Tuesday, April 30, 2002- - -
These unintended consequences I can vouch for. I was living in downtown DC - in the Harrington on 11th and E - when they opened the doors of the state mental hospitals there in 1983. According to the Post it was all Reagan's fault and entirely a cost-cutting move. I don't know about that one way or the other, but I'll never forget seeing the newly homeless sleeping on the steam grates surrounding the Treasury Building.
@9:14 PM
Bill Quick has something special to say that's well worth reading.
@9:13 PM
Amid all this controversy there is some bright light. Scientists have discovered why one leg of the V of flying geese is longer than the other. .. There's more geese in that leg.
@6:37 PM
Is it just my imagination, or does it seem that there's scarcely a field of the academe that has not been co-opted to some extent by some group with an agenda? Whether it's phony history ala Michael Bellesiles, phony public health issues, phony environmental issues, or what have you, it seems there are plenty who would rather be politically correct than scientifically accurate.
To be fair, this view is probably skewed considerably by selective reportage - unpopular science probably doesn't get much ink - and there certainly is some fine work being done, but it seems that for too many it's not about science - it's all about politics and money, power, prestige, and careers, all those things your average superhuman scientist isn't supposed to care about.
@6:21 PM
I hope there was a prize!
@6:19 PM
Steve Den Beste has posted a thought-provoking series of articles in which he explains the conceptual link between the Cambrian fossils of the Burgess Shale and World War III.
He draws an apt analogy between competition for survival at the species level and competition for markets and between ideas that serves as an interesting heuristic device for understanding our current geopolitical situation.
Any competitive system goes through a major change which, barring a major perturbation of the system by external events, is permanent. This pattern applies to the history of life, to the development of markets, and to the competition of political forms, and it's the deep source of the current war.
Stephen Jay Gould refers to it as "experimentation followed by standardization" but he's describing the effect, not the cause. I consider it to be caused by a transformation from nonzero-sum to zero-sum competition due to saturation. ..
Which finally leads up to the key insight I had a couple of days ago: during the non-zero-sum expansion stage, it is the virtues of each competitor which decide how well they prosper. But after the switch to zero-sum competition, it is their faults which decide who will die. An uneven competitor, with both virtues and faults, may prosper in the early stages but will in the long run be destroyed by a competitor which is uniformly mediocre.
Great stuff.
Alas, among the less optimistic predictions that might be drawn from Steve's analysis is that mediocrity is an almost inevitable characteristic of today's successful politician or bureaucracy*.
*Update: While we're checking our assumptions, my big assumption here is that we're through with the non-zero-sum expansion stage of government. I sincerely hope we are, but I've got to wonder.
@8:53 AM
Monday, April 29, 2002- - -
Is climate change real?
I watch much of the current global warming debate with considerable amusement. During the late Pleistocene, between about 15,000-25,000 years ago, much of the earth north of the 40th parallel was under continental glaciers up to a mile thick. During the early Holocene between about 6000-7000 years ago the Killpecker Dune Field in present-day Wyoming was open blowing sand covering an area roughly equivalent to the modern Sahara. The geological evidence of these and many other major climatic events is compelling. There is no question in my mind that the earth's climate is a dynamic system that changes constantly. It always has changed and some of the changes have been radical. There is every reason to believe that the climate will continue to change just as radically.
Yet, you'll often read, as we do here, that someone or other's climate model suggests that ".. severe climate changes are strong possibilities .." Sigh. No. Severe climate changes are a geological fact. You just don't hear much about past changes due to the additional and very inconvenient fact that humans weren't available to be blamed for all this past environmental degradation, climatic deterioration, and .. well, pick your own semantically loaded terminology, the 'environmental scientists' certainly have.
Any group is very suspect to me when they routinely ignore 13 billion years worth of the earth's history* while pointing at computer models that 'strongly suggest' this or that, based on, at best, a few hundred years of weather data that doesn't begin to encompass the range of climatic change we know to have occurred in the past. Any group that routinely uses the semantically loaded language you see coming from 'environmental scientists' is very suspect as well. And finally, any group that so viciously rounds on anyone who questions them is terribly suspect. Such behavior suggests to me that the global warmers aren't all that secure in their beliefs and confirms that global warming is indeed a 'belief,' propounded with religious fervor and often defended with remarkably similar sorts of arguments.
The recent, hideous hatchet job pointed out by the InstaPundit, in which John Rennie, Scientific American's editor in chief, questions Bjørn Lomborg's credentials while knowingly and repeatedly misrepresenting those credentials and simultaneously talking holier than thou about whose ad hominems have been worse, is an excellent example of the level of discourse I've come to expect from global warmers. In this case, it's also a good thing they call themselves Scientific American, not Literate American. At the least Rennie desperately needs an editor.. a criticism as fully to the point as most of Rennie's.
This was just too delicious: The very first sentence of Rennie's article reads: Many critics of Bjørn Lomborg's book refer to Mark Twain's comment about "lies, damn lies and statistics," but I am more reminded of H. L. Mencken's remark, "For every problem, there is a neat, simple solution, and it is always wrong." Later Rennie says: He [Lomborg] particularly seems to enjoy quoting a statement that Schneider made in an interview in 1989 about the "double ethical bind" researchers can find themselves in, to the effect that sometimes they might need to "offer up scary scenarios" to build public support. Lomborg does not overtly accuse Schneider of lying about global warming forecasts but his innuendo is clear.
Of course, in this context Lomborg wasn't accusing Schneider of anything - he simply quotes Schneider acknowledging what should be obvious; that scientists are human, science costs money, and some scientists value money, prestige, and position more than they value science. This should be no great revelation to anyone. But somehow in Rennie's eyes it becomes a damning example of selective quotation that Lomborg left off Schneider's plaintive last sentences at the end of the quote. According to Rennie, the damning missing citation is this: Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both. I hope so too. But what a world view this implies. To even suggest that there exists a balance to be struck between honesty and effectiveness certainly might be taken to imply that to be more effective one must be less honest. This strikes me as the world view of a Machiavellian politician, not that of one committed to science. The whole point of this juvenile rant appears to be that Lomborg has enjoyed a little innuendo, so Rennie's continuous innuendos are OK too, right?
And then there are the constant, even quasi-religious appeals to authority. Someone really should explain to Mr. Rennie that Science isn't a democratic process. We don't vote on what's valid. When most people hold a similar view it certainly makes that view the dominant paradigm, but to imply that the dominance of a paradigm somehow proves it's correctness, as Rennie repeatedly does, reveals an abysmal ignorance, not only of how science works, but of human nature in general. Not to mention it's just plain silly - most every commonly accepted scientific thought started out as a minority opinion.
Me thinks thou doth protest too much.
*Update: Yes, I meant to say 13 Billion, although I certainly could have phrased this better. If there is any 'beginning' to natural history that's probably it. Bear in mind that I was referring to the 'history' of the earth, not the 'age' of the earth, which is, as several sharp-eyed readers have pointed out, more like 4.5 to 5 Billion years. I was thinking that the natural history of the earth starts with the history of the cosmos and should have burned another sentence or two to make that more clear.
@4:41 PM
A few weeks ago the Casper Star Tribune changed ownership. All the same old crew are still there, but the new owners seem to be making some changes. First, although their web site has been online for several years, they've always run the online news a couple days behind the print edition. Running a news website seemed to be a grudging acknowledgement that the internet existed, while running all the news two days late insured that it would never be a threat - or a compliment - to their dead tree operation. Now they've finally wised up and have most of the news online simultaneous to the print edition. It's not pretty, but it's finally available.
While the same old crew still sit at the same desks, it's also apparent that the editorial policy has changed, at least as far as selection of OpEds goes. Instead of the constant 'in your face' commie commentator of the day OpEds offset by the occasional loopy screed from Cal Thomas or Charlie Reese to show how balanced and objective they were, they've now gone to using more bigger name writers - perhaps the new owners have more money - and seem to be trying to add more balance to the OpEds. For today, we have an all star selection of OpEds, with Nat Hentoff, Nicholas Kristof, and Paul Krugman. Perhaps not entirely balanced, but not the sort of second-string leftwing loonies we usually see featured.
No, now we have a certifiable first string loony leftie. I'm sure that Megan McArdle will have something interesting to say when she does her next Krugmanwatch, but in the mean time I couldn't resist pointing out that Paul Krugman is making the effort to maintain the spirit of the old 'don't confuse me with the facts' Red Star Tribune.
Says Krugman: "Second, the Bush plan still allows twice as much pollution as experts at the Environmental Protection Agency privately think appropriate. The cost of an additional 50 percent reduction in pollution, according to internal E.P.A. documents, would be pretty small. But the administration apparently prefers not to ask industry to bear even those small costs.
The cost of a 50% reduction in pollution "would be pretty small," eh? Did I read somewhere that this guy used to be an economist?
