The Problem of Ilhan Omar

The obvious problem for the Democrats of the Representative from Minneapolis is she offers Donald Trump and his co-conspirators the perfect boogey man: A Muslim who characterizes Israel as an apartheid state (alienating some American stalwart Jews who still support Israel out of an atavistic affection for the nation of Leon Uris) and she extends her remarks to attack American Jews whose money (Benjamins=$100 bills) support Israel and she questions their loyalty, because, after all, how can you support two countries and be loyal to either?

Part of the problem is she is not very bright and she is ignorant.
Part of the problem is she has not mastered English and is unaware of the resonance of certain phrases.

Bret Stephens, in a very convincing article, suggests she knows exactly what she is doing in her references to the moneyed Jews who conspire against America in the interests of "world Jewry," which must be based in Israel.

She is from a part of the world where people who regard Jews as a powerful enemy, who embrace an image of Jews as money obsessed, virulently self interested, do not even see that as Antisemitism. Now she finds herself in America where the resonances are different. 

(There is also something a little suspect in her own presentation of her life story: She portrays Arlington, Virginia as a place where she suffered taunting as a Muslim, and this may be true, but that place is one of the most diverse spots in the nation, perhaps second only to Queens, N.Y.. If there is any place to be an immigrant, that has got to be it. It is Ellis Island on the Potomac.
The Wilson Center describes it thusly:
Arlington, in other words, is at the forefront of demographic processes which are changing the face of American communities as well as the United States in its entirety.  Arlington is doing so with relatively little rancor as well as with improving economic opportunities and advancements, achieving low crime rates and far-reaching transportation opportunities. Arlington, in other words, reveals how an “inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable” city looks.

So Omar's description of her having overcome the bullying of life in a parochial Southern city may be overwrought.)

But I digress: The fact is, Omar has criticized Israeli Jews, American Jews, not because they are Jewish but because of what she says they have done in terms of buying Congress and turning Congress into an "Israel occupied territory."

But the fact is, she has also attacked Saudi Arabia for its depredations in Yemen and she has attacked Egypt, Syria and other Arab nations, saying they are every bit as vile as Iran. So she's sort of an equal opportunity agitator.

Why do I say she is not very bright? Because that description Trump seized upon, while it may emanate from a simple deficit in English vocabulary and training, it was also an invitation to misinterpretation. Part of intelligent speaking is clarity and bullet proofing. "Something happened on September eleventh," did in fact stand as a dismissive remark, "Oh, the L train was late on September eleventh."  No, there are some events you cannot describe without clearly stating where you stand on the issue. No Japanese ambassador to the United States would ever say, "Oh, something happened on December 7, 1941."

And tying misdeeds of Jews to money is a pretty ripe trope. For whatever reasons, every anti Semite always suggests Jews are powerful because they are rich and control the flow of money. If she did not understand that, maybe she is just ignorant, which is bad, but if she did know that then she's worse.

The dual loyalty thing is trickier. This really is a problem. Of course, the laws have changed so Americans can now hold dual citizenship. When I was growing up you had to give up every other citizenship once you became an American citizen. Few people seem to worry about the woman who has Norwegian and American citizenship or even British and American passports. But those countries rarely have policies which bring them into conflict with America.

Israel, with its rightward move to Netanyahu, with its ongoing push into lands claimed by Palestinians has, in fact, looked like the bully, even though the Israelis are vastly outnumbered by their mostly hostile neighbors. And Israel has a fundamental, structural problem, as far as I can understand it: Either it is a Jewish state and that means that it cannot allow the majority of people living within its borders (Arabs) to have full political power or it is not, in which case, the Knesset could become a truly representative legislature and vote the Jews out of power. Israelis I have known are as horrified by Orthodox Jews as they are by Palestinians, but they do not go so far as to say Israel should not be a Jewish state. These secular Jews nevertheless cannot accept Israel as an open democracy in which the possibility exists, someday, if demographics go that way, Israel will be just another Arab state in the Middle East. 

