Lion Sightings Call for Concern With mountain lion sightings on the rise, the U.S. Forest Service is warning hikers to beware. The Forest Service recently released an advisory warning for Santa Barbara County cautioning hikers of an increase in mountain lion sightings. According to a statement released by the Forest Service, reports of mountain lion sightings involved hikers on the San Ysidro and Romero Trails, located in the nearby Los Padres National Forest. In one case, a mountain lion followed a hiker until scared off by a hurled object. Despite their elusive nature, the Forest Service suggests hikers in mountain lion country follow a few safety guidelines. These include avoiding hiking, biking or jogging alone, especially at dawn, dusk or night, when mountain lions are most active. If a mountain lion encounter should occur, face the animal, make noises and try to appear bigger by waving your arms and throwing rocks or other objects. And if attacked, the advisory states, fight back....

U.S. House action puts Mineral County in $407,000 hole The ink was barely dry on Mineral County's 2009 budget before action by the U.S. House of Representatives left the county with a $407,000 shortfall. The federal payment into the county road fund has been over $400,000 each year since 2000, as part of the U.S. Forest Service payments to forest counties under the Secure Rural Schools and Communities Self-Determination Act. According to the budget documents provided by the Clerk and Recorder's Office, the county budgeted $407,000 for its road fund from the Forest Reserve Payment. Last year, it was the U.S. Senate that blocked reauthorization of Secure Rural Schools by just one vote. This past week, the Senate approved a multi-year reauthorization by a vote of 93-2, but the House yanked all funding from the bill the next day. Secure Rural Schools appears dead until the next Congress convenes in January 2009....

Lasater ranch has history Standard-Times: How did your family get into ranching? Laurie Lasater: My grandfather, Edward C. Lasater, founded the South Texas town of Falfurrias when establishing his ranch there in 1890. His ranch grew to 350,000 acres, but the family was forced to sell most of the land following his death in 1930 due to the Depression and mounting debt against the property. Among the assets salvaged were the remnants of my grandfather's upgraded Brahman herd and the remains of his 20,000 purebred Hereford cows. Dad withdrew from Princeton in the middle of his sophomore year in 1931 to come home and help hold things together. His mother and uncle sold him the cattle on credit, and by 1940 he had paid for them. The Beefmaster breed is the result of Tom Lasater experimenting with various combinations of three breeds - Hereford, Shorthorn, Brahman. He quickly discovered that the three-way cross was superior to any other combination and converted his entire herd to that cross. Beefmasters were recognized as a breed by the U. S. Department of Agriculture in 1954. On the other side of the family, my maternal great-grandmother, Sallie Reynolds Matthews, was a member of the pioneer ranch legacy families of J. A. Matthews and George Reynolds, who settled Shackelford and Throckmorton counties. My great-uncle was Watt Matthews, managing partner of the Lambshead Ranch near Albany....

It's All Trew: Bertillion Method early way to track criminals I take great pleasure in learning a new word, a little-known fact or hearing a story I have not heard before. In the book "Texas Gulag" by Gary Brown, the history of Texas prisons, jails and even the early-day chain gangs is presented from the years 1875 to 1925. The book outlined in detail how criminals were identified as they processed through the old systems. No doubt early Texas prisons, as well as prisons all over the world down through time, were brutal and dangerous. The thinking at the time was, if you are convicted of a crime, you have no rights. Treatment of prisoners will always be argued depending on whether you are a prisoner or a victim of a crime. The old saying of "an eye for an eye" seemed to rule much of the thinking. Interestingly, long before fingerprinting, pupil photographing and DNA, prisons used the Bertillion Method to identify prisoners. Research shows in 1883 in Europe, a police clerical officer was recognized for developing the first scientific method of criminal identification used by police....

Green horses and a red wagon
Cowgirl Sass & Savvy

Julie Carter

Lots of things in a cowboy's life are not fair. Two items on the top of the inequitable list are having to feed in the mud when green grass should be filling that bill and fixing a water gap into a droughty pasture when the guy up the hill got all the rain.

In ranch country, feeding cattle is a standard operation that is driven by opposing weather conditions - the lack of rain or the abundance of snow.

Most outfits have the necessary equipment for feeding cattle in all kinds of weather.

The hands that operate it, and the cattle that depend on it, fall into a routine that continues throughout the season.

One year, this particular ranch had an unusually long rainy spell. Ranchers are known for their mantra of "never turn down a rain or a calf," but fighting the mud sometimes challenges their resolve on the "how much" rain issue.

