Monday, May 05, 2008

Wolverine Spotted in Snake River Valley in Idaho

This is actually a pretty interesting sighting. We have always known that there are wolverines in the national forests of mountainous central and northern Idaho and there are some sightings in the Hell's Canyon area of the Snake River along the Oregon/Idaho border, but I was not aware of any recent sightings in the Colombian Plateau of Idaho until I read this article.


The terrain in King Hill, Idaho. Not exactly prime wolverine habitat, but wolverines have been road-killed and trapped in similar locales recently in Wyoming, Oregon and Utah.


However, recent sightings and roadkilled wolverines in similar habitat in the West in Utah, Oregon and Wyoming indicate that wolverines do use such habitats, possibly especially when dispersing.

This wolverine was actually sitting on a telephone pole in the middle of the day near a small town!


A wolverine got stranded on a telephone pole in King Hill, Idaho on March 25 of this year. That photo actually looks kind of ridiculous. Tell me again how these animals hate people so much that they can't stand to go anywhere near us. Right.


It was spotted along Montgomery Road near King Hill, Idaho. King Hill is located about 57 miles northwest of Twin Falls, Idaho. Wildlife officials were called in and decided to just wait around until the wolverine climbed down off the pole.

The initial caller had reported a badger on a telephone pole, but badgers don't climb. They can dig a hole faster than any animal alive, but they can't climb a thing. Badgers and wolverines appear to be relatives - they are both very large weasel-type animals.

There have been two other sightings of wolverines in "the valley" (apparently the Snake River Valley, whatever that encompasses) in the past two years. I don't know much about the economic base of this county, but at least wine grapes are grown here.


Sagebrush terrain in the Eastern Snake River Valley of Idaho. King Hill is at the western end of the Eastern Snake River Valley. Pretty odd to find wolverines here, but they have been spotted at least 3 times in 2 years in this region.


The fact that wolverines are dispersing out in the Great Basin may mean that some day in the not too distant future they may return to Nevada. King Hill is a mere 63 miles north of the Nevada border.

Click the wolverines label at the end of the post to see other posts on wolverines in the US, including many sighting reports and photos.

References

Biodiversity Legal Foundation, Predator Conservation Alliance, Defenders of Wildlife, Northwest Ecosystem Alliance, and Superior Wilderness Action Network. (2000). Petition for a rule to list the wolverine (Gulo gulo luscus) as Threatened or Endangered under the Endangered Species Act within the contiguous United States. Submitted to the U.S. Dept. of Interior Fish and Wildlife Service on July 11, 2000.

Groves, Craig R. 1988. Distribution of the wolverine in Idaho as determined by mail questionnaire. Northwest Science 62(4):181-5.

Predator Conservation Alliance. (2001) Predator Conservation Alliance's Literature Summary - Draft - January 24, 2001 - Draft Conservation Status and Needs of the Wolverine (Gulo gulo).

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Uncle Semite

Subtitle, "Not Your Father's Anti-Semitism".

Ok, this site is pretty funny. I don't think it's really anti-Semitic at all, but I'm not sure. The whole thing is pretty much tongue in cheek, and after a while I thought it was another one of those fake anti-Semitic sites those hilarious Jewish comedians are always putting up.
According to recent studies by the Anti-Defamation League, anti-Semitism is on the rise in Europe, Russia, and the United States. In Arab media, diatribes against Jews are increasingly overt and commonplace, "the elevator music for the Arab world." Much of this anti-Semitic expression is characterized by shrill rhetoric and old prejudices, leaving little room for fresh dialog on the subject.

Uncle Semite seeks to elevate the conversation, moving the rhetorical, knee-jerk anti-Semitism of the past towards a progressive, "green" anti-Semitism, relevant in our time.

We hope you enjoy your stay with us at uncle-semite.com.* If this site displays improperly, please install the latest version of Fire Foxman, Sephardi, or your favourite web browser. Until this site can be fitted with a proper Content Management System, brief postings will be made below.
That's actually pretty damn funny right there. Haha! As far as the articles go, it's mostly leftwing anti-Zionist or at least anti-Israel stuff, pretty much like this blog.

I did read Shitler's List, and that was pretty damn funny too.