@8:02 AM
Surely tourist season is almost over down there?
@8:02 AM
What? There are people struggling along out there with only one gun?
@8:01 AM
None, of course.
@8:01 AM
Sunday, April 28, 2002- - -
Via Jim Henley, another great splash in the blogosphere©! Bruce Baugh, author of about a jillion role-playing games, has started a blog.
@2:24 PM
Well, I for one refuse to link to this.
@2:24 PM
Bill Quick says the Israeli-Arab "problem" is insoluble at this point:
For the west to live in peace, the entire [Islamic] culture must be changed, and I suspect that this is not possible without first defeating it so thoroughly that even its religion is discredited.
Andrea Harris responds in a comment that underlines the fundamental problem - no amount of appeasement, no social programs, no economic development will help, as long as a stated goal of fundamental Islam is the destruction of the west.
@8:13 AM
There's been some movement in the Cobell v. Norton Indian Trust case while I was off loafing in the woods. According to the Washington Post, Senate Majority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.) and Sens. Tim Johnson (D-S.D.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) introduced legislation Friday [4/19] to create an Interior Department position of deputy secretary for trust management and reform to handle all trust fund duties, and to make it easier for tribes to directly manage or co-manage their own trust funds, which few tribes do now.
This won't be the first time Congress has tried to fix the Indian Trust. Accounting firm Arthur Andersen was paid $20 million in the early 1990s to reconcile tribal accounts and failed. The Interior Department, which oversees the BIA, has tried to fix the system and failed. Despite repeated failure, the DOI still wants to create another agency to overhaul the trust fund -- the Bureau of Indian Trust Asset Management (BITAM), although the past seven years of Congressionally mandated reforms have had no effect.
According to John Miller, deputy in charge of policy for the Office of the Special Trustee, a department-level office charged with oversight of the $3.1 billion Indian Trust system, the federal government is no closer to fixing the broken Indian trust than it was seven years ago. Even if the balances of accounts belonging to 300,000 American Indians and more than 300 tribes were correct today, there is no way to ensure their accuracy in the future. Says Miller, "The major problem is, we do not have a system that can fulfill the fiduciary responsibility now or in the future much less account for the past. There is no system in place to accurately maintain the records. .. In other words, the 'bleeding' would continue. .. The DOI has no awareness of its fiduciary responsibility either on a legal or moral basis .. Decisions are not based on what is best for the beneficiary but what best serves DOI and its decision makers."
Despite years of legal wrangling, the fundamental issue - the government's paternalistic management of Indian assets - has not been shaken, or even questioned in some venues. Therefore, Daschle, Johnson, and McCain's move to make it easier for the tribes to manage their own affairs is encouraging.
@6:59 AM
Actually, the hat and jacket aren't nearly as important as the whip..
@6:59 AM
Friday, April 26, 2002- - -
James McNeil, 24, of Cheyenne, charged with shooting at a robbery suspect fleeing from a convenience store in January, has been charged with one count of assault with a deadly weapon, one count of reckless endangering and one count of carrying a concealed weapon without a permit.
McNeil posted a $3,000 bond and was released on his own recognizance Wednesday in Laramie County Circuit Court.
The assault charge, which is a felony, carries up to 10 years in prison and a $10,000 fine. Reckless endangering is a misdemeanor with a possible penalty of up to a year and/or a $750 fine. Carrying a concealed weapon without a permit is a misdemeanor punishable by up to six months in jail and a $750 fine.
In court papers filed Wednesday, Laramie County District Attorney Jon Forwood said the would-be robber was not armed when he left the convenience store, and that someone else inside the store already foiled the robbery by the time McNeil got involved. Leamon Jefferson, 27, tried to rob the Mini Mart with a hammer, the prosecutor said in a court document. Ben Griffith, who was in the store at the time, jumped Jefferson from behind as Jefferson tried to get money and foiled the robbery. Jefferson dropped the hammer and ran out the door, and Griffith followed. "The videotape clearly shows Jefferson was unarmed," Forwood said.
Remember, after talking with McNeil, Cheyenne attorney Leonard Munker had said ‘McNeil chased the suspect when he was outside the store. The suspect threatened McNeil with a knife at least twice.'
Now, District Attorney Forwood tells us that McNeil called 911 to report the robbery and told the dispatcher the robber came at him with a pickax. Then McNeil gave conflicting stories to police about the number of shots fired and also said the suspect came at him with a knife. Says Forwood: "The only weapon the investigation has disclosed that Jefferson had that morning was the small hammer he dropped inside the store."
It sounds like they're going to hang Mr. McNeil out to dry.
@11:55 AM
Yep.. Then you need beans to go with those bullets, and Logistics is born.
@11:54 AM
Thursday, April 25, 2002- - -
Over the years I've often worked in the Black Hills and studied the natural history of the region extensively. I can go on for hours, but dry description doesn't capture the magical essence of the place. The easternmost and most geologically recent range of the Rocky Mountains, the hills are truly an Island in the Plains. They're low compared to the more western mountain ranges, but they rise abruptly, looking mountainous all out of proportion to their maximum 7242 feet of elevation. With an extreme continental climate, summer temperatures often exceed 110°F and winter brings weeks of -40° lows, while their isolated position exposes them to the full brunt of the hot summer wind and arctic blasts sweeping in from the Dakotas. These extremes of temperature would seem to imply an uninhabitable waste, but quite the opposite is true.
The hills are ringed with a limestone plateau that's deeply incised by streams, often forming deep canyons with near vertical walls and crenellated cap rocks. The layered and fractured limestone that frequently comprises these outcrops often givens an ancient and eerily man-made feel to the place. The main canyons usually carry a perennial trickle of water fed by rains in the high country and by springs exposed along the canyon floor. These winding canyons form whole series of unique microclimates and are a huge natural arboretum. An overhanging cliff reflecting the southwest sun can become a virtual solar oven, unbearable in summer but a natural solarium in winter that mimics a southern desert. The opposite cliff face will have a northeast aspect that catches the winter drifts and provides perpetual deep shade providing a cool, wet boreal climate. Every conceivable solar aspect and microclimate is explorable at some turn, up a sheltered box canyon, or on a breezy mesa top ringed with pines. Paper birch and burr oak grow side by side with ferns, shooting stars, sage, and cactus. Timberline is quite low in this northerly latitude and sedge and crocus - arctic tundra species - cover the tops of the highest ridges. If you're familiar with these plants in their normal range, the effect of finding them all growing together is quite startling.
The wide variety of flora support an equally diverse fauna. Bighorn sheep, mountain goat, elk, and mule deer share the range with white-tailed deer and turkeys. Mountain lions thrive, and all the other predators are well represented. Raptors are everywhere, and sleeping in on a spring morning is impossible - the woods are a riot of songbirds screaming for sex. The streams and mountain lakes are full of gullible trout. But watch your step, the rattlesnakes come large for this northern country and poison ivy is common.
The canyon bottoms appear impassable, whether sunlit and choked with tangles of wild rose and blackberry thorn, burr oak, and deadfall cottonwood, or shaded dark, with moldering black duff and wet ferns, barred by the crossed bare black trunks of pines bearded with moss. Where the slopes aren't vertical they're cloaked in the deep shadow of close-set Ponderosa pines. Impassable thicket and impenetrable dark give the place an air of mysterious inaccessibility that turns out to be quite false - game trails lead through the thickets and the deer keep much of the undergrowth trimmed, there is remarkably little undergrowth in the pines regardless, and sunlit clearings abound.
After a few days of exploring it's very easy to understand why this was the hunting ground of the Dakota, Arapaho, and Cheyenne. The foothills were very attractive. A tree line overlooking the plains provides access to the resources of plains and woodland at one location and was a favored camp site. Oddly, although the region was well populated and there are many exploitable resources throughout the hills, there's little archaeological evidence of prehistoric activity in the higher elevations and particularly in the central hills. Oral traditions show that the central hills were familiar ground to the various Indian groups, however.
Between the occasional weathered spire or low rock wall looking like the ancient ruins of a forgotten castle, and the jungle of exotic flora growing in plots as if once tended, I'm often reminded of a grand garden grown old and unkempt, but with well-fed wildlife, fountains still functioning, and fish in the pools; all tended in due time by the genteel descendents of a once-grand civilization. Mystical country to roam on foot with plenty of time to step quietly and observe the plants and wildlife. I spend as much time there as I possibly can.
The turkeys all survived, but other than that the turkey hunt was a success.
@7:51 AM
Sunday, April 21, 2002- - -
Gone Hunting
Yahoo! I've gotten caught up, taxes done, and all the clients happy for a few days. It's time to run over to the other side of the mountain and try my luck with the turkeys.
@7:07 AM
This is awful, but awfully funny.