About this time, two new hands had just hired on, green as the grass that had not yet grown and full of enthusiasm and energy.

The deep mud had rendered the feed truck useless, but these two go-getters had seen pictures of ranchers feeding cattle with a wagon in some northern state.

Fortuitously, the ranch had a rubber-tired wagon, painted bright red, which was generally used for hay rides for the boss' kids. Perfect.

All they needed was a team of horses to pull it.

Their gaze turned to the large horse herd that supplied the saddle horses for the cattle operation. It seemed to them that would be a good place to find some wagon horses.

Smart enough to know the saddle horses wouldn't know anything about being hitched to a wagon, they decided a couple green colts would be "trainable" and wouldn't know any different.

So they gathered up the 3-year-old colts, most of which had never been handled in any way.

They tied a back foot up on each colt and maneuvered them up to the wagon, where harnesses and collars were put in place while the colts stood trembling.

A quick inspection of the wagon revealed a small problem. No brakes. The brighter of the two cowboys decided that a colt tied to the back of the wagon would work just fine for a brake.

When the driver (the honor given to the other cowboy) needed to stop, he could just wave his hat in the face of the colt at the back, making him set up and stop the wagon. Seemed like a fine idea, falling just short of brilliance.

The colts were wild-eyed and not happy about the wagon attached at their backsides.

The lad on the ground untied their hind feet and when the driver slapped the reins on their backs, the colts stood momentarily frozen. Then, with a bolt, they left out like scalded hounds.

The driver didn't need a whole lot of time to decide that the use of a brake might be in order.

He stood up on the wagon seat and waved his hat in the face of the colt tied to the back.

As planned, the colt sat back hard. Not as planned, when the hard jerk hit the rope tied to the wagon, it pulled the entire back end out of the wagon and never even offered a moment of slowing to the run-off team.

The driver, still attached to the fast-exiting horses, unwisely held tight to the reins while most of the hide on his face, and all the way south to his boots, was skidded off in the drag.

Finally, the colts managed to lose their dragger and eventually, they ran out of steam. It still took most of the afternoon to get them caught and retrieve the harnesses.

The green hands, not so green anymore, decided that God had created this mud and He would dry it out.

Wisdom is often born of pain or, in this case, rain. At least one cowboy is now a little wiser.

Politicalspeak 101

by Gary Reed

Since politics has become a year-round hunt with no definable season, this article is offered as a public service for those who want to become political sharpshooters but aren't completely familiar with the vocabulary of this most ancient and ruthlessly brutal of human blood sports.

Politics – The art of manipulating people. This definition can be infinitely refined and redefined but those five words are its essence.

Democracy – A system of thuggary in which the majority enforces its will on everyone else, as opposed to the original United States, which was a constitutional republic featuring a minimal government empowered to protect the rights of individuals from the thuggary of the majority.

Fair Share – A term imposed by the recipient of anything on the supplier of anything to guarantee the highest possible share for the recipient. The term is always defined by the recipient. Politicians define the state's "fair share" of taxpayer's incomes. Socialists define a society's "fair share" of its most productive citizen's efforts. Unions define their employee's "fair share" of corporate profits (and then define their own "fair share" of their member's dues). Welfare beneficiaries define their "fair share" of government largess. The fairness of the share is inevitably enforced by some form of coercion.

Fair Trade – A treaty between two countries in which the more powerful country uses its political clout to enforce its own definition of "fair" on the other country.

Fair Tax – A system of taxation that abolishes the IRS, dramatically simplifies the tax-paying process and is equitable for all economic classes while guaranteeing that nothing of substance will change because citizens will still be forced to cough up nearly half their incomes to corrupt politicians who will continue to spend trillions more in revenue than what they collect.

Level Playing Field – A euphemism concocted by incompetent business boobs demanding special interest legislation designed to drag their skilled competitors down to their own level of ineptitude so they won't have to actually compete with them.

Unfair Trade Practices – A term used by incompetent business boobs to define the sagacious business acumen of their competitors. A typical cure for politically manufactured "Unfair Trade Practices" is called "Antitrust Suit."

Change – An utterly shallow word masquerading as a set of meaningful ideas which, when repeated mindlessly, acts to "energize a whole new generation of voters" because those new voters have just emerged from government-run holding cells known as "high schools" where their brains were successfully stripped of the very concept of meaningful ideas.

Move forward – A meaningless phrase used whenever a candidate gets caught hand-in-cookie-jar. Example: Reporter says, "You passed a syrup subsidy bill after receiving donations from the syrup lobby." Candidate says, "We need to forget the past and move forward." In today's Pabulum Press reportage, candidates usually get away with this.

