March Night Sky

Sure, it is still February so you're probably wondering what's-up with a March Night Sky post.

Tomorrow, March 1, brings a special astronomical event.

A planetary conjunction occurs when two or more planets appear close to each other in the sky. The apparent proximity of planets is an optical illusion as the fact of the matter is they are very far away from each other.  It is their alignment that tricks our eyes.

The highlight beginning this evening has been building all of February.  The two brightest objects in the night sky - Venus and Jupiter - have been slowly approaching each other  And they are kicking-off the month of March with a spectacular close encounter.  And with a pair of binoculars or a telescope you can get a terrific view of both of them together.  

Look for them in the western sky, low above the horizon immediately after sunset. 

Fingers-crossed for clear night skies.

 

 

February Night Sky

More than a week ago I shared that Jupiter and Venus were visible above the western horizon after sunset.

It's getting better.  

Venus is closing-in on Jupiter as their conjunction approaches on February 28.

In the astronomy world a conjunction occurs when any two objects in the sky (moon, planet, star, asteroid) appear to be close together in the sky.  Beginning now Jupiter and Venus commence a dance that will culminate in a planetary conjunction on March 1.  After that the planets will pull-apart.

You don't have to stay-up later for this and it's easy to spot as they are the brightest objects in the sky.  Look to the west after sunset.

Sunday Morning Economics

Keep your eye on the money supply.

If you go back in time the Federal Reserve followed twin policies of:

1.  Purchasing Treasury securities from banks to increase reserves in the system.

2.  Selling Treasury securities to banks in order to drain reserves from the system.

This is easy to remember.  If you wish to loosen monetary policy you add reserves to the system.  If you desire to tighten monetary policy you drain reserves from the system.

As a consequence of either of these actions banks have to trade reserves with one another to meet their reserve requirements.  When the Fed manipulates the supply the interest rate that banks charge one another is impacted.  A policy of scarceness resulted in stable interest rates and low inflation for as long as I can remember.  

Along came the Financial Crisis of 2008-09 and the policy of scarceness was supplanted with a policy of abundance.  The Fed literally flooded the system with more reserves than ever before.  Moreover, the Fed manipulated the reserve system by paying banks to hold them.  Banks no longer had to engage in overnight trading amongst themselves to meet their reserve requirements and thus a market interest rate.  Banks could sit on their hands and wait to see whet the Fed would pay them to hold them.  (4.65% per annum) 

Result?

No more market interest rates.  Instead it is determined by the Fed.

Getting back to the first line in this post. During the first two years of the Covid pandemic it was a policy of abundance on steroids.  The money supply (M2) ballooned by more than 40%. Abundant fuel to allow inflation to rear it's ugly head.

In an effort to beat inflation into submission the Fed has engaged in a series of interest rate hikes and beginning in 2022 the M2 has shrunk faster than at any time since the Great Depression.  I may be old but I wasn't around that long ago so my frame of reference is the early 1980s.  That's long enough ago to suggest I've never seen anything like this.

M2 data comes out early next week and we'll learn weather or not the money supply has continued to shrink this year and whether additional increases in interest rates will impact the money supply further in 2023. 

We are living during interesting times.  It remains to be seen if raising interest rates is impacting the M2.  If the Fed reaches a point of cessation will the supply of money continue to shrink on its own?  Or will it reverse on its own?  This is uncharted territory.

Unlike the sound bites spouted by political partisans or what you might drink from the Face Book cesspool of lazy economic thought when the Fed influences monetary policy its impacts are not felt immediately.

As always, with economies the size of a aircraft carrier when you tweak the rudder it takes considerable time to turn the ship.  It's too soon to know for sure whether, or not, there will be a soft landing or if the economy tips into a recession.

Keep you eye on the money supply.  

And stay tuned.....

Antler Drop is Nigh

Bucks on the winter landscape.

Not surprisingly they are still sporting their headgear.

With the arrival of March that will have begun to change as they shed their 2022 antlers.

And I am without a four-legged antler hunter.

Gotta do something about that...

