Bird Brained Federal Hypocrisy

As seen on Wombat-socho's "Live at Five: 06.06.14." Obama administration gives wind farms a 30 year kill permit for protected birds, while prosecuting individuals for minor infractions.

Just last month, US Fish and Wildlife cited 26-year- old tree trimmer Ernesto Pulido for violating the 1918 Migratory Bird Treaty Act for disturbing a nest of herons. Pulido was hired by the U.S. Postal Service to rid their parking lot in Oakland, Calif. of the birds and the droppings they left behind.

"It's a violation of federal law," said conservationist Lisa Owens Viani. "Nesting birds (herons) are protected under federal law."

Viani arrived at the scene May 3 to find several adult herons circling the trees and five baby herons hiding under a postal truck. She took them to a wildlife rehabilitation center for blood work, fluids and feeding.

Pulido, who grew up in rural Mexico, visited the birds and voluntarily paid for their rehabilitation costs. Nevertheless, wildlife officials threatened to prosecute and fine him. On Thursday they relented, dropping the charges.

A couple of different points here.  First of all, did they check Pulido's immigration status?  If he's anything like the tree trimmers who worked for the contractor who did our tree's he's not likely to be legal. Certainly, messing with protected species is a deportable offense.

Second, a strictly rhetorical question; why aren't they going after the Post Master (or Mistress, I don't want to be accused of sexism) for this offense?  It was the Post Office who clearly decided they wanted the birds gone from their grounds, Pulido was simply the rather ignorant executor of Post Office policies.

Next, a citizen (relatively for sure) catches even more grief, not for interfering with live birds, but for molesting dead ones:

Avid New York City birdwatcher Lincoln Karim's experience was even worse. Karim knows the law: To touch a protected bird-- even a dead one-- you need a permit. But Karim found a dead red-tailed hawk in Central Park on a Sunday. He called animal control to pick up the carcass. When no one responded, he put the bird in a plastic bag, took it home and kept it in the refrigerator so it would not get eaten by predators.

"If I left it on that lawn, it was going to be picked up and taken up by a raccoon or a dog or something," he said. Suspecting the bird had been poisoned, Karim turned it in Monday morning for an autopsy.

"When I handed it over, they arrested me," he said. "It's not nice getting handcuffed -- especially when you know deep inside you're not a criminal.” Karim was charged with illegal possession of a raptor. Though his charges were eventually dismissed, marine biologist Black wasn't so lucky. The U.S. Attorney's Office, on behalf of the Marine Mammal Protection Act, gave Black three years probation and fined her $12,000 for feeding a whale in Monterey Bay.

Possessing even the smallest part of a protected species (and soon, all non-human species may be protected) is illegal.  Even a Secretary of the Smithsonian has fell afoul (or is that afowl) of this law by possessing and displaying Indian Native American artifacts made with feathers of protected species.

But to really go industrial about harming protected species, all you need is the excuse of saving the world from global warming, and a get out of jail free card from the Obama administration:

Under a new Obama administration policy, wind farm operators are getting 30-year permits to kill protected species.
The new renewable energy policy gives wind farm operators 30-year permits - up from the current 5 years - to kill a specific number of protected species without threat of prosecution.
. . .
"Now they've got the 30-year eagle permit get-out-of-jail-free card," said Johns. "Nobody else is getting that. Nobody else is allowed to go out and kill eagles like this and get away with it. In California alone, wind farms out there are estimated to have killed over 3,000 golden eagles. And there hasn’t been a single prosecution out there for that.''

The wind industry says it needs the permits to obtain financing and avoid prosecution. They claim some fatalities are inevitable, but hope to mitigate the damage through location and design. In addition, if the world ever hopes to get off fossil fuels, they say wind is an important, clean alternative.
. . .
"President Obama's climate plan would initiate an open-ended avian holocaust the likes we have never seen before," wrote James Taylor, managing editor of Environment and Climate News.

Linked at The DaleyGator in "Your Weekend Link-a-round."

Can Femen Voodoo Put Putin in His Place?

Topless feminist stabs wax Putin in France

A topless member of the radical protest group Femen used a metal chisel to stab and bash in the face of Putin's statue in a famed Paris wax museum on Thursday.

The activist, who had 'Kill Putin' written on her bare chest, reportedly screamed "Putin is a dictator" while destroying the figure at the Grevin Wax Museum, French daily Le Parisien reported.

Police arrested the activist shortly after the attack, which happened near statues of US President Barack Obama and recently abdicated Spanish King Juan Carlos, both of which escaped without a scratch.

Putin is to arrive in France on Thursday to attend the 70th anniversary of D-Day events, which have attracted scores of world leaders to France. Putin arrives under the cloud of the confrontation between western powers and Russia over the annexation of Crimea.

My usual position on the follies of Femen is to support whatever they oppose, to help keep the protest going.  However, in the case of Putin and the Ukraine, I'm in the position of being able to have my cake and eat it too, support Femen against Putin, because it cannot possibly have the slightest effect on Putin's course of action. In fact, external symbolic opposition to Putin feeds his ego and stature in Russia, as well as the historical feeling of inadequacy of the Russians which fuels their distaste for the rest of the West. I'm sure Putin is sitting back and having a nice laugh at the girls.

And, in any event, it can't be said it will do much less than Obama's policies so far.

Wombat-socho has the Mother of All Rule 5 posts: "Rule 5 Sunday: The Fremont Street Experience" up at The Other McCain, despite the distraction of Las Vegas. Viva Las Vegas!

Obamacare Schadenfreude 6/6/14

Another nice morning here, mid 60s, sunny, as yet mild humidity.  Even if we don't deserve it, we'll take it.

