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Animal Rights

The ongoing push to secure "personhood" for sentient animals - otherwise known as "Animal Rights" assumes that the animals, like chimps and elephants, are just like people, and so they should be accorded human rights. This assumption is a throwback to our 18th century, which carried with it the corollary: an animal found guilty of murder must pay the price.

Animal "Rights" imply animal responsibility, so they either have rights and responsibilities, or absent the responsibility component, they cannot be viewed as having rights.

You don't get it both ways.

 

California: AntiVaxxer Heads Explode

Governor Moonbeam has reportedly ordered the deployment of California National Guard - in hazmat gear and armed with squeegees - to remove the remains of brain-dead rich people whose heads exploded after he signed SB 277, which requires all kids to be vaccinated absent a valid medical exemption.

Several celebrities, including actresses Kirstie Alley, Selma Blair and Jenna Elfman, weighed in with their opposition to the bill on Twitter.

"Greed trumps reason again as Gov. Brown moves closer to signing vaccine law in Cali," comedian Jim Carrey wrote. "Sorry kids. It's just business."

If it's all the same, I'd rather have healthy people. Caving in because a few rich, washed-up actors don't like vaccines just doesn't seem like good public policy. Those folks always seem to think that because they made a lot of money in showbiz, they must be really smart.

But opponents who have rallied against the bill at the state Capitol, saying the legislation violates their parental rights, immediately vowed both to sue the state and take their case to California voters.

"We are going to have a referendum to ask the public to put a hold on the law,'' said Palo Alto resident Christina Hildebrand, president and co-founder of A Voice For Choice. "We will continue to fight this -- we are not going away,'' said the mother of two unvaccinated children.

Well, ideally, Christina and her family will go away. From a purely evolutionary perspective, willful stupidity is not rewarded.

Quick, Capture It!

Most of the helium in the USA is used in medical imaging devices, and there's been some concern that we may be running out of the stuff. So it should be great news that:

A huge fault in the Earth's crust near Los Angeles is leaking helium, researchers have found.

What's the Daily Mail have to say?

Now explosive helium is leaking from massive earthquake fault under Los Angeles

Good Old Oregon

Even with all the young people moving to Portland to retire, the state population is ageing. Unfortunately, wisdom doesn't necessarily come with age.

Oregon’s 65-and-older population grew by 18 percent between July 2010 and July 2014, according to newly released population estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau. That outpaces the country as a whole, which saw its senior population grow by 14.2 percent in the same time period.

Most Oregon counties saw their 65-and-older population grow by more than 10 percent in the same time period. No county saw a decrease.

And they're still voting for Democratics in the Valley.

Habla Americano?

The USA has more Spanish-speakers than Spain. In fact, only Mexico has more.

By state the highest concentration is in the former Spanish colonies of the south and south-west, with New Mexico top at 47%, followed by California and Texas (both 38%) and Arizona (30%).

Well, at least our borders are secure.

Grand Old Potty

Well, the thug from Joisey's decided to jump into the pool, which is unfortunate since with the drought and all, his cannonball dumped all the water out, and it probably can't be replaced. It would have been nice if he'd gone to San Diego and made his jump at Sea World, as they could have just pumped in more water from the Pacific ocean.

Perhaps he didn't want to disturb Shamu. But there we have it: the guy with a ferret on his head and and the thug are busily crapping in the pool, to the detriment of actual candidates.

Here in Oregon, GOP dude Sid Leiken has withdrawn his hat from the governor run, and instead will try for Secretary of State. Good luck with that; Portland/Multnomah County's never going to vote for him, because Republican.

Fire Season

That fire in Wenatchee, Washington took out 28 homes and a number of businesses, burning some 4 thousand acres in the process. At least a thousand people evacuated; fortunately, nobody died.

Meanwhile, down in Eugene, a landmark wooden stadium (formerly on the National Register of Historic Places) went up in flames just two months after an agreement was reached to turn it into a venue for kids' sports. It's a total loss, though nobody knows what started it.

Related articles

Residents return to their Wenatchee homes in wake of Sleepy Hollow fire

Civic Stadium owners hope fire doesn't destroy dreams

$1 Trillion For Toast

Tests earlier this year demonstrated conclusively that the most expensive weapon in history, the F-35, is dead meat in a dogfight; proving no match for the 1970s-era F-16 pitted against it.

The test pilot explained that he has also flown 1980s-vintage F-15E fighter-bombers and found the F-35 to be “substantially inferior” to the older plane when it comes to managing energy in a close battle.

Thanks to Pentagon efforts to acquire a plane that can do it all, we have a plane that can't do anything. It can't bomb, it can't provide close-in air support to ground troops, and it can't defend itself against air attacks. The F-16 Block 40, by the way, is one of several planes that the F-35 would supposedly replace.

Oregon's National Guard flies the F-15, and they're remarkable killing machines; pilots from other forces arriving here for training swear that ONG does a better job of maintaining the jets than the federal military does. Up here on the mountain, we get pairs of them passing over the house several times a day, either coming home or heading out to the coast, and it's easy to tell without even looking - the engines' sound is completely different from the domestic flights.

