Friday, July 7, 2017
Sunday, July 9, 2017
(The fact that in normal life and in psychiatry, anyone who “consistently and persistently insists” on anything else contrary to physical reality is considered either confused or delusional is conveniently ignored.)
Michelle Cretella, M.D.
The map is not the territory.
Alfred Korzybski
If a foreign government had imposed this system of education on the United States, we would rightfully consider it an act of war.
Glenn T. Seaborg, National Commission on Education, 1983
TRUMP’S WARSAW WAFFLE
In Poland, he casts doubt on election meddling by Russia
Los Angeles Times
Since all my additions are on topics discussed here, I have simply added to Friday’s post. There is considerably more content here. Open as we did Friday.
Trump Urges West To Show Courage
Wall Street Journal
Both of those headlines in today’s papers refer to the same speech given by the President to cheering crowds in Warsaw. Inside, the Journal, in an editorial, referred to that speech:
Trump’s Defining Speech
In Poland, he asks the West to defend its values of faith and freedom.
The White House description of Donald Trump’s speech Thursday in Warsaw was simply, “Remarks by President Trump to the People of Poland.” In truth, Mr. Trump’s remarks were directed at the people of the world. Six months into his first term of office, Mr. Trump finally offered the core of what could become a governing philosophy. It is a determined and affirmative defense of the Western tradition. [snip]
[snip] This is the speech Mr. Trump should have given to introduce himself to the world at his Inauguration. In place of that speech’s resentments, his Warsaw talk offered a better form of nationalism. It is a nationalism rooted in values and beliefs—the rule of law, freedom of expression, religious faith and freedom from oppressive government—that let Europe and then America rise to prominence. This, Mr. Trump is saying, is worth whatever it takes to preserve and protect.
It was an important and, we hope, a defining speech—for the Trump Presidency and for Donald Trump himself.
The Los Angeles Times, a Democrat newspaper, has no inside editorial about the speech. It does call for an investigation of voter fraud to be abandoned.
I think no further comment is needed on newspaper bias and reliability. Apparently the threat to all of Western Civilization is unimportant to the Times; certainly not more important than Russian meddling with the US elections. Mr. Trump did point out that we don’t really know who hacked the various servers, which is what the charge of “Russian meddling” refers to. It was said in a news conference, not in the Warsaw speech.
He did say in his speech:
http://www.cnn.com/2017/07/06/politics/trump-speech-poland-transcript/index.html
[snip]
Today, the West is also confronted by the powers that seek to test our will, undermine our confidence, and challenge our interests. To meet new forms of aggression, including propaganda, financial crimes, and cyberwarfare, we must adapt our alliance to compete effectively in new ways and on all new battlefields.
We urge Russia to cease its destabilizing activities in Ukraine and elsewhere, and its support for hostile regimes — including Syria and Iran — and to instead join the community of responsible nations in our fight against common enemies and in defense of civilization itself. (Applause.)
Finally, on both sides of the Atlantic, our citizens are confronted by yet another danger — one firmly within our control. This danger is invisible to some but familiar to the Poles: the steady creep of government bureaucracy that drains the vitality and wealth of the people. The West became great not because of paperwork and regulations but because people were allowed to chase their dreams and pursue their destinies.
Americans, Poles, and the nations of Europe value individual freedom and sovereignty. We must work together to confront forces, whether they come from inside or out, from the South or the East, that threaten over time to undermine these values and to erase the bonds of culture, faith and tradition that make us who we are. (Applause.) If left unchecked, these forces will undermine our courage, sap our spirit, and weaken our will to defend ourselves and our societies.
I could have written those lines, and I’m glad that Mr. Trump said them.
Reading the President’s Warsaw speech, something jumped right out at me that I haven’t seen anyone else sensible comment on. (Leaving entirely aside for now the torrent of leftist blather about defending the West being somehow beyond the pale.)
(Speech transcript at
)
Embedded in the heart of the speech, there is a clear invitation to
Russia: “We urge Russia to cease its destabilizing activities in Ukraine and elsewhere, and its support for hostile regimes — including Syria and Iran — and to instead join the community of responsible nations in our fight against common enemies and in defense of civilization itself.”
Much of the rest of the speech defines the West in terms that, Poland and central Europe aside, seem to me also designed to flatter Putinist Russia’s post-communist self-image as a bastion of (orthodox) Christian traditionalism against both Muslim south and “degenerate” west.
