Having been blown out the day before, Alex, Kelly and I took quick boat ride this morning.  Given Kelly's interest in Drum Point Light at the Marine Museum yesterday, I decided to run down to the Cove Point Lighthouse:

The winds were down below 5 knots this morning, and we had a great ride.  We even saw breaking fish at a couple different locations along the way.  I did stop briefly at the Pez Dispenser to show off, but the only fish were sickly...

Only the Names have Changed

15-Year-Old Dead, 6 Shot After Dice Game Goes Bad

At least seven people are shot, including a 15-year-old, in West Baltimore.

Monique Griego was at the scene. It happened in the 1500 block of West Fayette Street. Police still have the entire street blocked off.

Shots fired came into police at 9:15 p.m. Saturday night. Once officers arrived on the scene, they found one victim at the corner. He was shot in the head. Two more victims flagged down officers two blocks away from where the shooting happened.

“This appears to be an illegal dice game that was taking place out here. Most likely—we don’t know what the motive is—but we know from history there’s some connection to a robbery, trying to take money or something along those lines,” said Commissioner Anthony Batts.

Now, from history, a great song, based on a similar moment from the past. The late, great Dave Van Ronk performing "Stackerlee":



If you don't want to hear Dave's commentary, skip to 2:25

Watch the World Change

A Timelapse of 30 Years of Human Impact on Earth

Since the 1970s, NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey have been amassing satellite images of every inch of our planet as part of the Landsat program. Over time, the images reveal a record of change: of cities expanding, lakes and forests disappearing, new islands emerging from the sea off the coast of rising Middle East metropolises like Dubai.

If you could thumb through these historic pictures as if in a flip book, they would show stunning change across the earth's surface, in both our natural environments and our man-made ones. Now, the digital equivalent of that experience is possible – three decades of global change as GIF – in a project unveiled today between NASA, the USGS, TIME, Google, and the CREATE Lab at Carnegie Mellon University.

Landsat images taken between 1984 and 2012 have been converted into a seamless, navigable animation built from millions of satellite photos. As Google wrote this morning on its blog: "We believe this is the most comprehensive picture of our changing planet ever made available to the public."

Pretty cool.  If you zoom in on our area, you can watch the sand wash down the Bay from the north.

Thanks to Gary Clarke.

We Visit the Marine Museum

 In an effort to see something exciting in Calvert County, Alex, Kelly and I decided to visit the Calvert Marine Museum, down on Solomons Island, which neither Alex nor I had seen in several years, except for concert nights.

 After a run through the fossil displays (a very impressive collection which I envy), and the aquarium (very nice aquaria, but a very limited selection of fish, due to the limited number of fish in the middle Chesapeake Bay), we came out to the otter exhibit.  The otters were having a good time, and many photos were taken.

The Drum Point Lighthouse.  Originally located on Drum Point (obviously) at the mouth of the Patuxent River and the Bay, it was moved intact to the Marine Museum in concert with the building of the Thomas Johnson bridge across the Patuxent between Calvert and Saint Mary's Counties.

The lighthouse was open for visitors, so we went up and through the house.  It has three stories (if you count the little room with the light at the top).  It's well furnished now, and looks like an attractive vacation cottage inside.

Kelly and Alex up in the top, with the light.  Originally an oil lamp which needed to be tended regularly, it's currently equipped with an electric incandescent light.

Another look at the light.  The red windows were there to warn people of dangerous sectors in the original location.

A view of Solomon's Harbor from the second floor of the lighthouse.

Back At Last

Even though we arrived back in Maryland late Monday/early Tuesday, we never made it to the beach this week, as various tasks kept us on the run.  However, our younger son Alex, and his wife Kelly (and their little dog Hendrix) came to visit this weekend, so we managed to find the time.

We had hoped to go out on the the Bay, and convince Kelly it wasn't always awful, but the wind didn't cooperate, running 10+ mph from the north, and having good sized white caps.  Maybe a little later.

The wind had a long shot at the cliff, and must have had a good "ridge" lift; the eagles and ospreys were out.  We saw one prolonged chase where an eagle tried to bushwhack an osprey into dropping his fish, but failed; once the osprey got above the eagle, it quit and came back to shore.





