We did not put out our bird feeders out this year since we are spending so much time away from the house this summer. Needless to say, we didn’t put out our hummingbird feeders either.
Whenever we do I am reminded about how different they are from sea gulls. When I would go fishing and come to shore to clean the fish the first gulls to see me would screech loudly to attract all their friends. It didn’t matter how many fish I had caught … they would screech and within minutes every gull within earshot was there waiting for me to finish cleaning the fish.
Yes, they might try to grab something from another gulls grasp, but they seemed quite communal in their approach. By contrast, I have watched gulls repeatedly try to steal food from pelicans, some going so far as to land on the pelican’s head and just peck at anything hanging out of its mouth.
Here is a picture I shot of one gull sitting next to a pelican after several attempts. As I watch the birds in our yard feeding from the bird feeders they seem perfectly polite, each waiting their own turn. That is, until a cardinal comes along who tends to drive away any other bird to get to its preferred perch.
However, there is nothing more antisocial and greedy than a hummingbird. We have two feeders in the area and any hummingbird on any perch in any feeder becomes hostile to any other hummingbird even getting near one of those feeders. There are a total of 8 perches they could use, and two of them on each feeder would permit them to feed without even seeing each other … but no … they just never let another hummingbird eat when they are there.
How on earth did this bird species get to be this way? And, why is this a universal trait within the hummingbird species? If we ever needed to see an example of anti-communal behavior in the animal species, hummingbirds take the cake!
I am sure you remember this adage from the health care industry about our collective responsibility to act responsibly with COVID 19. I tracked our progress weekly and wrote a summary of how we were doing right here in our community and compared that to other parts of the US and the world. I offered alarms when there seemed to be an uptick in our cases and offered encouragement as we all tried to be good citizens. The goal of course was to avoid overloading our healthcare system.
It is striking to me that we are not offering the same public tracking information for our concerns over carbon emissions. The data is all there as the chart here shows. Why aren’t we offering insights into how we are doing?
Perhaps the reason is that the curve is going in the wrong direction … it is getting worse at an increasing rate. We have bent the curve in the wrong direction. How can that be with all the world talking about this plus the last few years of COVID 19 supposedly thwarting economic growth?
If you have been following my blogs, you know precisely why the curve is bending in the wrong direction. A part of it is that we are simply not retiring coal as the pundits promised (see China, India, and Pakistan), and all of these EVs, solar panels, and batteries embody years of carbon dioxide in their production. All this is of course driven by the increasing appetite of the world for things we take for granted here in the US.
We are spending money like drunken sailors yet nobody can give us any cost-benefit analysis to justify it. We have alarmists and scare tactics prodding us on to throw more money at EVs, solar and wind, yet all of these are going to further bend the curve in the wrong direction.
Insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result.
Most of us grew up with the three-ring circus presented by Barnum and Bailey or Ringling with animal, acrobat, and crazy feats demonstrated live and in real time. People were on tightropes high above us and animals were uncaged. We saw parades of elephants seemingly dancing to music, and then there was the side show. It was, as its name implies a relatively small area with a separate fee to see people or animals who were a bit off the mainstream norm: bearded ladies, etc. As Wikipedia points out:
These might be partly a freak show exhibiting “human oddities” including “born freaks” such as midgets, giants or persons with other deformities, or “made freaks” like tattooed people, fat people or “human skeletons”- extremely thin men often “married” to the fat lady, like Isaac W. Sprague). However, for variety’s sake, the acts would also include “working acts” who would perform magic tricks or daredevil stunts.
Remember, I grabbed this from Wikipedia. Notice the language and descriptions which are no longer acceptable. Frankly, I am surprised Wikipedia still uses the term freak and describes these individuals as human oddities. Think about it. We are no longer free to use language like this, or to “make fun” of any of our human variations which the site describes as human oddities.
We have had our boat in Sarasota which was the winter home for all those animals and people in the Ringling circus. They have a fabulous museum there commemorating all this. The animals are gone. The side show is gone. This is all due to public pressure, and most people today would probably defend their demise. But, when asked by an American magazine interviewer during the 1919 tour if the circus whether it would ever be altered by progress, Ringling responded: “It never will be changed to any great extent, because men and women will always long to be young again. There is as much chance as Mother Goose or Andersen’s Fairy Tales going out of style.”
Mother Goose is now a sexist label and fairy tales are being rewritten … see Disney’s remake of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs along with a host of other famous attractions. So, we now have hypersensitivity to political correctness. Yet, at the same time, we have a side-show of our political process which grows in size and intensity every day.
Why are we so insensitive to the political incorrectness of our politics? Why aren’t they embarrassed when they behave so poorly? Could it be that our politicians like the political incorrectness of their own behaviors because it is the red meat they feed to their devout lapdogs to keep them distracted from the main event in their circus?
I keep hearing the politicians and the scientific community insist that we should follow the science. The implication is that we doubt the claims of climate alarmists and therefore are somehow dullards.
Well, the simple fact is that we know that a lot has changed over time that must also be taken into consideration besides the “fact” that average temperatures are warming. For instance, most of these measurements are at airports which have moved from grassy fields to concrete jungles of runways and warehouses. Another fact is that our air pollution is lower today than it was decades ago so the sunlight gets to the earth’s surface more today than then.
