Maggie's Farm

Re the press and climategate:

The Times seems to have forgotten the most important aspect of the news business.  For years now ’skeptic’ has been a dirty word at the Times when the subject of climate change comes up.  Excuse me, but reporters are supposed to be skeptics.  They are supposed to be cynical, hard bitten people who trust their mothers — but cut the cards.  They are supposed to think that scientists are probably too much in love with their data, that issue advocates have hidden agendas, that high-toned rhetoric is often a cover for naked self interest, that bloviating politicians have cynical motives and that heroes, even Nobel Prize laureates, have feet of clay.  That is their job; it is why we respect them and why we pay attention to what they write.

Jimmy Rodgers is said to have risen from his sickbed to record this the day before he died. h/t SDA

This is a re-post from guest author Skook:

Glaciers and mountain-building have created many distinct species of trout throughout the Pacific drainage.  To find them, fish a mountain river, take a boat out on the Pacific, or hike to a desert lake.

Rainbow (above) – Silver with black spots and a reddish band along the side.  Their native range is the West Coast mountains, though they have been introduced elsewhere in North America and beyond.   Redbands are a variant found in the Great Basin, where they have adapted to high summer temperatures.  Steelheads are anadromous rainbows that spend parts of their lives in the North Pacific from Kamchatka down to Malibu Creek near Los Angeles.  In the Northwest, rainbows and steelhead are the premier game trout of the rivers and coast.

(While Rainbows are to be found in the East, these are all transplants or hatchery fish. The native stream trout in the East is the Brook Trout - which is a char.)

Cutthroat – Meriwether Lewis stopped at a Philadelphia tackle shop before setting out and his purchases served his expedition well, like on the Great Falls of the Missouri in June 1805.  Private Silas Goodrich fished the river as Lewis described events.  Goodrich caught a trout “with specks of a deep black…and a small dash of red on each side behind the front ventral fins… the flesh, when in good order, of a rose red.”  There are at least 14 types, often unique to particular river systems.  Cutthroats are the classic trout of the inland American West, and they sometimes interbreed with Rainbows.


Dolly Varden  - These are char (as is the eastern Brook Trout), like trout but with different teeth and coloration.  Dollys are olive or gray-green with yellow to pink spots and light gray bellies.  A character from a Dickens novel, Dolly Varden became the name of a patterned dress and in the 1870’s the name was given to the char found in California’s McCloud River. Dolly Varden are similar to Bull Trout, another char, and at one time they were thought to be the same species. They spend time in the ocean as do Cutthroats.     

There are a few other species found in isolated areas that exist today only due to the hard work of folks like Trout Unlimited.  Here are two examples:     

Apache Trout - Jump in your car and drive to the Ft. Apache Indian Reservation about three hours northeast of Phoenix.  There in the White River is the gold, red, and black Apache.  It has been a long struggle due to loss of habitat and interbreeding with rainbows.  But now things look good enough to move it from the endangered list to merely “threatened” so you may legally try your luck at catch and release.

Gila Trout – Another modestly reviving species in eastern Arizona and western New Mexico, it too had been pushed to the brink by development and competition with non-native trout introduced decades ago.  Gilas have black spots on gold and copper bodies and grow to over a foot. Long term restoration has brought them back enough to permit limited fishing in a few beautiful mountain streams.  Bring your hiking boots.

That's what the beer man calls out at Yankee Stadium: "Hey! Beer man! Beer man here! You know you want it." Devilish marketing.

You know you want this pretty Hinckley 49, currently for sale. But even if you afford her, can you afford to keep her?

- Robin from Berkeley at Am Thinker

- Driscoll: I Think We Can Now Officially Pronounce The Late ’60s D.O.A.

- and via that Driscoll post, this good one from Reason last fall: The Paranoid Center - How the panic over right-wing violence is being used to marginalize peaceful dissent

Your Maggie's Farm posters tend to be fairly Centrist-Conservative, like most Americans. How scary are we?

The Endeavor, off Newport in 2004

Our recent post on this year's America's Cup race in Valencia got me to reviewing the history of J-Class boats, often known as "J-boats." An excellent summary here, which takes note of the surviving Js.

I've seen 'em up close, but never sailed one. Open for an invitation, though. I do know how to trim a jib but that monster foresail is one big Genoa, not a jib.

The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false face for the urge to rule it.

H.L. Mencken

A Pudd'n Guy who knows his math. An easy investment in a lifetime of free air travel.

BTW, it would save us all some linking time and trouble if y'all would just check Vanderleun's American Digest daily, or twice, or thrice daily, same as you do Maggie's.

