On the first of August, Gander returned to the field – not with his flock, but with his flight.  He now has a flight of 34 lesser Canadian geese following him, training for the Fall migration.  This time, the landing was on the mowed field, not on the water.  We still have 2 adult geese with the four last hatched goslings just beginning short flights, and one courting couple without goslings. 

It looks like we would have a good place for the turkey hens to raise their chicks, but the woods conceal the raven nests.  While the ravens are no threat to an adult turkey, their size and intelligence adapts them to raid the nests of eggs, and the small birds on the ground are easy victims to their flying skills.  At the north end of the place the young turkeys fare better.

The little orphan yearling that hung out by the sawmill became the little doe, and she continues to hang out near the house and sawmill.  The fawn shows its amazing speed along the driveway and trails.  Our new coyote shows up much closer to the house than the old pair did.  So far, it has been a year without seeing bears on the place.

With the hay all up, it’s time to start working the trees and the sawmill again.  I keep getting reminders of how much work the sawmill is – but its a different story when you’re retired and milling lumber as part of thinning and cleaning up the woods. 

We have wound up with some decent rains over the past couple of days – not enough to take the fire danger down for the rest of the Summer, but at least a couple days break.

The essential notion of a capitalist society … is voluntary cooperation, voluntary exchange. The essential notion of a socialist society is force.
-Milton Friedman

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages. Nobody but a beggar chooses to depend chiefly upon the benevolence of his fellow citizens.
-Adam Smith

There is no moral distinction between the act of a pickpocket and the progressive income tax.
-Leonard Read

I don’t believe in quotas. America was founded on a philosophy of individual rights, not group rights.
-Clarence Thomas

All governments are run by liars and nothing they say should be believed.
-I. F. Stone

The true remedy for most evils is none other than liberty, unlimited and complete liberty, liberty in every field of human endeavor.
-Gustave de Molinari

The problem is that democracy is not freedom. Democracy is simply majoritarianism, which is inherently incompatible with real freedom. Our founding fathers clearly understood this.
-Ron Paul

When we lose the right to be different, we lose the privilege to be free.
-Charles Evans Hughes

Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.
-Henry David Thoreau

What we should have fought for was representation without taxation.
-Sam Levenson

Taxation of earnings from labor is on a par with forced labor.
-Robert Nozick

Liberals want the government to be your Mommy. Conservatives want government to be your Daddy. Libertarians want it to treat you like an adult.
-Andre Marrou

Government is best which governs least
-Thomas Paine

The main political problem is how to prevent the police power from becoming tyrannical. This is the meaning of all the struggles for liberty.
-Ludwig von Mises

The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out… without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, intolerable.
-H. L. Mencken

Freedom is the emancipation from the arbitrary rule of other men.
-Mortimer Adler

Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of liberty.
-Thomas Jefferson

There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him.
-Robert A. Heinlein

There comes a time when a moral man can’t obey a law which his conscience tells him is unjust.
-Martin Luther King, Jr.

A wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities.
-Thomas Jefferson

Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.
-P. J. O’Rourke

One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.
-Plato

Every man has a property in his own person. This nobody has a right to, but himself.
-John Locke

The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good, in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it.
-John Stuart Mill

Sometimes the information that the Center for Disease Control holds is very easy to understand.  This is one of those times – if you can find and click on

QuickStats: Age-Adjusted Rates of Firearm-Related Homicide, by Race, Hispanic Origin, and Sex — National Vital Statistics System, United States, 2021 | MMWR the first thing you come to is this graph:

While it didn’t surprise me, it did shock me.  That tall column that represents Black American deaths – which should include about an eighth of our population – is five times the national average, and probably on the order of 15 times the rate for white Americans.  As I listen to liberals wanting to outright ban assault weapons, I realize that statistics show us where the problem is. 

