Alligators are native to Florida. Burmese pythons are not … or are they?

While pinpointing the genesis of the Sunshine State’s burgeoning Burmese python population has proven elusive, it appears that at some point in the second half of the 20th century an unspecified number of imported pet pythons either escaped or were dumped into the Everglades.

First sightings date back to the 1980s.

Perhaps some recovering reptile aficionado woke up one day and resolved to trade his private constrictor collection for something a little more low maintenance. Because Al Gore hadn’t invented the Internet yet, googling “how to properly dispose of pet pythons” wasn’t an option, and so he loaded his scaly friends onto his pickup, drove them out into the Floridian wetlands, where he assumed—quite correctly, as it turns out (and to the detriment of the local mammalian fauna)—they’d feel reasonably at home, bid the slithering knot of serpents a heartfelt … Read More →

Late last year, Hillary Clinton tweeted that “[e]very survivor of sexual assault deserves to be heard, believed, and supported.”

Who could possibly argue with that?

Ms Clinton’s pronouncement is as non-controversial as it is cleverly phrased. One expects nothing less from a lawyer/politician than to excel at crafting statements that say one thing but seem to say another, so that at some later point s/he can refer to having ” very clearly” articulated either this or that.

Of course, every survivor of sexual assault—or any assault, for that matter—deserves to be believed and supported.

The tricky part, which the tweet so cagily dodges, is to distinguish between assault survivors and individuals that made bogus assault claims (and who, therefore, are not assault survivors as pertains to the alleged assault(s) at issue).

Although the tweet sounds like suggesting that every person purporting to be a survivor of sexual assault … Read More →

Earlier this moth, Bruce Springsteen canceled a concert in North Carolina in protest over its government’s religious freedom legislation, which allows Christian businesses to refuse service if providing it conflicts with their faith, and bans individuals from using public bathrooms that match their stated gender identity rather than their biological sex.

Yet last night, opening his show in NYC with a cover version of Purple Rain, Mr Springsteen chose to pay a manifestly heartfelt tribute to a—by all accounts—very devout and active member of a church (Jehovah’s Witnesses) that expressly opposes same-sex marriage, regards homosexuality as a sin, and teaches in the least mistakable of terms that “God created humans to engage in sex only within the arrangement of marriage between a male and a female.” (I’m quoting straight, pardon the pun, from their website.)

Methinks if one feels that an artist like Prince shouldn’t be reduced to his religion and hence doesn’t deserve to be excoriated and shunned for some of its arguably bigoted tenets, one might as well be of the mind that an entire state and its people shouldn’t be reduced to and shunned for some of its arguably bigoted laws.

I’m not quite sure I follow the boss’s logic (assuming he has one) when it comes to genuflecting versus boycotting.

Opposition to a so-called “Fortress Europe”—i.e., the enforcement of designated points of entry, a requisite corollary to the outlandish concept that a country, or a union of nations, should be in a position to ascertain the identity and regulate the flow of new arrivals—appears to rest on the daringly sanguine premise that the number of migrants entering through unsecured borders will never exceed a certain limit at which Europe’s capacity to distribute and integrate newcomers in a humane and orderly manner would be exhausted and all-out chaos would ensue.

In other words, that no matter how many famines and civil wars break out on this warming and ever more drought-ridden planet of seven billion people—to which, at the present rate, another billion is added every thirteen years—the number of refugees and asylum seekers pouring into Europe will always remain manageable (at least assuming the E.U. were to eventually get its act together on the equitable distribution front).

That the number will cap itself, as it were, commensurate with Europe’s ability to handle the … Read More →

Anytime a woman was, or felt, sexually molested in some way, it is the mother of all unforgivable no-nos to imply, be it ever so subtly, let alone to openly suggest, that she—via her apparel (or the economy thereof), her arguably flirtatious manner, her state of inebriation, etc.—may have sent a wrong or mixed signal that an individual with low impulse control and a proclivity for aggression could conceivably have mistaken for an invitation to engage in improper conduct toward her.

Even if a young lady, no matter how many sheets to the wind, rips off her clothes and launches into a racy pole dance at a drunken rager, enlightened people will agree that in doing so she is in no way whatsoever “encouraging” indecent advances by any of the onlooking frat boys. Period. End of story. If bad things happen, and you were to sink so low as to dare insinuate that her behavior, although not having outright provoked them, may not exactly have been conducive to preventing those … Read More →

For the mother of all looming calamities, all but guaranteed to put paid to civilization and mankind as we know it in the not too unforeseeable future, compared to some of its ineluctable side effects like environmental destruction and mass migrations, the global overpopulation disaster itself appears to cause surprisingly few tongues to wag and scant ink to spill by way of sounding the ground proximity warning system in humanity’s cockpit.

One of Mahatma Gandhi’s most popular aphorisms may provide the most plausible explanation for the universal reluctance to call a spade a spade, as it were, when it comes to global overcrowding. Gandhi famously decreed that “we must be the change we want to see in this world.”

In other words, if we think there are too many people in the world, we’re obviously one of them. It follows that the most intuitive measure to take in keeping with … Read More →

If you’re like most people, you own not one but several keys, a good number of which you prize so highly that you carry them around with you at all times.

But what is a key for? What does it represent?

A key represents two things. It represents (1) a border, and (2) the fear that this border may be crossed by anyone except yourself and perhaps a limited number of other designated copy holders of precisely that key.

In other words, show me an unapologetic key holder, and I’ll show you a xenophobe. For how can you be one without the other?

If you insist that you don’t have a xenophobic bone in your body, I suggest you walk your talk and unlock all your doors (front door, car door, garden gate, etc.) and then throw away all your keys.

After all, it’s enough to simply close your apartment door in order to protect yourself from that chilly draft … Read More →

Sherlock Holmes taught us that “when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

When it comes to sexism—and racism, for that matter—people split into two camps:

For one camp, the mere contingency that sexism (or racism) might lie at the root of a given state of affairs suffices to convince them that sexism (or racism) is to … Read More →