Sunday, July 07, 2013

Wildfire ash poses risks for some NM farmers

Recent rains have given some relief to farmers in the Middle Rio Grande Valley of north-central New Mexico, but thunderstorms also have washed wildfire ash into the upper end of the Elephant Butte Irrigation District system in southern New Mexico. The Albuquerque Journal reports flash floods from the area burned by the Silver Fire in the Gila National Forest washed ash into the Rio Grande. Water managers issued a warning to downstream water users because of the risk the ash could clog farmers' drip irrigation systems and municipal treatment plants. Farmers installed drip irrigation to conserve water during the drought. The Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District, which serves farmers from Cochiti to Socorro County, released the last of its irrigation water from storage in El Vado Reservoir at midday June 30. With that water gone, the only water in the Rio Grande downstream from Cochiti Dam is federal water to meet Endangered Species Act requirements for the Rio Grande silvery minnow and water earmarked for Pueblo irrigators, who have earlier and higher-priority water rights. The conservancy district notified farmers Tuesday that it was cutting off deliveries to non-Indian farmers after July 4. The only way that will change, according to the district's announcement to its farmers, is if enough rain falls to raise river flows to allow irrigation with natural flows. While the week of afternoon and evening storms has helped slow the river's decline, there has not yet been enough water for the district to resume deliveries to non-Indian farmers. Downstream, the Elephant Butte Irrigation District continues to release the last of its irrigation water from Elephant Butte Reservoir. That is currently expected to end Saturday, according to Phil King, water management consultant to the irrigation district. Releases of Elephant Butte water for New Mexico and Texas farmers and cities since June 1 has drained Elephant Butte Reservoir to its lowest levels since the summer of 1972, according to Bureau of Reclamation records. The nearly depleted reservoir stands at 3 percent of its total capacity. The last time the reservoir was full was in 1995...more

Cowgirl Sass & Savvy


Cowboy Christmas, also known as the rodeo season

by Julie Carter

By the time you read this, America will have just celebrated her 237th birthday. Rodeo cowboys across the country began a week or more ago observing the holiday in their own traditional way called "Cowboy Christmas."

The summer holiday rodeo season is one of the circuit's richest weeks of the year with at least 35 professional rodeos and several hundred open rodeos held annually to celebrate America's independence.
Cowboys and cowgirls will try to get to as many rodeos as they can in a weeklong period by driving and flying (and sometimes not in a plane) from one rodeo to the next, competing day and night for more prize money than is offered any other time of year.

The name rodeo comes from the Spanish word "rodear" which means to encircle or to surround. To the Spanish, when they arrived in Mexico in the mid-sixteenth century, a rodeo was a cattle roundup. The competition of showing off their skills in breaking broncs and roping wild cattle eventually evolved into organized contests in the mid-eighteen hundreds.

Annually millions of people from all walks of life go to watch a rodeo. The sport ranks in spectatorship ahead of pro-golf and tennis. Even more watch televised rodeo events and the cowboys that "yusta ride'em" will record them and watch over and over.

In 1997, Texas named rodeo as their official  sport as they would like to take credit for the first ever rodeo celebration. In the early 1880s in the West Texas town of Pecos, cowboys would get off work and come into town on the Fourth of July. They would thunder down Main Street roping steers and then corral them in the courthouse square. By some historical accounts, this was the birth of rodeo in the United States.
Deertrail, Colorado also lays claim to the first rodeo as does Prescott, Arizona. But it was a group of Texans that started one of those earliest rodeos in Cheyenne, Wyoming in 1872. 

As the story goes, some Texas cowboys had arrived in Cheyenne and decided to celebrate the Fourth of July with an exhibition of their steer riding prowess.

The event was successful enough that the next year to celebrate Independence Day, some local cowboys decided to do a little bronc busting down the middle of one of Cheyenne's main streets. This was the forerunner of the current weeklong Cheyenne Frontier Days. 

You'll spot these die-hard competitors around the country as they pull in to buy fuel -- both for their truck and for themselves when they grab a "for the road- heartburn burrito." 

By the end of the long drive, they wear a haggard and weary look. But at each rodeo, they'll perk up when the National Anthem is played signifying to the bareback riders that their event is about to begin.

Rodeo is the perfect blend of tradition, competition and showmanship. It is a piece of Western heritage boxed up and placed in an arena on display year after year, bringing new generations to the sport on both the spectator and the competitor ends. 

When the rodeo cowboy lays his hat on his heart in honor of the American flag, let us tip our hats to them for being an enduring part of American history.

Ruidoso News columnist Julie Carter may be reached for comment at jcarternm@gmail.com.


Independence Day: Cornudas Mountain Music



Framers to ordinary Americans
Cornudas Mountain Music
Independence Day
By Stephen L. Wilmeth



