Shepherds Meet, Mardale 1921

A nice Xmas present for sportsmen from Ron Black: his “The Mardale Hunt: A History,” a 166-page downloadable electronic text of the history of the oldest, and most famous, of the Lakeland Fell Shepherds’ Meets. This is the kind of simple, hard-bitten North Country hunting associated with John Peel: foot-following foxhounds on the often pretty vertical landscape of the Lakeland Fells.

Hunting in Mardale is a fundamental and immemorial feature of the season.

[T]he shepherds’ meeting at Mardale ” wasn’t founded in’t memory of man.” That the shepherds gave up a week to ‘ raking ‘ the fells and bringing down to the Dun Bull the sheep that were not their own. That though there is a Shepherds’ Guide with all the lug-marks and smit marks of the various flocks in it, it is very seldom referred to, for all the shepherds ken the marks as well as they ken their own bairns. From the time whereof the memory of man runneth not to the contrary, a hunt succeeded by a good dinner ushers in the shepherds’ ceremony of ‘ swortn ‘ the sheep; and after the sorting a hound trail and pigeon shooting at clay pigeons affords diversion till daylight fades; then tea is served and the shepherds who determine ‘to remain on spree,’ as they call it, instead of driving their sheep home, make a night of it. I gathered from the old farmers that they thought ‘ nowt ‘ to the hound-trail and pigeon shooting. They wur new-fanglements and mud varra weel be dispensed wid.’

By the early years of the last century, the fame of the Mardale Shepherds Meet had spread and visiting sportsman often attended and participated.

For years the Mardale Meet’s popularity relied on the reputation of Joe Bowman (Hunty or Auld Joe) and his Ullswater Foxhounds. Visitors travelled to the meet from all parts of the country and some the world, they travelled in a variety of ways-“Rolls-Royces, carriages, horseback and on foot walking over the high mountain passes sometimes in bad weather (snow was not uncommon) and my Great Uncle Brait and Trimmer his hound actually got lost on the tops in bad weather. Trimmer subsequently won his trail. Expensive furs, kid gloves and silver mounted walking sticks mingled at the meet with woollen clothing, hand made walking sticks and fustian jackets. Most people walked and the general view was summed up by Tommy Fishwick who was once heard to say to a friend “Yan wants nowt wi’ riding as lang as yan legs ‘ell carry yan.”

Hinchcliffe quotes that after a good days sport, huntsmen, shepherds, visitors, sheep dogs and terriers (hounds were not admitted) all turn towards the Dun Bull for a meal.

In the evening, a smoking contest took place. Skelton records “ the main portion of the pack, cast off in the large dining room and every room in the house filled with overflow meetings-or rather concerts”

The big room was the focal point, a tray was sent round and money subscribed for the evening’s refreshment. Each individual orders his choice of drink and the chairman pays out of the general pool. Toast’s and song follow in quick succession. The chairman selects the singer and everyone is supposed to sing at least one song and there was an element of pride in singing one that had not already been sung that evening. If the song had a good swing or chorus the men got particularly enthusiastic, the shepherds beating the tables with their sticks in time to the tune and the sheep-dogs and terriers howling either in enthusiasm or execration, no man knows which.

One song often sung paid tribute to the renowned local huntsman.

JOE BOWMAN

Now his head’s on the crook and the bowl is below,
And we‘re gathered around by the fire’s warming glow,
Our songs they are merry, our choruses high,
As we drink to the hunters who joined in the cry.

When this song is sung at Ullswater, the third verse should be given as follows:

The shout of the hunters it startled the stag,
As the fox came to view on the lofty Brook Crag,
“Tally-Ho” We’re away, o’er the rise and the fell,
Joe Bowman, Kit Farrar, Will Milcrest and all.

Yale’s Kroon Hall, a recently built, fantabulously expensive ecological Taj Mahal proves that Harvard is not unique. In that building in order to reduce tapwater usage, “Stormwater is collected from the roof and grounds and filtered through native aquatic plants. Wastewater collected from sinks and showers is added to the stormwater and used for all non-potable needs such as toilets and irrigation. Water demand is further reduced by the installation of low-flow plumbing and irrigation fixtures.”