This website Notes from the Field: Firearm Homicide Rates, by Race and Ethnicity — United States, 2019–2022 | MMWR provides the data, so we have more to look at than the graph:

Race and ethnicity*	Rate†
	2019	2020	2021	2022
A/PI, NH	1.0 (202)	1.0 (208)	1.2 (241)	1.1 (233)
AI/AN, NH	6.4 (154)	7.9 (191)	7.7 (185)	9.3 (224)
Black or African American, NH	20.5 (8,438)	28.3 (11,832)	30.4 (12,721)	27.5 (11,565)
White, NH	1.6 (3,129)	2.0 (3,969)	2.1 (4,064)	2.0 (3,828)
Hispanic or Latino, any race	3.8 (2,301)	4.8 (2,947)	5.5 (3,455)	5.5 (3,500)
Overall§	4.4 (14,414)	5.8 (19,384)	6.3 (20,958)	5.9 (19,637)

Go ahead – pick your own year and see how uncommon it is for a white American to die from firearms violence.  It looks to me like a Black American is about 14 times as likely to be murdered by someone with a firearm.  That bothers me – mostly because the names and faces of my students come to the blackboard of my mind as I look at the vastly higher probability of being murdered.

I think of a nutty white kid, with 2 parents who are mental health specialists, climbing onto a roof to shoot Donald Trump’s ear – and how much we’ve heard about that event.  We’re not hearing how much worse firearms homicides are in America’s Black community.

PEW research, at What the data says about gun deaths in the U.S. | Pew Research Center offers more data – and when four times as many Black Americans are murdered by firearms users than whites, I think the data can be used to figure out a way to do something effective.

PEW shows that nationally suicides by gun outnumber homicides by gun:

This kind of explains the difference – all of the studies I have read, from Durkheim on, show white males as the most likely to suicide (though some of our Native tribes show even higher rates. 

Toward the end of the article, PEW reports:

“In 2020, the most recent year for which the FBI has published data, handguns were involved in 59% of the 13,620 U.S. gun murders and non-negligent manslaughters for which data is available. Rifles – the category that includes guns sometimes referred to as “assault weapons” – were involved in 3% of firearm murders. Shotguns were involved in 1%. The remainder of gun homicides and non-negligent manslaughters (36%) involved other kinds of firearms or those classified as “type not stated.”

Maybe, just maybe, we could figure out where we need more safety training?

My grandson – who is beginning to use words – distinctly said airplane.  Since we’d been baling hay, and were working with the tractor, I wondered at the word choice.  It turned out that his better hearing let him hear the airplane engine at least a minute before I could distinguish the sound.

The toddler had more relevant information than the old professor.  Here, in Trego, it’s an interesting thought.  In England, during the blitz, it might have been life or death in getting to a bomb shelter.  Might still be in Ukraine.

A lot of education doesn’t help much when you lack the critical information – the one piece of information that lets you reach the correct conclusion.  I suspect that’s a significant part in explaining unanticipated consequences.  “Low information voters” is a term I hear regularly.  I suspect that even some of the folks who toss the term out casually are  themselves ‘low information voters.’

High intelligence doesn’t combine well with low information.  High intelligence and high ego really makes for poor conclusions.  Reading articles that disagree with me postpones decisions – and a decision is, at its simplest, something that occurs when you quit thinking.

In higher ed, one phrase you don’t want to use is “If you really want to understand X, you can read my dissertation.”  The reason is that a doctoral dissertation is done to prove you can perform original research.  Albert Einstein’s dissertation was on determining Avogadro’s number based on Brownian motion (1905).  Once Millikan developed a technique to measure the charge of an electron (1909), Einstein’s research based on Brownian motion was no longer the best estimate. 

Obviously, the first researcher – demonstrating his/her ability to conduct original research for the first time – doesn’t have the advantages later researchers do.  In my own dissertation, research proved my hypothesis invalid.  It was a neat hypothesis.  It was wrong.  The dissertation gets cited because the conclusion was correct – but it had nothing to do with cell phones.

High intelligence – High IQ – combines dangerously with low information.  Giordano Bruno – who refined the Copernican model – was burned at the stake for heresy in 1600.  Thirty-odd years later, Galileo (with Bruno’s example to consider) chose to recant and spend the rest of his life under house arrest instead of being burned.  I am sure the church officials at the time were intelligent men – but they had stopped thinking and reached erroneous conclusions.

We need disagreement to keep us looking for a more correct answer.  High intelligence plus low information (or worse, incorrect information) is a recipe for bad conclusions.  Remi was right – he heard the airplane long before my aging ears could notice the sound.