            John Adams suggested Americans regale the celebration of this nation’s independence with great merriment. Normally a fairly high brow fellow, our second president pulled all the stuffy stops out by urging “pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illumination from one end of the continent to the other from this time forward.”
            The Father of our country, George Washington, did one better … he ordered double rum rations for his artillerymen. 
            North of the border, too
            If somebody asked me where the most spectacular Fourth of July fireworks celebration occurred in my life, without question it was the one in Stampede Stadium in Calgary, Alberta in an evening extravaganza production of the Stampede. The amount of powder expended that night would have made George’s artillerymen envious.  
            The only thing more spectacular would have been to watch the reactions of the broncs and the bulls that weathered the spectacle directly under where the aerial display was detonated. From our vantage point from the box seats, the pens were obscured behind the bucking chutes and Stampede race track. From the decibels and the immensity of the explosions, though, it had to have been a real rodeo unto itself.
            At the time, we thought it was part of the show to welcome Westerners to a celebration of our life’s common ties. What we learned was it was a continuing celebration of Canada’s own Independence Day held, officially, each July 1.
            Never, though, have I felt more part of our way of life.
            Diesel pickups, gooseneck trailers, good horses, and people who can speak articulately to the same issues that affect our existence were there in abundance. It was more western than most of our West.
Over the years, that theme has only grown more pronounced. We are outnumbered, but our existence may be the greatest indicator of the health of our Union.
            Life we live
            Farming and ranching are not professions. They are life styles of the most improvident dedication. There is something profoundly humbling to absorb debt, market volatility, the esoterics of our pursuits, production constraints, extreme barriers of entry, and the immensity of the stewardship of life, and … lives.
            Then, there are the external threats to our existence.
            Few of our number can operate with the degree of freedom that Adams, in particular, would have envisioned for future generation Americans. In today’s emails alone, there were 23 new federal agency regulation notices of intent and or NGO suits filed against our industry components.
            Tomorrow, there will be more.
            We can’t operate in equilibrium. We find ourselves spending as much time or more defending our lives and investments than we do planning for our future. That is a recipe for disaster and, yet, that is what we face.
            Cornudas Mountain music
In another corner of the American West, a gathering celebrating our way of life takes place every Fourth of July.
It is there, on New Mexico’s Otero Mesa, a group of Westerners gather. They come mostly in ranch broke four wheel drive pickups. They drink coffee, share discussions, offer grace, and break bread together. The mountain … Cornudas Mountain has called them back.
The women seek new babies, and offer counsel to young mothers and reassurance to themselves. The men have largely traded felt hats that have withstood the spring winds for more comfortable summer straws.
Bobby and Pat Jones are the hosts and the ranching stewards of the mountain and part of the mesa that spreads out beyond. Bobby will have wood split and stacked. He will tend the fire, the coffee, and cook the meat for the meal and gathering.
Following the meal, most of the group will make its way into the cave and find a place to sit and wait patiently in the coolness. On the walls are preserved reminders of times when buffalo soldiers chased Indians, travelers stopped on dusty overland stage journeys, and families endured the dangers and the promise of a new land.
Those reminders are preserved solely through the protection provided by the ranching stewards hosting the gathering.
The musicians will arrange their chairs. They will sit in a circle facing each other. They will talk and tune their instruments. Their attention will be concentrated inward within that circle. Their music will highlight the day’s celebration.  
The musicians are all familiar. They bring their fiddles, their guitars, and other stringed instruments. In addition to Bobby Jones there will be Pete Lewis or other members of the expansive Lewis clan. Pop Snow was a featured artist for years. Joe Delk is sometimes there with his fiddle. Vaughn Teel and his guitar often sit facing westward in the circle. Brian and Amy Muise have become regulars, and even the likes of Junior Dougherty and Frank DuBois have accompanied the tradition of the mesa.
There is no program agenda.
The process will start by one of the musicians. He, or now she, will pick up a tune and set off on a personal rendition. The others will join in variously until the circle is engaged.
The acoustics in the cave are wonderful.
The audience will tap their toes and sway to the tunes largely returned from another time. The mix might include the ‘Kentucky’ or ‘Westphalia Waltz’, ‘Draggin’ the Bow’, ‘Faded Love’, ‘San Antonio Rose’, ‘Marie’, ‘Milk Cow Blues’, or ‘The Old Rugged Cross’. There will be more spiritual favorites mixed with two steps and traditional ballads.
After a song, the musicians will comment on their mistakes or somebody’s good licks. They will pause, talk and laugh, and get set for the next tune. The protocol is to work from chair to chair with each successive performer expected to make the selection and be featured for a solo and then accompanied performance. They become noticeably unaware of the audience around them.  
The audience, though, is as interesting as the musicians. The matriarchs are honored features. From the families of Jones, Bennett, Bond, Cookson, Davis, Lee, Lewis, Schafer, and others, they will come. Collectively, they are always there to fill the table with food and the gathering with genuine western feminine charm.
Their men are there with them. Cowmen and cowboys they are. They are the men that former Arizona Congresswoman, Gabrielle Giffords, referred to as ‘those mysterious men with the rough hands’. Their families started coming to the mesa as early as the mid 1860’s. Together, they are land stewards of significance. They are immensely important to the customs and the culture of the mesa.
The entire gathering is an event of major heritage importance, and … it is in jeopardy.
Secular affront to original intent
The mesa is high on the environmental wish list. Saving the ‘pristine nature’ of the most southern grama grasslands in New Mexico has long been a priority of the environmental left. Notwithstanding the presence of the entrenched socioeconomic ties with the land, the ranching heritage on the mesa is ignored in the process.
Evidence of that is clearly set forth in the recent BLM draft of the region’s resource management plan. In the plan’s ‘Impacts on Socioeconomic Conditions’, the mesa’s ranching heritage is mentioned only superficially and that reference is most troubling.
In one of the alternatives for livestock grazing is the plan to force the termination of grazing “after voluntary relinquishment of all or part of a grazing preference”, or, in other words, force those ranchers out with federal buyouts. The preferred alternative, the continuation of the social value of ranching, is conditionally set forth with the unqualified conclusion that such an alternative “may be slightly less potential for economic gains from livestock ranching”.
That conclusion is utter nonsense.
Unless changed through the process of public comments, this destructive principle will stand in this document and others like it that set the course for at least a decade of federal land management. That conclusion was reached without any input from a qualified Ag or impartial socio-economic evaluation.
Implicit throughout the plan is the secular, environmental agenda. The cleansing of rural communities from the land is in process. Otero Mesa is on a front burner.
John Adams would not comprehend many things today not the least of which would be to cleanse human bonds of stewardship from American lands. We can clearly discern his position time and again. It is revealed in his desire to promote the celebration of Independence Day. In his continuing words urging Americans to celebrate the day, he wrote, “It (Independence Day) ought to be commemorated as the day of deliverance, by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty!”
The Cornudas Mountain July 4 musical gathering is exactly that. Those people and that event represent the heart and soul of the American experiment, and … their continued presence on that land is critically important to every American.


