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Going to the dogs ...

Heart vs. Head

Call me hard hearted, but I am increasingly annoyed by those using emotional images and sounds to get me to do or not do something. Many, many years ago when I was riding the New York  subway, we riders were confronted by a crying baby. I saw myself and others getting increasingly agitated and tried to understand why. I concluded that this angst has been built into our genes from a long time past. When humans were clans living in caves, children were the future of the clan .... meaning it was to every one's long-term survival interest to be concerned if a child was distressed ... so the whole clan responded.

This tropism is clearly used by opinion shapers in our current media. Today I saw a political ad against Trump's immigration policies which included message text and no sound but a crying baby. In the above context, this sappy appeal didn't get my sympathy, it only pissed me off. Just as other heart-strung strumming ads that show shivering (in the winter) or sweltering (in the summer) dogs ... asking for ASPCA donations ... or "starving" holocaust survivors ...  or crippled children ... or etc. piss me off  ... not that these sufferings don't exist ... . but that they are being exploited for gain to others than these sufferers. (The ASPCA had to put that dog out in the freezing cold in order to get it to shiver.)

I guess Democrats really are a party of the heart and Republicans, of the head. All I ask from the phony lefties  and charities is to stop using emotional images and sounds to  get what they want. Appeal to my logic for a change. It is clearly less exploitative.

Headlines

These headlines are real ... they have all been discovered on Internet news sites.

[South Carolina] School bans American flag from football games

Colin Kaepernick's Mom trashes him on Twitter

Mark Cuban: It wasn't Hillary's fault her server wasn't set up right

Study: Dogs know what you are saying

Barbara Streisand says she will move to Australia if Trump becomes president

MIKA: Mental health professionals should take a look at Trump

Soros funded DA arrested on six counts of helping criminals

Obama to bypass Senate, ratify 'climate' accord himself

Apple Sauced: Apple ordered to pay $15B in EU tax

[Bill] Clinton: Give Detroit jobs to Syrian refugees

Leaked memo reveals Soros plan for federally controlled police

State finds 30 deleted Clinton e-mails on Benghazi

Ser-vice Animals

Like, it seems, almost everything else in this country, a good idea is being turned into another air-conditioned corner of hell.  Today’s case in point is service animals … animals that are necessary to aid physically or mentally handicapped individuals … super seeing-eye dogs if you will. Guidelines for same (see: NMEDA Story) are ignored and Chiwawa dogs have suddenly become indispensable for many a dowager’s mental well being.

More and more what was a reasonable solution for various handicaps is corrupted so that it loses all meaning and becomes just another way around sane social norms. As we have seen, handicapped parking has been abused to the point of insanity … now service-animal special permits are being handed out like Wendell Willkie buttons so that any valid use becomes immediately suspect.

Animals of all sorts … dogs, monkeys, ferrets, pigs, and even snakes are given this suspect designations by doctors and vets out for the quick buck … see: NCHPAD Article. Shame on the abusers ... for, as a result, it will not be too many years before legitimate use of this privilege will be lost. For a recent examples of this abuse see: Powerline Blog.

I predict that it won’t be too long before we start to see humans showing up as service animals … remember Barney Frank on a leash?

Poop Science

Here is a “scientific” study that doesn’t pass the smell test.  It seems that twelve researchers at the Czech University of Life Science have determined that dogs generally prefer to defecate and urinate with a North-South orientation … see: CBS Story.  This seemed to me like junk science so, like any good critic I then went to the actual study itself.  If you want to be bored with pages upon pages of arm-waving statistical gobble-de-gook read: Frontiers in Zoology.

As a result of my reading, this seems a perfectly senseless scatological study … particularly since many observations of how dogs did their business were discarded because the earth was not in a “quiet” magnetic field (MF) period. OK, I had never heard of quiet MFs so I Goggled this term and found a study by the British Geological Survey that quantified the magnitude of polar shift that occurs apparently on a daily basis … go to Geomag Article to peruse this study yourself.

From this research I found that clearly these variations are de minimis (a little over 1/10^th of a degree).  Can any animal sense such a tiny variation in our magnetic flux?  I doubt it.  One has to wonder therefore if these rejected Czech study observations were also those in which these tested dogs pooped facing the wrong way … and if these rejected observations, if included, might invalidate this study’s specious conclusions.  (And does this process not begin to resemble how the “climate scientists” at East Anglia University in England dealt with any discrediting data on global warming?)

Therefore, to conclude this matter of dog pooping orientation, let me rightfully quote Hillary Clinton, “After all what difference does it make?”