While we were eating lunch, outside on the deck, a Hawk landed on our backyard trellis thingy. Michele heard her – or him, I have no idea – first, thinking the cat had jumped up on the railing with a loud thump. Then she spotted her/him sitting on the top rail, a little brownish lump about 3/4s of the way down. And sitting, and sitting, and sitting. On the other side of the screen is a group of chickadees was hanging out in the Buddleia and we think the hawk may have been hunting although we finished lunch and went into the house before he/she did any hunting. 
BTW, we think the little guy was a Sharp-shinned Hawk (Accipiter striatus) but we are not sure.
Monthly Archives: August 2016
Watching Simone Biles, thinking about human deversaty
According to our current understanding of the DNA evidence, somewhere around 50,000 to 75,000 years ago, about 600 people, out of the total human population of about 1,500 people, left Africa. The ancestors of those 600 people populated the rest of the earth. The thinking – which is being refined on an almost daily basis as we learn more from massive DNA sampling, among other things – is that they crossed the water somewhere around where the Red Sea changes into the Gulf of Aden and then slowly worked their way along the coast, to south-eastern Europe and India. From India, some humans migrated deeper into Asia. Some of those humans migrated to what we now call China and eventually, even to the Americas while others doubled back to northern Europe.
Just as the migration out of Africa involved a sub-set of the entire human population, each additional migration was a sub-set of the original migration. As a result, there is more human genetic diversity in Africa than the rest of the world put together and way more than, say, in Europe. Because of this, the chances are good that the shortest Olympian would be of African heritage just like the chances are good that the tallest Olympian, DeAndre Jordan, would be of African heritage. Interestingly enough, the chances are that the smartest Olympian is also of African heritage.
The idiots and change
And while you’re spot on in terms of the good she’s done for white women and children in this nation as a result of her activism, you also know the facts concerning her lobbying for the 94 crime bill and welfare reform, with the repercussions of that still reverberating today in minority communities, as well as her overt militarism that she demonstrated in her Senate seat, as well as the State Dept, as is also still witnessed today in the refugees pouring out of Libya and Syria as ISIS pours into those failed and failing states. Of course, the list goes on and on… Will Taylor on Hillary Clinton in a facebook comment.
I was listening to Barney Frank and Bill Maher talk about the guys that booed Berni, and Barney Frank. They – they being Bill and Barney – were very dismissive and we got a short lecture on government being compromise. The Bernie booers were written off as being unreasonable purists. On facebook, they are called sore losers, or simply not getting it, or just, idiots. I know I can go there, calling them idiots, not with the Bernie idiots but with the Tea Party idiots refusing to compromise. But listening to Bill and Barney’s sanctimonious chatter, I began to think of them as heroes. I realize that Bernie lost, even Bernie knows he has lost, and I want to be reasonable. I don’t want to be called an idiot of facebook. But we reasonable ones, we pragmatists, the great majority of us who say the purists are unreasonable, owe them a big debt. They are purists and extreme so we can be reasonable.
People like me who want change but agree to vote for Hillary, who fall in line, because it is the sensible thing to do, will not bring on the change we so desperately want. The people who are called idiots on facebook, are the people who actually move the political needle, not the reasonable ones like us. They are the ones that, in reality, create change.
My favorite tweet of the week