Just stumbled on this 2001 book by Ted Dalrymple: Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass.

I think I'll track down a copy. It's the first book I have heard of from a Psychiatrist taking a look at the topic, and Dalrymple has spent much of his career in tattoo land. 

I assume he is talking about Brit families of multi-generational poverty and dysfunction rather than the temporarily poor (eg the unemployed, new immigrants, grad students, people down on their luck, etc) or the electively poor (eg hippies, small farmers and farm help, spendthrifts, Maine fishing and hunting guides, aspiring artists and actors, etc) who together make up much of the American poverty stats. 

Addendum: By coincidence I see from Insty that Dalrymple has a new book:

IN THE MAIL: From Theodore Dalrymple, The New Vichy Syndrome: Why European Intellectuals Surrender to Barbarism.

Can he say that nowadays? Oh, I forgot. He's in the USA now, isn't he?

Photo: Ted Dalrymple, aka Anthony Daniels MD, retired Psychiatrist

It's an 11,500 year-old temple in southeastern Turkey. h/t to a good piece at Protein.

- The Mediterranean population of the Bluefin Tuna - "Tonno" - the King of Fish, is headed for extinction due to overfishing. Their vulnerability is that they all congregate in one place for breeding, and helos direct the netting. EU politics will permit that extinction to occur. A damn shame. Of course, the regular Atlantic population is headed for the same fate.

- And Bottlenose Dolphins aren't really fish, but the Japanese in Taji kill 23,000 of them each year. This is not stewardship.

- Another fish tale: An Entirely Synthetic Fish: How Rainbow Trout Beguiled America and Overran the World.

Apparatchiks who pretend to be revolutionaries — that’s an awful lot of the press these days.

Prof. Reynolds, here.

It's time we did a plug for a wholesome site, The Borderline Sociopathic Blog for Boys. Photo is not from it, but sorta could be:

Did you pack your own bag?

Yes, you always pack your bag. You'll be tempted to say that your new man-servant Abdul Arafat packed it in his tent, and then welded it shut so you couldn't peek. Resist this compulsion unless you crave proctological attention followed by long rides on Greyhound buses for life.

Are you innocent?

Yes. Everybody in this prison is always innocent. Just ask them.

Lots of other important FAQs at Vanderleun

Marriage, and Conflict or Divorce? A ?Lenten confessional piece, with good links.

Who ever said anybody was really a "great catch"? We're all just flawed people.

- The new, improved Science. Prof. Phil Jones:

...he claimed it was not 'standard practice' to release data and computer models so other scientists could check and challenge research.

- You can now forget everything they said about hurricanes. Never mind.

- Everybody is mocking Al Gore's goofy NYT op-ed piece. I am beginning to feel sorry for the guy. This from Big Journalism's Former Veep Goes Girly-Man, Has Hissy Fit in Pages of New York Times:

This piece of pure, dribbling, drooling emoting is going to either make you collapse in a torrent of tears or retch into the nearest barf bag.  The only human beings on the planet to whom this editorial would appeal are a bunch of 13-year-old girls without a single clue between them.

With hundreds of millions of dollars on the line, Al is going all out to save his “investment” in global warming hysteria.  Here, he comes up with histrionics befitting the amount of personal loss he stands to suffer.

A re-post. We'll do the Western species later in the week -

It's getting near Opening Day around here, so here's an update on the Salmonidae. For our other pieces on fishing, enter "fishing" in our search space - you will catch some good stuff - along with some random entries.

Taxonomy: The family Salmonidae includes a number of cool-water fish subfamilies: trout, salmon, char, grayling, Lake Whitefish, and other less well-known fish. The Brook Trout and Lake Trout are technically members of the Char subfamily of the Salmonidae.

Heritage: The aggressive, young-trout-killing Brown Trout is a transplant from Eurasia. The fast-water Rainbow Trout is a transplant from the Pacific watershed. The splendid Brook Trout and the big Lake Trout are the common native game species of the Eastern US, and both are technically Char, not trout per se. At this point, the wonderful game "trout" have been transplanted world-wide, and some have established viable wild populations, as with the trout in Patagonia, where you can even catch New England's Brook Trout today.

Anadromy: Most Salmonidae have the capacity, or the preference, to be anadromous - to migrate to salt water until maturity - when they have the opportunity. The Arctic Char, of culinary and cold water fame (anti-freeze in the blood), is anadromous. So is the Steelhead - actually a migratory Rainbow. Salmon are, of course. Sea-going fish grow larger on the rich variety of big-water foods. Interestingly, many land-locked Salmonidae imitate anadromy by entering streams to spawn, and then return to their home fresh-water lakes or just stay put in the streams, if there is enough to eat.