And what does it mean to be a "Jewish state"?  I'm not sure. But I assume it means Jews have privileges not granted to others, namely Palestinians, who live as their neighbors. In that sense, Israel is some flavor of theocracy. But you can say the same of England, with its official Church of England or Italy with its Catholic Church. 

Now, I say all this knowing I do not really know what I'm talking about. I do not know enough about Israel and its laws, demography and politics. But neither do most of my fellow Americans. We know we like Israel because they are the only democracy in the Middle East, and they are basically Europeans--at least they look and sound like Europeans even if they resent that perception. We know Israel has actual free elections and we know Israel does not require women to be accompanied by a male in public, holds no public beheadings, allows women to drive, vote, serve in the legislature. Israels, in short, don't offend us with their religious based beliefs. 

No matter how you slice it, Omar has been a gift wrapped present to Trump running in the Rust belt and she poisons the Democratic party, which was oh so weak kneed to jettison Al Franken for horsing around, but when Omar rattles the anti Semitic cage, well, the Dems have to be very understanding.

Fact is, there are way more white, male Rust belt voters than Muslim voters.
That's simple democracy.

New Hampshire Apple Orchard Scam

When you think about "the system is rigged" you get angry, but that whole thing is just a vague idea until somebody does some digging.

Listening to Michael Lewis's podcast "Breaking the Rules" he details the sleazy way companies have ruined the lives of teachers, cops and firemen by acting as their "student loan managers" and managing to deny the former students the Congressionally enacted program which allows their student loans to be zeroed out after 10 years of faithful payments. When this happens, the companies managing their accounts lose customers and so they do everything in their power to keep the former students on the hook.

That's a pretty obvious scam.

But lately I was reminded of another sort of less personal but still sketchy scam involving apple orchards.

The richest man I personally know, a guy I knew from high school when I didn't know how rich his family was, now lives in New Hampshire and he invited me up to his apple picking fete one autumn. He lives on a ten acre compound bordered by a creek which feeds into a river and he's devoted maybe half an acre to apple trees and he invites friends up to pick the apples, drink apple cider and he cooks hamburgers on his Weber. 

"This is a great party," I said. "Much better than just a dinner party."
"Well," he said, "Of course there's a financial angle to it."
"Oh, did I miss the admission tickets?"

No, he explained, if he keeps a certain number of apple trees, or a certain acreage in apples, he gets a tax break on his property taxes, which are then cut because his land is in "agricultural use." 

I hadn't thought about it again until I took my bike ride yesterday and coming down Old Stage  Road in Hampton Falls I noticed the big McMansions on Avery Ridge Road had apple trees. Riding up the road, it was remarkable nearly every single manse was flanked by apple trees. At the summit of the ridge I looked over toward that huge chateau with the windmill and the Buddha statues out front, and apple trees lined up from the ridge on down.  All these rich folks with their huge chateaus were apparently apple fanciers.

And I thought, these guys are gaming the system.
Now, I haven't seen the tax returns of any of the folks who own these McMansions on Avery Ridge Road, but I do find it curious they all seem to have apple orchards.

Trump and the Anesthesia of Amnesia: Give Us Lloyd George

A bayonet is a weapon with a worker at either end
--Lenin

No Vietamese ever called me nigger
--Muhammad Ali

A fully equipped duke costs as much to keep up as two Dreadnoughts
--David Lloyd George

The past is not dead. It's not even past.
--William Faulkner

Something about Donald Trump has turned me into a reader of history.
Maybe it's his complete indifference to history, to history as it existed a month ago or a few minutes ago, as in "I know nothing about Wikileaks."

Reading Margaret McMillan's wonderful book about the causes of World War I almost began to grasp the idea of history. History is one long argument, of course, but what Ms. McMillan shows is history is a river with many currents and they all flow in and out together to take us somewhere. 

