It’s the Bluejay Crisis of 2009. Day 1.

We’ve known for several weeks that we had a pair of nesting bluejays in the back yard. As of today, however, any person (or dog) that ventured out the back door was subjected to screechy dive bombing about the head and shoulders.

Eventually, we deduced the cause for this anti-social behavior. One of their adolescent babies had fallen out of the nest and was hopping around on our back porch.This bird is about 1/2 to 2/3 the size of the adults, is old enough to have all the color and markings of a jay, but not quite old enough to fly.

It’s difficult to determine at this point who is more agitated and distressed about the situation–the mama bird or Mrs. Blather.

Being a clueless male, I felt it my responsibility to point out to the women of the house that nearly 100% of birds that fall out of the nest don’t survive. I think this helped everyone.

My bride sent me out to rescue the helpless creature. Shrieking streaks of blue took turns targeting my corneas. I lasted about 15 seconds before running back into the house (in a manly way.)

Later, she decided to try to get some food to the grounded avian. Mrs. Blather took a piece of bread and headed out the back door. I suggested she chew it, swallow it, and regurgitate it for the birdlet. Again, I think this advice was appreciated.

Darkness fell with no resolution to the crisis. I don’t know what tomorrow may hold . . . but it might involve the renting of a beekeepers hat and 20 foot extension ladder.

My Dad will be 80 tomorrow. In the morning we’ll all load up and make the three-and-a-half hour drive into the hills of southeastern Oklahoma to the ancestral home to join the celebration. Dad and Mom will have every one one of their 10 grandchildren with them at church Sunday morning–an increasingly difficult feat to pull off these days.

Eighty years is a milestone my father is clearly astonished to see. His own father died  of prostate cancer in his early fifties almost 50 years ago. When dad reached his fifties, he  had some health problems of his own and had to wonder if perhaps he might be making an early exit, too. But he rallied.

Twelve years ago, my folks allowed their friends and family to throw a big 40th wedding anniversay bash for them. Why? Because they were confident neither of them would make it to their 50th. But they did. So we had an ever bigger event two years ago.

Two years ago . . . that’s when it became clear something was not right with Dad’s memory. I wrote about his diagnosis of Alzheimers in this space two years ago this week.

In the intervening months, he’s fought hard and fought well. And, true to form, knowing the path the disease was leading him down, he’s been diligent to make sure everyone was taken care of and all loose ends were tied up. That’s what good men do.

But tomrorrow . . . we’ll just celebrate. I guess you could say Dad’s having a surprise birthday party. It’s a party for a birthday he’s pleasantly surprised to be having.

Jonah Goldberg on the betrayal and death of the free enterprise system:

• Et Tu, Big Business? The coup de grâce of capitalism’s murder is at the hands of its most successful child.

My school years validated! Researchers discover the value of daydreaming.

• A Wandering Mind Heads Straight Toward Insight:Researchers Map the Anatomy of the Brain’s Breakthrough Moments and Reveal the Payoff of Daydreaming

The Bears are Coming

• Bears and Other Predators Invade U.S. Neighborhoods

Whatever happened to Bob the Tomato? Veggie Tales Exclusive:

• Where are They Now?

From the Wall Street Journal:

Girl “Accidentally” Gets 56 Tattoos on Her Face

Let’s go to the video . . .

Hot, with astonishing levels of humidity this weekend. Last night the air was thicker than a taxi driver’s accent. On cue, we developed an A/C problem today. Help is on the way first thing in the morning.

Speaking of technologies on which I’ve become utterly dependent . . .

Last Friday morning my MacBook refused to boot up. Drove the catatonic laptop to a local Apple store and bellied up to the “Genius Bar.” Diagnosis: Bad logic board. Prescription: 5-7 days at the Mac hospital.

That means borrowing Mrs. Blather’s laptop this week and doing without most of my email addresses and contact information. Inconvenient, to be sure. But to put my travails in perspective . . .

