Synonyms: correct, right
California jays have headed my personal life list of the birds I hate, for decades. I am willing to include the Eastern jays in the same category. Thus far I have had no particular sour experience with Steller�s jays, but they are on probation.
Of course it is a fallacy to attribute human motives to another living creature. Jane Goodall spent more time than anyone ever has, in observing chimpanzees at a game preserve in East Africa. She fell into the same error, actually to the great annoyance of the serious primatologists and anthropologists. She had been a secretary to Lewis Leakey during his excavations in Olduvai Gorge. She was lettered only to the high school level, and had no college work, and nothing at all in the way of natural history studies. Therefore, she described chimpanzee�s behavior in human terms: hate, murder, etc. I think with time she mellowed, and she was given an honorary doctorate in recognition of some thirty years of watching those critters while they were watching her.
A phrase that comes to mind from freshman philosophy back at UC Santa Barbara, was �pathetic fallacy:� the attribution of human qualities to non-human or even non-living things. Surely it should apply to jays. It is not enough to defend them as the bird worshipers do, saying it is their nature, so it is no more evil for them to slaughter the helpless hatchling than it is for a cow to eat grass. However, they are evil. They are the only bird or animal of which I am aware that literally �skulks.� They can be seen with their shoulders hunched, their heads down, looking wickedly suspicious as they flit slowly in the lower branches from tree to tree seeking victims for their next crime.
Your experience with the jays attacking birdhouses was shared by my cousin when she was a little girl, about age six. My uncle had hung a wren house in the lower branches of a tree, perhaps seven feet from the ground. There were two eggs and when they hatched, they were visited by a jay. While my cousin jumped up and down beneath the wren house, waving her arms and screaming at it, the jay coolly killed and ate both hatchlings, while the mother wren fluttered helplessly about. That started my uncle on a jay-recycling program. His implement of choice was a .410 shotgun.
After we moved to our present house in Redding the jay population in the vicinity far exceeded any practical need, so I commissioned my sons with a $1.00 bounty for each jay brought to bag with a .410. It became too expensive after 24 or 25 jays, so I reduced the bounty to 25 cents, but the numbers continued to rise. I was sharing this anecdote with guests at a table at a fund raiser back then (which in my dim memory was for the Democratic party) and a Justice Court judge across the table from me said that �You had better not let me hear you say that. I just fined a man $50.00 for killing a blue jay.� I was appalled. To protect jays is as logical as protecting a tuberculosis bacillus or the AIDS virus.
There are those woolly headed sentimentalists who speak of the great web of life, where all creatures are interrelated, and I have seen the phrase emblazoned on tee shirts �All life is sacred.� I approached one such in the mall one day, and with a cheerful expression I asked amiably if they really meant that tuberculosis and malarial organisms lives should be preserved, or what about bubonic plague infected rats? There was no answer.
The kids have now grown and gone. I still have the .410 shotgun in the garage, but the current prudent choice is a Sheridan air rifle, with a 4 power scope. It is accurate enough to shoot one inch groups at 30 yards. It attracts less adverse attention than would the shotgun. In conclusion, you mentioned in your column that you might finally resort to the same thing, but don�t let an officer of the law hear you say that. You just might be fined $50.00, or rather by now I suspect inflation has increased the fine to $200.00
Best Regards,
FMB
June 2004
For 5,000 years of recorded human history and 200 years of American history, marriage has meant a religious or civil legally sanctioned ceremony, representing a bonding of a male and female, with certain benefits to society at large as well as to the participants. It was not until 1973 that a seven-member panel of American Psychiatric Association officers, four of whom were homosexuals, voted to remove that diagnosis from the list of personality disorders. Essentially, they declared it to be just another normal �orientation�.
At one stroke, the APA redefined the male rectum to be a genital organ for sexual pleasure, in a structure whose anatomical and physiological function is the temporary storage and evacuation of digestive wastes.
As part of the ongoing cultural revolution, which began in the 1960s with the rejection of long held mores, the acceptance of homosexual activity as wholesome has been promoted throughout our society. Anyone who raises a question about it will be instantly branded �homophobe�.
Many homosexuals may indeed be fine people, worthy in many way, may provide good parenting to children, and make other contributions to society. The may do whatever they wish in private, and are at liberty to declare publicly their commitment to each other, but it does not alter the basic anatomic and physiological facts.
They may acquire all the legal rights that they presently seek, hospital visitation, rights of survivorship, and the like without being in a state-sanctioned marriage. It is paradoxical that as heterosexual couples are increasingly abandoning formal marriage and cohabiting in unconventional relationships, the homosexual community is continually striving to gain �marriage� rights, to further its own agenda: approval and acceptance.
The citizens of California in Proposition 22 voted overwhelmingly to define marriage as a legally recognized relationship between a man and a woman. I believe it should remain that way.
Liberal judges view laws and constitutions as infinitely elastic, to be stretched or twisted to suit the whim of the moment. If judges, by fiat, redefine marriage to include same sex couples, what is to prevent any other citizen, in the name of equality, from claiming similar rights to marital benefits regardless of any sexual variation: single, polygamous, incestuous, pedophile, group, bestial, or necrophile. Is not the right to marry, hetero or homo, all about fairness?
February 2004
Like deity, the ways of the Supreme Court are sometimes inscrutable. Its decision prohibiting capital punishment of convicted murders of low intelligence has provided the means to empty death rows across the land.
These convicts are not the mentally ill (who have lost contact with reality), they are simply dumb, even though they are smart enough to plan a murder, commit it, then attempt to conceal the evidence.
After years of reviewing data on intelligence testing and its correlation with heredity, social position, achievement and behavior, the scholars Herrnstein and Murray in 1994 published their findings in the book �The Bell Curve�. The result was a firestorm from the academic left, outraged at the violation of their egalitarian dogma: All humans are the same except for the damage done to them by an oppressive society.
Criticisms were that there was no such entity as intelligence, that it could not be tested, that any differences revealed on IQ tests were solely the result of cultural bias, and finally the ad hominem charge that the authors were just neo-Nazis anyway.
The same leftists who denied the possibility of intelligence testing now enthusiastically applaud the court�s decision that low IQ exempts murderers from capital punishment.
Samuel Johnson trenchantly observed that �when a man knows he is to be hanged, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.� Is there a murderer (coached by a defense attorney) who isn�t smart enough to avoid giving good answers on a court-ordered subjective IQ test, when achieving a high score means execution
July 2002
