Blog Heap of Links for the day 18 April 2012

Picking out the most disturbing moments of Barack Obama's presidency is kind of like trying to choose the wettest parts of the ocean.
7) Obama bows to a Saudi King
6) Obama sides with a foreign leader against an American state
5) Obama shoves through history's single most wasteful spending bill
4) The manned space program comes to an end

In an April 3rd appearance on the left-wing Democracy Now TV show, Van Jones has offered his own behind-the-scenes take on an incident that made race a political issue three years before the Trayvon Martin case. As Jones describes it, the infamous "beer summit" on the White House lawn was a case where President Obama was "forced" into a meeting with a "racist" police officer. [I don't have all the facts, but I'd say the President acts stupidly!]

My father served in the Soviet Army during the Second World War, and while it was easy to make him talk about the war (especially after a few drinks .... and always with his war buddies) .... he and his war buddies always got silent whenever one of them would mention the time that they liberated a small Polish camp filled with Russian Slavs and Jews near the end of the war.

As a young child .... and later as an adult .... seeing 5-6 hardened decorated Soviet veterans of the Second World War going completely silent at the same instant when that war experience was mentioned .... the hard look on their faces when they sipped or gulped their vodka .... not even able to look at each other .... I have .... and I will .... never forget that. I know that my father and his comrades experienced some horrible things in that war .... and they always talked about it among themselves .... but that experience of liberating that camp is the only one that they could never talk about in depth .... even when they were totally stoned drunk.

Michigan Department of Natural Resources has, in total violation of the Fourth Amendment, conducted two armed raids on pig farmers in that state, one in Kalkaska County at Fife Lake and another in Cheboygan County. Staging raids involving six vehicles and ten armed men, DNA conducted unconstitutional, illegal and arguably criminal armed raids on these two farms with the intent of shooting all the farmers' pigs under a bizarre new "Invasive Species Order" (ISO) that has suddenly declared traditional livestock to be an invasive species.

[h/t TheWrightWing at Moonbattery]

Just in one little corner of culture -- cuisine -- there's so much that people blow off. According to these guys, "There are over 20,000 species of edible plants in the world yet fewer than 20 species now provide 90% of our food." Somewhere, there's a culture that makes something awfully tasty out of plant #14,247.

Octopuses have the largest brains of any invertebrate.... The common octopus has about 130 million of them in its brain. A human has 100 billion.... Three-fifths of an octopus's neurons are not in the brain; they're in its arms. "It is as if each arm has a mind of its own...."