Needless to say, these weren't those birds (or at least not then; there were at least four eagles in the sky at one time, and several osprey).

Rule 5 Saturday - Bar Refaeli Walks on Waters

This Rule 5 post goes out to Bar Refaeli, the Israeli super model, who finally got fed up with sitting silent while know-nothing celebrities trashed her county:

Israeli supermodel Bar Refaeli on Wednesday demanded of Pink Floyd front-man Roger Waters, a vocal supporter of Boycott Divestment and Sanctions against Israel, that he remove a glamorous shot of her from a video he uses in his performances, saying that Waters’s calls for a cultural boycott of the Jewish state should also include her.

So who do you want, an aging rock star, or a hots supermodel.  I like Floyd, but there are other singers...

Via Twitter, Refaeli (@BarRefaeli) told her 500,000+ followers in Hebrew: “Roger Waters, you should remove my picture from videos at your concerts. If you’re going to boycott, then go all the way.”

Yesterday, Waters, who recently raised the ire of the Jewish community by featuring a pig shaped balloon emblazoned with a Star of David at his concerts, formally called for his supporters and musician colleagues to join the Boycott, Divestment and Sanction movement against Israel.

In an interview with The Algemeiner Tuesday, Simon Wiesenthal Center associate dean Rabbi Abraham Cooper said he was surprised by the timing of Waters’s latest call in light of the 1,700 recent political-related deaths in Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Lebanon and the current ongoing US-brokered peace talks.

“The fact that Roger Waters would call for a boycott against Israel, when Israelis and Palestinians are actually meeting today, shows a complete disconnect from reality, and probably really just a disinterest in even the headlines of today’s newspaper, and certainly, a fundamental bias; I guess you could call it a hatred,” Rabbi Cooper said.

Presidential Procrastination on Keystone Continues

Final Decision On Keystone May Not Come Till 2014

The State Department's Office of Inspector General announced Friday it does not expect to release the results of an investigation into a possible conflict of interest in the department's Keystone XL pipeline review until January—a move that could delay a final decision on the project until next year.

Earlier this month, the OIG began an inquiry into allegations made by the Sierra Club and other environmental groups that Environmental Resources Management, a consulting firm hired to produce the draft environmental impact statement for the pipeline, had ties to TransCanada Corp. and the American Petroleum Institute, two organizations with a key stake in the project.

TransCanada Corp. is the company set to build Keystone, and the American Petroleum Institute is a trade association, which publicly supports the pipeline.

The conflict-of-interest inquiry and the State Department's review of the pipeline have been ongoing, and State has not yet said when it will make a final determination on Keystone XL. But Friday's announcement that the OIG investigation results won't be released until January makes it likely that a decision on the project will be pushed back to 2014.

The "conflict of interest" issue is total BS; all kinds of companies work together and separately; their only interest is in money.  If you applied the "Kevin Bacon" principal, I suspect you would find most companies 'have ties' to almost all other companies in 3-4 jumps, and less in cases of certain industrial complexes.  In particular, large environmental consulting firms like Environmental Resources Management 'have ties' as such to nearly all such petroleum companies.

Any stall will do.  Obama is stuck between two constituencies, labor unions on one hand who want the growth and  jobs for their workers, and the environmentalists who want absolutely no growth, no how, no way, especially if it helps move any carbon anywhere to market.

Found at Hot Air.

Reign of Pain Update: Lack of Money Kills Art at Berkeley Dog Pound

Public art a casualty at Berkeley animal shelter

While most new structures built using city bonds are decorated with public art, Berkeley’s new $12.4 million animal shelter is not. City staff skipped out on the municipally-mandated public art process during construction and the reasons why remain difficult to pin down.

Since the project’s inception in 2002, shelter plans ran into a range of obstacles, from difficulty finding an appropriate site to a series of cost overruns. As a result, said Deputy City Manager William Rogers, the city decided not to set aside $142,500 of its budget for public art, despite a Berkeley ordinance that requires municipal projects to do just that.

Others familiar with the project said the decision not to include public art in the shelter was due to a failure to put the proper language in the bond measure that funded construction. Whether that was an oversight or an intentional decision to ensure flexibility in the project budget is unclear.

