Dumb-Ass Heron

Last week I wrote about a Great Blue Heron that found my pond. He has been visiting steadily ever since. My last words were , “I hope it freezes tonight so he will migrate south.”  The past few nights the temperature has been in the twenties, and the pond is frozen over. He is still here. 

Late this afternoon, I saw him standing at the edge of the pond waiting for it to defrost. How dumb can he be?

I had to look in my Peterson Field Guide  to learn that the Heron’s summer-winter range cuts right through the south end of Chicago. The crazy bird may decide to winter here. I always thought  Herons relied solely on aquatic creatures for nourishment, but I learn that they also take small mammals. Oh well.

Decisions, Decisions, Oh Dear What Am I to Do?

     I’m glad the rules of football require time limits on making decisions.  Can you imagine any football game if  it took the coaches hours to make a decision about the next play while the players stood on the sideline freezing their butts off. If the Commander-in-Chief (CIC) continues to run the war as he has, Congress will have to begin passing laws limiting the amount of time the Chief has to make a decision. Of course, with the ass kissing Democratic Congress we have now, it is highly probable that Congress would write the law requiring twelve months to make any decision that was not on the Liberal Left agenda. If POTUS were the coach of an NFL team he’d have more pressure on him then he does as Commander-in-Chief. 

    Being that POTUS is a basketball player, I have to believe he understands the concept of winning. He leaves me wondering if he has the same philosophy when it comes to beating hostile tribes who are hell-bent on destroying the United States. Then again, he is doing a pretty good job of that himself. Could it be that he is one of them?

    POTUS gave an un-inspiring speech at West Point the other night. In it, he openly announced his game plan for the war. I’m sure the Taliban has already begun an exodus from Afghanistan to begin a holiday that will last until September 2011.  After our troops begin to pull out, the Taliban and Al Qaeda will begin their hostility anew.  In the meantime we will have spent another sixty billion dollars plus for nothing.  POTUS confirms Sadam Hussein’s prediction that the US has no stomach for war and that we would leave the mid-east after a very short time.

CIC will attempt to pull Euorpean countries into the fray to assist him in his mission. As usual, they will all have more important things on their plates. POTUS will be forced to take it on all by himself. We all know he won’t do that. He’ll leave and quit even though he has openly declared, in the war against the people of the U.S on Health Care Reform, that he is not a quitter. 

POTUS needs to learn Ronald Reagan’s policy regarding war; “we win they lose.”

Once Upon a Time

Once upon a time the planet earth was covered in ice.  About two hundred years ago, people began to notice strange things around the earth. Boulders the size of a house were found in the middle of fields where there was no rock of the same type. Some how these people began to deduce that the ice field on the mountain pushed the boulder down.  Eventually, more people got on the band wagon and a theory developed about the glacial period.  I refer to it as the Ice Age.  In the two hundred years since the glacial period was discovered, scientists have learned that there have been four ice ages.  They  took place over periods of millions of years, but they did take place. Each time, the ice receded and melted. The last ice age was twenty thousand years ago. The arctic and the antarctic ice caps, and mountain glaciers are the remnants.  Let’s face it, there were no cars or power plants twenty thousand years ago to make all that ice melt, so what made it go away?

Today, we have a giant argument about how our CO2 emissions are causing global warming. True, CO2 does cause global warming, it is one of the mechanisms that made the glacial periods recede? Could it be that we are still in the recession period of the last glacial period? Could it be that all the cars and coal-fired power plants in the world running twenty-four hours a day could not have any effect whatsoever on global warming? Could it be that global warming is merely a natural cycle that the planet earth experiences?  Who has been around for a million years to tell us?

I once visited a great place near Tucson Arizona called the Biosphere 2.

Bio-Sphere 2 was originally designed as an experiment to determine if man could survive in a totally closed cell natural environment. They could not. The property was sold to a University that used the Bio-sphere as a closed environment where they ran full size experiments to measure the effects of  CO2 on the planet. The results were too erratic to continue.

While there, I saw a small-scale experiment which was more controlled. The exhibit was a series of twenty-gallon fish tanks. Each growing corn at different levels of CO2. What I recall is that it took a huge amount of CO2 in the atmosphere to cause plants to grow poorly. In fact, the plants did  better with more CO2. The amount of CO2 plants can handle before it becomes deleterious is huge. 

It is clear to me that the current evidence for CO2 emissions causing global warming are irrelevant when compared to the natural dynamics of the solar system, and the cycle of glaciation on planet earth. It is also clear to me that the CO2 content of the atmosphere is still at a level that will help things grow more vigorously. It is also clear to me that the current hysteria about global warming is based on a bunch of questionable data that has now mysteriously disappeared. It is also clear to me that the Cap and Trade system being foisted upon us is still another way for POTUS to grab more control over our lives.