Category Archives: Throw Da Bums Out

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.

 

Syria (Sigh)

Posted on by

The President of the United States drew a red line in the sand. Then he lied about it.

I worry…
1. I worry that our Administration just keeps on lying to us. Again. (From the vast domestic surveillance program to ordering Boeing to shut down its new factory in South Carolina — because the factory and its 1,000 new employees were non-union — that should be no surprise.)
2. I worry that isolationism is taking hold. Again.
3. I worry that we either don’t have a plan or that our plan is radically different than anything the Administration is telling us. Again. (See #1.)
4. I worry that every airhead in a “leadership” position says Mr. Assad is violating “norms” because they want us to think they have neither law nor treaty authority. Again. (Except the Chemical Weapons Convention explicitly outlaws producing, stockpiling, and using chemical weapons.)
5. I worry that so many ostriches are asking, “Should there be consequences?” Again.


Should there be consequences? Committing genocide, whether writ large or small, violates my very core and, I suspect, yours. We do have two options:
1. Snatch Mr. Assad and deliver him to a world court.
2. Destroy the chemical arsenal of any nation or terrorist group that uses them anywhere in the world. Then do number one.

According to a poll making the rounds on the Interwebs, the Majority Of Americans Approve Of Sending Congress To #Syria.


We Have Met the Enemy
 

Fair Share

Posted on by

A Thomas Sowell quote is making the Internoodle rounds again. “What is your ‘fair share’ of what someone else has worked for?”

Dr. Sowell is an economist, social theorist, and philosopher. He is the Rose and Milton Friedman Senior Fellow on Public Policy at the Hoover Institution at Stanford. Dr. Friedman, a Nobel laureate, founded the Chicago school of economics; Dr. Sowell is perhaps the leading voice of that school.

Rationing Means a 'Fair Share' for All of Us“I know the intention was to slam ‘distribution of wealth/social service program’ supporters,” my friend Nola Guay said to me, “But my real question is this: ‘What’s [ExxonMobil CEO] Rex Tillerson’s fair share of the $2.72 million salary and $4.59 million bonus he gets this year’? After all, his $600 million in federal handouts padded their gargantuan bottom line.”

Nola, dear? How much of what you’ve worked for do you want to give me?

“That’s a strawman and you know it, Dick,” she said.

Maybe so, but Mr. Tillerson is a piker. !@#$%^ Comcast’s CEO Brian Roberts picked up $29.1 million in salary, bonus, and so on (down from $31.1 million in 2011) while delivering a whole lot less customer satisfaction. ExxonMobil at least puts a tiger in your tank. Heck, Walmart CEO Mike Duke’s pay jumped 14.1% to $20.7 million, mostly on a performance-based cash bonus. The average Walmart employee would have to work 785 years to earn that much.

Still, Nola, you didn’t answer the question. I really wonder how much you plan to give me out of what you worked for? I really wonder if you’ll tithe to me?

There is a belief that people who have more of something are required to give it to others who have less. Required.

“I’m looking for balanced, moral behavior on everyone’s part,” Ms. Guay said

Yeah, baby. When Rufus starts collecting Social Security this year at age 62, he’ll pull in $1,923/month or $23,076 per year because he qualifies for the maximum benefit. Ms. Guay’s 1040 showed a total income of $19,742. I guess Rufus owes Nola $1,667 this year just to keep them morally balanced. And Mr. Tillerson gets to give it to all of us. Of course, dividing his 7,310,000 pre-tax cash dollars between the 315,848,000 of us gives us each 2.3 cents.

“You’re missing the point as usual, Dick,” she said. “I’m looking for that good behavior on everyone’s part. You want to keep slashing benefits for the disadvantaged while filling the coffers of the already abusive wealthy. That’s just plain hateful and immoral.”

And that’s the smoke-and-mirrors part of Ms. Guay’s argument.

Dr. Sowell was a Marxist too, “during the decade of my 20s,” but he rejected Ms. Guay’s fair share economics (in favor of laissez faire) after he interned with the Feds in the summer of 1960. That’s when he discovered the link between the rise of mandated minimum wages for workers in the sugar industry of Puerto Rico and the rise of unemployment. Studying the patterns led Dr. Sowell to conclude that the government employees who administered the minimum wage law cared more about their own jobs than the plight of the poor.

“I don’t want to give even more money to Big Sugar, either,” she said.

Agreed.

The USDA will buy 400,000 tons of sugar in a massive bailout of domestic sugar processors. That will cost taxpayers about $80 million in the sweetest deal possible for the companies that grow cane and beets. See, they borrowed millions against this year’s sugar harvest but the harvest was soooooooooo good that prices dropped so they can’t pay back all of the loan.

Say what?

The National Debt increases at an average of $3.78 billion per day which will add up to some $1,400,000,000,000 (1.4 trillion dollars) this year so that extra $80 million is just .005% of the total increase in debt. We need to find the other 99.995% of immoral government spending, preferably from handouts to Big Sugar and Big Solar and all the other political boondoggles. After all, individual taxpayers paid $1,434,100,000 (coincidentally about 1.4 trillion dollars) in federal income tax last year. If we have to pay the spending we authorized, we’ll have to double our “contribution.”

It’s a simple calculation. Cut spending or double taxes. It’s your “fair share.”

Your choice.

“I don’t understand how these clowns keep getting elected,” Ms. Guay said. “Oh, wait. I do. They make us believe that the ‘other people’ are our enemies. They run hate filled campaigns. Then these damn fool middle class buy that load of bilge and keep voting them in.”

And all I could think of was, Why is she maligning her own Demorats?

For the record, ExxonMobil paid $31.05 billion in federal income tax last year, after the huge handout of $600 million in annual federal tax breaks, on earnings before taxes of $78.73 billion; WalMart paid just $7.98 billion on $25.74 billion in earnings before taxes.
Comcast got about the same $566 million tax reduction in 2009 and avoided paying all the Pennsylvania corporate income taxes again last year.