Tag: Mississippi

The day we nuked Mississippi

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Horace Burge, 2 miles from Ground Zero, came home to more damage than expected

The Salmon test on Oct. 22, 1964 and the Sterling test on Dec. 3, 1966, were conducted to help determine whether and how nuclear test yields could be disguised through “decoupling” and how well such blasts could be detected.

After nine years of negotiations, the United States, the Soviet Union, and other countries signed the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1963…The treaty did not address underground testing, because of disagreements and uncertainty over how to verify that nations were not testing weapons underground.

In most cases, seismographs could detect underground nuclear tests. The United States wanted to know more about underground testing and how it could be detected and designed Project Dribble, which included the two Mississippi detonations, to investigate the possibility that cheating nations could hide their underground tests in some way…

The plan called for two detonations. The first, code-named Project Salmon, would be an explosion 2,700 feet down in solid salt.

The second detonation, Project Sterling, would use a smaller bomb in the cavity left behind by the first blast. Scientists hypothesized that the shockwaves of the second detonation would be muffled by the cavity, effectively concealing it from seismographic detection…

The nuclear test was scheduled for September 22, 1964, but the wind direction was not right until October 22. On that date, about 400 residents were evacuated from the area and were paid $10 per adult and $5 per child for their inconvenience…

At the test site, creeks ran black with silt-laden water, and by seven days after the blast, more than 400 nearby residents had filed damage claims with the government, reporting that their homes had been damaged or that their water wells had gone dry…

Within days, the United States government began reimbursing local residents for the damage done to their homes.

Think the silly buggers in Congress could figure out how to react this quickly, nowadays. Republicans would have to get permission from FOX Noise, first.

RTFA for more details … and results.

100 years ago, Mississippi’s Senate voted to send all the state’s Black people to Africa

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One hundred years ago, the Mississippi state Senate voted to evict the state’s Black residents — the majority of its total population — not just out of Mississippi, but out of the country.

The Senate voted 25 to 9 on Feb. 20, 1922, to ask the federal government to trade some of the World War I debts owed by European countries for a piece of colonial Africa — any part would do — where the government would then ship Mississippi’s Black residents, creating “a final home for the American negro.”

The act is a reminder of just how long after the end of slavery some White Southerners were pushing not just to strip African Americans of their political rights but also to remove them from the land of their birth…

Senate Concurrent Resolution No. 21 was written by Sen. Torrey George McCallum, a former mayor of Laurel in Jones County. The county has achieved some measure of Hollywood fame as the “Free State of Jones,” a pocket of Unionist sentiment during the Civil War, but the McCallums were deeply engaged in the institution of slavery. Torrey’s grandfather Archibald enslaved 51 people on his plantation in 1860 and had a net worth of $80,000, about $2.5 million today…

His resolution argued in flowery language that “the spirit of race consciousness” had grown with a postwar increase in nationalistic feelings worldwide and that it was “our most earnest desire to reach a just, fair, amicable, and final settlement” to what some White people then called “the Negro question.”

I can’t know exactly how such a vote would total out, nowadays. Been a few decades since I’ve been in Mississippi; but, this crap still would have passed, then. I think it would pass, now. And this kind of racism isn’t limited to one state, just one piece of our nation’s history.

A reminder of picturesque Mississippi

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Photograph: Emmett Till Interpretive Center

A sign riddled with bullet holes marks the spot where, in 1955, 14-year-old Emmett Till’s mutilated body was pulled from Mississippi’s Tallahatchie River. Two white men lynched Till for allegedly flirting with a white woman. Site markers such as this one were defaced and replaced repeatedly until 2019, when a 500-pound steel sign—bulletproof and indestructible— was installed.

Emmett Till was lynched a few months after I graduated from high school. I remember the news stories – in most of the North – as clearly as anything else about that summer. The so-called trial of the men who murdered that 14-year-old Black youth found them Not Guilty.

Most inspiring event I ever saw on TV

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Four weeks later, I was co-chairman of a newly-chartered chapter of C.O.R.E., the Congress Of Racial Equality. The other co-chair, a Black man named Frank, was a machine operator in an aircraft engine factory. I was working in a warehouse. We both lived and worked in a factory town in Southern New England.

We marched forward. Never looked back.

John Salter, a social science professor at Tougaloo College, sat with his students Anne Moody, Pearlena Lewis and Memphis Norman–a white man and three black students–at the “Whites Only” counter in Woolworth’s store lunch counter. Nobody would serve them. Behind them was a growing crowd of frenzied onlookers, police officers and news people. It was 11:15 a.m. on May 28, 1963.

#Bill Minor, then a reporter for the New Orleans Times-Picayune, was there that day. He was the Mississippi correspondent covering civil rights events in Jackson and the state. Minor, tipped off by Medgar Evers, gathered with the other news people at the planned sit-in and watched the scene unfold.

Please read the article. Learn something about American history. This was not an isolated incident. Fightback had been going on since the first slave escaped. The racism that was part and parcel of justifying slavery lasted decades and centuries beyond the inhumane economics that justified the lies.

After 128 years…

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…Mississippi’s new magnolia flag starting to fly after vote to replace Confederate-style flag.

A new Mississippi flag without Confederate images was flying in parts of the state on Wednesday, one day after a majority voters approved the design that has a magnolia encircled by stars and the phrase “In God We Trust.”…

“Mississippi voters sent a message to the world that we are moving forward together,” former Mississippi Supreme Court Justice Reuben Anderson said in a statement.

