Outside:

Mike Miller’s proposal to train wolverines to search for—and help rescue—avalanche survivors has raised some eyebrows around his corner of Alaska, near Anchorage.

“New ideas normally do sound ridiculous,” Miller says from his office at the Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center, about an hour south of Anchorage in a valley popular with backcountry adventurers. The organization, which Miller founded two decades ago, houses hundreds of displaced or orphaned animals and has worked on big projects like reintroducing the Wood Bison to the Alaskan wilderness and repatriating condors from the San Diego Zoo. But what’s got Miller excited these days is training and breeding Kayla and Kasper, the two wolverines he’s recently acquire.

“Anything you can train a dog to do, you can train a wolverine to do, five times quicker,” Miller says.

Miller is fully aware that his plan sounds a little ridiculous. When I emailed him to ask about his idea, he felt compelled to defend it preemptively. “One hundred years ago, people who suggested using dogs for avalanche victim search were thought to be crazy,” he wrote. “I hope your readers understand that we are professional and serious.”

On the phone, Miller’s pitch is compelling. Right now, avalanche search and rescue or recovery is carried out by dogs—usually shepherds or retrievers—who walk the avalanche site with trainers, hectare by hectare, hunting for the scent of buried humans. Wolverines, Miller says, were born to do this; smelling a creature 20 feet below the snow is instinctive for them. They’re known to run along avalanche lines searching for dinner among the animals buried deep in the slide. The squat, bear-like member of the weasel family is famed for powering up difficult terrain that would require professional climbing equipment for humans.

Read the whole thing.

Wolverines dig faster than dogs, and then, when he finds a victim, your wolverine rapidly consumes the body, thus saving the deceased’s family all those funeral costs. The trick is bound to be: how do you stop him from eating the avalanche victim found still alive?

Ty Cobb would have kicked his Asiatic ass.

Jay Caspian Kang, delivers for the New York Times, one of those insolent and offensive expressions of the support for minority vulgarity and vices as a perverse kind of contrarian opposition to the values and culture of the European-descended American majority.

By instinct, honed reflex and general contrarianism, I root for all “flashy” “showboats” who are “disgraces to the game.” It has been this way since I left Boston at age 10 to move to North Carolina, a state with no notable baseball team save the minor-league Durham Bulls, who, at least when I was growing up, seemed more a Hollywood relic than a ball club. Freed from having to like the Red Sox, I began to root for Rickey Henderson of the Oakland Athletics, mostly because I liked how deeply he squatted while taking a lead off first base. He seemed as if he were taunting the pitcher. As I grew older and started feeling alienated from my white classmates, I gravitated toward athletes who, in some way, flouted the white, stoic traditions of American sports — Allen Iverson, Ken Griffey Jr., Rasheed Wallace, Pedro Martinez. I felt as if this was a moral choice.

Read the whole thing.

Nothing guarantees acceptance and applause by prestige publications in the community of fashion than some vigorous expressions of racial and cultural treason.

Daruma Netsuke, Japan, 19th century, boxwood.

What happens when Donald Trump runs out of campaign cash? It won’t be terribly long before we find out. LA Times

One of Donald Trump’s most compelling arguments to voters is that by self-financing his campaign, he isn’t beholden to “the special interests, the lobbyists and the donors” as he puts it. Essentially, Trump gets to run on a platform of “What you see is what you get.”

“I don’t need money,” the billionaire boasted in July. “I don’t want anybody’s money.”

How much longer will he be able to make similar claims? We figure less than three months.

In July, Bloomberg News estimated that Trump’s personal liquid assets hovered around $70 million. The most recent Federal Election Commission funding reports showed that Trump had contributed $18 million to his campaign through Jan. 31. …

This campaign season, Hillary Clinton’s already large coffers suggest a projected spend of over $800 million through Nov. 18. Even if Trump stays on the relatively spendthrift track he’s on, his campaign is still projected to cost an additional $300 million. Both presumptive nominees will rely heavily on additional spending by their respective parties. If 2012 is an indication, more than a quarter of additional total spending will come from super PACs.

Even a conservative model – one that allows Trump to spend barely a third as much as his primary competitors, on average – still shows Trump’s liquid assets running out entirely by June 1.

While Trump will then have the option of selling securities and property to increase his cash on hand, it’s likely he’ll dramatically increase the proportion of outside funding he’s willing to accept well before that date.

What happens then is anyone’s guess.

Claire Berlinski

Claire Berlinski is a Balliol College graduate, who started her literary career by writing a spy novel featuring the kind of details of the CIA’s recruiting and training that persuade this reader that she is really a former spook.

A few years later, she had moved on to international journalism, covering European problems from a sophisticated perch at the continental crossroads in Constantinople. When the situation in Turkey deteriorated, she demonstrated her intelligence by moving to Paris.

These days, the old-school publishing industry is perishing because technology has made self-publishing, promotion, and distribution feasible, so it is not possible even for an accomplished and respected writer to get a book advance to cover travel and operating expenses for a project. Claire Berlinski (clever girl!), who writes most frequently these days at the group blog Ricochet, therefore, decided to try crowdfunding her next book.

Her pitch is here.