And, as obvious as it may seem to say, we are all here because we came from somewhere, and, as Faulkner noted, in that sense, the past lives in all of us today.
McMillan is unusual in her willingness to step out of her historian's role and to parenthetically point out how what happened then devolved to where we are now today, even in the case of a small town on the Nile which was poor then and is still poor but became the focus of conflict between England and France and then got swept up into the conflicts which persist in Sudan and that part of Africa today.

The World War, and I am beginning to think of WWI and WW II as simply one long fight, with a pause between the rounds, happened because of struggles between the haves and the have nots in European countries. In this sense, Lenin and the communists were correct, the "nations" of Europe were divided by boundaries and borders but the wars they fought were really fought by hapless workers who constituted a single interest group, the dispossessed, duped into fighting the boys in the other uniforms by calls for "patriotism." 
So Lenin's remark about the bayonet is true.  The German farm boy  with the bayonet had no antipathy toward the Russian peasant or the Frenchman or the British butler with the bayonet but each of them had been indoctrinated with the idea of "patriotism" and "God, King and country."

As for the kings, well, they were never in danger and war was nothing more than horse racing with respect to their own personal fortunes. Even the Kaiser, in the end simply decamped to the Netherlands and continued to live in luxury.

In Eric Maria Remarque's "All Quiet on the Western Front" this theme of the German soldier in the trenches having no animosity toward his enemy across no man's land comes up again and again and the Germans say what they should do is to put the Kaiser and the King of France in a field, in their underpants, with cudgels and let them fight it out and then everyone could go home. 

This is really what they were saying at Woodstock, during the summer of peace and love. Make love not war. We've got no skin in this game. 

In fact, reading between McMillan's lines, you can clearly see the importance to the ruling classes that the idea of patriotism and country be promulgated, because without a foreign enemy to loathe, the working classes would look for more local targets for their seething resentment and hate. 
Mr. Trump has played this hand over and over. 
"You will all be winners. You'll be winning so much you'll get bored of winning."

One of the most fascinating characters to emerge in this history is the Welchman, David Lloyd George, who grew up speaking Welch in a part of the United Kingdom which, I am led to believe is something like West Virginia is to the United States, disparaged, poor, uneducated and disregarded. 

Of course, other currents which flowed toward the great War were rooted in animosities which percolated among common folk: Ethnic hatreds in Bosnia, the Balkans, between Slavs and Germans drove nations toward conflict. Hate trumped love in those parts of Europe. It was not all peace and love among the have nots.

Part of the run up the the War, one of the currents, was an arms race to build the greatest navy. Britain, or its leaders, which included the king but also the parliament, believed it could be invaded unless its navy was indisputably superior to all others. It needed not "air superiority" as we now say, but naval superiority. When Germany began challenging that with a program of building ships, England felt threatened, and the British inclination toward Germany and against its historical enemy, France, shifted. So individuals in the British government steered her into conflict with Germany.

Lloyd George did not disagree, at least in the beginning, about the need to win the arms race but he was determined the economic consequences be born by the upper classes as well as by the poor. He  campaigned for a "death duty" on inherited estates, and for property taxes, disproportionately falling on the land owning class and he went on to institute the first national health care system, social security and other benefits for the less wealthy part of the population. Immigrants living more than 10 years in the country we eligible for all benefits. 

Lloyd George (who was Margaret McMillan's great grandfather--and she describes him as "a radical) was on the wrong side of history in some instances: He was a major actor in the 1918 treaty which insured the continuation of the war 20 years later and he insisted on Irish conscription which led to the infamous Easter rebellion and ultimately the "Troubles." But he was someone who had come from a downtrodden place and never forgot his roots, the struggles of the people on both sides of the bayonet. 

Inflexible Minds

Nearly eight thousand endocrinologists from all over the world met in New Orleans for 5 days and speakers at each session were drawn from well known, highly published researchers and clinicians working on the topics they discussed. 