Libertarian – A concept entailing personal freedom and individual responsibility that scares the living bejesus out of politicians from presidents to dogcatchers because they know that if the idea of actual, genuine, no-lip-service freedom ever catches on they'll all lose their cushy con jobs.

Politicogenic – In the same sense that "anthropogenic" means "human-caused" and is routinely found as an adjective preceding such phrases as "global warming," "climate change," "pollutants," "methane emissions" and "greenhouse gasses," the term "politicogenic" means "politician-caused" and should rightfully be frontloaded onto words and phrases like "inflation," "war," "loss of freedom," "energy crisis," "starvation," "genocide" and so on and on and on.

Envirogenic – A term meaning "Death by Environmentalism," i.e., an international ban on DDT that has allowed 50 million people to die from malaria since 1972, branding bio-engineered crops that resist harsh climates, insects, diseases and don't need chemical pesticides as "Frankenfood" while millions starve worldwide, demanding high-mileage cars which require smaller and lighter construction which increases highway fatalities, and et cetera.

Photogenic – Looking good during a ten second sound bite. What did you think it meant?

Los Payasos - Government At Work

FEMA ice left to melt in Texas and Louisiana; truckers told to keep quiet The San Antonio Express-News reported Wednesday, Sept. 24, that hundreds of trucks were pulling in at Randolph Auxiliary Air Field near San Antonio. The trucks were loaded with pallets of ice, and the ice was being off-loaded to melt in the sun. A FEMA spokesman said the excess ice proves the agency was well prepared. But when a reporter started talking to truckers, the Express-News quoted a man in a FEMA shirt as saying, “This conversation is over.” He then reportedly threatened to fire the truckers if they talked to the media. One trucker, who was contacted later by the newspaper, estimated that $1.5 million dollars worth of ice was being dumped on the ground at the Texas air field. And in Carville, LA, trucks full of ice had been sitting parked for more than a week. WVLA-TV, the NBC affiliate in Baton Rouge, reported that nearly 3 million pounds of ice were thrown out at a FEMA staging area.

Homeland Security Detects Terrorist Threats by Reading Your Mind Baggage searches are SOOOOOO early-21st century. Homeland Security is now testing the next generation of security screening — a body scanner that can read your mind. Most preventive screening looks for explosives or metals that pose a threat. But a new system called MALINTENT turns the old school approach on its head. This Orwellian-sounding machine detects the person — not the device — set to wreak havoc and terror. MALINTENT, the brainchild of the cutting-edge Human Factors division in Homeland Security's directorate for Science and Technology, searches your body for non-verbal cues that predict whether you mean harm to your fellow passengers. It has a series of sensors and imagers that read your body temperature, heart rate and respiration for unconscious tells invisible to the naked eye — signals terrorists and criminals may display in advance of an attack....

Justice Dept. to delay new terror-probe rules The Justice Department, in a nod to concerns that Americans could be investigated in terrorism cases without evidence of wrongdoing, said Tuesday it will tweak still-tentative rules governing FBI national security cases before they are issued. The changes represent a small but first victory for skeptical lawmakers and civil liberties groups that want the Justice Department to delay the rules until a new president is elected. Not all of the planned changes were outlined during a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, but Assistant Attorney General Elisebeth Cook said they would include limits on the length and kinds of investigative activities used in monitoring demonstrations and civil disorders. "We do anticipate making changes in response to the comments we have received," Cook said. Justice Department and FBI lawyers have been briefing lawmakers and interest groups on the rules for the last six weeks. The short hearing came as three Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee demanded "bare-minimum" civil rights protections for U.S. citizens and residents as the Federal Bureau of Investigation expands its power to seek out potential terrorists....With the Republicans supporting the rule and Democrats only wanting to protect our rights to the "bare-minimum", liberty is bound to suffer another loss.

Encrypting Against Department of Homeland Security's New Laptop Search Policy Computer security has never been more necessary. In the past, the threat of a security breach has come in the form of thieves: stolen laptops and PDAs, identity theft, and the like. These days the threat comes from a new ruling by a U.S. court. The Department of Homeland Security will now be allowed to confiscate laptops coming into the U.S. for an indefinite amount of time. Customs and Border Patrol will be able to search laptops or any other electronic device, download entire contents and keep the device for several days. "This policy can create headaches -- or worse -- for unsuspecting travelers who don't plan ahead," says Jamie Brenzel, CEO of online data storage and backup service Data Deposit Box ( www.datadepositbox.com ). Imagine your vital business accounting data being out of reach for days. Worse yet, what if your private financial information was exposed to the wrong people? What if a potential business partnership was leaked before the deal was made? Any of these scenarios is cause for concern. So what can be done? Some experts suggest simply leaving electronics, such as laptops and PDAs, at home. While this strategy is easy enough for someone heading off on vacation, business travelers need more practical options to protect sensitive information. According to Brenzel, encryption is key to data protection...Looks like this will be a boon to the online backup providers. Folks will just transfer their files to the online server, then download the data after they've crossed the border.