Prospective VA leader expects Obamacare to lead to single payer

The first name to emerge as the favored choice to head the Department of Veterans Affairs previously predicted that Obamacare will eradicate employer-based insurance and push the U.S. towards a single-payer system “like they have in England”. The Wall Street Journal reported that Dr. Delos “Toby” Cosgrove, who heads the Cleveland Clinic, is being heavily sought by the Obama administration to replace Gen. Eric Shinseki, who was forced out last week amid the VA wait list scandal. Cosgrove, who is a Vietnam veteran, has served as head of the clinic since 2004. Touted as a world-class facility, both Obama and GOP nominee Mitt Romney praised the 42,000 employee clinic during the 2012 presidential debates for its high-quality, low-cost health care.

In a 2012 interview, also with the Wall Street Journal, Cosgrove predicted that Obamacare would dismantle the employer-based insurance system and would eventually lead to a single-payer system.

In the interview, Cosgrove was asked if he thought employers would stop providing health insurance despite being penalized under Obamacare.

“The first ones will be the small companies,” he told the Wall Street Journal. “Every CEO I’ve talked to knows how much he’d save between insuring his people and paying the federal penalty. . . .The first time some big player does that, it’s going to fall like dominoes,” he continued. “What that does is drive everybody to the exchanges.”

Asked what that meant in the long-term, he said, “it’s going to be a faster move towards one payer. Increasingly, people think that in 10 years you’re going to have 75% of the health-care costs paid by the federal government,” he said.

At a health conference earlier this year, Cosgrove put a more precise timeline on the transition to single-payer. “I think we are taking steps in that direction,” he said at the 32nd J.P Morgan Healthcare Conference, according to a Medical Device Daily report from January. “I think ultimately in maybe twenty years from now we will have a basic healthcare provision across the country and then there will be [optional supplementary] insurance on top of that like they have in England.”

Because everyone really wants a single payer system like England and the VA.  To be sure, it's not clear from the article that he is in favor of the trend, but given that he's Obama's first choice to head America's one true example of the a single payer system, and one that has become massively corrupt and inefficient, one would reasonably suspect that he believes in them.

From Reason Magazine, a story on how Democrats are avoiding fixing Obamacare for fear that to admit its failures would be to help Republicans in the mid-terms:

. . .In her reporting, the DC publication's Rebecca Adams revealed how twisted and potentially dangerous the Obamacare-related political motivations are on the left, where pretending that everything is fine is clearly more important than acknowledging and quickly fixing serious – perhaps even deadly serious — problems (bolds are mine):

At least 2.9 million Americans who signed up for Medicaid coverage as part of the health care overhaul have not had their applications processed, with some paperwork sitting in queues since last fall, according to a 50-state survey by CQ Roll Call.

Those delays — due to technological snags with enrollment websites, bureaucratic tangles at state Medicaid programs and a surge of applicants — betray Barack Obama’s promise to expand access to health care for some of the nation’s most vulnerable citizens.

As a result, some low-income people are being prevented from accessing benefits they are legally entitled to receive. Those who face delays may instead put off doctors appointments and lose access to their medicines, complicating their medical conditions and increasing the eventual cost to U.S. taxpayers.

Democratic lawmakers who have promoted the law’s historic coverage expansion are wary of acknowledging problems that hand opponents of the Affordable Care Act another rhetorical weapon, said Robert Blendon, a professor at Harvard University School of Public Health and Kennedy School of Government.

Well, there you have it. Millions of poor people are not able to access promised benefits. Many of them are putting off or avoiding needed trips to the doctor. They're not able to get necessary medications. Hey, I thought Obamacare and Medicaid expansion were going to solve these problems?

But if you're on the left, don't you dare utter a word about any of this, because it's far more important that the public not know and that Republicans and conservatives not be given another "rhetorical weapon" than it is to put pressure on the people who have allowed these dangerous messes to continue to fester to fix them. . .

Besides, Obamacare isn't really the object; Obamacare's failure, and the subsequent replacement with single-payer is the object.

Leftists upset that Dr. Ben Carson compared Obamacare to the 9/11 attacks

Dr. Ben Carson, the Republican right’s favorite African-American neurosurgeon, often says that President Obama’s health care law is the worst thing since slavery.

But in my recent interview with the good doctor—who is riding high in the presidential preliminaries, having come in a close second to Sen. Ted Cruz this past weekend in the Republican Leadership Conference’s much-ballyhooed straw poll—he upped the ante.

He claimed that Obamacare has been even more damaging to the United States than the terrorist attacks of 9/11.

“You said Obamacare was the worst thing that has happened to this coutry since slavery. Why do you think it was worse than 9/11?” I asked him.“Because 9/11 is an isolated incident,” he answered.

To make a weather analogy, the 9/11 attacks were like a tornado, doing horrific damage in a limited area in a short time, while a hurricane will cause much more total damage over a greater area for a longer period, although the no one area may be as intensely damaged. Can we imagine the death toll of Obamacare exceeding 3,000, and costing the economy $3 trillion? Easily, but not one one day.

We Have Met The Enemy, and She is Us

A feminist makes the realization that not all misogynists are men, and blames men...

Too many women ignore their own misogyny

. . . It is heartbreaking, and intolerable, and a whole host of other adjectives that, taken together, still couldn’t account for the daily reality of women treating themselves and other women with an unbearable amount of disrespect and contempt.

How do women hate each other? They’re too numerous to catalog here but we can include ubiquitous women’s magazines and websites that ingrain false notions of physical perfection, hypersexuality and material wealth while peddling alcohol, cigarettes and elixirs of youth.

And, therefore, of course, men who make and profit from such magazines.  It just couldn't be something innate to women.

Then there are the ever-present culture wars pitting women who believe in the “right to life” against those who believe in “a woman’s right to choose,” or those who want to pursue a career versus those who want to stay home with kids, or breast-feeding against bottle feeding, yada, yada, yada. Each portrays the other as incapable of making good choices. 

Or it could just simply be that other women are their own natural competition for resources; to men, to jobs, for other resources necessary for existence and the feeding of their children.  Until Samuel Colt made all men and women equal, most women had no choice but to abide by the choices that men made, while seeking in their own way to "guide" their choices.  The physical differences are just too great, as well as the testosterone driven ability of men to excel at violence, which persists into the modern era of firearms.

