Posts Made By: Ron Zick

I thought bats navigated by echoed chirps, "sonar". I understand the concern mover the bird kills but a single bat death?

I suspect that this single bat might have been a Darwin award winner. I remember when I was a kid there was a big issue over the construction of microwave towers and the deaths of thousands of migrating barn swallows. Seems that the whole problem was rather blown out of proportion and so far I don't have a shortage of barn swallows at our farm in the summer.

I'm for adequate impact studies but some of these bureaucrats need to get a real life.

Jim,

Not to be an I told you so, but here is a post I made in Feb. 2011 when Mubarak was on the verge of stepping down :


I'm starting to see a replay of the Carter-Iran situation. Not to imply that I want to be an interventionist, but we are allowing a power vacuum to be created without any real governmental solution in the wings. Islamic governments have had a long history in oscillating between anarchy and totalitarianism and at very sudden speeds. Even though the Egyptian military is pro-western leaning, no one knows how loyal and for how long the current situation will stay as it is.

Unless there is some sort of intervention by an outsider, I see the formation of an Islamic theocracy as a given. I'm afraid the Egyptian people are trading one dictator for a worse one.

Mubarak was a dictator but he did not have the worst human rights record of the Middle East. It appears from the news feeds that the underlying issue has been economic in nature. No matter who takes up the reigns, economic issues are very difficult to fix and take a significant passage of time to see any appreciable progress. This in itself creates a revolutionary environment in which citizens are requested and often willing to "make sacrifices" for the home land i.e. give up freedoms.

What I see as our real problem is that we as a culture are totally clueless about the regions worldview and how we need to interact with them. I'm afraid that this is only the beginning of what is about to unfold and it is not good.

Jim,
The charts are misleading, there is a disconnect in the data. Red states and counties have a strong correlation with property ownership, especially large tracts of land. i.e. farms and ranches.

In the Midwest, dairy farmers have a strong tendency towards leaning blue because of the dairy subsidies. Wisconsin is interesting in that counties that were once strong blue have become red after the cows have left.

Large employers such as Caterpillar in Ill which are unionized strongly shift counties that the plants are in to the blue.

University towns also strongly tend to the blue.

Large population centers and where the size of land tract owned is small, strongly tend to vote blue.

If you would overlay the congressional districts with some of the demographic characteristics I just mentioned, you would see a correlation between congressman that deliver the goods to their constituents, what ever the flavor, red or blue.

So in conclusion you can have a predominately red state that has a congressional district that gets an abnormal amount of blue pork. i.e. lots of federal funds. Same thing happens in reverse. The real dividing lines are the congressional districts and who the particular congress person is.