City considers options after NRA gun ban lawsuit The Evanston City Council is still discussing what to do next after being "forced kicking and screaming" to amend its handgun ban last month. The change was made following a June 26 Supreme Court ruling, District of Columbia v. Heller, declaring a similar ban in Washington, D.C. to be in violation of the Second Amendment. The day after the landmark decision, the National Rifle Association brought a lawsuit against Evanston alleging its ban was unconstitutional. The City Council chose to change its ban instead of fighting the potentially expensive suit, said city corporation counsel Jack Siegel, who wrote the amendment. Now, Evanston residents can have handguns in their home for the purpose of self-protection, Siegel said. Other uses and other types of guns are still prohibited....

Opponents of Tough Federal Sentencing Rules Take Up Heller for Help The federal judge that sentenced Weldon Angelos to 55 years and one day in prison in 2004 said his hands were tied by mandatory-minimum gun laws, calling his own sentence "unjust, cruel, and even irrational." Now a law professor and a group of Am Law 200 lawyers are challenging the sentence on unique grounds: that Heller v. District of Columbia, the case celebrated as a definitive victory for gun rights, protects Angelos and others like him convicted of gun crimes. Douglas Berman, a law professor at the Moritz College of Law at The Ohio State University, devised the strategy with help from attorneys at Steptoe & Johnson and Snell & Wilmer. Angelos is hoping to have his sentence overturned by the U.S District Court in Salt Lake City after a federal appeals court upheld it in 2006 and the U.S. Supreme Court denied cert. Berman knows Heller's core supporters--the National Rifle Association, for example--don't typically overlap with individuals who are tough on criminal sentences. But he believes Heller should make it harder to tack dozens of years on to a prison sentence simply because someone happens to own a gun....

Revenge of the Bitter Gun Owners Last spring, after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual right to arms, Democrats hoped the decision would neutralize the gun issue. Instead the ruling, by inviting debate over which kinds of gun control are constitutional, has made the issue more salient. That's bad news for Barack Obama, who the National Rifle Association says "would be the most anti-gun president in American history." The Democratic nominee pays lip service to Second Amendment rights while calling for "commonsense," "reasonable" restrictions. But Obama's sense of what's reasonable, while common among the left-liberal politicians and activists inside his comfort zone, may seem decidedly unreasonable to the pro-gun voters the NRA is trying to mobilize against him. Since these voters made a decisive difference in the 2000 presidential election and arguably in 2004 as well, this is a threat Obama ignores at his peril. The NRA plans to spend $15 million urging voters in battleground states of the Midwest and Mountain West to "Defend Freedom" and "Defeat Obama." Meanwhile, the Obama campaign is running radio spots in swing states such as Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia that promise "Barack Obama and John McCain will both make sure we keep our guns."....

Under anonymity, gun licenses soar in Florida The number of Floridians with permission to pack heat has jumped nearly 50 percent in three years. In 2005, one year before the state Legislature's decision to provide anonymity to people holding concealed weapons licenses, there were 347,350 active permits statewide. Now, that number has swelled to about 520,000. Some states ask applicants why they want a concealed weapons license. Florida isn't one of them. That makes it almost impossible to say who is getting licensed and why. But recent changes to the state's gun laws by the Republican-led Legislature suggest Florida is an attractive place to own a gun and privately tuck it away....

Mexico drug crackdown breeds more violence from the cartels It was Mexican Independence Day and the square in this colonial city was packed with revelers. Suddenly, something flew over the head of Angelica Bucio, struck a man in front of her and rolled to a stop on the ground. A second later, the grenade exploded, slamming Bucio against a fountain. Her arms and legs burned with white-hot shrapnel. Smoke and screaming and blood were everywhere. For residents of this city, last week's attack that killed seven people and injured 108 was yet another sign that President Felipe Calderón's nationwide war on drugs, which began in Morelia nearly two years ago, is going poorly. Instead of subsiding, drug-related murders are rising and becoming more gruesome. Once-quiet border towns have become battlegrounds. Police-on-police clashes have left citizens wondering who the good guys are. And the Morelia grenade attack, which the Mexican Attorney General's Office blamed on drug traffickers, has raised fears that smugglers are moving into outright terrorism. The turmoil is in stark contrast to the U.S. side of the border, where Calderón's crackdown looks like a success. The White House has credited Mexico's efforts for a drop in the drug supply. Since 2006, the U.S. has seen an 84 percent jump in methamphetamine prices and a 21 percent increase in cocaine prices. Meth use has dropped 50 percent and cocaine use has decreased 19 percent, according to the Office of National Drug Control Policy....

