Life in the Desert Update
After the kind reception for my Life in the Desert post, I thought I’d give a couple of updates.
This little guy has been growing next to my driveway for years. I didn’t include anything for scale, but its about six inches tall. I’ve seen others around – they are some kind of wild cactus (typically, I have no clue what its called). This one had a really good year for flowering. I think its probably the good rain we got over the winter.
We had a new visitor at the Casa Dean on the 4th of July. Mrs. Dean came out of her office around 11:00 and made . . . sounds . . . that brought me running from across the house – I thought a snake had gotten in or something. Nope. There was a full grown mountain lion scratching and swatting at her bedroom window. I measured (later); some of the scratches were nearly six feet off the ground. He eventually stopped that nonsense, laid down in the shade, and then proceeded to amble around the house, staying right next to it in the shade, even laid down on our front porch for a bit. His back was over two feet high (I could reference it off the bottom of some windows), and I would say he was five feet, maybe a little more, nose to butt. He was acting . . . off, sluggish, panting, kind of distressed. After about 20 minutes or so he wandered off into the desert. Sorry, no pics. I had other things on my mind.
We called it in (I wasn’t 100% sure of the legality of me just killing him). A couple of sheriff’s deputies came out (response time, probably about 15 minutes) (really nice guys, BTW), heard our story, and retrieved a couple of ARs from their vehicles. They spotted him (we glimpsed him again from the house), watched him for a bit, and said he wasn’t obviously rabid so they didn’t shoot him. I’m sure our neighbors were excited by a couple of heavily armed deputies roaming the area; mountain lion hunting had to be the most fun the deputies had all week. Animal control came out, but never spotted him. They said it was concerning, as there have been some rabid animals not far away, and it sounded like he might be in the early, “stupid” stage of rabies (the second stage is the aggressive stage). Let’s just ponder a moment what it would be like to run into a rabid mountain lion. Oh, and it turned out nobody would have batted an eye if I had shot him, which is good to know.
He was found dead by a neighbor less than a half mile from our house, in the same wash we last saw him in. He probably died the next day. Cause of death unknown, but no visible injuries.
And then, a week later, another mountain lion showed up at the hospital I used to work at. They darted him, tested him, and cut him loose, err, relocated him.
Naval Ponderings
I mentioned in the comments awhile ago that I was wondering if aircraft carriers might be on the verge of obsolescence, like battleships before WWII. After all, the Russian Black Sea fleet has gotten spanked by the Ukrainians, who don’t even have a navy, with drones and missiles. Aircraft carriers might just be big, slow targets for a drone swarm, possibly including air, surface, and subsurface drones. Since our Navy is basically built around and heavily dependent on aircraft carriers, losing one would knock a big hole in our capabilities. While active countermeasures are also advancing, that just reminds me of the late 19th century race between armor and naval gunnery, and we all know how that turned out.
Just as aircraft carriers (and their aircraft) displaced battleships, and in a shockingly short time, I wonder if drones of various kinds aren’t going to be the future of naval warfare, with the ships themselves being little more than missile and drone platforms. If nothing else, and despite the ferocious rearguard action by the Air Force fighter mafia, the time will come when there is little or nothing a manned aircraft can do, that a drone can’t do at least as well, and cheaper.
Immunity
No, not than kind of immunity.
SCOTUS recently made a decision on whether/to what extent Presidents have immunity from prosecution. I thought the decision, on the whole, was probably about right. It was overcomplicated, because the Justices were lawyers, and lawyers gonna lawyer. Anyway, SCOTUS held:
“Under our constitutional structure of separated powers, the nature of Presidential power entitles a former President to absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions within his conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority. And he is entitled to at least presumptive immunity from prosecution for all his official acts. There is no immunity for unofficial acts.”
Naturally, this leaves ample room for lawyers and judges to churn on what actions are “within his conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority”, as opposed to his “official acts”, and of course his “unofficial acts”.