Friday Music

This song by the British group Pink Floyd was released as the title track in 1975 on the album of the same name.  

Composed by David Gilmour and Roger Waters; Gilmour sang the lead vocals.  This song is a solid classic of my generation.  The cohort that attained adulthood and came of age in the 1970s.  Thusly, it occupies the 302 place on Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Songs of all time. 

This awesome acoustic version came my way at the recommendation of a friend with similar musical tastes.

Enjoy Wish You Were Here..... 

Blizzard

The wind is still gusting robustly but the snow has stopped.  Or has it simply paused?

Looking outside to the east the snow drift alongside the machine shed is now a couple feet below the windows.  If memory serves the sill of those windows are five feet above the floor.

Digging-out....

 

Hooked on Phonics

A classroom of five-year-old students have been learning to read.  Looking at a book one of them blurts-out...

Look!  It's a frickin' elephant!

The teacher inhales and takes a deep breath and calmly asks....

What did you call that?

Child...

It's a frickin' elephant!  It says so on the picture!

And so it does.

African Elephant

Hooked on phonics....

photo - National Geographic

Hunkered Down

23F our there and the wind is howling and the snow is blowing.

That radar map to the right explains everything.  We are located at the blue dot underneath all of the weather that has cancelled every commercial flight in the upper Midwest.

The Door County Sheriff Department has strongly recommended everyone stay home as the plows have been recalled to give the crews a spell to rest before resuming operations early tomorrow morning.

Tomorrow (Thursday) is cancelled for everyone else.

Meanwhile, I'm recovering from surgery, there is a fire in the wood stove and it is a cozy 71F here indoors.

We're hunkered-down and sheltering in place with ample supplies to ride-out the weather.

We'll see what tomorrow brings........

Tower From Power

Ferdinand Lewis Alcindor Jr.  (Kareem Abdul-Jabbar).

He led his Power Memorial Academy high school team to three straight New York City Catholic championships, a 71–game winning streak, and a 79–2 overall record. This earned him "The Tower from Power" nickname.

Photographed in New York City by Richard Avedon, 1963

 

When I was a waiter at Farrell's I served him.

 

Got an autograph somewhere.....

 

Hopefully The Final Balloon Update

Last week Old Uncle Joe spoke to a nation weary of balloon drama about the necessity to develop sharper rules to identify and, if necessary, shoot down unidentified aerial objects.  All of this a consequence of weeks of breathtaking drama associated with the transit of a Red Chinese spy balloon that crossed the airspace of the United States and Canada.

As I have said before, I take seriously the encroachment of anything suspicious in our nation's airspace.  This includes civilian private and commercial aircraft, military aircraft and balloons;  anything without a previously-filed flight plan.   Satellites are a completely different matter.  On this matter there is nothing funny about China's criminal conduct and willful disregard for our laws.

It should be obvious to anyone paying attention that roughly half the population dislikes Old Uncle Joe.  That is OK.  Everyone is entitled to an opinion.  It is a foregone conclusion that this population will complain if a balloon isn't shot from the sky immediately.  Considering the Red Chinese balloon was more than 200 feet tall and carrying a payload the size of three school buses if blown to bits it might result in a very sizeable debris field.  Suppose you shoot out of the sky something of this size?  Suppose all of that mass broke-up at an altitude of 50,000 feet, scattered and fell from the sky, damaged property, injured some children or killed someone?  Do you think these same people might howl even louder? 

Seems to me Old Joe is damned if he does and damned if he doesn't.  But that's his problem, not mine. 

I'm actually slightly tickled to have witnessed some people contort themselves into knots over the course of events because as days passed we eventually learned that by the time the spy balloon had crossed into American airspace late last month our military and intelligence services had been tracking it for nearly a week already; watching as it lifted-off from its home base in Hainan Island near China's south coast.

Expecting it to surveil our extensive military installation on Guam an unexpected jet stream carried it far off course to the north where a cold Canadian weather front pushed it back south and then eastward penetrating the American heartland.  Chinese ineptness following a bad turn of events?  What, no self-destruct mechanism?  Or a Chinese attempt to exploit a bad turn of events?  Its sloppy carelessness either way.