“I don’t know why the bond measure didn’t include an art requirement,” said Rogers. “But what I know is we basically put the dollars into animal care and the facility so we could do things like prevent transmission of disease so fewer animals need to be euthanized. And we ended up with a state-of-the-art facility that’s absolutely in the best interest of the animals.”

A wise choice.  I like dogs and cats, but I've never noticed them to be trenchant art critics.

Is This a Great Country, or What?

That's quite a smile

City Will Pay 'Filthy' Filner Legal Fees, Damages in Lawsuit

In exchange for his long awaited exit as Mayor, the city of San Diego will pay Bob Filner's legal fees and his share of damages in a lawsuit according to anonymous sources. An estimate puts that amount around several hundred thousand dollars.

The body count is up to 18, possibly more, women who have alleged Filner groped, licked, squeezed and harassed them. Filner refused to leave office, even as women continued to come forward. Obviously, his resignation was the only bargaining chip he had in his pocket. A lawsuit was filed by Gloria Allred on behalf of her client who was a city employee and Filner's Communication Director; the City and Filner were both named in the lawsuit. There is no word if there will be more lawsuits forthcoming, but the County Sheriff has set up a hotline especially for Filner victims.

At some level, you have to admire the audaciousness of the man.  Eighteen and counting accusations of sexual harassment, and his response is a one week quickie therapy session, and a promise to try not to harass any more.  He should represent some city; I just can't think of which one. New Orleans perhaps?  Maybe his next job should be holding self-confidence seminars.

There's a convenient gallery of Filner's accusers on CNN here, it only goes to #17.  It is pretty hard to keep up, after all.

For the most part he seems to have accepted Benjamin Franklin's advice to a young man to choose an older mistress, because, among other things, they are more grateful. He was generally accepting of race, hair color, and age.

However, number 9, Emily Gilbert the Marilyn Monroe impersonator is rather fetching in a dated sort of way:

Reign of Pain Update: Budget Cuts Threaten Dolphin Funerals

Federal cuts threaten team dealing with dolphin crisis

Looming budget cuts are threatening the local stranding team formed to respond to mass dolphin die-offs. And amid one of the largest dolphin die-offs in 26 years, stranding teams across the country are pleading for federal funds.

Without federal money, the staff of eight would be reduced and there would be fewer people available to respond to strandings.

So far this year, more than 170 dolphins have washed up dead on Virginia’s coastline – mainly in the southern portion of the Chesapeake Bay – in a marked increase from a normal year.

A smaller staff could mean that, wherever a dead dolphin washed up, the landowner would be responsible for disposing of it, said Mark Swingle, director of Research and Conservation at the Virginia Aquarium & Marine Science Center. Before the stranding team was established in the late 1980s, the city used to bury the dolphins.

Oh my goodness, a landowner would actually have to take care of his own beach?  We can't have that; they might start thinking they have some rights there!

Here's to Never Growing Up

As Ted says, if you haven't by the time you're 50, you don't have to.  I made the cut off...



Really just a cheap way to get both a Rule 5 post and an FMJRA (Rule 2 post) from Wombat-Socho, who pointed out how Avril and Danica McKeller make out in Avril's next video, sadly, not this one, but then, another opportunity, another time.

How is Pot Like Global Warming?

Research for both is funded by the government, and specific results are expected

Read the whole thing.

...Gupta initially opposed marijuana legalization because a review of the medical literature showed him that 96% of all published articles found some sort of negative effect of marijuana, and almost no articles showed a benefit, especially compared to existing approved medications. However, a couple of anecdotal cases coming out of the states that had legalized medicinal marijuana in SPITE of the federal governments laws caused him to go back and reexamine the funding model. In retrospect it shouldn’t have been surprising, but he learned that 96% of all funded research was to look for negative effects of marijuana, and that to get funded and permission to get government grown pot was so difficult that there simply weren’t all that many papers in the first place. In well over thirty years of intensive examination, all of the examination was literally preselected to find problems, almost none to find benefits, and one had to walk on water and push much paper to do either one (and relatively few scientists had bothered).
...
This situation almost perfectly matches the evolution of “climate science”.  Nobody cared about it for decades, but suddenly a group of individuals emerged that all benefited from the demonization of carbon. This included environmental groups, that hated civilization itself and the burning of anything (as long, of course, as their own lifestyle was preserved), energy producers that saw in this the opportunity to triple or quadruple their profits by creating artificial scarcity of a plentiful resource, politicians that saw in this the opportunity to raise taxes, get elected on a world-saving “issue”, and perhaps line their own pockets along the way, and a United Nations that saw an opportunity to transform it into a way to tax the rich nations and transfer money to developing nations (while again lining various pockets along the way)...