@7:06 AM
Friday, April 19, 2002- - -
Here's the chance of a lifetime. Ross Seyfried is offering dirt cheap ($1950) personally guided hunts for antlerless elk (probably for herd management) on his Elk Song Ranch, for the 2003 and 2004 season. There's no website, but he can be contacted at 59653 Morgan Lake Road, La Grande, OR, 97850. 541) 963-6711
Seyfried is a world champion IPSC shooter, licensed African professional hunter, and he's hunted all over the world. He's also quite a story-teller and a good journalist in a specialized field. It would be great fun to hunt with him.
@5:21 AM
Via Anton Sherwood, this is a sign of the times (pun intended).
@5:20 AM
Thursday, April 18, 2002- - -
Megan McArdle has an interesting bit on flat tax proposals and whether or not they would actually simplify tax filing. I'd suggest that the answer is yes and no - it depends on your source of income.
As a sole proprietor I file a Schedule C (pdf file) Profit or Loss From Business to itemize and deduct all my business expenses. On this form I list my gross receipts from business and then deduct my cost for goods sold and expenses for advertising, vehicle expenses, costs of equipment and supplies, repairs and maintenance, and depreciation and amortization on vehicles and equipment, rent and utilities, legal and professional fees, state and local taxes and licenses, subcontractor costs, and on and on. Bottom line, for 2001 my business overhead was 45.02% of my gross receipts.
Business overhead can range from a few percent to nearly 100% of gross receipts depending on the type of business, costs of goods sold, how many employees are required, and many additional factors. A flat tax could conceivably eliminate all personal deductions, but I don't see how the tax code can eliminate these business expense deductions. Taxing a flat percentage of gross receipts would quickly put the local hardware store out of business. Retail merchants often have 90% or more overhead, as they have very high costs for goods sold and employee wages. Taxing them at say 10% of gross receipts and taxing me at the same rate would be grossly unfair.
As the Schedule C and supporting documentation is about 90% of the effort of filing my taxes, a flat tax won't simplify things for me much at all. However, I'm still in favor of a flat tax, as opposed to the current 'progressive' income tax, as the progressive tax acts as a penalty for hard work and success.
Megan responds: Agreed -- flat tax wouldn't help sole proprietorships. But in MeganWorld, there'd be no corporate tax and equalized treatment between income and capital gains, so you'd be a corporation.
@9:29 AM
Wednesday, April 17, 2002- - -
In a post on April 12th, Mickey Kaus perhaps inadvertently illustrates why the Democrats are doomed. There's a deep-running current of willful self-delusion becoming more apparent in their rhetoric and political strategy every day. It was painfully apparent in their 'Bush is a dummy' routine and its converse, the 'Gore is Mr. Science Guy' shtick.
Bush is a Harvard MBA. He's not very articulate but he's no dummy. On the other hand, Gore is a law school dropout and divinity school dropout with a BA in journalism. Read Earth in the Balance and then tell me he's not as loopy as a box of Cheerios. 'Bush is a dummy' is only convincing if you want very badly to be convinced.
The capper is this 'Hillary for President' push. Forgetting for a second that her greatest appeal is to those who still believe in a free lunch, beside all the baggage (premium alligator with gold fittings) she would bring to the campaign, I can't imagine another Democratic candidate who could insure the Republican turn-out at the polls that Hillary would generate. Reality aside, she seems to engender a degree of loathing in Republicans that makes the most chad-chewing Democrat look positively sanguine by comparison.
While I suspect that quite a few folks besides myself reluctantly voted for Bush as the lesser of two evils, if Hillary were the opponent the Republicans would have little trouble convincing a substantial percentage of the population that they were voting against someone who is wholly evil. Go ahead, run Hillary for President. The Republicans won't have to waste any money on efforts to get out the vote and once those voters are at the polls the negative effect won't stop at the top of the ticket. Shoot yourselves in the other foot while you're at it.
@7:03 AM
Via the InstaPundit, Tailgunner Joe is putting together a new Devil's Dictionary. It's pretty darn funny too. However, Ambrose Bierce's original is timeless, so if you haven't read it you should. Here's one of my favorites:
Egotist, n. A person of low taste, more interested in himself than in me.
Post this one on your office wall. It will get you chuckles and blank stares, and tell you something in either case:
Education, n. That which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding.
@7:01 AM
By the way, these babies are custom-made, so if you want a pair made thigh-high in a color to match the velvet whip, have at it.
@7:00 AM
This sounds plausible, except that OBL is in that special part of hell reserved for 'religious' figures who preach hate and his followers aren't sophisticated enough to fake such things, although apparently they've just tried.
@6:59 AM
Tuesday, April 16, 2002- - -
We drove to Cody, "Gateway to Yellowstone," yesterday to spend the five bucks the IRS let us keep.
A bumper sticker on an old pickup in Cody: Why do they call it tourist season if you can't shoot 'em? Don't be silly, it's more like shearing season.
We had gotten a few light snows in the last few weeks. It rained on and off through the day yesterday and on through the night last night. By yesterday afternoon the hills were taking on a decidedly green tinge that I haven't seen in two or three years. I don't know if this qualifies as breaking the drought - we may yet get much less than the average precipitation - However, it's not how much rain we get, but when we get it. So far it's right on time.
At the least this will put enough moisture into the ground to germinate and rejuvenate the prairie a little, which is good, the wildlife were in desperate shape for lack of forage.
I'll be watching for another interesting phenomenon this spring; not all the native vegetation sprouts every year. Some of the little forbs lay dormant for years waiting for just the right conditions. In the 18 years I've lived in Wyoming I've seen pussytoes (Antennaria species unk.) bloom exactly once, although they're supposedly common to the south in Colorado. That one year they were everywhere. After this extended dry period it's anybody's guess what will be springing out of the ground.
I've heard the fish are biting at Wedding of the Waters. It's time to find out. Fish stories coming up..
Update: [Sigh] By the time I got my act together the temperature had dropped to the mid-thirties (from a high of 80° two days before) and the rain turned to snow. As a fair-weather fisherman I was starting to rethink the whole thing and then a client needed a bid and .. no fish stories. But no pneumonia either.
@8:02 AM
Monday, April 15, 2002- - -
Michael Moore compares himself to Jonathan Swift! But he manages to work food into the conversation.
@9:13 PM
At first I was tempted to weigh in on the suicide bombers v. homicide bombers v. murder bombers debate by pointing out that JDAMS may be dandy, but we have a long way to go to produce a 'smart bomb' like theirs. However, it's since occurred to me that they're not really that smart. Someone with a bit of explosive and the wit to apply it at key points could wreck a lot of critical infrastructure and watch the destruction on the evening news. Instead, they bow up grocery stores, and themselves.
Update: They are probably a little smarter than my spell checker, however.
@7:43 PM
Happy Taxpayer's Day!
@6:52 AM
How do you deal with people who would even conceive of this?
@6:51 AM
Steve Den Beste draws an astute analogy between chess programming and our war on terror. However, there's a complicating factor here he doesn't consider.
To take the analogy farther, the terrorist problem we have now is at least partially due to the tendency of politicians to look only as far ahead as the next election. There's an enormous incentive to do all the 'feel good' stuff now and put off anything difficult until after the election, or better yet to leave the problems for one's successor. Only a great statesman might be relied on to look beyond the horizon of their incumbency and we haven't had many of those lately.
But we live in interesting times. By the next presidential election we should begin to know whether Bush is a politician or the statesman we desperately need.
@6:51 AM
Check out the computer generated art Anton Sherwood has put together. Pretty wild stuff.
@6:12 AM
A week ago we set a new record low temperature overnight here in Worland. Then we set a new record high day before yesterday. Of course the records have only been kept for a little over 100 years, not a large sample.
@6:11 AM
The VodkaPundit knows some things he can't prove.
I've decided to devote my life to proving that a day spent hunting or fishing doesn't count against our allotted time.
But Steve, don't forget the calked boot Libertarians - those who apparently need serious footwear to keep any grip on reality.
@6:10 AM
Sunday, April 14, 2002- - -
Sunrise services at the rifle range this morning. I feel so much better.
Now I think I can even handle another day of polishing on my tax forms, if I only keep telling myself that the 'progressive' income tax wasn't actually meant to be a punishment for success and hard work.
@12:19 PM
Moody winds?
"It was flaming," Golden Fire Department spokeswoman Julie Brooks said of the blaze ..
@6:50 AM
Eugene Volokh makes a very interesting point regarding the Colorado Supreme Court's ruling on the Tattered Cover Bookstore case:
What's really going on here, I fear, is a replay of the argument that some businesses or professions are entitled to special First Amendment privileges: that reporters are entitled to a special "reporter's privilege" that others don't deserve, that the media is entitled to spend money endorsing candidates while others can be denied this right, and now that bookstores can protect their records but ordinary people must turn over the information that they possess. The U.S. Supreme Court has generally rejected the notion that the First Amendment provides such preferential treatment for some speakers over others -- and I think it has been right to do so.