James Delingpole referred recently to the immense difficulty sane people face in trying to resist an unstoppable bandwagon of do-gooders and reformers, brainwashed kids, powerful NGOs, sanctimonious corporations, and politicians all pushing the party-line of Enviromentalist stupidity. At American Thinker, Peter Wilson admires the colossal scale of resources the other side has at its disposal, and notes just how deeply entrenched the green priesthood is at one of our most prestigious universities.

Australian science writer Jo Nova estimates that since 1989 the U.S. government has spent $79 billion on global warming-friendly climate research. Nova notes that the “figure does not include money from other western governments, private industry, [or universities] and is not adjusted for inflation,” and yet even this partial sum is 3,500 times the $23 million spent by Exxon in the same period. Global warming alarmists however continue to accuse skeptics of being duped by disinformation from well-funded carbon polluters, while they seem incapable of recognizing the far greater funding that supports their own efforts.

Case in point: I attended a “Harvard Thinks Green” program last week, which promised “6 all-star environmental faculty, 6 big green ideas.” (According to the flyer, “Green is the new crimson.”) The most polemical of the six speakers was medical doctor Eric Chivian, a founder of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, the nuclear freeze group that won the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize. One of Chivian’s big green ideas: “legal restrictions on oil consumption.” Dr. Chivian lashed out at the evil Koch brothers, enunciating their middle initials as further evidence of their perfidy: “Charles G. Koch and David H. Koch,” who together with “vested interests” like Exxon-Mobil, have spent “tens of millions of dollars” on a “disinformation campaign,” aided by the likes of Rush Limbaugh.

Vested interests? Take a look in the mirror, Dr. Chivian. His speech came from the podium in Saunders Theatre, a sumptuous wood-paneled auditorium in H.H. Richardson’s Memorial Hall, a clubhouse for the 1% at Harvard University. Dr. Chivian earns his generous salary as Founder/Director of the Harvard Medical School’s Center for Health and the Global Environment, which is “designated an official ‘Collaborating Center’ of the United Nations Environment Programme.” The Center’s Corporate Council includes 3M, Baxter (pharmaceuticals & medical devices), Johnson & Johnson, and Siemens. These are some deep pockets and vested interests.

Looking further: The sponsor of the evening was the Harvard Office for Sustainability, which is staffed by fifteen full-time employees, holding graduate degrees in things like Public Administration and the Sociology of Religion/Gender Studies. They hold titles like: Manager, Sustainability Communications; Manager, Sustainability Engagement; Coordinator, Business and Finance Sustainability Engagement Program; or Coordinator, FAS Green Resource Efficiency Program.

A separate department called Green Building Services employs seven full-time employees and manages student volunteer teams at Harvard College, the Business School and the Law School.

Harvard students can apply for the following 10-hour-a-week internships: Sustainability Innovation Challenge Engagement Assistant, OFS Events and Sustainability Engagement Intern, Housing and Real Estate Design Internship, Greenhouse Gas Reduction Program Research Assistant, Green Skillet Team Leader, Green Skillet Assessor, Green Office Liaison and the Green Ribbon Commission Internship.

Over at the Graduate School of Design there’s the Sustainable Design program G(SD)2. And Harvard Business School has a Green Living Program, “a peer-to-peer education program” that…well, you get the idea.

These various activities are supported by the Harvard University Task Force on Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Emissions, commissioned by President Drew Faust, which is committed to reduce the University’s GHGs through 2016. In other words, these people will not be losing their jobs any time soon, no matter what happens at COP-18.

Reading this, I was reflecting that, if Jonathan Edwards and the other “New Light” enthusiasts of the mid-18th century Great Awakening had only taken care to arrange for the construction of exceptionally architecturally distinguished buildings to serve as centers for the study the personal experience of religious revelation and the penning of passionate sermons, and taken care to establish well-paid corps of special managers, communicators, coordinators, deans and interns, all devoted to intensifying man’s consciousness of his sinfulness, unworthiness, and dependence of Divine restraint, why, the emotionalist version of Congregationalism and Sunday hell-fire sermons about sinners in the hands of an angry God might never have gone out of fashion at Harvard and Yale at all.

These local festivities are characterized by a prominent humor site as insane, but I think several of the are of distinct historical or anthropological interest and the ones where you throw fiery things around sound like fun.

