Maggie's Farm

Over the transom and most likely apocryphal, said to be from a Nashville teacher:

We are worried about "the cow" when it is all about the "Ice Cream."

The most eye-opening civics lesson I ever had was while teaching third grade this year. The presidential election was heating up and some of the children showed an interest. I decided we would have an election for a class president. We would choose our nominees. They would make a campaign speech and the class would vote.

To simplify the process, candidates were nominated by other class members. We discussed what kinds of characteristics these students should have. We got many nominations and from those, Jamie and Olivia were picked to run for the top spot. The class had done a great job in their selections. Both candidates were good kids. I thought Jamie might have an advantage because he got lots of parental support. I had never seen Olivia's mother.

The day arrived when they were to make their speeches Jamie went first. He had specific ideas about how to make our class a better place. He ended by promising to do his very best. Every one applauded. He sat down and Olivia came to the podium. Her speech was concise. She said, "If you will vote for me, I will give you ice cream." She sat down. The class went wild. "Yes! Yes! We want ice cream." She surely would say more. She did not have to. A discussion followed. How did she plan to pay for the ice cream? She wasn't sure. Would her parents buy it or would the class pay for it. She didn't know. The class really didn't care. All they were thinking about was ice cream.

Jamie was forgotten. Olivia won by a landslide.

Every time Barack Obama opened his mouth he offered ice cream and fifty-two percent of the people reacted like nine year olds. They want ice cream. The other forty-eight percent know they're going to have to feed the cow and clean up the crap.

This tribute to the Gray Eagles (WWII pilots) was in conjunction with an air show in Ohio called "The Final Roundup." It was the last large gathering of the remaining P-51 Mustang fighters used during WWII. There were about 120 of the fighters there, all of them in flying condition, of course.  The flyover seen at the end of the video trailer is composed entirely of P-51s spelling out the number 51.

A fine airplane. Video here.

What are these?

I checked with Snopes and found that this story from 2005 was true. The piece at Snopes also includes the gracious and embarassed reply by the guy who had complained about the fly-by noise.

Some people just can't get enough sailing. These folks were frostbiting last weekend in 23 degrees on a breezy Long Island Sound. Yes, there is a rescue boat in case you fall overboard or capsize - which sometimes happens.

Watch it assembled, in hyperspeed:

From the WSJ:

Arthur Laurents needed a Maria for his upcoming Broadway revival of "West Side Story." The 91-year-old director, who wrote the libretto for the legendary 1957 musical, found her on YouTube.

Josefina Scaglione was an Argentine stage actress working in Buenos Aires. She spoke English with a rich Spanish accent, was unknown to American audiences and was exactly what Mr. Laurents had been searching for.

Read the whole thing. Here she is with Libertango:

Readers know that we at Maggie's are ardent conservationists and some like Bird Dog are fair amateur naturalists, but we are neither pagan greenies nor Gaia worshippers - and we have no problem with forest fires. The link last night to two pieces about the Spotted Owl brought to mind Alston Chase's 1996 In A Dark Wood: The Fight Over Forests and the Myths of Nature.

Here's a 1996 review of the book from Reason:

Ten years ago, in his book Playing God in Yellowstone, Alston Chase took on two supposed shining lights in American life: the National Park Service and the environmental movement. Chase showed how the Park Service, captured by an environmental religion that fetishized its vision of nature, was passively allowing exploding elk populations to destroy important parts of Yellowstone National Park. The same misplaced religious zeal threatened the future of the park's grizzly bear population as well.

In a Dark Wood has Chase returning to these themes in a new setting: the spotted owl controversy in the Pacific Northwest. Here again, in an excess of religious enthusiasm, the environmental movement is wreaking havoc. Tens of thousands of jobs and hundreds of mills representing significant portions of the Pacific Northwest timber industry have been wiped out, and the federal government has lost $20 billion in future timber revenues - money that will have to be recovered from taxpayer pockets. Equally important for Chase, the ultimate outcome is likely to be bad for the environment as well.

As in Yellowstone, Chase finds a false understanding of nature at the heart of the problem. Environmentalists are driven to recover the Garden of Eden - the forest conditions of the Pacific Northwest before Columbus. The spotted owl crusade, as Chase follows its course, becomes a spiritual quest having little to do with forests and owls and much to do with finding personal salvation. . .

Thus, environmentalists willfully avert their eyes from the fact that forest fires swept across the Pacific Northwest with great regularity until their suppression in the 20th century.. . . .

Another case of willful ignorance on the part of environmentalists affected the controversy. The northern spotted owl probably never should have been listed as a threatened species in the first place. Virtually nothing was known about the owl until the 1970s. By the mid-1980s, as environmental groups were deciding that the owl would be the chosen instrument for shutting down federal timber harvesting in the region, there were only a handful of academic studies on the owl. The federal courts then prematurely forced the Interior Department to list the spotted owl under the Endangered Species Act, just as the scientific data were starting to accumulate. When this research finally became available after the owl listing in 1990, estimates of owl numbers soared - from 3,000 to 12,000 and heading still higher. Contrary to the assumption behind the listing, it increasingly appears that spotted owls do well in young forest stands and may even require them.