So why do I think this is about right? Because leaving Presidents exposed to prosecution after they leave office is how you get a President-for-Life. As has been noted, on the short list of issues that brought down the Roman republic was their practice of immunizing their leaders only while in office, and then dogpiling them in the courts as soon as they left office. With that hanging over you, you hang onto office like grim death. It’s no accident, either, that when particularly obnoxious dictators have to go, they are offered asylum somewhere as a better alternative to the civil war it would otherwise take to oust them.
Aside from that, if a President can be prosecuted for taking action (or, why not?, for not taking action), you have a heck of weird incentive structure for the President, which would be a whole new and different way to break the separation of powers construct of the federal government (which is certainly broken now, but that doesn’t mean breaking it in whole new ways is a good idea).
That said, we wouldn’t Presidents to be immunized for common crimes, such as, say, torching the White House on their way out the door, or even punching out an obnoxious reporter. Those would be unofficial acts, so they aren’t immunized.
Immunity for the President is a good thing in the right dosages. Too much would be a bad thing (as we have seen with so-called “qualified immunity” for other government employees). Too little would be its own flavor of a bad thing – as bad as our recent run of Presidents has generally been, at least they all left office after their allotted term. If nothing else, the decision leaves room for all that legalistic churning to fine tune the balance.
Sorry, no pics. I had other things on my mind.
Didn’t want to put the shotgun down?
It sounds like he was thirsty. You should have given him a bowl of water.
And maybe some treats.
Kitty!
While there have been reports of mountain lions here, even some pictures but even bobcats are rare. I’ve never actually seen a bobcat in the wild. Bears, wolves in the yard, yeah. I have some pictures of a bear taking a nap in my yard. They wander through occasionally. Wood ticks and mosquitoes are more of a problem.
I have a gamecam out now but mostly fox and bunnies, occasional deer or bear.
Thanks for the update, RC, good to see and learn those things we’ve missed in life.
Bobcat are stealthy. We have significant population in KY and I know of hunters taking them from tree-stands during late bow season (when Bobcat season and deer season overlap), but I’ve only seen one twice.
Both times were at significant distances and just at first light.
Actually, three times. The first time I saw one, I was using the thermal site on my Bradley, while sitting on a screen line in KS.
I walked into a bobcat sitting ramrod still in some underbrush. As in, reach-out-and-pet close. It was terrified of the 120 lb. dog I had next to me (which was thankfully too daft to know there was a bobcat sitting right next to us). I grabbed the dog, checked out the cat for a few seconds in curiosity/awe, and tip-toed away. Everyone was happy with the outcome.
I went to the zoo last week and didn’t even see the bobcat in a cage. Crafty they is.
At the Biodome in Montreal, they put out cardboard boxes. The lynx comes out of hiding and sits in it. This is not a joke.
Two Lynx pens, didn’t see them either. Maybe next time I’ll take a box to throw in the pen.
I went to a big zoo in Sweden. Very animal-friendly habitat. They told us in advance that we’d be unlikely to glimpse the lynxes.
Lynxes must have said “Hold my Absolut” because when the tour train got to their enclosure, two of them came right out in the open and immediately got into sexy time right there in front of us.
Quite a show.
A few years ago my wife and I heard a big screech outside the window… didn’t think much of it (the neighbors had a Peacock.. they make noise).. then it happened again.. two bobcats mating on the lawn… watched them follow each other around the property. We have a few pictures of them.
One time I saw a little kitty by the road, well it was kitty sized but built like a bulldog. A baby bobcat..
“Wood ticks and mosquitoes are more of a problem.”
This man speaks truth.
I dunno what chiggers are like up there but down here they are a curse worse than leprosy and impossible to avoid.
Despite my best efforts even Mrs. Suthenboy occasionally gets a few. Apparently the dogs and I bring them in and they get in the laundry.
I use a lot of DEET.