If you pay your money, you can attend and even as a wee little humble country endocrinologist, you can go up to the microphone and ask your question of the giant on the stage.

My first question was prompted by the comment from the professor who was discussing weight loss diets which included intervals of severely restricted caloric intake, alternating with less severe restrictions. She began by saying that she was from Wisconsin where 65% of the population is obese, so she had no chance to find human beings who were willing to severely calorie restrict for her studies, so she studied mostly rats. 

I rose to point out that she had on her campus a cohort of young men who had engaged in severe calorie restriction from roughly age seven for 6 months of each year until they were 22 and they were spending 4 years on her campus: The wrestlers. 

She blinked like a deer in the headlights and asked the other doctors on the stage what I had said. "The wrestling team," one of them explained. "Oh," she said, clearly having no idea what I was talking about and that was her entire interest in the proposition. 

I have long thought the caloric privation of this group of human beings ought to be studied systematically. There is a theory that diabetics who are intensively controlled with weight reduction and sugar control, if only for a year or two will have a "legacy" effect lasting many years. If this is true, what happens to the young men who have been rigidly controlling their weight and diet? Do they have a legacy effect after they finish their wrestling careers?

No interest in that on the part of the scientists.

Another professor talked about adrenal nodules which have been called "Non functioning" for decades, meaning they do not over produce any of the hormones made by the adrenal gland.  They have been thought to be inert, just sort of like calluses, a lump in the bread dough. But this professor showed a slide demonstrating these nodules make the usual array of adrenal hormones, just none in excess. I asked whether we should not drop the term "non functioning" since they clearly did function, just not excessively. Again, the professor seemed stunned. But we've always called them non functioning adenomas. 

But the best was the testosterone lectures. The professor went through the very common problem of young men who "abused" testosterone, usually "gym rats" who take industrial doses of testosterone they get illicitly at the gym, but when their supplier runs out, they often stop their injections and allow their blood levels to fall to very low levels. It takes a while for the testicles, which have shut down while a tidal wave of exogenous testosterone from the bottle has been washing through, to restart and to fire up endogenous production. During that recovery period, the man can go to his primary care nurse and ask for a testosterone level, which is temporarily low, and then they get referred to the endocrinologist so they can get prescriptions for testosterone to inject.

Of course, this game is easy to recognize: The patient comes in looking like Arnold Schwartzenager, his testes often small and atrophic, complaining of "low T." The professor described a variety of lab studies to confirm all this, and much discussion ensued about who to deal with these drug abusers. 

These men are in some ways like anorexia nervosa patients, who look in the mirror and no matter how thin they are the anorectics see a fat person; the same is true for the testosterone abusers; no matter how muscular and bulky they get, they see themselves as under muscled.  Doctors from other countries described how they treat these patients in clinics alongside psychiatrists. 

Then I visited the talk by the doctor from Mt. Sinai Hospital (NYC) who talked about how he replaces testosterone in his patients who are female to male transgenders and how he relentlessly increases the dose of testosterone, raising their blood levels to "levels we see in androgen abusers" but this is necessary to achieve the goals of facial hair growth,  voice deepening, muscle development.

After the session, I emailed the professor who had spoken about "androgen abusers" and asked whether he would agree that the folks treating transgenders were not also "androgen abusers," both the doctors and the patients. 

He replied that this was using testosterone for "gender affirming" goals and only if the patients were attempting to become overly muscular would he think of this as androgen abuse.

The fact is, political/value thinking has driven the approach to "transgender medicine."  The suicide rate among transgender patients has remained between 25 and 30% for 30 years.

If we embarked on any other sort of therapy for patients which was attended by a 30% mortality rate, would we be permitted to persist? 

The transgender clinic folks say transgenders commit suicide because they are so abused by an intolerant society.

