Froggie went a-courtin'

Cascades Frog. Phil spotted him on the trail the other day. I stopped to take a pic, but Phil was in a better position, so he got this one. Amphibian population are in sharp decline all over the world, so I always get excited when I see one in the wild. I was never the frog-catching kind of kid, but I liked watching them whenever I was near a pond, creek or river, and now they're increasingly hard to find. Not too long ago, apparently, the tree frog population in this area was as loud on summer nights as the cicadas are in the midwest, but we've been here two years now and I have yet to hear one.

McCain on health care: Go to the doctor. Never mind how to pay for it, right Senator?

Orang-utans on health care: Do it yourself. Raises one of my favorite unanswered questions: How do we know what plants are good for us, and how to use them? Or maybe, "how did we know, in the first place?" If these orangs found this plant by trial and error, then that says a LOT about their ability to observe and reason (and that's pretty damn significant). If we found it first that way, and they found it by observing us using it, then we have even more questions: how did the humans know about the plant in the first place? How did the very reclusive and solitary orangs observe them? How did the orangs know that the humans were treating pain? And if the orangs knew that the humans were treating pain, then that implies that the orangs enjoy the knowledge that other things are sentient as well. And Established Science doesn't really accept that possibility, at this point. In other words: if the easy answer is right, then we have to answer the even-harder questions.

This tells me, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that we humans are not the only sentient critters on the planet. The only significant difference between us and anything else, is procedural: at a molecular level, we're all the same. The differences only appear as a result of following different instructions from the same DNA.

Me on health care: If my neighbor is sick with something contagious, then I am at risk too, no matter how good my doctor is. In a sense: if one of us is sick, we are all sick. The public health is as much an element of the Public Good as a police force, fire department, and usable roads. Medicare for all is essential.

Healthy individuals make a healthy society.