Shilter's List is an archive of the 120,000 people who signed the petition to have Jew-Watch removed from Google's search engine, because when folks typed in "Jew", the first link they got was Jew-Watch, which is run by some sort of anti-Semite Holocaust Denier type with a German name. Creepy!

I don't really like Jew-Watch, but it's one of my brother's favorite sites. He never had anything against Jews until he sued the local cops for tasering him with stun guns just to torture someone for fun. The lawyer was some Jewish guy. Well, my brother found out and told my grandpa, who, bless his departed heart, was also an anti-Black racist and mild anti-Semite, but that's what happens when you are born White in St. Louis in 1890 or so.

My grandpa made some cryptic comment about Jewish lawyers that meant Jewish lawyers were crooks, but I thought it meant they were the best to get you off the hook. Well, my brother repeated the comment and the lawyer went nuts, wanted to know all about our grandpa, wanted to know what kind of name my brother's last name is (his last name is German, but he has a different last name than I do).

When he found out my brother had a German last name, he went totally psycho. My brother was just trying to apologize. Well, after that day, if you know Jews, things were never the same. My brother was an anti-Semite from an anti-Semitic German family. The lawyer quit trying to get a good deal and just sold out for peanuts and moved down to Mexico to retire. Plus, he sold out via a sweetheart deal with a Jewish judge.

Then my brother started developing some anti-Semitism and read all up on da Jews. Result is my brother is a good guy, and he's brilliant, but he's a bit of an anti-Semite, and it's all cuz of some stupid Jewish lawyer with a persecution complex.

Anyway, if you go through Shitler's List, it serves sort of like a WhoozaJew software program, because it is chock full of Jews! This is unfortunately important to know, as it's important to try to figure out why some public figures act like they do and why some writers write what they do.

Jews are sneaky and tricky and use fancy hairstyles to cover up the horns on their head. They deviously change their names and take Gentile names, but almost never Christian or Christina.

Run the WhoozaJew program and uncover any suspicious dark-haired person's deepest tribal connections.

I usually just go to Google and type "last name" + Jewish and try to go from there.

Keep in mind that a lot of Jewish names are also German names. As the Germans say, there's a little bit of Jew in every German, which makes the Holocaust all the more poignant really, as it makes it seems suicidal.

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Sunday, May 04, 2008

Interesting Links on Oil Refinery Profits

Via commenter Uncle Milton, a fine writer in his own right, we get a few links about oil refinery profits. They were doing great a year ago, but this year, things may not be looking so good. The much-blathered about talking point about no new refineries in the US in 30 years is true, but it's because the oil companies refuse to add new refineries, as the more refineries out there, the more prices go down.

So the supply of refineries is automatically being limited by a collusion of capitalists in order to keep prices artificially high. Some free market! Free markets only work in theory. This is something that freemarketeer liars - assholes never seem to figure out.

Capitalists will always collude, price fix, seek government bailout for their losses, seek to have the public pay for the costs of their enterprises, use the state make laws to screw the public, and plot to become monopolies, meanwhile screaming about monopolies once their competitors become one.

That's in addition to the lying, cheating and just general criminal behavior that any business or especially collection of businesses engages with the same regularity and quotidian mindset that the rest of us sit down to our meals.

That's my main beef against capitalists, they lie like rugs and steal more than Gypsies. They even kill people. All this, and in a society under corporate Gramscian hegemony like ours, and no one gives a fuck. As Nader says, they are "thinking corporate".

Chart showing the relative breakdown of the cost of a gallon of gasoline by refineries, distribution and marketing, taxes and crude prices. As I have stated in several recent posts, the present pricing is a feature of speculation in the crude oil bourses.

It generally doesn't have anything to do with conspiracies by oil companies costs or any of that. You can also see that in recent days with skyrocketing crude prices, not only do taxes take much less of a relative bite, but refinery profits are eating it too.

Make of these links what you will.

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Evil Jews Bleed Gentile to Death for Matzos

Take a look at this sordid spectacle here. A pack of vicious, feral, Asiatic Zionist Jews surround a poor Gentile, Lance Thruster, (actually a stand-in for Jesus) in the woods somewhere in the Pale of Russia, torture him to death by crucifixion, and are in the process of draining all of the blood out of his body with thousands of pricks with tiny knives.

The blood is being collected as I write this, and Lance is still alive and typing somehow despite being nailed to the holy cross like our Savior. The blood will be collected and used to prepare matzo balls. The Blood Libel is no libel - it's actual truth, and you can see it right here on the Internets.