Stephen L. Wilmeth is a rancher from southern New Mexico. “The Cornudas Mountain Independence Day gathering has national and historical implications.”

Many a good time was had at Cornudas Mountain. Good folks, good food and good music. 


Trail Dust: Old New Mexico Spanish words fading away

by Marc Simmons


I’ve long considered the variant of the Spanish language spoken in New Mexico to be one of our country’s great cultural treasures. The local speech is rich in pronunciations and vocabulary that are unique, having evolved in place over more than 400 years.

I find especially fascinating those regional words whose meanings are closely connected to our history. Collecting and studying such New Mexicanisms gives us small glimpses into a way of life now largely gone.

Take the old word coi, borrowed from the Tewa language north of Santa Fe. In the 18th century, it was part of everyday speech here. Coi was the name Spanish-speakers used for the first story, or floor, of multilevel Indian pueblos.

In the early days, remember, the first floor had no windows or doors. Outside ladders gave access to the roof and to the stair-stepped stories above. This arrangement allowed for the drawing up of ladders in case of attack, whereupon the pueblo became an effective fort.

The coi could be entered only through a trap door in the roof, as kivas are today. Its dark chamber was not suitable for daily living, so it served the residents as a storage area, particularly as a granary.
By 1870 or so, the pueblos were no longer subject to attack, so doors and windows were opened in their first floors, and the interior space converted to apartments, like those above. The word coi dropped from use and within a generation was forgotten.

Another term, having a somewhat similar history, was genízaro, referring to Indians, captured or ransomed, who were assimilated into New Mexican society. The royal government allowed them to establish their own communities on the frontier. Belen, Abiquiú and San Miguel began as genízaro towns.

Hispanos looked down upon them as being crude and rustic bumpkins. A mother might admonish her naughty child: “Hijito. No seas genízaro,” (that is, “Son. Don’t act like a genízaro.”) The meaning of that archaic expression would not be understood at present.

One of the most New Mexican of all words is cíbola, preserved as a place name in Cíbola National Forest and Cíbola County. Coronado in 1540 knew the cluster of Zuni pueblos as the Province of Cíbola. Strangely, cíbola (or cíbolo) also became the regional term for buffalo.

The Spanish language did not have a word for that New World animal, so when it was encountered on the northern frontier, pioneer folk called it simply a “vaca de Cíbola,” or a Cíbola Province cow. By the 17th century, cíbola alone had come to mean buffalo, and buffalo hunters were known as ciboleros.

The reddish-brown American elk also presented a problem. Spanish lacked a name for this creature, too. So here in New Mexico, it was called an alazán venado, signifying a “sorrel deer.”

Elk were considered so exotic that the king ordered New Mexicans in the 1780s to capture several and ship them to Spain. They finally arrived and were placed on display at the Retiro Park in downtown Madrid.




Megadrought in U.S. Southwest: A Bad Omen for Forests Globally


by Caroline Fraser

As brutal fires torch tinder-dry dense forests and neighboring homes in the American West, researchers are examining the relationships between drought, wildfire, and a warming climate, predicting mass forest die-offs and prolonged megadrought for the Southwest. These forces are accelerating, they say, and already transforming the landscape. Unchecked, they may permanently destroy forests in the southwestern U.S. and in some other regions around the world.

Across the West, “megafires” have become the norm. With climbing temperatures, after a century of fire suppression, the total area burned has tripled since the 1970s, and the average annual number of fires over 10,000 acres is seven times what it was then. Fighting and suppressing fires costs more than $3 billion a year, not to mention lives lost. So understanding what, if anything, can be done to reduce intense forest fires has assumed an urgent priority.

Currently suffering the worst drought in the U.S., New Mexico has emerged as a “natural experiment” in megadrought, a laboratory for understanding drought’s deep history in the region — and what might lay in store in an era of rapid, human-caused warming...

Armed with 13,147 such site-specific cross-sectioned specimens, gathered from more than 300 sites, Williams and his co-authors devised a new “forest drought-stress index,” integrating tree-ring measurements with climatalogical and historical records for a paper published earlier this year in Nature Climate Change. Winter precipitation has long been thought important to tree growth, but another key variable leapt from this fresh examination of the data, related to a warmer, dryer climate: the average vapor pressure deficit during summer and fall, which is driven by temperature. As air grows warmer, its capacity to hold water vapor increases exponentially, which speeds evaporation and sucks more moisture out of trees’ leaves or needles, as well as the soil itself.

If the vapor pressure deficit sucks out enough moisture, it kills trees, and there’s been a lot of that going on. Looking back in time through the tree rings, Williams determined that the current Southwest drought, beginning in 2000, is the fifth most severe since AD 1000, set against similarly devastating megadroughts that have occurred regularly in the region. One struck during the latter 1200s (probably driving people from the region) and another in 1572-1587, a drought that stretched across the continent to Virginia and the Carolinas. Few conifers abundant in the Southwest — including piñon, ponderosa pine, and Douglas fir — survived that latter event, despite lifespans approaching 800 years; those species have since regrown.