So yeah, I'm kinda pissed about this.  Floating thru our airspace is at a minimum an affront to national pride.  At worse an act of aggression.  Nevertheless, if I had to hazard a guess the PLA was caught flat-footed by this untoward turn of developments; so much so they wouldn't even pick-up the phone to answer our calls to ask- WASSUP?

Their playbook was reminiscent of a Mad Magazine Spy vs. Spy cartoon strip.  Did the PLA do and end run around President Xi?  Or fall on their sword for President Xi?  Meanwhile, if you paid attention to the rhetoric last week at the Munich Security Conference, China's senior foreign policy advisor Wang Yi  was indignant and laid blame for all of this at the feet of U.S. indiscriminate use of force. He demanded an apology.  In Asian cultures Face counts for much more than in western culture.

So, in my view, I thought it prudent to follow the advice of the military and intelligence services to track it, jam its transmissions, study it, photograph it, record its telemetry, shoot it down in shallow territorial waters, recover as much wreckage as possible, move the debris to the FBI lab at Langley to study it further and reverse engineer as much as can be done.  Maybe even rub their nose in it.

Big loss of face to be punked on those terms.  Plausible?

You may disbelieve all of the foregoing or disagree with it.  That's perfectly OK.  Inasmuch as anyone reading this (including yours-truly) isn't privy to secure briefings in a SCIF we all are entitled to an opinion.  Nevertheless, and because I try to keep an open mind, if your narrative of the spy balloon drama includes our military lying to us, all of the combined intelligence services deceiving us, the Biden Crime Syndicate accepting billions of dollars of Chinese bribes, Hunter's laptop, and the Canadians implicated in the entirety of it than by all means please share.  If you have evidence of a cover-up or conspiracy you have an obligation and absolute duty to reveal it.  Post it in the comments section.  The congressional inquiries, indictments, impeachments, arrests and firing squads will follow.  

Which is more plausible; the latter or the former?

One more thing; I believe that splashing some hobbyist's or a university's or other legitimate entity's non-nefarious and totally legit balloon with an air-to-air Sidewinder missile at $400,000 a pop is just a wee bit over the top.  So we'll just have to see how this is parsed in the real world.

In closing, and to remain grounded in some rational perspective on the whole affair, consider this:  People routinely allow Face Book, TikTok (Red Chinese spyware), Pinterest, Alexa and similar platforms to spy on their lives willingly and all the damn day long.  Is a Chinese spy balloon a larger threat than Google Earth?  Want to see a missile silo from above?  Open source photos are readily available on the web.  (The silo doors are always closed BTW and everyone knows their locations).  Listen-up people, everyone's satellites have already photographed everyone else's secret stuff by high resolution means already.

It occurred to me the other day that the commotion over Red China's balloon is reminiscent of the hysteria that followed the launch of Sputnik by the Soviets when I was a little kid.  Or a scary cold war era episode from The Twilight Zone.

For the love of God and all that is holy I sure hope I don't have to publish anything further on the subject of balloons.

Speaking of balloons - these are one more of many useful tools that the US Weather Service uses to forecast their guesses.....

Carnival

If you are celebrating  Carnival, Joe Cain Day is commemorated on the Sunday before Fat Tuesday. 

Joe Cain (1832-1904) is regarded as the founder of Mobile's modern-day Mardi Gras celebration. In 1866, Cain paraded through downtown Mobile dressed as an imagined Indian chief, an act that helped rejuvenate the city's carnival tradition after the Civil War.

Joe Cain lies at rest in the Church Street Graveyard in Mobile, AL

 

What Do You Call A large Number OF Whitetails?

A herd of course.

Although these showed-up like a mob.

I took this picture from indoors looking out back just beyond the rain garden on Friday, 4:45 PM.

I was not able to get them all in the frame and stopped counting at 18.

As per usual, this time of year they concentrate in the better cover here in Southern Door farmland.

