This handsome black and white bird is “The Clark’s Nutcracker”
Well, it’s time for me to celebrate birds again, my favorite creatures of all the creatures that God made. I’m going to use this article from National Geographic that Mackenzie (not McKenzie) found.
It says:
It weighs only four or five ounces, its brain practically nothing, and yet, oh my God, what this little bird can do. It’s astonishing.
Around now, as we begin December, the Clark’s nutcracker has, conservatively, 5,000 (and up to 20,000) treasure maps in its head. They’re accurate, detailed, and instantly retrievable.
It’s been burying seeds since August. It’s hidden so many (one study says almost 100,000 seeds) in the forest, meadows, and tree nooks that it can now fly up, look down, and see little x’s marking those spots—here, here, not there, but here—and do this for maybe a couple of miles around. It will remember these x’s for the next nine months.
It starts in high summer, when whitebark pine trees produce seeds in their cones—ripe for plucking. Nutcrackers dash from tree to tree, inspect, and, with their sharp beaks, tear into the cones, pulling seeds out one by one. They work fast.One study clocked a nutcracker harvesting “32 seeds per minute.”
These seeds are not for eating. They’re for hiding. Like a squirrel or chipmunk, the nutcracker clumps them into pouches located, in the bird’s case, under the tongue. It’s very expandable …
The pouch “can hold an average of 92.7 plus or minus 8.9 seeds,” wrote Stephen Vander Wall and Russell Balda. Biologist Diana Tomback thinks it’s less, but one time she saw a (bigger than usual) nutcracker haul 150 seeds in its mouth. “He was a champ,” she told me.
Next, they land. Sometimes they peck little holes in the topsoil or under the leaf litter. Sometimes they leave seeds in nooks high up on trees. Most deposits have two or three seeds, so that by the time November comes around, a single bird has created 5,000 to 20,000 hiding places. They don’t stop until it gets too cold. “They are cache-aholics,” says Tomback.
When December comes—like right around now—the trees go bare and it’s time to switch from hide to seek mode. Nobody knows exactly how the birds manage this, but the best guess is that when a nutcracker digs its hole, it will notice two or three permanent objects at the site: an irregular rock, a bush, a tree stump. The objects, or markers, will be at different angles from the hiding place.
Next, they measure. This seed cache, they note, “is a certain distance from object one, a certain distance from object two, a certain distance from object three,” says Tomback. “What they’re doing is triangulating. They’re kind of taking a photograph with their minds to find these objects” using reference points.
Behold the cuteness:
Monstrous!
I think now is the time to remind all my readers that birds have trouble finding food in the winter. Now is a good time to build or buy feeders for them, and a bag of seed. When things get very cold, it helps if they can find some comfortable trees to hide in, where there is not so much wind and snow. So, plant some trees, put up some feeders, and don’t let your cats out.
I’m going to steal this entire post from Tough Questions Answered to get a conversation started:
Many of the people I know who reject God or who have crafted a God that makes no demands on them have a fundamental problem with authority. They don’t want anybody telling them what to do.
For a person who wants complete autonomy, who chafes at the thought of anyone having authority over them, a creator God who makes demands is way inconvenient.
Many people who believe in God, but also have this authority hang-up, create their own version of God. This God gives them what they want when they want it. He approves of everything they do, as long as they are just trying to be happy. He encourages them to follow their desires, wherever they lead. C. S. Lewis compared this God to a senile, old grandfather who never says “no” to his grandchildren. You want chocolate for breakfast, lunch, and dinner? No problem!
Is this the Christian God? Philosopher Paul Moser answers the question:
It would be a strange, defective God who didn’t pose a serious cosmic authority problem for humans. Part of the status of being God, after all, is that God has a unique authority, or lordship, over humans. Since we humans aren’t God, the true God would have authority over us and would seek to correct our profoundly selfish ways.
If you are “worshiping” a God who makes no demands on you, you’re worshiping no God at all. You’re just trying to find a deity to make you feel good about your selfish choices. What’s the point?
I’m posting this because I’m looking for comments. Do you know anyone like this? I’ll help by getting you started with some sample atheists.