If women became safe and respected by all men becoming feminists, then women accepting their own misogyny — whether defined as bias, hatred, cattiness or extreme snark — would seem to hasten a similar state.

Women may never be able to walk down a dark alley and feel completely comfortable, but it shouldn’t take so long to feel their self-esteem is likely to be safe within a diverse population of other women. For now, plenty of women wage war on other women.

In 2013, a Gallup poll found that women are likelier than men to express a preference to not be supervised on the job by a woman. Clearly, even as we struggle to gain the respect of men, there’s plenty of work to be done setting the sisterhood right.

I believe that a whole lot of social behavior in humans is as evolutionarily driven as it is in our primate relatives.  The hunter/gatherer animal that modern humans were for thousands of generations before we became civilized has indelibly marked our behavior; both cooperation and competition within and beyond the "local group" are essential parts of our behavior, and sex differences have also been evolved and selected for.  That doesn't mean we necessarily should tolerate bad behavior, but it helps to understand how it arises.

Wombat-socho has the Mother of All Rule 5 posts: "Rule 5 Sunday: The Fremont Street Experience" up at The Other McCain, despite the distraction of Las Vegas. Viva Las Vegas!

Who Needs Drones?

Oyster Recovery Partnership Celebrates 20 years of Failure

After 20 years of restoration work, oysters are still a small fraction of their historical abundance

In 1994 Maryland scientists, watermen and businesses vowed to work together to respond to a critical decline in Chesapeake Bay Oysters. Now the 'Oyster Recovery Partnership' is preparing to celebrate its 20th anniversary on Wednesday, the largest oyster restoration project underway along the east coast.

The Oyster Recovery Partnership's sole mission is to rebuild the oyster population. Part of the restoration project includes taking oyster shells from nearly 250 seafood restaurants and dumping them into the bay to re-build a marine habitat. So far they have planted 5 billion oysters: over 1,700 acres. . . 

Which is a tiny fraction of their original extent in the Bay.

Fritz's oyster restoration plan.  Ban wild oyster harvest for 5 years, preferably 10.  Leave them alone.  Don't plant any, don't harvest any.  If, at the end of that time, evaluate the extent of their natural recovery. If it looks promising, proceed with recovery operations.  If it looks like they won't recover on their own, plant a new species, maybe the Japanese River Oyster, Crassostria ariakensis which tolerates lower water quality, and seems to grow well, and disease free in the Bay.

Obamacare Schadenfreude Keeps on Truckin'

We had a line of storms roll in late last night, lightning, thunder and rain, all of which left us with about a half inch of rain, cloudy skies and winds shifting out of the north and rising.

Obamacare Schadenfreude keeps on going and going.

More than 2 Million (with an "m") Obamacare enrollees policies are at threat of higher prices or cancellation due to "irregularities" in the signups.

A huge new paperwork headache for the government could also be jeopardizing coverage for some of the millions of people who just got health insurance under President Barack Obama's law.

A government document provided to The Associated Press indicates that at least 2 million people enrolled for taxpayer-subsidized private health insurance have data discrepancies in their applications that, if unresolved, could affect what they pay for coverage, or even their legal right to benefits.

The final number affected could well be higher. According to the administration the 2 million figure reflects only consumers who signed up through the federally administered HealthCare.gov website and call centers. The government signed up about 5.4 million people, while state-run websites signed up another 2.6 million.

For consumers, a discrepancy means that the information they supplied, subject to perjury laws, does not match what the government has on record.

For example, someone who underestimated his income, and got too generous a subsidy as a result, could owe the Internal Revenue Service money next year.

The seven-page slide presentation from the Health and Human Services Department was provided to AP as several congressional committees investigate the discrepancies. Most of the data conflicts involve important details on income, citizenship and immigration status — which affect eligibility and subsidies.

An error rate of 25% for a government run system?  Whoda thunk?

From Hotair:

The law says that an enrollee’s coverage will continue for 90 days while a discrepancy is being resolved. According to HHS, fully 40 percent of the 2.1 million affected by this — more than 800,000 people — are now outside that window. Think President Overreach will intervene to give them relief if/when HHS decides that it can’t resolve this problem by the end of summer, as it currently hopes to do? No surprise either that most discrepancies are being resolved in favor of enrollees.

And the fiscal picture for Obamacare continues to get murkier: Fiscal Diagnosis Only Gets Tougher for Health Care Law

Four years after enactment of what is widely viewed as President Barack Obama’s key legislative achievement, however, it’s unclear whether the health care law is still on track to reduce the deficit or whether it may actually end up adding to the federal debt. In fact, the answer to that question has become something of a mystery.

In its latest report on the law, the Congressional Budget Office said it is no longer possible to assess the overall fiscal impact of the law. That conclusion came as a surprise to some fiscal experts in Washington and is drawing concern. And without a clear picture of the law’s overall financing, it could make it politically easier to continue delaying pieces of it, including revenue raisers, because any resulting cost increases might be hidden.

Charles Blahous, a senior research fellow at George Mason University’s free market-oriented Mercatus Center, calls the CBO’s inability to estimate the net effect of the law “a real problem.”

“The ACA’s financing provisions were assumed to be effective so as to get a favorable score out of CBO upon enactment, but no one is keeping track of whether they’re being enforced,” says Blahous, a public trustee for Social Security and Medicare. “We receive occasional updates on the gross costs of the law, but none on whether the previously projected savings provisions are producing what was originally projected.”

As a result, Blahous says, “there’s no barrier to continually rolling back the financing mechanisms without the effect on the ACA’s finances ever being fully disclosed.”

It was always bait and switch anyway.

No You Can’t Keep Your Plan And Yes You Have To Pay For Other People’s Abortions

How can a government claim to derive its powers “from the consent of the governed” when it deliberately deceives the people whose consent it supposedly requires? The case of a Connecticut family forced to pay a fee to be used to fund others’ elective surgical abortions or face fines under Obamacare is the latest demonstration that the law is a Rube Goldberg machine of impenetrable statutory language designed to confuse.
. . .
As Executive Director of Rhode Island Right to Life, Barth has long warned that some exchanges may offer no plans without elective abortion and that Obamacare secrecy clauses forbid insurers or exchanges from telling customers the truth. Now it is personal.