 

February Night Sky

There's a bunch of things going-on in the February night sky tonight and tomorrow that are stargazer-worthy.

First-off is the New Moon.

Several years ago I published a post about the problem of light pollution and how it can mess-up your viewing of the celestial bodies on a dark night.  The next few nights present a terrific opportunity to venture outside for what might be a great opportunity to catch some familiar planets.   This is because it will be extra dark.  The darkness is a consequence of the new moon.  

With this new moon, the earth, moon and sun will align with one another in a straight line.  The moon will fall between the earth and the sun and with this alignment the moon 'disappears' because the side we see is not illuminated.  Word to the wise - never observe anything in the direct path of the sun.  Doing so may damage your eyes and cause permanent blindness. 

On the subject of what to look for, Venus, the brightest planet, will be rising higher in the western sky after sunset.  It also will be moving closer to the second brightest planet which is Jupiter.  Watch for these two bright planets in the western sky after sunset.  Between now and the end of February they'll become even more noticeable.

Mars is visible high in the evening sky.  It's past its best but noticeably red in color and brighter than most stars.  Look for it in the constellation Taurus (above Orion) in the south southwest.

Edit to add:

Sunday evening was socked-in by overcast so there was nothing to view.

Here's a helpful hint to help you locate Mars.

Locate Orion in the southern sky and then Taurus just above.  Mars is circled in this star map.  Both constellations are visible as soon as the darkness begins to descent and will rotate west all evening.  

Dark skies are on top.  Good luck!

 

Yard Bird

A week and a half ago I provided an update on the semi-tame game bird that has adopted our place as his home.

I never considered that I would become an accidental pheasant farmer.  Nevertheless, this guy is one of several birds spotted around here since last fall.  Because this guy is missing his long tail feathers it is reasonable to conclude it is the same bird we're spotting on a daily basis.

It would appear he roosts in the lilacs and thicker adjacent cover and dines beneath the bird feeder.

Periodically he'll stroll down the front walk, hop up on the porch and crow a couple of times.

Next step is to train him to wipe-off his muddy feet.....

 

Friday War Monger

For a change of pace there is no music today.

Instead there is this gem that I stumbled-across on the interweb.

If ever there was a real-life reenactment of my childhood this would be it.  This is how we played.  And boy oh boy did I covet this as a tool of backyard warfare.  My parents and my buddies parents never indulged any of us with this multi-tool of world domination.  I figure they knew intuitively that anything as sophisticated as this wouldn't last until the end of a day's ordinary battle......

 

How To Tell A Wolf From A Coyote

While there are no reported breeding pairs of wolves on the peninsula it is not unheard-of to have a sighting from time to time.  It's typically a juvenile male - a solitary individual - who has dispersed from his pack to strike out and claim his own territory.  These animals typically find their way here from northern Wisconsin (via Green Bay) or travel over the ice on the bay from Michigan's upper peninsula.  There was a reported sighting a week or so ago and a discussion ensued on a local Face Book group about identification of a wolf versus a coyote.

Being a Snapshot Wisconsin participant I figured they would have some useful info on how to differentiate a wolf from a coyote.

From a stationary camera here you go with both individuals superimposed together for comparison....

click on the image to enlarge

Door County Basics

In the 1800s  Belgian immigrants settled in Wisconsin and brought with them culinary traditions that persist to today.

The largest wave of Belgians arrived between 1853 and 1858.  They spoke a French-influenced patois and settled the wooded land extending from Green Bay to the southernmost extent of Door County.  By the 1880s there were more than 5000 people of Belgian descent who had settled in several communities in the area.  To this day it constitutes the largest concentration of Walloon Belgians anywhere in the world outside of Belgium.  It's a national treasure.  But I digress.

Getting back to the subject of culinary traditions I happened-upon this short video published only a few years ago.  I'm sharing it as it is about the tradition of hog butchering in both English and the original lingua franca. 

One of the elements of the past that is alive and well is a local favorite called Belgian Trippe.