Perhaps this is less a victory than I had thought.
@6:35 AM
Saturday, April 13, 2002- - -
Steve Den Beste has some good observations on this 'sunken city' off the coast of India. It is highly unlikely that these structures are of human origin, for all the reasons he states.
I think there's a simple explanation for these structures. Although it's hard to tell what anything is when it's covered with layers of marine growth, I suspect that the structures are stromatolites, a form of colonial cyanobacteria that live in shallow ocean environments. Compare the picture of the structure in the sunken city article that's labeled "Structures are clearly visible in the murky waters" to the pictures of stromatolites here.
Stromatolites are quite common in the fossil record. However, living stromatolites are relatively rare and it's not surprising that the sunken city proponents aren't familiar with them.
@12:04 PM
I'm glad I wasn't in charge of this one. From today's Casper Star Tribune. A Casper police officer shot himself in the foot Wednesday during a firearms qualifying test at the local Division of Criminal Investigation office. The officer has not been identified, but he's a member of the Central Wyoming Drug Task Force.
@8:44 AM
Friday, April 12, 2002- - -
Of course, The Fat Guy had to mention the Craig Biggio cycle. At least he had the grace not to mention who gave it up.
@2:47 PM
Here's a good one. Hungarian Egri Bikavér* bottled by Vitavin. We'd heard it was good and ordered a case shortly after the first of the year. It finally came. It was worth the wait. I have no idea what variety of grape it's made from and it is different. A red of course, it has a bold, fruity, peppery nose, quite full body, and color much like a good Burgundy. It has a bit of oak and the '99 has just the faintest trace of tannin. The flavor is quite light and very subtle, slightly peppery, slightly fruity, and very swillable. I think it's developing further as it breaths. Likewise, it has a long but very subtle finish. Oh yeah, it's also dirt cheap.
*'Bull's Blood of Eger', according to the label.
@2:46 PM
I've got some more blogger correspondents from my informal blog critique:
First up, we have Scott Chaffin, The Fat Guy, who likes my archaeology and business and outdoors stuff. He says he's a 'big hat - no cattle' kind of rancher. Judging from the hat racks he's been eyeing he'd better have a big hat, although I bet it's no bigger than mine. (I like the 'Stagecoach' Stetson's and Bailey's. Short of the 'Tom Mix' that's about big as they get.) I've often thought a couple strips cut from one of those would make outstanding belly material for a composite bow.. Horn bows are usually quite short because horns are usually pretty short.
Scott has his own little piece of heaven and he'd gladly share it with you. Luxury camping on the bank of the Brazos. He'll even provide the tent. Not to mention fly-tying lessons. It doesn't get much better than that. It looks like he's also got room for the Land Yacht, my idea of luxury. But then I spent some 180+ nights on the road last year and working out of a motel sucks.
Scott likes 'books, music, food, tractors, and baseball! He thought San DayGlo's camo uniforms were a little over the top. I did find it hard to watch when one team was invisible.. I wonder if the batboy had to wear a cammie sack that day. I always felt sorry for the San Diego batboys. All the other batboys get mini uniforms, but in San Diego they wear a 'Padre' outfit - brown monk's robe and white rope belt. It doesn't look terribly comfortable to me.
And don't worry Scott, the archaeologists don't agree on how to spell 'archeology'.
Last, but certainly not least, we have Jan Yarnot, The Fossil Freak, who's been corresponding with me since day one of my blog.
Jan says she's been a registered Libertarian since the early '80s, which is about as long as it's been possible to register as a Libertarian. I'm not sure it's possible now to register as a Libertarian here in Washakie County. Trouble-maker that I am, I've registered Democratic and that got me enough of a fisheye from the gals at the courthouse. Since then I've met some of the other Democrats in Washakie County and now know why they looked at me that way.
Jan's no link troller, she sort of failed to mention to me that she'd been blogging longer than I have. I spotted her on the InstaPundit's list though. I'd thought of responding too, but Virginia Postrel and Steve Den Beste were more my inspirations.
When I spotted Jan's URL I hustled on over to take a look, and this was the first thing I saw: Harry Browne is an embarrassment. Yes, I think embarrassment is as good a way to put it as any.
And yes, Jan is in her right mind. Says she, 'that's what makes Americans Great!' I might add that using a left-handed mouse also keeps other folks from messing with my computer..
@11:06 AM
Via the Free-Market Environmental insider Update, it appears that Nature has been publishing bad science. They make much of their peer review process, but then I could find a jury of 'peers' who'd confirm that the world was created 6000 years ago.
PC has invaded the paradigm in insidious ways. If you think these guys first priority is the dissemination of accurate scientific information, go to their website and see how many articles you can read without a subscription. If you're going to sell popular science, you'd better have science that's popular. Unfortunately, this creates a situation where correct often takes precedence over accurate in publication on controversial subjects.
@6:14 AM
I've used the old dictionary a lot more since I started reading blogs. It is refreshing to read folks who write for adults rather than gearing everything for the average eight-year-old. I may never have seen the word approbation used correctly before this morning.
@6:13 AM
Thursday, April 11, 2002- - -
Careful with those, you could put someone's eye out.
@2:49 PM
I used to OIC quite a few of these classes. We called it a successful day if no one was hurt and we got most of the pieces back.
My favorite weapon to teach? The M72A2 LAW With Coupler! They're a disposable unit. Take one out of its factory packing. Pull a pin and the end caps fall off. Grasp both ends and pull to extend the launcher tube, pull the safety to the forward position, check your backblast area, aim, fire, dispose of fired tube. No maintenance, no assembly or disassembly, no parts to lose. In class everyone got to fiddle with a fired rocket, practicing the steps I've outlined above. The best part? LAWs are relatively expensive. We fired one rocket per class to demonstrate their devastating effect (What? That's all it does?). So we didn't have to worry much about anyone shooting themselves.
The live fire demo was my favorite part - you can guess who got to do the shooting. We'd get everyone a good seat safely off to the side and I'd go through the whole drill one more time. I'd aim and fire at a large, close target. And everyone would watch down range and wait, and the whispers of 'he missed' would start, and then the rocket would hit the target - pop! (There is no visible rocket exhaust while it's in flight) The ooh, aahs at that point were generally underwhelming. I figure the whole point of the training was to impress on folks not to be heroes and attack anything that might shoot back with an M72A2 LAW With Coupler.
While the old warhorse is one of my favorite weapons, my least favorite class was the M1911A1 .45 handgun. Small parts under spring pressure zinging around the classroom. Too much recoil and blast for anyone not accustomed to firearms. Far too easy to miss-handle and shoot someone. I suspect that many folks left the course more afraid of the handgun than when they entered. The course scared hell out of me, as I was well aware that the purpose of the OIC is to have someone to hang if anyone gets hurt. Better than losing a good NCO I suppose.
@10:42 AM
Wednesday, April 10, 2002- - -
"Absent-minded professor" is more than a verbal caricature. Several times recently I've caught myself with an 'Oh oh, he's been talking to me for quite awhile, while I was thinking about how to phrase the terms of that contract.'
Between the annual taxes, quarterly taxes, spring start-up and hiring, my truck in the glass shop, and turkey season slipping away, I've been more than a bit distracted of late. I need a T-shirt that says "If you want to communicate with me, send an email."
@9:01 PM
Ok, so what we need to do is form support groups where we get together and talk it out, right?
@9:00 PM
Dang! They're on to us. Isn't that just too bad?
@8:59 PM
Whew! I've finally caught up with my email. I love the input and find that most folks like more or less the same things about this blog. Unfortunately, I can't manufacture another Colonel Jeff Cooper, they broke the mold. Of course, some might argue that it was already a little cracked.. But I'll try to focus on what I seem to do best. For those who like all the outdoorsy stuff, just wait until field season (assuming there is one, it's a boom & bust business). We're sometimes on the road for weeks at a time and the posts will become less frequent, but I'll have more material to work with than the view out my office window.
In the process of this reader critique, I've 'met' some more really entertaining folks, including some fellow bloggers of whom I'd not been aware. If it's taken me awhile to answer all the mail it was because so much of it was long and thoughtful letters that required something more than a 'Thanks for writing' in return.
First to write was the Desert Pundit, who went after Butt Weasel Browne with a vengeance after he spotted the link here. An excellent line-by-line takedown. If there are any war profiteers it's surely the Ralls and Brownes who spout crap they can't possibly believe themselves - for the publicity. Or perhaps they are as willfully self-deluded as they appear. One must wonder how their careers are going if they troll for publicity from blogs.
