L.J. "Curley" McCarey 1916-2008

My Uncle Curley passed away on August 14 at 92 years of age.

As I’ve written here before, it was Curley who taught me how to bulldog and it was Curley who convinced me to go back to college. So, if it wasn’t for Curley, I would have much better knees, but also no degrees and no career.

I have many fond memories of Curley, but will share two which I believe best describe him.

The first time I qualified for the USTRC finals in Guthrie, OK, Curley decided to fly up there to be with me. I picked him up at the hotel and we headed to the Lazy E. I pulled into their stall area and went in to get my stall. They said no stalls were available, and I would have to haul my horse back to OKC and stall him at the Fairgrounds. About that time Curley walked up, heard the discussion and then asked the gentlemen if “Cocky” Leblanc still shod horses for the Lazy E. Yes, they said, and asked “do you know Cocky?” Curley told a few stories about him and Cocky, and the next thing you know I had a stall at the Lazy E.

Many years before, when I was just a youngster, I spent the summer with Curley in Lecompton, Kansas. He took me with him to a PRCA (RCA in those days) rodeo in Kansas City, Mo. On the way I remember Curley slapped his hip and said “damn, I brought the Grand Junction check.” He had sold his place in Grand Junction and had the down payment check in his billfold.

After we got to the arena, I was excited when Curley introduced me to Monty Montana. Curley then pulled out his war bag. Curley’s ankle was sore and swollen, as Mike, his roping horse had clipped him on the ankle during a practice session. I couldn’t figure out how he could rope with that injury. Out of the war bag came an old pair of high top football shoes, with regular soles – no cleats. He laced them up tight and warmed up Mike.

When his name was called, Curley made a good run, fast enough to win the day money.

After the performance, several of the younger contestants came over and said, “Hey old man, how much did the day money pay?” Curley reached in his pocket and pulled out the Grand Junction check and handed it to them. “God-a mighty” they hollered as they stared at the amount of the check. Then Curley started laughing and showed them the day money check.

That was Curley McCarey. He loved horses, he loved rodeo and he loved having a good time.

And I loved him.

Fire risk linked to global warming Global warming and past management practices are making forests in the Western United States more susceptible to fire, according to a report released Thursday. Large wildfires, like two that burned thousands of acres in Utah last year, are blamed for making climate change worse and putting unnatural stress on ecosystems, the National Wildlife Federation report said. The report, "Increased Risk of Catastrophic Wildfires: Global Warming's Wake-Up Call for the Western United States," claims global warming is increasing the risk of fires because of rising temperatures, drier conditions, more lightning from stronger storms, added dry fuel for fires and a longer fire season. Those factors have combined with decades of fire-suppression tactics that allowed unsafe fuel loads to accumulate, as well as severe bark-beetle infestations that are rapidly decimating trees and ever-expanding human settlements in and near forests, the report said. "The result is increasing vulnerability to major fires."....