Trippe (pronounced like trip) is a sausage similar to a bratwurst but with a not-so-secret ingredient.  The thrifty Belgian settlers extended their pork sausage with the inclusion of cabbage.  Further seasoned with onion, salt, pepper, thyme, nutmeg and ginger it is made locally by Marchant's.

It's pretty good stuff for breakfast, lunch or dinner and you won't find it anywhere outside of northeast Wisconsin.

Here's a newspaper clipping from 1963 with a recipe for 60+ pounds of the sausage for serving at a Kermis - or Belgian harvest festival....

click on image for a closer look

 

 

Patron Saint

In the Roman Catholic tradition of the Christian Faith St. Valentine is the Patron Saint of betrothed couples, happy marriages, love, lovers, bee keepers, fainting, epilepsy, plague, travelers, and young people.  His feast day is today.   

As a consequence of so little being known about the man the Church removed St. Valentine from the General Roman Calendar in 1969.  Nevertheless, he remains recognized as a saint.  

One of many stories is that Valentine was imprisoned for committing the most heinous of crimes - marrying Christian couples and aiding Christians being persecuted by Emperor Claudius of Rome.  Angered to the point of rage Claudius commanded Valentine to renounce his faith or be beaten with clubs and beheaded.  Refusing the emperor - Valentine was executed outside the Flaminian Gate on February 14, 269.  

In case you’re wondering if Valentine was a real person - archaeological excavations have unearthed a Roman catacomb and an ancient church dedicated to him.  In 496 Pope Gelasius marked February 14th as a celebration honoring his martyrdom.   

Today his relics can be found throughout the world – including his skull at the Basilica of Santa Maria in Rome.  

 

Happy Valentines Day.

 

February Night Sky

A couple of evenings ago I took a peak outside to check on the condition of the night sky.

It was excellent.

So, I grabbed my new telescope and trained it on the heavens unsuccessfully trying to locate Mars and the elusive green blob comet directly overhead.

Failing that, I opted to take a photo of the southern view of the sky from my front yard and got this.

Constellation Orion and the Dog Stars of the Winter Circle in all of their glory.

 

Further evidence that the iPhone14 Pro is a really good camera that also manages data and communications as a sideline.

BTW - don't know why it took me so long but I'm joining the Door Peninsula Astronomical Society.  Gonna take this to the next level.

Raising a toast to clear, winter night skies......

Balloon Update

Has the Chinese spy balloon become a punchline or does it remain a threat?  The humiliation of Red China getting caught red-handed (pun intended) and having to continue denying it with lame evasive explanations really has diluted its propaganda and/or surveillance value.  

When the F-22 Raptor weapons system was conceived its creators likely could not have perceived it's initial prey being a balloon and several other "objects".  Who would have predicted that this state of the art military technology would be engaging with UFOs?  At the time of publication the current record is F-22 Raptor 3 and balloon/objects 0. Yesterday, and a little too close to home, an F-16 splashed a UFO over Lake Huron in Michigan using a Sidewinder air-to-air missile.  One has to wonder if Old Joe Biden won't have to emerge before too long and reassure us that our forces aren't doing battle with extraterrestrials. 

I'm not sure to whom this balloon belongs.  Discuss it amongst yourselves.....

 

From The Kitchen

Among other things the weekend agenda included hard rolls......

Sunday Morning Economics - An Update And A Prediction

The over-expansive monetary policy and flooding of the economy with liquidity in 2020 under the Former Guy and continuing with the largess under the rule of the Current Guy it should come as no surprise the surge in inflation that we have been witness-too.

There is a combination of good and bad news with regard to the United States' near economic future.  Which would you like first?  Good news or bad news?  Good news you say?  I agree - eat dessert first.

The good news is that the Fed would appear to be putting the brakes on inflation.  Not a full stop - rather a slowing of growth and a retreat in a handful of sectors.  The bad news is that there is a very real possibility that this will come at the cost of a recession.  Is this an absolute certainty?  Nope.  But it is a probability.  Compounding this is the specter of a fight over the debt ceiling. 

In 2022 the Fed spurred interest rates four times in increments of 75 basis points.  And they did it again at the beginning of this month - which is kinda a big deal inasmuch as this old man hasn't seen that since the early 1980s.