The Desert Pundit falls on the 'writer' side of Steve Den Beste's linker/writer dichotomy. His most recent post is a good analysis of the Yahoo! News story about Boston Globe reporter Anthony Shadid, who was shot in the West Bank [I bet that hurt]. The Globe's silly assumption seems to be that the Israelis were firing their weapons and so they must have shot him. From the Yahoo! News story it seems that it never occurred to the folks at the Globe that the Israelis might have been shooting at something that, by logical extension, might have been shooting back. Unlike our Arab friends, the Israelis rarely use their weapons as party noisemakers.
The Desert Pundit also has an entertaining piece on the monorail as public transportation. These things look better and better every time I go to Yellowstone. There's a physical limit to how many cars can be crammed onto the park's road system and they're approaching that limit, with something on the order of 3 million visitors per year. A monorail would also make the park much more accessible in winter and it is a winter wonderland.
Next to respond was Jonathan Harrington at I can Blog! And yes, he certainly can. Linking and thinking with equal alacrity, he's come up with some good ones. Like this link (from ABC News, it must be true).
Jonathan has an interesting insight here. Is Blogger acting as a facilitator of a new forum, or an enabler of our addictions? My insurance man is probably banging on Ev's door right now.
And he's thinking of going to the Kentucky Derby! I was stationed at Ft. Knox (Yes, I did guard the gold - on the rotating El Dorado detail - but I never got to see it) but I never dared venture to Louisville during the Derby - the fact that you had to pay somebody $50 to park in their front yard five miles from Churchill Downs had something to do with it, but mostly I just don't like big crowds and lots of traffic, and the Louisville drivers are the worst in the US at the best of times. (Don't take my word for that, ask your car insurance agent) I do love Churchill Downs though and always found it amusing (Ok, I'm a sick puppy) that the first sight the horses see out the starting gate is the Purina plant next door..
Finally, Jonathan points out that we are indeed cursed with living in interesting times.
I haven't forgotten the rest of you, but this post is getting entirely too long, so I'll pick up here in a bit.
@9:55 AM
Tuesday, April 09, 2002- - -
"Warfare is the Tao of deception. Thus although you are capable, display incapacity. When committed to employing your forces, feign inactivity. When your objective is nearby, make it appear as if distant; when far away, create the illusion of being nearby.
Go forth were they do not expect it, attack where they are not prepared." Sun-Tzu The Art of War
At this point, I think we've pretty well established who's with us and who's against us in the Middle East, and it's a very target rich environment. Mark Steyn (link via Bill Quick) cites a recent Trevor McDonald interview with President Bush on Britain's ITV network in which Bush repeatedly points to Iraq as our chief target. Of course, practically everyone thinks Iraq is our next target and this makes perfect sense considering that Iraq might well have been the elder Bush's undoing.
Perhaps the most important principle for a successful military attack is surprise. Thus, the harder everyone focuses on Iraq the more I must suspect that the next shoe will drop elsewhere.
There's another principle at work here as well. Fear and uncertainty are debilitating. The longer we can keep Saddam thinking he's about to be attacked any second the more exhausted his forces will be when we do attack.
@10:19 PM
Score one for the Constitution. Via the Denver Post: The Colorado Supreme Court refused Monday to force the Tattered Cover Book Store to turn over sales records to aid in a drug investigation, saying that both the U.S. and Colorado constitutions protect an individual's fundamental right to purchase books anonymously.
Justice [Michael] Bender said the case revolved around the rights of Americans to read whatever they want without fear the government is looking over their shoulders.
@1:51 PM
Monday, April 08, 2002- - -
Via Suman Palit, I had to try this: "What D&D Character Am I?"
I Am A: Neutral Good Elf Ranger Bard
Alignment:
Neutral Good characters believe in the power of good above all else. They will work to make the world a better place, and will do whatever is necessary to bring that about, whether it goes for or against whatever is considered 'normal'.
Race:
Elves are the eldest of all races, although they are generally a bit smaller than humans. They are generally well-cultured, artistic, easy-going, and because of their long lives, unconcerned with day-to-day activities that other races frequently concern themselves with. Elves are, effectively, immortal, although they can be killed. After a thousand years or so, they simply pass on to the next plane of existance.
Primary Class:
Rangers are the defenders of nature and the elements. They are in tune with the Earth, and work to keep it safe and healthy.
Secondary Class:
Bards are the entertainers. They sing, dance, and play instruments to make other people happy, and, frequently, make money. They also tend to dabble in magic a bit.
Deity:
Mielikki is the Neutral Good goddess of the forest and autumn. She is also known as the Lady of the Forest, and is the Patron of Rangers. Her followers are devoted to nature, and believe in the positive and outreaching elements of it. They use light armor, and a variety of weapons suitable for hunting, which they are quite skilled at. Mielikki's symbol is a unicorn head.
Find out What D&D Character Are You?, courtesy of NeppyMan (e-mail)
@10:51 PM
What I find particularly amusing about this, is that the bourgeois are loudly denounced about the university - until fund raising time. Then, of course, we're their favorite people.
@10:51 PM
Our tax dollars at work.
@10:50 PM
Holy Moly, the VodkaPundit says he blogs 14 hours a day. That's serious.
@10:49 PM
Outstanding! Via the InstaPundit, I find that Jan Yarnot, who grew up in Laramie and who offered me much early encouragement, has started her own blog: Fossil Freak's News and Views. A good read, too.
@10:48 PM
Dinkytown! There's a place I haven't heard of in awhile. I wonder if the old Rathskeller is still there..
@10:43 PM
Yesterday I wrote: Where do you all come from? Why on earth do you read this blog as opposed to one of the other million or so out there? My curiosity is killing me.
It never occurred to me to just ask. Now I've got a stack of email, often explaining at great length what folks like and don't like about this blog. That's just outstanding, and until I can answer each, I thank you all.
It does appear that I've mislead a good number of folks though. I'm not really a 'hard-working, salt-of-the-earth' sort. I spend most of my time sitting in front of this infernal contraption. The computer is a great labor-saving device - it saves me from doing any labor. When I do twist off I'm not so much an outdoorsman as a woods loafer.
@8:55 AM
We had an earthquake! There's not much info online yet, but it was supposedly the first quake over 2.5 magnitude ever recorded in the Worland area and only the fourth quake in Washakie County that's registered over 2.5 since they started recording them in 1871. One little bump at 2.9 on the scale. It made the house creak. My wife is a geologist. She'd never experienced an earthquake before, so it made her day.
@7:43 AM
Via the Billings Gazette, Les Dolezal was an investment officer with Dain Rauscher for 14 years. Now he's a river guide, leading canoe trips through one of the last really untouched prairie grasslands. I haven't floated that stretch of the Missouri yet, but friends who have assure me that it's spectacular.
I wonder if he ever misses the office?
@7:35 AM
The Wringneck Wranch was planted in Budweiser barley yesterday. I trust you'll all do your part.
@7:34 AM
Nice. At 4:32 pm today, according to my notation, it will be 0204081632.
@7:34 AM
A field of dreams gets the axe over on the Pine Ridge Reservation.
@7:33 AM
A telling bit of human nature at work here.
@7:32 AM
Sunday, April 07, 2002- - -
Via the InstaPundit, what's truly sad here, is that the guy who thought he was defending himself isn't of age (21) to own or carry a handgun. At this point it's a good bet he's in a lot more trouble than the morons who attacked him:
According to the Denver Post: In a 1999 Thornton case, paintball shooters were charged with battery, illegal discharge of a firearm and criminal mischief. Witherwax and the Mace brothers could face similar charges, authorities said.
"They could face charges down the line," Oulton said, "but right now the detectives are focused on the more serious crime of the shooting."
@12:28 PM
Every time I try to sign up for GoStats I fill in the registration form, click submit, and .. Nada, nothing, zip, zilch. Blank screen. No Response. Good thing they're not trying to sell something, they'd be missing a lot of customers.
Building a big readership wasn't really the aim here. How could it be? With something like a million blogs out there I'm still astonished that anyone besides my dad reads this. I'm doing it principally to break out of the technical writing straight jacket. I write constantly in my work, but it's all very mechanical: "On fill in the date, fill in the crew members conducted an investigation of fill in the client and project." On and on, ad nauseam.
I get no points for originality or style - quite the opposite. Much of what I write are technically legal affidavits. Ambiguity is Bad. The paperwork must fly through the federal and state review process. To do that I must try to anticipate any questions the reviewers might have and answer them, but more important, the answers must be in the same place and in the same format - in the same words if possible - time after time, because the reviewers won't read the entire report, they only read the parts that answer their specific questions. The more of the report they actually read, the more likely they'll find something they don't like, so I don't want to force anyone to search through the document looking for their answers.
But I like to write. Like Sgt. Stryker, I find it cathartic. Yes, I get rid of my troubles and aggravations by loading them on You. Back when I started this in January it was 'start a blog, or pitch the TV out in the street.' Writing letters to the editor wasn't getting through to anyone. Or maybe it was getting through to the editors - why else would they spend so much effort 'editing' a one paragraph letter that was electronically submitted and in passable English when they got it? Especially if the regular result was to make the letter look like a submission from Deliverance Land..
