Why isn't he dead yet

Senator Mitch McConnell, who has civil service insurance and is old enough to be on Medicare, warns us that government run insurance kills people.

I think if you have any kind of government insurance program, you're going to be stuck with it and it will lead us in the direction of the European style, you know, sort of British-style, single payer, government run system. And those systems are known for delays, denial of care and, you know, if your particular malady doesn't fit the government regulation, you don't get the medication. And it may cost you your life.

This is another one for the "follow-up questions you wish reporters would ask, but you know they won't" file.

Mammoths in the news

A Spanish-German-Dutch research team has announced the discovery of the remains of four woolly mammoth skeletons in southern Spain. The location, Padul near Granada and about a hundred miles northwest of Gibraltar, is the furthest south woolly mammoth remains have been discovered in Europe.

Woolly mammoths, as opposed to their cousins the Colombian mammoths*, only lived in tundra regions close to the ice sheets and on the mammoth steppes immediately south of that. To get to Southern Spain, there would have had to have been an unbroken belt of steppe extending all the way across Spain. This is the most important aspect of the find, according to the team that excavated them; until now, there was no evidence that the mammoth steppe extended that far south. It means Southern Europe was colder during later part of the last ice age than we previously thought. The carbon dates for the mammoths, twenty-five to thirty-five thousand years old, also show that this climate wasn't just a short cold snap. An alternative theory is that the mammoths had timeshare vacation condos in Padul and were vacationing there when they died. So far, this theory has not garnered much support.

This is the second announcement this year that has made us need to adjust our models of the range mammoths in Europe. Last summer, a team in England dated some remains from Shropshire and discovered they came from seven thousand years later than any other find in Northwestern Europe. They believe that the find implies mammoths went extinct in that part of Europe during the Last Glacial Maximum and then returned to their old range several thousand years later. Taken together, the two finds reassert the main lesson of almost any area of academic study--it was a lot more complicated than we thought.

PS If someone with access to the Paleo 3 article wanted to send me a copy, I wouldn't complain.

PPS Two copies just popped into my mailbox at the same time. Thanks all.

* Colombian mammoths covered North America from the edge of the mammoth steppe into Central Mexico.

Imagine my shock and surprise

Lieberman has stabbed the Democrats (and the American people) in the back on healthcare.

Mammoth toes

Brian Switek has a colorful post up on a recently discovered site of mammoth scavenging. You should read his post, but here is the short version.

Virginia's Saltville Valley has been a productive source of Pleistocene fossils for decades. For some reason, the paleontologists have worked on the site till now have given most of their attention to big herbivores, such as our friends the mammoths, and ignored (or failed to find) the carnivores. Recently, a team working there came across the bones of a short-faced bear. Short-faced bear were one of the largest bears that has ever lived. One of their distinguishing features is their smashed in muzzle (but you had already figured that out, right?). At the same time, they found a mammoth calcaneus (heel bone) that shows teeth marks of a bear. Brian asks, "why would these carnivores have been gnawing on the mammoth's feet? Surely there were meatier parts of the mammoth's body that would have been preferred by these large scavengers." I have a possible answer to that question.

Michael Adams recovered the first of the great frozen mammoths in 1806 and it was also the first intact skeleton of a mammoth to be recovered and mounted. When he arrived at the carcass, scavengers had already eaten or carried off all the organs and most of the flesh. He specifically mentions polar bears as one of the scavengers. The only unscavenged parts were the least meaty parts of the head (scalp and upper part of the face) and two of the feet. It appears that the thick, calloused skin of the sole kept scavengers from going after the feet right away. It might be that Saltville bear was late to the buffet and that the feet were the only things left.

When Wilhelm Tilesius mounted the skeleton, he left the skin on the feet. This annoyed many anatomists of his day, who were more interested in the skeletal structure, but it's helpful to us.


Detail of a mammoth's hind feet from Tileseus' original etching of the Adams mammoth. Notice the thick sole.


Fore feet of an Indian elephant, the closest li8ving relative of mammoths. Note the tip-toe posture.
As Brian points out, there is quite a bit of meat and fat on an elephant's foot. Like camels, elephants walk on tip-toe. Their feet have a thick sole and a large fat pad between the sole and the palm. This acts as a shock absorber when the come down with their great weight in each step. To visualize the mechanics, place you hand on a flat surface like a table or deck top. Now raise your palm so only the tips of your fingers touch the surface. If you places a tennis ball under your palm, as a pad, you'll have a rough analogy for an elephants foot. That ball of fat would have been a tasty source of energy for any scavenger who took the time to gnaw through the sole of the foot. However, as long as there was easier flesh to be had, they would probably have ignored the feet.

Of course, it might have been that the Saltville bear just liked feet. Who knows what a bear thinks?