Coincidentally, the Fed reduced market liquidity at the breathtaking pace of $95 billion a month by choosing NOT to rollover its portfolio of maturing Treasury securities.  The swing from loosey-goosey Covid policy to the belt-tightening of the last year is quite unprecedented.

A handful of forward-looking economic indicators suggest that housing costs (accounting for 40% of the CPI) are now falling.  No surprise there - mortgage rates today are double what they were at their historic lows in 2022.  Additionally, wage inflation has softened to 4.5% and the Purchasing Managers Indices imply the economy is at the possible threshold of a recession.

The country is reporting blow-out job growth with unemployment at its lowest level since 1969.  If you want a job in America you can probably get one.

Conclusion:  the tea leaves are mixed.  Under ordinary circumstances a recession might be mild or avoided altogether in the form of a soft landing.  Unfortunately, the circumstances are neither ordinary nor fortuitous.  The nihilists (a minority of Kevin McCarthy's caucus) still seem bent-upon blowing shit up and burning it to the ground.  This is hardly good faith bargaining or governing by means of responsible forward-looking budgeting. 

Sigh.

The last time this happened in 2011, vulnerable financial markets were rattled by the mere prospect that our government would default on its obligations which led to a downgrading of Treasury Bonds by the ratings agencies as it became clearer that we might not be a reliable borrower.

Do I think there will be a default?  

First-off, this blogger had to turn-in his crystal ball when he retired from the day job.  But my reading of the tea leaves suggests that there will be an agreement at the last minute of the last hour.  There will be an abundance of drama - followed by an agreement.  It will likely take the form of caps on discretionary spending, the formation of a commission or committee that will propose entitlement reforms along with rules for any proposals to come to the floor for a vote. 

Or I could also be full of it.  Or just pulling your leg for fun.

You're probably scratching your head and wondering.  To which my answer would be this:

McCarthy's caucus is singularly focused on one thing and one thing only: 

Restoring the Former Guy to the White House 

I think they understand that if they reach for another bridge too far a default would instantaneously result in a collapse of the global currency markets, throw the US economy into a deep recession, further cascading into a shit show of economic nonsense.  As their nest eggs evaporate retirees would revolt at the ballot box, Trump would be thumped in 2024, McCarthy would lose the house, the Dems would increase their hold on the Senate and Old Uncle Joe would have to don his crazy aviation glasses to avoid the glare of victory.  

Or maybe they don't understand this.

If it were me, I wouldn't want to die on that hill.  But nobody listens to me anyway.

Bottom line is Kevin is talking.  Biden is talking.  Which is good. There will be an agreement and I don't think the debt ceiling will be breached. Some forward-looking budget restraint would be a good thing.  Nevertheless, there will be theatrics.  Strap-on your harness and buckle-up.  As the days lengthen, spring is going to be awash in drama.

Stay-tuned......

February Night Sky

Asterism - a prominent pattern or group of stars, typically assigned a popular name but smaller than a constellation.

The Winter Circle (Winter Hexagon) is a winter asterism formed by seven stars that dominate the winter sky in the northern hemisphere.  Included are Rigel in Orion, Aldebaran in Taurus, Capella in Auriga, Castor and Pollux in Gemini, Procyon in Canis Minor and Sirius in Canis Major.

Sirius, the brightest star in the sky, is known as the Dog Star.  Procyon is known as the Little Dog Star.  This is a fun time to watch for these stars as beginning tonight and for the following evenings the moon will be passing among them.

Balloon Update

 

 

Amazing how much valuable bandwidth is being wasted on Face Book With feigned balloon outrage.

What is important and meaningful to the social media world is this.

Not to be upstaged by the Chinese spy balloon the Kardashians have launched their own.....

Friday Music

Stevie Winwood is likely 17-18 years old in this video and is belting-out this song with as much soul as an elderly black man.  A talented songwriter, vocalist and virtuoso on the keyboards or guitar.