Now, the more I blog, the more I find that my curiosity demands I at least attempt to find out what it is I'm doing right, and more important what I'm doing wrong in attracting readers. I can't track my own stats, unless there's some facility for doing it through Blogger that I've not yet found. But some ways I don't have to.
While I was shopping for a counter and stats service I took a look at Megan McArdle's counters. I haven't looked into it enough to interpret the stats very well, but she was getting on the order of 100-150 "First Time Referrers" and roughly the same number of "Returning Visitors" refers in a six day period associated with this blog in some fashion. Those numbers are now in the 200-250 hits per week range. I'm not sure if that means that over 200 people are finding their way to me from her, or vice versa, but it doesn't really matter. The number is ridiculous. Especially since I don't think I've linked to her in the last week other than my Favorites list, nor has she recently linked to me.
And Bill Quick has complained when I send him too many refers! (Hmm. Actually I guess you'd need the email that went with that post) He was joking of course, but now I see that he was only about half joking. He's in a financial bind, generating more readership than he can afford bandwidth. He wanted to move back to BlogSpot, but BlogSpot won't have him! Go figure. If you support yourself through advertising and more readers means more revenues, why would you turn down someone who brings a good readership with them? Unless you simply didn't have the bandwidth to spare - which could explain why I wasn't able to get on Blogger at all Saturday, and two little posts took half an hour to copy, paste & post this morning (Sunday). I think I'll wait until the wee hours to post this one. I digress. Perhaps Bill will explain Ev's reasoning in more detail, but in the mean time, if you can spare a few bucks please help him out.
Where do you all come from? Why on earth do you read this blog as opposed to one of the other million or so out there? My curiosity is killing me. I've finally emailed GoStats to ask for some direct intervention. Perhaps I'll have a counter and some answers soon.
@10:19 AM
Hmmm. Not a single email in almost 24 hours now. Not even a spam. Me thinks my IP may be having problems again.
@7:05 AM
I suppose that until the range of these critters can be defined, and appropriate habitat can be identified and evaluated, the US Fish & Wildlife Service will be forced to stop all development in San Diego and the vicinity to protect these rare and obviously endangered species.
@7:03 AM
Friday, April 05, 2002- - -
We just finished watching HBO's The Laramie Project. Neither my wife nor I is a native of Wyoming. We have no relatives who live in Wyoming. In our business we could live anywhere in the Rocky Mountain west. We live in Wyoming by choice, not by chance of birth. That said, we lived in Laramie between 1986 and 1991. My wife has her master's from the U. of Wyoming, in Laramie. As a confirmed bar fly, I'm intimately familiar with the scenes of the crime.
I've been encouraging all my friends to watch the film premier on HBO and I'll be collecting feedback through the weekend. There's a lot to digest and I'm still cogitating, but here are a few initial reactions:
I think The Laramie Project is an honest effort. Moises Kaufman and his crew tried very hard to capture the essence of Laramie and I think they tried to do a fair rendition of the people and events. Considering Kaufman et al. are city folk, I was half expecting Deliverance II, complete with banjo music. In some ways they did much better than that, but still I wish they'd been familiar with the term "stereotype."
For now I'd like to point out that you don't have to come to Wyoming to find religious cretins preaching hate from the pulpit. Unfortunately, that seems to be a near universal problem. In fact, although they didn't go out of their way to point this out, the most visibly hate-filled wacko who showed up in Laramie, the preacher in the cowboy hat who was faced down by the Angel Action group, was the Rev. Fred Phelps of Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas. Last time I looked Kansas wasn't a county in Wyoming, although it's big enough to be one. Sorry, we don't own the guy.
Second, there's a strong undercurrent of gay paranoia throughout the program. Early on it was stressed that several of Kaufman's crew were afraid to come to Laramie because they were gay. They brought that preconception and prejudice against the rural west with them to the Project, although I'm not sure they realize they made it explicit. Several of the locals who were interviewed stressed that Wyoming is a 'live and let live' kind of place. One gay Wyomingite interviewed for the Project said 'sure, that means if I don't tell you I'm gay you won't beat the shit out of me.' Really?
We have a gay couple living about three doors down, across the street from us, in a far smaller and more insular town than Laramie. I don't know that they've ever done a Rosie and 'come out' on the front page of the local paper, but they certainly make no secret of being gay. They own a bar north of town and they did have some jerk giving them a hard time out at their bar a few years ago, which event was featured in the local paper just in case anyone didn't know they were gay, but other than that I'm not aware of anyone seriously hassling them. I can lean a little to the left and look out the window at their house, and no one's burning it down at present.
It is a sad, sad thing that most of the hate being preached in The Laramie Project was coming from our 'religious leaders.' This, I think, was deadly accurate.
@6:20 PM
It seems like the major media are running about an article a day on blogs right now. Steven Green just had to point out the latest from John C. Dvorak. I suppose I should read it .. and yes, it's about what I'd expected. I bet Hunter Thompson will be surprised to learn that 'gonzo' is a blogger term..
I've read a lot of theorizing on why some mainstream media writer types seem so aghast at blogs. I don't have anything to add. But there is another group in the major media who should be aghast. The advertising managers. Virginia Postrel termed it the 'advertising depression' when she mentioned their problem in passing a few days ago. It seems that advertising is one of the easiest line items to chop from the corporate budget when times get tough. It is certainly one of the first things to go from my business' budget. Couple that with huge increases in the cost of paper and newsprint over the last few years, and things start to look pretty grim around the business offices of the print media.
So who shows up to take a little dip in that relatively finite pool of ad dollars? Bloggers. Amazon.com seems to be the major advertiser on blogs, and the first blog ads I remember seeing were Amazon's ads at The Scene. A brief tour of my Favorites shows that Megan McArdle also carries Amazon ads. Bill Quick has a similar Amazon button on his site, but it's for his book. I'll genuflect in his general direction if Amazon also pays for the spot. But if I were him I'd argue that nobody buys just one book.. With his daily traffic it's a wonder that Glenn Reynolds doesn't carry ads.
Given the amount of time I spend at this, I should probably start running an ad acknowledging which of my clients is paying the bills this week, although they don't directly support the blog.
@3:14 PM
This is starting to look like a textbook 'good cop, bad cop' routine: "Not having a good time, Yasser? Starting to wonder what they'll do next? Well, we'll try to restrain the IDF, but you'd better get real serious with us right now, because we're the only thing standing between you and them, and we don't know how much longer we can hold them back."
I have serious doubts that it will work, but I suppose it's worth a try. What are the options after all?
@11:43 AM
I'm much taken by James Lileks' "Grandma's Camera" piece. A labor of love, and it shows.
The history of industrial technology is a particular interest of mine, so I'm terribly entertained by this photo, as it contains some great old machinery, some of it even from before my time. The photo tells quite a tale. I think Lileks is mistaken in calling this a thresher. If you want to know about antique farm machinery ask an antique farmer. I have - my dad - and I'll soon know more than I ever wanted to about the rig. In the mean time, it's great opportunity for me to practice my machinery ID skills.
It looks to me like the little girl in the front is sitting in the steering wheel of a tractor that's faced toward the camera. The right rear fender of the tractor is the large curved piece of sheet metal that occupies the lower left quarter of the photo and the right rear corner of the gas tank, which sat above the engine of the tractor to allow gravity flow of the fuel, is the other curved metal object in the far lower right. The woman in the background is sitting on the operator's spring seat of what's generically known as a "swatter", perhaps very similar to the McCormick-Deering Tractor Binder. If you look very closely you can see the unoccupied spring seat in the very rear of this contraption and the tractor in front. The tractor would have been used to pull various implements and earlier, horses would have been used to pull them, as you see here.
In Lileks' picture you can see one of the boards of the swatter reel behind the little girl's head in the far upper right, and another behind her right arm. Rising vertically between the legs of the woman at center frame are three control levers. These would have been the clutches to engage and disengage the reel and mower, and perhaps either a mower height control, or rake or binder control, depending on the exact model of the swatter.
The purpose of this whole rig was to cut the grain and bind the stalks into bundles. These bundles would have been collected and delivered to the actual threshing machine, a stationary implement that separated the seed from the straw and chaff. In this photo you can see the threshing machine in the background by the pile of straw, the steam tractor* in the foreground that was used to power the thresher via the broad leather belt visible stretching between them, and the threshing crew that made the whole business work. Machines were gradually introduced to accomplish all of these tasks, and eventually the combine came along, which literally 'combined' the swatting and threshing operations in a single mobile implement. In this photo of the combine the swatter reel is the prominent 'paddle wheel' in the front.
