My Wild Neighborhood

A few years ago, we moved from a house on a city block, to a house in a cul-de-sac that borders a woods.  The difference in wildlife is amazing:  for example, my kids counted something like 46 species of birds that have landed in our yard.  That includes the flock of wild turkeys that sometimes walk through the neighbor’s yard.  They must know about the firearms ban in the city.

Unfortunately, some of the mammals are acting like they own the place.

At supper time, we often see a herd of deer moving through our neighbor’s yard.  One night, the deer were on the neighbor’s driveway, as he drove his SUV into his garage.  You would think they would be spooked and run away, but instead they walked off at the speed of a teenage jaywalker who wears his pants hanging halfway down.

I have also seen deer tracks in my FRONT yard, less than 10 feet from my mailbox.  Don’t they understand what it means to be a “wild” animal? 

I am used to seeing raccoons and the occasional skunk at night, but this morning, I saw the fattest raccoon in the world walking tward my garbage can in broad daylight.  I snuck out on my deck, hoping to catch him in the act of eating my garbage.  I threw something at my tipped-over garbage can, thinking that if he was inside, the noise would scare him off and keep him away for a day or two, until temptation was too strong again.

But no, he ambled off at about the speed of a PENNDOT worker in July.  He was probably going to visit his lawyer, to sue me for disturbing his digestion.

If these creatures get any less afraid of humans, they’ll come into my house, log on to my computer, and start reading my blog.

Since nothing else seems to work, here is a message for all of you large non-human warm-blooded creatures who trespass on my property:

For the deer:  We can eat you!  And the economy is bad enough that you are looking tastier all the time! 

For the raccoons:  If you eat my garbage and I decide you are too gross to eat, my son can play Davy Crockett with your hide!

For the turkeys:  We can stuff you, eat you, and use your tailfeathers as writing implements!

More Personnel Problems at the Treasury Department

The day after I published this, NPR decided that it was newsworthy to report on President Obama’s problems with staffing the Treasury Department.  I’m glad they read my blog.

A week later, the problems have only gotten worse.  Timothy Geithner, tax cheat, is still alone at the top of the Treasury Department, without a single deputy secretary, undersecretary, or assistant secretary.  Here is a list of the positions that need to be filled, and other than the Treasury, not a single nomination has even gone to the Senate for confirmation.  It’s not like there’s a financial crisis going on or anything.

In fact, just this week, 3 nominees for Treasury Department positions have withdrawn from consideration, before their nominations were sent to the Senate.

George Stephanopoulos, hardly a member of the vast right-wing conspiracy, reported that “H. Rodgin Cohen, a partner in the New York law firm Sullivan & Cromwell LLP, and the leading candidate for Deputy Treasury Secretary, has withdrawn from consideration.”  The reason given was that “an issue arose in the final stages of the vetting process.”

Before H. Rodgin Cohen, Annete Nazareth had withdrawn from consideration.  According to the article:

Nazareth was forced to withdraw from consideration for the deputy treasury slot because senators made it clear she would face tough questioning over her time at the Securities and Exchange Commission — tenure that overlapped with the agency’s failure to catch Bernie Madoff.

Meanwhile, 

the candidate for Undersecretary for International Affairs, Caroline Atkinson, was told she had to withdraw after a “tax problem” was revealed early in the vetting process, according to officials.

Wow.  If George W. Bush had these problems I sure don’t remember them.

Freedom!!!!

Some birthdays are worth more than others.  So, for example, becoming 9 gets you a birthday cake and some presents, but you don’t really get any privileges to go with it.  Becoming 18 or 21 is a big deal, however, even though I can’t figure out why the drinking age and the voting age are two different ages.

All this is preface to noting that today is Christopher’s 8th birthday.  Being 8 doesn’t mean he can drink, or vote, or get his ear pierced, or get a tattoo, or buy cigarettes, or have a girlfriend, but it does mean that he gets to wriggle free from the clutches of the nanny state in a small way.