There's a lot to unpack here, Spencer Davis Group, Traffic, Blind Faith, solo career and much more.

I've been to a number of recording studios in the past year and the ubiquitous Hammond organ commands respect. 

The quintessential garage band and CYO dance music of my youth.

Enjoy the genius (and pardon the Finnish subtitles)....

From The Trail Camera

From someone else's trail camera there is this.

Raccoons saddle-breaking feral hogs and riding them into battle against the possums.

The mainstream media likely will not cover this.....

Meme of the Day

If I had to hazard a guess the voters of Georgia Congressional District 14 place a higher value on performative politics than forward-looking governance.  I thank my lucky stars that I live in the normal Wisconsin Congressional District 8 with the very normal Republican Congressman Mike Gallagher.

Old Uncle Joe baited these  jerk-offs like a bunch of rubes last night.

Way to keep it classy GOP.....

Winter Yote

Every visit to the trail camera trap line turns-up more of our resident coyote pack.

It's mating season now so it will be interesting to note if there will be an up-tic in the number of trail camera encounters this spring and summer....... 


 

Inflation

Evidence of the ubiquitous nature of inflation are these advertisements from the early to mid- 1960s.  

Which, coincidentally, were my childhood years.

No doubt inflation is an insidious thief - particularly when it is thrust-upon an unprepared population.

Nevertheless, the historic record is undeniable.

It's been running in the background all along.

Factoid - When I was a kid i would take the city bus downtown to visit the public museum.  Aside from bus fare mom gave me money to eat at the Woolworth lunch counter.

Simpler times for an 8 year-old

If memory serves that bus fare was 15 cents.....

Balloon Update

 

 

In the unlikely event that you missed this air force tidbit the shoot down of the Chinese balloon off the coast of Myrtle Beach was the first air-to-air kill for the F-22 Raptor.

Here is pilot sporting his balloon kill marking.

Apparently they had a ready stencil for this...

Oooooh The Humanity

The drama of a Chinese Civilian Airship (cum) Spy Balloon floating over North America has certainly been an embarrassment for Old Uncle Joe what with Xi Jinping giving him the finger over this.

Was this because Chinese hardliners wanted to upstage the planned summit between Antony Blinken and Xi Jinping thus nixing the opportunity for the first US Secretary of State to sit down with the Chinese Premier in nearly six years and the first of Uncle Joe's Cabinet Secretaries to visit China?  

Or was it retaliation for neutralizing and isolating China from the global semi-conductor manufacturing sphere?

Or was this a consequence of the US Navy aggressively exercising Freedom of Navigation operations in the South China Sea and Taiwan Strait (without violating Chinese airspace)?  

Or was it something as benign as clumsy carelessness and gross incompetence?

Or something else?

Out of an abundance of patience and forbearance this blogger is satisfied to wait a bit and see what comes from the salvage of this airship and allow smarter minds in the intelligence community to analyze it, reverse engineer it, scavenge information pre and post-flight and see if this might not be a net intelligence gain for the US.

What I do know is that out of an abundance of patience and forbearance; and on the advice of the military and intelligence community, Old Uncle Joe waited to splash the balloon only after it had safely drifted beyond the mainland and could be dropped into salt water.

Was the overflight of a Chinese balloon an urgent matter of national security to us and our friendly neighbors to the north?  Or was it a turgid assault on the national pride of some of my countrymen?

I can only speculate on this, but what I do know is that last Friday and Saturday there was ample evidence of some of my FB friends wasting valuable bandwidth as they got their undies in a twist over (get this) our woke military and senile president didn't shoot down the balloon (including in the sovereign airspace of our friendly neighbors to the north) immediately.  Woke military?  Between you and me that seems a bit over the top.

My hypothesis is these individuals were going to shout at their handheld devices and furiously broadcast their rage if Old Uncle Joe didn't put the trigger immediately.  And if Old Uncle Joe did pull the trigger and something on the order of two to three school buses worth of debris dropped to earth and crushed a school, flattened a business park, set a neighborhood on fire or killed a single Montana steer and possibly hurt or killed a bunch of people they would howl their outrage over that too.  Only louder.  Anti-Biden people gonna howl their outrage one way or the other.  They got grievances - plenty too.  I get it. And I got no problem with it.  There was a Full Snow Moon out this weekend - which explains much of the howling.  It must really suck to go thru life humping the burden of all of those grievances.  But I digress.