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Once you’ve finished attending all of the above list of seven events, you’ll want to get right to work on Figaro’s list of 100 things you need to do in Paris during your life.

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Demographic map of New Jersey. (I have been pretty successful in avoiding that state myself.)

Christopher Hitchens (center), between friends Ian McEwan (left) and Martin Amis.

Electronic and print media are absolutely filled with tributes to Christopher Hitchens, who died this week of esophageal cancer aged 62. Hitchens seems to have known, and won extravagant admiration for his wit, his writing, and his panache from just about everyone in the international republic of letters.

David Berlinski (father of the lovely and talented Claire), I thought, delivered the most poetical, comparing Hitch’s conspicuously gallant departure, conducted deliberately on the record and before his enormous readership in print (final example), to that of the great William Marshall.

Christopher Hitchens chose to greet death publicly. Had he thought of it, he might well have invited an orchestra. We signed books together after our appearance in Birmingham, and to admirers on his very long line inquiring after his health, Hitchens replied that he was dying. It was a response that inevitably took his interlocutor aback, the more so since it was true. I followed his interviews and read his essays about cancer and death. I found them moving. But they do not evoke the man. In his portrait of William Marshall (Guillaume Maréchal), The Flower of Chivalry, Georges Duby describes William “advancing calmly toward death” in full public view, his friends and retainers at his side, “proud of having been the instrument of the final, the fugitive, the anachronistic triumph of honor.”

Having contracted a terrible illness in the twenty first century, Christopher Hitchens returned to the thirteenth century in order to have it be seen to its end.

Australian News:

Darren Webster was meant to be going back to work after dropping his son off at home when, on a whim, he stopped by a field and decided to have a quick forage with his metal detector.

Within 20 minutes he made a discovery that was to introduce a new name to the turbulent history of medieval England.

One of the objects in a hoard of silver buried one metre down in the earth was a coin marked with the name of Airedeconut, thought to refer to Harthacnut, a previously unrecorded Viking king powerful enough to have his own currency in 10th-century Northumbria.

Mr Webster, who has a stone tile workshop in Yealand Conyers, Lancashire, said that he had permission to search in the field near his home in Silverdale but did not choose it for any particular reason.

“My machine was telling me that I’d found some kind of silver. So I was slightly disheartened when I saw a lead pot. It was as I was lifting it that silver pieces started falling out of it.”

Once the lead container had been prised open there were 201 silver objects, including 27 coins, ten arm-rings, six brooch fragments, two finger rings, a fine wire braid and 14 ingots.

There were also 141 fragments of metal known as hacksilver, which would have been used for barter.

Gareth Williams, curator of early medieval coins at the British Museum, where the discovery was announced yesterday, said that the hoard would have been worth a midsized herd of cows in the 10th century, and would probably fetch a “high five-figure sum” today.

The exact value will be determined by a panel of experts in the spring, when museums will be allowed to bid for it. The Lancaster City Museum has already expressed an interest.

Under the Treasure Act, Mr Webster will be awarded half the value of the hoard, and the remainder will be given to the owner of the field, who has asked to remain anonymous.

Why someone hid a small fortune is a mystery, but burying treasure is usually an attempt to keep valuables safe in uncertain times.

“It is a period of political instability,” said Dr Williams. “The Vikings of Dublin were expelled and came to the North of England. There was also the Battle of Tettenhall, on the outskirts of Wolverhampton, where several northern kings were killed.”

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Telegraph:

The hoard was placed in a lead box and buried underground at a time when the Anglo-Saxons were attempting to wrest control of the north of the country from the Vikings.

Yesterday, the central London museum unveiled the hoard, the fourth largest ever found, which included Anglo-Saxon, Anglo-Viking, German and Islamic coins.

In total there were 201 silver objects, including the 27 coins which date the burial around 900AD, around the time the Vikings had been expelled from Dublin and were fighting the Anglo-Saxons to keep control of the north of England.

It also includes also coins from the time of Alfred the Great, who reigned from 871 to 899, and from the Viking kingdom of Northumbria.

One silver denier, bears the name Charles. Others bear the name Airdeconut, a Viking ruler in northern England.

Officials said the inscription Airdeconut, appeared to be an attempt to represent the Scandinavian name Harthacnut.