Another fact is that the combination of satellites and mathematical modeling has enabled us to “know” the severity of storms in far greater detail than in the past. So, if decades ago a storm intensified and then moved back down before landfall we probably wouldn’t have known.
The graphic from the recent storms shown here is a perfect illustration of facts we know now that were not known decades ago. That’s great news but invalidates any comparison of storm intensities between today and decades ago. Perhaps you studied the detailed predictions for this last storm and noticed that it indeed peaked to a Cat 4 but came ashore at much reduced strength … still a serious storm, but nowhere near a Cat 4. However, the news media wouldn’t let go of that Cat 4 strength.
I do have one funny illustration from my days back in graduate school as I was studying wind waves to determine the incidence of “rogue waves” from extensive navy data. Believe it or not, navy ships serving in the notoriously violent waters around Cape Horn kept detailed records of wave heights and they were pretty scary with heights over 10 story buildings reported.
So, I manually entered over 1,000 detailed measurements and then did statistical modeling to see how they behaved. And much to my surprise there was a definite bias in the reported heights as the wave heights moved beyond about 80 feet. This meant that something was moving measurements over 80 feet to be “exaggerated” in some way. Yes, you can prove bias in data like this.
So, I then researched how these measurements were actually taken and realized that no one was going to want to be out on the forward deck taking careful measurements when a wave of that height was about to wash you off the deck, so it was clear to me that the observers just noted something large and ran for cover. After all, wouldn’t you? Nobody was going to be the wiser.
Except me … a curious analyst who just wanted to know how wave heights truly behaved statistically so we could factor in rogue waves into hull design.
We are such an interesting species living in unprecedented times. A bewildering array of food choices have been developed specifically to appeal to our taste buds. These foods are produced in unsustainable ways, and even when we try to cut down on things like red meat, the markets come up with substitutes that defeat our responsibilities to reduce consumption. We simply want ways to continue bad habits. Miracle meats are simply not really miracles.
Then, coupled with media that amps up our desires leads to a toxic cocktail of societal desires to live life well and ironically at our own peril. We simply are not aware of how modern foods, especially salty snacks and diet drinks, are so bad for us. We see countless ads implying our friendships will be enhanced if we offer arrays of these foods. We will be liked, and we want that for sure.
Even things like our diet drinks have so many chemicals in them that they twist and torment our natural body safety and control mechanisms … then couple all this with sedentary lifestyles and we get a nation of overweight people whose diets are just not balanced and nutritious.
We enjoy all this so much we look for ways to continue our bad habits with miracle cures for obesity, hair loss, wrinkles, and the quest for social acceptance. When we find anything that works, we then jump on it with both feet hoping it will restore us to our youth and make us popular … something we longed for since our teenage years.
Well, in the case of obesity, Big Pharma may have unleashed the devil itself. They once again seem to have found something that offers us the easy way out. We don’t have to change our behaviors … we simply have pills to take our responsibilities away. According to a recent article in MIT Research:
“Medicare still doesn’t cover drugs for obesity, but a recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine warned that, in the hypothetical scenario that all Medicare beneficiaries with obesity were to use Wegovy, the cost would exceed the entire Medicare Part D budget. And if just 10% of obese people on Medicare were to take it at the net annual price of about $13,600, it would cost Medicare nearly $27 billion a year, according to the study. Unless the list price of Wegovy were discounted by more than 40%, the overall cost of the medication would eclipse the benefits to the U.S. healthcare system of lower obesity levels, according to a report by the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review. “If you spend all your money on weight loss, you’re not going to have money to do other things in healthcare,” says Dr. David Rind, chief medical officer of ICER.”
What makes matters worse is these drugs will have to be taken for the rest of a person’s life. If they stop taking them, their weight returns. Evidently, our bodies have natural mechanisms that require natural answers to these behavioral questions. We can’t just take a pill and forget about our personal choices. We must relearn the basics and practice them religiously (pun intended). Unfortunately, the business world sees the bounty in all this:
“The amount of attention drugs such as Ozempic are getting on social-media platforms, driven by testimonies from ordinary people and celebrities, shows how popular this new class of drugs is quickly becoming. Wall Street is working up its appetite.”
So, the real appetite problem is not only with us … the consumers. The lure of big money and the continued flow of that is a drug corporate America has always been addicted to. So, perhaps it is ironic and tragic that companies whose mission is to help consumers cope with their bad eating and living behaviors such as Jenny Craig are now going out of business, as reported today in the Walls Street Journal:
“Jenny Craig is going out of business after 40 years. The once-highflying weight-loss brand, which offered personalized plans and coaching and touted endorsements from stars like Queen Latifah and Mariah Carey, said Thursday it was canceling all online food orders. The closure comes after new drugs such as Ozempic, Wegovy and Mounjaro—which have been embraced by competitors such as WeightWatchers—have shaken up long-held beliefs that diet, exercise and willpower are the way to weight loss.”
Perhaps we need to stop thinking about miracles and more about personal responsibilities.
Do you see a pattern here? It seems to be everywhere these days.
anything hanging out of its mouth. 