(I saw recently that Russia was 30% avowed Orthodox when the Wall fell, now 80%. Also recall that Russia loudly and continuously decried the Obama-Clinton State Department’s arrogant pressure on them to swallow the full spectrum of modern political correctness.)
And if you squint a bit, the speech implicitly praises the Russian people too for also surviving and (eventually) rejecting communism, while indirectly pointing out how Putin’s growing klepto-authoritarianism betrays that rejection.
Some quotes:
“..we can still hear those voices that echo through history. Their message is as true today as ever. The people of Poland, the people of America, and the people of Europe still cry out “We want God.””
“And with that powerful declaration of who you are, you came to understand what to do and how to live. You stood in solidarity against oppression, against a lawless secret police, against a cruel and wicked system that impoverished your cities and your souls.”
“We write symphonies. We pursue innovation. We celebrate our ancient heroes, embrace our timeless traditions and customs, and always seek to explore and discover brand-new frontiers. We reward brilliance. We strive for excellence, and cherish inspiring works of art that honor God.”
This speech is two-pronged. Trump is offering Putin a rationale to stop fighting the West – Obama attacked Russia with western-lefty weapons of cultural mass destruction; Trump here is offering a cease-fire. (I find it massively ironic, by the way, that Putin knows perfectly well that said “degenerate western” weapons originated in Soviet Russia.
Apparently memetic warfare has the same problem as biowar: It can come back and bite the originator.)
Trump I believe is also demonstrating he can go over Putin’s head to the Russian people, telling them “we’re basically on your side – so why is your government siding with the militant South and expansionist East, while brutalizing and impoverishing you in the process?”
Carrot and stick, a way out of the economic cleft Putin has gotten Russia into, and a warning that Trump knows how to knock the heart out of Putin’s case that the Russian people should just put up with it.
It is, I think, a hugely ambitious move. I would guess that if anything is to come of it, it will start soon with small things. It may then at some point develop very fast. Or, of course, not at all.
Interesting times.
Porkypine
I made an encouraging reply and got:
So, you see it too, then. Good. I’ve been occasionally known to read more between the lines than is there.
I’m pretty sure the timing of this speech a day before Trump’s first meeting with Putin is not coincidental. Nor is the nominally half-hour meeting going on for over two hours.
As for how that meeting went, I haven’t a clue.
Mind, neither does anyone in the press I’ve seen so far. The difference is, I *know* I don’t have enough data yet to reach useful conclusions.
That doesn’t seem to be stopping anyone else. There’s boatloads of tendentious blather being peddled.
The Syria cease-fire outcome may be the first clue. If the Russians actually use their local clout to make it work (instead of their usual
lip-service) that would be a positive sign.
Time will tell.
Porkypine
The best way to understand Trump is to assume he has a reason for doing what he does, although how he does it can often be influenced by lack of experience with this governing elite; he probably has more experience with a number of foreign elites than most US political figures ever get. He has made deals with them.
You will generally not be far wrong when he does something unexpected if you assume he is crazy like a fox.
I am reminded that I am to take part in a discussion of Mars projects at UC Irvine September 7 this year.
http://www.marssociety.org/mars-society-hosting-sci-fi-panel-human-future-space-2017-convention/
I am also an invited guest to Dragon Con in Atlanta this September.
More added Sunday night below. This is an important subject.
Scientific facts: so inconvenient
Drudge just dropped this:
https://realclimatescience.com/2017/07/latest-from-the-greenland-meltdown/
Do scroll down – the “news” reactions are priceless.
It matters far less of what we do (burn coal, fly jets) than one key fact: the sun is a 3% variable, and that vastly outweighs stuff we put into the air. Astronomy: it just might affect the weather!
The sun is cooling off. Glad we live in FLA.
James F. Ponder
Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats
—–H.L. Mencken, 1919
Well, I live in California, at least for now. It does seem to me that solar output dominates; especially since Lowell noted a brightening of Mars in the 19th Century when we know Earth was warming…
You would think that when you make adjustments you’d sometimes get warming and sometimes get cooling. That’s almost never happened.”
—————————————
Roland Dobbins
You would if you paid attention to the results and not the theory, and knew the map was not the territory.