Funny how that works isn't it?  He who pays the piper, calls the tune.

Even completely ethical scientists have to eat, and if the only way they can eat is to get funded, and the only way they can get funded is to submit proposals that seek to prove that CO_2 is bad, guess what they will propose to study? And if they want to get funded AGAIN, guess what they will find? Climate science has been effectively corrupted beyond any hope of objectivity.

Amen. I've seen that in action. Virtually all RFPs in the biological or ecological sciences list carbon cycling and climate change issues, and increasingly strained connections to ecological harm as potential subjects of interest. And they're not looking for tales of how the warmer weather will make things flourish. They want to know how things will get worse. And that's how you get sad tales about chickadees moving north of some magic road.

I would venture a guess that most of the research devoted to global warming does not study whether or not global warming (in the anthropogenic sense) is real, but rather assumes it is real, and goes on to find changes that can be blamed on it.

Midnite Music - Alligator Ugly

I blame Bert.

Rule 5 Sunday didn't come around until Tuesday at The Other McCain this week, busy Wombat!

College Racial Incident Turns Out to be False Flag Operation

Obama-supporting white kids perpetrated Oberlin race hoax

One of the two students removed from Oberlin College earlier this year for allegedly circulating virulently racist, anti-Jewish and anti-gay messages around campus is an ardent leftist and committed supporter of President Barack Obama, The Daily Caller News Foundation has learned.

Dylan Bleier, one of the two students, organized a voter registration drive on behalf of Obama before the 2008 election. That voter drive is still listed on the website for Organizing for Action, the non-profit group whose mission is to advance Obama’s agenda.

Dylan Bleier

The Oberlin Police Department identified Bleier and his partner in the spree, Matt Alden, as two of the principal architects of a month-long spate of racist, anti-Jewish and anti-gay messages at the small, private campus.On his now-defunct LinkedIn page, Bleier noted that he was the founder and president of the Ithaca High School for Obama club. He also identified himself as a member of the Oberlin College Democrats.
...
The progressive school canceled all classes for a day in a mad scramble to address the alleged hate-related incidents the campus. The saga culminated in a report of a person wearing a hood and robe resembling a KKK outfit near the Afrikan Heritage House, according to Oberlin’s president Marvin Krislov in a letter also signed by three deans.

The very least the school should do now is to cancel classes for a day to warn of the dangers of political hoaxes, but it sounds like they should just cancel the school altogether, and send the students off to somewhere they can get a sort of non-biased edumacation.

Good comments from Instapundit,

"The good news about America in 2013 is that if you’re a lefty and you want a racial incident to fire up the troops, you pretty much have to make it up yourself."

Ann Alhouse,

"When you don't know who has said/written/done something, don't take the expression at face value."

 and Stacy McCain:

Another God-Hating Anti-American Democrat Exposed as a Criminal Liar

Obama Boosts Pit Bulls

Obama Joins The Fight For Pit Bulls 

Not only did the Obama family introduce Sunny the puppy to her adoring country, but the White House also came out against breed-specific legislation -- regulations and laws that restrict ownership of dogs by breed, pit bulls being the most common target.

I wish them well with their new puppy, and I hope it brings them as much joy as sky brought us, however unlikely that seems. But it would sure be cool to have an Osprey to take the dog to the beach with...

Groups like the American Bar Association have said for years that these sorts of restrictions do harm -- to families, to dogs, to due process and to the economy -- without actually improving public safety.

Based on a statement that the White House put out about a week ago, it would seem that Obama agrees. "Breed-Specific Legislation Is a Bad Idea" begins the White House's official response to an online petition, signed by more than 30,000 people, asking for laws that target dogs by breed to be outlawed at a federal level.