Fur Real? 4 Articles On Bigfoot

‘Bigfoot’ press conference reveals possum DNA Bigfoot lived in North Georgia, and his cousins are still there. That’s what a pair of Clayton County outdoorsmen claim. But if they have definitive evidence to prove it, it wasn’t presented at a press conference here Friday where they had said they would make believers out of everyone. Dozens of mostly skeptical reporters showed up, lured by a flurry of interest in the story since pictures of the supposed discovery hit the Internet late last month. Matthew Whitton and Rick Dyer said a second round of DNA testing on what they claim is a dead 7-foot bigfoot they say they stumbled upon while hiking in June in North Georgia is still being completed. Of three samples in a preliminary DNA test, one came back inconclusive, one contained traces of human DNA and one had traces of opossum DNA - probably from something the creature ate, they said....
Bigfoot Press Conference Yields Little Evidence, Lots of Scorn It was perhaps the most highly touted press conference of the week, but it didn't reveal much in the way of evidence: Three bigfoot enthusiasts announced today that a series of genetic tests performed on samples taken from a carcass they claim is a Sasquatch came back as a mixture of human and opossum. In addition to the mixed DNA results, Tom Biscardi, Matthew Whitton and Rick Dyer showed the audience two blurry photos, one of a solitary figure in mixed hardwood forest and another of the mouth of what appeared to be the tongue and teeth of a primate. Nevertheless, fielding questions from a packed room in Palo Alto, the trio called their discovery groundbreaking and held to their claim that the animal they are currently holding in "an undisclosed location" is indeed the legendary bigfoot....
Fur Real? Pair Say They Have Bigfoot Bigfoot has been found in the Georgia woods and is being held in a cooler at an undisclosed location. So say two self-proclaimed Bigfoot trackers, Matthew Whitton and Rick Dyer, who held a news conference in Palo Alto on Friday to publicize their claim of having found the elusive Sasquatch, or at least the body of one, in the northern part of the Peach State. The exact location is being kept secret, they said, to protect other Bigfoots still wandering there. The public was excluded from the conference, but a picture of the supposed 500-plus-pound dead biped was posted online at on http://www.searchingforbigfoot.com, looking like a mangy mound of fur, entrails and the pinched face of a close cousin to "Star Wars' " Chewbacca -- all crammed into a water-filled icebox. Some Bigfoot enthusiasts were less than convinced....
Bigfoot, Humboldt County’s native son “We want everyone to know that Bigfoot is from Humboldt,” says the media and marketing spokesman from the Humboldt County Convention & Visitors Bureau. His comments come after two men held a press conference today to proclaim that they found Bigfoot in northern Georgia — and have the body on ice to prove it. Stenger points out that Bigfoot was born in Humboldt about 50 years ago when he was sighted — and named (he had previously been referred to as Sasquatch) — for the huge footprints reportedly found at Willow Creek, about an hour east of Arcata. “Within three days, it made huge international headlines,” Stenger said. From there, Bigfoot became a huge cottage industry up there: the Bigfoot Museum and Statue, the annual Bigfoot celebration, even the local Blue Lake Casino claims Bigfoot as its mascot....

Drilling Down: How Democrats got bulldozed on energy Representative John Shadegg was very proud of his Republican colleagues in the House. They had, after all, wrestled down rising gas prices. "The market is responding to the fact that we are here talking," he told reporters. And, even if he wasn't right about the technical workings of the petroleum market--which, strangely enough, responded to a decrease in consumer demand and not the posturing of conservative congressmen--he had a point: By showing up and making their case for drilling for oil, Republicans were indeed moving the needle. From the opinion polls, you could see how the GOP has persuaded the public of the wisdom of its fetish for populating the U.S. coastline with oil rigs. According to a CNN/Opinion Research Survey, nearly three-quarters of Americans like the idea of offshore drilling. And, most dishearteningly, the public apparently believes the least plausible piece of Republican spin--that such drilling, even if it won't yield oil for many years, will lower prices in the near term. Then there is the Republican domination of the energy debate in the presidential contest. Under pressure from McCain, Barack Obama felt obliged to temper his long-standing opposition to drilling. On one of his stronger issues, Obama was suddenly on the defensive. That Republicans have, against the odds, won the first round of this debate is a remarkable feat. This initial triumph owes as much to Democratic ineptitude as it does to GOP savvy. It speaks to the fact that Democrats have been unable to rhetorically defend their environmental policy as sound energy policy. If Democrats can't figure out how to make their case for alternative energy and conservation, they will have squandered an historic opportunity--and find themselves buried in a deep political hole....

Environmental groups challenge Desert Rock decision A coalition of seven environmental groups, represented by Earthjustice attorney Nick Persampieri, Thursday filed a challenge to the federal Environmental Protection Agency's July 31 decision to grant an air permit for Desert Rock. Desert Rock Power Plant is the 1,500 megawatt pulverized coal-burning plant proposed near Burnham, about 30 miles southwest of Farmington on the Navajo Nation. "We feel EPA placed the public health and the environment at risk by not doing a number of required analyses before it issued the permit," Persampieri said. The challenge to the EPA's Environmental Appeals Board in Washington, D.C., enumerates five main points it states were not addressed in advance of the permit. "This was a politically motivated decision to issue the permit in response to Sithe's suit against EPA," Persampieri said. "EPA caved in to the pressure and issued the permit without doing the analyses."....

