Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 853

February 25, 2016

Marco Rubio redeems himself by destroying Donald Trump and his lame Chris Christie impersonation

Republican front-runner Donald Trump loves to find a line and hammer, hammer, hammer it until the words mean as much as your own name does after you've repeated it to yourself 100 times -- and normally that doesn't hurt him. But during tonight's debate, he wasn't repeating his own line, he was borrowing one of Chris Christie's from an earlier debate about the formerly robotic Marco Rubio's tendency to repeat himself. Rubio attacked Trump for not offering specific plans. "What is your plan?" Rubio asked. "What is your plan?" "The biggest problem with him," Trump said, "is he doesn't understand anything! He doesn't know anything! I watched him repeat himself five times four weeks ago." Trump insisted he has plans, to which Rubio replied, "he's just repeating himself." "I don't repeat myself!" Trump said. "I watched you repeat yourself five times five seconds ago," Rubio shot back. "He just says five things -- 'I'm going to build a wall,' 'we need to get rid of the lines,'" but the other items were drowned out by Trump shouting, "I saw him meltdown three weeks ago!"Republican front-runner Donald Trump loves to find a line and hammer, hammer, hammer it until the words mean as much as your own name does after you've repeated it to yourself 100 times -- and normally that doesn't hurt him. But during tonight's debate, he wasn't repeating his own line, he was borrowing one of Chris Christie's from an earlier debate about the formerly robotic Marco Rubio's tendency to repeat himself. Rubio attacked Trump for not offering specific plans. "What is your plan?" Rubio asked. "What is your plan?" "The biggest problem with him," Trump said, "is he doesn't understand anything! He doesn't know anything! I watched him repeat himself five times four weeks ago." Trump insisted he has plans, to which Rubio replied, "he's just repeating himself." "I don't repeat myself!" Trump said. "I watched you repeat yourself five times five seconds ago," Rubio shot back. "He just says five things -- 'I'm going to build a wall,' 'we need to get rid of the lines,'" but the other items were drowned out by Trump shouting, "I saw him meltdown three weeks ago!"Republican front-runner Donald Trump loves to find a line and hammer, hammer, hammer it until the words mean as much as your own name does after you've repeated it to yourself 100 times -- and normally that doesn't hurt him. But during tonight's debate, he wasn't repeating his own line, he was borrowing one of Chris Christie's from an earlier debate about the formerly robotic Marco Rubio's tendency to repeat himself. Rubio attacked Trump for not offering specific plans. "What is your plan?" Rubio asked. "What is your plan?" "The biggest problem with him," Trump said, "is he doesn't understand anything! He doesn't know anything! I watched him repeat himself five times four weeks ago." Trump insisted he has plans, to which Rubio replied, "he's just repeating himself." "I don't repeat myself!" Trump said. "I watched you repeat yourself five times five seconds ago," Rubio shot back. "He just says five things -- 'I'm going to build a wall,' 'we need to get rid of the lines,'" but the other items were drowned out by Trump shouting, "I saw him meltdown three weeks ago!"Republican front-runner Donald Trump loves to find a line and hammer, hammer, hammer it until the words mean as much as your own name does after you've repeated it to yourself 100 times -- and normally that doesn't hurt him. But during tonight's debate, he wasn't repeating his own line, he was borrowing one of Chris Christie's from an earlier debate about the formerly robotic Marco Rubio's tendency to repeat himself. Rubio attacked Trump for not offering specific plans. "What is your plan?" Rubio asked. "What is your plan?" "The biggest problem with him," Trump said, "is he doesn't understand anything! He doesn't know anything! I watched him repeat himself five times four weeks ago." Trump insisted he has plans, to which Rubio replied, "he's just repeating himself." "I don't repeat myself!" Trump said. "I watched you repeat yourself five times five seconds ago," Rubio shot back. "He just says five things -- 'I'm going to build a wall,' 'we need to get rid of the lines,'" but the other items were drowned out by Trump shouting, "I saw him meltdown three weeks ago!"Republican front-runner Donald Trump loves to find a line and hammer, hammer, hammer it until the words mean as much as your own name does after you've repeated it to yourself 100 times -- and normally that doesn't hurt him. But during tonight's debate, he wasn't repeating his own line, he was borrowing one of Chris Christie's from an earlier debate about the formerly robotic Marco Rubio's tendency to repeat himself. Rubio attacked Trump for not offering specific plans. "What is your plan?" Rubio asked. "What is your plan?" "The biggest problem with him," Trump said, "is he doesn't understand anything! He doesn't know anything! I watched him repeat himself five times four weeks ago." Trump insisted he has plans, to which Rubio replied, "he's just repeating himself." "I don't repeat myself!" Trump said. "I watched you repeat yourself five times five seconds ago," Rubio shot back. "He just says five things -- 'I'm going to build a wall,' 'we need to get rid of the lines,'" but the other items were drowned out by Trump shouting, "I saw him meltdown three weeks ago!"Republican front-runner Donald Trump loves to find a line and hammer, hammer, hammer it until the words mean as much as your own name does after you've repeated it to yourself 100 times -- and normally that doesn't hurt him. But during tonight's debate, he wasn't repeating his own line, he was borrowing one of Chris Christie's from an earlier debate about the formerly robotic Marco Rubio's tendency to repeat himself. Rubio attacked Trump for not offering specific plans. "What is your plan?" Rubio asked. "What is your plan?" "The biggest problem with him," Trump said, "is he doesn't understand anything! He doesn't know anything! I watched him repeat himself five times four weeks ago." Trump insisted he has plans, to which Rubio replied, "he's just repeating himself." "I don't repeat myself!" Trump said. "I watched you repeat yourself five times five seconds ago," Rubio shot back. "He just says five things -- 'I'm going to build a wall,' 'we need to get rid of the lines,'" but the other items were drowned out by Trump shouting, "I saw him meltdown three weeks ago!"Republican front-runner Donald Trump loves to find a line and hammer, hammer, hammer it until the words mean as much as your own name does after you've repeated it to yourself 100 times -- and normally that doesn't hurt him. But during tonight's debate, he wasn't repeating his own line, he was borrowing one of Chris Christie's from an earlier debate about the formerly robotic Marco Rubio's tendency to repeat himself. Rubio attacked Trump for not offering specific plans. "What is your plan?" Rubio asked. "What is your plan?" "The biggest problem with him," Trump said, "is he doesn't understand anything! He doesn't know anything! I watched him repeat himself five times four weeks ago." Trump insisted he has plans, to which Rubio replied, "he's just repeating himself." "I don't repeat myself!" Trump said. "I watched you repeat yourself five times five seconds ago," Rubio shot back. "He just says five things -- 'I'm going to build a wall,' 'we need to get rid of the lines,'" but the other items were drowned out by Trump shouting, "I saw him meltdown three weeks ago!"

