Nature is a Mother

Both coyotes and wolves are social animals, and generally monogamous. Coyote pairs mate for life, and raise their pups together, so any groups you see are usually immediate family members. They sometimes form temporary hunting packs with unrelated coyotes, usually in the winter when food is scarce and they need to cooperate to bring down larger game. They breed once a year in late winter or early spring, and the old crop of pups will disperse before the new crop is born, so the current family group only consists of two generations.

The social structure of wolf packs are different. Their packs consist of an alpha male and an alpha female, and several generations of their pups, along with some outsiders that managed to work their way into the pecking order. Usually the alphas are the only ones breeding, but sometimes a subordinate pair may breed. All the wolves in the pack contribute to the effort of feeding the pups and, when food is scarce, the alpha pair's pups get fed first. The iconic lone wolf is usually a former alpha that has been overthrown and will not accept a subordinate position, or it may be the sole survivor of a pack that has been exterminated. The old alpha doesn't usually last very long, and the sole survivor will join another pack if he can find one that will accept him.

The reason that housecats bring home live prey is to teach their kittens how to hunt. Cats without kittens may be sharing their prey with you, dead or alive, to show how much they love you. Then again, they may be just fooling around with a predatory instinct, the true purpose of which has been lost somewhere in the ancestral gene pool.

Nature is not cruel, and Nature is not kind, at least not the way humans are. Nature is a pragmatic businesswoman, if something works it's good, if not it's just useless. One day, when I was visiting with my daughter as she peddled her wares at an arts and crafts show, it started raining really hard. Her goods were pretty weatherproof, but the guy in the next booth had some fragile stuff, so we went over and helped him get it all under cover. He complained that this was the third show in a row he had been rained out, and asked us why God hated him. Quoting Jesus, I said "God causes the rain to fall on the just and the unjust alike." My daughter, who is a practicing Pagan, replied "Yes, She certainly does, doesn't She!" The guy told us that he didn't know much about religion, but he always had thought that God was a male. I explained to him that, in many pre-Christian cultures, the principal deity was indeed female, and that the concept is still preserved in the way we talk about Mother Earth or Mother Nature. He said, "Well, I'm not sure that I know what you're talking about, but one thing's for sure, you've got the 'Mother' part right!"

I know you wanted to talk about the recent Fort Hood shooting, but I only heard a little bit about it on the news, and I'm not familiar with the details. As far as I know, it's just another random act of insanity like you said. Sure it would have helped if somebody besides the shooter had been armed, but, even on a military post, people don't commonly walk around with a loaded gun unless they have a specific reason to do so. Sure it could have been prevented if the shooter had been unable to obtain guns and ammo, but the vast majority of gun owners never do anything like that in their lifetimes, so why should they be punished for the actions a few crazy people?

mother nature

I don’t know how well scientists can tell bodies of different ‘races’ apart. I think there is still some controversies about where some ancient Americans come from, and like you said more and more of us are getting mixed, so it will be even harder in the future and just be generally less used as we progress into the future.

Aren’t coyotes loners like cats, except for lions? Are wolf packs like elephants with the pack consisting of females and kids and the males wandering off in their lone cowboy way?

Coyotes are somewhat common in Chicago. There was one that wandered into a downtown convenience store a few years ago, although that did create quite a stir. Since we assume that they are eating rats as well as garbage, people are generally favorable to them. What was shocking was when a full grown cougar showed up in a northside neighborhood not unlike our Gage Park neighborhood, but more dense, a couple years ago. Unfortunately they had to kill it. Damn, it looked so noble lying in that alley.

Ah, the noble lions, I used to watch them on the nature channels. My cats got mad at me because I was always rooting for the wildebeests to get away.

I have had some critter killing cats in my day. Back in my hippie days my first cat must’ve learned hunting from her mom. We all lived in this big house and she kept her first litter of kittens in my room, and one day we were all sitting there smoking dope, and in comes Mama with a bird in her mouth. Well she immediately got into that catch, let free, catch, let free torture thing and encouraged her kittens to join in.

We just stared. The joint must have burnt somebody’s fingers. Do we do the humanitarian thing and free the bird? Do we let nature take its course and watch the bird die an agonizing death? It was all too heavy Man, we just walked out without a word and reformed our circle in another room, and didn’t speak of it.