Unclear on the concept

Lindsey Graham on Fox News yesterday:

There will be no climate change bill with my vote unless you have offshore oil drilling. I won't vote for any climate change bill that doesn't allow a dramatic increase in nuclear power. I'm not going to vote for any climate change bill that doesn't allow us to use our coal deposits.

Got that? No climate change bill unless it allows us to burn more oil and coal.

Tenther nonsense

When Michele Bachmann made her conspiracy theory comments about the census, I thought she would be laughed off the stage. Every census, some nuts on the farthest fringes make that claim that the Census Bureau can't do anything except count people, but only conspiracy nuts and libertarians take them seriously. Bachmann is a bona fide conspiracy nut so no one of any responsibility should have taken her claims seriously. However, not only have so called grownups paid attention to her, they have now built on her arguments to claim healthcare reform is unconstitutional.

Their argument is that the Tenth Amendment prohibits the federal government from doing anything except for the very few things specifically mentioned in the body of the Constitution. The Tenth Amendment reads, in it's entirety:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

That's it. "Powers" is a very vague word. They choose to define it as meaning only those very specific tasks and responsibilities mentioned in the body. If the Constitution doesn't specifically mention healthcare, then the Federal government can't do anything about it.

For the census, here's what the Constitution says in Article I, Section 2, the section on the elction of members of Congress.

Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers ...[this part, about slaves counting as three fifths of a person, was deleted by the Fourteenth Amendment]. The actual Enumeration shall be made within three Years after the first Meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent Term of ten Years, in such Manner as they shall by Law direct.

They read this to mean the Census can only ask questions about how many people live at a given location. They can't ask their names. They can't write down the address. They can only count. The part about "in such Manner as [Congress] shall by Law direct" must mean something like whether the census counters have to count on their fingers or use paper.

The writers put Congress first in the Constitution--Article one. They must have thought Congress was pretty important, but the tenther line of argument doesn't leave the Congress much to do. They get to pass a budget, declare war, run the Post Office, determine whether census counters count on their fingers or use paper, and not much else.

Over the years, the same argument has been raised whenever the government is doing something that conservatives don't like or that provokes some kind of populist paranoia. In the thirties, conservatives and Republicans pulled out the Tenth Amendment argument to fight the New Deal and declaired that Roosevelt had ended constitutional rule and become a lawless tyrant. Southern politicians pulled out the Tenth Amendment argument during desegregation and declaired that Eisenhower had ended constitutional rule and become a lawless tyrant. When Medicare was being debated in the sixties, Ronald Reagan recorded a speech declairing that Johnson had ended constitutional rule and become a lawless tyrant. You get the idea.

These things sound ridiculous to most of us, but many Republicans are still fighting those battles. Newt Gingrich would like to repeal most of the social legislation of the sixties. Other Republicans are still trying to repeal the reforms and initiatives that Roosevelt used to end the Depression. When the sane among us try to laugh at the tenther argument by pointing out that, by their logic, Social Security, Medicare, veterans' hospitals, and the interstate highway system are unconstitutional, a frightning number of office-holding Republicans will look us in the eye and soberly answer that that, yes, they do think those things are unconstitutional.

Asking them about big government programs doesn't really expose the complete irresponsibility of the tenther argument. There are lots of things that the federal government is involved in, in one way or another, that are not specifically mentioned in the body of the Constitution. Among them:

• Murder
  
• Kidnapping
  
• Predicting the weather
  
• Texas secceeding
  
• Terrorism
  
• The Air Force
  
• Child pornography
  
• Preventing flooding on the Mississippi
  
• Helping people after flooding on the Mississippi
  
• The definition of marriage
  
• Public schools
  
• Illegal immigration
  
• Fighting forest fires
  
• The war on drugs
  
• Air traffic control
  
• People putting poison in our food
  
• Abortion

I think everyone can find something on that list that they think the government should not be involved with, but only the most over the edge libertarians would say they shouldn't be involved anything on that list. Somehow, mainstream Republicans have decided they need to pander to that fringe of the fringe.

One power that is specifically delegated to the government is to "fix the Standard of Weights and Measures." This means that while the government cannot do anything to fight child pornography, it can standardize shoe sizes. That's the original intent of the framers of the Constitution. That's how it should be.

A mammoth repair job

I've been working on the Adams Mammoth lately. Every time I Google, trying to track down some detail, I come across the Wiki page for it. Now, it's cool that Wiki has a page for that one mammoth, even if it was a pretty short entry, but I was being driven to distraction by the fact that it had the wrong mammoth for an illustration


The real Adams Mammoth
Yesterday, I signed up at Wiki just so I could fix that damn illustration. While I was there, I rewrote and expanded the article. I guess that's how Wiki is supposed to work. Now I'm looking at all the other articles that in any way refer to mammoths and being tempted to fix them all. I suppose that's also how Wiki is supposed to work. Just what I need, another internet time suck. The cats are already complaining that I don't spend enough time with them...