They said this was because many Vikings had converted to Christianity within a generation of settling in Britain.

On the other side were the words DNS (Dominus) REX, which was arranged in the form of a cross.

“The design of the coin relates to known coins of the kings Siefredus and Cnut, who ruled the Viking kingdom of Northumbria around AD900, but Harthacnut is otherwise unrecorded,” a museum spokesman said.

“It is a very significant find. It is a very large haul and it is the fourth large Viking find in the UK. Because it is recently discovered there is lots of research to be done.”

Experts believe the hoard, which also includes 10 arm rings, two finger rings, 14 ingots, six brooch fragments and a fine wire braid which may have been worn as a necklace, could have been buried by a Viking warrior before he went into battle.

The collection of 10 bracelets and other jewellery are thought to have been worn to signify rank of the influential owner.

Dr Gareth Williams, the curator of early medieval coins at the museum, said: “Some of the coins reinforce the things we already know but with some of them it fills in the gaps where we didn’t even know we had gaps.

“It is always great when you get a new piece of evidence. This is the first new medieval King for at least 50 years and the first Viking King discovered since 1840. It is a very exciting find.”

It was found in September by Darren Webster, 39 using a metal detector on land around Silverdale, in north Lancashire.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Look to the right.

British skeptic James Delingpole discusses why Warmism is so difficult to stop, despite the Climategate scandal.

7:46 video

The thing about both the Soviet Union and Adolf Hitler’s Germany was that the enemy was plain in view. We knew these guys were bad, they had black uniforms, they had swastikas, they had tanks – they were obviously the bad guys, they wanted to destroy us. What makes the modern environmental movement so dangerous is that it masks its intentions behind this cloak of cuddly, touchy feely, polar bear-hugging, Nobel Prize-winning righteousness. …

What could be nicer than trying to save those cuddly little polar bears from melting due to our wanton greed and selfishness? It gels with a sense that I think grew in the affluent ’90s, when people began asking themselves questions like, Shouldn’t there be limits to growth? You know, isn’t there more to life than consumption?

So, you have this alliance of ordinary people, of kids who’ve been brainwashed at school, of the big corporations which wanted to get in on the act by greenwashing their image, of powerful NGOs like Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund, of politicians wanting to be seen to take action in matters of public concerned. So what you have is this unstoppable bandwagon, all pushing this agenda based on the flimsiest of junk science.

Iranians gloat over US RQ-170 Sentinel drone downed last week

The Christian Science Monitor has an exclusive story which must be causing some serious embarrassment in parts of the US military and intelligence community.

Iran guided the CIA’s “lost” stealth drone to an intact landing inside hostile territory by exploiting a navigational weakness long-known to the US military, according to an Iranian engineer now working on the captured drone’s systems inside Iran.

Iranian electronic warfare specialists were able to cut off communications links of the American bat-wing RQ-170 Sentinel, says the engineer, who works for one of many Iranian military and civilian teams currently trying to unravel the drone’s stealth and intelligence secrets, and who could not be named for his safety.

Using knowledge gleaned from previous downed American drones and a technique proudly claimed by Iranian commanders in September, the Iranian specialists then reconfigured the drone’s GPS coordinates to make it land in Iran at what the drone thought was its actual home base in Afghanistan.

“The GPS navigation is the weakest point,” the Iranian engineer told the Monitor, giving the most detailed description yet published of Iran’s “electronic ambush” of the highly classified US drone. “By putting noise [jamming] on the communications, you force the bird into autopilot. This is where the bird loses its brain.”

The “spoofing” technique that the Iranians used – which took into account precise landing altitudes, as well as latitudinal and longitudinal data – made the drone “land on its own where we wanted it to, without having to crack the remote-control signals and communications” from the US control center, says the engineer.In 2009, Iran-backed Shiite militants in Iraq were found to have downloaded live, unencrypted video streams from American Predator drones with inexpensive, off-the-shelf software. But Iran’s apparent ability now to actually take control of a drone is far more significant.

Iran asserted its ability to do this in September, as pressure mounted over its nuclear program.

Gen. Moharam Gholizadeh, the deputy for electronic warfare at the air defense headquarters of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), described to Fars News how Iran could alter the path of a GPS-guided missile – a tactic more easily applied to a slower-moving drone.