Bones Beat Trees as Markers for Environmental Change To track atmospheric change caused by human activity, researchers have long studied a variety of materials, from tree rings to air trapped in glacial ice. A problem has been "noise"-- natural variability caused by sampling and random events that affect atmospheric chemistry. Noise can make it hard to tease out trends from the data. Joseph Bump, a PhD candidate in forest science at Michigan Tech, and his colleagues speculated that those trends would be picked up by top predators as well as by trees. And they further suspected that measurements from predators would show much less noise. "Wolves consume many prey animals—a minimum of 150–200 moose contribute to an Isle Royale wolf’s diet over the course of its lifetime—and the prey consume a whole lot of plants," Bump explains. "Just by being who they are, wolves and other top predators increase the sample size, because they do the sampling for us." The team studied moose and wolf bone samples dating back to 1958 from Isle Royale National Park, in Lake Superior, the site of the longest-running predator-prey study in the world. In addition, they looked at 30,000-year-old bones from the long-extinct dire wolf and prehistoric bison pulled from the La Brea tar pits in Los Angeles. They compared the trend found in the bone chronologies to trends already established for tree rings in North America. They found that gray and dire wolves, provide a much clearer record of environmental change than either the plants, the moose or the bison....

Rio Grande Foundation Launches New, User-friendly Legislative Tracking Tool The Rio Grande Foundation has launched a new online tool for New Mexicans wanting to better follow how legislation moves through their Legislature. This site, called “New Mexico Votes” which can be found online at www.newmexicovotes.org will be available and free to the public for the first time during the Legislature’s upcoming special session. The site will provide bill information in plain English and includes a whole host of features that those who want to track what happens in Santa Fe will find useful. The results of floor votes will be listed in near real-time and will allow users to put information in a more usable format than does the Legislature’s website. Lastly, users of the site will be able to interact with each other, commenting on legislation as it moves during the session....

NM Game Wardens Raise Concerns Over Director's Violation of Game Laws New Mexico game wardens with the state Department of Game and Fish are complaining that the man who runs the department lacks leadership skills. Colin Duff, the president of New Mexico Conservation Officers, says the group has sent a letter to the Game and Fish Commission complaining that Bruce Thompson lacks leadership skills and is a poor communicator. “The core content of it [the letter] is about his leadership ability and his communication skills,” said Duff. Another concern among some wardens is the fact that Thompson, the state’s chief game officer, shot and killed a deer illegally in Lincoln County last year. Thompson claimed that he misread his GPS device, was fined $500 and was put on 180 days of probation. Thompson has since gotten another deer tag for the upcoming fall hunt, a license that still could be revoked by the game commission in October.

Pelosi to address nation on gas prices House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is hitting back directly at President Bush and congressional Republicans on energy and gas prices. Pelosi (D-Calif.) will deliver the Democrats’ weekly radio address, which is a response to the president’s weekly address to the country. She will take aim at Republican energy policies, highlighting Bush's and Vice President Cheney’s background in the oil industry, and lay out the Democrats’ latest plan for energy independence and addressing high gasoline prices. “America faces a choice: a continuation of the Bush-Cheney-McCain approach that perpetuates the failed policies that have produced soaring prices,” Pelosi will say, according to a partial transcript of her remarks released Friday, “or a comprehensive, bipartisan strategy that develops new and traditional sources of energy.” That partial transcript does not mention whether the Democrats’ plan will include offshore drilling in the Outer Continental Shelf, which is currently banned by a moratorium....

L.J. "Curley" McCarey

My uncle Curley, aged 92, passed away this morning. I will write more about him soon.