Data and charts, easily understood
Subj: July 4, 2017 : Coldest July Temperature Ever Recorded In The Northern Hemisphere | The Deplorable Climate Science Blog
https://realclimatescience.com/2017/07/latest-from-the-greenland-meltdown/
Arctic Temperatures
This is long and more intended for professionals, but here is some more data:
On the
Validity of NOAA, NASA
and Hadley CRU Global Average
Surface Temperature Data
&
The Validity of EPA’s CO
Endangerment Finding
https://thsresearch.files.wordpress.com/2017/05/ef-gast-data-research-report-062717.pdf
Dilbert creator Scott Adams on cognition
Dr. Pournelle,
Scott Adams is blogging about persuasion and cognitive dissonance, and has also remarked on the Tucker Carlson interview with Bill Nye. See http://blog.dilbert.com/post/157823678756/tucker-carlson-induces-cognitive-dissonance-in . Worth your time, as I think Adams is successfully (perhaps courageously) introducing some rational debate into public discussion of climate change and of subjects associated with Donald Trump.
I often hear that a “denier” has little or no credibility because of an often tenuous link of some sort to the petroleum, coal, or nuclear industries. I never hear or read of any reduction of credibility of a media personality whose ego, reputation, and/or income is closely tied with environmental science. While it is not his obvious purpose, I believe Adams’ blog is exposing the ego bias in some of those advocates.
With hopes for continuing recovery for both you and Roberta,
-d
And see http://noconsensus.org/scientists/freeman_dyson.php which asks questions yet to be answered.
Sunday, July 9, 2017
Freeman Dyson
Regarding the Freeman Dyson on,
“Having seen many faddish notions come and go, Dyson is distressed that many environmentalists now believe “global warming is the greatest threat to the ecology of our planet.”” at
http://noconsensus.org/scientists/freeman_dyson.php
The environmentalist are are right. The fraud, personal oppression through climate related taxation and the massive transfer of money from the producers of goods and services to the producers of bigger government as a result of believing that human can have an impact on climate change will result in more damage to the ecology of the planet than any climate change ever could!Peter
The problem is that they start with the assumption that their models are accurate; that their map is the territory. It has been shown time and again that the maps are not accurate; their models do not predict, Spending ourselves broke on the assumption that they are leaves little to make combat the conditions that may result if they’re really wrong – if, for instance, the Sun really is a variable star and its variances belittle all the odd climate changes caused by man. For an amusing science fiction story on that, see Fallen Angels by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Michael Flynn.
Greenland climate change
I read on either ITV or BBC that with the glaciers melting in Green land there was a strong very strong chance that the warming current (Gulf) that keeps the UK warm would be diverted back across the UK, all that cold water would cause havoc. Yes it was diverted. German and UK scientists have found it was diverted to run down the east side of the N American Continent. It is probably responsible for the horrible storms this and last winter. You may have scientific friends that will conform this. I also understand from an article in the southern hemisphere that with the latest satellite videos and the new lens on the recent satellites that the ice that is or was melting in Antarctica there is now a claim that the reforming ice is clear. This with your contacts may be proven correct.Mike
I invited comments from experts.
Greenland climate change
I see many studies by the standard people, purporting that a reversal of the North Atlantic gyre (thermohaline circulation) COULD occur. A lot of “studies suggest that X MAY happen,” or “a new model says that X MAY occur” and the like. I see some indication that the Gulf Stream may be weakening; whether this is temporary or not, only time will tell. I do not see any indication of a backflow of cold water down the eastern seaboard of North America.
In fact, researchers at Columbia University say the whole “thermohaline circulation drives climate” is an outright myth:
http://ocp.ldeo.columbia.edu/res/div/ocp/gs/
Also this:
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/07/14/danish-scientist-demolishes-another-hyped-global-warming-claim-gulf-stream-slowing/
~Stephanie Osborn, “The Interstellar Woman of Mystery”
Award-winning author of the Division One, Gentleman Aegis, and Displaced Detective series
I hadn’t seen anything current.
This article from 2011:
seems to be tied to your correspondent’s concern, but I have learned to take any “science journalism” in the British tabloids with a large enough grain of salt to eliminate the supposed freshwater problem if properly dispersed.
This report, also from 2011:
http://www.whoi.edu/news-release/GulfStream
says that the Gulf stream was diverted about 125 miles north of it’s usual flow in places. That does not seem consistent with the correspondent’s concern, in my opinion.
I’ve not found any easily accessible articles suggesting a cool countercurrent along the East coast.
Bottom line, I’m not sure I can add anything substantial.