HE IS NO LONGER REQUIRED BY LAW TO USE A CHILD SEAT IN THE CAR.

[Of course, booster seats are still recommended until he is 80 pounds, but since we have little skinny kids, he could be 12, or even 14, before he reaches that weight, so I don't see us following that rule forever.]

To quote William Wallace,

“FREEEEEEEEEEEEEEE-DOM!!!!!!!”

Personnel Problems At the Treasury Department

Remember when Timothy Geithner, tax cheat, was nominated to be Secretary of the Treasury? 

A lot of senators said that in normal times, his IRS problem would be a deal-breaker, but this was an emergency, and we needed a Treasury Secretary now!!! 

The guy must be pretty lonely now.

The Treasury Department is supposed to have a deputy secretary, two undersecretaries, and eight assistant secretaries.  Unfortunately, President Obama hasn’t gotten around to sending nominations for any of them to the Senate, and so our financial crisis continues with a severely understaffed Treasury Department.  (Which may be a good thing, since whenever Timothy Geithner speaks, the stock market goes down.  Imagine what he could do with assistants.)

You are probably wondering why President Obama is so far behind in his nominations.  You won’t find the answer in the Erie newspaper; and the answer was buried deep inside the Washington Post.   

Apparently, after the tax problems with Geithner, Tom Daschle, and others, Obama’s nominees are being re-vetted,  and  “According to one estimate, as many as a third of potential nominees were found to have had some tax questions to answer. ”

Why do Democrats approve of higher taxes? Because they don’t pay them.

We’re Not Dead Yet!!

It’s bad when all of your kids get the stomach flu within 6 hours of each other.

It’s really bad when all of your kids and your wife get the stomach flu.  That leaves you, the husband, in charge of all the cooking and laundry.

[If all of your kids and your wife get the stomach flu, and your name is Jim Bob Duggar, it may be time to call in FEMA.  But I digress.]

This sickness which afflicted our entire household starts with stomach upset, and then makes its victims feel like zombies for a few days afterward.   I am speaking metaphorically, of course:  real zombies can move around and keep their food down.  Our household was kind of like this:

Or, for the more musically inclined:

We wondered if it was something we ate, but we couldn’t figure out anything that could be the culprit.  It’s not like we ate the Salmon Mousse or anything.

We are all better now, and life goes on.

Not Above Her Pay Grade

Here is a 12 year old girl who can speak her mind quite well.  Her 7th grade class was her audience.

What if I told you that right now, someone was choosing if you were gonna live or die? What if I told you that this choice wasn’t based on what you could or couldn’t do, what you’d done in the past, or what you would do in the future? And what if I told you, you could do nothing about it?

I think we’ll hear more from her in the future.

Hat Tip BaylyBlog

Why Was This On the Front Page?

On Friday, the Erie Times News ran a front page story ( “Loved and Left Behind“) about the failed marriage between Dr. Blaine Bell, a local dentist, and Martha Ramirez Bell, a Columbian woman who married him and moved to Erie.  The marriage, which was his 4th marriage and her second, ended after 7 weeks, leaving her stuck in Erie, with very little money, and facing deportation with her daughter.

The story does an effective job of portraying Dr. Bell as a person with lots of problems.  In addition to mentioning his 4 marriages, including one that lasted 9 days, it notes that on his Facebook page there was a picture of his latest girlfriend, who is also Columbian.  (He seems to draw his future ex-wives from the Southern Hemisphere.)  The reader is drawn inexorably to the conclusion that Dr. Bell is a skunk, and we have a hard time imagining how he could tell his side of the story in a way that would persuade us otherwise.

The question I have, though, is WHY IS THIS DIVORCE FRONT PAGE NEWS?

I mean, people get divorced all the time, and most divorces appear in small type in the back sections of the paper.  Yes, this one is a bit unusual, since it involves a rich man and an immigrant woman, and there will be questions raised about immigration law and prenuptial agreements, but still, WHY DOES THIS STORY GET 3 PAGES?