Judge rules roadless ban violates federal laws A federal judge in Wyoming has overturned a Clinton-era ban on road construction in nearly 60 million acres of national forest, extending a long-running dispute over U.S. Forest Service rules for large sections of undeveloped land. U.S. District Judge Clarence Brimmer’s ruling Tuesday is the latest turn in a legal battle over the Clinton administration rule that limited logging and other development in roadless areas that make up nearly a third of national forest land. Brimmer issued a permanent injunction against the so-called “roadless rule,” saying the ban was enacted in violation of the National Environmental Policy Act and the Wilderness Act. “The Forest Service, in an attempt to bolster an outgoing President’s environmental legacy, rammed through an environmental agenda that itself violates the country’s well-established environmental laws,” Brimmer wrote....For additional info see Wyoming Judge Again Blocks Roadless Area Conservation Rule.

Drilling limited across a million acres in Wyoming Federal officials say natural gas companies will face limits on drilling across a million acres in Wyoming's Powder River Basin for the next several years in order to protect declining sage grouse populations. The new rules limit development to one wellpad per square mile unless companies can prove more wells won't hurt grouse, a popular game bird. Previously, the federal Bureau of Land Management had allowed eight to 16 wellpads per square mile. Scientists have said that higher density was driving sage grouse toward extermination. The rules will be in place for about four years while the BLM revises its management plan for the Powder River Basin, a region straddling the Montana-Wyoming border with rich reserves of natural gas....
Judge Dismisses Inyo County Suit to Open Roads in Death Valley A federal judge today largely threw out a suit by Inyo County to open highways through remote roadless areas of Death Valley National Park. Inyo County had hoped to take control of three routes -- little-used paths and canyon bottoms -- using a repealed Civil War-era law known as RS2477. The judge ruled that Inyo County waited too long to assert its claims to three roads within the National Park because they were included in a 1979 wilderness study by the Bureau of Land Management. The court agreed with conservation groups and the National Park Service that the county failed to file suit within the 12-year statute of limitations. The court thus dismissed the county's claims to all of one route and to the vast majority of two others....
Prairie dog plan finds little favor The U.S. Forest Service this week released its plan to control black-tailed prairie dogs - including the use of poison - within the Buffalo Gap and Fort Pierre National Grasslands in South Dakota and the Oglala National Grassland in Nebraska. But the announcement of a final environmental impact statement drew the ire of people on both sides of the issue: Wildlife conservation groups claim it will have a ripple effect on other species, while some ranchers were angered that the Forest Service didn't go far enough. The goal would keep prairie dog colonies to 3 percent or less on affected federal lands. The plan applies to 800,000 acres of grassland but does not include sites where the black-footed ferret has been reintroduced - including a wide swath of the Conata Basin south of Wall where the Forest Service said more prairie dogs are needed. The rare and endangered ferrets feed almost exclusively on prairies dogs....
1988 fires in Yellowstone paved way to forecasts As large swaths of Yellowstone National Park burned during the destructive fires of 1988, a small group of fire analysts descended on the park for a firsthand look at how massive fires burn. From those observations, U.S. Forest Service researcher Richard Rothermel crafted a technique to track some of the largest and most dangerous types of wildland blazes known as crown fires. Twenty years later, Rothermel's fire behavior formulas are still in use today and stand as a pillar of wildland fire science, said Lloyd Queen, a University of Montana professor who directs the National Center for Landscape Fire Analysis in Missoula. Unlike surface fires, which move through a forest at ground level, occasionally torching entire trees as they pass, crown fires roll through the dense upper reaches of the forest canopy. Leaping from treetop to treetop, their flames can top 100 feet in length....

Did Communication Errors Exist In Fatal Crash? New documents obtained by KCRA 3 appear to paint a picture of confusion and miscommunication in the hours following last week's fatal helicopter crash in Trinity County. KCRA 3 has exclusively obtained a U.S. Forest Service dispatch log. "It is very concerning to the sheriffs and all those responsible to public safety," Trinity County supervisor and retired forest service member Roger Jaegel said. "The reason for concern is the accuracy and lack of information passed on about this crash not only to emergency responders, but also to the public." The U.S. Forest Service defends its actions, but said an investigation is underway. When asked if at any time there was a decision to intentionally withhold information from the public, Jim Pena from the forest service said, "no."....