For what it’s worth, Wikipedia says:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shutdown_of_thermohaline_circulation
Global warming could, via a shutdown of the thermohaline circulation, trigger cooling in the North Atlantic, Europe, and North America.[9][10]
Take that with a grain of salt also.
Also for what it’s worth, this came up on Google Books during my search of the above:
American Journal of Education, Volume 52-53, page 250-1, 1918:
Mistakes in Geography Teaching.
THE GULF STREAM MYTH.
There are few better examples of the persistence of popular error, once deeply imbedded in social consciousness, than that of the Gulf Stream Myth. The warm temperature of this current opposite the coast of South Carolina was discovered in the days of Franklin.
It was this fact that gave the stream an importance in the minds of navigators that it no longer possesses.—James Page, U. S. Hydrographic Office, in Monthly Weather Review for August, 1902. Perhaps the most amusing recent instance or repetition of all the old rhetoric and all the old error about the Gulf Stream is an article by Mr. F. T. Bullen, in the London Spectator. Mr. Bullen says: “But who among us with the slightest smattering of physiography is there that is not assured that but for the genial warmth of this mighty sea-river our islands would revert to their condition at the Glacial Period; who is there but feels a shiver of dread pass over his scalp when he contemplates the possibility of any diversion of its life-giving waters from our shores? The bare suggestion of such a calamity is most terrifying.” Now, as a mere matter of climatic fact, were the aerial drift, that is, the circulation of the atmosphere in the north temperate Zone, to remain as it is to-day and were by
any possibility the Gulf Stream to be diverted at the Straits of Florida, no one in England would be a whit the wiser, for it is the aerial drift that has the gift of mildness in its flow. The diversion-Of-the-Gulf-Stream bogy may impress those who have a “smattering of physiography,” but it has no terror for him who knows that the Gulf Stream myth has nothing to rest on Save the bad science of fifty years ago and its recrudescence in the present.—Harvey Maitland Watta, in the Monthly Weather Review for September, 1900.
Perhaps as a final word on this subject, the following from Mr. Henry Gannett, Geographer of the U. S. Geological Survey, in the Bulletin of the American Geographical Society for July, 1901, may be quoted:
“Can it be supposed that the Japan Current, however warm it may be when it leaves the tropics, retains any appreciable excess of heat after a journey of 6,000 miles in northern latitudes? As a matter of fact, no trace Of this current reaches the shores of North America, its force being entirely lost thousands of miles to the westward. There is nothing left but the merest drift of the surface water before the prevalent west wind.
“In the north Atlantic the condition is much the same. The Gulf Stream loses its velocity and disappears as a current long before the British Isles are reached. That the cold climate of the eastern portion of the United States is caused by an Arctic current close inshore is disproved by the fact that there is no such current along this coast.”
Before leaving the Gulf Stream it may be noted that the fact that this stream does not sweep around the Gulf of Mexico, as still shown on some of our maps, was thoroughly demonstrated by the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey prior to 1888.
Some geographies still persist in giving as the causes of ocean currents the unequal heating of the water in different latitudes, the excessive evaporation of the tropics, the diminution of atmospheric pressure in low latitudes, and the alleged greater saltiness of equatorial waters. Of course all of these have been banished to the limbo of the shades of ingenious guessers, the real cause being the winds.
PERMANENCY OF CLIMATE.
The old settlers in any new country look back upon their pioneer days of privation and suffering, and ascribe most of both to weather conditions which, in the haze of memory, seem to have been severer than the climate of the present. Thus Thomas Jefferson said:
“It is apparent that the climate of Virginia has changed. The old inhabitants here tell me that they remember when the snow lay on the ground four months every year and they rode in sleighs.”
The early settlers of Ohio, Illinois and Indiana gave the same experience and the typical old. settler of the Dakotas insists that he knows that the climate is milder than it used to be on these plains. His testimony, however, is not verified by temperature and other weather records which have been carefully made by the United States Weather Bureau. If we to-day had to endure the long continued exposure to the elements which the early pioneer had to undergo and had their less efficient supply of food, clothing and shelter, our bodies, sensitive thermometers as they are, would register exceeding extremes of climate. Besides, the one big snow-storm of some winter in the past gets bigger as our memories grow longer and fills the whole winter with associations of inclemency. It cannot be said that climates of countries do not change, but if such changes do take place centuries, if not milleniums, are required to record any appreciable variation from the mean.