Does the Erie Times News believe in the sanctity of marriage, and therefore that someone who trashes this sacred institution deserves social stigma?

Is this lady now on the rebound and dating one of the reporters at the Erie Times News?

Is the Erie Times News trying to become the Erie Inquirer in order to increase subscriptions?

Inquiring minds want to know.

Things Darwinism Doesn’t Explain

Today is the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin, so it’s a good day to blog about him.

The idea that natural (or artificial) selection can introduce changes in a species is not controversial.  After all, even hard-core six-day creationists like me believe that both Vikings and Bushmen are descended from Adam and Eve, and we all know that the different breeds of dogs come from wild dogs or wolves, so we can allow for a species to change somewhat to adapt to its environment.

But that doesn’t mean natural selection explains how we got here.  Some creatures and processes that we see go against the rules of natural selection.

1.  Cleaner Wrass and other Cleaner Fish , and their hosts

There are quite a few species of these slightly crazy creatures.  They will set up a cleaning station, and wait for host fish to come to them for a cleaning.  (Other cleaner fish make “house calls.”)  They eat the dead skin and parasites off of the host fish, and will sometimes even clean the teeth of predators.  The predators recognize them by color and don’t eat them, even though some of them will cheat and munch a scale or two.  Predators will pose in an unnatural way, signaling that they are not a threat, and will even let the cleaner fish into their mouths and gills.

For this symbiosis to occur, there must be a previous understanding.  The large predatory fish needs to “know” that it is beneficial for a small fish to nibble it, and it needs to resist the temptation to bite back.  Getting humans to the dentist is hard enough.  Meanwhile, the small cleaner fish has to go against all natural instincts to avoid predators, and has to set up a “business” much like a dental hygienist.  It has to “know” that it won’t be eaten.

The creationist has no problem with this symbiotic arrangement, but “natural selection” does not explain the origin of this behavior very well.  The first cleaner fish had to be suicidal, and the first host fish had no way of knowing that a cleaning would be beneficial.

2.  Bombardier Beetles

Skunks repel predators with their scent glands, which are similar to other animals’ scent glands, but a whole lot nastier.

Bombardier Beetles have a whole chemistry lab in their behinds, and can shoot benzoquinones at 100 degrees C, pulsing 20 times per second, at a range up to 20 cm.  They can rotate the direction of their spray 270 degrees, so a predator can’t attack them from a “safe side”.  Their spray mechanism is being studied and imitated to improve spray technologies.  It requires a lot of creativity to explain how the spray mechanism could have evolved by time plus chance, plus natural selection.

3.   Archer Fish

The Archer Fish spits a stream of water to shoot down insects and small animals at ranges up to 1.5 meters.  They develop their skills as they grow, and are able to compensate for gravity and the refraction of light as it goes from air to water.  They also conserve energy by adjusting the power of the jet to the size of the target.  All that spitting takes a lot of energy.

The problem with this skill evolving is that for this skill to be useful, it has to work right away.  Otherwise we have thousands or millions of years of pointless spitting until the mouth of the archerfish, plus its eyesight, plus its behavior all combine to make the spitting into a useful skill.  A series of gradual changes doesn’t work too well here.

4.  Sexual Reproduction

It’s easy to understand why we keep doing it, but it is not obvious how it got started.

For sexual reproduction to get started, you need a male, and a female, of the same type, at the same time, close enough to each other, and they have to like each other.  (Perhaps there was this singles’ bar 1.2 billion years ago…)  For the system to work, a lot of things have to come together at once, or you have a colossal waste of biological energy.

Sacred Cow Cola and Skittles Vodka

If the newspaper headlines are driving you to drink, here is some news you can use:

1.  You may have heard it said that “sacred cows make the best hamburger,” but some Indians got the idea that sacred cow urine can be made into cola.

INDIA MAKES COLA FROM COW URINE

To millions of devout Hindus, it’s the real thing: a cola made from the urine of India’s sacred cows.