Famous atheists agree: God is not the boss of them
Consider the words of Thomas Nagel, a famous atheist philosopher:
“In speaking of the fear of religion, I don’t mean to refer to the entirely reasonable hostility toward certain established religions and religious institutions, in virtue of their objectionable moral doctrines, social policies, and political influence. Nor am I referring to the association of many religious beliefs with superstition and the acceptance of evident empirical falsehoods. I am talking about something much deeper–namely, the fear of religion itself. I speak from experience, being strongly subject to this fear myself: I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers.
I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.”(”The Last Word” by Thomas Nagel, Oxford University Press: 1997)”
And what about atheist Richard Lewontin: (and when he says “science” below, he means “naturalistic science”)
“Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our own a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, not matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a divine foot in the door.” (Richard Lewontin in New York Review of Books, January 9, 1997, p. 28)
Interesting. He’s willing to tell people lies to keep the Divine Foot outside the door.
And one last one from Aldous Huxley:
“I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning; consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption. The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in metaphysics, he is also concerned to prove that there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do, or why his friends should not seize political power and govern in the way that they find most advantegous to themselves… For myself, the philosophy of meaningless was essentially an instrument of liberation, sexual and political.” — Aldous Huxley in Ends and Means, 1937
So this is pretty widespread among famous atheists. How about among ordinary atheists?
Drawing on some ten data sets, Brooks finds that religiosity is among the best predictors of charitable giving. Religious Americans are not only much more likely to give money and volunteer their time to religious and secular institutions, they are also more likely to provide aid to family members, return incorrect change, help a homeless person, and donate blood. In fact, despite expecting to find just the opposite, Brooks concluded: “I have never found a measurable way in which secularists are more charitable than religious people.”
Consider some examples. Religious citizens who make $49,000 gave away about 3.5 times as much money as secular citizens with the same income. They also volunteered twice as often, are 57 percent more likely to help homeless persons, and two-thirds more likely to give blood at their workplace. Meanwhile, those who insist that “beliefs don’t matter as long as you’re a good person” are not as good as those who do think beliefs matter. The former group gave and volunteered at much lower rates.
Yet even these findings tend to obscure the impact of religion on charity. This is because some of the survey respondents that Brooks classified as secular are indirectly affected by religion if they were raised in a religious household.
Keeping the Divine Foot outside the door has advantages – you don’t have to worry about giving away your own stuff to others.
It’s a number that is trumpeted from the rooftops — and the pulpit: Half of marriages among Christians and non-Christians alike end in divorce.
But the reality is that Christians who attend church regularly get divorced at a much lower rate.
Professor Bradley Wright, a sociologist at the University of Connecticut, found that among people who identify as Christians but rarely attend church, 60 percent have been divorced. Of those who attend church regularly, 38 percent have been divorced.
W. Bradford Wilcox, a leading sociologist at the University of Virginia and director of the National Marriage Project, found a nearly identical spread between “active conservative Protestants” who regularly attend church and people with no religious affiliation.
Professor Scott Stanley from the University of Denver, who is working on the Oklahoma Marriage Initiative, said couples with a vibrant religious faith have more and higher levels of the qualities that marriages need to avoid divorce.
“Whether young or old, male or female, low-income or not, those who said that they were more religious reported higher average levels of commitment to their partners, higher levels of marital satisfaction, less thinking and talking about divorce and lower levels of negative interaction,” he said. “These patterns held true when controlling for such important variables as income, education and age at first marriage.”
Again, keeping the Divine Foot outside the door has advantages. You don’t have to make a commitment that goes against your self-interest. When you don’t feel good in a relationship, you can get out.
I have found that atheists think that even if Christianity were true, atheists have no intention of changing the way they live. Even if they don’t personally engage in tons of obvious immorality, they frequently advocate for a society where Judeo-Christian values have disappeared completely, e.g. – abortion, same-sex marriage. Atheism, if it means anything, means that the strong should be allowed to pursue their own pleasure at the expense of the weak. And God has to go, because he gets in the way of that unrestrained pursuit of pleasure.