FOREST’S AND RAIN FALL AND FLOODS.
While careful records have been preserved of precipitation and floods in areas which have been forested, deforested and reforested again, there is as yet no evidence to justify the wide-spread belief that the presence of forests increases rainfall and the cutting away of forests diminishes it. A very elementary knowledge of the causes of rainfall shows one how infinitesimal must be the relation of forests to the amount of precipitation, if any causal relation exists at all. A glance at the mean annual precipitation map of the United States shows how independent rainfall is of forests. Michigan, with her Great Lake surroundings and forests, has less rainfall than the inland prairie areas of southern Illinois. The same remark applies equally well to the theory sometimes advanced that if the dried lake beds of the Dakotas were filled with water by artesian wells we should get more rainfall. Such a theory is based upon an erroneous conception of the causes of rainfall and of the general circulation of the atmosphere over the United States. There is this to be said
![[blocks in formation]](https://books.google.com/books/content?id=_09HAQAAMAAJ&output=text&pg=PA271&img=1&zoom=3&hl=en&q=Gulf+stream+diversion&cds=1&sig=ACfU3U1ofZdrtCwYH93h8JA9UIAItkb-tw&edge=0&edge=stretch&ci=473,156,429,482)
Out of a class of twenty-nine graduates of high schools of the Dakotas, Minnesota and Iowa, whose answers I happened to preserve, twenty-two gave incorrect answers and seven gave correct answers. The incorrect answers were fairly evenly divided between the moon’s not rising at all or rising in the west, and the majority of the incorrect answers concerning the position of the star had that luminary remain on the eastern horizon for three hours. Since these students were not at all below the average high school graduates of this section, this record does not indicate that a knowledge that the earth rotates on its axis is very widespread, or is more than so many words.
I fear it is true that a vast majority of the teachers of our children would say, if asked for evidence or proof of the rotation of the earth, that the fact that we have day and night proves that the earth rotates,—a most childish conception of a proof of this phenomenon
J
There has been speculation about the Gulf Stream for a long time, but none I have seen for how it could have affected Denmark, East Prussia, Poland. and China, who all recorded warm seasons in the Viking era.
Before my stroke in late 2024 I could touch type, and very rapidly. I wrote a long essay on the global warming dispute here https://www.jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/obama-faces-climate-change-and-iraq/ and it still reads well. Excerpt:
President Obama told us today that CO2 traps heat. He said in a way that implies that no one can question that, and everyone must know it, and there is nothing else to discuss. Dyson points out that water vapor traps heat much better than CO2: indeed, anywhere there is high humidity, CO2 is irrelevant because there is no heat escaping for CO2 to trap. The water vapor has got it all. Therefore the effects of CO2 will mostly be on cold dry places. Most of the Earth is covered with water.
Methane is also a much better greenhouse gas than CO2, and any place that has methane in the atmosphere – above certain evergreen forests, and near large herds of cattle, as an example – CO2 will be irrelevant because all the heat escaping through the atmosphere will already be absorbed.
We could continue but there is no need to break a butterfly on the wheel: these are questions that are seldom addressed by the Climate Change True Believers, and when they are it is generally with condescension, as if everyone knows what brought about the Greenland farms. When pressed for a bit more specific information one usually is told “Gulf Stream” as if the Gulf Stream could simultaneously affect the temperature of Greenland, the Western Scottish Islands, Northumberland, York, Denmark, Saxony, Lithuania, and China, all of which recorded warmer weather and longer growing seasons. I have never had any of the True Believers offer to go beyond that condescension.
The President apparently is going to make Climate Change a big and important driver of his policies for the next few years. He seems quite positive that he knows all that anyone needs to know about the subject, and the topic is closed. Anyone who does not understand this believes that the Moon is made of cheese. There is nothing to discuss.
Report: Steve Bannon’s Star Rising in the Trump White House
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Note also that Bannon now shaves and wears a tie to the White House; he didn’t for earlier White House events, and his invitations stopped… Coincidence, maybe.
Angelo Codevilla: Scientific Pretense vs. Democracy
I did not see this when it came out, back in 2009, alas!
https://spectator.org/41862_scientific-pretense-vs-democracy/
It resonates with much of what Doctor Pournelle has written, for example
https://www.jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/obama-faces-climate-change-and-iraq/
I found particularly thought-provoking Codevilla’s contrast between
(a) one of my favorite works of historical story-telling and analysis, C.P. Snow’s _Science and Government_, which tells and analyses the story of how Winston Churchill’s science advisor, F. A.