The shotgun was out, but I wasn’t actually carrying it in the house.
Because of a quirk of our address, the deputies missed our driveway (Google maps sends everybody to the other side of our 3.5 acre property). I had to walk out to fetch them, (very) shortly after the mountain lion had (apparently) wandered off. Talk about head on a swivel. I debated, but didn’t take my shotgun, on account of not wanting to roll up on law enforcement visibly heavily armed.
And no, I wasn’t going to give him water. I wanted him gone, not hanging around.
A friend in Oklahoma rescued a little wet Manx kitten lost in rainstorm.
Kitten grew and grew and grew…. Became evident it was not a Manx kitten. But my buddy and the bobcat were so attached to each other by then that he got his exotic animal license so he could keep him.
That cat was hilarious and very tame. Ate Purina chow.
Missile technology combined with the drones probably doom the carriers. We haven’t figured out a defense against the hypersonic missiles that are too fast for our current defensive missiles and guns.
Get the cheap drones to swarm and distract the ships and launched planes, then launch a couple of hypersonic missiles at standoff distance (via ship, shore, sub, or plane) and boom. Might not sink it, but they attack vertically so could easily destroy or disable the flight deck making the carrier worse than useless.
Directed Energy weapons are going to become practical soon as well.
Don’t think phasers, but air defense systems linked to radar. That’s gonna be how you address things like hypersonic cruise missiles and drone swarms.
Active jamming as well. Radar and jamming are already directed energy, it’s just a matter of turning up the juice.
You rang ?
Eh….
For effective weapons, you need to be able to store energy then release it very fast. Explosives are great at this. Lasers are much less so.
How’s the Death Ray coming?
I noticed we don’t have any carriers in the western pacific right now, I wonder why?
Heavy deterrence towards Iran after Israel walked into their house and eliminated a target with relative ease?
Has technology overtaken war as an option? I certainly hope so. Can’t we all just get along?
There was a time when the crossbow was going to render warfare obsolete.
War never ends. Technology always advances.
They can’t get the Ford working so they can’t load it up with new planes that don’t work.
It probably has a bunch of factory recalls, typical Ford.
The dealership needs to fix or replace the catapult system.
I called it in (I wasn’t 100% sure of the legality of me just killing him).
You can hunt them, but there are certain actions to be taken prior to and after the fact (license, tag, etc, G&F wants a tooth as proof). One time I was working the sporting goods desk at the Flagstaff Wal-Mart a guy asked me if there was any chance I could fill out the cat tag for yesterday.
There is always the “its coming right for us” defense. Stay safe out there.
“There is always the “it’s coming right for us” defense.”
That would have been my plan. Right down to a claim of a warning shot that the mountain lion ignored as it was crouching to attack. I actually probably would have given it a warning shot, depending on circumstances.
What I would say – “I wanted to scare it off, but it heard me too soon and sprang at me, so I had to shoot it. Sorry.”
What really would have happened – “My anal sphincter slammed shut in fear, so hard it sounded like a church bell, and it startled the cat. I panic fired and hit it.”
Sorry, R C-
I don’t know nuthin bout birthin no babies
Let me just say, as a person who has not birthed a child from my own womb, I take grave offense to these comments. I don’t know what children Vance himself has birthed — it’s my understanding that it was his wife who had the children — but it seems the senator just can’t help himself from opening his mouth and disparaging large swaths of the American public. Most Americans probably don’t agree with the idea that if you don’t have children, you don’t have a stake in this country’s future.
Obviously, this isn’t the first time Vance has attacked women without biological children and every time another one of these rants is unearthed, further damage is done to the Trump-Vance ticket.
This all goes back to the importance of vetting in a presidential campaign. I recently spoke to former Attorney General Eric Holder, who ran the vetting process for the Harris-Walz campaign. During that conversation, I asked him if he was sure his team got everything and that no stone was left unturned. Holder told me he combed through the internet and watched hours of videos of the top contenders.
