Category: nature

National Strategery

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Elizabeth Nickson’s post on Substack generated this post. Read first:
Net Zero is Predator Class Policy
Using it, they will monetize air, land and water for themselves, in perpetuity

After reading it, I jumped sideways to a previous wondering: Why has Bill Gates become the largest farmland owner in the United States. What will he do with a quarter million acres? Is he thinking about establishing a competitor to Archer Daniels Midland? Is he going to build solar panel deserts over the grazing lands, or vast windmill excrescences where ethanol precursors once grew (that precursor is corn, if it wasn’t obvious)?

Could he be thinking about taking hundreds of thousands of acres of American farmland out of production simply to reduce cow farts and fertilizer use?

If that last seems like an insane idea, first consider that Bill Gates is not like you. The cost of this farmland is not going to affect his lifestyle. He can indulge an expensive, virtuous whim.

Second, there is the fact that there is a well established model for strategically buying lots of land for environmental purposes. For example, The Nature Conservancy.

My uncle was the driving force behind The Nature Conservancy, and I trusted it because he was a consummate and dedicated outdoorsman. He would unquestionably preserve human use of the land for fishing and hunting – for people who could hike to the sites.

Possibly “ableist” problematic today.

And Federal cash wasn’t showering upon him; limiting any vast ambitions to, mostly, the ultra-wealthy private citizens he could convince to donate.

Of course, trusting man for long term institutional probity is a fundamental mistake.

The Nature Conservancy PR is up to that challenge. One of their goals by 2030:

We will partner with communities around the globe to conserve 650 million hectares (about 1.6 billion acres) of land. Together we will restore and improve management of working lands, support the leadership of Indigenous Peoples as land stewards, and conserve critical forests, grasslands and other habitats rich in carbon and biodiversity.

The Nature Conservancy is a non-profit, giving them instant credibility with people who don’t know that ‘non-profit’ does not mean noble. Everyone wants to preserve natural beauty, no one wants pollution. This mission sounds wonderful, though that interpretation does depend on exactly what restrictions they decide to apply to the particular real estate they manage to control.

Balanced human well being is not a concept ecostatist organizations readily acknowledge. Spotted owls and snail darters are more important. We need people who argue this position to keep us conscientious. We definitely do not need them in control.

Less charitable interpretations can be applied depending on the definitions of “steward,” critical,” and especially “conserve.” All those things can be read to mean “the benefits of removing the land entirely from human use.” Could The Nature Conservancy be motivated by that idea? Well, they have arguably gone there in the past.

Third, consider efforts by the Federal government to prevent human activity on 30% of American land and water by 2030. The Nature Conservancy is onboard with the 30×30 project, to conserve 30% of US land and water by 2030. ‘Conserve’ here is reasonably read to mean excluding human activity. No crops, no livestock, no vehicles, no windmills, no solar panels, no resource extraction, etc..

An example:

While Congress was passing the Inflation Reduction Act (Inflation Act) last month that included $20 Billion for the climate crisis conservation programs, the radical left was rolling out the next targeted phase of their attack to achieve 30×30 (permanently protect 30 percent of our lands and oceans by 2030). This one is focused on the western federal lands.

An article entitled “Rewilding the American West,” (Rewild) was strategically released in several progressive publications, and then quickly reprinted and cited by others around the time the Inflation Act was passed. The Oxford Academia Journal Bio-Science was first, followed by recreational publications such as Outside Magazine, and then the international World Economic Forum.

The plan is to remove livestock grazing, mining, oil and gas, timber production and eventually recreation, from the western federal lands, and prioritize these areas for wolves and beavers. They have identified 11, 5000 square-kilometer reserves that total approximately 13.5 million acres. These reserves are to be connected, with additional federal land acquisitions and conservation easements on private lands, to create continuous wildlife corridors from Mexico to Canada…

We can thank Bill Gates for saving the green agenda. He is taking credit for convincing Senator Manchin (D-WV) to pass the lighter version. It should be no surprise then, that livestock grazing is first on the chopping block. After all, Gates has significant investments in plant-based meat companies and funds efforts to convince people to stop eating beef. Just like the Robber Barons of the Industrial Age, Bill Gates is bankrolling the environmental movement to drive out the competition.