What they won't grouse about is that the Chinese Communist Party has been launching these balloons for more than a decade.  According to the Pentagon five have successfully circumnavigated the globe, three that intruded into our airspace during for the reign of the Former Guy and one additional intrusion earlier in the Current Guy's administration.  Including a second over Latin America.  Granted, and speaking only domestically, the former incursions were not as lengthy as the most recent; nevertheless before you hurry-up and shoot something down you need to ponder basic stuff such as what toxic or dangerous substances might be present in the payload.  Consider our policy not to routinely shoot down other nation's satellites in low earth orbit. From 1992 to 2020 we adhered to an Open Skies Treaty with the Soviets.  (Trump withdrew from that treaty).  We got history with restraint.

Given all of the forgoing I think an abundance of patience and forbearance was in order and am perfectly fine with waiting until yesterday for the balloon's demise over open water. 

We shot down the assholes' balloon, the summit was been cancelled, the Chinese now have another grievance to howl-about on top of being largely shut-out of the semiconductor trade.

My only grievance is that we couldn't capture the airship intact so we could proudly parade it in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade as a propaganda prize and give Xi Jinping the finger.

In the meantime, a retired pal of mine in Myrtle Beach sent me some photos of the shoot down.  They were really cool.  And out of an abundance of caution, patience, forbearance and respect for his privacy I'll not post them here for everyone on the interweb to see.  

Instead there is this....

Not So Secret German Spy Balloon

Stay-tuned.  There's so much more to learn.  

And if you are aggrieved - by all means - HOWL!

Yard Bird

Pheasants are not a naturally-reproducing species around here.  Although we see them all the time - likely birds released by the Door County Fish Farm and Game Club.  

The club raises these birds from chicks beginning in the spring.  Once they've grown to maturity club members receive an allotment of these pen-raised birds for release on their own property.  They can hunt them at their leisure during the pheasant season.  As per usual, birds find their way to our property as the cover is plenty nice if you are a critter.  When I had dogs this was a real treat as I'd keep a shotgun at the back door and our daily walks would not only entertain the dogs, but keep their flushing and retrieving skills sharp.  There was a daily opportunity to bag a bird for dinner.

Anyway, We've had a bird hanging around here.  He prefers to roost in the lilacs and we see him every day. There's always spillage from the feeder to pick-at so he's a chubby bird that doesn't have to travel far to forage for his dinner.

Presuming this is the same bird that we're accustomed to seeing he's lost is tail feathers recently.

I wonder what the backstory is.....

February Night Sky

Native Americans have long grown familiar with this moon.   

Colloquially known as the Snow Moon the origin of the name is rooted in the notion that February has the largest amount of accumulated snowfall here in this part of the northern hemisphere.

As a consequence of its association with hunger and starvation members of the Cherokee nation refer to this month’s full moon as the Bone Moon and the necessity of cracking-open bones to access the marrow for survival food.  Those of the Kalapuya nation referred to this as the Out of Food Moon.   For others it was the Little Famine Moon or the Hunger Moon. 

The Ojibwa call this the Bear Moon, the Lakota people know it as the Raccoon Moon, to the Cree nation this is the Bald Eagle Moon and because bear cubs arrive this month the Tlingit people call this the Black Bear Moon. 

Indeed, these ancient native tribes named this moon after the way trees cracked in the cold, or how people had to huddle around a fire for warmth.  My own people – the early Celts – remember this as the Moon of Ice as it is associated with the coldest month of the year.

 Photo NASA

Watch for it to climb above the horizon in the east around sunset and reach its highest point in the sky around midnight.

The Snow Moon should reached peak illumination at 12:30  AM CST tomorrow morning, February 5.

Fingers-crossed for cold, clear, winter skies.