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Published on February 25, 2016 19:01

“If Trump hadn’t inherited $200 million, he’d be selling watches on the streets of Manhattan,” whatever demon possessed Marco Rubio claimed tonight

Whatever demon decided to possess the body of Florida Senator Marco Rubio has wit and clever to spare, as his withering commentary on Donald Trump's Horatio Alger narrative demonstrated tonight. "If you hadn't inherited $200 million, you'd be selling selling watches on the streets of Manhattan," Rubio told Trump. Trump tried to counter by claiming that his father only gave him $1 million in start-up money, but Rubio's eye-roll and the audience's audible gasps clearly indicate who won that point. Rubio also went after Trump's "fake university," saying "there are people that borrow $36,000 to go to Trump University, and they’re suing him now, and you know what they got? They got to take a picture with a cardboard cutout of Donald Trump." The cardboard cutout of Donald Trump on stage next to him glared with utter incivility and demanded to answer the charge, but CNN's Wolf Blitzer felt it was time to move on.

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Published on February 25, 2016 18:21

Tonight’s Republican debate is 4 minutes old and Patton Oswalt already won it, repeatedly

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Published on February 25, 2016 17:52

The GOP hopefuls are getting beyond ugly in the most entertaining debate to date

The gloves are off at tonight's Republican debate, with even the rhetorically flaccid senator from Florida trying to get a few licks in. Marco Rubio accused Donald Trump of hiring undocumented immigrants -- people who, unlike his mother, didn't become citizens through the proper channels. Instead of addressing Rubio's criticism, Trump attacked Rubio for not being a job creator. "I’m the only one on this stage that’s hired people," Trump said. "You haven’t hired anybody." Texas Senator Ted Cruz tried to get some skin in the game, saying that when he was leading the fight against amnesty for undocumented immigrants, Trump was "firing Dennis Rodman on 'Celebrity Apprentice.'" Cruz continued to hammer Trump, claiming that he funded the "Gang of Eight," to which Trump replied, as is his wont, with playground taunts. "I've had an amazing relationship with politicians," he told Cruz. "You get along with no one." He also complained that the former Mexican president, Vincente Fox, once used "a filthy, disgusting word on television," which isn't the least bit ironic coming from the man who called Cruz a "pussy" just last week.

