Category Archives: Politics & News

“We have met the enemy and he is us.”

Half Staffed

Posted on by

The shutdown has hit backcountry guides in the Florida Keys. The National Park Service told charter guides that they cannot take clients fishing in Florida Bay until the Feds return to work. That puts the prime fishing between the southern tip of the mainland to the Keys — more than 1,100 square miles — off limits until further notice.

US Flag -- Mayday at Half StaffThe shutdown has hit veterans who demanded access to the World War II Memorial following the government shutdown Tuesday. The site is one of several hosting protests. Park rangers erected barricades and police tape to block veterans and other visitors. Rep. Randy Neugebauer (R-TX) confronted a ranger for keeping visitors out. “The Park Service should be ashamed of themselves.” (Say what? The park rangers didn’t shut down the government. Mr. Neugebauer and his 534 Congress Critters did.)

The shutdown has hit Vermont’s Billings Farm and Museum of Woodstock in the wallet, too. The Billings Farm and Museum is the gateway to Vermont’s rural heritage and a working dairy farm but it is also right across the road from the Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park.

“It’s a national disgrace,” a visitor from London said. “You don’t get government shutdowns in Germany, in China, or other civilized places. It’s a disgrace. What does [your] government normally do that makes it safe to walk” around there?

The shutdown has not hit the U.S. Congress who appear to be on vacation. Again.

Even Mark Halperin, the senior political analyst at Time Magazine, acknowledged that the Demorats’ strategy depends not on the facts but on the mainstream media blaming Repuglicans for the shutdown.

Determined to jettison the Constitution, this Administration and this Congress don’t know how prescient the Founding Fathers were. After all, if the framers in that hot, sticky, Philadelphia hall had hewed a little more closely to our British cousins, we would have already had the No Confidence vote and recall election.

 

Shut Down

Posted on by

For 10 days, every MSM news outlet and every elected Demonbrat reported that the House Repuglicans “refuse to pass a budget unless it shuts down ObamaCare.”

That, of course, is not exactly true.

For 10 days, the House Repuglicans have passed about 47 budgets so far; the Senate Demonbrats have refused to consider any of them and Obama has stated publicly he will “veto any bill that shuts down ObamaCare.”

Who is refusing what?

For 10 days, John Boehner (R-OH) and Harry Reid (D-NV) lobbed the spending bill back and forth.

Mr. Reid sent the Senate home on Sunday.

The bill would have prevented the government from running out of money at 11:59:59 p.m. last night.

Mouse with smaller craniumMr. Reid sent “his” Senate home when Mr. Boehner passed “his” conference request last night.

And we pay these airheads to work for us?

There are 800,000 “furloughed” federal workers this morning. Each and every one of them should go to the Capitol and demand our money back.

 

Mo’ Brains

Posted on by

Certain mice and voles have grown bigger brains over the last 100 years.

Mouse line art from Wikimedia CommonsIn her new study, Anthropogenic Environments Exert Variable Selection on Cranial Capacity in Mammals, University of Minnesota biologist Emilie C. Snell-Rood offers a startling affirmation that where critters live may well cause the evolution of bigger brains. And smaller ones.

Dr. Snell-Rood looked at a collection of mammal skulls collected as early as the beginning of the 20th Century by the University of Minnesota. She measured the dimensions of the skulls of ten species including mice, shrews, bats and gophers.

Mouse with bigger craniumThe brains of the white-footed mouse and the meadow vole who had lived several generations in cities were some six percent bigger than the brains of animals collected from farms or wood. She concluded that their brains grew when these species moved to the bright lights and big city distractions.

Uh oh. Does that mean I would have gotten that Nobel by now had I just not stayed a country mouse?

Maybe it’s not just city life.

Evolutionary biologists recognize change is a formidable evolutionary force. Corn’s wild ancestor is teosinte, a grass with tassels. While grasses don’t look much like corn-on-the-cob, a single gene changed by a single kernel’s (almost) uninterrupted passage through a wolf brought about a longer cob in the next season. Likewise, bacteria have adapted to antibiotics in less than a century.

Dr. Snell-Rood found two species of shrews and two species of bats grew mo’ brains in rural Minnesota as well.

She proposes that the brains of all six species have gotten bigger because the radically disrupted environment allows only the animals better at learning to survive.

[Ed. Note: Neanderthal cranial capacity is now believed to have been larger than human skulls. Reconstructions of Neanderthal infants showed that Neanderthals and modern humans started with the same size skull but the Neanderthal brain outpaced the modern human brain by adulthood.]

The Minnesota study also found that the cranial capacity shrinks in species in environments that require no added learning to survive.

Mouse with smaller craniumA subsequent study at the Lightman Group looked at rattus norvegicus trained to hide food from their study group. The animal models developed an interesting added behavior: after the initial concealment, the animals studied distracted all the others in the environment away from the hiding place. In other words, they lied to their study group. After just three generations, cranial capacity in the entire cohort shrank by eight percent.

Finally, a Smithsonian Institution study of groups of 535 people in Washington DC from 1900-2012 shows that brains have gotten 11 percent smaller in that sample.

 

Full Moon

Posted on by

A surgeon friend pulls ER duty at the local medical center on Friday nights and whenever there is a full moon. Last week we had both when a paramedics brought in a man found collapsed in the road, the victim of an apparent hit-and-run.

“This is medicine as it’s supposed to be,” he said to me as he probed the distended stomach of the man he was about to take to surgery, eager as only a surgeon can be to cut and slice and repair.


PLAN AHEAd

My friend the surgeon was wrong.

Coming at that from a different angle, Wile E Coyote should have considered ordering from Zenith instead of Acme. The Acme Giant Rubber Band, for example, never tripped a Road Runner.

“When I was 15, I had a crush on this guy who was really good at magic,” Danica McKellar said, “and so I learned to juggle, thinking it would impress him. I spent hours and hours practicing, planning to show him. And then I never even saw him again. But at least I learned how to juggle.”

Planning.

As far as I know, none of my grandparents ever had a credit card. “When I run out of money, I plan to stop spending,” my grandfather said.

Planning.

My friends Missy and Biff live in North Carolina but they love to spend time in South Puffin. They scheduled a vacation there this week but they forgot to ask where I’d be (I’m nearly frozen in North Puffin) so they arrived this morning with no place to stay.

Planning.

The search term, “Plan Ahead,” gets about 390,000,000 results in 0.27 seconds on Google. 390 million.

Our apparent hit-and-run victim went in to surgery where the doc found no broken bones, no bruises, no trauma. He did find a bowel obstruction that had burst through the intestinal wall, sending fecal matter into the abdominal cavity.

Our victim was a car wreck indeed, but not because any vehicles came close to him. He was a car wreck because he had avoided good medicine.

PLAN AHEAd
“Never look back unless you are planning to go that way.”
— Henry David Thoreau

Good medicine isn’t life-saving emergency surgery. Good medicine is preventing the need for life-saving emergency surgery.

“I’m not good at future planning. I don’t plan at all. I don’t know what I’m doing tomorrow. I don’t have a day planner and I don’t have a diary. I completely live in the now, not in the past, not in the future.”
— Actor Heath Ledger

That worked out very well for Mr. Ledger.

The United States Congress may actually be in session this week (although this might be another planned vacation). As we near the 793rd episode of “let’s shut down the Government” this year, I’m thinking they would do better to emulate my grandfather than Mr. Ledger.