Pigeons and Republicans

It turns out that pigeons (Columba livia) can rank items by numbers; they recognize, for example, that three is larger than two.

On the evidence, this makes them brighter than House Republicans.

The First American Environmentalist

WC was brought to believe that Henry David Thoreau, under-bathed proto-hippy and general rabble rouser, was America’s first environmentalist, with Ralph Waldo Emerson in a supporting role. WC was taught wrong.

Teabaggers, presumably, will be appalled to learn that the man who on May 12, 1818 said:

[W]e can scarcely be warranted in supposing that all the productive powers of its surface can be made subservient to the use of man, in exclusion of all the plants and animals not entering into his stock of subsistence; that all the elements and combinations of elements in the earth, the atmosphere, and the water, which now support such various and such numerous descriptions of created beings, animate and inanimate, could be withdrawn from that general destination, and appropriated to the exclusive support and increase of the human part of the creation; so that the whole habitable earth should be as full of people as the spots most crowded now are or might be made, and as destitute as those spots of the plants and animals not used by man. 

turns out to be the Father of the U.S. Constitution, co-author of the Federalist Papers and Father of the Bill of Rights, James Madison. You don’t get much more Founding Father than that.

Heh. WC can hear the screeches of outrage already.

But it’s true. Speaking to the Agricultural Society of Albemarle, Virginia in 1818, about a year after the end of his second term as president, Madison sounded an awful lot like David Brower, founder of the Sierra Club.

So, Teabaggers, in your reverence, your near-worship of the early leaders of our country, do you agree with Madison? Do you agree that, say, the Endangered Species Act has its roots in the thinking of the guy who wrote the Constitution?

WC awaits your response.