And the Biden Administration is upping the ante with an executive order it calls a ‘New National Strategy’. As Nickson points out this is monetizing the air and water:
A New National Strategy to Reflect Natural Assets on America’s Balance Sheet

Fourth, the mention of the World Economic Forum in that quote is intriguing. This group has inspired a number of conspiracy theories with its “Great Reset” proposal. Dire and hazy speculations abound, but we need not consider those fever dreams given what the WEF has to say about themselves.

The magic words are ‘stakeholder capitalism’, a concept that WEF chairman Klaus Schwab has been hammering for decades and which occupies pride of place in the WEF’s Great Reset plan from June 2020. The idea is that global capitalism should be transformed so that corporations no longer focus solely on serving shareholders but become custodians of society by creating value for customers, suppliers, employees, communities and other ‘stakeholders’. The way the WEF sees stakeholder capitalism being carried out is through a range of ‘multi-stakeholder partnerships’ bringing together the private sector, governments and civil society across all areas of global governance.

The idea of stakeholder capitalism and multi-stakeholder partnerships might sound warm and fuzzy, until we dig deeper and realise that this actually means giving corporations more power over society, and democratic institutions less.

The plan from which the Great Reset originated was called the Global Redesign Initiative. Drafted by the WEF after the 2008 economic crisis, the initiative contains a 600-page report on transforming global governance. In the WEF’s vision, “the government voice would be one among many, without always being the final arbiter.” Governments would be just one stakeholder in a multi-stakeholder model of global governance. Harris Gleckman, senior fellow at the University of Massachusetts, describes the report as “the most comprehensive proposal for re-designing global governance since the formulation of the United Nations during World War II.”

Stakeholder capitalism is just a way to give equal weight to the opinions of those who have no skin in the game. It’s the origin of ESG. If you don’t like the TV show, change the channel. If you don’t think the company is virtuous enough, don’t invest.

The WEF is also the author of this little gem. Welcome to 2030. I own nothing, have no privacy, and life has never been better

One implication is that you won’t be happy if you don’t move to a city. WEF doesn’t much like rural attitudes, which tend toward self reliance.

We could, of course, have a national strategy called laissez faire, and it would not involve redistribution of assets according to the distilled expertise of our betters.

A National Strategy does not have to be a government plan to seize assets. But it always is. Without that, how would our legislators manipluate insider information into profitable trades? From whence would come the extra-legal regulatory creep keeping unelected, faceless bureaucrats employed?

XX need not apply

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A very happy Day of the Oppressive Patriarchy to all non-birthing persons who provide a traditional XY chromosome role model to immature humans within a nuclear family scenario.

By traditional, I mean supported by a hundred thousand years of evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology.

Everybody else, take your large, stationary, biologically expensive gametes to Mother’s Day, please. It’s where delicious apple pie lives.

On father’s day we honor beef and whiskey. I just got a pot roast started, while drinking whiskey.

Now all I have to do is finish cleaning the bathrooms and arrange the Heath bars on a dessert platter. Difference from Mother’s Day? Then I cooked steak.

Bees, fish, lions, corn, masking toddlers, women, and Marine Corps readiness

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We are all socialists fish now. If the Babylon Bee identified as a fish, could it get its Twitter account back?

It’s OK: It identifies as a bee. Err… fish.

Taco Bell hardest hit. Or maybe movie theaters.
Archer Daniels Midland will be fine. So I bought a little.

Face swaddling. Follow the science.

Speaking of science: What is a woman? Apparently it’s complicated.

But not as complicated as a newly minted SCOTUS Justice who is female, but is not a biologist, thinks. A woman who IS a biologist and a woman has an answer.

Looks like tactical lipstick.

Rabbit holes & curiosity

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Loosely organized things that struck me.

Below is a simple comparison of English speaking volunteers who were asked if a particular string of letters was an English word they recognized. Knowing a definition was not required. Made up ‘words’ were included, and marking one of those as a real word was penalized.

These words showed the largest gap between male and female recognition.
Table 2 Words known better by males than by females (left), and vice versa (right)I sent that table to a friend and he replied: “A rebuttal to arguments that there are no differences between men and women.” Indeed.

You will quickly see an overall pattern. The blank slate crowd will argue that this pattern is entirely a symptom of social conditioning. This is a key tenet of identity politics. Any disparity between groups is solely a result of pernicious thinking which can be corrected by the State.

Totalitarian utopias (a redundancy) depend on the idea that human minds can be conditioned to think only State approved thoughts. Those who think human minds have no inherent structure, and can be inscribed at will by society, could benefit from a little research into the science. Two short suggestions. One. Two.