Making matters worse in the near-term, forests hit by so-called “stand-destroying” wildfires may not recover. During a recent phone interview, Craig Allen, a co-author of the Nature paper and a USGS research ecologist at the Jemez Mountain Field Station near Los Alamos, explains that the catastrophically hot fires seen recently in New Mexico, while a natural result of a century of fire suppression and dense growth during wet periods, create conditions for permanent forest loss through “type conversion.” Basically, high severity fires that burn over a wide area subvert the ability of southwestern conifers to reproduce, a process requiring nearby mother trees to drop their seeds. Ponderosa pines, for example, can’t cast their seed much more than 100 yards, virtually ensuring that large forest gaps will be replaced by shrub and grasslands, with unfortunate consequences for a range of forest services, particularly those provided by delicate watersheds. “These anomalously big patches where every tree is killed create a high risk that they won’t come back as forests,” Allen says.

The devastation wrought by extreme wildfire is on vivid display these days in New Mexico. During my drive in the Jemez Mountains with Park Williams, with near-record temperatures in the nineties, he directs me onto a forest road traversing Cochiti Mesa, a spine of land at the heart of the 2011 Las Conchas wildfire, an event that has become legendary among students and fighters of fire.

On June 26, 2011, an aspen tree blown onto a power line sparked fire so hot, travelling so fast, that it consumed 44,000 acres during its first 13 hours, nearly an acre per second. By the time it was fully contained in August, it had burned more than 156,000 acres. Las Conchas was the largest fire in New Mexico history, a record that stood for a mere year, when a bigger, if less destructive fire, burned to the south.

Even two years later, the view from the mesa is jaw-dropping, a forest Golgotha. In a gap 40,000 acres wide, for miles in every direction, every tree is dead. As the wind whips grit into our eyes, Williams tells me that trees in some areas burned so hot that the trunks vanished, leaving ghostly holes. Others flash-burned from heat alone, their crisp, dead needles still intact. Photographs taken afterwards show a moonscape of ash. Few living things have returned — shrubs, clumps of grass, a few splashes of Indian paintbrush.

But trees, no. Ponderosa pine may not come back, without help. The intense heat sterilized soil and destroyed virtually all biomass across wide areas, creating huge gaps that trees will not be able to reseed.






Rancher attacked by grizzly released from Denver hospital

POWELL, Wyo. — A Park County rancher seriously injured in a grizzly bear attack believes the sow was simply trying to protect her cubs and could have killed him if she had wanted. The Powell Tribune reported Friday that Nic Patrick, 64, has been released from University of Colorado Hospital, where doctors have been rebuilding his face, but he still requires up to five more surgeries. In his first interview since the attack, Patrick said the incident could have been much worse. He said the 400-pound bear came at him twice but not to kill him. "Either time, she could have taken me out," he said. Patrick was irrigating crops at his Wyoming ranch early June 20 when the bear went after his dog, then attacked him...more

In Secret, Court Vastly Broadens Powers of N.S.A.

In more than a dozen classified rulings, the nation’s surveillance court has created a secret body of law giving the National Security Agency the power to amass vast collections of data on Americans while pursuing not only terrorism suspects, but also people possibly involved in nuclear proliferation, espionage and cyberattacks, officials say. The rulings, some nearly 100 pages long, reveal that the court has taken on a much more expansive role by regularly assessing broad constitutional questions and establishing important judicial precedents, with almost no public scrutiny, according to current and former officials familiar with the court’s classified decisions. “We’ve seen a growing body of law from the court,” a former intelligence official said. “What you have is a common law that develops where the court is issuing orders involving particular types of surveillance, particular types of targets.” In one of the court’s most important decisions, the judges have expanded the use in terrorism cases of a legal principle known as the “special needs” doctrine and carved out an exception to the Fourth Amendment’s requirement of a warrant for searches and seizures, the officials said. That legal interpretation is significant, several outside legal experts said, because it uses a relatively narrow area of the law — used to justify airport screenings, for instance, or drunken-driving checkpoints — and applies it much more broadly, in secret, to the wholesale collection of communications in pursuit of terrorism suspects. “It seems like a legal stretch,” William C. Banks, a national security law expert at Syracuse University, said in response to a description of the decision. “It’s another way of tilting the scales toward the government in its access to all this data.”...more

What The NSA Knows About You From Your Phone Usage Alone

The National Security Agency’s collection of data regarding telephone conversations is a far greater threat to privacy than many of us believe. A lawsuit filed by a German politician proves just how much you can learn about a person’s life by monitoring and tracking their phone usage. Malte Spitz, a member of Germany’s Green Party, sued his cellphone company, T-Mobile, in 2010 in an attempt to determine how much the carrier knew about him. Malte won the suit and received a CD that showed how easy it is to track a person via their phone. When he won his lawsuit, Spitz received a CD containing 35,830 records, each documenting his movements. Spitz learned that T-Mobile could pinpoint exactly where he was at a given time. By combining GPS with the data, Spitz could track his own movements around Germany. T-Mobile knew exactly how many telephone calls Spitz received in a day, how many calls he made, how many Twitter messages he sent out, and how many he received. By examining the data, T-Mobile could figure out that Spitz was attending a political demonstration on Sept. 5, 2009. Spitz shared the data with the German magazine ZEIT, which had an easy time creating a simple interative graphic that tracked Spitz’s movements based on the metadata. Those with access to such data could determine what church you go to, what people you visit, and where you shop. It could be used to make criminal cases or to orchestrate surveillance of a person. Spitz’s lawsuit proves that telecom providers gather a vast amount of metadata about their customers. This is the kind of data that Edward Snowden revealed the NSA collects about Americans and shares with the FBI and other law enforcement agencies...more

