A dead skunk in the road

I'd rather clean up skunk roadkill in East Texas on a Dog Day in August than pick up a Newsweek ever again.

The recent screwup at Newsweek has stirred up the blogosphere like nothing since Rathergate. Last night I read the Newsweek article and the commentary on the web and thought I was Ok.

But this morning I saw a Newsweek and felt like I'd just run over a skunk.

One has to ask several questions.

First, if they, meaning the MSM, blew something as big as this, then what else have they told us which is not true in part or in whole?

Is this lack of clarity due to incompetence or is it due to maliciousness?

The Powerline excerpt of todays White House press conference is telling.

"Press:With respect, who made you the editor of Newsweek? Do you think it's appropriate for you, at that podium, speaking with the authority of the President of the United States, to tell an American magazine what they should print?"

WTF? Is that a question or is that a reporter lecturing a White House Official?

1. One of the top TWO US Weekly news magazined LIED. They printed a story which had no basis in fact and was used by Anti-US forces to inflame public opinion against the USA.

2. People have died as a direct consequence of this story.

3. The press is openly hostile to a White House official who is stating a Fact - that the retraction is a good first step.

4. Any polite individual and most Americans would agree with the White House that Newsweek needs to make amends.

5. The Newsweek story and the resulting press reaction as shown during the press conference shows just how out of touch the press is with both the Real World, US public opinion, and common standards of decency.

6. The ongoing MSM pattern of deception and agitation raises a disturbing trend that verges on sociopathy.

In her book The Sociopath Next Door, Martha Stout depicts the various degrees of evil inherent in a sociopath. She also gives us some rules to spot these often dangerous personalities.

The first and strongest rule she has is that if you catch a person in three lies, then you MUST break your ties with them, because lies are the primary hallmark of a sociopath. This is the Modern's restatement of the old saying, "Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me."

How many lies has the MSM pushed in the last 12 months?

Ask yourself if this was a Medical Doctor or a Lawyer or an Engineer? Would this person still have a job? Or would they be in jail?

There is only one conclusion one can reach - that there are persons in the MSM that are sociopathic and who mean us, meaning most Americans, real harm, either by stupidity or outright maliciousness.

UPDATE: The New Criterion has a quote from Dennis Praeger.

UPDATE2: Orson Scot Card, author of the brilliant Ender's Game jumps on the bandwagon as well. He gives us an essayist's eyeball view of the press crowd in all their hickish faults.

Who's Your Daddy

We shifted the herd yesterday. A few cows were left behind and did not want to play follow the leader.

These dissidents all had newborn calves. One old biddy did not have a calf and made a beeline to the other side of the field. She ran down into a gully and did not come out.

That's weird. So I walked a mile and went and looked. Her calf was stuck in some old fence in the gully.

I always carry pliers. So I jumped down into the gully and whipped them out and got to work. But little girl was wrapped up real good.

But mom kept intervening. She would charge down into the gully then I would counter-charge her and she would run away. I would cut three wires and then she would come back. Meanwhile the calf is bucking and bawling and kicking me while I am dogging it and digging for wire in its fur and peeking over the gully looking for mom.

After 20 wires, I had three left before the struggling calf could run. I looked up and did not like what I saw.

Mom came back with reinforcements. All four moms plowed into the gully, snorting snot and hurling buff cuss words at me.

I decided to stay put and finish the job. I steadied myself and cut the last wires and yanked the calf free and shoved it towards the mommie storm troopers.

I jumped up on the bank and ran out into the pasture. I ran for 20 yards and stopped to look back.

The calf was right behind me with the angry beasts right behind! The calf was running for its life and I could almost hear it calling , "Daadddddyyy!!"

I headed back for the gully and the cover the trees offered. The calf followed me, grunting and moaning all the way. The moms were right behind, but they had spread out and were circling around.

I jumped into the gully at full speed, landing flat on my back. Pain jerked through my leg causing me to stop breathing. The calf came right over the bank and landed ten yards from me.

In my mind I could see the cows leaping into the gully around me and beating me up so bad I would not get out nor would I be found..

I stood up and jumped up the bank towards the trees, clawing up the dirt face, my ankle useless.

I looked back and saw the calf trying to come up the bank as the moms swarmed over where I had just been, trying to get to the calf.

The bank defeated the calf, but I kept going, hopping on one leg, until I got to a fence. I tried to leap it but my leg would not work. I flopped on the ground and lowcrawled through the poison ivy under the bottom wire.

I stood up on the other side and saw the moms and calf run away. My leg gave away and I fell to the ground with pain so bad I could not breathe.

My ankle swelled up. I swapped into running shoes. And spent the rest of the day on the tractor planting. And spent the night with ice on my ankle.

This morning I woke to rain and smiled.

And in the shower I almost passed out from the pain when I bumped my foot.

I saw the moms this evening with their calves. They were happy and the calves were doing well.

And my ankle did not hurt as much.

Plains Power

In Frank Herbert's Dune , Duke Atreides unlocks the secret to controlling Dune by seeing that it had to come from Dune itself - it was Desert Power.

Desert Power in the Dune novels was nothing less than the power of place which is nothing more than the ages-old Comparative Advantage - that is a better set of practices and knowledge and motivation.

Sustainable ranching is often defined as the maximum sustainable yield of beef that the land will produce. There are obvious problems with this, but the problems are deeper. And the latest "settlers" are still stuck to their Greenhorn Ways.

In Grassland, Dick Manning talks about Desert Power. He shows us that everyone has a plan for the Great Plains, except for the people who live in the land itself. Everyone come from the outside with their dreams only to be confounded and defeated by the nature of the place itself.

But people are not defeated - its their ideas that are defeated - its their ideas, not the people, that are not sustainable.

Ted Turner has bought up vast ranches. So have many other environmentalists and eco-groups. But something is not right. On one level, I strongly admire ANYONE who will put their money where their mouth is. And I admire them for saying the truth - that we have screwed up things that we cannot replace in a long time.

But, and this is the big but, the New West is not sustainable. Its true that they are stocking lightly, that they are burning more, that they are focusing on more than just pounds of beef per acre.

But, are they making a true profit? Does the cash made from selling the values inherent in the land exceed the cash put into the operations?

The simplest way to see this is to look at the ratio of livestock versus the number of people in an operation. Turner has a real problem with 30,000 head and over 200 people. This is 150 head per person. Even if his net is $100 per head, that's only $15,000 per person. Not enough to pay salaries.

But some operations have no income at all coming from the land. Their situation is akin to the settler who came West and plowed up the land and lived off the stored nitrogen and whose lives crashed when low prices and drought destroyed their balance sheets. These operations depend on donations to survive.

How sustainable is this?

The fatal flaw of environmental operations is that they do not derive their power from the land, but from the cities' largesse. Its the same old story. And it will fail in time because it is a net loss of energy.

The land must sustain itself. This is the central truth. Just as Dune had its Desert Power, so must the Great Plains derive its power from itself.

This means beef and bison and sheep. It means men on horseback. It means owner-operators and VAST operations. It means knowledge accumulating in committed minds who not only can surmount obstacles of weather and prices and men, but who LOVE the place unconditionally to be able to face it on its own terms.