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Published on February 25, 2016 17:08

Scalia’s elite hunting pals: Meet St. Hubertus, patron saint of rich guys with guns

When Justice Antonin Scalia died suddenly on Feb. 13, he was at the Cibolo Creek Ranch in Texas, hunting for pheasant and chukar. It has now been revealed that he was in the company of 35 members of an “exclusive fraternity for hunters called the International Order of St. Hubertus, an Austrian society that dates back to the 1600s.” According to the Washington Post, the owner of the ranch, John Poindexter, and Scalia’s traveling companion are both high-ranking members of the group. It sounds like a terrific setup for a conspiracy theory. But how secret can a society be if it has offices and a website? Its existence is out in the open. The tricky part is pinning down the names of its members. Was Scalia one of their official numbers? Probably not, given that the Order is “under the Royal Protection of His Majesty Juan Carlos of Spain, the Grand Master Emeritus His Imperial and Royal Highness Archduke Andreas Salvator of Austria and our Grand Master ... His Imperial and Royal Highness Istvan von Habsburg Lothringen, Archduke of Austria, Prince of Hungary.” In other words, the named ranking members are passionate about hunting to the point of folly. They also tend to be royal or, if American, officers in the military. I would not be surprised to learn that princes Charles, William and Harry are members. (Though Elizabeth I was renowned for her hunting skills, there don't appear to be any women in this Order.) There are reasons for both the high level of social privilege as well as the commitment of its members to an activity that many Americans find both anachronistic and offensive. The Order’s motto is “Deum Diligite Animalia Diligentes” or “Honoring God by Honoring His Creatures.” No less quaint to modern ears is the affirmation that the “a true knightly order in the historical tradition.” So what’s the history here? Let’s start with the name of the order itself. Hubert (or Hubertus) was a French saint and bishop of Lìege in the 700s who took his story from Saint Eustace, who began his life as a Roman soldier named Placidus. As described in the Golden Legend, 1275:

So on a day, as he was on hunting, he found a herd of harts, among whom he saw one more fair and greater than the other… And [the hart] spake to him, saying: Placidus, wherefore followest me hither? I am appeared to thee in this beast for the grace of thee. I am Jesu Christ.

In medieval illuminations, the hart of St. Eustace/St. Hubert appears with a crucifix suspended between its antlers, which have 10 prongs to represent each of the Ten Commandments. This is the origin of the much-mocked “holy hunter,” who combines reverence for God’s creations with a (seemingly contradictory) love of hunting wild creatures. Crucially, until the 19th century, hunting in Europe was traditionally restricted to members of the nobility who had the express permission of the king to hunt his land. This could cause resentment among nobles as well as the peasantry. For example, Forest Law was the central conflict in “Robin Hood,” as the merry men, starving peasants all, were forbidden to hunt the King’s forest, and so they resorted to poaching. We have nothing today that resembles the theologically saturated performance that was the royal hunt, which involved hundreds of men, horses and dogs for a protracted activity that was ceremonial, symbolic and limited to ten quarry animals: Five noble beasts blessed by God, and five “black beasts (bete noirs)” who were creatures of the devil. Yet the truest of hunters wasn’t a saint, but Sir Tristan (or Tristram) of Lyoness, who was also the first and best of knights. To those who would "learn the art of venery or hunting," wrote George Turberville in 1576, “let him give eare, to skilfull Trystrams lore.” There are many versions of Tristan’s legend, but one of the oldest, an early 13th century German manuscript, devoted extensive passages to hunting lore. Sir Thomas Malory made most of those passages disappear in his celebrated “Morte d’arthur” ("Death of King Arthur"), first published in 1485. By the time the 19th century rolled around, Tristan was too busy reading poetry to his uncle’s wife, Ysolde, to go galloping after wild deer. Notably, however, it wasn’t until the 17th century that the royal hunt was understood as a sublimated form of war. It was in 1695 that Count Franz Anton von Sporck founded the Order of St. Hubertus in what was then the Kingdom of Bohemia, now the modern Czech Republic. At this moment, I cannot independently verify what the “history” section of the Order’s website claims, but it affirms that in 1938, after Austria was absorbed by the German Reich, “Herman Göring demanded membership in the Order and executed the Grand Prior when he was denied.” Later, surviving members “were authorized by Halvor O. Ekern, chief political advisor of the US Armed Forces in Austria to use their sporting guns to provide winter food to the rural population, avoiding not only famine but helping to save the country from falling behind the Iron Curtain” after the end of WWII. Göring was not only Reichsmarschall and founder of the Gestapo, but Jagermeister (or Hunting Master) during the Nazi era, and the Library of Congress has dozens of images on file documenting his enthusiasm for the activity. He was a good hunter but a terrible human being, and that the men of the Order of St. Hubertus would rather die than make him a member says something about their values. Once the Order of St. Hubertus was reinstated in 1950, the American diplomats and generals involved in bringing about the end of WWII were the first American members. In 1967, 1st Lt. Don Feeney (U.S. Army 7th medical brigade, 56th medical battalion) was stationed in Germany, and each battalion had an officer assigned to interact with the local authorities. Among other things, Lt. Feeney had to work with the forest manager to compensate locals for damage after American military maneuvers. He eventually received permission to shoot two deer, but never undertook it, as it was simply too different from American practices. What he described was more a cull than a hunt, as he was to shoot two aged bucks that the forest manager had specified, and under his supervision. The following year, in 1968, George Wood founded the first American branch of the Order of St. Hubertus. 1950 is not that long ago, but the world has drastically changed. Today, the International Order of St. Hubertus asserts that its members are also wildlife conservationists. Again, it is difficult to interpret this without additional material to assess, but it is also the case that ethical hunters are, in fact, dedicated to preserving the wildlife as well as the wilderness. That desire to preserve nature was what prompted the Great White Hunter himself, Theodore Roosevelt, to create the National Park system. One crucial difference is that Scalia was not "in nature" but at the Cibolo Creek Ranch, which offers hunting as an activity for all of its guests, not just nobles. (What its website describes is a drive, not a canned hunt, so requires shooting skills but not expert hunting abilities.) Today, the human relationship to nature and animals is very different from what it used to be three centuries ago. What hasn’t changed, alas, is the human tendency to war.