The NSA's mass and indiscriminate spying on Brazilians

As the headline suggests, the crux of the main article details how the NSA has, for years, systematically tapped into the Brazilian telecommunication network and indiscriminately intercepted, collected and stored the email and telephone records of millions of Brazilians. The story follows an article in Der Spiegel last week, written by Laura Poitras and reporters from that paper, detailing the NSA's mass and indiscriminate collection of the electronic communications of millions of Germans. There are many more populations of non-adversarial countries which have been subjected to the same type of mass surveillance net by the NSA: indeed, the list of those which haven't been are shorter than those which have. The claim that any other nation is engaging in anything remotely approaching indiscriminate worldwide surveillance of this sort is baseless. As those two articles detail, all of this bulk, indiscriminate surveillance aimed at populations of friendly foreign nations is part of the NSA's "FAIRVIEW" program. Under that program, the NSA partners with a large US telecommunications company, the identity of which is currently unknown, and that US company then partners with telecoms in the foreign countries. Those partnerships allow the US company access to those countries' telecommunications systems, and that access is then exploited to direct traffic to the NSA's repositories. Both articles are based on top s; O Globo published several of them...more

Report: Two more killings traced to missing Fast & Furious guns

Another weapon lost in the Obama administration's failed Fast and Furious gun-tracking operation has purportedly been traced to two more killings, including the fatal shooting of a police chief in Mexico.
The officer was killed Jan. 29 in the city of Hostotipaquillo when gunmen intercepted his patrol car and opened fire, according to Justice Department records obtained by The Los Angeles Times. The chief’s bodyguard was also killed and a second bodyguard and the chief’s wife were wounded. Operation Fast and Furious was run out of an Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives field office in Arizona. The plan was to sell guns to buyers and trace them in the black market as the crossed the U.S.-Mexico border, with the expectation they would lead federal officials to drug cartel leaders. However, hundreds of guns were lost in the operation. And roughly 210 people have either been killed or wounded by them, according to Mexican officials. In addition, U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry was fatally shot.The semi-automatic rifle that killed the police chief in central Mexico has been traced to the Lone Wolf Trading Company, a gun store in Glendale, Ariz. The gun was purchased in February 2010 by 26-year-old Jacob A. Montelongo, of Phoenix, who purportedly bought more than 100 guns connected to Fast and Furious. He is now serving 41 months in prison on charges including making false statements and smuggling goods from the United States. It is unclear how the gun got deep into Mexico...more

Song Of The Day #1047

Hank Snow - Jesus Wept 1952 Available on Hank Snow - The Singing Ranger, Vol.2 Bear Family Records


http://youtu.be/l89QqFTKXfo

Friday, July 05, 2013

U.S. Postal Service Logging All Mail for Law Enforcement

Leslie James Pickering noticed something odd in his mail last September: a handwritten card, apparently delivered by mistake, with instructions for postal workers to pay special attention to the letters and packages sent to his home. “Show all mail to supv” — supervisor — “for copying prior to going out on the street,” read the card. It included Mr. Pickering’s name, address and the type of mail that needed to be monitored. The word “confidential” was highlighted in green. “It was a bit of a shock to see it,” said Mr. Pickering, who with his wife owns a small bookstore in Buffalo. More than a decade ago, he was a spokesman for the Earth Liberation Front, a radical environmental group labeled eco-terrorists by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Postal officials subsequently confirmed they were indeed tracking Mr. Pickering’s mail but told him nothing else. As the world focuses on the high-tech spying of the National Security Agency, the misplaced card offers a rare glimpse inside the seemingly low-tech but prevalent snooping of the United States Postal Service. Mr. Pickering was targeted by a longtime surveillance system called mail covers, a forerunner of a vastly more expansive effort, the Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program, in which Postal Service computers photograph the exterior of every piece of paper mail that is processed in the United States — about 160 billion pieces last year. It is not known how long the government saves the images. Together, the two programs show that postal mail is subject to the same kind of scrutiny that the National Security Agency has given to telephone calls and e-mail. The mail covers program, used to monitor Mr. Pickering, is more than a century old but is still considered a powerful tool. At the request of law enforcement officials, postal workers record information from the outside of letters and parcels before they are delivered. (Opening the mail would require a warrant.) The information is sent to the law enforcement agency that asked for it. Tens of thousands of pieces of mail each year undergo this scrutiny. “In the past, mail covers were used when you had a reason to suspect someone of a crime,” said Mark D. Rasch, who started a computer crimes unit in the fraud section of the criminal division of the Justice Department and worked on several fraud cases using mail covers. “Now it seems to be, ‘Let’s record everyone’s mail so in the future we might go back and see who you were communicating with.’ Essentially you’ve added mail covers on millions of Americans.” Bruce Schneier, a computer security expert and an author, said whether it was a postal worker taking down information or a computer taking images, the program was still an invasion of privacy. “Basically they are doing the same thing as the other programs, collecting the information on the outside of your mail, the metadata, if you will, of names, addresses, return addresses and postmark locations, which gives the government a pretty good map of your contacts, even if they aren’t reading the contents,” he said...more

Arctic expedition to highlight global warming brings guns to fight off polar bears

In an effort to highlight the effects of global warming, an Irish-Canadian team plans to cross the arctic’s Northwest Passage in a rowboat while armed with rubber bullets to ward off polar bears. The team will also carry shotguns to kill the animals if necessary. “They are the only animal out there that will actively hunt down a human being,” said seasoned adventurer Kevin Vallely, who is part of the rowing expedition which will take about 80 days and traverse the distance between Inuvik in Canada’s Northwest Territories and Pond Inlet, Nunavut. Despite being the poster child for species affected by global warming, the polar bear is the king of the arctic and has no natural predator. The bears can range in weight from 900 pounds to 1,600 pounds and can reach sizes of up to 8 feet in length...more

Whatever it takes to "highlight the effects" of global warming.  Even if we have to take a shotgun and blow the head off a polar bear, why surely its worth it.