Seriously folks, I happen to know Lance, and I don't really think he is an anti-Semite at all. I think he's a college student at USC, my alma mater. He just hates Israel, that's all. These Zionist Jews are torturing him and roasting him over their fire, calling him racist, fascist, anti-Semite, Nazi, KKK, Jew-hater, bigot, skinhead, on and on.

They are also accusing him of being paranoid. Whenever you shine the light on any aspect of Jewish Power, you get accused by entire football fields of snarling Jews of suffering from a paranoid psychosis. Yeah, a paranoid psychosis called reality.

Jewlicious, I believe, is a liberal to progressive Jewish site who take a relatively soft line, as Jews go, on Zionism. Mostly young, hip, leftwing funny Jewish guys on there with a few of their female counterparts.

This just goes to show you that as far as Zionism goes, US Jewish society is just flat-out morally bankrupt these days.

It's also an object lesson in how to create anti-Semites. If poor Lance makes it through this session with hating Jews too much, he deserves a medal. Lots of folks are just plain human and don't have such powers, so anti-Semitism grows while Israel cheers and urges the Diaspora to high-tail to Eretz Israel pronto. It's not quite conspiracy, but it's pretty squalid.

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Great Site on Endangered Languages of Europe

Great site on endangered languages of Europe. Tapani Salinem, a Finnish linguist, has done a bang-up job on this stuff. This report was prepared for UNESCO.

The last good report I read on this subject was a great book published in 1976 called something like The Endangered Languages of Europe. Great little book if you can ever find it, and it covers pretty much most of the larger ones anyway.

Salinem is decidedly pessimistic, but I am not so much so. Furthermore, he often pessimistically notes that this or that language is heavily contaminated by some larger nearby language that the speaker usually also speaks. I don't think that this is all that relevant. Most modern languages nowadays are full of borrowings, often from English, for all sorts of modern words.

What matters is that you are speaking. Borrowing is a natural phenomenon, whether for lexis, syntax, phonology, morphology or whatever. It's been happening for 1000's of years. He often notes that not many children are learning these languages well. That may well be the case, but I do not think that is the end of the world either.

In 100 years though, long after I am gone, I think many of these languages may be on their way out. Note that many still have lots of older speakers. To be honest, the only way to almost surely guarantee a tongue nowadays in Europe is to get your own state. This is partially the impetus for separatism in Europe, but Europe is by and large mature enough to handle separatism.

Many of these types of researchers are too pessimistic. Compared to the US, Europe is doing great. Manx on the Isle of Man has 2,500 2nd language learners, many of whom are fluent. Some are even bringing up their kids speaking Manx! However, purists, often folks like this guy, say Manx is still dead because there are no more Manx first language speakers.

This is too pessimistic for our modern era. Cornish has 1,000 2nd language speakers. Both of those languages were actually revived from extinction. As linguists, we are pretty happy that any of these languages are still alive at all, being the language fetishists that we are.

In order to preempt some rejoinders, let us note that hardly any linguists are going around trying to force communities to retain languages to retain their languages. Communities all over decide to suicide their tongues, and as owners of their languages, they are entitled to that decision. Bilingualism is the answer to those who say that retention of a minority tongue is useless in a transnational world.

Truth is that none of these arguments really hold up. Contra this website, Europe is seeing an explosion of language retention and revitalization efforts. It's one of the few places on Earth where this is occurring and succeeding in a big way.

But Europe also has some extremely popular languages of states that in many cases even extend beyond state borders. These languages have many newspapers, magazines, TV and radio shows, are used by governments, and in some cases often have extensive literature and other books published in them. A number are also developing a significant Internet presence.

The separatists are probably correct that in order to guarantee your tongue, you need a state.

Europeans are now mature, wealthy and relaxed enough, and have retained the best Western values, such that they are some of the only people on Earth who are actually prepared to break up states with massacring each other in displays of mass idiocy. Nevertheless, few breakups are actually occurring. It is not known why this is occurring, but economics probably plays a large role.

Europeans are also probably friendlier towards minority tongues for the most part than folks in any other part of the world. The result is an interesting mix of attitudes and trends both help minority tongues in Europe to prosper and also cause them to slowly go extinct.

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