A friend of a friend took his family out for a big birthday celebration a few nights ago as big thunderstorms were rolling through the area. They returned home to find a smoldering ruin where there house used to sit. Lightning had taken all they owned with no opportunity to salvage even a family photo album or treasured keepsake.

Not all inconveniences are created equal. I think I’ll stop bellyaching now.

I wrote the previous post right before turning in last night. As I was drifting off, I was reminded of a wonderful quote by William F. Buckley about the cluelessness of smart people. He famously said:

I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard.

The current bunch of Ivy Leaguers running the government on behalf of the Obama-Pelosi-Reid troika represent a massive validation of Buckley’s insight.  In the name of creating and saving “jobs,” they have been relentlessly waging war on the nation’s job providers–small and large businesses.

Clearly, I’m not smart enough to understand how that makes sense.

Get comfortable. I feel an essay coming on.

Actually, this one has been germinating for a couple of weeks . . . ever since I saw a flurry of discussion last week about a study published in the journal of the National Institute of Education titled, “Conservatism and Cognitive Ability.”

I know you will be astonished to learn that some liberal academics decided to study the intelligence of conservatives and found us inferior to liberals in the smarts department. This research is of a time-honored tradition in academia–a previous shining example being a 2003 study funded by the NIH which posited that conservatism is actually a form of mental illness.

This is nonsense only a tenured Ph.D. can excrete and it has been ably given the thrashing it so richly deserves by other conservatives elsewhere.  (conservatives who miraculously summoned the mental capacity and grip on reality to read the research and respond.) See here, here and here for example.

Let’s set aside questions about the intellectual honesty of liberal academics and the unexamined presuppositions and agendas they bring to their research. Let’s just stipulate for a moment that liberals really are more intelligent than conservatives. If that is the case, then IQ is of little value in evaluating existing conditions and determining the wisest course of action.

Why is this so? Because history has shown liberals to have been wrong on virtually every important policy question of the last 100 years, with the qualified exception of the civil rights movement.

• In the 1920s, liberals were wrong about the Russian revolution and the nature of the nascent Soviet Union.
• In the 1930s liberals were wrong about the New Deal.
• In the 1940s through the 1980s, they were wrong about the Cold War.
• In the 1960s liberals were wrong about the “war on poverty” and put in place policies that destroyed the urban family and destined two entire generations of young black men to prison.
• In the 1970s they were wrong about forced busing, the Shah of Iran, unions, and the sexual revolution.
• And in the 1980s they vilified Reagan on a myriad of issues on which he has since been vindicated.

There is a great research paper waiting to be written about why it is intelligent liberals are consistently dead wrong in their publicl policy prescriptions. But don’t hold your breath. Conservatives in academia stay stealthed

Famous “intellectuals” like Noam Chomsky and Susan Sontag are inarguably brilliant in their fields. They are also comically wrong about most things political.

Just today, Slate’s Camille Paglia, a very, very smart liberal wrote this paragraph (emphasis mine):

Barack Obama was elected to do exactly what he did last week at Cairo University — to open a dialogue with the Muslim world. Or at least that was why I, for one, voted for him, contributed to his campaign, and continue to support him. There is no more crucial issue for the future of the West, whose material prosperity masks an increasing uncertainty about its own principles and values. Religion, abandoned by the secular professional class, will continue to be a major marker of cultural identity for most people — even more so during periods of economic or political instability. But the now widespread stereotyping of Islam as medieval and inherently violent and intolerant ensures eternal war. Visionary leaders are vitally needed on both sides to call for mutual understanding and rational coexistence. Yet, post-9/11, troublingly few voices of Muslim moderation have emerged.

There are two real howlers packed into that highlighted sentence. First, Ms. Paglia confidently asserts that viewing Islam as “medieval and inherently violent and intolerant” is “stereotyping.” Seriously. This is sort of like decrying the stereotype of professional basketball players as athletic and inherently tall.

Then she asserts that it is this stereotyping that “ensures eternal war.” Again, this is a serious liberal intellect at work here.

As I suggested in my headline . . . apparently intelligence is overrated.