Of course the polar bear is listed as "threatened" supposedly as a result of global warming.  Thank you George W. Bush. 

Polar bears were added to the Endangered Species List because of global warming and were classified as “threatened” in May 2008. However, today there are as many as 25,000 polar bears worldwide, far more than there were four decades ago. “There are far more polar bears alive today than there were 40 years ago,” author Zac Unger told NPR in an interview about his new book, “Never Look a Polar Bear in The Eye.” “There are about 25,000 polar bears alive today worldwide. In 1973, there was a global hunting ban. So once hunting was dramatically reduced, the population exploded.”

Nixon signed the Endangered Species Act in 1973 and 35 years later Bush Jr. listed the Polar Bear, even though the population "exploded" after the hunting ban.  

And here we are 40 years later and the critters do need protection...from the enviros.  





Homeland Security Conducts “Top Secret” July 4 Drill

The Department of Homeland Security is conducting a “top secret” drill codenamed ‘Operation Independence’ across the United States today, during which officers in riot gear as well as undercover agents will patrol transport hubs. According to a report by KTTV, the exercise is a “full scale terrorism drill”  taking place nationwide. In Los Angeles, the drill involves the LA County Sheriff’s Department, Homeland Security and TSA agents, as well as plain clothed officers who will be, “working undercover, looking like any other passenger, they scour faces, briefcases and backpacks, looking for anything out of the ordinary.” Officials claim the drills are to make the public feel “safe” in light of claims that the alleged Boston Bombers had planned a July 4 terror attack in New York. According to Nicole Nishida of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, Americans will celebrate their “independence” from tyranny by submitting to random bag searches. Although the drill is “high visibility” in one sense – cops dressed in riot gear will be involved – many details of the exercise remain “top secret and that’s the way it should be. Only they need to know what the game plan is,” reports KTTV. L.A. County’s Homeland Security Division chief Ted Sexton admitted that the DHS drill was not based on “any credible threat information.”...more

Thursday, July 04, 2013

Jefferson Weeping

by Andrew Napolitano

Do you have more personal liberty today than on the Fourth of July 2012?

When Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, he used language that has become iconic. He wrote that we are endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights, and among them are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Not only did he write those words, but the first Congress adopted them unanimously, and they are still the law of the land today. By acknowledging that our rights are inalienable, Jefferson’s words and the first federal statute recognize that our rights come from our humanity – from within us – and not from the government.

The government the Framers gave us was not one that had the power and ability to decide how much freedom each of us should have, but rather one in which we individually and then collectively decided how much power the government should have. That, of course, is also recognized in the Declaration, wherein Jefferson wrote that the government derives its powers from the consent of the governed.

To what governmental powers may the governed morally consent in a free society? We can consent to the powers necessary to protect us from force and fraud, and to the means of revenue to pay for a government to exercise those powers. But no one can consent to the diminution of anyone else’s natural rights, because, as Jefferson wrote and the Congress enacted, they are inalienable.

Just as I cannot morally consent to give the government the power to take your freedom of speech or travel or privacy, you cannot consent to give the government the power to take mine. This is the principle of the natural law: We all have areas of human behavior in which each of us is sovereign and for the exercise of which we do not need the government’s permission. Those areas are immune from government interference.


That is at least the theory of the Declaration of Independence, and that is the basis for our 237-year-old American experiment in limited government, and it is the system to which everyone who works for the government today pledges fidelity. 

Regrettably, today we have the opposite of what the Framers gave us. Today we have a government that alone decides how much wealth we can retain, how much free expression we can exercise, how much privacy we can enjoy. And since the Fourth of July 2012, freedom has been diminished.

In the past year, all branches of the federal government have combined to diminish personal freedoms, in obvious and in subtle ways. In the case of privacy, we now know that the federal government has the ability to read all of our texts and emails and listen to all of our telephone calls – mobile and landline – and can do so without complying with the Constitution’s requirements for a search warrant. We now know that President Obama authorized this, federal judges signed off on this, and select members of Congress knew of this, but all were sworn to secrecy, and so none could discuss it. And we only learned of this because a young former spy risked his life, liberty and property to reveal it.

In the past year, Obama admitted that he ordered the CIA in Virginia to use a drone to kill two Americans in Yemen, one of whom was a 16-year-old boy. He did so because the boy’s father, who was with him at the time of the murders, was encouraging militants to wage war against the U.S. 

He wasn’t waging war, according to the president; he was encouraging it. 


Simultaneously with this, the president claimed he can use a drone to kill whomever he wants, so long as the person is posing an active threat to the U.S., is difficult to arrest and fits within guidelines that the president himself has secretly written to govern himself.

In the past year, the Supreme Court has ruled that if you are in police custody and fail to assert your right to remain silent, the police at the time of trial can ask the jury to infer that you are guilty. This may seem like a technical ruling about who can say what to whom in a courtroom, but it is in truth a radical break from the past. 

Everyone knows that we all have the natural and constitutionally guaranteed right to silence. And anyone in the legal community knows that judges for generations have told jurors that they may construe nothing with respect to guilt or innocence from the exercise of that right. No longer. Today, you remain silent at your peril.

