A happy Zero is a well-fed Zero

Did you know this was the year of the polar bear? The Milwaukee County Zoo even posted this cute video that just begs the liberals to go play in the water with Zero the Polar Bear. I'm beginning to think Zero was pushed into the moat just for the publicity.

I have an idea. Let's show people what it's really like in the state of nature and throw a seal or two down there. The polar bear will be happy. The seals - not so much. Or better yet, push a liberal down there and have him try to coax Zero out of the moat by singing the Obama song.

Maybe then damn fools won't go trying this stunt. From the book's cover:

In April 1992 a young man from a well-to-do family hitchhiked to Alaska and and walked alone into the wilderness north of Mt. McKinley. His name was Christopher Johnson McCandless. He had given $25,000 in savings to charity, abandoned his car and most of his possessions, burned all the cash in his wallet, and invented a new life for himself. Four months later his decomposed body was found by a moose hunter.

Yeah, the liberals make fun of Governor Palin because she likes to hunt moose, but I bet McCandless was one liberal who wished there were a few more moose hunters in Alaska.

"Solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." The book on life in the state of nature was written long ago.

Mother Nature rumbles

Scientists are listening to earthquakes off the Oregon coast. The earthquakes are the type that usually indicate impending volcanic activity - but there are no volcanos.

Scientists listening to underwater microphones have detected an unusual swarm of earthquakes off central Oregon, something that often happens before a volcanic eruption — except there are no volcanoes in the area.

Scientists don't know exactly what the earthquakes mean, but they could be the result of molten rock rumbling away from the recognized earthquake faults off Oregon, said Robert Dziak, a geophysicist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Oregon State University.

There have been more than 600 quakes over the past 10 days in a basin 150 miles southwest of Newport. The biggest was magnitude 5.4, and two others were more than magnitude 5.0, OSU reported.

On the hydrophones, the quakes sound like low thunder and are unlike anything scientists have heard in 17 years of listening, Dziak said. Some of the quakes have also been detected by earthquake instruments on land.

There's no connection, of course, but it reminded me of Mount St. Helens and the explosion in May, 1980. If there's a lesson for us: We're studying the Earth more than ever before, and the Earth just reminded us again how little we actually know.