December 30, 2017

Medical Marijuana and Firearms Purchases (3)

A year ago I speculated what would happen if the authorities went after gun buyers who marked "No" to the question, "Are you an an unlawful user of, or addicted to, marijuana [and list of other drugs]?
on the federal form 4473, completed by every purchaser  were also on their states' medical marijuana registries.

Shortly afterward, I noted that the federal Department of Justice was still taking a hard line, despite the number of states with legal medical marijuana.

Last month it has happened — or almost happened — or will yet happen — in Honolulu. As Tom Knighton wrote at Bearing Arms,
Hawaii is one of the handful of states that maintain a gun registry. They know every lawfully held firearm in the state and who has it. As a result, it was easy for law enforcement to compare the two databases and figure out who owned guns and was getting medical marijuana.
Now, he continues, they are "reviewing the policy" after getting a lot of pushback, not just from gun owners/buyers but from the larger pool of cannabis users too.

The problem remains, as the Honolulu police are happy to state, "Federal law prohibits firearm possession for unlawful users of controlled substances. Pot is classified as a controlled substance under federal law."  So just saying, "I'm a medical user, I'm not an addict fercrissakes" would go nowhere in a federal court.

So when do we get national legalization?

December 22, 2017

Crazy Mountaineers and Dead Mountaineers

Death looks so clean on Everest.
(Phurban Sherpa/New York Times)
My high- altitude mountaineering is limited to peaks in the Rockies and Cascades, but I have a couple of times seen . . . personality changes . . . at altitude.
In a new study of psychotic episodes at extreme altitudes, researchers have determined that high-altitude psychosis is a stand-alone medical illness, rather than a condition stemming from acute altitude sickness as had been previously believed.

High-altitude psychosis is a fairly well-known illness and is frequently mentioned in mountain literature. For example, a mountaineer may suddenly think he is being chased, start talking nonsense or change his route without any real reason.
Read the rest: "High-Altitude Psychosis Seen as Distinct from Altitude Sickness."

No, I am not saying people who climb Mount Everest are crazy. Absolutely not. But some people die there. There are famous ones, like George Leigh Mallory (1886–1924), whose body was found — and deliberately left after study — in 1999.  (Some people cherish the thought that he and climbing partner Andrew Irvine might have been the first to summit Everest, but it is unlikely.)

And there are others:
Nepal officials estimate that about 200 bodies remain scattered across Everest. A few are so familiar, so well preserved by the subfreezing temperatures, that they serve as macabre mileposts for the living, including one corpse commonly called Green Boots.
Others are better-identified:
Not far from where they found Ghosh’s body that morning was another body that Dawa Finjhok Sherpa estimated had been there for five or six years. And somewhere nearby, they knew, was the body of a doctor from Alabama who had died a few days before. There was no plan to bring it down.
Yes, leaving the body means there is more money in the estate for the heirs, right? Bringing a body off Everest is expensive!

But some Bengali families were willing to pay, for their own cultural reasons, which makes a fascinating New York Times Magazine story, "Deliverance from 27,000 Feet." Excellent, unflinching photography too.

December 21, 2017

Early 2018 Drought Forecast — La Niña Winter

Click to embiggen

It's snowing this solstice morning here at Owl House, but judging from the radar, we are not going to get more than another little two-inch storm, enough to keep the fire danger down for a few days.

If you want more information on weather predictions, visit the National Weather Service's Climate Prediction Center for a whole bunch of maps.

Yes, it is definitely shaping up to  be a La Niña winter:

La Niña is predicted to persist through the Northern Hemisphere winter 2017-18 by nearly all models in the IRI/CPC plume [Fig. 6] and in the North American Multi-Model Ensemble (NMME; [Fig. 7]). Based on the latest observations and forecast guidance, forecasters favor the peak of a weak-to-moderate La Niña during the winter (3-month Niño-3.4 values between -0.5°C and -1.5°C). In summary, La Niña is likely (exceeding ~80%) through the Northern Hemisphere winter 2017-18, with a transition to ENSO-neutral most likely during the mid-to-late spring (click CPC/IRI consensus forecast for the chance of each outcome for each 3-month period).