In the past year, the same Supreme Court has ruled that not only can you be punished for silence, but you can literally be forced to open your mouth. The court held that upon arrest – not conviction, but arrest – the police can force you to open your mouth so they can swab the inside of it and gather DNA material from you. 

Put aside the legal truism that an arrest is evidence of nothing and can and does come about for flimsy reasons; DNA is the gateway to personal data about us all. Its involuntary extraction has been insulated by the Fourth Amendment’s requirements of relevance and probable cause of crime. No longer. Today, if you cross the street outside of a crosswalk, get ready to open your mouth for the police.

The litany of the loss of freedom is sad and unconstitutional and irreversible. The government does whatever it can to retain its power, and it continues so long as it can get away with it. It can listen to your phone calls, read your emails, seize your DNA and challenge your silence, all in violation of the Constitution. Bitterly and ironically, the government Jefferson wrought is proving the accuracy of Jefferson’s prediction that in the long march of history, government grows and liberty shrinks. Somewhere Jefferson is weeping.

Happy Fourth of July 2013.

Originally posted here





Wednesday, July 03, 2013

Oregon bans some insecticides following bee deaths

Bees and other insects can breathe a little easier in Oregon — for now. The state has responded to the recent bumbleocalypse in a Target parking lot by temporarily banning use of the type of pesticide responsible for the high-profile pollinator die-off. For the next six months, it will be illegal to spray Safari or other pesticides [PDF] containing dinotefuran neonicotinoids in the state. Oregon’s ban comes after more than 50,000 bumblebees and other pollinators were killed when Safari was sprayed over blooming linden trees to control aphids in a Wilsonville, Ore., parking lot. A similar incident in Hillsboro, Ore., was also cited by the state’s agriculture department as a reason for the ban...more

Tuesday, July 02, 2013

K-State Showcases Drones Designed To Aid Farmers

It's called precision agriculture- using using unmanned aerial systems to improve the care of crops and livestock- and the emerging technology has farmers lining up to buy it, according to industry leaders. On Tuesday, Kansas State University Salina hosted a flight demonstration of several different unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) at the Great Plains Joint Training Center in Lindsborg. K-State is one of two four-year institutions in the country involved in the development of the unmanned aircrafts. "It’s a way for us to showcase an often misunderstood technology for a purpose that really could touch everyone on the planet and that’s agriculture. These small devices have the ability to increase agriculture productivity greatly in some cases," said Dr. Kurt Barnhart, a professor, head of the department of aviation, and executive director of the Applied Aviation Research Center at Kansas State University. The drones, ranging in price from around $5,000 to upwards of $100,000, take video and color infrared imagery that can detect subtle differences in crops that can't be seen with the naked eye. They're designed to help farmers with their crop yields- detecting infect infestations and diseases in crops and processing images and data so that farmers can make the best decisions when it comes to what they're producing. The agriculture sector is expected to be the largest market for UAS technology, Toscano said, and they can save farmers the significant cost of hiring or operating manned aircraft. Right now, farmers can use UAS for personal use over their individual fields and Toscano says in the near future, farmers will be able to hire companies to come out and survey their crops. It’s predicted that in the first year that unmanned aircrafts are introduced into the national airspace, it will create 770 new jobs at K-State and $750 million in economic impact. On a global standpoint, in the first three years the aircrafts are allowed to fly in the national airspace, they will generate $13.6 billion in economic impact and create around 70,000 jobs, officials said...more

Irrigation backers rally in Klamath Falls; more than 200 vehicles in downtown drive - video

John Briggs, who ranches north of Chiloquin, stood with hundreds of people Monday morning on the steps of the Klamath County Courthouse. Briggs has been on his ranch for 30 years. “I built it,” he said. “I put in the pumps. I put in the irrigation. I took out the stumps. I planted the grass. I built the corrals. I built the barn. I built everything. And I created my piece of the American dream. I have fed, in 30 years, thousands of people with the beef that I raised.” Like many of the ranchers standing beside Briggs, he has had his water shut off. His was stopped Thursday. “This is my piece of the American dream,” he said. “I am 63 years old. Every single president of the United States has talked about the American dream. And mine was just taken away from me.” Briggs and ranchers from around the Klamath Basin rallied Monday from the Klamath County Fairgrounds to the courthouse. They drove through Klamath Falls in a long convoy of trucks, semis, hay trailers, cattle trailers, tractors and nearly every other type of farm vehicle. At the courthouse, about 500 people waited with signs, cheering the convoy. Ranchers were making a statement: If water is shut off, it will hurt the Basin. It won’t just hurt the ranchers who may have to sell their cattle early or move the animals out of the area, it will hurt all of the local economy...more

Here's a tv video report.


http://youtu.be/SP3TGkcye9g

Judge orders BLM to sell more timber (I know, I know, but the headline is accurate)

A federal judge on Wednesday ordered the U.S. Bureau of Land Management to sell more timber in Southern Oregon, and vacated a system federal scientists use to avoid harming the northern spotted owl. The ruling out of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia came in a case filed by the timber industry against the Department of Interior. Judge Richard J. Leon ruled that BLM has failed to consistently offer as much timber as called for in its 1995 resource management plans for the Medford and Roseburg districts since 2004. And he found that a computer model used by government agencies to estimate spotted owl numbers in timber sale areas was adopted without input from the public, as required by the Administrative Procedures Act. He prohibited government agencies from using the protocol until it goes through a public comment process. The ruling did not address whether timber sales that have been sold based on the invalidated owl estimation protocol, but not yet cut, were still valid. The timber industry called it a clear win, validating their longstanding position that a 1937 law known as the O&C Act sets timber production as the top priority for the BLM forests. “This is clearly a victory for timber dependent communities in southwest Oregon, and it’s a victory for the forest, that has not been managed appropriately,” said Anne Forest Burns, vice president of the American Forest Resource Council, a timber industry group involved in the lawsuit. The judge ordered the agency to fulfill its obligation to meet 80 percent of the amount set in management plans in future years. The next fiscal year begins Oct. 1. Burns estimated that BLM will have to offer double the timber it now sells on the Medford District, and increase it by 55 percent on the Roseburg District. The extra 54 million board feet would be enough to fuel more than 400 logging and mill jobs. She noted that the extra timber will come too late for one of the plaintiffs, Rough & Ready Lumber Co., which shut its O’Brien sawmill last month for lack of logs...more

I think I'll bookmark this one, we'll probably never see a headline like that again.  

