Around the Web

Of course I have still been at least crawling around the web and have found much entertainment and as always a little offense. I'll direct you to some goodies, but I hope that in my absence you have visited not only friends linked to here but also O &P, Heidi, Mary, Chas, Roseann, Pluvi (returned from the Stans and seeing Goshawks at home!) and Darren.

Patrick weighs in here on mandatory spay neuter and-- scroll up on the site-- with a wrinkle on Zumbo: "Marmot Culture". Patrick, you haven't seen Marmot Culture until you have visited Mongolia!

A federal court finds for the Second Amendment! The NYT is somewhat shocked. Istapundit isn't.

Bruce Douglas comments:

" "The majority rejected the District’s
argument that the Second Amendment should apply only
to the kinds of guns in use at the end of the 18th
century" always gets me. I'd be cool with carrying a
brace of flintlocks if the media was willing to
distribute the news on individually printed
handbills, distributed by horse and foot. Oh yeah,
they also have to get rid of air conditioning in DC
and go back to outhouses. And, of course, dueling
was legal again."

Carel delights Libby by telling us all about softshell turtles, her favorite reptile (if in this cladistic age we can still use such an archaic term.)

Sixty to eighty cheetahs persist in Iran!

The Irish may really be English.

Puritan anti- drug warriors are trying to turn our kids into Stalin-era youth prohibitionist- informants. Luckily ours (Mr. P.) didn't get anything like that, and I doubt his potential kids-- or Odious's actual one (see his recent post)-- will either.

Annie D sends news of a new clouded leopard in Borneo. This cat is not just genetically distinct-- it actually looks different.

The prairies should burn-- but not evenly.

"The prairies were never some homogenous sea of grass rolling off in unending sameness. They were a patchwork, a shifting mosaic of burned and unburned, some places grazed down, others hardly grazed at all. Some areas were replete with forbs and others not. Patches ranged from small to immense. And none of this happened on a set schedule; the whole process was infused with randomness and rotating change. Conditioned to forests, settlers from the east may have little perceived the diversity of the prairies, but diverse and dynamic they were."

(HT Walter Hingley).

Stewart Brand has never stopped thinking originally. As Tom McIntyre says: "God (or Gaia, if you prefer) bless old acid freaks!"

You want biodiversity? THIS is biodiversity! HT Nate and Liz Johnson.

And finally: they can always amaze me. The AR movement has apparently combined with academia to convene the (seventh annual!) "Convention on Inadmissible Questions" on the question "Can the Holocaust be compared with African American slavery or the Native American genocide? Can any of these experiences be related to those of animals on today’s factory farms?".

Their apparent answer is "Yes". I was going to comment but I think I'll just let it hang. I'm not sure it isn't historically illiterate to compare the first three...

Doomed!

Update: Darren has already informed us that the "new" clouded leopard was described in 1823. Two lessons: don't get sick and don't miss Darren, even for a few days...