Anyway, I was curious about the chart and the study that produced it. The test is so simple that the only bias would be based on individual vocabulary. Which is what the test is measuring.

I’ve been looking at the M/F table a bit, rating my own knowledge and wondering about patterns and oddities. I could define all the male-side words and half the female-side ones. I knew 9 of those were fabrics, but I couldn’t have told you the difference. This proves females have been conditioned by the patriarchy to be more concerned about style than STEM.

There were 4 words I didn’t know were words: I’m not sure I’ve ever seen whipstitch, peplum, or boucle. I also didn’t know espadrille, but had to look twice to see it wasn’t escadrille, which is how I initially read it. On reflection, it seemed unlikely that women would be more knowledgable about French air force squadrons than men. Espadrille (is that also the plural?) are shoes. My mistake proves I am a programmed dupe of the patriarchy.

Of course, I then had to download the full spreadsheet to see if escadrille was in the 62,000 words. It was.

I found out that about 400 people of the 220,000 participants were exposed to each of the 62,000 words.

Gives you an idea about the magnitude of the research.

I noticed the highest recognition percentage for both sexes in the male column is for one word – “shemale.” “Taffeta” is that word on the female side, at very nearly the same ratio. It’s a curiosity that there’s one word on each list that has the highest recognition factor for both sexes. You see below that I would have expected that word to be jacquard on the female side.

Shemale (trans women with male genitalia) is associated with pornography. Is there some association between shemale and taffeta? I don’t know if it’s significant, but Duck Duck Go returns a lot of hits for ‘+taffeta porn’ and ‘shemale +taffeta’.

Turns out to be true for damask and jacquard, too. ;)

If they run this study again, they should ask about sexual orientation. We need a column of words known by men who think they are women.

Words with multiple definitions… or, at least, pathways to recognition. Jacquard, for example, could be recognized as a digital loom, or as the fabric it produces. That’s partly a STEM vs. fashion distinction. The male side of the table is mostly STEM, while the female side is preponderantly related to appearance (fashion/makeup). You might expect more men to recognize jacquard than chambray, taffeta, or damask, but they don’t.

I already mentioned confusing espadrille and escadrille. There’s also pessary and peccary.

If you are curious about the methods used in this experiment, it’s worth reading the short abstract here: Word prevalence norms for 62,000 English lemmas
A lemma is the word that appears as an entry in a dictionary, it stands for all forms of the word. “Build” is the lemma for “builds”, “building”, “built”, etc..
Here’s the intro:

We present word prevalence data for 61,858 English words. Word prevalence refers to the number of people who know the word. The measure was obtained on the basis of an online crowdsourcing study involving over 220,000 people. Word prevalence data are useful for gauging the difficulty of words and, as such, for matching stimulus materials in experimental conditions or selecting stimulus materials for vocabulary tests.

Other rabbit holes:
Discussion at ycombinator
Reddit thread
The 24 Words That Are Most Known To Only Men Or Women – 2014 results of the same study

Calinferno – Anthropogenic Regional Malfeasance

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I don’t want an argument about irrelevancies, so let’s stipulate that warming of the earth is a factor in California’s infernos. For our purposes here, it’s irrelevant. Whether it’s anthropogenic or not, California doesn’t control it. What they could control, they leave to chance.

Claims that wildfires started by lightning can be ameliorated today in California by achieving tenths of a degree reductions in global temperature by the year 2050 are facially specious. California’s only proven anthropogenic wildfires came from arson, poorly maintained power lines, and gender reveal parties.

In the gripping hand, we have technology to mitigate wildfire. And we know that California refuses to employ it, even as science tells them they should. Decreasing the amount of fuel available to a wildfire and creating clear-cut firebreaks are within the direct control of California. Eliminating CO2 and cow farts world-wide are not.

Propublica, no right leaning climate denier site, tells us the extent of this failure. They Know How to Prevent Megafires. Why Won’t Anybody Listen?

Academics believe that between 4.4 million and 11.8 million acres burned each year in prehistoric California. Between 1982 and 1998, California’s agency land managers burned, on average, about 30,000 acres a year. Between 1999 and 2017, that number dropped to an annual 13,000 acres. The state passed a few new laws in 2018 designed to facilitate more intentional burning. But few are optimistic this, alone, will lead to significant change. We live with a deathly backlog. In February 2020, Nature Sustainability published this terrifying conclusion: California would need to burn 20 million acres — an area about the size of Maine — to restabilize in terms of fire.

