VIEWPOINTS
Saturday, December 1, 2018
East Oregonian
Page 5A
Getting goosed
O
ne evening not long ago, I walked
out from our house to get a better
view of a full moon rising in the
smoke and dust over the mountains. Across
the face of the moon I saw the season’s first
formation of geese. They were flapping
along at maybe 500 feet above the valley
floor, honking directions and
fast food advice to each other,
sounding like an orchestra of
bicycle horns.
Twenty-some years ago
I spent a short time working
for a fellow named Shelly in
Long Valley, Idaho. Shelly
was one of the most honest,
fair, friendly fellows I’ve
had the privilege to have as
a boss. So friendly, in fact,
that his employees had to
brace themselves when he
was on the job, to keep from
getting knocked off their feet
when slapped on the back.
His was the only outfit I ever worked for
that gave each employee a turkey at both
Thanksgiving and at Christmas.
We didn’t see much of Shelly in the fall
because he was an addicted goose hunter,
the kind that isn’t enjoying the sport unless
he has been laying in a mucky, wet windy
blind for eight hours. Late in the afternoon
he’d show back up on the job, covered in
mud and goose down, smelling and smiling
like a golden retriever, to award that day’s
bag to whomever wanted a 10 pound,
un-plucked, un-gutted honker.
Shelly, I miss you. I know that wherever
you are, bird season is open, and you are
laying out there in a dank pit with your
earflaps pulled down, gloveless, squinting
into the sunrise, honking away on a celestial
goose call. I’ve taken a little break from
wheelbarrowing concrete uphill to study
the book on Canada geese. Hope you don’t
mind if I introduce my readers to Branda
canadensis moffitti, the Western Canada
Goose.
First the science. They weigh eight to
10 pounds when mature.
They eat salads and seeds.
There is not much evidence
that Canada geese are bug
or minnow eaters. When
the feed gets scarce, they
flap on further south, as far
away as the Central Valley in
California. Come Spring, the
families return to within just
a few miles of where they
were born, and those that are
2 or more years old pair off
for breeding purposes. Once
formed, this bond lasts for
life, but contrary to folklore,
when one of the pair dies, the
survivor doesn’t pine away. It finds a new
mate.
Pairs of nesting honkers are extremely
territorial and will actively pursue and
harass other members of the flock that
stumble onto that turf. They will nest darn
near anywhere, on ditch banks, in trees,
on cliffs, on muskrat houses but, like me,
they prefer to nest on islands. The female
lays five or six eggs, incubates them for 28
days, and is pretty much chained to the nest
except for short periods in morning and
evening when she leaves, accompanied by
the male, to eat, bathe and preen. While she
is sitting on the nest, the gander stands guard
nearby to discourage egg-sucking coyotes,
skunks, crows and magpies.
On average, five out of the six eggs
Geese have
a fairly
rigid social
structure that
translates into
their flying
formation.
hatch, and both of the parents escort the
young to water within 30 hours of birth. For
the first week, Mama broods the goslings
under her wings at night, but even though
The Old Man is standing by to hiss and flap
his wings at critters wanting to snarf up
the little geese, there is a 20 percent loss of
goslings between hatching and when they
are able to fly away from danger themselves
60 days later.
Kids will be kids. While all this domestic
stuff is going on, the yearlings and the
unpaired 2-year-olds that are not sexually
active take a cruise to a sort of reverse
Daytona Beach for single geese in the
Beverly and Aberdeen lakes region west
of Hudson Bay. There, in flocks as large as
50,000, young Canada geese from across
North America spend a month listening to
rock and roll and undergoing a wing molt,
losing and replacing the large flight feathers
on the trailing edges of their wings. During
that time they are not very efficient fliers
and the Arctic foxes fatten up.
Meanwhile, back on the home front, Mom
and Pop are molting in between loads of
diapers, and are strong flying machines again
by the time the new quadruplets are ready for
aerial lessons. About this time the teenagers
show up, back in their home territory, and the
family gathers up to head south.
Western Canada geese are notoriously
late to leave their breeding grounds. Seeing
a v-line of Canada geese in the fall is usually
a good sign that humans who plan to winter
above the 45th parallel should be out cutting
firewood because breeding season is over,
the chicks are up, healthy, on the wing, and
it is time to head south. Snow is not far off.
