We’ll be up there with my friend Nick and his two boys and daughter.  I’ll have my son Will with me.  It should be a good time.

My one concern at this point is the fire burning in Kings Canyon, which has spread now to be fairly close to where I intended to hunt.  I am hoping that the forest service has not closed the area.  The website seems to indicate that it’s still open.

I’ll be going for a bear this year as well.  I’ve identified some high meadows that I intend to stake out.  We’ll see how it goes.

Read the full ruling here.

Over the next few weeks I will be surveying and commenting on the fallout, which promises to be substantial.  For now, I would direct you to this early commentary by Ilya Shapiro on Akin Gump’s SCOTUS Blog.  Shapiro correctly points out that the Court arrived at the right conclusion, but took the wrong path.  It would have been preferrable for the Court to rule on the basis of the Privileges and Immunities clause, but they wimped out and ruled on the Due Process clause.  Only Justice Thomas, in his concurring opinion, made the case for the obvious.

Nonetheless, today the right to keep and bear arms was affirmed as fundamental to our established notion of a free and ordered society.  Today is a good day for liberty!

This story from FoX News appears to be about Mayor Daley’s exasperation with a reporter, who apparently wasn’t willing to swallow the Chicago admonistration’s arguments uncritically.  He kept asking if the gun ban had actually been effective.  Imagine!  Such rudeness!

Daley’s pressecretary then tries to present a tragic case to support the gun ban.  Trouble is, the details of the story work against the gun ban argument.   From the Foxnews.com story:

Thomas Wortham IV, a 30-year-old Chicago police officer who recently returned from a tour of duty in Iraq, was shot and killed Thursday when several people approached him outside his family’s home and tried to steal his new motorcycle, authorities said.

Wortham IV’s father — a retired Chicago police officer — came to his son’s aid and shot two of the attackers, killing one of them late Wednesday, police said. Retired police officers are allowed to keep guns.

 

First of all, my sympathies are with the family of Officer Wortham.  He did not deserve to be killed by a gang of scumbags with guns.   However, please notice what happened.  His father, a retired policeman, came to his aid WITH A GUN!  He managed to injure one of the s***heads and kill another.  Good for him.

Ask yourself if those criminals expected to face a gun while they robbed Wortham of his motorcycle.  I’ll gurantee you they didn’t, because in Chicago OWNING A HANDGUN IS ILLEGAL!  That means criminals can be nearly 100% certain that they face unarmed victims.

Now ask yourself if those same criminals would have been so bold if they had a reasonable expectation that their victim and other people in the vicinity were armed.  My guess is they would not have attempted the crime at all.  Criminals attempt crimes because they expect to get away with it.  If they expected to get their asses shot off they wouldn’t try it at all.  Wortham’s father, under Chicago law, was allowed to do what every law abiding citizen in Chicago ought to have the right to do — defend himself, his family and his property, with a firearm if necessary.  I guarantee that crime rates would fall if the ban were lifted and a “must-issue” concealed carry law was implemented.

Our prayers are with the Wortham family.  And our prayers are with the Supreme Court.

The first paddle was 17 miles from Moabi Regional Park to Castle Rock.  We explored some great canyons and wonderfully incongruous marshes.  The river carries a massive amount of water through the Mojave Desert, and along the way supports more life than we ever imagined.

Will preparing for early morning launch on Day On

Heading for the Canyons in the Morning

The river often widens into flat, sandy marshes that attract an incredible variety of birds and wildlife.  Will and I saw countless dove and quail, redwing blackbirds, and large carp swimming under us.

Desert skies really have no match for bigness and blueness

Navigating narrow passages between cliffs and tules

Days 2 and 3 we paddled another 25 total miles starting upstream from the town of Needles, CA.  There were no canyons, but miles and miles of desert riparian habitat, populated by vast numbers of birds.  The night of Day 2 we spent on the banks of the river as guests of the Fort Mojave Indian Tribe and listened to a deafeningly loud chorus of birds, led by mourning doves, that sang the sun down.  In the morning, the avian chorus sang it up again.

