Demons

Statistics

Rudolph versus Sarah Palin

Road hunting

Grouse camp sauna musings

my first xtranormal cartoon. enjoy.

Open sights and aging eyes

I made a discovery this week when the muzzleloading deer season started--I'm blind as a bat when it comes to seeing my musket sights. What I really learned was that I can see the front sight when I put my reading glasses on (my eyes went to hell in the last six months). Voila! I can see the front sight.

Which led me to spend the last day or two researching Rx shooting glasses, aperture suction-cup thingies, etc etc. I should have stayed in skirmishing when I was young and able-bodied; now I am decrepit and can't see straight.

I suspect my eye issues are partly explain why I shot the carbine (with a peep) better than my two-bander this past season.

I like what my teammate Jon Faucher said--I wish I could have last season back knowing what I know now. But at least I've got a game plan for my musket for this next season.

Jim

ps. here's a cool link: http://www.starreloaders.com/edhall/nwongmain/eyeguide.html . Check out the links to his other topics.

Sarah Palin versus Aaron Sorkin versus Gary Francione

Aaron Sorkin has let loose with this expletive-laden diatribe against Palin: "In Her Defense, I'm Sure the Moose had it Coming."

Now, the most fun yet: Rutgers law professor Gary Francione--he of the ultimate pro-animal rights position--writes to Sorkin saying "I Hate to Say It, but Sarah Palin is Right: A Response to Aaron Sorkin."

I haven't had this much fun since I was reading for my A-exam.

Of course the hunting blogs are all over this the last few days--Sarah Palin taking five or six shots (and missing) at a caribou on her Alaska show. Apparently the scope got bumped earlier in the 'hunt.' Hard to believe this made it to the final edits and onto television.

Fascinating reading on Judy Curry's climate blog . . . going over the list of "denizens," I am struck by the varied backgrounds and the level of interest people bring to the topic. Not to mention the various biographical accounts of how folks came to the topic. Very, very thoughtful people.

just about says it all:

James Hansen at Princeton

Luboš Motl has a great post featuring a running commentary about a talk Hansen gave at the Institute for Advanced Studies on November 19. I trust he won't mind me posting some of it here:

From the very beginning, Hansen made lots of bold statements about the "planetary emergency" and horrible things waiting in the pipeline unless we reduce the CO2 concentration from 390 ppm to 350 ppm (a randomly chosen nonsensical number that is lower than 390 ppm) but he hasn't provided the listeners with something that they are used to from pretty much all the talks at their institute, namely evidence or a story that makes at least some sense.

Instead, the IAS researchers could repeatedly see photographs of Hansen's grandchildren who have admittedly inherited certain ugly and visibly non-cute features from their granddad. At some moment, you can watch a picture of Sophie for minutes. Hansen argues that it's partly right to call him the "grandfather of global warming" because he is a grandfather.

Additional ugly pictures of children are shown and given silly captions. Two little bastards, Sophie and Connor, are claimed to evaluate the radiative forcings. ;-) A traditional way to abuse the children - something that is even more widespread in Islam than it is in AGW.

Hansen claims that the Earth is "out of balance", without explaining whether it should be usual for a planet to be at balance, how much imbalanced it normally is, and what is the error bar of his current estimate. Clearly, the talk is optimized for people who never ask any sensible questions. Not sure whether the IAS folks were the right audience, however.

New pictures of grandkids follow. Somewhat prettier than before. Sophie is writing one of her first letters to President Obama now. She asked Barack: "Why don't you listen to my grandfather?" Meanwhile, the grandfather considers this argument "very clever", using his standards. Hansen told us that even the greenest countries such as Norway suck: imagine, they fund tar sands instead of using perpetual-motion machines to get the energy they need.

Remotely related: James Hansimian, a chimp, didn't beat NOAA in his hurricane predictions this year. Via NCPPR.

On another picture, Connor joins Hansen and Sophia and they celebrate the very good letter mentioned above. Congratulations. Hansen must be really proud. :-)

Hansen's mood rapidly deteriorates at 18:05; he has to return to the science. Superficial tautological statements are made about the sources of information - history, present, models. Global temperatures going back 65 million years ago were shown: there were no ice sheets prior to 40 million years before Christ.

Preposterous statements that all these changes were caused by CO2 are soon fixed: he admits that the orbital motion is the main cause. But he returns to the preposterous statement quickly. He doesn't feel any urge to even try to produce some evidence that CO2 mattered. Whenever it's clear that something is not caused by CO2, he mentions that CO2 has to be a powerful feedback - against, with no evidence. It's just some "mandatory baggage" that has to be added everywhere to skew the truth and that cannot be questioned.

