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Thursday, July 7, 2016

Of Felonies and Frigate Birds

Since everyone with a computer or a phone is talking about the FBI's inscrutable decision to not recommend indictment for Hillary Clinton, I thought I'd talk about something else instead.

That is, after I say this about that: It's mystifying how FBI Director James Comey could meticulously enumerate a lengthy list of laws violated by Ms Clinton and then deliver himself of the complete non-sequitur that the agency has decided there's no crime being committed because they can't prove Ms Clinton intended to break the law. Yet as numerous experts have pointed out intent isn't even necessary for the law to be broken. It's not even mentioned in the relevant statute.

Even Comey's good friends are saying that the case he made at the recent press conference is utterly nonsensical.

Comey implied at that presser that what Ms. Clinton did with her email server could result in her having her security clearance yanked. But she's running for president of the United States, for heaven's sake. How can someone who shouldn't have a security clearance to review classified information get nominated to run for president? What sort of people are they who'll continue to support her candidacy after this?

As a friend of mine suggested on his Facebook page, her campaign should change their slogan from "I'm with Her" to "I'm with Careless."

When the people are apathetic or morally indifferent the government inevitably becomes corrupt, and when government is corrupt the corruption spreads like a metastasizing cancer to every agency in it, even one as supposedly competent and honest as the FBI.

Anyway, I don't want to give readers rhetorical whiplash, but I actually wanted to talk in this post about frigate birds. These magnificent creatures (The species found in the western hemisphere is even named the magnificent frigate bird) are extraordinary fliers. They're seabirds which, unlike any other bird, can remain aloft for months without ever touching down on land or sea. They sleep in snatches of two to twelve minutes while soaring the on motionless outstretched wings. Their long wings and deeply forked tails give them a majestic appearance as they soar at great altitudes, as high as 13,000 feet, on the thermal updrafts along the coast.

Biologists have been studying a species of these birds off the coast of Madagascar, and have put together a short film that highlights some of the unique capabilities of these birds. I thought I'd like to share it with you:

I've had the experience of watching magnificent frigate birds, which are larger and more graceful than the Madagascar species, in Florida and Central America and watching them soar so effortlessly is like watching the law of gravity being flouted.

Sort of like watching the laws of our nation be so effortlessly flouted by the Clintons and their cronies, now that I think of it.