Geese have a fairly rigid social structure
that translates into their flying formation.
There is a definite pecking order. The larger
families dominate the smaller families,
that dominate the pairs, that dominate
the individual orphans. When the sub-
flocks gather into larger flocks to begin the
migration from the breeding grounds to
the wintering grounds, the lead goose in a
flying formation is usually going to be the
largest gander of the largest family, and that
same goose will fly point through the entire
migration. Unless, of course, it makes the
fatal error of suckering into Shelly’s stand of
decoys and ends up in the back of a pickup,
riding to destiny with the caulk, nail guns,
and pier blocks.
“If the Russians are aware that
senior American officials are publicly
stating things that are not true, it’s a
counterintelligence nightmare,” Rep. Adam
Schiff, D-Calif, who is in line to take over
the House Intelligence Committee, told me.
As he points out, this issue contributed
to former national security adviser
Michael Flynn’s downfall. Flynn, you
might remember, appeared to have lied
to Vice President Mike Pence about his
conversations with the Russian ambassador.
This alarmed Sally Yates, then the acting
attorney general, because the Russians
would have known that Flynn was
deceiving Pence, and could have used that
knowledge against him. “Logic would
tell you that you don’t want the national
security adviser to be in a position where
the Russians have leverage over him,” Yates
told the Senate last year.
The same, said Schiff, “is true in spades
for the president of the United States.”
Speaking to reporters before flying to
Argentina on Thursday, Trump justified
his pursuit of a Moscow project this way:
“There was a good chance that I wouldn’t
have won, in which case I would have
gotten back into the business, and why
should I lose lots of opportunities?” This
could be read as a confession of motive.
In the 2016 campaign, Russia wanted to
humiliate Hillary Clinton and delegitimize
America’s election. Trump wanted help
building his brand.
In light of some other recent revelations
in the Mueller inquiry, we can even
see Trump getting talking points, albeit
indirectly, from Moscow.
This week, Jerome Corsi, a right-
wing conspiracy theorist who appears to
have been a conduit between the Trump
campaign and WikiLeaks, released a copy
of what he said was a draft statement of
offense against him, given to him during
plea negotiations with Mueller. On Aug.
2, 2016, Corsi wrote to Roger Stone, the
political dirty trickster in frequent contact
with Trump, about the “word” on coming
document dumps from WikiLeaks. “Would
not hurt to start suggesting HRC old,
memory bad, has stroke,” wrote Corsi.
Shortly afterward, Trump started making
sustained attacks on Clinton’s purported
lack of “mental and physical stamina.”
(Corsi has since said, on MSNBC, that his
apparent foreknowledge of WikiLeaks’
plans came through a flash of divine
intervention on a trans-Atlantic flight.)
There are still many shoes to drop in
this scandal. “Given the extraordinary
obsequiousness the president has shown
in his relationship with Putin, it begs the
question of whether there’s more leverage
than this,” said Schiff. “That’s one of
the reasons why we’re so determined to
make sure that we look into any credible
allegations of financial entanglements,
whether that involves potential Russian
money laundering in the Trump
Organization or anything else.”
But even before those inquiries begin,
we can see that Putin has been in possession
of crucial information about Trump’s
business interests that the president
deliberately hid from the American people.
In a normal political world, Republicans
would have enough patriotism to find this
alarming and humiliating. Every day of
the Trump presidency is a national security
emergency. The question now is whether
Senate Republicans, who could actually do
something about it, will ever be moved to
care.
■
Michelle Goldberg became an Op-Ed
columnist for The New York Times in 2017
and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer
Prize in 2018 for public service for reporting
on workplace sexual harassment issues.
J.D. S mith
FROM THE HEADWATERS
OF DRY CREEK
Trump is compromised by Russia
By MICHELLE GOLDBERG
New York Times Columnist
ne of the chief questions in the
Trump-Russia scandal has been
whether Vladimir Putin has leverage
over the president of the United States,
and, if so, what that leverage looks like.
The significance of the fabled “pee tape,”
after all, is not that it would reveal Donald
Trump to be a pervert bent on defiling the
place where Barack Obama slept. Rather,
the tape matters because, if real, it would
show the president to be vulnerable to
Russian blackmail.