There are no known abortion free plans on the Connecticut exchange. For the Bracys and every other consumer buying plans in Connecticut, this means that in order to buy an Obamacare-compliant exchange plan they will be required to pay a separate surcharge that the insurer must use solely to pay for abortions. There are indications that people seeking coverage on the exchanges in Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, New Jersey, Oregon, Rhode Island and Wyoming may face the same dilemma. And every exchange (and insurer) is forbidden to answer the very basic questions of many prospective customers: (1) Does this plan cover abortion? And (2) How much would I be paying for others’ abortions?

Abortion is not my thing, but I don't have any problem with the fact that a majority of the country still opposes abortion on demand, and think that women and families who want them should be responsible for their costs.  Of course, it's Connecticut, so more abortions are probably a good thing.

The found of Staples describes how Obamacare poses a new problem for small business owners and entrepreneurs.

Of course, not every small business succeeds. But unshackled entrepreneurs fuel America’s economic growth and create our opportunity society. Small businesses are also the most creative. According to the Small Business Administration, innovative smaller businesses produced 16 times more patents per employee than larger companies also creating intellectual property.

Instead of supporting this type of innovative growth, the president’s health care law stifles it. The employer mandate — requiring employers with 50-plus employees to comply with expensive requirements — was long planned, left unexplained, then delayed. Many companies endured chaos as Washington contorted. Small business owners, always hit harder with the cost of compliance, don’t know what will hit them next.

Now business leaders are discovering a new provision, hidden as a “fee” on health care insurers. This is a tax that will be passed straight onto small businesses and their employees. The small business community calls it the health insurance tax, or HIT, for good reason — this is essentially a tax on Main Street USA. The added cost doesn’t affect big businesses; they self-insure their employees. The HIT only hits the health-insurance marketplace, where most small businesses and the self-employed purchase their health care plans.

The HIT charged to health-insurance companies will be passed on to small business. In turn, those companies, with typically slim profit margins, will pass the HIT on to employees. Since small businesses employ two-thirds of all the US workforce, most Americans will pay the bill. Families will pay up to $500 more each year beginning in 2014. The tax will actually increase over time, causing a greater burden in the years to come.

At Job Creators Network, we are already hearing stories of the HIT’s impact on small businesses. According to the same US Bank Small Business survey, three out of five owners who run a business making $1 million or more annually say the law resulted in higher premiums for their business. Forty-five percent of business owners with at least five employees reported cutting back on new hires. Clearly, the HIT is a major factor.

Gee, I wonder why the economy has been so poor going into the sixth year of the "Obama recovery."

You knew it was coming:

Miss the Mammoths? Don't Blame Climate Change

A new study published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society concludes it was us, modern humans, who extirpated the Pleistocene Megafauna:

Global late Quaternary megafauna extinctions linked to humans, not climate change

Abstract

The late Quaternary megafauna extinction was a severe global-scale event. Two factors, climate change and modern humans, have received broad support as the primary drivers, but their absolute and relative importance remains controversial. To date, focus has been on the extinction chronology of individual or small groups of species, specific geographical regions or macroscale studies at very coarse geographical and taxonomic resolution, limiting the possibility of adequately testing the proposed hypotheses. We present, to our knowledge, the first global analysis of this extinction based on comprehensive country-level data on the geographical distribution of all large mammal species (more than or equal to 10 kg) that have gone globally or continentally extinct between the beginning of the Last Interglacial at 132 000 years BP and the late Holocene 1000 years BP, testing the relative roles played by glacial–interglacial climate change and humans. We show that the severity of extinction is strongly tied to hominin palaeobiogeography, with at most a weak, Eurasia-specific link to climate change. This first species-level macroscale analysis at relatively high geographical resolution provides strong support for modern humans as the primary driver of the worldwide megafauna losses during the late Quaternary.

In some ways, this is bad news for the global warming crowd. With astonishing frequency, studies come out pointing to a small change in the range of species due to warming, with warnings that the species will be unable to keep up with the rate of change of the earth's temperature.  Of course, this completely ignores the recent geologic history of the earth, oscillating between warm times like the present, and glacial periods, with a majority of the time being spent in the deep freeze.  The oscillations between these are known to be extremely rapid, in many case with huge differences over the course of a few decades.  The earth's flora and fauna, at least the ones left at the end of the last glaciation, survived these oscillation just fine, and then only the largest, juiciest steaks (as well as their predators) were eliminated during the next warm interval as a renegade ape equipped with sticks tipped with sharp rocks spread over the earth.

It also points to the fact that we don't have the foggiest clue what the world would be like in the absence of humans, with the truly giant mammals of the Pleistocene dominating the landscape.  We know that change in a few keystone species can totally change a landscape; in the elimination of the megafauna, and the domestication of others mankind forever changed the course of landscape ecologies across the world.  Africa alone was partially spared because the animals there evolved with, and had some time to "adapt" to human beings.  African elephants persisted, while several species of Mammoths and Mastadons were turned into stew.

Found at WUWT.

Wombat-socho has the Mother of All Rule 5 posts: "Rule 5 Sunday: The Fremont Street Experience" up at The Other McCain, despite the distraction of Las Vegas. Viva Las Vegas!

You Must Be Kidding!

Back in the day, I could solve a Rubik's Cube in a minute or two, but this is just amazing. I had no idea they had created such complex puzzles that take so long to solve.

Beach Report 6/4/14

It was a warm, steamy day by the time we got to the beach, 80 F, a little humid, with dramatic clouds, which have yet to do anything.  The beach was pretty well occupied.

We stopped to talk to Patton's owner.  Patton is a young Belgian Malinois who is growing rapidly. A real cutie, and quite a handful.

