Tuesday, February 24, 2015

Dealing with terrorist

According to breaking news, ISIL increased its demand for the release of Kayla Mueller after the administration bargained for the release of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl in Afghanistan.  Bergdahl is now charged by Army authorities with desertion in relation to his captivity and is set to stand trial in a court martial for the same.

This doesn't mean that the young woman, who was in Syria by her own volition, would have been freed by ISIL but for the administration securing the release of Berghdahl in the fashion which it did.  But it is something people should stop and consider.  Mueller was a devout Christian (something that the news media has largely ignored regarding her, and there is evidence that she was handed out as a war prize bride to an ISIL fighter by that entity, somewhat applying a practice that Mohammed sanctioned for his fighters in allowing them to take captive women for their own, in consolation for their separation from their spouses.  ISIL has been dolling out Christian and Yazidi women to its combatants as "brides". That fate was most likely grim for Mueller but it may also have been keeping her alive.  Of course, that status may also have kept her there.

At any rate, a person should pause to consider, in light of this, what unfortunate lesson was conveyed by the US bargaining with prisoners for the release of a man we will now try as a deserter.

Lex Anteinternet: The return of a perennial bad idea, the transfer o...

The bad idea discussed here; 
Lex Anteinternet: The return of a perennial bad idea, the transfer o...: Every few years Wyoming and the other western states get the idea that the Federal government ought to hand over the Federal domain to the ...
is still advancing, having gone form the Senate to the House.  As it proceeds, its gaining opposition from Wyoming's sportsmen.

Legislators would do well to remember that past proposals that drew the ire of sportsmen came back to haunt the individuals who voted for them, in some instances.  I suspect that this one would.  I know that it will impact my view of anyone who has supported it and will be included amongst the things I consider in the future, when they run again for office.

Saturday, February 21, 2015

Cities and Yeoman's First Law of History

Research and the University of Colorado suggests that:
Our findings indicate the fundamental processes behind the emergence of scaling in modern cities have structured human settlement organization throughout human history, and that contemporary urban systems are best-conceived as lying on a continuum with the smaller-scale settlement systems known from historical and archaeological research.
And; 
What we found here is that the fundamental drivers of robust socioeconomic patterns in modern cities precede all that.
And that wealth and monuments were easier to find in ancient cities, like modern ones.

Can't say we're surprised.  Yeoman's First Law of History at work again.

Random Snippets: Saturday Night Live really isn't all that funny, and never has been.

Saturday Night Live is celebrating its 40th Anniversary right now, and it recently had a special in which all of its surviving old hands came in and reprized some of their famous skits.  And everyone has some that  they like.  I, for example, like the memory of The Samurai Delicatessen, even if when I see it rerun it doesn't seem to be that funny. And some of the mock ads, or the some skits, I find genuinely funny.  And nobody can deny, I think, that the mock political debates are hugely funny, as are occasionally the satires of individual Presidents (the ones of Clinton were hilarious).

Having said all of that, by and large, the show just isn't all that good.

Now, humor is very subjective, but for a lot of Saturday Night Live to be funny, you have to have both a sophomoric sense of humor that even most sophomores in college or in high school don't have, and I think it helps if you fit into a downtown, middle class, east coast urban demographic.  That demographic seems to fill the population of television writers in general, and indeed years ago on NPR I had heard how a surprising number of comedy writers all come out of the same Ivy League school which is why they all have the same sense of humor from their college days, which never really changes.  Humor is, I"m pretty sure, both genetic and cultural, and there's a lot of funny stuff out there which just isn't going to make it on to something like Saturday Night Live, let alone television in general. In contrast, there are entire acts that one demographic finds funny and another does not. Chevy Chase, for example, isn't funny.  In anything.  But somebody must think so.

But Saturday Night Live, in spite of not really being all that funny, by and large, is long running, and television likes to celebrate itself, and so it has been. And that's part of the appeal, I think, of Saturday Night Live.  The culture believes its funny as to maintain otherwise would be to suggest that we've all been playing along. 

Of course, it could all be subjective.  My wife thinks Wayne's World is hilarious.  I think its stupid.  My son and I find the Grand Budapest Hotel to be very funny, my wife does not.  Everyone here loves Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?, but one of my in laws can't stand it.

Old Picture of the Day: Nethers, Virginia

Old Picture of the Day: Nethers, Virginia: Welcome to Nethers, Virginia Week. This week we will look at a little slice of American History that is lost forever. The experience t...

