Starvin Larry

It’s frustrating: You ­invested a lot of time, effort, and money into creating food plots on your property, but you’re not getting a lot of production. Worse, what grows on those plots gets eaten up so quickly that deer don’t stick around—which is the whole point of putting in food plots.

Diagnosis
Deer are moving to nearby property where there’s more acreage in plots, with crops that offer better nutrition and palatability. So you need to improve existing plots and break ground for future sites.

Rx
To improve your output per acre, buy a plow such as the CountyLine Middle Buster ($150; tractorsupply.com) and plow plots 8 to 16 inches deep where you’ve only been shallow-tilling or disking the top by 4 to 8 inches. Your plants need softer, uncompacted soil so roots can dig deep and grow stronger by utilizing phosphorus, potassium, micronutrients, and moisture they couldn’t reach before. After deep plowing, let the plot sit for a few weeks, then till to a smooth bed. Now test the soil to determine lime and fertilizer needs, and disk those into the soil.

Preventive
Clear fresh sites for new plots in areas that you’re not hunting now; in areas that you are hunting, plan to make plots after the season closes. Existing forest trails are good potential sites; you can increase light on them by cutting back shading trees on the sides. Natural clearings in woods, log landings, and abandoned fields are other possibilities. If you have none of these, hire a bulldozer operator to create openings in your woods. Clear debris, kill existing vegetation, mow, and then disk or plow the organic residue into the soil. Also consider planting perennials such as clover or chicory,  which are rarely destroyed by overbrowsing and will keep whitetails on your land even if they eat annuals down to the ground.

From Field&Stream Here

The massive Army blimp that broke free from its mooring and drifted from Maryland to Pennsylvania is “actually still deflating,” a Pentagon spokesman said Thursday.

“I am not able to give you the mechanics of exactly how they’re deflating it,” said Navy Capt. Jeff Davis.

The blimp traveled almost 200 miles north at 30 miles per hour, reaching an altitude of 16,000 feet before it lost altitude and speed, landing in northeastern Pennsylvania.

Another Pentagon spokesman confirmed reports that the 240-foot blimp was shot down, but did not know how close to the ground the blimp was when it happened.

It is not clear who shot down the blimp.

The blimp, formally known as an aerostat, was part of a three-year research project for the JLENS program, which stands for Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Defense Elevated Netted Sensor System.

The system consists of two aerostats: one that provides broad surveillance, and the other that provides more specific surveillance. The blimp that provides more specific surveillance is the one that broke free.

The blimps were both flying at about 6,800 feet, and were tethered to the ground at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Md., when one of the cables broke near the base.

The blimp then drifted along with the about 6,800-foot long cable hanging down. It snapped power lines and left tens of thousands of residents in central Pennsylvania without power.

Read the rest Here

The federal government has been fighting hard for years hide details about its use of so-called stingray surveillance technology from the public.

The surveillance devices simulate cell phone towers in order to trick nearby mobile phones into connecting to them and revealing the phones’ locations.

Now newly released documents confirm long-held suspicions that the controversial devices are also capable of recording numbers for a mobile phone’s incoming and outgoing calls, as well as intercepting the content of voice and text communications. The documents also discuss the possibility of flashing a phone’s firmware “so that you can intercept conversations using a suspect’s cell phone as a bug.”

The information appears in a 2008 guideline prepared by the Justice Department to advise law enforcement agents on when and how the equipment can be legally used.

The Department of Justice ironically acknowledges in the documents that the use of the surveillance technology to locate cellular phones ‘is an issue of some controversy.’

The American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California obtained the documents (.pdf) after a protracted legal battle involving a two-year-old public records request. The documents include not only policy guidelines, but also templates for submitting requests to courts to obtain permission to use the technology.

The DoJ ironically acknowledges in the documents that the use of the surveillance technology to locate cellular phones “is an issue of some controversy,” but it doesn’t elaborate on the nature of the controversy. Civil liberties groups have been fighting since 2008 to obtain information about how the government uses the technology, and under what authority.

Local law enforcement agencies have used the equipment numerous times in secret without obtaining a warrant and have even deceived courts about the nature of the technology to obtain orders to use it. And they’ve resorted to extreme measures to prevent groups like the ACLU from obtaining documents about the technology.

Read the rest Here

LAWRENCEVILLE, Va. — Attorneys for The Rutherford Institute have filed a petition with a Virginia Circuit Court challenging an order of the state Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) cancelling, revoking and/or demanding the return of specialty commemorative license plates issued to the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) bearing the Confederate battle flag on the grounds that such a recall is unauthorized by Virginia law and beyond the power of the DMV. The DMV’s order comes in the wake of a U.S. Supreme Court decision holding that states issuing specialty license plates may engage in viewpoint discrimination when granting applications for specialty license plate designs. However, in the petition challenging the DMV’s September 2015 order, Rutherford Institute attorneys assert the order is unlawful and does not comply with Virginia statutes relating to the cancellation and recall of license plates.

“No matter what the U.S. Supreme Court might say about the matter, the First Amendment is unmistakably clear about the fact that the government has no right to dictate how we should act, what we should believe or what we should say, nor should it be in the business of determining what is or is not offensive, whether such expression appears on a license plate, a T-shirt, or a protest sign,” said John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People.

Under Virginia law, specialty Virginia license plates bearing an organization’s logo and motto in addition to letters and numbers as found on other Virginia license plates may be issued to members and supporters of various organizations or groups. In 1999, The Rutherford Institute and the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV), a non-profit organization dedicated to preserving the history and legacy of citizen-soldiers who fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War, brought a lawsuit against Virginia and the DMV challenging its refusal to include the logo of the SCV which includes the Confederate battle flag. A federal district court ruled in 2001 that the State’s refusal to include the Confederate battle flag on SCV specialty plates constituted viewpoint discrimination in violation of the First Amendment. This ruling was upheld by the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in 2002.

Read the rest Here