But is it not also possible transgender commit suicide at such astonishing rates because the underlying disorder is itself, a severe psychiatric disease? Are we actually helping these folks by giving them what they ask for? 

It is also remarkable how wide the range of therapy: Some female to males do not want voice changes but just to "seem more masculine" and so they are given just a little testosterone. Others receive super doses if that's what they want.  Some receive testosterone but continue to have vaginal intercourse, and need contraception so they don't get pregnant.

When discussing placing IUD's in these patients, one of the treating physicians remarked the whole procedure of placing the IUD was very traumatic for the patient, presumably because it was a reminder of their underlying anatomy--in a patient who is having vaginal intercourse!

Much was made of the idea that we all ought to be careful to elicit what "pronoun" the patient prefers to refer to himself/herself with. Females to males often want to be referred to as "him." This should be scrupulously complied with. 

Some "binary" patients (those who identify with both or neither gender) want to be referred to as "they."

My mind is clearly too inflexible to accommodate all this. It all struck me as the inmates in charge of the asylum. And that is just what the transgender clinic folks would object to: We are not superior to these patients and it is patronizing to even question whether we should not give them anything they wish. 

Which means, of course, we have to give the transgender all the testosterone he desires but we refuse this to the male who wants to "abuse" testosterone to get the effect of increased muscle mass. 

MAGA, MAGA, All Come Home

Bill Nye recently asked Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez how she planned to deal with those who were afraid of change.

This, in essence, is the question of the current era: Mr. Trump won, if he won on anything, on the idea that we have to go back to a better time: Make America Great Again, was a call to return to the times when father went off to the factory with his lunch pail, while mother stayed home with the kids and they had a car and two weeks summer vacation and everything was just swell in America. 

While we cling to the past we should remember that the Czar, before World War I, called for a convention of nations in order to get everyone to agree to not seek new knowledge, new technology to make guns shoot farther or to develop more powerful weapons, because he realized his government could not spend the money an arms race would require.

He knew, on some level, that any army or navy of the modern age could defeat any army or navy of preceding ages simply because their technology is better. So the mighty wooden British Navy of the 1700 and early 1800's would be utterly destroyed by any Navy, say, the Italian Navy of 1940, without the loss of a a single ship or life by the Italians, simply because of technology.

There is a wonderful scene in "Master and Commander" in which Jack Aubrey, the captain of a British man of war examines a wood model of the ship he has battled and been nearly wrecked by, the double hulled French ship, and he remarks, "What a marvelous modern age we live in!"  He could not even imagine iron ships under steam power. He was so masterful handling his wooden ship, which he had joined as a 13 year old, and had bled into its wood enough that he felt it was a relative, he could not make the mental leap into an age where none of what he knew, the wind, the sails, the management of sailors aloft, using the wind gauge, firing mussel loaded cannon, would be rendered totally irrelevant to winning a battle at sea.

And yet, less than 60 years later the iron clad ships of the American civil war would render wooden ships impotent. 

Small changes, like the rifling of gun barrels, changed the equation on the battle field, and another small change, the machine gun did even more,  but physics would ultimately make these incremental advances seem almost quaint.
It was only 76 years between Custer's last stand and the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. All that in the lifetime of a single man.

Those who could not embrace the notion of change were, literally, incinerated.

Now we are asked to hold fast, to in fact, turn around, about face, toward a sweeter, happier nation, an Ozzie and Harriet, a Leave It to Beaver past.

Pre vaccination polio, iron lung ward

But consider that past, a past when "White Supremacy" was the official motto of the Alabama Democratic Party (1966) and before the state of Mississippi had not ratified the 13th amendment abolishing slavery (1995!) and 1923 when the Mississippi supreme court found it legal for that state to expel from all-white schools two children whose great-aunts were rumored to be married to coloreds on the grounds that the law was intended to "prevent race amalgamation" and, the court approvingly noted the law meant to insure "the broad dominant purpose of preserving the purity and integrity of the white race."  Oh, this too, was America, as Louis Menard has noted in his New Yorker article "In the Eye of the Law." 