Now, it’s not as if California lacks deep, ongoing experience with wildfires. And they do indeed know what to do. Here’s a blurb from the CAL FIRE website about plans submitted to the Governor in 2019. Emphasis mine:

Using locally developed and vetted fire plans prepared by CAL FIRE Units as a starting point, CAL FIRE identified priority fuel reduction projects that can be implemented almost immediately to protect communities vulnerable to wildfire. Socioeconomic characteristics were also considered, including poverty levels, residents with disabilities, language barriers, residents over 65 or under five years of age, percent non-white, and households without a car. [Decide for yourself which of those criteria are best addressed so as to prevent widespread conflagrations.]

Through this process 35 priority projects were identified, reducing risk for over 200 communities. Project examples include removal of hazardous dead trees, vegetation clearing, creation of fuel breaks and community defensible spaces, and creation of ingress and egress corridors.

As Governor, if you sincerely believed climate change was THE major factor in your well established wildfire problem, and knew you had little control over that, is it prudent to ignore the means of significant mitigation your advisors recommend, or is it better to have an excuse for having ignored the advice?

I’d like to assure you that all 35 CAL FIRE proposed fire break/prescribed burn/fuel reduction projects have been completed. CAL FIRE is nice enough to provide a link:

… which leads to the California Natural Resources Agency. Where we get this:

It’s usually easier for bureaucrats and politicians to find a reason not to take an action which requires a decision or represents any immediate risk to their sinecure. Sometimes, though, responsibility avoidance goes pear shaped: The Governor attracts an argument from Donald Trump about it because, you know, California is burning. Then, decisions avoided must be clumsily disappeared.

Back to the Propublica article:

“[P]lanning a prescribed burn is cumbersome. A wildfire is categorized as an emergency, meaning firefighters pull down hazard pay and can drive a bulldozer into a protected wilderness area where regulations typically prohibit mountain bikes. Planned burns are human-made events and as such need to follow all environmental compliance rules. That includes the Clean Air Act, which limits the emission of PM 2.5, or fine particulate matter, from human-caused events. In California, those rules are enforced by CARB, the state’s mighty air resources board, and its local affiliates. “I’ve talked to many prescribed fire managers, particularly in the Sierra Nevada over the years, who’ve told me, ‘Yeah, we’ve spent thousands and thousands of dollars to get all geared up to do a prescribed burn,’ and then they get shut down.” Maybe there’s too much smog that day from agricultural emissions in the Central Valley, or even too many locals complain that they don’t like smoke [Ed: Well how do you like the smoke you’ve got now?]. Reforms after the epic 2017 and 2018 fire seasons led to some loosening of the CARB/prescribed fire rules, but we still have a long way to go.”

It’s natural to want the beauty of nature to go undisturbed. In California it’s become natural to assume man’s limited mastery of nature is sufficient to create a wildfire safe space through the power of imagination. And you might well believe this if you aspire to effect a global change in the composition of the atmosphere from your San Francisco penthouse by forcing rolling blackouts on the unwashed.

The chemistry of fire is an objective fact, which probably makes it patriarchal and colonialist. Still, It Burns.

One thing we can say is that the extent of California wildfires have an anthropogenic origin. We can name names.

Update: 11:35AM, Sep. 16th
Sorry, solar panels won’t stop California’s fires

According to Dr. Bjorn Lomborg, climate change isn’t the issue in California’s wildfire problem.

Lomberg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, Cool It, How to Spend $75 Billion to Make the World a Better Place, and False Alarm, is a “lukewarmer”.

“Lomborg thinks global warming is real, man-made, and a serious problem, which can be and needs to be tackled. But he disputes that it is an existential risk, or indeed our biggest challenge.“.

In other words:

“[C]limate alarm causes nothing but anxiety and bad policies, arguing we can do better with smarter solutions to the problem…. If climate change really could end the world, then perhaps this alarmism might be warranted, but that is simply not the case.“.

Climate change panic policy today boils down to limiting access to cheap energy, (women, children, and the poor hit hardest) and promoting alternative energy sources (subsidizing Warren Buffets windmills- he should pay more taxes by foregoing the subsidies). Since energy = wealth, opposing zero-emission nuclear power tells you all you need to know about the actual motives of Big Green.

Ardnassac

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This is a book recommendation. Sadly, it’s out of print, and I can find none in any of the used book sites I have used. The good news is it’s cheap on Kindle.

I found out about it here if you want a short opinion second to the one that follows.