The Great Lakes and other large lakes have their own Salmonidae species, such as Lake Whitefish, and Lake Trout which are not found in trout streams.

Hatchery fish:  When you fish for trout in the East, you are, in all likelihood, catching hatchery fish, not wild, born-in-nature fish. Too many anglers, and not enough habitat, so we pretend we are catching wild fish. Catch-and-release gives your fellow angler a chance, and saves your state government, or your fishing club, money on their hatchery budgets. Still, some wild breeding populations do exist, and fly-fishing with barbless hooks gives every fish a sporting chance to avoid the crushing humiliation of the sportman's net. But I still wonder what would happen if we banned all fresh-water stream fishing for five years. What would we find in our streams? Nothing?  Or big, mature breeding trout hunkering under stream banks and fallen logs? We will never know, but I suspect that many of our streams would not support wild trout populations.

Other details:

 - Superb taxonomy website: ITIS
 - Good Eastern trout summary, Pennsylvania Fishes
 - An example of how eastern states manage their fresh-water recreational fisheries, from Connecticut
 - An example of what fish hatcheries do, from New York State

 Image: Brook Trout, by Denton

From VDH's excellent but scathing Obama Fatigue:

...just as liberals were turned off by Bush’s cowboyisms, so too conservatives are tired of Obama’s professorial, condescending sermons. After a year, the people are tired of all the “let me be perfectly clear” psycho-drama, the “make no mistake about” pseudo-tough man pose, the straw man “I reject the false choice that some would…,” and  the narcissistic “I have ordered…..my team…to.”  The boilerplate is now recognizable even to the Washington press corps. But as important, it dovetails with more disturbing propensities: there are the periodic signs of inanity like “Cinco de Cuatro” and “corpse-man;” the constant fudging on the truth of multibillion dollar new programs really “saving” money; and the surreal bowing to dictators and emperors, with the relish of turning our misdemeanors into felonies and our enemies’ felonies into benefactions.

Read the whole thing. I did not vote for the guy, but I "hoped" for better.

Smart guys do not tolerate fools or BS, and Lindzen doesn't. How about a Nobel Peace Prize for Prof. Lindzen's lecture videotape? It's long. It's about data vs. models.

Richard Lindzen PhD, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology: The Peculiar Issue of Global Warming.

If that link doesn't work (it works for me), try this: http://vmsstreamer1.fnal.gov/VMS_Site_03/Lectures/Colloquium/100210Lindzen/f.htm#

Philippians 3:17-4:1

3:17 Brothers and sisters, join in imitating me, and observe those who live according to the example you have in us.

3:18 For many live as enemies of the cross of Christ; I have often told you of them, and now I tell you even with tears.

3:19 Their end is destruction; their god is the belly; and their glory is in their shame; their minds are set on earthly things.

3:20 But our citizenship is in heaven, and it is from there that we are expecting a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ.

3:21 He will transform the body of our humiliation that it may be conformed to the body of his glory, by the power that also enables him to make all things subject to himself.

4:1 Therefore, my brothers and sisters, whom I love and long for, my joy and crown, stand firm in the Lord in this way, my beloved.

A reader sent in this photo of Phragmites australis, aka Phragmites, aka Common Reed, from a southern New England marsh yesterday. This presumably non-native, invasive reed has spread like a cancer in marshes across the US, crowding out native marsh species and, in many areas, creating hundreds or thousands of acres of sterile "monoculture" marshland (eg the vast and once-biologically-bountiful New Jersey marshlands).

(There is a native species of Phragmites, shorter, far less aggressive, and pickier of habitat. I took a photo of a stand of it in Canada, but can't find my photo. Here's a genetic study of Phragmites species in North America.)

Ducks Unlimited has many programs, such as this one, to try to control these weed reeds. Nonetheless, they are here to stay. Illegal immigration or globalization?

Are You Content?

I call on those that call me son,
Grandson, or great-grandson,
On uncles, aunts, great-uncles or great-aunts,
To judge what I have done.
Have I, that put it into words,
Spoilt what old loins have sent?
Eyes spiritualised by death can judge,
I cannot, but I am not content.
He that in Sligo at Drumcliff
Set up the old stone Cross,
That red-headed rector in County Down,
A good man on a horse,
Sandymount Corbets, that notable man
Old William Pollexfen,
The smuggler Middleton, Butlers far back,
Half legendary men.
Infirm and aged I might stay
In some good company,
I who have always hated work,
Smiling at the sea,
Or demonstrate in my own life
What Robert Browning meant
By an old hunter talking with Gods;
But I am not content.