Lindemann (later Lord Cherwell) damn near single-handedly lost the Battle of Britain, and hence the War, by trying — unsuccessfully, thank God! — to derail the desperate race to develop and deploy the Chain Home radar system and the command and control system for RAF Fighter Command based thereon, and
(b) President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s caution, in his Farewell Address, not only against the dangers of a Military-Industrial Complex (which caution is widely known and quoted), but also against the danger that “in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific technological elite” (which caution is almost entirely forgotten and ignored).
I also liked Codevilla’s pointing out that the non-scientist politicians and administrators, while disclaiming any scientific expertise themselves, nevertheless implicitly claim expertise in discerning that those who claim to be scientists, and who agree with them, are indeed legitimate scientists, while those who claim to be scientists, but who disagree with them, are deniers, anti-Science, religious fanatics, or otherwise not legitimate scientists. “[T]he modern struggle is over control of the process of accreditation, and … the arguments the masses hear must be mostly ad hominem, seldom ad valorem— not least because the experts deem the masses incapable and unworthy of hearing anything else.”
Angelo Codevilla used to be a graduate student associate when I was a professor at Pepperdine, Lo! these many years ago. As usual with Codevilla, this piece is worth reading in its entirety. Definitely recommended.
Your revolution was dumb and it filled us with refugees.
Hi Jerry,
A Happy 4th of July to our American friends… even though this is sent July 5th. Thought I’d pass an article written by Conrad Black, with a slightly different take on the Revolution. Please read this as a bit of gentle ribbing from the ancestors of loyalists who fled in the 1770’s.
http://nationalpost.com/news/canada/your-revolution-was-dumb-and-it-filled-us-with-refugees-a-canadian-take-on-the-american-revolutionary-war/wcm/b8a6b815-25de-4ea6-be42-a7af9d0323ed
All said and done….we truly are blessed to have the U.S.A. as close neighbors.
Sam
Mistaken article attributed to Conrad Black
Hi Jerry
My apologies for any email entries sent without content. My fingers were moving too quickly over the keyboard. I sent a tongue-in-cheek article your way around July 4th 2017 and attributed it to having been written by Conrad Black. It was actually written by a Tristin Hopper for National Post. This Newspaper was founded by Mr. Black back in the 1990’s. It is still an interesting perspective but of course the Revolution was more complicated than outlined in the article.
http://nationalpost.com/news/canada/your-revolution-was-dumb-and-it-filled-us-with-refugees-a-canadian-take-on-the-american-revolutionary-war/wcm/b8a6b815-25de-4ea6-be42-a7af9d0323ed
Canadian humour being what it is, I hope your US subscribers don’t take offense. We accept any comments about us anyone cares to throw our way. Being Canadian we always enjoy being noticed, if at all, whether good or bad.
Sam
I knew Mr. Black in those days, and I didn’t detect any alarm bells.
From years ago:
Another reason I don’t Facebook: I’d never do anything else. My wife follows Facebook including my daughter’s page, on which was posted today something fascinating: a Great Blue Heron, on what looks like a golf fairway: a large well mowed level grass field, no body of water in sight, nothing around but this big bird walking slowly across the lawn, clearly stalking something. Slowly he advances. Then stops. Assumes the pose they take when fishing, absolutely still, neck cocked back, beak aimed a foot or so in front of his feet. Stands that way for about half a minute. Then strikes. Out of a previously unseen hole in the ground comes beak and struggling gopher. Bird shakes gopher, finally bangs is on the ground several times. Gopher is still. Bird tosses gopher and catches it by the head, aims beak at the sky, and swallows gopher whole.
Of course he’d have to swallow the gopher whole, just as he does fish. He hasn’t got any teeth. But this was no accidental find. That bird knew precisely where he was going and watched that hole until he saw the gopher, and grabbed it. I once saw Sasha, the Siberian Husky we had previous to our last dog Sable, do that with a gopher up on the hill above us, but one expects wolf dogs to do that sort of thing, and Huskies can be very still, alert, and patient when they want to be; and of course you expect herons to be alert and patient when fishing, but I never saw one hunt a gopher before. Anyway, it was fascinating, and another reason I think I have to avoid Facebook…
Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.