Old Picture of the Day: Japanese Surrender

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Old Picture of the Day: Iwo Jima

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Old Picture of the Day: Battle of Okinawa: Today's picture shows a view from the Battle for Okinawa. Some of the most intense fighting of World War II occurred on Okinawa. T...

Old Picture of the Day: Normandy Invasion

Old Picture of the Day: Normandy Invasion: This is another picture of the Normandy Invasion. This picture was taken after the troops had established a beach head. It is amazing a...

Old Picture of the Day: D-Day

Old Picture of the Day: D-Day: Today's picture is an iconic image of soldiers as they approach Omaha Beach on D-day. The striking thing to me is that most of thes...

Friday, February 20, 2015

Agricultural Ignorance

As somebody with a foot in agriculture, and a foot outside of it, I have a view of both worlds and how people in one perceive the other.  I don't know that this is always a good thing, but it is something I experience.  One thing about it is it makes it plain how often one group mus-perceives the views and the status of the other.  I've written about this a bit here before, often in the context of how those who have spent their lives in agriculture don't appreciate, in some circumstances, the unique gift they have in the modern world to be able to live on the land, and how they erroneously believe that "good" city jobs are the path to idle richness.

But perhaps a bigger misconception, in the West, is the one held by a select group of liberal environmentalist on how nature actually works, and how that dovetails with real agriculture.  This ignorance, moreover, can bleed over to the general non agricultural population country wide, and can have, or threaten to have, really negative consequences.  It also leads, in part, to the pretty pronounced distrust that agriculturalist have for "experts" outside of agriculture, and of those who brand themselves to be environmentalist.  As somebody who is very familiar with farmers and ranchers, I've sometimes wondered why they seem so opposed to what would seem to be sensible conservation efforts, or what seems to be well established, if controversial, scientific matters.  Or even, in some circumstances, environmental positions.

But, if you spend much time listening to environmentalist, you'd know why.  They can be as blind and ignorant as anyone.

As an example, take the current issue of The New Republic.  I've mentioned the magazine, now just past its 100th year, here before.  This pat issue was an odd one anyway you look at it, but included in its oddity is an article blaming ranchers in the west, and more particularly the dreaded "public lands rancher", for drought in the West.

 Stock tank, several years ago during a drought.  The water is on, but no cattle are to be seen, a  there weren't any in this pasture, which never looks any better than this, but which does support both deer and antelope, and seasonally, cattle.

Bull.

The thesis is, basically, that cattle drink up all the water and cause drought.  Nonsense.

Cattle do require a lot of water, but everywhere the brake on range carrying capacity is grass, not water.  Even in the arid West, in the parts I'm familiar with, there's generally enough water if there's enough grass.  And if there's truly not enough water, all the cattlemen I'm aware of cut back on the number of cattle they have.  In the modern West, I've never seen an instance of cattle drinking a water source dry.  And generally, if there's that little water, there's not very much grass, and cattle numbers were accordingly cut back anyhow.

Beyond that, the old idea that use of water creates drought hearkens back to the long discredited views of the 20s and 30s that "rain follows the plow" or that trees cause rain. They don't.  It was sincerely believed that production agriculture created rain clouds in the 1920s, and seriously advanced as a theory, to the detriment, and over the opposition of, cattlemen.  In the 1930s, when the dust bowl had disproved this (and the plowed ground started going back to rangeland), the new theory about trees was advanced and the Federal government planted them all over in droughted areas under the naive belief that they'd cause rain, when in fact their water consumption did the opposite.

It isn't, of course, that cattle don't drink water, they do, but precipitation in any one year, much of which in the West comes during the winter, isn't controlled by that.  The snow that fell here over the past two days came from moisture stored up in clouds over the Pacific Ocean, not over a local stock pond.

And speaking of stock ponds, one of the real ironies of current environmental baloney on this topic is that it always cites to wildlife, when in fact the creation of ranch based water projects, and some farm based ones, actually caused and supported the boom in wildlife numbers in the middle of the 20th Century.  Old accounts make it plain that prior to stock ponds much of the prairie was devoid of large wildlife as a rule.  Small ponds changed that.  And as wildlife habits differ from those of cattle, stock ponds benefit wildlife more than they do cattle.  Indeed, I've been stopped by a game biologist years ago just so he could ask me about a windmill driven stock tank.