To be sure, the owl was never the real object. Environmentalists from the beginning sought preservation of the full forest ecology - the "ancient cathedrals," as they conceived these areas. Once again, though, actual science proved uncooperative. "Ecological management" depends on the idea that a forest or other natural system moves through a succession of transitional stages to reach a final equilibrium or "climax" stage. Europeans had supposedly disrupted this happy equilibrium, but the methods of ecosystem management would now restore it.

The ecological vision of succession and climax, offering a (thin) scientific veneer for the environmental gospel, did in fact have wide scientific acceptance until the 1970s. By the 1990s, however, any ideas of an inherent tendency toward stability in nature had been replaced by an evolutionary biology of chaos and unpredictability. As environmental historian Donald Worster commented in 1993, "The climax notion is dead, the ecosystem has receded in usefulness....Nature should be regarded as a landscape of patches, big and little, changing continually through time and space, responding to an unceasing barrage of perturbations."

For environmentalists, however, coming to terms with this new understanding would have been the equivalent of conceding the Garden of Eden had never existed. Not surprisingly, the environmental movement has treated the science about the same way the Catholic Church reacted centuries ago to the discoveries of Copernicus and Galileo. Indeed, Al Gore, Bruce Babbitt, and other environmental crusaders of the Clinton administration have enshrined ecological management as the official philosophy of the federal government, even as most scientists now say it has no valid foundation.

In a Dark Wood reads like a good novel. Chase sketches the personalities of key participants in the spotted owl drama, often pausing to give a short life history. The book is filled with interesting details and has a strong plot. Indeed, Chase is not immune from some of the same tendencies he criticizes in environmentalists. The spotted owl story is gradually revealed as yet another fierce struggle between good and evil. For Chase, the devil is the idea of the ecosystem and biocentrism, which is corrupting environmentalists - who are basically good people - and leading them into the destructive excesses of contemporary religious warfare.

But there are other ways to interpret the events in the Pacific Northwest. Timber companies with large private lands have thrived, even as competitors dependent on federal land have been eliminated. The spotted owl has proven a remarkably effective anti-competitive device. On the environmental side, there is a constant need to raise large sums of money to pay for fancy buildings and professional staff. Organizational imperatives therefore demand a continuing stream of polarizing conflicts with national publicity to stimulate the faithful's contributions. This is not religion; it is just good business practice.

Nor should one be surprised to find that the environmental gospel may serve other purposes besides inspiring devotion. Indeed, this faith has provided a religious sanction for the takeover of the federal forests of the Pacific Northwest by the new urban and professional groups moving into the region in such large numbers. The conflict became all the more bloody because of the very fact of public ownership of these lands. Politics, not market trading, would have to be the determining factor in deciding the future uses of the lands.

And in the political fray the new recreational groups were not unique in their willingness to fight with whatever tools they could grab. If bad science and clothing themselves in the garb of religious righteousness were what it would take to get control over federal forests, so be it. The spotted owl struggle, in short, was a product not only of a misconceived theology but also of a flawed institutional framework of public land ownership, one which tended to foment conflict and to bring out the worst in those involved.

We view the Greenie movement as political, with little seriousness about real conservation issues. The owl was a tactical tool for the urbanite sentimentalists. They are all about political tactics, and there is no Teddy Roosevelt in them.

I took this photo in Oct, 2002. That's a bay on Lake W, about a mile across. The bay is only around 30" deep, which is why the diving ducks love it.

World air traffic over 24 hrs:

World Air Traffic Over 24 Hours - For more funny videos, click here

from Iowahawk:

It's not too soon to begin thinking about the opening of fishing season in April. If markets don't improve, we'll be fishing out of necessity instead of for sport.

From my window, this afternoon:

More photos of this happy bird below the fold.

Editor: Darn nice pics, Gwynnie. Given his hunting success around your bird-feeder, he'll be back often. My diagnosis is in the comments, so folks can make their own minds up first.

Now we understand!  From the WSJ “Best of the Web”:

“Someone at FiredOglake.com calls Warren an "eliminationist hate preacher." We didn't know what this meant, so we followed the links and ended up with this definition:

 

“’That's how eliminationist hate works, regardless of its target: Its aim is to threaten and intimidate not merely the immediate target, but anyone who might think of speaking out on their behalf. This cuts the target off from the community support it might normally enjoy and leaves them feeling even more isolated.’

“What, really, is eliminationism?

What we have just been given is a secret buzzword for the Left’s entire strategy for the last four years. 

Doesn’t that perfectly describe what the Left has been using in place of reasoned debate?  The leftist writer, by using their code word to attack Warren, has given the rest of us the key to, or a new understanding of, the deliberate intent  behind what we thought was the “Bush Derangement Syndrome”.  We are not surprised.

Friday evening on the CT coast:

We will not be posting much today, but we want to say that a sunset from a duck boat on Lake Winnipegosis is an excellent representation of God's bountiful nature.

Try this: Splash a little real Maple Syrup on top of your slice of Pumpkin Pie tomorrow.

You'll be hooked.

We posted the website, HuntFishCook.com, a couple of years ago.

They have a good Game Cooking Basics.