If Bees Can Find Their Way, Why Can’t Politicians?

By Ed Raymond
Staff Writer
This column will be on the newsstands just a day after the vote, so as I write I don’t know which politicians or party “won.” After viewing the campaigns and using the TV remote “mute” switch thousands of times, I can say this: regardless of who won, the people have lost. This is absolutely the worst campaign in several decades.

Just last week researchers at the University of London revealed that bumblebees with a brain the size of a grass seed can solve complex mathematical problems to find the shortest route among several flowers containing their food. The researchers said the bumblebee is the first animal to solve the “Traveling Salesman Problem,” easily matching human salesmen who often have to find the best route in visiting several distant clients. After exploring the location of several flowers, the bees quickly learned to fly the shortest route.

After hearing hundreds of candidates, I wonder if they have a grass seed large enough to solve any route problems. Politicians certainly did not reveal this skill in the millions of words used in confounding voters.
Too Many Grass Seeds for Brains
Candidates are all patriotic, but Mark Twain described a patriot as “the person who can holler the loudest without knowing what he is hollering about.” We had a lot of Twain patriots running for office this year.

We had senate candidate Christine O’Donnell, the “witch of Delaware,” state that Senator Hillary Clinton was doing a fine job in the senate and she would like to work with her. Somewhere within O’Donnell’s grass seed she should have known that Hillary has been secretary of state for about two years, not senator from New York.

Her grass seed also failed Nevada senate candidate Sharron Angle. She insisted that Dearborn, Michigan and Frankford, Texas instituted Islamic “sharia” laws instead of good ol’ American laws guaranteed by our Constitution. Yes, Dearborn has a large Arab-American population, but they don’t stone or behead yet. They pay fines and go to jail like other citizens. Frankford was annexed by Dallas 35 years ago, so it doesn’t exist.

Twain also said, “there is no native criminal class except congress.”  I hope these candidates don’t join congressional ranks. We need serious, curious, intelligent people with expertise in many areas, not people whose only armor is ignorance.
                 
The Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan
In that the candidates rarely talked about the issues facing us except for the silly arguments about whether the “stimulus” or TARP had failed or had been successful, I thought I would draw up a “To-Do” list for the next Congress just as a reminder of some of the real issues facing us.

I can’t remember hearing a candidate speak the words “Iraq” and “Afghanistan.”  Why have the wars been totally ignored by the candidates?  Don’t they care about our mercenaries?  Shouldn’t wars at least equal cutting taxes and job creation as campaign topics? What have we sacrificed for the wars besides our values and integrity? Is there any decision more important than sending our poor “volunteers” to war? Or are wars simply “job creation” for the poor?

We have politicians and generals who actually believe we have won something in the Iraq war. What could it possibly be? The Iraqis won’t even give us decent oil contracts! What do we do if the civil war continues in Iraq? We started the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld war without adequate body armor or armored vehicles, causing the deaths of thousands of our troops.  Over 100,000 Iraqis have been killed. We are destroying our armed forces with endless combat tours. How long can we ignore them?

What are we going to do about Afghanistan? We just “celebrated” the tenth year of the war. The retiring commandant of the Marine Corps says he doubts we can withdraw by the July 2011 date because “the Southern region is too unstable.” He adds: “Counterinsurgencies just take time. I think the thought process ought to be: We’re there until we win this thing.” 

Win what, General Conway? Another blood-soaked valley or mountain range? Will it be another 10 years? Forty years? Great Britain, which really isn’t so great anymore, gave up after forty years of occupying Iraq. It had enough sense not to tackle Afghanistan. Let’s hope our brains are larger than a grass seed. It costs us a cool $1 million to keep a soldier or Marine in Afghanistan for a year.  That’s just about the cost of an elementary school in that country. Something to think about.
What Are We Going to Do About Canned and Pay-Per-View Hunting?
It was possible just a few years ago to sit at an office desk in New York City, turn on LiveShot.com to a fenced hunting site in Texas, trail a lion, pig, or elk with a mouse, line up a shot on the computer screen–and click, a rifle fired and the animal dropped. If you were a poor shot and just wounded the animal, someone on the Texas ground would run down the injured animal and finish it off. Texas has since banned remote control hunting but still has over 500 fenced-in game farms for your hunting pleasure.

Five years ago the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported that 350 “hunters” belonged to Live-Shot, paying $14.95 a month and $5.95 per ten rounds of ammo to shoot at inanimate targets. If the hunter wanted to shoot an animal he would schedule a session for about $1,500, with the final cost based on the species and size and the cost of having a trophy mounted. When the scheduled time came, the “hunter” would track the animal to a feeding station, line up the animal in the computer cross-hairs and click the mouse to fire the rifle. At that time licenses were not necessary!