In Plessy v Fergusson, a case decided in 1896, the Court argued "We consider the underlying fallacy of the plantiff's argument to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race choose to put that construction on it." 

As if there could be any other construction put to it.

Not until Antonin Scalia did mental contortions to explain why "A well regulated militia" did not mean the authors of the Second Amendment were saying guns did not not belong to individuals but to organizations intended to defend the state, was there such transparent idiocy from the Court. 

But this was all an effort to keep change at bay.

In 1896, there were 130,334 colored voters registered in Louisiana; by 1904 there were only 1,342. This was not because colored voters had left the state; colored voters were stripped of their right to vote in that America of former greatness. 
That was "Jim Crow." That was the counter revolution to the 2nd American Revolution which freed the slaves and gave all men the right to vote regardless of race.

In 1930, Birmingham, Alabama passed a law making it illegal for a White and a Black person to play dominoes or checkers together. In 1932, Oklahoma outlawed baseball clubs, one Black one White, playing baseball within 2 blocks of one another.  

For a period of 50 years there were something like 10 lynchings of Blacks in the South every week. 

So this is the America we seek when we want to Make America Great Again.

We want to go back to wooden ships, and muskets and a time when hate rule supreme in the 14 states of the former Confederacy and in Western states like Oklahoma, and in the mountain states and the high plains states which now comprise the Red States. 

Read Howard Zinn, Oliver Stone. Read real American history. Watch "Platoon," and "Full Metal Jacket."  There you will find the real MAGA. 

Humankind cannot stand too much reality, T.S. Eliot warned, and we can see that in full bloom in Mr. Trump and his core.  
These are the fearful, the cowering, who are terrified of what the future may bring, who cleave to a past where you got points for being white, where simply being white guaranteed you always had someone below you in America.

 Make America Hate Again. That's the real message. And it's a message of weakness. "Home of the free. Land of the Brave." Not for Trump who sees MS-13 in every immigrant family presenting itself to the Southern border. 

MAGA. 

Sacred Heart: Audacity Incarnate

It's that time of year again: The warrant articles marathon.
Rather than a town meeting, Hampton, NH has a day when residents show up at Winnacunnet High School and vote on a tome of articles concerning funding for schools, police, fire department and whether or not Mrs. Jones should be allowed to plant petunias on the far side of the sidewalk, which is ground actually owned by the town.

Sequestered in among all the weeds is a nasty little piece of work, warrant number 5 in the SAU category, having to do with schools.

The local Catholic school, Sacred Heart, located behind the Miraculous Medal church, has 39 children who live in Hampton but whose parents enrolled them in the Catholic school.

Now the Catholic school has presented a bill, it hopes the good people of the town will vote to pay for those 39 students x $998=$38,922. The school argues that if those children attended Hampton public schools, it would cost the town $15,000 to educate each of these kids, so the town is actually getting a break and saving money as a result of the efforts of Sacred Heart.

Of course, the immediate objection was this would be a violation of Church/State, a local government sponsoring a religious school

But that is not actually the most outrageous argument here: The basic premise is wrong.  It's accounting flim/flam on the part of the Church.

Paid For Lovely School, Hampton, NH

It would cost the town of Hampton not a single dime more if all 39 of those students attended Marston Elementary, the Hampton Academy or Winnacunnet High. Those kids have already been paid for: the teachers are already in place to teach them; the buildings are already constructed (or, in the case of the Academy, under reconstruction at great cost); the facilities are already supported by Hampton taxpayers and now taxpayers are being asked by Sacred Heart parents to pay for their own private school.

Hampton public school could use 39 more students

If Hampton had a community swimming pool, would the parents of Sacred Heart  ask the town to reimburse them for the private swimming pools they had built in their own backyards, on the grounds that the town no longer had to pay for the use of the community pool by the children of the homeowners with private pools?