Hansen promotes his crackpot pet theory of the sliding ice that will simply walk to the ocean - a hypothetical process that definitely doesn't decide about the fate of the ice sheets. Listeners had to go through a long and standard litany about melting glaciers, wildfires, coral reefs, ocean acidification, and others. At this point, his talk really picks comic proportions. He shows the list of all these hypothetical "catastrophes" - [here a miracle occurs] - and "derives" that each of them implies that the "right" CO2 concentration should be between 300 and 350 ppm to "preserve creation". Holy cow.

Could you please be more specific about the step 2 in the calculation, Mr Hansen?

Again, we simply cannot burn the available fossil fuels, he says. We can't burn the coal, we can't burn the unconventional fossil fuels. Well, be sure that we almost certainly will. Again, we learn that even Norway, the greenest country, is controlled by Big Oil. Well, it has to be so because the whole modern civilization depends on energy, Mr Hansen.

Hansen actually realizes that the cheapest fuels will be burned if they're the cheapest source. Of course, it's just like Newton's law of gravity, so the "right" solution he proposes is to distort the market in so gigantic ways so that they're no longer cheap. He wants a fee to be paid for mining or important fossil fuels. In fact, he also wants the fee to keep on increasing until the economies are happily devastated. The money should be given to the U.S. citizens to adapt to the fact that they must live without energy. In his viewpoint, it's better than cap-and-trade.

Two previously undisclosed grandchildren have totally distracted Mr Hansen while he was explaining that "China is going to suffer most from climate change" - what a piece of crap, by the way. We're promised that aside from the four grandchildren, we will also see Hansen's wife. I don't think that he has fulfilled the promise.

The grandson Jake is a gentle giant. He's among the top 1% biggest kids of his age, we learn. You need to be a top IAS researcher to understand this talk. If we allow Jake to grow under business-as-usual, he will be 2 meters tall. That's unacceptable so Jake must be made starving and hungry - that's how I understood Hansen's bizarre mixture of the two topics.

Jefferson's "Earth belongs to the living" is totally misinterpreted - really inverted to its negation. Jefferson clearly meant that you can't allow dead and future people to vote about the decisions about the present. Only the present generations can decide. Jefferson surely did not mean that the rights of hypothetical people in the future should be taken into account now. He mainly wanted to say that the debts calculated by the previous - currently dead - generations shouldn't determine the lives of the present generation (a point I only partially share, but that's clearly unrelated to our relationship with the future generations).

Governments shouldn't be allowed to decide about their levels of carbon regulation. Courts should tell them that they are obliged to destroy the economies completely, Hansen argues. Thanks, the talk is over. Thank God.

Maldacena's question

The question-and-answers period began. Juan Maldacena, the author of what most top people in high-energy physics consider the greatest breakthrough of theoretical physics in the last 15 years (the 1997 AdS/CFT correspondence), among a hundred of other papers, asks whether geoengineering is a suitable alternative solution to the extra taxes and duties that Hansen has promoted.

Now, we agreed with my contact at IAS that Hansen probably doesn't know who Maldacena even is. This is a crazy world given the fact that Hansen, a random average activist employed in an inferior discipline of physical sciences, is now known to Maldacena.

Hansen answers that we are "already doing geoengineering" by emitting CO2. Well, it is not quite a Maldacena-level-sophisticated geoengineering, I guess. ;-) Carbon sequesteration is the only acceptable geoengineering for Hansen. He admits that aerosols etc. could cool the planet but it would not solve the ocean acidification problem or the main problem he truly cares about, namely how to cripple the world economy.

Instead of talking about the topic of the question - geoengineering - Hansen returns to his mentally ill delusions about collapsing ice sheets and other tragedies that have nothing to do with the question. He is really incapable to focus on science.

He eventually returns to the question and says that "covering one pollutant by another is not a sensible thing to do". That's it. However, he immediately stops thinking about any technicalities and returns to his clichés that energy has to be expensive so that people don't "waste" it.

Pretty funny stuff.

The "Problem" of outdoor media

I posted the following as a comment on Galen Greer's blog in response to a post titled Responsibility in Outdoor Media.  I originally saw Galen's post mentioned on Albert Rasch's site. 

I'll play devil's advocate on this one . . . . We don't have tv, so I don't watch these shows regularly. But I remember when they first came out (10-15 years ago?) I thought that they were a net positive for hunting. At the time, hunters were routinely being told to "cover their deer carcass up in the truck" and "don't wear camo in public." I believe that such advice simply drives hunting further underground and out of the public eye. So I was glad to see hunting shows on the outdoor channels--and moreover, I was glad to see the kill shots. Any attempt to mask over the kill would have been an unnecessary sanitation of what goes on in hunting.

Now, with that said, it may in fact be the case that the majority of hunters shown on these television programs are morons. Whooping it up at the kill, high fiving it, etc. As they say about such displays in football, when you get to the endzone you should act like you've been there before.