Tribes object to fighting fire in sacred places Indian tribes from the Klamath River canyon are worried that the U.S. Forest Service is violating some of their sacred lands by fighting a remote wilderness wildfire rather than letting it burn naturally. The area is home to many prayer seats or vision quest sites shared by three tribes, where tribal members have fasted, prayed and sought spiritual guidance for thousands of years. The area is also used to gather grasses for baskets and Port Orford cedar for ceremonial buildings, such as sweat lodges. "Talking with Forest Service firefighters, I have been saying this is the Sistine Chapel, the Mount Sinai, the Vatican," for the Yurok, Karuk and Tolowa tribes, Chris Peters, the Yurok tribe's liaison with the Forest Service, said from Arcata, Calif. But though the fires are far from any homes, leaving them to burn without a strong perimeter around them is not an option, given the nearby timber resources and expectations that the fire conditions will get worse, he said. He added that because the fires are in a wilderness area, fire lines are built by hand, not with bulldozers....

The Promise and Peril of Shale Oil On a 160 acre parcel near Meeker, Colorado, Shell Energy Corporation is trying to efficiently extract the hydrocarbons from a layer of rock known as the Mahogany Shale. It's been tried before, many times, dating back to when cowboys noticed that if you used certain dark rocks in your fire ring, they'd catch fire. But Shell is taking the effort to a new level, spurred by record energy prices, accommodating federal land managers, and a willingness to radically evolve the technologies for extracting fossil energy from the earth. It will take ten to fifteen years to discover if the experiment will produce economically viable amounts of oil and natural gas, or if the EROEI – the energy returned on energy invested- will balance out, but the technologies involved in the experiment are so new that in the course of operations, some entirely different process may yet reveal itself, drawing the elusive genie of energy from the thousands of square miles of ancient seabed algae....

'Bigfoot' Seekers Claim To Have Found Prey Matthew Whitton and Rick Dyer, Georgia residents who lead Bigfoot-tracking expeditions, said they found the body of what appears to be a Bigfoot in the woods of northern Georgia. They will join Bigfoot researcher Tom Biscardi at the news conference, according to Robert Barrows, who is publicizing the event. Among the creature's other physical characteristics, according to the hunter's Web site, were flat feet similar to human feet. Its footprint is 16 ¾ inches long and the length from palm to tip of the middle finger is 11 ½ inches long. Whitton, a police officer in Clayton County, and Dyer, a former correctional officer, are not saying exactly where the body was found or where it is now. Biscardi, a veteran Bigfoot tracker who said he went to Georgia to view the find over the weekend, said DNA tests are being conducted and a team of scientists will study the body, but declined to name any scientists involved....
Proof or Hoax? Bigfoot Said Found in Georgia They say they have a body, photos of the body, and DNA evidence — some or all of which will be revealed this Friday, Aug. 15, at a press conference in Palo Alto, Calif. If the group does have a Bigfoot carcass (and if they actually show the body, instead merely displaying photographs of a supposed body), then perhaps scientists will take note. Still, it's not clear how, exactly, the group will prove that what they have is a Bigfoot. Because there is no comparison specimen, there is no DNA analysis that can definitively identify Bigfoot tissue....

Prince Charles: Genetically Modified Food 'Disaster' Britain’s Prince Charles has warned that the mass development of genetically modified crops could lead to the world’s worst environmental disaster. In an interview with Britain’s Daily Telegraph, Charles accused multi-national companies of conducting a “gigantic experiment I think with nature and the whole of humanity which has gone seriously wrong.” Small farmers would be the major victims if those corporations take over the mass production of food, the Prince declared. "That would be the absolute destruction of everything … and the classic way of ensuring there is no food in the future. "If they think it’s somehow going to work because they are going to have one form of clever genetic engineering after another, then count me out, because that will be guaranteed to cause the biggest disaster environmentally of all time … We [will] end up with millions of small farmers all over the world being driven off their land into unsustainable, unmanageable, degraded and dysfunctional [urban developments] of unmentionable awfulness." Many scientists believe genetically modified crops are the only way to guarantee food for the world's growing population as the planet is affected by climate change....Poor Diana, no wonder she ran off with an Arab.