 The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, India’s leading Hindu cultural group, has developed Gau Jal or Cow Water, at its research centre in the Indian holy city of Haridwar on the River Ganges, and hopes it will be marketed as a ‘healthy’ alternative to Coke and Pepsi.

Hindus worship cows for their life-sustaining dairy products, but many also consume bovine urine and faeces in drinks and spice mixes for their “health-giving” properties.

In some Indian states, cow dung and urine are sold in regular dairy shops alongside milk and yogurt, and “ayurvedic” Indian health food companies make porridge, toothpaste and tonic drinks which claim to cure ailments ranging from liver complaints to diabetes and cancer. The urine is also believed to have disinfectant properties while the dung is used in many Indian village huts as a clean and antiseptic flooring.

Now, the RSS’s Cow Protection Department has invented a new urine-based soft drink it hopes will promote its health-giving properties to a wider market. “We refer to gau ark (cow urine) as gau jal (cow water) as it has immense potential to cure various diseases. We have developed a soft drink formula with gau jal as the base and it has been sent to a laboratory at Lucknow for testing,” said director Om Prakash.

His team is now focusing on packaging, marketing, and of course preservation to stop its curative drink from going whiffy in the summer heat. 

“It will be a revolution of sorts. The acceptance of cow urine as a potent medicine is increasing day by day and once it comes as a cold drink, its demand will definitely increase. It will prove and justify the high stature accorded to a cow in Indian culture.” he added.

I’d rather have a V-8, thank you.

2.  This drink is more up my alley, even though I haven’t had vodka in any form for about 5 years.  I always sort my Skittles before I eat them, in the order of the color spectrum:  Green, Yellow, Orange,  Red, Purple.  I’m not compulsive about it or anything.

Here is a link that explains how to make Skittles Vodka.

SKITTLES VODKA TUTORIAL

3.  For the disgruntled Republicans of 1997, Judge Robert Bork recommended the “judicious use of alcohol,”  and went on to explain why the martini was the only proper drink to take the edge off of one’s political sorrows, and how to make a proper martini.  This recipe has been brought back for use (in moderation) by Republicans in 2009.

JUDGE BORK AND MARTINIS

What George W. Bush Didn’t Do On January 20

Sometimes, it is significant that a dog does not bark.  In the case of  President George W. Bush, there is something noteworthy that he did not do much of in his last few days in office.  

Often, politicians use their last days to pardon a large number of people.  President Clinton, for example, pardoned 140 people on the last day of his presidency, and during his term he gave pardons or clemency to 456 people.  These pardons included quite a few Democratic politicians (for example, Mel Reynolds, Henry Cisneros, Dan Rostenkoswki), big-time Democratic donors like Marc Rich,  his brother-in-law Roger, and Susan McDougal, who had shared legal troubles with him.

President Bush, by contrast, was very cautious about issuing pardons throughout his two terms.  The Wikipedia article about his pardons reports that he pardoned 189 people, but all of them had served their entire prison term;  the effect of the pardon would be to clear their record or eliminate the collateral effects of their conviction, such as the right to vote or own a gun.  He also commuted the sentences of 11 people.  There did not seem to be a long list of people pardoned at the end of his term.

Of the 200 people pardoned or granted clemency by President Bush, only 5 are well known enough to rate their own Wikipedia article.  The best known is Lewis “Scooter” Libby, who received a commutation of his sentence in 2007, but never a full pardon.  The two border guards, Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean, had their sentences commuted.  (Most people didn’t think it fair that the border guards received a longer sentence than the illegal alien and drug smuggler that they shot.)  The last well-known person was rapper John Forté , who was convicted on drug charges.

Our ex-President is very unpopular right now, but it seems like when it came to pardons, he used his power wisely, and did not abuse his office to pardon political allies.  He also did not favor the rich and famous, but rather chose to pardon mostly small time criminals who had long ago served their sentences.  I hope that future presidents follow this example.