played outdoors awaiting the completion of the Astrodome (and the corresponding name change). One evening Dodgers pitcher Sandy Koufax was swarmed on the mound by a cloud of mosquitos & the game was halted while the groundscrew drove them off with cans of bugspray. IIRC, in a postgame interview, Koufax said, I’m not saying those bugs were big, but I swear a few of them were twin-engine jobs.
Miss Bianca
@geg6: Way late to this thread, but…I just cannot get into Erik Larson. At all. Even when his books fall within my particular research bailiwick, so you’d think I’d devour them. Just something about his style puts me off. It’s a shame, I know he’s very highly regarded.
And Caste? When I finally got hold of it, I couldn’t get into it either. Not because of the writing, but because COVID brain just couldn’t engage with the subject matter. Too overwhelming. I am going to try that one again later – maybe read The Warmth of Other Suns first.
ETA: The one nonfiction book I *was* able to finish in the last few weeks was John Berendt’s City of Falling Angels. That one was fun.
UncleEbeneezer
Raising a glass to you and Cheryl! Is that not the sort of raise you meant?
pluky
@Adam L Silverman:
Not going to happen. The soil of both the Canadian and Siberian north is both thin and nutrient poor. Thaw it all you want. It’s no replacement for the Ukrainian steppe or the Great Plains prairie soils.
pluky
@Mallard Filmore: Yup. Prior to it’s break-up for agriculture, the depth of tall grass prairie topsoil was measured in feet.