“We have a project on hand that is one step ahead of jamming, meaning ‘deception’ of the aggressive systems,” said Gholizadeh, such that “we can define our own desired information for it so the path of the missile would change to our desired destination.”

Gholizadeh said that “all the movements of these [enemy drones]” were being watched, and “obstructing” their work was “always on our agenda.”

That interview has since been pulled from Fars’ Persian-language website. And last month, the relatively young Gholizadeh died of a heart attack, which some Iranian news sites called suspicious – suggesting the electronic warfare expert may have been a casualty in the covert war against Iran. …

Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta told Fox News on Dec. 13 that the US will “absolutely” continue the drone campaign over Iran, looking for evidence of any nuclear weapons work. But the stakes are higher for such surveillance, now that Iran can apparently disrupt the work of US drones.

US officials skeptical of Iran’s capabilities blame a malfunction, but so far can’t explain how Iran acquired the drone intact. One American analyst ridiculed Iran’s capability, telling Defense News that the loss was “like dropping a Ferrari into an ox-cart technology culture.”

Yet Iran’s claims to the contrary resonate more in light of new details about how it brought down the drone – and other markers that signal growing electronic expertise.

A former senior Iranian official who asked not to be named said: “There are a lot of human resources in Iran…. Iran is not like Pakistan.”

They saved your right to continue to use Thomas Edison’s incandescent light bulbs if you so choose. We won’t all have to sit in our living rooms bathed in the Orwellian florescent glare of the over-priced alternative bulbs favored by devotees of the modern cult of Gaia.

The Politico reports.

The shutdown-averting budget bill will block federal light bulb efficiency standards, giving a win to House Republicans fighting the so-called ban on incandescent light bulbs.

GOP and Democratic sources tell POLITICO the final omnibus bill includes a rider defunding the Energy Department’s standards for traditional incandescent light bulbs to be 30 percent more energy efficient.

DOE’s light bulb rules — authorized under a 2007 energy law authored signed by President George W. Bush — would start going into effect Jan. 1. The rider will prevent DOE from implementing the rules through Sept. 30.

But Democrats said they could claim a “compromise” by adding language to the omnibus that requires DOE grant recipients greater than $1 million to certify they will upgrade the efficiency of their facilities by replacing any lighting to meet or exceed the 2007 energy law’s standards.

Fueled by conservative talk radio, Republicans made the last-ditch attempt to stop federal regulations from making their way into every Americans’ living room.

“There are just some issues that just grab the public’s attention. This is one of them,” said Rep. Greg Walden (R-Ore.). “It’s going to be dealt with in this legislation once and for all.”

Our self-appointed lords and masters on the left were not pleased.

White House… communications director Dan Pfeiffer [was] saying Wednesday that the House GOP plan would “undercut environmental protections.”

On Twitter, Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chairman Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) wrote: “I strongly oppose that language. I hope it’s deleted from any final bill that we pass.”

“This is just another poke in the eye,” said Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.).

Genus Pogona.

The Aurignacian culture of the Upper Paleolithic (Late Old Stone Age) flourished between 45,000 and 35,000 years ago (or so we think, theories of carbon dating are subject to revision).

The Aurignacians are generally awarded the title of being our earliest genuinely human ancestors in Europe on the basis of artistic achievement. It was they who produced the Hohle-Fels Venus, the Chauvet cave paintings, and the Stadel cave Löwenmensch (“Lion Man”), all powerfully moving, but cryptic and fundamentally incomprehensible to us, artistic expressions.

The last object, the Löwenmensch, was discovered in a cave in the Swabian Alps in 1939. WWII resulted in its being neglected for 30 years, but eventually scholar attention arrived. The fragments were assembled, and interpreted. First, as a deity or a shaman representing a lion god, later as (Gawd help us!) a “cave lioness” and an icon of Stone Age Feminism.

Near the end of the last century, a few more pieces were discovered, so scientists are now in the process of removing earlier “restored” bits and having a go at reassembling the original artifact absent recent interpolations. The results will be very interesting.

Spiegel article

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

I’ll be gone hunting at Oxbow Farm (Raymond Guest’s old place) with the Blue Ridge Hunt in the morning, so blogging will be done late.