What kind of man or woman would sit in an office armchair and kill a lion by remote control and hang the head over a doorway in the mansion? Such a practice would make a rather remarkable psychological study, but we humans have a wide psychotic range, from Ed Gein the Wisconsin killer-skinner to Vlad the Impaler, the real Dracula. Do not read about these guys with a full stomach.

What kind of man would go to a pheasant farm and kill 70 pheasants in an afternoon? Why, that would be Dick Cheney, the man who proclaimed Iraqis would welcome us as liberators!  He should be included in that psychological study. We should also include the young women starring in animal “crush” videos. They kill small animals by stepping on them in high heels.
Is Pot Worse Than Alcohol?  What Should We Do? Legalize It?
Many of the 30,000 Mexicans killed in the last four years in drug wars have died so our potheads can enjoy “31 flavors” as advertised by one California pot shop. How many potheads have you kicked into the ditch because their dead bods were blocking the streets? 

California spends more money on prisons than it does on higher ed. Each year 750,000 U.S. potheads are arrested for possession of small amounts of pot. Most of them are in jail, each costing us about $40,000 a year. A juvenile arrested for possession in California costs the state $216,000 a year if placed in detention. This is insane. California spends about $8,000 each year to educate each public school student!

Evidently we learned nothing from the Prohibition days, Al Capone, the various mobs, and the fact that Joe Kennedy bought his son the presidency of the United States with profits from smuggling booze into the U.S.

Medical pot has been approved in California since 1996. Some doctors are ready to sign any “physical liability” statement for a buck, and many in California have done so.  Actually there has been no large increase in usage in the state in the last 14 years.

No doubt some people will graduate to harder stuff—but they do that now. I don’t know what you can do to prevent a person from stuffing the pure white stuff up his nose if he really wants it.  Just take a look at the drunks on your block. How many have tried to quit? We should sell pot like booze—and tax it like booze.

What Can The Congress Do to Improve Race Relations ?
The Secret Service tells us that President Obama gets 30 death threats a day. Another source says that isn’t even close.

Ron Kessler, who has been around Washington for a lifetime and has all kinds of sources, says George W. Bush got 3,000 death threats a year and Obama gets about 12,000 a year.

The Secret Service does not like to describe threats because a lot of copycats exist among the crazies. One plan involved white supremacists who planned to rob a gun store in Tennessee, shoot 88 black people, decapitate another 14, and then assassinate the first black president in American history.
What Is Congress Going to Do About “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell?”
In 1980 almost half of the churchgoers in the U.S. were OK with gays serving in the military. In 2010 that number has gone over 70 percent. 

What happened? Have all those Bible verses condemning homosexuality written by ignorant old men thousands of years ago been modified? Have they been changed in “new” Bible translations?

There has been no word from Pat Robertson, Franklin Graham, or all of those other Bible thumpers who talk to God regularly that He is planning revisions. 

Senator Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma once stood in the senate chamber and guaranteed that no member of his family or ancestors going back forever were gay. This guy should sit next to O’Donnell and Angle if they are elected so they can share their grass seeds.
What Is Congress Going to Do About China?
We hear about China from the Obama administration but I don’t remember China being mentioned by any candidate during the campaign.

The average American consumes five times as much energy as the average Chinese. While we can do nothing about global warming, climate change, or anything else because Republicans have been at 72 degrees since Herbert Hoover, China has appropriated $738 billion to spend on clean energy programs over the next decade.

China has just won the race to develop the fastest computer in the world. Their latest, the Tianhe-1A, is 1.4 times faster than our largest based at a government lab at the University of Tennessee.

In just a decade China has gone from being a computer also-ran to a world technology leader.

China’s new computer performs mathematical calculations 29 million times faster than the earliest supercomputers made in 1976. For mathematicians with huge grass seeds, it performs 2.5 times 10 to the 15th power math operations per second.

(One saving note: the Chinese computer uses computer chips made by Intel and Nvidia, both U.S. companies.)

China has 220 mph trains in service and the world’s longest high-speed rail network. Meanwhile we have slipped to 22nd in average broadband connection speed.
What Is the National Institute of Health Doing About Alzheimer’s?
So far Alzheimer’s is incurable and 100 percent fatal.  Isn’t it about time to spend some money and see if there is an answer?

Among people over 85 (the fastest growing segment in our population) dementia will infect one out of two.

For every penny we spend on research we now spend $3.50 for care.  We now spend $172 billion a year caring for Alzheimer’s patients. In ten years we will be spending $2 trillion; by 2050, over $20 trillion.

One advantage of passing legislation for research: it affects the rich as much as the poor.

Nothing has been developed yet to stop the degeneration. Will the party of “Hell, no!” say no Republicans get the disease?  Remember that Ronald Reagan had Alzheimer’s for ten years.

I will always remember a woman’s statement about caring for her husband afflicted with Alzheimer’s: “It’s like being chained to a corpse.”

OK, politicians!  Do something worthwhile instead of bitch at the other party!
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