A seed head form a "Goats Beard" aka "Salsify" or "Oyster Plant".  Basically a giant dandelion.

Omega Protein Turning Sewage into Energy

Omega Protein uses new fuel source at Va. facility

REEDVILLE - The company that operates the menhaden fishery in the Chesapeake Bay in Virginia says it has been able to reduce its fossil fuel use thanks to a new oil source.

Omega Protein Inc. said a partnership with an Arizona-based company for a new fuel source has cut energy costs and decreased fossil fuel consumption by up to 80 percent at its Reedville facility.

Omega is a Houston company that operates the fishery in Reedville that processes an oily fish called menhaden that is used in fish oil and other products.

The company says that since 2012 it has replaced more than 3 million gallons of oil with renewable diesel oil made from everyday food and cooking oils collected from wastewater.

It's not clear to me from this article whether this is was general waste water from Reedville, or waste water from the Reedville processing plant. Certainly, the oils in menhaden could be turned into diesel, but who wants a car that smells like menhaden, although, it would probably go without notice in Reedville. Besides, the oils are one of the primary product of menhaden; it wouldn't be waste at all.

If it's done with ordinary city wastewater, why haven't bigger municipalities jumped on the option to save money?

Joni Ernst Makes the Pigs Squeal

Ernst wins big in Senate primary, DSCC attacks as “the Sarah Palin of Iowa”

Joni Ernst only needed 35% of the vote to avoid a convention fight against her four competitors for the Republican nomination to the US Senate. Instead, she gained a clear majority of 56% and put herself in position to consolidate GOP support across all factions to face Rep. Bruce Braley, the uncontested Democratic nominee for the seat being vacated by retiring Democrat Tom Harkin.
. . .
Ernst got onto the national radar with the fun jab at pork-barrel politics by recalling her hog-castration experience, but she won the state by attracting support from both Tea Party and so-called establishment Republicans in Iowa. Ben Sasse won in neighboring Nebraska using a similar, open-tent strategy, and both are expected to be strong candidates in the general election.

The pigs were quick to squeal:

Ernst’s big win certainly has the DSCC worried, which rushed last night to paint her as a Sarah Palin clone:

“Her rigid partisanship and support for the federal government shutdown not only won her the support of Sarah Palin, but proved that Joni Ernst is the Sarah Palin of Iowa who would bring more gridlock and dysfunction to Washington,” Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee Deputy Executive Director Matt Canter said in an email statement.

Gee, do all Republican women look alike to the DSCC? More seriously, do they expect that a Palin comparison will actually do damage to Ernst at this point, or at all in any context in Iowa? That looks like a boiler-plate Beltway perspective on flyover country that speaks volumes about the problems Democrats face in middle America this November.

More Joni:

No Obamacare Schadenfreude Today!

Obamacare had been largely replaced in the news by the VA Scandal, which has now been shoved to the back burner in favor of the "Unusual Case of Bowe Bergdahl."

The Obama administration is reported to be believers in "stray voltage", the idea that even bad coverage is better than continued hammering on the original issue:

. . .Officials in every White House crowbar the facts to make their cases. Administration officials over time have also learned how to turn lemons into lemonade, harnessing the frenzied news coverage from a perceived White House miscue to the president's advantage. Losing the news cycles between 8 a.m. and 3 p.m. doesn't necessarily matter; if by the end of the saga you've got a coherent story to pitch, the frenzy has simply given you a larger audience who will listen to it. “Stray voltage,” the term Obama strategist David Plouffe used to describe this approach, is also a great buzzword that makes it look like you’ve got a theory for what might otherwise look like chaos. But this twist is a new, higher order of deception: creating the controversy for the purposes of milking it. . .

It sort of reminded me of an old childhood ditty:

Quakes Threatening the Home Ground

L.A. has always been a seismic hot spot, but somehow I managed to grow up there barely experiencing it. My mother tells a story about diving under the bed with me as an infant during a good sized quake.  I felt a few minor ones growing up. I remember water sloshing out of fish tanks at the tropical fish store I worked at in High School.  I missed the 1971 Sylmar quake by going to college.  Never had any in my years at Humboldt State (which has had several recently), and none in Oregon.  In fact, the biggest quake I ever felt was the Virginia quake three years back that damaged the Washington Monument.

It seems the activity is picking up in the L.A. area again: Quakes are increasing, but scientists aren't sure what it means

After a relatively quiet period of seismic activity in the Los Angeles area, the last five months have been marked by five earthquakes larger than 4.0. That hasn't occurred since 1994, the year of the destructive Northridge earthquake that produced 53 such temblors.

Over the next two decades, there were some years that passed without a single quake 4.0 or greater.

Earthquake experts said 2014 is clearly a year of increased seismic activity, but they said it's hard to know whether the recent string of quakes suggests that a larger one is on the way.

"Probably this will be it, and there won't be any more 4s. But the chance we will have a bigger earthquake this year is more than if we hadn't had this cluster," U.S. Geological Survey seismologist Lucy Jones said. "Every earthquake makes another earthquake more likely."

Someday another big one is going to hit the LA area, but so far the answer as to when is eluding seismologist. A younger brother, Mark, and his family live right in the center of that red blob. I hope they manage to be away some place nice if and when it happens.

Midnite Music - "Things Never Needed"

Cardin Insists on Wind Power Controls

Cardin says Md. wind farm must respect Navy needs

U.S. Sen. Ben Cardin says firm rules are needed to ensure that a wind farm under development on the Eastern Shore doesn't interfere with fighter jet testing at the Patuxent River Naval Air Station across the Chesapeake Bay.
. . .
He says the 25-turbine Great Bay wind power project planned by Texas-based Pioneer Green Energy in Somerset County remains a concern. Democratic Gov. Martin O'Malley vetoed a bill last month that would have placed a 13-month moratorium on construction.

Opponents say the spinning blades could compromise radar that tests the stealth capabilities of fighter jets. The developer has offered to turn off the turbines during test flights.

