It is official

You might have figured it out in comments below but it is official: because the Feds are allowing a three- decade exemption for wind farms to kill as many eagles as they “need” to, and because they exert no pressure on tribal use (right and understandable for religious practice, but ignoring the profitable if clandestine …

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Red Kite?

I can’t prove the bird morphed into an “eagle” in the hoax video below was a red kite (Milvus milvus) but I have seen a few in the wild and I think it was. A beautiful bird with remarkable buoyancy and power of flight, a common medieval street scavenger, a most challenging quarry hunted through …

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Another dumb quote

From a review in the New Yorker for 27 August: “Buying a car, Grescoe writes “is the beginning of a spiral through selfishness, road rage, and anomie, one whose ultimate goal is the mall or the gated community”. Unless you, you know, live in the country. Do our coastal elites even “get” Upstate New York? …

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First Let’s Kill All the Tigers..

Professor McMahan, the guy who wants to eliminate all predators, is back with what he thinks is a refutation of his critics. This time he begins with a thought experiment: since Amur (“Siberian”) tigers are supposedly insignificant ecological actors these days, why not let them go extinct? “Many of the commentators said, in effect: “Leave …

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More Thoughts on Prof. McMahan’s Essay

Reading yesterday’s NYT (online) essay, The Meat Eaters, by Rutgers University professor of philosophy Jeff McMahan (forwarded by reader Daniela and shared below by Steve), I’m almost more puzzled by my own need to comment on the piece than I am amazed by it. It’s tempting to lump this man’s essay in with the tiresome mass of …

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Worst NYT piece EVER?

Unfortunately the Times is not up to Jeff Lockwood’s standard today, at least outside of their science pages. Last night Daniela sent me this essay by a philosophy professor at Rutgers who is also a visiting one at Princeton (which at least balances him and Peter Singer with Freeman Dyson, who outweighs them both together …

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5000 Year-Old Scammer?

David Z (see below) sent us the latest on Hari Scam and and, amazingly, it is even more ridiculous than what has gone before. “Among the mixed-bag films at Tribeca this year, Thorkell Hardarson and Örn Marino Arnason’s Feathered Cocaine was arguably the most mixed. Alan Howell Parrott, an American Sikh convert, introduced falconry to …

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