La Niña is anticipated to affect temperature and precipitation across the United States during the upcoming months (the 3-month seasonal temperature and precipitation outlooks will be updated on Thursday December 21st). The outlooks generally favor above-average temperatures and below-median precipitation across the southern tier of the United States, and below-average temperatures and above-median precipitation across the northern tier of the United States. 

December 17, 2017

Why Are Avocados So Expensive? You're Buying These Guys' Ammo

M. has been fuming at the grocery store. Avocados, $2 apiece. It seems like a lot — and I know that many are just thrown away or, sometimes, end up in the donations for the bears at the wildlife rehab center. (We watch the cartons unloaded with undisguised envy, but those furry guys need the calories!)

There is drought. And there is organized crime. (I am surprised no one is talking about "blood avocados.")

From the BBC: "The Avocado Police Protecting Mexico's Green Gold."

"Police" is a bit of a misnomer: These are local growers' militia, or autodefensa as they say. Some apparently receive official support on the municipal level, so I suppose that makes them "police."
Mexico produces about 45% of the world's avocados and Michoacán is Mexico's largest avocado-producing state.
From here alone, nearly two billion avocados are shipped to the US every year.
And because the industry is a lucrative one, it has been the target of organised crime.

As you enter Tancítaro, there are a series of checkpoints. They are known as filtros, or filters, by people here.
Some are more informal than others. One has a few sandbags and some elderly men sitting on a broken car seat outside a hut.
We pass another one with several pickup trucks standing outside. I notice a man with a rifle across his back. This is a well-armed town. . . . .
The police force is part-funded by avocado producers, who pay a percentage of their earnings depending on how many hectares they own (emphasis added).
Oh, didn't you know that Mexico has very strict gun control? Why, there is only one legal gun store in the entire country! Yet Tancírito is "well-armed." Imagine that.

What Tancírito must have is a public relations agent, because here is a very similar story by a different report on another site! "Mexico's Vigilante Groups Are a Force to Reckon with for Drug Cartels and Army."
The autodefensas have been returning houses and farms to the original owners or their families, because in many cases they were murdered after signing a deed at gunpoint, leaving the farms to the criminal bands' leaders, who assaulted the properties bringing a public lawyer, who many times also by gunpoint validated such operations.
Think of all this when you're in the vegetable aisle at Megafoods.

December 03, 2017

The Smartphone vs. the Pocket Camera, Revisited

Last August I did a head-to-head photography comparison between a less-than-new Pentax pocket camera and a less-than-new iPhone.

The camera performed a little better — it has a real zoom and more shooting modes — while the iPhone (or any smartphone) is quicker to bring into action — just wake it, swipe the screen, and shoot.

Then the Pentax died. Its auto-focus stopped focusing. Buying a new one seemed pointless. Manufacturers are ditching the pocket camera market — Nikon shut a major digital camera factory this fall:
In recent years [...] due to the rise of smartphones, the compact digital camera market has been shrinking rapidly, leading to a significant decrease in operating rate at NIC and creating a difficult business environment.
But look on eBay. You can find digital pocket cameras for pocket change. A like-new Nikon Coolpix, with case and cord, probably made about 2010, cost under $30, shipping included. If I had wanted an earlier model, I could have paid much less.

Why buy it? The biggest reason is peace of mind. That little Nikon will be in my pocket on next weekend's mountain camp-out. It will go on hunting trips, hikes, etc.

Which is worse, to drop your smartphone in the river while trying to photograph that cute muskrat while you're fly-fishing, or to splash a $15 camera you got on eBay?

Smartphones do have their strengths. My fingers were almost touching mine one evening last week in Boston, when I saw the driver of an immaculate white Range Rover — she looked like an oligarch's mistress in it  — deliberately ram the rear bumper of a taxi that was not clearing the intersection fast enough to suit her. Never mind that he had nowhere to go forward.

I could have put it on Facebook or Instagram, maybe made a looping GIF ("Ram! Ram! Ram!"). But I didn't.