My inside source claims that the problem could be solved at the wind power stations by painting the blades with radar absorbent paint, part of the system used to produce stealth planes. Of course, then planes might not be able to see the wind turbines on radar, increasing the danger to air traffic.

Wind turbine?  I don't see any wind turbines.

Wombat-socho has the Mother of All Rule 5 posts: "Rule 5 Sunday: The Fremont Street Experience" up at The Other McCain, despite the distraction of Las Vegas. Viva Las Vegas!

What an Old Fuddy Duddy

Stacy McCain that is: Call Me Old-Fashioned, But …

. . . as the father of six children, the standard method of procreation has always seemed to me both efficient and fun.

Others, however, consider the natural way of baby-making to be too messy and unscientific, and so Progress demands a Brave New World of “reproductive technology,” about which Alexis Madigral of The Atlantic enthusiastically cheers. Synthetic gametes? Excuse my skepticism, Doctor Frankenstein, but I still prefer the messy natural way.

Feminism is all about the horrible thought that somewhere, somehow, some man is having fun.

A Good Start

“Minnesota ‘Unsession’ Dumps 1,175 Obsolete, Silly Laws”

It’s no longer a crime in Minnesota to carry fruit in an illegally sized container. The state’s telegraph regulations are gone. And it’s now legal to drive a car in neutral — if you can figure out how to do it.

Those were among the 1,175 obsolete, unnecessary and incomprehensible laws that Gov. Mark Dayton and the Legislature repealed this year as part of the governor’s “unsession” initiative. His goal was to make state government work better, faster and smarter….

Now they need to institute a constitutional mandatory sunset provision on new laws.  Every law expires in 5 years.  No blanket extension; rewriting to be mandatory.

Late Beach Report

We got to the beach later this afternoon, after errands.  It's a cloudy, warm, muggy day here with rumbles of thunder as I write this.  No rain yet though.

The Surf Scoter is still hanging around the harbor. According to the range map at the Cornell bird site, he should be wintering in the north, so maybe he's just stopping for rest and some grub before proceeding onto the tundra.

Not a bad day for butterflies though.  I don't know when to stop calling them Spring Azures and switch to Summer Azures, but this one stopped to try and suck some mineral water out of the sand. . .

As did this Eastern Tiger Swallowtail.

And the now familiar American Painted Lady. Last year the "regular" Painted Lady outnumbered them 10:1 or more, but this year I haven't seen any at all that I can identify. The Painted Lady is Northern Hemisphere wide, but the American is, well, American.

 Another way to tell them apart, if you can't see the little white spot surrounded by orange (which you can see above, but not to the left), is the eyespots on the underside of the back wing.  The American Painted Lady has two large spots, while the Painted Lady has four much smaller spots.

There were also Azures in the milkweeds on the sand dunes, not to mention the usual Clouded Sulphurs, who are abundant right now. I saw a couple of butterflies I couldn't identify, I thought I might have seen a Red Admiral, but it was headed to the Eastern Shore too fast to be sure.

Obamacare Schadenfreude, 6/3/14

Warmer, and more humid today, and still mostly sunny.  A front way out in West Virginia, Western Maryland and Pennsylvania threatens to bring us rain sometime this afternoon or evening. 

Obamacare gave President Obama a nervous tic:

The ritual started in earnest last fall in the midst of the biggest humiliation of Barack Obama’s presidency, the failure of the health care website. Anytime he heard a sliver of good news, the president reacted the same way: He knocked on the polished cherry wood table in the Roosevelt Room.

It’s a small thing, almost a nervous tic, but Obama’s habit of knocking on wood during Obamacare meetings had become notable, something that close advisers talked and even joked about among themselves.
...
When Obamacare fixer Jeffrey Zients told the president for the first time that the website would finally hold up under a rush of visitors, Obama joined his senior aides in a round of knocking. When the insurance marketplace finally functioned as it should, they knocked. When enrollment numbers picked up in March, they knocked.

In interviews with more than 60 people who have had close dealings with Obama — his aides, lawmakers, friends, historians, critics and outside advisers — the portrait emerges of a president shadowed by a deepening awareness that his time and power are finite, and that two-thirds of his presidency is already in the past tense.

Certainly the most scientific administration in history.  There's nothing he can't fix with a signing statement and an executive order.

This one's not directly Obamacare Schadenfreude, but since it's the direction health care is going under Obamacare, I think it's worthy:

Citing Expense, Medicare Officials Pass on Investigating Fraud

Medicare lost 6.7 billion dollars to fraud and error in 2010, according to a new inspector’s general report. Something close to that number is likely lost every year, and NPR explains how this happens: of the claims examined overall, more than half “were billed at the wrong rate or lacked documentation to justify the service.” Moreover, the investigation found that while some doctors bill for procedures cheaper than the ones they actually provided, many more billed for procedures that were more expensive than what they provided.

In light of the report’s findings, the inspector general’s office suggested that CMS should investigate those doctors who charge for more expensive procedures than they actually deliver. And how did the CMS respond to this shocking report?

But in its reply to the findings, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which runs Medicare, said it doesn’t plan to review the billings of doctors who almost always charge for the most expensive visits because it isn’t cost-effective to do so.

To put it simply: Medicare knows some doctors are ripping off taxpayers but lacks the ability or will to find out how bad the problem is, much less put a stop to it. If this is the glorious health care system we are building, God help us all.

The people ripping off Medicare are a constituency, and no government can profit from hurting a constituency, unless it's to benefit a larger constituency.  Tax payer should count, many of them are part of the constituency.  And the snake keeps eating it's own tail.

It's Important to Have Fresh Bait

Click bait that is....

Another Great Moment of Zero Tolerance

Sure looks like a hardened criminal

Honor student charged with felonies over Science Fair volcano

A 16-year-old girl was arrested and expelled from school after she demonstrating the traditional ‘erupting volcano’ in class as a science experiment. Even a year later, she is still being haunted by the multiple felonies she was charged with.