The cat before these two, Annie, caught a few birds on the balcony. I was able to rescue all but one, and that one I buried in one of my pots and surely its body went into the tomatoes, so you see even up here where people live stacked on top of each other and there is hardly a tree to be seen, the great spirit still rules.

Mother nature is probably our white peoples’ version of the great spirit. You generally see her wandering through flowery grasses with cartoon birdies buzzing around her, and all the bigger animals watching her adoringly. And look here she is fiddling with the legs of the deer so that they can run faster, and all the deer smile until they look over and see that she is also sharpening the teeth of the wolves, and maybe buying Beagles a better rifle.

I did watch a Great Barrier Reef show lately. You have to admit the sea is full of colorful incredible animals and here they are popping in and out of their holes to the tune of comical music and you are thinking, my isn’t this delightful, but then you realize everybody is eating everybody else, and then when just a few of the bigger and stronger critters are left, here come the sharks. Holy shit. Life on land is the same battle, but a lower slower, a little more genteel. If it were WW II, the battle on land would be the western front, and the battle in the sea would be the eastern front.

You know we humans have our faults, greed, cruelty for the hell of it, mass murder, hypocrisy, deceit, etc etc. But when it comes to sheer 24/7 unending barbarity, you can’t beat mother nature.

Science, Theory, and Myth

My understanding of the assertion that there was really no such thing as race is that it's supposed to be based on science, that there is no real biological difference between the races. Like a lot of stories, there is probably some truth in it, but not as much as some people think. If you skin out a Black guy and a White guy, and lay the carcasses side by side, I suppose the casual observer could not tell which was which. I would think, though, that a doctor or scientist could tell from their DNA or something, but maybe I'm wrong. I seem to remember reading something about bone structure differences, but it was a long time ago and I don't remember the details. Be that as it may, we don't commonly see people with their skin off, and there certainly are observable racial differences between live people. Of course, there is no such thing as a pure race anymore, most people have traces of this and that in them, whether they know it or not. Still, even a half breed like President Obama looks decidedly different from any previous U.S. president. How can anybody say there is no difference?

That coy-dog story has been around the Midwest since we were kids, and there is probably some truth to that one too. A domestic dog would not have to live with the coyotes and be socially accepted by them in order to get his genes into the pool. He wouldn't have to compete with them for food either. All he'd have to do is go on the prowl one night, come home in the morning, and curl up by the fire after eating the food that his humans provided for him. His lady friend would raise the pups as coyotes and, assuming that their dad was a big dog, they would be bigger than the average coyotes, which wouldn't hurt them a bit in the coyote pecking order. Of course, just because something could happen doesn't mean that it did happen.

Wolves have been in the news around here ever since a local trapper accidently caught one in a coyote trap a few years back. Since then, the DNR has caught at least one in a live trap, tagged it and released it. They said it was a youngster, which would seem to indicate that they are living and reproducing in our area and not just passing through on their way to somewhere else. Anyway, they said it was a true wolf, and not a wolf-dog hybrid, which means there must be some reliable way to tell the difference. If they can identify a wolf-dog hybrid and a wolf-coyote hybrid, they must be able to identify a coyote-dog hybrid. Have you heard of anybody doing that in your area?

Isle Royale is a really big island in Lake Superior. It's closer to Canada than it is to the U.S., and it is believed that the first wolves in modern times got there by crossing from Canada when the lake was frozen over. I don't think they have any deer there, but they do have Moose. When the wolves first started showing up, the park rangers were killing them to protect the moose. At some point it was decided to just let nature take its course and see what happened. You see, there are not many places in the East that are isolated like that with so little human activity, so it's a good place to study how Nature works without human interference. The moose and wolf populations have ebbed and flowed over the years but, for the most part, they have maintained a sustainable balance. Right now the wolves are at a low ebb and the moose are starting to eat themselves out of house and home, so there has been talk of bringing in more wolves. Last I heard, the humans were still keeping with their hands off policy. The past few winters have been mild and the lake ice has been scarce, but this year Lake Superior froze over hard as a rock. The U. S. and Canadian Coast Guards are having a hard time  breaking open the shipping channels as we speak, so maybe some new wolves have already crossed over on their own.