Deep down, I don't t hink that the opposition to agriculture in the West, and this sort of animosity is centered in the West in terms of its focus, really has much to do with the environment in real terms.  If it did, environmentalist would be backing ranchers, not opposing them.  Indeed, the irony of this is pointed out by one of the books written by an anti, a University of Wyoming law professor, who laments early in her book that her view from her house in Laramie is despoiled by a cow, which means that here house, at the time the book was written, was most likely relatively new in Laramie and in fact had directly despoiled the prairie itself.  And that points out what I think is the real root of such views.

Almost all hardcore anti agriculture views of this type, just like hardcore veganism, or the like, come from deeply industrial supported urban lives.  People who life in cities, even if they oppose it, are so deeply supported by industrialism that they can hardly grasp it directly.  It often seems, however, that they sort of sense that, and as they feel uncomfortable with it, they strike out at something.  With some, it causes them to view the wildlands preserved by Western ranching as parkland, for their hobby use, in a deeply industrial supported manner.  The armies of Gortex clad weekend hikers up in the hills are there only because of their petroleum fueled lifestyles, and are even wearing industrially produced synthetic clothing.  They're about as close to nature, in that sense, as workers in a chemical plant, but they don't acknowledge that.  Perhaps they sense that, to a degree, but at any rate with urban jobs supported by an advanced industrial economy that has economic roots and supply lines across the globe, they react by wanting to drive ranchers and farmers, who actually live on the land, off it, and thereby convert the land into what they think will be an even bigger or more pristine park, but what will in fact be busted up into more little divisions and thereby destroy the land itself.

At some point this becomes a real problem, as a society so divorced from real nature, is really in trouble.  And perhaps that's where another radical idea may be in order, at this point.  There's a myth of government supported agriculture in this country, which is largely untrue except in certain specific instances.  But the system of mega agriculture is supported in so far as the American economy is a corporatist capitalist economy.  Some other nations, France being an example, go more for a distributist agrarian model in agriculture, recognizing that there's value in a densely populated nation in keeping a percentage of that population on the land, and grounded in reality.  With our nation becoming so distant from nature, and yet with so many people yearning to be part of it, or part of agriculture, perhaps we should consider something of the same.

Wednesday, February 18, 2015

1954 Bel Air


The other day, I posted my thread on automobiles.  After I'd written it, I took this photo of a very nicely restored 1954 Chevrolet Bel Air.

I had a 1954 Chevrolet Deluxe myself, a picture of which is provided below.

 

 I used mine as a daily driver, while I had it.  It was a really neat car, and I should have kept it, although using it that way turned you into a full time mechanic.

Anyhow, the Bel Aire, which should have rear wheel well covers, but in the very nice example above does not, provides an example of something I didn't talk about in my recent entry. That 54 Bel Air is an automatic transmission.

Automatic transmissions go further back than that, but they weren't the transmission of choice for legitimate reasons. But about that time, they started to improve to the extent that they soon would be.  Sluggish at first, by the 1960s they'd improved a great deal.  By the early 1970s they were coming out in pickup trucks, and within the last decade they started to supplant standard transmissions in trucks, even 1 ton 4x4 trucks.  You can still get standards, but its getting difficult to do so. Standards are gone in mid sized cards entirely, and when you find them in a car today, it's probably in a small sporty car.

Quite a change.

My 54 had a three speed transmission with column shift.

Lex Anteinternet: The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men: Lex Antein...

I've been posting on the oil field slump here pretty regularly in a string of posts of which this one is part,  Lex Anteinternet: The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men: Lex Antein.... It isn't  the only one by any means, however. 

Anyhow, in today's Tribune there's a story that on the very day that Halliburton's local lift division (pumps) was to move into their new quarters, they ended up laying off the entire local division.  Pretty dramatic event really.  How many people that is, is unclear, but the paper noted that at the end of the day there were 25 trucks in the lot that didn't leave.  That would presumably equate with 25 lost jobs at least.

In fairness, it must be noted that Halliburton recently merged with Baker Hughes, and this might be principally due to that merger. The paper's article seems to suggest it probably is, based upon their overviews of Halliburton personnel, and that makes sense to me. Halliburton acquired Baker Hughes for a reason, and that reason was to acquire its business, but it would make sense that there was some overlapping business to start with.  Indeed, as I think of Halliburton as a service company, I was surprised that it had a division that installed oilfield pumps.   Chances are high that Baker Hughes, which started off as an equipment company, would be more likely to have a more developed line of business doing the same thing really, so that may explain it.

Still, even though the article still includes some people who take a "it may be temporary" and "things are still going on strong here (referring to South Dakota)", that things aren't going well in the oil patch right now is pretty evident.  I'd guess that for those who were looking at going right from school into the oil patch, things are looking much different.




