herbivores and carnivores

Another good day of hearings yesterday, the noose tightened up on his fat neck, the chair placed just so that it will easily topple with a quick kick.  But really did anybody think that he didn't hold up the delivery of those weapons to the Ukrainians for an investigation of his political enemies?  Maybe not in the legal sense of guilty beyond a reasonable doubt but in the less stringent, more practical sense of if you had to bet where would you put your money?  I think most of the reps would gladly just go with yeah he did it, and it was wrong, but not all that wrong and it doesn't deserve impeachment, but the prez won't let them because that would deny that everything he does is perfect so they are just basically making a very unconvincing case and mostly just talking about other stuff.  At this point I am a little worried about our charge into the valley of death.


I got distracted in my original sin discussion by the thought of scavengers vs animals of prey,  It seems likely to me that they go back and forth, that animals of prey have scavengers in their family tree and scavengers have animals of prey, maybe an interesting topic of another day.

Meanwhile on the surface of that sunny sea the first animals of prey are feasting on their fellows, well not their fellows anymore since they have become animals and that leaves their more peaceful fellows to be plants.  Eating plants is no big deal.  But in becoming animals they have changed their body chemistry, once they digest those plants they have to convert their proteins into animal proteins and that is a bit of work, but say that fellow next to them eating the plant cells, why he is just chock full of the right chemicals, why not eat him? Why not indeed, and maybe here is the original sin, when an animal eats another animal, because as I said eating plants is never a big deal.

Mother Nature, sometimes called The Great Spirit, is just a slip of a girl at this point, giving some animals faster cilia so that they can escape the predators, but when the enhanced cilia animal turns around she is giving the predator more powerful mouth parts to grab him with. 

It's kind of strange the way some animals are carnivores and herbivores, oh there is some cross over but mostly animals are one or the other.  As I said earlier we are the only apes that eat meat (chimps nibble a bit, but it's not a mainstay of their diet) and we became the big brained folk we are today by eating meat, and those big brains enabled us to think well maybe it is wrong to kill, and at this point God enters the stage and more about that later.


Meanwhile in the present day, I don't feel much kinship with artists of yore, I don't imagine Michelangelo painting that ceiling when I am painting, well I am painting alleys now.  A closer analogy would be tending my garden, but I have to say that this does not remind me of Og and Grog poking holes in the earth to drop seeds into.  I don't feel much of an urge to be at one with my ancestors.  Not that there is anything wrong with that, just not something I do.