Kiera Wilmot’s volcano was designed to demonstrate a chemical reaction simulating a volcanic eruption. Inside her volcano prop, was an 8-ounce water bottle with some toilet bowl cleaner in it. When the cleaner is exposed to aluminum, it creates an exothermic chemical reaction.

Her experiment got her in serious trouble on April 29th, 2013.

“When I put the aluminum foil into the bottle, the lid popped off an a little bit of smoke climbed out of the bottle,” Kiera described.

No one was hurt. No damage was caused. No harm was done.
. . .
She was charged with possession/discharge of a weapon on school grounds, and discharging a destructive device, both felonies.

For the record, I made a science fair volcano back in the 7th grade.  However, it was the more conventional baking soda, vinegar and Red Dye #2 volcano and not the more exciting aluminum foil and tidy bowl version, and so, would probably only be charged as a misdemeanor in today's climate.

The good news is that that, in a moment of apparent common sense, the authorities have at least partially relented:

Although prosecutors eventually declined to pursue Kiera as a criminal, the charges themselves continue to taint Kiera’s record and impede her future success.

“All my charges have been dropped, but the lawyer says that it takes 5 years to clear each felony off the record,” Kiera said.

2014 Hurricane Forecast - A Few, Maybe, Sometime

Time again for that annual guessing game "How many Hurricanes and Tropical Storms will there be, how many will hit the U.S. and, how much damages will they cause".  Fortunately we have NOAA on the job to be the contestant, and their answer to those questions for the 2014 hurricane season is:

NOAA’s 2014 Atlantic Hurricane Season Outlook indicates that a near-normal or below-normal hurricane season is likely this year. The outlook calls for a 50% chance of a below-normal season, a 40% chance of a near-normal season, and only a 10% chance of an above-normal season. See NOAA definitions of above-, near-, and below-normal seasons. The Atlantic hurricane region includes the North Atlantic Ocean, Caribbean Sea, and Gulf of Mexico.
. . .
Based on the current and expected conditions, combined with model forecasts, we estimate a 70% probability for each of the following ranges of activity during 2014:

• 8-13 Named Storms
• 3-6 Hurricanes
• 1-2 Major Hurricanes
• Accumulated Cyclone Energy (ACE) range of 40%-100% of the median.

. . .
These expected ranges are centered below the official NHC 1981-2010 seasonal averages of 12 named storms, 6 hurricanes, and 3 major hurricanes.

In short, a broad range, centered on values a little lower than average, due to an expected El Niño.  Not a terribly risky forecast, but still, we could have a terrible year, and then NOAA would have egg on their collective faces.

How has NOAA fared historically on this prediction.  Fortunately, someone else has waded through the data to look at that question: From 2011:

NOAA’s seasonal hurricane forecasts: Do they have any predictive value?

For each of the years, NOAA’s prediction range is about equal to one standard deviation, which implies a 1/3 chance of being right provided it is near the mean. Thus, if they were going by chance, then they should have had 13 (39/3) correct; instead, they were right 16 times. Unfortunately, because of the small data set, we can only say that they are better than chance at about the 80% level. In addition, they under-predicted 10 times and over-predicted 13 times, so there is a very slight tendency to over-predict. With more data, that trend would probably disappear.

Just a little better than rolling the dice.  It's also telling that they tend to overpredict.  Overpredicting is better for a forecasting institution in that people are more likely to be upset by an underprediction that goes horribly wrong than an overprediction that fails and results in a weak hurricane season.

I'd like to see a re-analysis of this with 2012 and 2013 data. 

But lets hope they're right and we have a weak hurricane season.

Beach Report: 06/02/14

The weather is still beautiful here, mid-60s to 70, sunny, with just the right amount of south breeze.

A Cabbage White butterfly puddling on a heap of mud that slid off the cliff.

Georgia is trying to find the big teeth that (sometimes) are found over the shelf of debris that forms just below the wave line.  No such luck.

I did find this Cow Shark tooth, which is pretty rare for us. If Fossil Guy is correct, this one is a Notorynchus cepedianus, the Seven Gill Cow shark, which can be seen from the coarse serrations at the "front" end of the tooth.

Right now, both the wild rose, and the Honey Suckle are in full bloom, and is some places, the smell is simply overwhelming.

The Ospreys were out and fishing.  We had one brief flyover from a Bald Eagle too.

An Eastern Tiger Swallowtail puddling.

By the time we finished, the beach was getting a little better used, but not nearly to the extent as it was on the weekend.

The Surf Scoter I noted yesterday is still hanging around.

Just a Little Bit of Obamacare Schadenfreude

Still a lovely day here so far, sunny, breezy, 70, without any humidity, which is promised for later today.  Just a quick Obamacare Schadenfreude update:

The GOP was right... GOP’s Obamacare fears come true

Liberals wanted a national enrollment system under Obamacare.

They might just get it.

Right now, 36 states rely on HealthCare.gov, the federal exchange, to enroll people in health coverage. At least two more states are opting in next year, with a few others likely to follow. Only two states are trying to get out.

That’s precisely the opposite of the Affordable Care Act’s original intent: 50 exchanges run by 50 states.

But please remember what Nancy Pelosi really wanted, a single payer (federal government) take over of the entire health care system, one sixth of the nation's economy.

The federal option was supposed to be a limited and temporary fallback. But a shift to a bigger, more permanent Washington-controlled system is instead underway — without preparation, funding or even public discussion about what a national exchange covering millions of Americans means for the future of U.S. health care. It’s coming about because intransigent Republicans shunned state exchanges, and ambitious Democrats bungled them.

Republicans had warned all along that President Barack Obama’s health law would lead to greater Washington control. “This was all predictable,” said Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.), a physician who sees growing federal control of the health system hurting patients. “Our friends on the other side didn’t listen.”

What's notable about all this is that the failed state exchanges are primarily blue states; Oregon, Hawaii, Maryland.  Is is possible they were deliberate failures to empower the federal option?