I remembered another case of animals that could be interbreeding but they don't because they hate each other. Lions, leopards, and cheetahs all share the same habitats in Africa. I don't know if there is an organized plot, but the bigger cats will kill any of the smaller cats that they can catch. Nobody messes with the lions except the other lions, and they frequently fight to the death over territory and females. According to National Geographic, more lions are killed by other lions than by any other cause.

Now that you mention it, I have heard of Turing and his test. I don't think artificial intelligence is that big of a deal anymore, they already have computers that think more rationally than a lot of people I know. The next big thing is artificial consciousness. Of course, you could program a computer to say it had consciousness, but how would you know if it was telling the truth? It's like that French guy said: "I think, therefore I am, but I'm not so sure about the rest of you guys."

nuts is nuts

Well I don’t know anymore if anybody uses those race boxes to determine anything, and certainly not to do anything for anybody who might be getting the short stick anymore. I guess the Hispanics might like it because they keep winning it, that is their numbers keep getting bigger, but how does that help Jose Sies Paqute? Hey did you know that if you individually translate six and pack you get what I wrote, but if you put both words in the little box, you get ‘six pack’. So I guess once they vastly outnumber us and put us in little reservations, they will still have to honor us on Gringo Day for giving them the six pack.

I have this friend in Indiana who rents a house on a farm and at night you can sit on the edge of the vast cornfield and hear howls from beyond that drives my friend’s little dog nuts. Coy dogs says the farmer, the mating of domestic dogs and coyotes, but I don’t buy it. First of all most domestic dogs are just too odd to live in the wild, secondly coyotes have honed their survival skills over millions of years, so how is a half-dog, half-coyote, going to compete with them?

But I did see that same tv show I think. I think it was grey(?) wolves who left that part of the country and coyotes moved in, and then the grey wolves moved back and started mating with the coyotes.

I don’t know anything about Isle Royale, do we need wolves there? I guess otherwise the deer get all spindly because they have eaten everything there is to eat. Well I guess it’s good that there are wolves howling at the moon out there even though I will never hear or see them. I don’t guess they really howl at the moon though, they just howl and sometimes the moon is out.

That was Alan Turing they gave the apology to. You didn’t ask, but I will tell you anyway about the Turing Test. It’s basically a test of artificial intelligence. There are two schools on artificial intelligence, one that having machines that talk like humans is just around the corner and the other that it will probably never happen. The Turing Test is where you go in a room with just a computer and talk to something from another room that may be a human on another computer, or just a computer, and if it turns out to be the computer and you can’t tell within five minutes than you can consider it to be intelligent.

I wasn’t all that surprised when the computers beat the chess masters, after all chess is just math, but when that robot did so well in Jeopardy I was impressed.

What about this guy who shot up Fort Hood? You guys say if everybody had been armed they would have shot him down like a dog after he had killed one or two. My people say if he hadn’t been able to load up on guns and ammo at Gunther’s Gun-O-Rama, he never would have shot anybody.

Well we can do that in our sleep can we not? But what I found interesting was they were interviewing some ‘expert,’ and he was saying we have to do more for our mideast vets, and then the reporter said the guy had never been to the mideast, and then the expert said, well we need more facilities to help all our vets, and the reporter said this guy was at a facility to help our vets, and the expert kind of mumbled, well we need more.

People have been going crazy forever, probably at the same rate today as way back when. Why do people act so surprised and shocked about it? Why do they claim to want answers? There are no answers. When one of these guys doesn’t shoot himself and they are able to question him, his answer is invariably something like, the sun was in his eyes, or somebody cancelled his favorite sitcom.  

"The Race is Not Always to the Swift"

I think Jesus said that, and I'm sure I'm quoting him out of context, but it makes for a catchy title.

I don't know if I'm in favor of abolishing the term "race" or not, but I don't think you can have it both ways. I don't see how you can use it to determine if everybody's getting their fair share and then turn around and claim that it doesn't mean anything. I'm not saying that we should keep race because animals are divided into breeds, I'm just saying that it seems to mean about the same thing. You have all these creatures that are of the same species, but they have genetic characteristics that can be used to distinguish one group from another. In the case of humans, they certainly should be all equal under the law, but to say that they are all indistinguishable from each other isn't quite honest. If there were no differences between them, there would be no need of laws saying that you can't treat them differently.