It’s bizarre. Weird, even. Why didn’t Trump choose a properly vetted VP who would appeal to childless upper middle class female abortion advocates? Doesn’t he realize what a vital electoral demographic they are?
And they are known to be undecided and persuadable.
Yeah…what an AWFL mistake.
🙄
When it comes down to it, AWFL really is an understatement.
*narrows gaze*
“This all goes back to the importance of vetting in a presidential campaign.”
Like the time that demented coot that your team forced onto the presidential ticket blurted out at a rally that he’d be picking a woman of color for his VP, and y’all looked around and thought, “Oh shit, we don’t have anyone on our bench right now who is pliable to our needs and also qualified.”, but you went ahead anyway and selected Kamala Harris, and then the demented coot refused to step down and went ahead in campaigning for a second term, and y’all forced him onto the presidential ticket again, and then, finally, y’all couldn’t hide any longer the fact that the demented coot is demented, so you forced him out of the race, but then looked around and thought, “Oh shit, it’s going to be tough to explain to everyone how we passed over the of-color lady for someone like that slick-haired white guy from Cali” and went ahead and manufactured enthusiasm for Harris, even though everyone knows she’s an empty suit standing in for the cabal and it doesn’t matter at this point which particular flesh-and-blood person the Dems have at the top of their ticket? That sort of vetting?
There is always the “its coming right for us” defense.
There is always the “its coming right for us” defense.
The front porch loophole.
Oops.
He was coming right at me. Twice.
Just got the news that I’ve been given a stage to run at Handgun Nationals. Muahahahaha! I have shot with two of my crew before, though I don’t know if they’re good workers (they are good shooters). The other guy is unknown to me but bought himself a life membership which has never been cheap (currently $1000).
The best part about being the CRO is you get dibs on the match banner to hang on your garage wall. The worst part is getting there a day early to finish setting up your stage.
Neighbors watching the deputies roaming about with ARs: “Well they finally came for RC. Been wonderin’ how long it was gonna take.”
Carriers: There’s a school of thought that the escort and escorted have switched, and that now carriers are really the escorts for the missile barges (destroyers). Totally true? No, but not false either. Obviously the brown shoe mafia is, and will be, fighting that to the bitter end. But that situation is also kinda a few years old already. Lots of the worry now is on how the proliferation of cheap drones or cheap-ish ASBMs could easily empty a fleet’s magazines (relatively few and high-cost missiles) if they really tried. No real missile unrep, so you pretty much gotta leave the theatre to reload. And not enough ships to do a rotation that would work. And most of it was super-obvious and predictable a generation ago…
The future of anti-drone warfare will be electromagnetic/directed energy not kinetic. The ability to fry/jam drone swarms en mass rather than blast them out of the sky will be the way forward.
We could resurrect Nike-Hercules, dodging a nuclear fireball is still pretty difficult.
De-escalating a nuclear exchange would also be rather difficult.
Missile Command by Atari!
That was tongue firmly in cheek. I do enjoy reading about the “Did you try putting a nuke on it?” era of weapons development, though. If you aren’t familiar, Nike-Hercules was a nuclear-tipped surface-to-air missile system designed to vaporize entire formations of Tu-4s (B-29 clones).
The attempt to counter them is already in production.
http://www.businessinsider.com/russia-fiber-optic-unjammable-drones-fix-a-big-problem-war-2024-8
There was an abandoned Nike Base atop the hill from my house in Rowland Hts, California.
In HS the holes were still empty and you could go 4 or 5 stories down into it, but the LASD would give you a significant ration of shit for doing so.
It is almost like a park now, with just some pads remaining.
Big (not impossible but really big) hurdle on the EM/DE path is that it a lot of possible variants would probably use a ginormous amount of energy, which can sometimes be hard to have handy. Another reason to think about nuke powerplants, btw, but probably won’t get traction. Also, you can’t turn those systems on without broadcasting where you are.