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Published on February 25, 2016 16:00

Mass sperm whale deaths across Europe leave scientists stumped

YORK, United Kingdom — Normally tranquil and windswept beaches across northern Europe were converted into cetacean graveyards this winter, as sperm whale after sperm whale kept stranding itself.

From January to early February, 30 of the magnificent creatures died on the coasts of the UK, Germany, the Netherlands and northern France, all “bachelor” or juvenile males.

For now the stranding appears to have ceased, yet scientists are hardly any clearer on what caused so many of the huge whales to be grounded in shallow North Sea waters. They were far from their usual hunting habitat in the deep north Atlantic Ocean, where they can plunge more than 6,500 feet preying on squid.

“It will be difficult to fully reconstruct why this group ended up in the southern North Sea,” Anja Reckendorf, a veterinary scientist with the University of Hannover, told GlobalPost. “We know very little about the journey that males make when they leave their natal group, which also makes the reconstruction of what went wrong very difficult for us.”

Many theories have been posited in the media, from squid hunting to solar flares. Early results from necropsies (whale post-mortems) conducted on some of the whales have revealed some details, such as plastic fish netting being found in the stomach.

Nicola Hodgins, the head of science and research with the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Center, believes such speculation and thirst for answers can be pointless.

“Until we get clear results from the autopsies being carried out, it is all just speculation,” she told GlobalPost. “The reality is that there could be numerous reasons these whales ended up where they did.”

Weighing 35 to 45 tons, the whales are an awe-inspiring sight. Yet beyond the large crowds and strange selfies being taken, seeing the beached creatures dying can also be a harrowing experience. Once on land they are hard to move and euthanizing them is not easy. Many of the North Sea whales were removed to a landfill to avoid the carcasses becoming toxic.

Beached whales are far from a rare sight. Scientists and officials have recorded mass strandings of sperm whales before in the North Sea. In 1996, 27 were found.

Nevertheless, the recent spate is the largest such recorded event of its kind for Germany and the UK in terms of numbers. With a global population estimated to be in excess of 200,000 individuals, there is little reason to be concerned for the immediate status of the species.

For scientists and whale experts, however, it is often hard to gauge the real impact as they come late to the game — only seeing the whales once they’re on the beach. Whereas monitoring the great creatures is relatively easy in coastal areas around, say, Mexico or India, it is a far different proposition tracking them in the deep Atlantic.

“They are deep-diving whales who hunt squid at depths around 1,000-1,500 meters [about 3,300-5,000 feet] … They also do this during the cold winter months, when light is scarce in the north, the ocean is rough and weather conditions can be challenging,” Reckendorf said.

One thing is certain: Large numbers of whales beaching at the same time is very likely to occur again in the coming decades. It is the frequency of such events that may help inform experts on the deeper effects the climate and humans may be having.

“I guess one thing we can learn is that human behavior does have an impact,” Hodgins said. “It also shows we know very little about some of the animals we share the planet with.”