Does such behavior give the non-hunting public a skewed view of hunters? Perhaps. But perhaps not. I would like to see some social science research/evidence that demonstrates such an effect on public attitudes. I doubt it's there.

Compare the hunting shows with the cooking shows, e.g., "Hell's Kitchen" and the like. The cooks on those shows are all morons--every other word out of their mouths are expletives that are beeped out. Do these shows have much impact on the general public's view of people who cook? I doubt it.

Same with other shows--Project Runway is one my kids and wife watch. Again, morons who sew and the morons who direct them. Do I care if they don't speak well and can't seem to utter a sentence without swearing? not really.

So I don't know that the outdoor media issue is as big a problem as some of the "hunting intelligentsia" makes it out to be. A bigger problem is kids not going outdoors and increasing urbanization so kids can't walk out the door and hunt squirrels and rabbits after school.

anyway. I'm probably in the minority on this one. And perhaps I have a blindspot because I don't watch the outdoors channels all day. But I think there are probably other more important 'problems' facing hunters.

Still don't know how detrimental the sensationalistic hunting shows are to hunting.  Would love to see some research on this, or to be pointed in the direction of such research.

Already posted a photo on the other blog, but who knows, someone may stumble on this one as well.

Got into my elevated stand around 3:00 yesterday afternoon, and there was a strong northwest breeze, so I was basically looking to the southeast corner of the field for most of the afternoon. Somewhere around 4:40 or so, this little guy came sneaking in from the northwest thicket, cruising with the wind, and popping into view less than fifty yards away (I'll have to laser it later). No real hesitation, I haven't seen any bucks since last week, so I aimed low behind the front shoulder and pulled the trigger. He did the hind leg kick thing, which was good, and bolted off toward the creek through the apple trees. I found him just on the other side of the shrub line, stone dead.

Was happy to see the points, I didn't even glass him given that he was so close. Not a heavy deer, and I was able to get him into the truck myself. But it was dark by the time I got him to the butcher. Ordered more processed items--kind of a sampler of everything, which the kids will like.

Now it's hurry up and wait for muzzle-loading season.

Penn and Teller on global warming

Watch Penn and Teller Bullshit S06E06 in Entertainment  |  View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

Shrike

Just saw one while on deer stand. Pretty cool! probably a northern shrike.

Honor the hunt by hunting with honor

Been working on the following piece for Orion. Thanks to Cagey for providing the bulk of the eye-witness testimony about what happened on that fateful day in the "illegal Riegel" blind.

Cross-posted from the Fair Chase blog.

____________________________________________________________________________

One opening day on Cayuga Lake several years ago, a friend of mine accidentally shot a grebe, mistaking it for a coot.

Derek had recently trained a new puppy for waterfowl hunting, and the hunter and his young dog were having a fine morning. The birds were flying well, and a mixed bag of puddlers and divers was hanging by 10 am. As the action slowed, a flock of coots swam through the decoys, and he ignored them.

But seeing how eager his dog was to retrieve, he began to regret that he did not shoot a coot for the dog, so he resolved to shoot one if they came by again. Ten minutes later, a lone bird came swimming up the shore, bobbing its head a bit and meandering through the decoys. It was promptly dispatched and retrieved.

A little while later, a pair of conservation officers could be seen making their rounds, from blind to blind, through the marsh, checking bag limits, ammunition, licenses, and duck stamps. When the officers arrived, Derek listed his bag: two mallards, one black duck, one bluebill, and one coot. The officer asked to see the bag. The stringer of birds was handed to the officers, who scrutinized the birds.

“Well, that’s a nice bird, but I have bad news for you,” said the senior officer, pointing at the smallest bird. “What’s that?” my friend asked. “Your coot is a grebe.” Derek answered, dejectedly, “I was afraid of something like that.”

“Then why didn’t you get rid of it?” the younger officer interjected. “Most guys would have.” To which Derek responded: “Because I shot it, and my dog retrieved it. And because it would be wrong to just kill something and throw it out. I wish I wouldn’t have shot it, but I did. I thought it was a coot, and that’s my mistake, which is bad enough. But I wouldn’t want to make matters worse by lying and cheating.”

The officers proceeded to inform Derek that his mistake was a federal offense, but they also seemed to recognize and respect his efforts to honor the hunt, the dog, the birds, and the traditions of hunting. I think that in the end they were somewhat easier on him than they could have been.

Fair chase and ethical hunting are usually what come to mind when people think of Orion. Although these terms probably don’t lend themselves to strict definition, I think that fair chase and ethical hunting can be summarized by the maxim, “Honor the hunt by hunting with honor.”