I can’t believe I’d never heard of the book, either.

The flying car topic of the title is used to weave a sort of ‘back to the future’ look at at technology, American ingenuity/entrepreneurialism, and government regulation. There is a strong science fiction presence used to ask “Why did, or did not, the predictions of 1930-1960 SF come to pass?” It’s a good summary of my contention that much of that literature should have been required reading.

Appearances, among many others, by H. G. Wells, Issac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke.

The brilliant Dr. Richard Feynman also takes a bow in a discussion of Heinlein’s novellas Waldo and Magic Inc..

I cut my teeth on SF with Tom Swift, and my strong technological optimism arguably started with that series. (I wonder if there is anything comparable now for 10 year olds?)

The author, J Storrs Hall, is a techno-optimist, too, and he suggests that after the 1960’s America became a much less “can do” polity than we had any reason to expect. We went from the Wright brothers to 747s in 50 years, from Goddard (1926) to the moon in 43. Now we’re mired in CAFE standards and cronyism.

Hall does spend a fair bit of time discussing the history of ‘flying cars’ and that alone is fascinating. There’s much more. He also makes very intriguing points about nanotech, nuclear power, AI, cybernetics, economics, city planning, and other topics.

One major consideration is envirostatism (my term), where he contends that the GREEN point isn’t CO2, pollution, or any of the other excuses offered. It is essentially anti-human nihilism.

For example,

“Green ideas have become inextricably intertwined with a perfectly reasonable desire to live in a clean, healthy environment and enjoy the natural world. The difference is of course that in the latter case, the human enjoying the natural world is a good thing, but to the fundamentalist Green he and all his works are a bad thing.”

Lest you think this is hyperbole, he supplies some words from the mouths of the horses-asses:

“The prospect of cheap fusion energy is the worst thing that could happen to the planet.”
-Jeremy Rifkin

“Giving society cheap, abundant energy would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.”
-Paul Ehrlich

“It would be little short of disastrous for us for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy because of what we would do with it.”
-Amory Lovins

The title of this piece is Cassandra backwards. I closely paraphrase J Storrs Hall,

“There seems to be a bizarre reverse-Cassandra effect operating in the universe: whereas the mythical Cassandra spoke the awful truth and was not believed, these days “experts” speak awful falsehoods, and they are believed. Repeatedly being wrong actually seems to be an advantage, conferring some sort of puzzling magic glow upon the speaker.”

We hear California wildfires are caused by global warming climate change, when it’s actually envirostatist mismanagement, and the conscious intent to build windmills rather than maintain power lines. The California satraps agree with Rifkin, Ehrlich, and Lovins. In order to cripple the supply of energy, what have their like told us that wasn’t true?

California wildfires are caused by climate change. Gavin Newsom – yesterday
Four billion people will die between 1980 and 1989 from climate change. Paul Ehrlich – 1970
The polar ice cap will disappear by 2014. Al Gore – 2007
The planet will warm by 3 full degrees (0.1, actually). James Hansen – 1988
We will see the ‘end of snow.’ Untrue, no matter how many times it’s been predicted. various – 2000, 2015, 2017, 2020
Air pollution will reduce the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half. – Various – 1970

Amusingly, we also didn’t see an ice age by the year 2000. Kenneth Watt – 1970

Meanwhile, we see the very people who want zero CO2 emissions steadfastly oppose nuclear energy. Which is zero emission, safe, and causes immensely less environmental damage than windmills or solar panels. They are not protecting the environment, they are attacking the very idea of human well-being. This antipathy is in the spirit of Rifkin, Ehrlich, and Lovins. It is about authoritarian power in the way Critical Theorists describe it: There are no objective truths. Human history and culture are merely examples of a struggle in relative political power dynamics.

They don’t mean power as in horsepower, they mean justifying the political power of Antifa and BLM riots.

And don’t get me started on Critical Theorists’ “science” on “individuals with a cervix,” or what 2+2 equals.

Anyway. I recommend the book.

Book plug

Hershblogger2 Comments

Following is a reminiscence incorporated into a review of:

Conversational Guide to Backcountry Equipment:
How to choose and use gear and clothing
-by Brad Groves. Lichen and Ice Press – Marquette, Michigan, 2020.

Full disclosure. I have never met the author, but my copy was a gift from his father. Maybe that affects my review, but I think I have given an objective assessment.