As far as animals of the same species that hate each other, wolves and coyotes immediately come to mind, although there are exceptions. For some time now, wolf-coyote hybrids have been turning up in the north eastern U.S. and south eastern Canada. I saw a TV show about it awhile back, and I didn't take notes, but I seem to remember it went something like this: Using DNA or something, wildlife biologists have traced this particular breed to one Canadian national park. Wolves have lived there since forever, but their population is cut off from other wolf populations that have survived farther west and north, so their genetic diversity is limited. Some decades ago, coyotes began to establish themselves in the park, as they have in many eastern locations where they never were originally. Perhaps because of the limited breeding opportunities enjoyed by the wolves, some of them began to fraternize with the coyotes, eventually establishing a hybrid breed that has now become so numerous that they can breed with each other and reproduce their own kind. In recent years these hybrids have expanded their range beyond the park boundaries, and are showing up in suburban areas all over the East. They have the coyotes' ability to adapt to all kinds of habitats and live among human populations without making too much of a nuisance of themselves, but they are larger than regular coyotes and thus more dangerous to humans. There has been at least one confirmed case of a pack of hybrids killing an adult human, which is something that  regular coyotes would never attempt.

Now that I think of it, wolves don't just kill coyotes, they also will fight to the death with other wolves from a different pack. There used to be three wolf packs on Isle Royale, a national park in Lake Superior until, some years ago, the two larger packs ganged up on the smallest pack and totally exterminated them. Last I heard, there was only one pack left on Isle Royale, and it was not doing too well. Biologists believe that they are suffering from a lack of genetic diversity, and have proposed bringing in some new wolves from the outside. This would be contrary to their long standing policy of non-intervention at the park, so they're not so sure they want to do it.

I have heard of Alan Turing, but I don't remember the part about him being gay, unless he was that British guy that was in the news awhile back. The story sounds similar, so maybe that was him. After all these years, the British government issued some kind of formal apology about it, which is why it was in the news. I do remember reading a biography of Jack London that told of some comments he once made to some friends of his. He didn't actually admit that he did anything like that, but people didn't brag about stuff like that in those days. London had been in prison once, and had spent some time at sea in his younger days. Based on this experience, he said that homosexuality was more common than one might think. He said that human sexuality was a powerful force and, if it couldn't find one way to express itself, it would surely find another. So yeah, I suppose this stuff has been around since forever, but that still doesn't mean I have to vote for it.

stuff I don't understand

I agree with you. Race doesn’t have any solid meaning, like species does, it’s a word different people use in different way. After writing my last entry I was looking through my turn of the century geography book, and they had the three main ‘races’, and then there were those indeterminate races in the Australian area. The way they used the term seems like they meant in the way of species, but surely they knew that we could all interbreed. I think maybe we would all be better off if we just abandoned the term.

Though it’s still used in the census and it seems like every application you fill out has that section. It is the sort of thing we liberals seem to like, so that we can make sure things are shared equally between the various ‘races,’ but mostly I think it is pretty meaningless, and probably something we would be better off without.

But did I read you correctly where you want to keep this categories because people who breed dogs and livestock, use similar descriptive terms? I suppose if we bred people to have certain characteristics we might use terms on them, but we don’t, so I don’t see much practical use in taking the term race seriously.

Is there a case where a species was divided into two groups and later they were brought back together and each side tried to extinguish the other? I have never heard of such a thing.

I think there are several conditions that have a genetic predisposition, alcoholism, homosexuality, schizophrenia, probably some others, but mostly it’s a tenuous thing, like if your twin brother has it, you have a ten percent better chance of getting it then if he wasn’t. But it’s a weak link, and they have never been able to pin it down to a particular set of genes so I don’t know how much it means.

There is that weird thing where men go into prison, or into the navy, have sex with other guys for the first time in their lives and continue to do that until they get out and then they go back to being straight. Then of course there were the Greeks and the Zulus, and probably some other people who have this warrior culture where the rules are that you get buggered as a boy and as a man you get to bugger. But despite all that buggering they all have wives and children. And I don’t know if you’ve heard about this down low thing, where perfectly straight guys go on the down low where they go to certain locations where similar guys go and have sex with each other and bring their vd or aids back to their wives. I’ve read it goes on, but I don’t understand it.

Some people say that instead of having this thing where you are either gay or straight, there is this sort of continuum where you are maybe 100 percent gay, or maybe 45 percent, or maybe 0 percent gay in which case you are 100 percent straight. I don’t know.