Back in the eighties, I wound up with a handful of Hakim rifles.  It was a great time for surplus – stuff that Israel had captured in the Six Days War had been stashed for 15 or 20 years and was being surplused.  So there I was with some rifles that had been dropped in the sand once.

Egypt bought the tooling for Sweden’s AG-42 Ljungman (and with Sweden’s neutrality, the rifle had no combat experience) made a few modifications, and started building them in Egypt.  About the same time, they contracted with Beretta to make a copy of the M1951 that they also manufactured in Egypt and called the Helwan.  One of those was unfired – I had to take a burr off the firing pin to fix it.  The biggest problem was a cross-bolt safety – secure  as it could be, but it took both hands to release the safety. 

There must have been a lot of 8mm Mauser cartridges in Egypt at the time – and the Hakim has a valve so you can tune the rifle for whatever powder/bullet combination you stumble across.  Very different from our M1 Garand, where the rifle takes a slightly reduced 30/06 load.  The really neat thing about the Hakim is that it has a very effective muzzle brake -no 8mm I have ever fired has so little recoil.  Loud as heck, and you really won’t want to shoot one without hearing protection – good hearing protection.

If I recall correctly, my Hakim came through Century Arms – and this may be the photo I saw before I bought them:

It’s big – basically 4 feet long and 11 pounds.   Since I lack understanding of Arabic, I have to remember that when the safety is to the right it’s safe, when it’s to the left it’s ready to fire.  I don’t need to read Arabic to adjust the sight elevation – it’s in 100 meter increments, and I can count to 10 with some ease.

It shot well – not so well as my Garand, but close – and the Garand has a new Marlin barrel, and has been bedded and accurized.  Those 196 grain bullets can keep an 8-gallon keg rolling like a 22 pistol can a pop can.  Semi-automatics can be a lot of fun. 

It’s a busy weekend in Eureka, with the Quilt Show, Play, and Fiberfest to visit. This Friday (7pm), Saturday (7pm) and Sunday (3pm) folks can watch a comedy:
“The Charitable Sisterhood of the Second Trinity Victory Church” performed by the Eureka Community Players at the Timbers Event Center. Tickets are $10 for adults and $8 for seniors and students.

On Saturday (9am-5pm), Fiberfest and the quilt show will both be ongoing. The annual outdoor quilt show is nearing the twenty-year mark, and covers increasing parts of the town in quilts. Plan to take a stroll through Eureka, visit vendors in the village and riverside park, and take lots of photos.

Fiberfest begins Saturday and will wrap up Sunday afternoon (4pm). Vendors and demonstrations can be found at the Fairgrounds. Learn to spin wool, watch a sheep herding demonstration, visit the petting zoo, and browse fibers and fiber products.

These days, you don’t have to go to Libby and check records for a title to find out who owns a piece of property. You can find out from home with a computer. Where do you look? Cadastral.

When you see the word ‘Cadastral’, think surveying. Cadastral is an adjective (in english, that -al ending is a clue), which means “showing or recording property boundaries, subdivision lines, buildings, and related detail”

It’s related to the noun, cadastre, which refers to a register of property. The word likely originates from the greek word for a register.

How is Montana’s Cadastral website useful? Montana Cadastral is a map tool hosted by the montana state library. You can search a name, an address, or simply just navigate to the region on that map that you are interested in.

For example, the address of the school provides the following:

From there, looking through details I can determine the size of land, read some construction details, and look appraisals. With private property, cadastral often also provides contact information for the property owner.

Snooping has never been easier than in this age of the internet.

When we got married, Renata didn’t have a piano to play – and pianos were expensive.  And big.  I was kind of a guitar and harmonica guy – and those are a lot smaller, and less expensive.  So the first keyboard instrument I got for her was a melodica – it’s a wind instrument with keys and hers looks like this. We still have it – but she always liked a piano more.