And talk about maneuverability! I got to see that front and center a couple of weeks after 9/11, when the airspace reopened: some idiot refueling his plane over in Scappoose made a joke about flying it into the tallest building in Portland. That comment was reported, and all hell broke loose. We had F-15s blasting around here on afterburner, seemingly just a couple of hundred feet above the house. Those babies can turn on a dime. 

You don't see stuff like that at an air-show; those pilots were dead serious. 

As it happened, the idiot never ventured into Portland airspace; he had a private airstrip on his property a few miles east of Scappoose. Not that it does him a lot of good, these days; they tracked him down and among other things, impounded his plane and stripped his pilot license.

Related articles

F35 loses to 1970's era F16 carrying weights in a dogfight

F-35 Gets Its Clock Cleaned by 1970s Era Fighter

Pentagon's F-35 stealth jet can't win dogfight - report

Apparently The F-35 Cannot Win In A Dogfight

History Facts

I received a note from a DDA acquaintance in southern California today. Apparently, the idiots at HSUS are calling for a ban on the use of "bull hooks" in the state. That term for the tool is one that they made up, because it sounds terrible. The correct term for the tool, which has been in use for 3,000 years, is "ankus". And the ankus is properly used as a tool for guidance; elephants are really big animals, and the ankus simply extends your reach.

Of course, any fool can misuse a tool, but the answer is not to ban the tool, but to ban the fool.

The ankus, when properly employed, is most often used to exert negative reinforcement, which is generally followed with positive reinforcement. People who lack an understanding of behavior modification commonly equate negative reinforcement with punishment; that is not the case. Reinforcement increases the probability of occurrence of a given behavior, while punishment leads to extinguishment of undesirable behavior.

Negative reinforcement, then, actually increases desired behavior, and particularly when it is used in conjunction with positive reinforcement. These are basic operant conditioning concepts, and they are concepts that most people seem to completely misunderstand. I have conditioned wild and domestic animals for over forty years. And so I'll tell you a little story about how it works.

Many years ago, I took on a "problem" elephant cow weighing about 10,000 pounds. Apparently, she'd attack people for no seeming reason, and at the time I arrived, staff were considering housing her in isolation. Having watched her for a while, this seemed like a bad idea; she lived for socializing with other elephants, but she did have a tendency to attack humans. So I proposed a different approach. It wasn't an easy sell, but they went with it.

I moved the elephant's mother, who was very tractable, to the right side of a cement and steel manger. Her "aunt", even more tractable, to the left. Then I brought our "problematic" cow between them. I tapped her head with the ankus, and told her to kneel. From past observations, I guessed that I had about eight seconds before she reared up and tried to smash me. So, at eight, I rolled under one of the other elephants. Sure enough, she reared up and drove her head into the wall.

That, my friends, is "punishment". When she backed out from between the other two elephants, why, there I was. Grabbed her ear, told her we aren't doing that, and led her again for another kneel. After a few times, her head really hurt. But she did it herself. That's punishment.

Within a few weeks, she realized that if I told her to kneel and then to stand, she got an apple slice - as long as she didn't try to kill me. She quit trying to attack people. She did, however, start following me around like a 10,000-pound gray dog. Well, hey.

I used a combination of negative and positive reinforcement, and let her inflict the punishment on herself. The result: she stopped the unwanted behavior, but willingly followed my instructions.

As the supervisor there noted: "Yeah, she does what I ask, now, but she does it for you without any reservations."

Key issues: negative and positive reinforcement works well. Although it does help if the animal inflicts its own punishment, because hey - it's not your fault.

SW Portland-Area Neighborhoods Up In Arms

Funeral business Riverview Abbey owns 17 acres of forestland in a city-designated "environmental conservation zone", and they're looking at maybe selling that off to some developers to build infill housing there. The developers plan to cut down a few hundred trees so that they can build the Portland politicians' dreams: "high density housing" on what would become 46 lots; 35 of which are in an active landslide zone.

Some of the folks in the surrounding neighborhoods are pretty miffed; claiming that the plans call for removal of 879 trees that will "impact fish and wildlife habitat, groundwater recharge, wetlands, and is in an existing land-slide area" (there are no fish in the area, nor wetlands). Apart from all of that, they note that the development would add hundreds of trips on already congested and poorly-maintained area roads (which would be the case, assuming that developers were not forced to modify the roads to accommodate the increased area traffic, which suburbs require but Portland does not).

And so although some of their "concerns" seem well founded (traffic, a known landslide area), it appears for the most part that their main concern is keeping a "forested, urban, undeveloped tract of land" for their own enjoyment as a park of sorts. In that case, they should purchase the land themselves, rather than attempting to strong-arm acquiescence to their demands. If the funeral home is willing to sell them the property, then they can protect it to their hearts' content.

At present, however, the spat has all the earmarks of your typical Lefty Portlanders attempting to impose their will upon the owners of the land - and for free.