Her funding site is here.

The funding project has also been endorsed by the great Glenn Reynolds.

Irma Bule was in the habit of performing with several cobras as on stage props. One of them, at least, was a King Cobra (Ophiophagus hannah), and clearly someone had blundered.

Telegraph:

Indonesian pop singer Irma Bule died this week after being bitten by a snake used as an on-stage prop during a live performance on Sunday.

“The accident happened in the middle of the second song when Irma stepped on the snake’s tail,” audience member Ferlando Octavion Auzura told local website merdeka.com.

“The snake then bit Irma on the thigh.” …

It’s thought that Bule believed the cobra had been defanged. She was well known for using snakes during live performances – a relatively common practice in the region – and had previously appeared with pythons and boa constrictors.

45 minutes after the bite took place, the performance was abandoned as Bule started vomiting and collapsed. She was subsequently taken to hospital, where she was later confirmed to have died.

More details from the Daily Mail.

Skull of a Roman solider who died during the Gallic Wars, 1st century BC. Museo Rocsen, Argentina.

Aryeh Cohen-Wade, in the New Yorker, imagines what The Donald would do to the best-known soliloquies.

Listen—to be, not to be, this is a tough question, O.K.? Very tough. A lot of people come up to me and ask, “Donald, what’s more noble? Getting hit every day with the slings, the bows, the arrows, the sea of troubles—or just giving up?” I mean, smart people, the best Ivy League schools.

But I say to them, “Have you ever thought that we don’t know—we don’t know—what dreams may come? Have you ever thought about that?” Ay yi yi—there’s the rub! There’s the rub right there. When we shuffle off this mortal whatever it is—coil? They say to me, “Donald, you’ve built this fantastic company, how’d you do it? How?” And I say one word: “leadership.” Because that’s what it’s all about, is leadership. And people are so grateful whenever I bring up this whole “perchance to dream” thing. So grateful.

And on and on with the whips and the scorns of time and the contumely and the fardels and the blah blah blah.

Then I see a bare bodkin and I’m like—a bodkin? What the hell is this thing, a bodkin? Listen, I run a very successful business, I employ thousands of people and I’m supposed to care whether this bodkin is bare or not? Sad!

And when people say I don’t have a conscience—trust me, I have a conscience, and it’s a very big conscience, O.K.? And the native hue of my resolution is not sicklied o’er, that’s a lie! If anyone tells you that the native hue of my resolution is sicklied o’er, they’re trying to sell you a load of you-know-what. And enterprises of great pith—listen, my enterprises are so pithy. So pithy. Fantastic pith. But sometimes, hey, they lose the name of action, right? I mean, it happens—it happens.

Read the whole thing.

I don’t know much about these things, but I’m told this Kalashnikov is a Type 56. The CEO of Underground Tactical reportedly took it away from a poacher somewhere unspecified in Africa. And, even in this condition, it still shoots!

Jon Wayne Taylor on Instagram was the original source.

The typical Gun Broker dealer would rate it as NRA Good, and say: “Has light patina.”

George Gilder explains that the ability of Wall Street to get rich while Middle Class America sinks deeper into unending recession doesn’t really have anything to do with Hispanic immigrants or Free Trade. The real cause is the nationalization of capital. These days Washington picks all the winners, and if you aren’t Goldman Sachs or the like, you haven’t got the necessary blat to be receiving any favors.

Why does Wall Street keep recovering after recessions but the economy seemingly never does?

The reason, as I document in my book, “The Scandal of Money: Why Wall Street Recovers but the Economy Never Does” is that Washington and the Federal Reserve together have created a closed loop economy where the Fed creates money for the government and the S&P 500 and Main Street is left out.

The Fed decides what money is worth and who receives it and how much. The Fed prices it at zero interest rates, allegedly to stimulate economic growth. But whenever something is free, it’s distributed by queue, and only the privileged, connected people in the front of the line get any, not the innovators who create growth and opportunity for Main Street. Trump voters are wrong if they blame Mexico and China, but they are right about one big thing: The economy is rigged against them.

The Fed takeover of the economy has turned Main Street into Mean Street; it has gelded Silicon Valley, reducing our most creative entrepreneurs to climate cranks obsequiously petitioning in Washington.

Almost two-thirds of jobs created between 2002 and 2010 came from 23 million small businesses, according to the Small Business Administration. But venture capital investment in 2014 of $48 billion is just one-third of the 2000 total (in 2015 dollars), according to the National Venture Capital Association. There were half as many IPOs in 2015 as in 2000, and they were mostly focused on a few large deals. Back in 1999, there were seven times more IPOs than mergers and acquisitions for tech companies. Today merger and acquisitions outnumber IPOs by almost 36 to 1.

The Fed regulations and money manipulations have displaced an open market of IPOs by an exclusive game of horse trading among “qualified investors” who get rich and leave Main Street out, and fail to create new jobs.

And Wall Street? The once powerful engine of capitalism has been nationalized by the Obama bureaucracies feeding on fines and fees. We’ve had a covert socialist coup in Washington and it must be reversed or the free enterprise engine of growth and opportunity is in jeopardy.

Read the whole thing.