Maggie's Farm

As a certain famous preacher said a long time ago in the last century, "I have a dream..." that on November 8th I will wake up to a brighter world, one with increased personal freedoms and interpersonal respect, that all the repressive creatures in our current Government will suddenly become quieter and more respectful of us. And then we can start, to get rid of all the extra "hires" the government is making now to help them crack down on us, and all the enforcers they are setting up to push Obamacare down our throats, not to mention the unqualified Board of Enforcers who are planning to get us to "die quickly."

We have a friend who lives in another state but we do see her once in awhile. She told us last month that she had a persistent cough, the result of an earlier illness. She went to her doctor to ask for a prescription to get rid of the cough, and her physician told her he couldn't give it to her, because she was "too old." She was still steaming when I talked to her. She's several years younger than I, by the way. So here it is folks. The Obamacare bullies are already in action, cutting back on treatments for those elderly who have dared to live this long. Her physician, by the way, is affiliated with The Menninger Clinic in Phoenix.
We need, desperately, to get rid of this Administration, before we all go bankrupt and go back to "folk medicine." If necessary, I'm going to dress my husband and myself in dog costumes and go to a veterinarian. They're usually pretty sound doctors, and they probably won't tell us to "die quickly."

Marianne

John A ... Folks who don't know much about polar bears frequently make this mistake. My husband has studied the bears for more than twenty years and has written several books about them. These bears are not "pack" animals like wolves. They are solitary creatures who wander around by themselves and have no commitment to the "pack." You will see them assemble temporarily on the shores of big northern bodies of water like Hudson's Bay, waiting for the water to freeze over so they can go out on the ice and hunt seals. The females do keep their cubs with them for about a year after they are born, and then it's "sayonara baby". Polar bear scientists, like most scientists, want to keep things neat so they can count how many individuals there are, but they can only make rough estimates which constantly shift. The Canadians keep a rough count, partly because the folks who live in little villages up there call the "animal cops" when the bears bother them often enough by invading their dumps to find any spare food. Then the bears are temporarily captured and put into the polar bear jail [a Quonset hut divided into cells. When they've filled up the jail, the wildlife scientists bring in a helicopter and airlift the bears back out on the ice so they can do their hunting thing.
Naturally, with a necessarily rough count like this, it is hard to be accurate on numbers, but the wildlife people protect them as best they can. The last time we got a count from Canada and Russia's Wrangel Island where many of the females go to give birth privately in little dens, most of the groups counted had increased.
There was a big bear count throughout the circumpolar regions back in the 1970s or 1980s, but even then the scientists could only estimate.
I think that you'll find that the environmentalists, most of whom have mistaken preconceptions, regularly get panicky about polar bear populations because they think of the bears as a family pack. They aren't. The male bears don't even recognize the females which they had knocked up last mating season, and the females have to defend themselves from being eaten.

It's a cruel world out there, but that's the way it is.

Marianne