If selecting appropriate outdoor gear is of any interest to you – if you’re into backpacking, camping, hiking, hunting, wondering about optimal choices for your bug out bag, even just blowing the snow from a 1,000 foot driveway – you should click the link above. And you needn’t take my word for it, check out the videos.

Brad Groves has written an engaging… well what the title says. It is well and profusely illustrated. The advice on equipment is intelligent and guided by vast experience. Practical details abound. Beginning and experienced backpackers will benefit from Coach Groves advice.

Beginners will want to read straight through. More experienced folks are also likely to find new insights. In either use case it could benefit from an index, or a searchable digital edition.

For example, a book addressing backpacking will necessarily include much discussion of the weight of items. On page 65 there’s a note on the weight difference in two nearly identical down vests – almost half a pound (a lot) – 37 pages later there is a note on the weight of a pair of camp shoes. Avoidable weight is important. Easily finding these examples of how to calculate avoided weight would be nice: I can trade off this weight for this weight for this cost.

I’m a geek. I would have a spreadsheet or two on this.

Without an index you have to RTWT. Which you will do because the writing will hold your interest, but being able to easily collate various references would be useful.

This does not detract from the quality of the content.

My relative expertise in these matters is tiny and ancient, but in my younger days I did a fair bit of backpacking. I still have some of the micro-sized stoves and other ultra-low weight gear popular in the 70s.

Following is a backpacking experience of my own, where weight and camp shoes combined with youth and optimism to override intelligence and experience.

Screen Shot 2020-06-24 at 1.05.38 PMYes, that pack was too heavy… read on.

My most adventurous trip was backpacking on several of the Hawaiian islands in 1975, and the most notable trek of that excursion was Haleakala Crater on Maui.

The Haleakala caldera is essentially an 8,000 foot high desert. There’s a 2,000 foot wall of mountains around it which blocks almost all the 55 inches of rain annually falling on nearby Hana. We needed to carry water for four days. So, everyone started out pack heavy.

I well recall setting off at 10,000 feet at the Sliding Sands Trailhead.Sliding Sands trailhead edit
About a mile in…
Peaty Fran Sliding Sands Trail

…I came to regret a couple of my “gear” decisions.

1- There were four of us – in our twenties. We wanted to have some alcohol along for end of day celebrations. So, in addition to my normal gear (and extra water), I was designated wine carrier. Four bottles. At two pounds twelve ounces each. As noted below, I knew the weight was an issue, but how often do you get to carouse on the caldera of a dormant Hawaiian volcano?

2- I was wearing relatively new boots. Hadn’t hiked in them before, but I’d worn them about the yard and house for a few weeks prior to the trip. They seemed well enough broken in. I did carry a pair of low cut Converse All-Stars as a backup and for use in camp. I wrote off the additional weight as “just in case.”

The first day was a 10 mile long descent of 2,000 feet – over some pretty rough terrain. I exchanged my boots for the All-Stars about half way. Blisters.Duane foot trailI worried about twisting an ankle for that last 5 miles.

On page 82, under “Footwear Height” Groves explains why my understanding of ankle support was flawed. If I was going accept the weight of an extra pair of shoes, I could have had much better ankle support.

While we’re on weight, my first comment after we had camp set up was,
“We’re drinking all this wine. TONIGHT!’

Not that I was naive about carry weight. Fanatic would be more accurate. I trimmed the edges off my maps. I pulled the tags and strings off teabags.

So, the section titled “Footwear Weight” on page 81 is in my youthful mistake wheelhouse, as are the comments on camp shoes under the photo on page 102. If I had had Brad Groves’ book in 1975, I might have reconsidered my boot break-in technique, the All-Stars, and the wine. Intelligence might have suggested replacing the wine with a single fifth of Jack Daniels. ;)

Groves’ advice about weight doesn’t go near the extent of my obsession (which started with a 70s book on backpacking). It is sensible. And professional.

I paraphrase: “Don’t carry unnecessary stuff, and here are some examples of unnecessary stuff.” The reasons for excluding that ‘stuff’ are made very clear. He gives you parameters for identifying ‘stuff’ you need not carry. The edges of paper maps and tea bag tags don’t appear on a list. The list is up to you. Groves gives you good guidance for decision making. With a touch of humor.

Next, I’m reading the section on cold weather boots and gloves, and seeking a balaclava solution that leaves my glasses less fogged: Because my old hands too easily get cold and I have a 1,000 foot driveway I must clear of winter snow.

Conversational Guide to Backcountry Equipment is a very good book, and a fine gift. I should know.