I hope that more atheists look in the mirror and are honest with themselves about what’s really going on. Is it really such a terrible thing to have a relationship with the person who cares the most about you and wants the best for you? Is fun really that important that people have to push away the Creator of the universe just because he requires self-denial? You can’t get the experience of choosing to imitate God in order to be in solidarity with him if you shut him out because you want your autonomy. And that’s what we are all here to do – to know him, to be his friend, to act in a way that allows us to feel what he feels, and to have sympathy with him.
The Obama administration is having trouble detecting fraud in asylum requests from immigrants seeking to stay in the United States for their protection, according to a government study released Wednesday.
The Government Accountability Office looked at asylum requests from immigrants who have already made it to the United States and are asking to stay to escape persecution. The report doesn’t address the refugee application process, which also is overseen by the Homeland Security Department but involves people not currently in the United States. The refugee process has become an issue in debate over Syrian refugees.
The 96-page report concluded that neither U.S. Immigration and Citizenship Services nor the Executive Office for Immigration Review, the Justice Department agency that oversees immigration courts, conduct regular fraud risk assessments. The GAO recommended that both do so.
At USCIS, a paper filing system that doesn’t capture key fraud-detection information electronically also is a problem, the study says.
The GAO review found that more than 4,500 people were awarded asylum in 2014 despite being associated with lawyers or document preparers arrested that same year in an immigration fraud investigation in New York.
[…]”This new GAO report adds to mounting evidence that the Obama administration refuses to take the steps necessary to crack down on asylum fraud and protect the integrity of our immigration system,” said Rep. Bob Goodlatte, the Virginia Republican who is chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.
GAO investigators found problems at nearly every step of the way: USCIS officers aren’t properly trained to spot fraud; the agency’s fraud-detection unit doesn’t pre-screen applications to weed out potentially bogus ones beforehand; and neither USCIS, which is part of Homeland Security, nor EOIR, which is part of the Justice Department, have a sense for how big a risk fraud is anyway.
More troubling still, the government rarely prosecutes those who commit fraud, so there’s little downside to making an attempt, other than risking being sent back home.
OK, so the government system is broken – that much is clear. But what is the worst that could go wrong if we let a few bad apples in?
Senator Ted Cruz (R., Texas) and Senator Jeff Sessions (R., Ala.) want President Obama to release the immigration records of the San Bernardino shooters, arguing they should play a key role in the coming debate over funding the Syrian refugee resettlement& program.
Their request comes as CBS reports that one of the shooting suspects passed the Department of Homeland Security’s “counterterrorism screening as part of her vetting” for a visa. Federal officials maintain that they have a rigorous and effective screening process in place for people from countries such as Syria that have significant jihadist movements, making the immigration records of the San Bernardino shooters a potentially significant piece of the debate over refugee policy.
“We are dealing with an enemy that has shown it is not only capable of bypassing U.S. screening, but of recruiting and radicalizing Muslim migrants after their entry to the United States,” Cruz and Sessions wrote to Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, Secretary of State John Kerry, and Attorney General Loretta Lynch.
The letter reiterates the lawmakers’ longstanding request for the immigration records of twelve other terror suspects, which the Obama administration has failed to release even as the debate over the Syrian refugee crisis has heated up.
“Congress is days away from consideration of an omnibus year-end funding bill that would set the U.S. on an autopilot path to approve green cards, asylum, and refugee status to approximately 170,000 migrants from Muslim countries during the next year,” Cruz and Sessions wrote. “The security task involved is immense, and Congress must have the requested information if lawmakers are to act as responsible stewards of American immigration policy.”
Look here. If you expect to be able to hold people accountable for failure to perform, that is much easier to do with the private sector than it is with government. There have been plentyof major screw-ups in the Obama administration. Massive security leaks, cover-ups, arms smuggling to Mexican drug cartels, Iran deal side deals, leaking the names of agents and the details of our allies’ plans. And on and on and on. We have to learn from these failures not to put our trust in government promises about how serious they are with national security. Their lack of seriousness about criminal illegal immigrants killed Kate Steinle, for example. The only solution to their stupidity and carelessness is to not let them have the power to do anything.
WINTERY KNIGHT 