Now, I recognize there are rhetorical pros and cons to the idea of hunting with honor. It is almost an old-fashioned notion. Advantages include the positive connotations with fair chase; the respect for game animals and for the sport of hunting; and the positive idea of “honorable behavior” or hunting honorably when no one is looking.

Negative associations, on the other hand, may include the elitist or aristocratic connotations of the term “honor,” as in “Your honor” and deference to high rank.

Although some of the Orion members I have spoken with are sensitive to the negative connotations of “honor,” they argue that allowing some interpretation of what it means to hunt with honor isn't necessarily a bad thing. They point out that to some people, honor will mean respecting the animal, whereas to others it may mean respecting other hunters and landowners, and hunters being true to their own value system.

To me, honor as an ethical term carries more positive than negative associations. When we speak of an honorable person, we think approvingly of an honest and trustworthy individual who is able to follow his/her convictions and act with integrity. In this way, honor and integrity function as moral virtues. “He is a man of honor and therefore will keep his word.”

In one of the few sustained book-length works on the topic, Honor, anthropologist Frank Henderson Stewart argues that honor is best understood as a right to respect. This interpretation, too, has certain advantages to hunters. Ethical hunters command the respect of their fellow hunters. At the same time ethical hunters ask that society extend the same respect to them and to ethical hunting.

I believe it makes sense to examine the ideals of respect and honor in the traditional terms of sportsmanship. Sportsmen do not take advantage of the animal—rather they give it. Fair chase is all about giving every possible advantage to the animal within the limits of the hunter’s own individual abilities and skill level. Novice hunters begin on a more level playing field than experts. Experts accordingly limit their advantage over the game with ever more restrictive techniques, including stricter rules, less efficient technologies and voluntary restraint. Advanced deer hunters may forego the gun for a bow, impose antler restrictions, and hunt only by stalking their prey on the ground rather than using a tree stand. Each of these voluntary, self-imposed choices confer advantage to the animal while removing advantages from the hunter.

These voluntary choices are born of respect for the game animal, but they are also in an important sense born out of respect for the hunt itself. Hunting does not take place in a cultural vacuum, but instead occurs within an ongoing historical tradition that identifies the moral bounds of honorable and ethical hunting.

Fair chase is sportsmanship, therefore, in an important sense. Honorable fair chase hunting is hunting with honor, but fair chase hunting is also deserving of honor—that is, the honorable fair chase hunter is someone who has earned the right to society’s respect.

I believe this is the image of hunting that Orion - The Hunter’s Institute wants to communicate and promote. We should embrace the fact that ethical hunters deserve respect.

We also should acknowledge ethical hunters deserve a kind of “deference to high rank.” After all, the ethical hunter who holds to a high standard of fair chase is truly elite, in the best sense of the word.

Ethical hunters are worthy of our respect and deference. In the same way we defer to skill and knowledge in other contexts—dentists and doctors come to mind—we should hold up the example of good hunters as models to follow. We can and should defer to the experience of skilled hunters, and we should hold their hunting knowledge in the high esteem it deserves.

But to be absolutely clear: elite hunting is not simply about having superior knowledge or the most refined technique. Most importantly, the term elite refers to moral character. Derek the grebe shooter was hardly elite in terms of knowledge or technique—after all, he sluiced a grebe on the water. But he stands above other hunters in his ethics and character. He made a mistake, admitted his error, and accepted the consequences of his actions. Derek, too, is an elite hunter—an ethically elite hunter who has learned from his past mistakes, and this makes him a better hunter in the long run.

Orion strives to make better hunters. No hunter is perfect, but every hunter can strive to improve. In this way, Orion the Hunter’s Institute can promote a vision of admittedly elite hunting, and of elite hunters. Why wouldn’t we? Elite hunters, that is to say, who honor the hunt by hunting with honor.

Lewis Black on hunting, fair chase, and high fence

Followup: Courting Controversy with a New View on Exotic Species by Greg Breining: Yale Environment 360

facebook Jim Tantillo 5:13pm Nov 15th Courting Controversy with a New View on Exotic Species by Greg Breining: Yale Environment 360 This post sparked a twenty comment exchange this morning.

Courting Controversy with a New View on Exotic Species by Greg Breining: Yale Environment 360

facebook Jim Tantillo 5:52am Nov 14th Courting Controversy with a New View on Exotic Species by Greg Breining: Yale Environment 360 Courting Controversy with a New View on Exotic Species by Greg Breining: Yale Environment 360 http://e360.yale.edu/content/feature.msp... A number of biologists are challenging the long-held orthodoxy that alien species are inherently bad. In their contrarian view, many introduced species have proven valuable and useful and have increased the diversity and resiliency of native ecosystems.

Does the world need another blog?

Even Bruce Springsteen and Tom Petty have done solo albums.