A bunch of billionaires got together in New York the other day to discuss the world’s problems. Apparently in the minds of these oligarchs, our biggest problem is too many people. Seriously.

As the Times of London described it:

SOME of America’s leading billionaires have met secretly to consider how their wealth could be used to slow the growth of the world’s population and speed up improvements in health and education.

The philanthropists who attended a summit convened on the initiative of Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder, discussed joining forces to overcome political and religious obstacles to change.

Described as the Good Club by one insider it included David Rockefeller Jr, the patriarch of America’s wealthiest dynasty, Warren Buffett and George Soros, the financiers, Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New York, and the media moguls Ted Turner and Oprah Winfrey.

Allow me to begin by pointing out that this list of seven billionaires contains three utter loons (Soros, Turner, Winfrey); one nanny-state champion who has run New York City back into the ground after Giuliani resurrected it (Bloomberg); a one-world-government utopian (Rockefeller); and two smart businessmen who tend to operate from some extremely flawed assumptions about how everything outside their narrow areas of expertise, works (Buffett and Gates.)

Come to think of it, the fact that Bill Gates thinks the world’s biggest problem is overpopulation goes a long way toward explaining why all my Windows-based computers are screwed up most of the time.

One of the most widely held myths of our time is that over-population is a problem. As I wrote elsewhere a few years ago:

It is now universally understood that as societies develop and living standards increase, populations tend to level off and even decline. Today most countries in the Northern Hemisphere actually have a negative birthrate—meaning that not enough babies are being born to replace the older folks who are dying off. As a matter of fact, a few years ago population researchers predicted that the earth’s population would level off in the year 2050, but now some analysts think the world may already be hitting that point.

At the same time, constant advances in farming methods have made it possible to produce ever more food on less and less land. The fact is, most hunger that exists in the world today is the result of war, bad government, and/or bad religion—not overpopulation. (Of course, that doesn’t mean we, as Christians, have any less responsibility to try to ease their suffering if we can.)

Zimbabwe used to be a well-fed country and a net exporter of food. Today, after millions have either died or left, millions are starving. Why? Bad government and bad religion.

The fact is, if we have a population problem in the future it will be one of too few people.

So why do smart guys like Bill Gates insist on tilting at this windmill? Guilt, I suppose. A perverse form of guilt, to be sure. It’s a response that recognizes that there are no lasting solutions in “philanthropy” and therefore the only other answer is genocide. In other words, “If you can’t stop these icky people from being icky by throwing money at them, then lets just make sure they stop making more icky people.”

That’s Gates’ logic. Treat the poor like a computer virus. Identify them, isolate them, and stop them from replicating.

Nevertheless, there are a few among these enlightened beings that have begun to recognize the truth. Back in December I pointed out an op-ed, also in the Times of London, written by an athiest who, after years of working with secular philanthropic agencies in Africa like those funded by Bill and Melinda Gates, had come to a startling understanding:

Now a confirmed atheist, I’ve become convinced of the enormous contribution that Christian evangelism makes in Africa: sharply distinct from the work of secular NGOs, government projects and international aid efforts. These alone will not do. Education and training alone will not do. In Africa Christianity changes people’s hearts. It brings a spiritual transformation. The rebirth is real. The change is good.

Until guys like Gates and Buffett have that same awakening, they’ll continue to prescribe the wrong solutions to the wrong problems.

Just when you start thinking David Brooks’ conservative sensibilities have been dulled by whatever they put in the drinking water there at the New York Times, he comes up with this awesome piece of punditry. (hat tip: Fergus)

An excerpt:

Recently we were uplifted when the president informed Chrysler’s secured creditors that they had agreed to donate their ownership stake in the company to the United Auto Workers. Just last week, we were enthralled to see a group of auto executives beaming with pride as the president announced that in order to reduce gas consumption, they would henceforth be scaling back on all those car lines that consumers actually want to buy.

These events have heralded a new era of partnership between the White House and private companies, one that calls to mind the wonderful partnership Germany formed with France and the Low Countries at the start of World War II.