Oh, and I found this along the way:  Why Healthcare exchanges are like flea markets.

The flea market does a lot to draw customers in. It has a big billboard next to its highway exit, a food court, and even hires a live band on weekends.

The 14 state exchanges and Healthcare.gov are supposed to be like that for health insurance. It's even the same principle behind the New York Stock Exchange, says Economist Douglas Holtz-Eakin.
. . .
"You could look at health insurance and see the same thing: Do people want to sell their policies on there? Or is it growing in magnitude? Those are sort of standard metrics of success for marketplaces, and we should apply them to [the exchanges]," he says.

Eight million people showed up to buy insurance on the exchanges in the first six months. But will it be a good enough deal to bring them back? Will more insurers jump in? Holtz-Eakin says we don't know enough yet to conclude which state's exchanges are successful.

"I think we know the outliers, we know the big failures in Oregon and Maryland, for example. We know what appear to be the great successes in places like Kentucky, which is quite cheap and have a big fraction of people signed up. In between, it's pretty hard to make the case we know who's better than someone else," he says.
. . .
There's just not enough information right now for Economists like Holtz-Eakin pass judgment on the Affordable Care Act's marketplaces. He says they're only part of the picture of the federal health law's success anyway.

"I think the focus on the exchanges per se is a natural fallout from Healthcare.gov melting down at the beginning," he says, "but it's really not the right metric for success or failure."

Economist Jonathan Gruber agrees. "Success can really only be defined ultimately as a significant improvement in the well-being of the US public - un-insurance rates drop, seeing health improved, seeing bankruptcies drop."

True Friends

Midnite Music - "Far Beyond the Sun"

Wombat-socho has the Mother of All Rule 5 posts: "Rule 5 Sunday: The Fremont Street Experience" up at The Other McCain, despite the distraction of Las Vegas. Viva Las Vegas!

This Day on the Bay

Oh my goodness, what an amazing day here.  High 60s to 70s, clear, low humidity. Tomorrow we're supposed to start seeing some summertime heat and humidity, so we had to make the best of it.

Georgia and I got down to walk early, before the crowd arrived

I found this nice Mako tooth, although it wasn't really the best of days for fossils.

This sailboat had a hard time getting enough wind to sail

 The mid day mob is getting started now,

A practice kayak run.

 I just had to take the afternoon fishing trip.  This family was walking the jetty as I was leaving.

And this Surf Scoter was hanging around the jetty too.  I saw him this morning too, so he's (and it's a he from the the color) seems be taking up some kind of residence here.

Fishing was pretty good.  I caught a limit of Striped Bass (2) and two pretty decent Bluefish, about 20 inches long, one of which provided tonights dinner.  I also lost one large Striped Bass (estimated to be 26 inches) at the side of the boat. I stayed until sunset.

Looking south to Rocky Point and the Dominion Gas Docks.  The Belt of Venus gives the sky opposite the sunset the pink color

A cruise liner was going down the Bay, still in the sunset, while I was in the shadow of the cliffs. The ship is really all white.

The Vikings of Cheboygan?

USA: Viking Artifacts Discovered Near Great Lakes

Michigan| A group of amateur archaeologists searching for the remains of a native american settlements near the town of Cheboygan, on the coast of Lake Huron, have uncovered a large quantity of artefacts, allegedly of Norse or Viking origin. A total of 194 objects, mostly made from various metals including silver, iron, copper and tin, were found on what could be the site of an ancient viking trade post, controlling the Straights of Mackinac, that leads to Lake Michigan.

Seems like pretty solid evidence, or an extensive and very expensive hoax. Hoaxes aren't unknown in science, but I choose to hope that this finding proves true.

The artefacts are of various nature and geographical origin. Swords, axes and other weapons from Scandinavian or Germanic origin, silver buttons and a balance scale allegedly from the British isles, hair combs and knife handles made of walrus ivory and originating from Greenland or Iceland… The presence of all these goods suggests an elaborate and efficient economic system based on long-distance trade.

Archaeologists had been searching the eastern coast of North America for signs of the passage of Norsemen, ever since the discovery in 1960 of the site of l’Anse aux Meadows, in Newfoundland, Canada. Many items found on that first site had suggested that an elaborate network of trade existed between that specific Norse colony and the American continent. Such clues included the remains of butternuts, which didn’t grow on any land north of the province of New Brunswick, and therefore had to be “imported”. Other possible Norse outposts were identified in 2012, in Nanook, in the Tanfield Valley on Baffin Island, as well as in Nunguvik, on the Willows Island and the Avayalik Islands.

This is very interesting.  What happened to the Viking settlements in the New World?  We know that the Viking settlements in Greenland petered out as the the climate cooled at the end of the medieval warm period, and agriculture there became no longer viable. Hower, they were in contact with the Viking settlements in Iceland throughout the era, and it's thought the last settlers there sailed back to Iceland.

This is however the first Viking settlement discovered in the area of the North American Great Lakes, and this could bring a lot of new information concerning the actual extent of their trade network on the continent. The site is strategically located to enable control of the waterways leading to both Lake Michigan and Lake Erie, while enabling a navigable access to the St-Lawrence Bassin and the Atlantic Ocean. All of the items already already recovered have been transfered for further analysis to the Department of Archaeology of the University of Michigan, which has also inherited the responsability for the site. Further research should be done over the next months to complete the survey of the site and gather all possible remaining artefacts.

But what about American settlements?  Were they cut off when their compatriots left Greenland, or did they too, make their way back across the Atlantic?  If they were cut off, did they persist in America for some period of time, and breed into the local population. Can we find traces of the European genes in the Indians Native Americans of the the East Coast and Great Lakes region? Or were they massacred without leaving behind genetic evidence.

Wombat-socho has the Mother of All Rule 5 posts: "Rule 5 Sunday: The Fremont Street Experience" up at The Other McCain, despite the distraction of Las Vegas. Viva Las Vegas!

Obamacare Schadenfreude - Null

Zip, zero, none, nada. Maybe tomorrow.