Have you heard about Alan Turing? He was a brilliant scientist/mathematician, cracked the German enigma code that helped us defeat the Krauts and did a lot of work on computers, invented the famous Turing test. But he was gay, and back in that day it was completely frowned on, and even though he had helped win the war and done all this brilliant work, when he was caught in an affair with another man he was in deep do do. They made him take female hormones (chemical castration) to stay out of prison, and in 1954 he committed suicide probably because of that. And this was all the law, they probably thought they were doing him some kind of favor, maybe he even thought they were doing him a favor, and now it sounds so primitive, barbaric, and yet it was only sixty years ago.

A Different Breed of Cat

I have heard that the current politically correct theory about race is that there really is no such a thing, but I'm not sure what is meant by that. Of course people refer to the "human race", but that's just a figure of speech. Technically, there is no human race, there is a human species. Traditionally, what defines a species is that all its members can interbreed and produce offspring. Also traditionally, a race of humans is like a breed of dogs. A collie and a beagle can interbreed and produce offspring, so they are of the same species. The pups may or may not resemble either the father or the mother, but they will be dogs nevertheless.

Why they call collies and beagles two different breeds is because they are different both in appearance and behavioral characteristics. These differences are the result of selective breeding which, in the case of dogs, was done deliberately with the intention of isolating certain characteristics so that they may be predictably reproduced. With wild animals and humans, the selective breeding generally occurs naturally, which is why it's called "natural selection". Natural selection is more or less random, but geographic isolation of a population limits the number of random genetic combinations available, and so tends to produce populations of the same species that have different characteristics. If these distinct populations are then brought together and allowed to intermingle, they will, after multiple generations, tend resemble each other to the point that they become indistinguishable. That is, unless they hate each other, in which case they will avoid interbreeding and may even attempt to exterminate each other. It seems to me that, to deny the reality of different races in the human species would be the same as denying the reality of different breeds of pets and livestock. Am I missing something here?

I think it has been established that some people seem to have a genetic predisposition for alcoholism. Of course environmental influences also factor into it, but some people metabolize alcohol differently that others, which makes them more vulnerable to becoming alcoholics. I don't know if that qualifies alcoholism as a disease or not, I suppose it depends on how you define "disease". Now being predisposed to something doesn't necessarily mean you have to do it, but it means you would be well advised to watch out so that it doesn't sneak up and bite you in the ass when you're not paying attention.

I'm not sure how all this applies to homosexuality, but I suspect it's the same only different. If it's not something that a person deliberately chooses to do, if they are indeed "born that way", then it seems likely that there is a genetic component to it. Like with alcoholism, it may only be a predisposition, and may also be influenced by environmental factors. Like, say a seemingly straight guy goes to prison for 20 years, and there he becomes accustomed to homosexual activity. When he gets out of prison, he may continue being gay, or he may go back to being straight, or he may swing both ways.  Does this mean that his prison experience made him gay, does it mean that he always was gay and didn't know it, or does it mean that he never really was gay and just went along with it in prison because it was the only sexual option available to him?

Remember that gay friend of my parents that I told you about? Well, the way he got exposed was that one of his apprentices was drafted into the army. When he was filling out the paperwork, there was a question asking him if he ever had a homosexual experience, and he said "yes". This must have triggered an alarm of some sorts because the guy was called into an office and interviewed by somebody, I'm assuming a doctor but I don't know that for a fact. After some questioning, it was determined that the guy was not really a homosexual, and he was admitted into the army. In the process, the doctor, or whoever, explained to the guy that homosexuality was not "the purest form of love", as he had been previously led to believe. When the guy went home on leave, he angrily blew the whistle on the whole operation. Since everybody involved except the leader was a teenager, it would seem that he should have been prosecuted for child abuse or something, but nobody pressed charges. I suppose they all wanted to sweep it under the rug and forget about it because that's what people did about things like that in those days. I'm not sure how the army doctor determined that this guy was not really a homosexual. I mean he also had a girl friend, but so did most of the others involved, and the leader was married with children. The quote about "the purest form of love" reminds me of what you said about those Greeks, and this leader was a schoolteacher so he would have known about that.

"Greek love is a pain in the ass!" - Woody Ellis