Who is AARP pitching to?

A lot of mornings I iron a pair of pants, or a shirt, and turn on the television to catch The High Chaparral.

Who doesn't?

Anyhow, as I'm watching, by doing that, a really old television show, early in the morning, I'm watching something that is probably being watched, I guess, by a lot of retired folks. At least the advertisers must think so. And one of those advertisers is the American Association of Retired Persons.

AARP has an add that pitches its automobile insurance, through Hartford, to people "50 years old and older".

Really? Are a lot of Americans in their 50s retired?  I really doubt it.

Oh, no doubt some are, but not most.  AARP, which also sends out their "join AARP" stuff to you when  you hit 50, seems to be fishing at the deep end of the pool there, but come on, how many Americans in their 50s are retired.

For that matter, fewer and fewer Americans in their 60s are retired and the retirement age is climbing.

Not that the AARP is the only organization that does this sort of thing. Some years ago I had  the occasion to have to interact with The American Legion, and during that an individual who was effectively recruiting for them asked me if I ever had any service, and if I'd like to join.  I have nothing against The American Legion but I didn't think I wanted to join, as I'm not a combat or wartime veteran after all.  I told the person I had been in the Guard but I was sure I wasn't eligible.  Well, it turned out that for some weird reason I was.  My period of Guard service had overlapped some bad event, I think our involvement in Lebanon (I was in basic training at that time, which actually put you in the Regular Army for that period of time), so I could be a Legion member. But why?  Doesn't seem what they'd want.

Of course, organizations need members to be effective, so I guess I can't blame them for trying.  But I'm not retired. Based upon my observations of other lawyers I know, my chances of retiring are really slim at that.

Tuesday, February 17, 2015

Random Snippets. It snows in the winter.

In much of North America, indeed in darned near all of it, it snows every winter.

In the northern 2/3s of the US, it snows without fail every winter.  And in the top half of that, it snows a lot.

This is not news.

So why the panic on the press about something that happens, without fail, absolutely every year?  It's really absurd.

Monday, February 16, 2015

Lex Anteinternet: Civil Holidays

Today is President's Day.  I worked it.  I always do.  I'm sure I've never had it off in any job I ever had, save for the period of time during which I was employed part time by the Army National Guard.  I'm sure I would have had it off, if I were working on this day otherwise.

I looked at these types of holidays this past October in this thread:
Lex Anteinternet: Civil Holidays:  Leann posted an item on her blog about Columbus Day, urging Congress to consider changing it to Indigenous Peoples Day .  I'll confess ...
President's Day is a Federal holiday that came about due to the amalgamation of Washington and Lincoln's birthdays as a holiday, both of which occurred in February.   They were great men and they certainly deserve a Federal holiday.  But how many take it off?  Did you?

Lex Anteinternet: Lex Anteinternet: The Islamic State in Iraq and th...

Lex Anteinternet: Lex Anteinternet: The Islamic State in Iraq and th...: As of today, the situation discussed here has gone from bad to worse.  ISIS, or ISIL, depending upon the term you use, has taken the city o...
And now this horror has spread on to the Libya, where ISIL beheaded 21 Egyptian  Coptic Christians simply for being Christian.  Egypt has retaliated with airstrikes against ISIL in Libya.  This is significant in two ways.  One, it shows that ISIL's reach is expanding.  Secondly, Egypt has now joined Jordan as a Middle Eastern, Moslem majority, country that's now actively engaged in warfare with ISIL.

To my surprise, 10 to 15 percent of Egyptians are reported as being Coptic Christians, a much higher percentage that I would have guessed.  Generally they're second class citizens, but all Egyptians appear to be rallying to their cause.

Not unrelated, a Moslem terrorist also struck at a free speech event in Egypt.  Armed with an automatic weapon in a society which strictly controls access to firearms, he had a pretty free hand so the fact that the casualties were as low as they were is truly amazing.  This event should have the added impact of causing European nations to further wake up to the fact that Islamic extremists are both in their midst, and at war with their open societies.  While I am sure it won't have this effect, it should also cause nations in Europe to ponder their gun control provisions and consider the example of the US, which is the opposite of what they imagine, in that as gun control provisions have very much waned in the past 30 years gun violence has actually declined (which is also contrary to what many Americans imagine).  On a continent which now finds itself at war with a quasi invisible radical fifth column, with access to automatic weapons coming out of the Middle East, allowing the population to protect itself deserves some consideration.