Disaster Narrowly Averted

Our very excellent vacation almost had a very nasty ending.

We started heading home at 7:00 PM Wednesday, boarding Air Namibia in Windhoek for an 11 hour flight to Frankfurt. There, we had a 3 hour layover, before catching the 10 hour Lufthansa flight from Frankfurt to Portland.

We had not seen a newspaper or a television for a week and a half. We had no clue that a strike by the union for ground and cabin crews would lead to Lufthansa canceling 82 flights today.

This meant that there were over 300 passengers from our flight alone at the Frankfurt airport, looking for seats to Portland. That can make a standby list a very chancy business.

The Frankfurt airport is a dreadful place to be stranded. All the gates are secure access areas, which passengers may only enter as their passports and boarding passes are checked during the active boarding process. There are very few chairs available for those in transit who are not actively boarding. Frankfurt has, however, very thoughtfully provided a large horizontal surface for passenger relaxation. In the US, we call it a "floor."



We hustled to the Lufthansa transit center, and watched the queues grow longer as chaos descended on Frankfurt airport. When our turn finally came, the Lufthansa clerk put us on the waiting list for a flight to San Francisco. IF we could get to San Francisco, we then had confirmed flights on a flight from San Francisco to Portland.

There was a large crowd of hopeful standby passengers at the gate for the San Francisco flight. We were the last three called before they closed the doors and took off for San Francisco.

This day could have turned out a lot worse.

Hunting Completed

I am in Namibia, checking e-mails on a 9.6 kbps dial-up connection. No
photos by this connection. No opportunity to check the mac.com
account.

We have taken animals from A to Z, aardwolf to zebra. Elizabeth has
taken aardwolf, jackal, oryx, springbuck, duiker, and black
wildebeest. I have taken zebra, red hartebeest, blesbok, and warthog.

Tomorrow we go to a nearby village to make a donation of meat from our
hunts to one of the local boarding schools. We have a sense that if we
watch the meat go into the school's freezer, it will get to the right
place. One never knows with money donations.

Wednesday we start working our way back to Portland. We leave 7 PM
from Namibia for Frankfurt. On Thursday we leave at about 9 am for
Portland, and arrive in Portland at about 11 am after flying for 10
hours. Our internal clocks should be throughly thrashed at that point.

Report from Namibia

All is well so far. E-mail access is not straightforward -- we have a
very slow dialup connection, and our mac.com account is not at all
accessible from here. If there are any messages, please send them to
the gmail account.

The hunting score so far is Daughter 3, Father 2. Elizabeth has taken
very nice oryx, springbuck, and black wildebeest (what's gnu?). I have
taken a zebra and a red hartebeest. Tomorrow our aim is blesbock.

If any of you want to see where we are staying, the website is

bergzicht-hunting.com

More in due course!

Another photo

The internet connection here is a little buggy. It took one photo twice, and another not at all. I will add the skipped photo to this post, because I don't think I have enough time left to correct the first one.

Online in Nambia

We are sitting at an internet cafe in Swakopmund, Namibia, catching up on our e-mail. Out of 98 new e-mails, about 12 are from people we care about, and the rest are spam.

The flight from Portland to Frankfurt was one of the best flying experiences we have had. The comparison of Lufthansa to the various American airlines is stark. The only problem with the flight is that it delivered us to the Frankfurt airport, which is a dreadful place if you have to spend any time there at all. There are very few places to sit, as all the gate areas are closed off until the gate agents are checking boarding passes before the flight. So, after 14 hours in an airport with no places to sit, we boarded Air Namibia for Windhoek.

We were met at the airport by Augustine, who has been our guide since our arrival. We drove through the Gamsberg pass, going from Windhoek to the coast town of Swapokmund, which is Namibia's biggest tourist town. Along the way we spotted several new life birds: sociable weavers, gray chanting groshawks, and snake eagles. The animals we spotted on the drive included ostrich, baboons, springbucks, and at the top of a rocky peak there was a klipspringer.