Launching for Day 3 to the sound of an avian chorus

So this year I am considering applying for premium zones.  Specifically I am considering X3a, X3b, and X5a in northeastern California, in the Modoc plateau area.  Success rates are high, 4x4s or better are around 30% of the take, but only a few permits are awarded in the drawings.  Zone X1, east of Shasta, would be a great backup plan, but somewhere upwards of 2000 tags are usually awarded, so it could be crowded.  Nonetheless, success rates are typically much better than in D8.  I’ll probably ask for an X zone for my first choice, and D8 for second or third.  That way I’m probably going to end up in D8, which I know well, but have a chance for something better.

I’ll probably take bear hunting much more seriously this year as well.  I have some pretty good ideas where to hunt them in D8, and they are probably more plentiful further north.

It always amazes me how early and how acutely hunting fever strikes!

“Now suddenly if you don’t have your papers, and you took your kid out to get ice cream, you’re going to get harassed — that’s something that could potentially happen,” Obama said of the Arizona measure.

What a buffoon!  This is the Harvard trained lawyer?  Has he read the bill?  He’s just making this stuff up to rally the few Americans left who will admit they voted for him.     The fact is, Arizona police will not be randomly demanding from pedestrians that they produce passports.  It’s ridiculous to assert that this would happen.  What might happen is that someone who is stopped for a traffic violation, who fails to produce license, registration and proof of insurance (papers most illegal immigrants lack), that person may be arrested.  An investigation of the person’s resident status might ensue.

Just for the record, here’s the text of the new law.

Barack Obama is not qualified to read a very simple law, much less to be president of this great country.

U.S. regulators are planning a push to gradually cut the amount of salt Americans consume, saying less sodium would reduce deaths from hypertension and heart disease, The Washington Post reported on Tuesday.

The effort would eventually lead to the first legal limits on the amount of salt allowed in processed foods, the newspaper reported. The plan is to be launched this year but officials have not set salt limits.

The government plans to work with the food industry and health experts to reduce sodium gradually over a period of years to ratchet down sodium consumption, the newspaper said, citing U.S. Food and Drug Administration sources.

U.S. researchers said in a recent study that working with the food industry to cut salt intake by nearly 10 percent could prevent hundreds of thousands of heart attacks and strokes over several decades and save the U.S. government $32 billion in healthcare costs.

Is that the change so many Americans voted for?  A government so powerful and intrusive that it can tell them how much salt to eat? Did voters really mean they wanted a building full of unionized bureaucrats sitting in the FDA building with nothing to do but figure out if something you eat has too much salt in it?

Note the justification for this nanny state overreach:  saving health care costs.  My friends, there isn’t anything you do that they can’t connect to healthcare costs.  Today it’s salt, tomorrow it’s your guns.

Repeal Obamacare and fire them all!

The county intends to sterilize 9,559 women or their husbands who are suspected of planning to have a second or third child. So far about half that number have agreed to comply, the newspaper said.

Note that all they need to justify sterilizing someone is SUSPICION.

This is the country to which Obama wants us to owe our grandchildren’s inheritance.  It’s also not that far a throw from socialized medicine telling you what treatments you can have and when you can have them, to telling you how many kids you can have. 

If you voted for Obama, and you’re Christian, you should be ashamed.

Psalm 65:12 (NOV)

Last Sunday my family and I traveled to Anza Borrego State Park, just a couple of hours from our home in SoCal, to witness the riot of color brought on by abundant rains in the desert this year.  If you’ve never been in a blooming desert before, Anza is the place to see it.  My daughter made the first two photographs.  I made the next six.

1 Then the LORD answered Job out of the storm. He said:

2 “Who is this that darkens my counsel with words without knowledge?

3 Brace yourself like a man; I will question you, and you shall answer me.

4 “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation? 
Tell me, if you understand.

5 Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know! 
Who stretched a measuring line across it?

6 On what were its footings set, or who laid its cornerstone-

7 while the morning stars sang together and all the angels shouted for joy?

…………………………

25 Who cuts a channel for the torrents of rain, and a path for the thunderstorm,

26 to water a land where no man lives, a desert with no one in it,

27 to satisfy a desolate wasteland and make it sprout with grass?

Job 38:1-6, 25-27 (NIV)