Obama's statement doesn't speak to federal legislative efforts. But, the White House does adopt the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's community-based ideas for better methods of improving public safety.

While I agree that breed-specific legislation is a terrible idea, I also don't trust a loose dog on the
beach that looks like it has Pit Bull blood. While the dogs themselves can a often are properly socialized, there is a strain of dog on dog aggression that runs in Pits that needs to be carefully watched for.  And not all owners properly socialize their dogs, and I suspect Pits are less likely to be trained to be dog social.

Chesapeake to Get More Power

Combined-Cycle Gas Turbine generator to be built near Brandywine

Dallas-based independent power developer Panda Power Funds will build the proposed 859MW combined-cycle gas turbine (CCGT) Panda Mattawoman power plant, in Brandywine, southern Maryland, near the US capital of Washington DC. The Mattawoman project, scheduled for commissioning in 2016, is intended to cover the gap between power supply and demand in the region.

I, for one, think it might be educational if the enviro-ninnies in charge of Washington D.C. experienced a few years of insufficient power.  Unfortunately, given that they have the legislative and executive authority, I'm sure us rural bumpkins would suffer brownouts before they do.

Once operational, the CCGT plant will provide enough electricity to power 859,000 homes in the Greater Maryland and Washington DC metropolitan area. The plant is situated approximately 565 yards from the nearest road in an existing I-2 heavy industrial zone.

The Combined-Cycle Gas Turbine is an interesting technology, where the heat from the burning natural gas is used twice, first to turn the gas turbine (basically like a jet engine running on natural gas) and then the hot gases from that are used to boil water for a steam generator.  This increases the amount of energy for the amount of fuel used.

The Panda Mattawoman plant will have emissions control technology, the operator said. Like many gas-fired power plants, it is being planned termed a zero-liquid-discharge, which means it will not require waste water to a treatment facility treatment Chesapeake Bay. The cooling system at the plant will run on recycled municipal waste water.

So it should have essentially zero impact on the Chesapeake Bay.  Other than CO2, of course, which can be a limiting resource for the phytoplankton that grow in the Bay.

This of course, is due almost entirely to fracking, which has made natural gas a relatively cheap and clean source of power for the United States.  No wonder the libs keep trying to kill it.

Tattooed Temptress Tied To Hernandez Homicide

Gun found in Massachusetts car crash linked to investigation into former New England Patriot Aaron Hernandez

A .38-caliber pistol found after a car crash in Springfield, Mass., two months ago is part of an investigation involving Aaron Hernandez, law enforcement sources said Tuesday.

According to CNN, the gun was found in the trunk after the driver, 19-year-old Jailene Diaz-Ramos of Bristol, Conn., was taken to hospital on June 21.

According to a police incident report, Diaz-Ramos was not licensed to carry the weapon and was charged with possession of a firearm without a license, possession of ammunition without a license and improper storage of a firearm. She has been released on bail after appearing at Springfield District Court.

The weapon's ballistics match marking on bullets at the scene where Daniel Abreu and Safiro Furtado were shot dead outside a Boston bar last year, according to law enforcement sources.

Picture from Facebook

Jailene, huh?  Now that's a name.  She looks sweet and innocent to me, although the fish on the right arm is interesting.

Rule 5 Sunday didn't come around until Tuesday at The Other McCain this week, busy Wombat!

Slip 'N Slide!

This looks like fun.



Some cuties, some not so much. Use HD if possible.

Rule 5 Sunday didn't come around until Tuesday at The Other McCain this week, busy Wombat!

Seems a Little Dull to Me

German Doctors Remove Tumours From Liver Using an iPad

A team of German doctors have performed liver surgery with the aid of a tablet computer in what has been described as one of the first surgeries of its kind.

Professor Karl Oldhafer, chief physician of general and visceral surgery at Asklepios Hospital Hamburg-Barmbek, and his colleagues removed two tumours from a patient’s liver using an iPad in a three-hour-long surgery that took place last week, Reuters reported.

Posted from an IPad.

Fun With the TSA

Compare to the 1984 version:



Ah, the good old days.

Rule 5 Sunday didn't come around until Tuesday at The Other McCain this week, busy Wombat!