So when we were in Libby, I saw a piano advertised with a Yaak address.  I took the checkbook, the Isuzu pickup, a lot of bracing, and came home with a Piano – a small piano of less than outstanding name recognition.  It tuned up OK – had a kind of tinny, honkytonk sound, and it went to South Dakota with us.  There we were faced with the fact that our daughter liked the melodica, so we wound up getting one for her – a Honer Soprano:

Later, Renata inherited her mother’s 1963 Steinway – so we learned that electronic keyboards had replaced the bottom-of-the-line pianos (I think I got $100 for the little piano I had hauled down from the Yaak) and we replaced it with the Steinway.

In 2015, I retired and we moved back to Trego – but didn’t have the house yet, so we stored the piano in the apartment that became Sam’s.  It waited until this July, when we got enough manpower to load it in the back of the pickup, shift it into 4 low, and slowly, gently, drive it the last half-mile to get it into the house.  It looks like this:

Now, we only need to find the sheet music from where we stashed it, and it will be producing more than scales.

I accidentally ran across a couple of student papers written by Martin Luther King during the 1949-50 school year.  The first was a brief paper “A Study of Mithraism” “A Study of Mithraism” | The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute and the second included the research on the first and is titled “The Influence of Mystery Religions on Christianity.”  “The Influence of the Mystery Religions on Christianity” | The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute

He was a beginning grad student when he wrote the papers – both of which deal with some touchy areas for a minister.  Frankly, the papers are pretty darned good – particularly when you consider that there was no internet to use for search routines, and he was limited to the libraries of relatively small colleges (his doctorate, at Boston University) was still in the future when these were written.

It was fun to read how a young MLK researched the commonalities between the Mystery cults, between Mithraism, Isis, Osiris and Christianity – and see that he was capable of recognizing that the many religions of that area exchanged stories, myths if you have it, that later became part of the Christian story.  Seeing Martin Luther King Jr. as a young graduate student, instead of the mature civil rights leader was humanizing.  For most of my life I have respected the man for his courage.  Reading his student papers brought an additional respect for his willingness to research a hard topic, and do it well.  The links are worth clicking, and his essays worth reading.

My vote for President makes no difference – my state is going for Trump.  I’ve marked my ballot alongside his name twice – in 2016, I knew what to expect from Hillary Clinton and had hopes that Trump would be better.  He was . . . but then came Biden.  Now that was a low hurdle – Slow Joe has always reminded me of Warren G. Harding – who described his own presidency with the words: “I am not fit for this office and should never have been here.”   E. E. Cummings memorialized Harding with this poem:

the first president to be loved by his
bitterest enemies ” is dead

the only man woman or child who wrote
a simple declarative sentence with seven grammatical
errors ” is dead “
beautiful Warren Gamaliel Harding
” is ” dead
he’s
” dead “
if he wouldn’t have eaten them Yapanese Craps

somebody might hardly never not have been unsorry, perhaps.

Remember, cummings did some interesting things with capitalization and punctuation – but he did immortalize Harding’s grammatical failings.  It’s a pity that he isn’t around to describe Joe Biden. 

At the state level, I have one incumbent candidate to cheerfully vote against – Secretary of State Christi Jacobsen.  The Secretary of State is in charge of our elections, and I have seen Christi twice indulge her inner fascist to make our elections less democratic.  This last time, the District Court judge found that she was infringing on our constitutional rights.  Christi is running against Jesse Mullen and John Lamb.  I’d vote for a Chacma baboon over Christi. 

The other vote is more of a problem – I suspect that if I met Jon Tester, I’d like him.  The problem is, Jon has a long record of supporting the government spending that has devalued our dollar and made interest on the national debt the largest entry in our nation’s budget.  Gold was about $640 an ounce when he was elected in 2006.  Today’s spot price is $2397.45.  If Jon could see that balancing the budget is as important in Washington DC as in Big Sandy, I might not have the dilemma.  I am hoping that Tim Sheehy keeps his word on bringing government spending down.  It is not a strong hope – I know how easy it is for elected officials to spend other people’s money.

Locally, I’ll be voting against Neil Durum.  In 2018, Neil was elected state representative unopposed.  This last year he voted against Trego school’s best interests.  So far, he has opposition in the Democrat column.  I haven’t met his opponent – but I believe in voting against people who have a record of voting against my interests.  Sorry, Neil – but when you vote for something your party wants that screws over your constituents, you move into the vote against category.