Early on this must have been seriously labor-intensive as 'eat like a threshing crew' is still part of the local dialect. The combine and all the rest of the farm implements that were being introduced eliminated a huge amount of manual labor involved in collecting the sheaves of wheat and transporting them to the thresher. This farm-industrial revolution eliminated a huge number of agricultural jobs, mostly between about 1900 and 1940.
The tangle of stuff, including the John Deere sign, that lies between the girl and the woman in Lileks' photo looks like a pile of miscellaneous farm-industrial trash to me. I see a cone gear and various sprockets and rods and idler arms that don't appear to be attached to anything. If I had to guess, I'd say the picture depicts a 'wreck.' A pile of old parts & wire left hidden in the deep grass on the margin of the field that got tangled in the implement somehow. Wire can be particularly bad because it gets wound around everything and can be a real bugger to get untangled from machinery.
I might look a little disgusted too if my temporarily hired, hourly-paid threshing crew were sitting in the shade of the threshing machine eating all the food I'd just brought while the regular hands (or god forbid the implement mechanic who would have arrived in the 1926 or '27 Model T in the background) struggled to straighten out this mess and get the machinery back in operation. That might be why the third person in the photo is scurrying in the background behind the woman's left arm and didn't have time to pose for the camera.
And now you can see the sort of 'just so' stories that an historian or archaeologist can weave from tenuous evidence. The photos don't 'tell us' anything, but we interpret them to say all kinds of things. Wait until I've explained the entire 1930's farm economy on the basis of this one picture - and no, I'm not really joking, more elaborate tales have been built on less.
*Compare this picture of Lileks' granddad to the operator's area on the back of the steam tractor in the foreground here. These two photos could have been taken at the same 'threshing bee.' The steam tractor was the Big Dog - the most expensive, dangerous implement of the whole show. Thus, it's likely that the owner sat in the engineer's seat, as granddad does, both to protect it from the tender ministrations of the hands, and to keep the hands from severely scalding or killing themselves in the process of blowing up the steam engine. They were very powerful but very dangerous machines. Note also that the fireman, on the left in Lileks' picture, is sitting with his shovel at his elbow rather than shoveling coal as is the fireman in the other photo. This further suggests that Lileks' photos #4 and #5 are a pair taken during 'down time.'
If you're interested you might browse around some of the sites I've linked here. This is the equipment that truly changed the course of human history, allowed urbanization by freeing up a bunch of labor from the farm, and generally changed the face of the planet over the last 100 years. Human enginery at its finest.
@8:50 AM
Thursday, April 04, 2002- - -
Here's a little study in psychology that I wish a few folks in our government would learn from:
On the back side of Bald Ridge in the Bighorn Range, there's an old two-track trail that's ground almost door handle-deep into the ground by years of traffic. This is unusual because ordinarily when a two-track gets deep enough that folks start high-centering they move over and start another track. When you've got two or three parallel tracks going it's time to think about putting in a better road. What makes this track so unusual is the ancient Forest Service sign standing at the point where the road starts getting rutted. In barely legible lettering it says something to the effect of 'Howdy folks! The soil here is really susceptible to erosion, so please stay on the road.' And everyone does.
A few miles away there's another area of this same sort of soil, with big new Forest Service signs saying 'Warning! Under penalty of law and fines of up to $25,000, No off-road traffic is allowed in this area!' Of course, the whole meadow is torn to shreds by off-road traffic.
@9:25 AM
I'm always interested in what folks have to say about the blogging phenomenon, whether it's Alex Beam proving most anyone could hold his job, or a fellow blogger wishing they had a job. So when one of the old timers of the Blogocracy discusses the travails of the medium it's particularly interesting.
Yesterday, Steve Den Beste discussed the mixed blessings of attaining fame in the blogosphere. I'm grateful that he didn't explain my early technique of trolling for links, as he was a chief victim. It's too embarrassing to relate now, but I'm sure Steve would agree that with a little effort I could be the insurance salesman from hell.
Like Steve, I've found that there's simply not enough hours in the day to read all the blogs I like, much less search out new good ones. I'm embarrassed to say that I've never visited half the links of half my Favorites. I certainly respect their taste in blogs, although like Mark Twain, I am a little suspicious of the Favorites of anyone who lists me as one. Add to this the fact that in the 2½ months I've been at this I've updated and corrected my list of Favorites several times, most recently last week, and I'm sure some of the URLs are out of date again. A longer list, up front or in some 'links' file, is simply out of the question.
It's also clear that the blogosphere operates like a school of piranha - there's nothing left of a story but gnawed bones if you don't get there quick. Thus, for the sake of writing material it's better to hit the mainstream press for ideas and fresh news. This raises a dilemma for me, as my favorite reading has always been the OpEds and Letters pages, and now the blogs: Do I read the blogs for fun, or work on my own blog? Never having been one to stint myself, I choose both.
A warning for those thinking about starting a blog: It's addicting. Shoehorning in a little paying work can sometimes be difficult. As Bill Quick has pointed out, there is a certain opportunity cost involved in blogging. However, if everyone considered opportunity costs we'd be knee-deep in nickels. I know I've spent a ridiculous amount of time working on this blog and every minute of that time could have been spent doing paying work. But then, every minute I spend sleeping could be spent working. I've fallen in that trap. I'm self-employed as a sole proprietor. I don't pay myself overtime, or any given amount, but I get to keep the profits and sometimes it's hard to ignore the sound of that little cash register bell ringing in the back of my mind. But I do it all for you, gentle reader.
Oh, and did I mention the fact that I like to shoot off my mouth? That factor alone, I think, will keep blogging alive. The urge to communicate is very central to human experience.
@8:56 AM
This is interesting. Via Gary Farber, WorldNetDaily has published what they claim is an itemized bill found by the IDF when they raided Arafat's headquarters. According to that bill, someone had offered Arafat 3,000 Kalashnikov bullets @ NIS2 each. 6000 shekels for the lot. FXConverter says one US dollar will get you 4.795 Israeli New Shekels this morning, so that works out to $1251.
Down at the Sportsman's Guide they'll sell you 1000 rounds of fresh Russian-made 7.62x39mm Kalashnikov ammo for $79.97, plus shipping. This ammo is loaded with soft point bullets for hunting, military ball would be somewhat cheaper, but let's just assume for the moment that the Sportsman's Guide could deliver 3000 rounds of Kalashnikov ammo to your door for roughly $300. Incidentally, Cabela's can deliver 250 rounds of NATO War Shot M16 ammo for $62.99, plus shipping, or NIS1.21 per round. If you'll settle for South African surplus, Sportsman's Guide can fix you up with a 2700-rd battle pack of M16 ammo for $309.97. Yes, half a shekel per round.
Either UPS doesn't deliver on the West Bank, Yasir needs lessons on comparison shopping, or the bill is a hoax as Gary Farber had wondered. I suppose you might also suggest that Arafat uses the same suppliers of whom our military seems so fond. Of course, I'm only joking about Arafat ordering his ammo from Sportsman's Guide, and there are all kinds of laws about exporting arms and ammunition that would probably preclude UPS delivering ammo to the West Bank in any case. But the numbers don't add up. Especially when you figure those guys shoot 3000 rounds in the air every time they have a beer party.
Here's something to contemplate though: Sportsman's Guide wouldn't let me calculate shipping charges because they're currently sold out of Kalashnikov ammo. They're also pretty much sold out of M16 ammo right now, but with heightened military demand on our industry that's understandable, right? Now peruse the rest of the Sportsman's Guide or Sovietski Collection and you'll see that the entire Russian arms industry seems to be trying to support itself by exporting anything not firmly nailed down to the sportsmen of the US. For years there's been a pallet-load of Kalashnikov ammo sitting somewhere at every gun shop. To us civilians it's not much good for anything but plinking tin cans and the Russians have been flooding the market, so it's been way cheap. But what you couldn't give away a few months ago is now sold out.. [Cue ominous music]
Update: Maybe they are rich little boys: Steve Den Beste says they don't take very good care of their expensive toys.
@6:30 AM
Wednesday, April 03, 2002- - -
When the going gets weird the weird turn pro. Hunter S. Thompson
And getting paid to blog would be weird. Don't get me wrong, I'm a mercenary wretch, but I'm still waiting to see where the whole blog phenomenon is headed. I've a gut feeling - not to mention having read in 42 blogs - that original content is the missing ingredient at this point. Somehow I hope e-panhandling isn't the wave of the future. Glenn Reynolds' excellent April's Fool's spoof may be one possible future. Or a future possible for some.
Broad-based news networks where the individual with a cell phone and camcorder becomes the reporter on the scene - for a cash prize..
Still begs the question whence comes the cash?
In the mean time, I find it amusing to think that someone somewhere might actually be reading this. I'm surprised and very flattered by the response I've received and that seems thanks enough. I thank you all for stopping by.