Vile hyperbole

Over the last few years, the rhetoric used by Republicans, right-wing pundits, and other conservative leaders to demonize the left has become more and more extreme. Ever since Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism was published, no slur has been off bounds. Even the most middle of the road Democrats are regularly accused of wanting to destroy the economy or surrender to the enemies of America. Republican representatives take to the floor congress to call the president a socialist. Conservative talk show hosts call anyone to the left of Ben Nelson would be tyrants, communists, fascists, often both, and embrace the most ridiculous conspiracy theories. Leaders of the Republican Party rush to pander to the most unhinged members of the right. With that state of affairs, this shouldn't surprise me, and yet it does.

Operation Free is an organization of veterans trying to educate Americans on the potential threats to national security posed by dependence on foreign oil and ignoring climate change. They have, like everyone these days, organized a bus tour to take their message to towns across America.* Along the way, they try to meet with local legislators. Here is the letter from Republican Pennsylvania State Representative Daryl Metcalfe declining their invitation:

I believe that any veteran lending their name, to promote the leftist propaganda of global warming and climate change, in an effort to control more of the wealth created in our economy, through cap and tax type policies, all in the name of national security, is a traitor to the oath he or she took defend the Constitution of our great nation!

Remember Benedict Arnold before giving credibility to a veteran who uses their service as a means to promote a leftist agenda.

Drill Baby Drill!!!

Keep in mind that this is a letter to the veterans calling them traitors and not an offhand comment to someone else about the bus tour. This is what we have come to, Republicans are calling veterans traitors for not supporting the anti-science position of the Republican Party.

Correction and Update: Metcalfe did not send his despicable letter to Operation Free, he sent it to every member of the Pennsylvania State House. Metcalfe, who sits on the House Veteran Affairs and Emergency Preparedness Committee, not only has refused to apologize, today he repeated his claim that supporting cap-and-trade legislation is a violation of a soldier's oath to uphold the constitution and that makes them traitors. This isn't the end this conflict; Pennsylvania newspapers and fellow statehouse members have started to condemn Metcalfe for his slur.

* I wish I'd had the foresight about two years ago to invest in the comapanies that lease out tour buses. Their investors must be rolling in dough about now.

Killer robots? KILLER ROBOTS!!

Matthew Yglesias points out this exchange from and interview of Reihan Salam by The Economist.

DIA: What are some areas where you think Republicans can successfully work with Democrats in the future.

Mr Salam: In the far future, I imagine that there will be bipartisan cooperation on space colonisation and efforts to terraform Mars. In the nearer term, I’d like to see Republicans work closely with the Obama White House on education, an area where Jeb Bush and Arne Duncan, the secretary of education, agree on everything important. I’d also like to see cooperation on Medicare reform, but that won’t happen.

Yglesias takes eception to part of Salam's response.

On space colonization, I’m afraid I have to strenuously disagree. The problem is that the Spacers will inevitable become politically independent of earth, and then use their command over superior natural resources and robots to oppress us.

I have to question Yglesias' conclusions. Surely, Democrats and Republicans could work together to resist an invasion of killer robots--after they stopped trying to gain points by blaming each other, that is.

Killer chipmunks? KILLER CHIPMUNKS!!

A horde of killer Russian chipmunks, hundreds of thousands strong, is terrorizing the British countryside and the authorities are helpless to stop them. That fine journalistic source The Sun has the story.

VICIOUS killer chipmunks that escaped from a British park four years ago have never been found - and could now have bred into a horde thousands strong, The Sun can reveal.

The news will confirm experts' worst fears that the disease-ridden rodents, which are plaguing northern France, have already established themselves in numbers here.

About 30 of the deadly critters went on the run from Wellington Country Park on the Hampshire/Berkshire border in 2005.

Eighteen died and eight more were found or shot - but disturbingly FOUR remained free.

The BBC has tried to diminish the threat by interviewing "scientists," but the Beeb has ties to government and is clearly trying to drown out those citizens who have sounded the alarm for purposes of the administration.

Russia has a small nuclear arsenal designed for the specific purpose of dealing with threats from Russia. It would be an easy matter to deal with this treat by vaporizing Berkshire. However, that option creates the risk of creating a horde of radioactive, mutant, killer chipmunks which, while totally awesome, would be a bit disconcerting for those living near the former Berkshire.

Fortunately, we're safe. Our swarms of deadly killer bees and escaped pythons would make short work of killer chipmunks.