And why not ask the town to pay for the country club memberships on the grounds that country club golfers are no longer burdening the public golf course?

Lovely public school

The possibilities are rich and expansive. 

How about the cost of landscaping your home, on the basis the town no longer has to pay for roadside beautification?

Really spiffy school could use more Catholic kids

If this warrant article passes, Mad Dog will seek a lawyer willing to sue the town to prevent this payment. The warrant article may slip by, but the courts should have something to say about this boondoggle, which even in the age of Trump, is just one absurdity too far. 

Horses on Hampton Beach: The Straight Poop

Last night my wife was out to dinner and for once I had control of the TV. Ordinarily, by long established rights and privileges, she watches TV after the News Hour. 

She hates the PBS News Hour: It's booorinnng! I refuse to watch commercial news, so the compromise is I get that hour and she has the rest of the night. The TV adjoins the kitchen so she can cook, wash dishes, run the garbage disposal, do anything she can to drown out the News Hour and after that, I leave the room, go down to the basement or up to my room and she watches Blackish, Scandal, some show with Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin and we have peace in the house.

But last night, I got to watch my own choice and I chose Channel 22, the Hampton town channel which has the town selectmen or whatever they are called,  discussing important plans, projects and issues. I watched fascinated as a woman, Jennifer Hale, from the Dept of Public Works , described the progress of road construction, the replacement of street lights along Rte 1 with LED lighting. She was just so competent; she knew all the details about building roads, allowing for settling, drainage ditches and she must be some kind of engineer. I was mesmerized.

Just about the time things really heated up, my wife returned and immediately started storming around, demanding I relinquish the channel clicker, but just at that moment they got into the question of horse poop on Hampton Beach.

"I'm starting to get a flashback," my wife wailed. "It's PTSD!"

She used to cover town council meetings like this in her first job as a cub reporter for the Springfield Daily News. Sewer installations were her specialty. She is to this day very proud of the fact that H. Mead Alcorn, a big Republican mucky muck, had her bodily ejected from some meeting for asking "impertinent" questions. She was hero for the day back at the newsroom, but she hated that job.

Anyway, it turns out that "the equestrian community" loves riding their horses along Hampton Beach in the off season and there are sometimes as many as 12 horses down there trotting around. The horses, of course, leave behind lots of poop, and some locals have complained to the town selectmen. "After all," one of the selectmen noted, "I get after people who don't clean up after their dogs, and these horses leave a lot bigger poops behind than any dog."

There ensued a spirited, if completely uninformed discussion of the difference between dog and horse poop. One selectman asserted the dog diet is such that it poses a risk to human health but horses eat mostly grass and hay and so their poop is innocuous.

Consulting Professor Google, I could not find substantial evidence to the contrary. It seems, depending on the diet, dog poop may contain parasites or some sort of undesirable bacteria, especially if they have been fed raw meat.

Horses do not eat raw meat.

What nobody said what the risk to human health for either dog or horse poop may not be known but the aesthetics of poop on the beach, beyond seagull poop, is hardly in dispute. On the other hand, during the winter, the only people on the beach are walking animals. Well, maybe not the only people, but the vast majority.

It turns out the Hampton Main Beach and North Beach are state parks and come under state law and there is no state law against horses on the beach, although there has been a law against dogs on the beach, possibly recently amended to allow them after certain hours in the summer, on leash.

The question was referred back to the Hampton state representatives, two of whom were in attendance (SenatorTom Sherman, and Representative Pat Bushwick.) Presumably, they will bring the concerns of local beach walkers back to Concord and we will have some answers about horse poop, horses and the role of the equestrian community, in Hampton.

This morning, my wife noted, the headline about the meeting, written by some cub reporter, was "Hampton Selectmen Meeting Mired in Horse Manure."