@7:31 AM
The Department of the Interior is mostly back online and this is what's circulating in their email. Received this morning from a friend at the DOI, perhaps this expresses some of the frustrations of the rank and file in that fine organization. As usual with internet humor there's no attribution:
A major research institution has recently announced the discovery of the heaviest element yet known to science. This new element has been tentatively named "Administratium".
Administratium has 1 neutron, 12 assistant neutrons, 75 deputy neutrons, and 111 assistant deputy neutrons, giving it an atomic mass of 312. These 312 particles are held together by a force called morons, which are surrounded by vast quantities of lepton-like particles called peons. Since Administratium has no electrons, it is inert. However, it can be detected as it impedes every reaction with which it comes into contact. A minute amount of Administratium causes one reaction to take over 4 days to complete when it would normally take only a few minutes.
Administratium has a normal half-life of 3 years; it does not decay but instead undergoes a reorganization, in which a portion of the assistant neutrons and deputy neutrons and assistant deputy neutrons exchange places, and additional peons are added. In fact, Administratium's mass will actually increase over time, since each reorganization causes some morons to become neutrons forming isodopes. This characteristic of moron-promotion leads some scientists to speculate that Administratium is formed whenever morons reach a certain quantity in concentration. This hypothetical quantity is referred to as...."Critical Morass." You will know it when you see it...
@4:46 AM
Tuesday, April 02, 2002- - -
Evidence Found of Ferrous Huevos Culture.
I read often that this or that Pleistocene species 'may have been hunted to extinction when humans entered the western hemisphere.' The Clovis peoples, being the earliest generally accepted inhabitants of North America, are probably the most frequently fingered for these Terminal Pleistocene orgies of extinction.
While human predation was certainly a factor to be considered, how heavily that factor weighed in the extinction of any given species is an issue of considerable debate. I couldn't begin to sum up the current state of the debate nearly as well as Doc Frison already has. In this passage Doc employs a wit so dry that folks often miss it entirely:
Any discussion of mammoth hunting inevitably bring forth the question of mammoth extinction. Since Martin's (1967) article, Pleistocene overkill versus extinctions by natural causes has been a subject of numerous articles and debates with no indication that the problem will be resolved, at least in the immediate future. The Colby site [about 2 miles east of where I blog this] constitutes a significant part of the present data base on Clovis mammoth hunting in North America, and, being the principal investigator of the site, I claim the privilege of making comments, being fully aware they will probably serve only to fuel the controversy rather than resolve the problem.
The Colby site provides the only known evidence to date on the Northwestern Plains from which it is possible to propose an actual mammoth procurement strategy. This is because of the unequivocal association of Clovis materials in an identifiable landform, a deep, steep-walled arroyo, strongly suggesting some sort of natural trap. Juvenile animals were apparently the preferred target of long-term, systematic exploitation of a resident mammoth herd. The area was apparently capable of supporting mammoths at that time but the same is untrue today. Consequently, and based on paleoecological analyses of climatic studies at the terminal Pleistocene and beginning Holocene, we can assume that a deterioration of the area in terms of its animal-carrying capacity was in the process, which was not favorable for the mammoth populations.
At the same time, mammoths in the Colby site area which were facing problems due to diminishing forage were faced also with an intrusion of obviously successful human predators who were killing mostly young animals. For a species in which females produced young at the age of about 15 years, had a gestation period of under 2 years, and a mean calving interval of somewhere around 6 years (see Laws et al. 1975), the combination of human predation and a deteriorating environment were operating against survival of the species. Consequently, both human predation and climatic factors could have had strong implications in mammoth extinction on the Northwestern Plains.
On the other hand, deterioration of the environment was toward present conditions, which were continually more favorable for horse habitat, as can be demonstrated today by ever-increasing herds of feral horses. The archaeological record has produced little if any reliable evidence that either the Pleistocene horse or camel was systematically hunted by Clovis (see Frison et al. 1978) or any other cultural group, and both species became extinct in the area. However, the bison, which was the most heavily hunted of all the species by human predators, did manage to escape extinction along with the pronghorn, which was the next most heavily hunted species. .. We are left with the conclusion that more data are needed before the Pleistocene extinction problem can be resolved.
I might add that the African lion-sized Smilodon and the Short-faced bear, "the most powerful predator of the American Pleistocene," [think Grizzly bigger than a Clydesdale here] also became extinct about that time, and no one I've read has ever suggested that they were hunted to extinction. On the contrary, someone (who? Hmm. I can't remember.) has suggested that humans couldn't occupy the western hemisphere until the Short-faced bear became extinct.
These 'hunted to extinction' arguments certainly resonate with our modern environmental consciousness and are often the lede in news reports on any archaeological excavations that feature the remains of Pleistocene megafauna. This gives the whole argument a certain ad hoc flavor of sensation-seeking that may sometimes be deserved.
In a broader sense the 'hunted to extinction' argument is ad hoc, as climate change alone can easily explain the late Pleistocene extinctions. Either that, or there remains undiscovered the clan that hunted the Smilodon and Short-faced bear. As by some lights these folks must have existed, I think I'll jump on the naming priority by calling them the Ferrous Huevos Culture.
@3:23 PM
"Wind. Sun. Hydrogen. They are odorless, tasteless, invisible and abundant. And they can be harnessed to generate electricity, power cars and heat homes. So, hey, let's stop dallying! Replace those shameful fossil fuels with clean renewables. What is taking so long?" Says James K. Glassman, via Reason Express.
Glassman goes on to point out: "But there is a reason that renewables, despite a history of generous government subsidies stretching back to 1982, haven't made a dent in the dominance of oil, gas and coal - which together account for 85 percent of the energy used in this country. The reason is cost. As energy sources, wind, sun and hydrogen are hugely expensive and inefficient. Fossil fuels aren't.
The renewables have their own environmental costs as well. Wind turbines sparkling in the sun as far as the eye can see isn't my favorite vision of the future of southern Wyoming, but it's fast becoming a reality in some areas. They may be clean, but they're mighty unsightly. So are all the shiny power lines strung across miles of the Big Empty.
One area where renewables do have promise is in new rural development. The REA expansion of electric lines to rural customers was hugely subsidized and these subsidies are now largely ended. The cost for new rural power lines is in the close approximation of several thousands of dollars per pole. If living in a rural subdivision isn't your style, Central Vermont Solar and Wind say they can fix you up, with 19 years of experience "living off the grid." I can't vouch for them but it's an intriguing idea with cellular and broadband via satellite becoming more of a reality.
With a couple of solar panels I really could become Hermit Blogger! Live from my cave in the hills! Except that we all saw what living in a shack in the woods did to Ted Kaczinski's head. I think I'll stay here in town where folks can toss a net over me before I get nearly that bull-goose loony.
There are good environmental arguments to be made for going 'off the grid,' even where the economic argument doesn't apply. An isolated house with on-site solar and wind electric generation, and perhaps propane for heat and hot water, would be less of a visual intrusion on the landscape than the miles of power line that have been strung in the past to serve REA's rural customers. I understand that there are govmint subsidies available in Wyoming for installing these renewables in rural settings, although we here at Coyote Headquarters don't like to encourage such munificence with the taxpayer's dollars.
These certainly are isolated (no pun intended) circumstances (Ok, I intended it) and not about to become the norm until Butt Weasel Browne gets elected, divvies up the western public estate, we all get our 1.2 acres, and we're ordered to move there to disperse the threat from WMDs, since Bush II has so cravenly allowed OBL to win the war in Afghanistan.
@3:22 PM
If the date line on this was April 1st, I'd have thought it was a bad joke.
Many at the Department of the Interior are still off the internet and this is still causing wide-spread problems. Among those problems, many in Indian Country have still only received one check since early December from the Individual Indian Trust.
Glen Loveland, a spokesman for Rep. Tom Udall, D-N.M., one of the lawmakers upset over the disconnection, said Monday that the department's promise to speed interim payments to Indians who live off their trust accounts "is still a mess."
"Many, many of our constituents have received only one check," Loveland said. That's despite promises from Interior officials that more than 7,100 payments were in the mail to thousands of Indians who depend on the accounts.
@8:05 AM
It's definitely spring. 65°F yesterday, and it's now 15° with an inch of fresh snow. We don't every really get 'spring' here. It battles back and forth between winter and summer until finally summer wins. The skirmishes regularly extend into June. Then they have a re-match in the fall.
It does keep things interesting. I've left home in 80° weather and been trapped by a blizzard more than once. I've also started the day in long underwear and finished up in shorts. I like those days better.
And come to think of it, I've started the day in shorts, switched to long underwear and then back to shorts a few times too..
Those folks you see in Wyoming that look like street people? They're just natives who've given up trying to figure out what the weather's going to be like this afternoon and wear a winter coat all year-round.
@8:04 AM
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