So far, we have ridden horses on the dunes at sunset, and driven by the compound where Brad and Angelina stayed for their first baby. The horse they gave me to ride was very much like Major at Mathias State Park -- my father will know what this means. In the picture one can see that the horse and I are debating whether to hold still for the photo or not. We have seen greater and lesser flamingoes, and grey herons. Tonight, we are going for a camel ride. Tomorrow, we leave early to go to the lodge.

Team Penning

The Cascade Team Penning Association held an event at the Flying Dirt Ranch in Turner, Oregon last weekend. The Oregonian picked up this photo of mine for their online photo blog, "Oh, Snap!"

Second Amendment Pandemonium

The Supreme Court decision in District of Columbia vs. Heller defined that individuals have a fundamental right to defend themselves, and that the Second Amendment gives them the right to do so with a firearm.

This drives a stake through the heart of plans long cherished by some, to pay lip service to traditions of hunting and sportsmen, while working incrementally to restrict the "right to keep and bear arms" to the ability to check a shotgun out of a repository long enough to shoot a few grouse, then check it back in. These opponents of legal gun ownership operate on the belief that their world would be a safer place if you don't have a gun.

Most of these people have never had a felon with malicious intent in their living room or in their face. After the felon has left, the police are summoned. That is when you realize that to a large degree, the police are society's janitors. There is little chance that they will be there to protect you when the wolf comes to call. That is when you question the wisdom of remaining an unarmed sheep, supposedly for the greater good.

Opponents of legal gun ownership like to couch their advocacy in terms of public health concepts. When advocacy tries to masquerade as science, it plays fast and loose with the facts. Pretty soon, it starts to sound rather like blaming the tornado on the existence of the trailer park. Generally, valid scientific conclusions do not flow from exclusion of contrary evidence, fabrication of data, and incestuous literature references. The canons of scholarly discourse are not in evidence in the antigun health advocacy literature.

Antigun health advocates say that it is simple: more guns means more homicides, suicides, and fatal gun accidents, while restrictive gun laws mean fewer such events. However, this belief is not supported by the evidence. In 1973, the rates of U.S. gun ownership, handguns and all guns, was 176 and 610 per thousand, respectively. The homicide rate was 9.4 per 100,000. In 1992 the handgun and all gun ownership rate had increased significantly, to 304 and 870 per thousand, respectively. The homicide rate was 9.3 per 100,000. While gun ownership rates have increased, accidental gun deaths have decreased. There is no observable relationship between gun ownership and suicide rates. Antigun health advocates will not engage the data that suicide rates are much higher in antigun European nations.

The science which the opponents of legal gun ownership never want to acknowledge is criminology, when it looks at the effects of legal gun ownership on crime. Criminologists generally conclude that gun availability does not lead law abiding citizens to commit crimes, and that the value of firearms in defending potential victims has been significantly underestimated.

But now, the entire debate is shifting. As popular as it is right now for the antigun health advocates to say, "But it's bad for you!," the Supreme Court has said that there is an individual right to own and use a firearm in self defense. The Chicago Tribune at least is intellectually honest about the whole thing, as they call for repeal of the Second Amendment. The LA Times favors a more weasel-like approach, calling for legislation where gun manufacturers are somehow made responsible for target societal rates of gun violence, with surcharges and production limits if the target rates aren't met. Backdoor games to make guns expensive and rare are not likely to meet constitutional muster.

Those who are eager to impose their views on the nation as a whole should pay heed to what those efforts do to their other interests. Democrats have lost many elections because gun owners vote. Sometimes it seems as if the Republicans have the vote of Joe Paycheck despite making corporations supreme and shipping jobs overseas, simply because the Republicans can be trusted to not make a move on Joe's guns. If Democrats wanted to be more competitive in rural America, they could consider the idea of deciding that where antigun legislation is concerned, the voters have spoken against it, and move on to other issues.

One thing you can be sure of is that gun owners are paying close attention right now, to see who is wringing their hands and gnashing their teeth about the Heller decision. Those who see the Heller decision as an unfortunate setback to be overcome are revealing themselves right now. Gun owners do not forget.