Alternative tech to breach those kinds of defenses will keep coming, as that’s the way of all military technology development. Like maybe hardened and on-board AI/vision-based targeting – you’d actually have missiles coming in “looking” for enemy ships, just like in the old days. May even see sure-enough smoke screens coming back into fashion.
On the high-end side (cost and elevation), speed and time matter a lot. Missiles that come in very low and very fast will give you only a very short time period to figure out they’re there, decide what they really are, and try to get some kind of defense up, if you even have one.
So – in one lo-hi variant an opponent can try to put up a few swarms to use up all your defenses and/or broadcast your position so they can have a better idea of where you are, and follow up with smarter/faster big stuff when they think you’re empty.
I thought it was only generals that constantly prepared to fight the last war?
You’ve never worked in the tech world. Every change is to prevent the last outage.
The economic problems created by drone and missile warfare have been exposed in the Ukraine and Israel. Shooting down $5k loans with a pair of $million missiles is bad math for an extended conflict. Might even turn into deficits and inflation…
I actually probably would have given it a warning shot, depending on circumstances.
I knew several people in Montana who had mountain lions visiting regularly. Talking to one woman about the lion gazing in her living room window one evening, she said, “Oh, I could never shoot one” when I asked if she had her gun out.
I said shooting and hitting are two different options. I would definitely put a round in the dirt first, given the chance.
The thing is, they will attack people. If we had them around the house regularly (this was the first in more than 10 years), I would be thinking about taking my revolver with me when I would be messing around outside.
There’s a joke in there somewhere about a big hairy pussy that I am absolutely not going to make.
I don’t want Mrs. Dean to hunt me down and kick my butt.
More likely, she would pick you off from range.
No wonder you love that woman.
Million to one
Officers were responding to reports of a suspicious vehicle when a man jumped out of a car, ran onto the I-295 highway and placed the gun inside a storm drain, ABC News has learned. The suspect then fled the scene on the back of a motorcycle.
When police then tried to retrieve the weapon, it went off, striking David — a 25-year veteran of the police force — in the upper torso. Other officers rendered aid and David was transferred to a local hospital.
Executive Assistant Chief of D.C. Police Jeffery Caroll told reporters earlier in the day that David — a crime scene search officer — was “trained to recover evidence and firearms,” and had recovered “hundreds of guns” in his career.
If they find the guy who put it there, he’ll be charged with first degree murder of a cop.
How do you know if your job is important or not?
Worker dead at Wells Fargo desk for 4 days
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFCmNeTgdrs
I can see this happening to a work-at-home employee, but in the office?
The cleaning staff has some explaining to do!
Good point.
We only check for pulses on Wednesdays.
Union rules.
Taking the quite quitting thing too far?
We need you to come in because of team building. Face to face interaction is critical…
Speaking of-
When I was living in Montana, the mountain lions stayed up in the trees above me (as far as I knew). I always hoped one would come down and snatch one of the neighbor’s alpacas. I did see some bobcat tracks. The snow would come down off the roof and get to be about chest high by early spring. I was out there one day and saw a set of tracks along the top of the snowbank which were a whole lot bigger than any of my cats’. The snow was high enough it he had been sitting there looking in the window.
I may have been involved in that carrier discussion, what with my newfound obsession. The articles I’ve read mention “denial of area” or somesuch with an acronym to match. The idea being that drones and missiles are used to keep the carrier outside its effective range. To complicate things, the Ford class carriers, which are bigger, are starting to come online, and as you asked, should we even have them?
They only cost about $15 billion each and might work someday so why not?
“It’s a jobs program.”
The Nimitz is supposed to be decommissioned next year, and they just did a few million in upgrades including a lot of work on the flight deck. All for one last deployment this spring. So they’re expensive throughout their lifespan.
I have this half baked notion our navy should be essentially submarines only.