Michigan Senate votes to allow killing of wolves The Michigan Senate has voted unanimously to let farmers kill gray wolves caught in the act of attacking their livestock -- assuming the state removes the wolf from its threatened species list. The farmers would have to report to the state Department of Natural Resources within 12 hours of shooting a wolf. Legislation approved Thursday also would let the owners of hunting dogs kill wolves caught attacking their dogs. Until the DNR finishes hearings to remove the wolf from the list, a wolf only can be killed by a state official. The DNR supports the bills....

Court: No reserved water rights for NM trust land There are no federally reserved water rights for the millions of acres of state trust land in New Mexico, the state Court of Appeals has ruled. The court's decision Wednesday came in a case involving the adjudication of water rights in the San Juan River Basin of northwestern Mexico. In the river system, there are nearly 300,000 acres of trust land. Last year, a state district court in San Juan County rejected the claim made by the Land Office. The Court of Appeals affirmed the decision. The lands conveyed to New Mexico by acts of Congress from 1850 to 1910 "were never withdrawn from the public domain and reserved for a federal purpose. As such, it necessarily follows that any attendant federal reserved water rights that the commissioner now claims in connection with those lands were also not impliedly reserved," the court said in an opinion written by Judge James Weschler. "The Court of Appeals got it exactly right," D.L. Sanders, chief counsel for the state engineer, said in an interview. He said no state court has recognized federal reserved water rights for state trust lands in the West although the legal question has come up in other places, including Arizona and Montana. "By everybody's calculation, this was a huge stretch in the legal theories," Sanders said. Had water rights been reserved for New Mexico's trust lands, Sanders said, it would have been a "sweeping change in law" and disrupted the current system that allocates rights for using water. Federal reserved water rights typically are more senior than those held by private landowners or municipalities in New Mexico, giving them a greater priority in times of drought when not enough water is available to cover the demands of all users....

Credits where credits are due The Senate today overwhelmingly approved a massive tax package that mashes together incentives for renewable energy with support for traditional energy sources less beloved by environmental groups. The Energy Improvement and Extension Act of 2008, sponsored by Sens. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) and Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), would extend the investment tax credit for solar energy for eight years. It would extend the production tax credit (PTC) for wind for one year, and the PTC for solar, biomass, and hydropower for two years. The residential energy-efficient property credit would be extended through 2016, and the definition of the systems that qualify for that credit would be expanded to include small wind investment and geothermal heat pumps. The bill also includes provisions for carbon capture and sequestration, oil shale, tar sands, and coal-to-liquid fuels, which enviros are much less happy about....

Oldest rocks on Earth found in northern Canada A pinkish tract of bedrock on the eastern shore of Canada's Hudson Bay contains the oldest known rocks on Earth, formed 4.28 billion years ago, not long after the planet was formed, scientists said on Thursday. The rocks may be remnants of Earth's primordial crust, which formed on the planet's surface as it cooled following the birth of the solar system, according to Jonathan O'Neil of McGill University in Montreal. "Maybe it was the original crust, and before that there was no stable crust on the Earth. That's a big question," O'Neil said in a telephone interview. The expanse in northern Quebec, measuring about 4 square miles (10 square km), is made up of the volcanic rock basalt....

Meager North American jaguar population faces several risks Jaguars once roamed from Argentina to as far north as the Grand Canyon, but those that inhabited North America have now become isolated to roughly 70 square miles of rugged terrain in northern Mexico. To promote their conservation project, Diane Hadley, president of the Northern Jaguar Project (NJP), gave a presentation entitled “Protecting the Jaguar’s Place” at Babbitt’s Backcountry Outfitters on Sept. 17 at 7 p.m. Hadley said the region in which the jaguars live “is this little pocket of land surrounded by Río Aros on one side and the Río Yacqui on the other.” Hadley said NJP is trying to identify and establish safe corridors for jaguars to return to their former habitats within the U.S., particularly in southern Arizona and New Mexico....