TEXAS IS FED UP WITH CORN ETHANOL

At what price will corn be so expensive that the federal government will decide that it is time to stop driving up the price of food, asks Texas Governor Rick Perry?

In 2005, Congress imposed a Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) mandate requiring the addition of biofuel in gasoline; in 2008, nine billion gallons of ethanol were required to be blended in, and even more will be required in 2009. As a precautionary measure, Congress gave the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) the power to waive the new mandates if they turn out to have unforeseen, negative consequences.

And they have, says Perry. The price of corn has spiraled out of control:

* In 2004, the cost of corn hovered around $2 per bushel; now it is close to $8.
* In April 2008, Perry asked the EPA to cut the grain-based ethanol mandate in half for one year.
* In response, the agency opened a comment period and received more than 15,000 comments, most of which supported the request.
* But in August 2008, the EPA decided to deny the request.

The EPA claims that the mandates are not causing sufficient damage to warrant action. However, denying Texas's request "is a mistake that will…force families to bear a heavier financial burden to put food on the table than necessary and harm the livestock industry," says Perry. Instead, he continues, the United States should follow Texas's lead and begin developing technology that makes use of the available additional sources of renewable energy, such as the development of nonfood bioenergy, which has a minimal impact on food production and the environment.

Further, Perry states that if forcing Texas ranchers to close their doors because they can no longer feed their livestock is not sufficient damage to warrant action, than what is?

Source: Rick Perry, "Texas is Fed Up With Corn Ethanol," Wall Street Journal, August 12, 2008.

For text:http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121850115460131741.html

Disputed federal rangeland insurance discontinued The USDA’s Risk Management Agency has discontinued a crop insurance program that farmers and ranchers in Teton County say cost them thousands of dollars in premiums, but failed to protect them in the extreme drought years of 2006 and 2007. The GRP Rangeland offered farmers and ranchers the opportunity to purchase crop insurance on their rangeland so that if drought occurred and they had little or no rangeland production, they could file a loss claim and receive an insurance benefit that could be used to buy hay for their livestock to replace the lost pasture. For the 2009 crop year, the Risk Management Agency is offering a new insurance plan called the “Pasture, Rangeland and Forage-Rainfall Index” program. This plan will again insure pasture against production losses, but the trigger will not be net countywide dryland hay production. Instead, the trigger will be weather data with the actual figures compared to historic average. The coverage area will no longer be based on counties, but will instead be based on 12-square-mile areas and will be a “group risk” plan within each 12-mile square unit....

Idle Leases--Or Addled Minds? First, lease agreements already require timely use of leased land. The 1992 Comprehensive Energy Policy Act requires energy companies to comply with lease provisions, and explore expeditiously, or risk forfeiture of the lease. So the Bingaman-Rahall "solution" effectively duplicates current law. Second, and more disturbingly, Mr. Bingaman and Mr. Rahall's groundless accusation and proposed legislation rely on the absurd assumption that every acre of land leased by the government contains oil. Obviously, that's not the case. Third, if a commercial discovery is made, more wells must be drilled, to delineate the shape and extent of the deposit. Production facilities and pipelines must be designed, built, brought to the site and installed. Only after oil or gas is actually flowing does the lease become "producing." Further complications often stymie energy companies from obtaining and using leased land. Every step in the process must be preceded by environmental studies, oil spill response plans, onsite inspections, and permits. The process takes years, and every step is subject to delays, challenges--and litigation. In the Rocky Mountains, protests against lease sales rose from 27 percent of all leases in 2001 to 81 percent in 2007, according to government and industry records. Numerous additional prospects were never even offered, because land managers feared protests. The justification used to be endangered species. Now it's climate change--as though U.S. oil causes global warming, but imported oil substitutes do not....