I was just about to say something similar. A retired submariner I know says the US navy has two types of vessel: submarines and targets. Anti-submarine warfare is probably less advanced than that against surface ships, but how can subs be made more useful in the types of conflicts our Regime insists on getting us entangled in?
The scary thing about subs is that the chance of the crew escaping alive after being hit is basically zero.
The other scary thing about submarines is that despite claims to the contrary, they can’t see shit.
how can subs be made more useful in the types of conflicts our Regime insists on getting us entangled in?
Back when I was in college, ROVs with increasingly advanced capabilities were the big thing. I worked on an ROV and a UAV team for IEEE competitions, and the technology for the ROV was just starting to catch up with the UAVs (we were still cramming computers into model planes at that time… The first time I ever saw a quadcopter was on campus as part of a research project that eventually became gesture control). Anyway… Strap a couple hundred of those ROVs to a carrier submarine, and you have a formidable naval force.
The scary thing about subs is that the chance of the crew escaping alive after being hit is basically zero.
It’s basically a blimp, but where you either get squashed by an implosion or drown instead of falling to the ground at terminal velocity.
I’d rather see us more focused on the destroyer size ship, since the only (in my mind) purpose for our Navy outside of the continental US would be shipping protection in international waters (or, tbh, in waters of countries without navies that have pirate issues).
Good gravy, I get tired of seeing whiny writer tweets in my timeline about “Why can’t I get an agent? waaaahhhhhh I’ve done everything I’m supposed to do! Hired editors! Hired proofreaders! Story’s as tight and solid as I can make it!”
Well, for one, because there are too many of you and too few of them.
So I say, “Wouldn’t you rather have readers than an agent?”
“But I don’t want to self-publish! REEEEEEEEEEE”
The brass ring. I get it. I thought that way too once upon a time. Talk to me when you’ve been querying for 10 years and getting nowhere because your “comps” aren’t compy enough and they don’t see a big Harry Potter or Twilight payday in your book–and they don’t know what that is any more than you or the guy who was going to reject Rowling did.
And vagene, too?
I do like these articles. I feel like we don’t get enough long form RC around here.
not a big fan of royal crown cola . . . .
You’re too kind, TOK.
Xwitter recommendation:
Nicole Shanahan (RFK’s VP) seems pretty smart, and all of as sudden she’s seeing the horribleness of the Democrat party. It has been fun to see her get more pissed and come out swinging. https://x.com/NicoleShanahan
This lady, RFK, Tulsi… They would be the heart of the DNC if the sleaze of the Clintons and the ideology of Obama’s handlers hadn’t taken over.
I will keep saying this. The Dems keep making enemies of smart, talented people. They go scorched earth on anyone who who doesn’t go along 100%.
Not surprising.
U.S.-Made F-16 Crashed in Ukraine, Killing Pilot
I’m surprised (it took this long).
To be fair, it took a while to train him enough to get into the air so he could crash.
Using an F16 to intercept drones and ballistic missiles and it either crashed or was shot down. Makes sense – not the game changing role to propagandists described.
Speaking of weapons, houses, etc.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VsyaFCBKWuk
YT;DW: If you want to shoot someone hiding behind a refrigerator… in your neighbor’s house a 9mm works just fine. Houses absolutely suck at stopping bullets.
I know people have done this sort of thing using drywall mockups, but this one uses actual houses.
Which is why my home defense weapon of choice is a 20-gauge shotgun (i.e. powerful enough to do the job but not knock me on my ass.)
20 gauge with #3 or #4 buckshot. Enough to penetrate the threat, but not to leave the house. (Paul Harrel video)
A .22LR went into the house, through the back part of the refrigerator and dented out the front. And those are smaller than #4 pellets.
12 gauge with #4.
12 gauge with #4.
That’s what I run, too.
Sorry. I run #7.5 target loads now.
I wonder if drones of various kinds aren’t going to be the future of naval warfare, with the ships themselves being little more than missile and drone platforms.
This is what I expect.