Mustangs: How to manage America's wild horses? The debate rages



Just after dawn, a dozen mustangs stampede across the high desert, harassed by a white helicopter that dips and swoops like a relentless insect. Frightened stallions lead a tightknit family band, including two wild-eyed foals that struggle to keep up. Three animal activists watch through long-range camera lenses as wranglers hired by the federal Bureau of Land Management help drive the animals into a camouflaged corral. The private-contract pilot is paid $500 for each captured horse, dead or alive. After a 10-mile run, one band of horses storms past the corral, prolonging the chase. While most of the horses enter the trap, a few break for open territory, the chopper in pursuit. Few escape. The roundup corrals 180 mustangs, often employing a tactic that sets the species up to betray itself: A wrangler holds the reins of a tame horse at the mouth of the trap. As the mustangs draw close, the worker releases the animal — known as a Judas horse — which dashes into the corral, followed instinctively by the others. The decades-long debate over how to manage America’s wild horses has descended into an often-rancorous feud between animal advocates and state and federal authorities. BLM officials say the mustang population is out of control. Activists insist the agency has scapegoated an animal whose poise and dignity make it an apt symbol of the West. The two sides disagree on just about everything: on how to stem the growth of mustang herds, whether domestic cattle or wild horses do more damage to range land and whether mustangs are a native or invasive species. They can’t even agree how many wild horses are left on the range. This wasn’t the scenario envisioned when the Wild Free-Roaming Horse and Burro Act of 1971 directed the BLM to maintain a “natural ecological balance” among horses, wildlife and cattle...more

BLM Using Sprinklers to Mitigate Heat Wave's Effects

In expectation of continued three-digit temperatures this weekend and to address public concerns, the Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) Palomino Valley Wild Horse and Burro Center, located outside Reno, Nev., has installed sprinklers to three of the large, outside wild horse pens and five mare/foal pens as a stop-gap measure to attempt to reduce heat levels inside the corrals. BLM staff will observe how the animals respond to the sprinklers, which could include avoidance, or chewing on and rubbing against the sprinklers, which are foreign structures to the animals. Weather conditions, as well as determining the most appropriate way to address the needs of the animals, vary across the country. What works well and is needed for a small facility in the midwest might not be necessary or work well for a large facility in Southern California or Nevada, the BLM says. Each facility uses methods compatible with local animal husbandry practices to provide the best solution for maintaining the large numbers of animals for which the BLM provides care. Nonetheless, plans are underway for the BLM to consult the scientific research community to inform future options on this issue. The Palomino Valley Center is the largest BLM preparation and adoption facility in the country with a capacity of 1,850 animals. It serves as the primary preparation center for wild horses and burros gathered from the public lands in Nevada and nearby states...more

Feds Approve Huge Wind Facility Near Lake Mead

Interior Secretary Sally Jewell has signed off on a wind power facility that would cover almost 60 square miles of public lands in Arizona near the Lake Mead National Recreation Area. The Mohave County Wind Farm, built by BP Wind Energy North America, would include up to 243 wind turbines with blades about 180 feet long. The project would occupy 35,329 acres of land under the Bureau of Land Management and 2,781 acres of Bureau of Reclamation land, and would butt up against Lake Mead NRA about 44 miles east of Las Vegas. Depending on the transmission connection eventually chosen, the project would max out at between 425 and 500 megawatts peak generating capacity. According to the Interior Department, the design of the Mohave County Wind Farm was altered significantly due to the presence of eagle nesting areas on nearby Squaw Peak, to the east of the main road leading to the popular Temple Bar Marina on Lake Mead. As a concession to the eagles the redrawn plan includes a nesting zone buffer area at least 1.2 miles wide, a distance it would take an adult eagle at least one minute and 48 seconds to traverse at a typical unhurried soaring speed of 30 miles per hour or so...more

Off-Roaders' Dream or Environmental Nightmare?

Off-highway vehicle (OHV) use on public land is the issue this week in a Salt Lake courtroom. On Tuesday, the first of six Resource Management Plans by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) will come under fire from conservation groups. It is a battle that started in 2008, when they first challenged the Richfield Resource Management Plan (RMP) for south central Utah. Attorney Steve Bloch with the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA), said his group believes the plan puts too much emphasis on off-roading and oil and gas development in areas that deserve greater protection. "What we're seeking at this hearing on Tuesday is to bring some balance back to how the public lands are managed," Bloch said. "It's our position that designating more than 4,200 miles of dirt roads and trails, in this office alone, is not a balanced decision." Supporters of keeping the Richfield RMP as it is have pointed out that it resulted from six years of input and is a compromise plan, so none of the parties involved got exactly what they wanted. The conservation groups' challenge has languished in Washington, D.C., for the past few years until being reassigned to the federal district court in Salt Lake City, where oral arguments will be heard on Tuesday...more