Anderson led a nine-member commission that recommended the new flag design. Uncertified election results — which at midday Wednesday did not yet include numbers from Pearl River County — showed the new flag received more than 70% support. It got a majority in all reporting counties except George and Greene.”I have a renewed sense of hope for my grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and I know this new symbol creates better prospects for the entire state of Mississippi,” Anderson said.

Now’s the time to get more serious about removing all the Jim Crow practices that slide by underneath cosmetic advances. That’s not meant to diminish this achievement. Plenty of racist crud would rather have died than to see the “stars and bars” removed from their flag.

Mississippi white woman with gun orders Black couple off campground — gets $250 misdemeanor fine

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❝ A white woman in Mississippi who was accused of threatening an African American couple with a handgun while shouting at them to leave a KOA campground has been fined $250, and will receive a misdemeanor charge.

Only $250. A misdemeanor.

❝ Imagine if the race roles were reversed!

Mississippi “justice” ain’t changed a whole helluva lot in the last century or so.

All of Mississippi’s beaches are closed by toxic algae

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Get out your jogging sandals, folks. You ain’t going swimming.

❝ Summer’s the perfect time to hit the beach — unless you live in Mississippi.

Along the state’s Gulf Coast, all 21 of the state’s beaches have been shut down for swimming due to a blue-green harmful algal bloom (HAB), according to the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality…

❝ HABs occur when “colonies of algae — simple plants that live in the sea and freshwater — grow out of control and produce toxic or harmful effects on people” or wildlife, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) says.

The toxic algae can cause rashes, stomach cramps, nausea, diarrhea and vomiting, the state agency warned…

❝ HABs aren’t rare. In fact, every US coastal and Great Lakes state experiences them, the NOAA says. However, they are popping up with increasing frequency due to climate change and increasing nutrient pollution, according to the NOAA.

Shameful. Causes are inclusive. Decades of mismanagement of most of the waterways in the Mississippi system. Lousy regulation of farm chemicals. You name it – the Mississippi probably suffers from it.

Morgan Freeman Turns His Mississippi Ranch Into Honeybee Sanctuary

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❝ Morgan Freeman has long been known for having a voice of gold, using his clout and vocal talents for such worthy causes as environmental conservationist group One Earth. But it has also become apparent that the beloved actor also has a heart of gold–especially now that he has devoted his ranch to helping save honeybees.

The 81-year old actor took up beekeeping on his 124-acre Mississippi ranch as a simple hobby in 2014, largely in reaction to the mass die-offs that were occurring and continue to this day.

❝ “There is a concerted effort for bringing bees back onto the planet … We do not realize that they are the foundation, I think, of the growth of the planet, the vegetation … I have a lot of flowering things, and I have a gardener too.”

“As she takes care of the bees too, all she does is figure out, ‘OK, what would they like to have?’ so we have got acres and acres of clover, and we have some planting stuff like lavender, I have got like, maybe 140 magnolia trees, big blossoms.”

❝ While Freeman’s efforts may not be enough on their own to turn back the tide of adverse factors facing bees, his example is an inspiring signal that people are beginning to grow more conscious of the winged pollinators’ importance to humanity.

An example to us all.

Thanks, UrsaRodinia

3-Tons of Dead Feral Pigs Made for a Helluva Experiment

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Before

❝ In nature, mass mortality sometimes happens. More than 200,000 saiga antelopes in Kazakhstan drop dead in a matter of weeks; 337 dead whales wash up in a remote fjord in southern Chile; some 300 reindeer in Norway are felled by a single bolt of lightning— all that has happened since 2015. There’s evidence such spectacular displays of death are increasing in frequency due to climate change…

The problem is the die-offs are unpredictable. Once one has happened, scientists can’t go back in time to make the baseline measurements that would allow them to say how exactly an ecosystem has been changed by a sudden jolt of animal carcasses…

❝ …The team needed an immense mass of dead animals. Luckily, wildlife biologist Marcus Lashley of Mississipi State had connections with people at state and federal agencies who are responsible for combatting a wildlife pest that currently plagues Mississippi and many other states.

A few phone calls later, the dead feral pigs started streaming in…

❝ …on July 5th, 2016, with the help of some technicians graciously loaned to them by colleagues, they dragged 6,000 pounds of dead pigs into their study plots and left them to rot.

Almost immediately, camera traps recorded dozens of vultures descending on the piles of pigs. Sticky traps to collect insects had to be changed daily because “you couldn’t have stuck another one on there,” Brandon Barton of Mississippi State University says. The writhing maggot swarms on the carcasses were several inches deep.

Vultures and maggots were to be expected, of course, but the intensity of the response awed the researchers. “We were completely unprepared for what happened,” Barton says…The biological response was so extreme that the researchers had to abandon some of their sampling methods…

❝ Even now, more than a year later, the sites remain ecologically scarred. “Will they ever go back to normal? Probably not,” Barton says…Though not much is left of the three tons of dead pig they started with, the researchers plan to continue monitoring their experimental plots until they’re indistinguishable from the surrounding forest—which may be never, they note. “We’re going to measure this for the rest of our careers,” Lashley predicts.

RTFA. Truly interesting. I’ve blogged before about decomp, learning from the natural processes is an important part of criminology. This study takes a look at death in another direction.

An interesting read. If you’re up for it.