That’s also why evidence of Trump’s
business involvement with Russia would be
significant, as Trump himself acknowledged
shortly before his inauguration, when he
tweeted, “Russia has never tried to use
leverage over me. I HAVE NOTHING TO
DO WITH RUSSIA — NO DEALS, NO
LOANS, NO NOTHING!”
We still don’t know for certain if Russia
has used leverage over Trump. But there
should no longer be any doubt that Russia
has leverage over him.
On Thursday morning, Trump’s former
lawyer Michael Cohen — the former
executive vice president of the Trump
Organization — pleaded guilty to making
false statements to Congress about efforts to
build a Trump-branded property in Moscow
that extended into the 2016 presidential
campaign.
In an August 2017 letter to the House
and Senate intelligence committees, Cohen
said that the Moscow project ended in
January 2016. He claimed not to recall
contacts with Russian government officials
about a potential deal. Cohen told Congress
that he spoke about the project with Trump
— identified as “Individual 1” in the
criminal information document that Robert
Mueller, the special counsel, filed Thursday
— only three times. He said he never
briefed Trump’s family.
According to Mueller’s filing, all of
this was false. Efforts to obtain Russian
government approval for a Trump-branded
development in Moscow went on until
“approximately June 2016,” after Trump
had effectively secured the Republican
nomination for president. Cohen, Mueller’s
document said, “discussed the status and
progress of the Moscow project with
Individual 1” more than three times. He
also “briefed family members of Individual
O
1 within the company about the project.”
In January 2016, according to Mueller’s
document, Cohen had a 20-minute
conversation with the assistant to a Russian
official in which he sought Russia’s help
moving the project forward. The next day,
Felix Sater, a Trump associate identified
in the court filing as “Individual 2,” wrote
Cohen to tell him he’d heard from Putin’s
office. Cohen made plans to travel to Russia,
calling them off only on June 14, which
happened to be the day that The Washington
Post first reported that Russian government
hackers had penetrated Democratic National
Committee computers. At one point, Cohen
and Sater were also coordinating with
figures in Moscow about a potential Trump
visit in connection with the project.
So we now know that Trump lied to the
American people about at least one part
of his business relationship with Russia,
a geopolitical foe that interfered in our
election process on his behalf.
In a Jan. 11, 2017, news conference,
Trump said that the “closest I came to
Russia” was in selling a Palm Beach
mansion to a Russian oligarch in 2008.
While we’re just learning precisely how
dishonest this was, Putin has known it all
along. That means that throughout Trump’s
campaign and presidency, Putin has had the
power to plunge him into political crisis.
The ethical problems with creating gene-edited babies
Los Angeles Times
t has long been a scientific
dream: to inoculate people
against terrible diseases before
they’re born. Now a team of
doctors based in China has dangled
that possibility in front of us by
claiming it has edited the DNA
of two human embryos during in
vitro fertilization. The goal of the
project was to protect the two (who
are now twin baby girls) from HIV,
the virus that causes AIDS.
If this was intended to be a
gift to the world, though, it came
in ugly wrapping. The principal
investigator didn’t bother with
such scientific protocols as
peer review and publishing in
a respected journal. Instead, he
made claims about his results
I
informally to a colleague at a
conference, granted an interview to
The Associated Press, and posted
a video on YouTube. He offered
no evidence or independent
corroboration that his experiment
succeeded.
And if indeed it did take place
as described, it unquestionably
crossed all sorts of ethical and
safety lines.
The reaction was explosive.
The hospital named in documents
filed by researcher He Jiankui
says that neither the research nor
the birth of the twins happened
there. The Chinese government,
though it has not outlawed genetic
experimentation on human
embryos, launched an investigation
into the ethics of the project. More
than 100 Chinese scientists issued
a statement condemning He’s
actions, saying his team harmed
the reputation of research coming
from their nation.
Until now, research on gene
editing has been restricted to
faulty embryos in cases in which
it was clear that children would be
born with horrible illnesses. Even
then, such research has been hotly
debated, as it should be. While it
is tremendously exciting to think
that researchers might be able
one day to switch off genes that
predispose people to breast cancer,
say, or Alzheimer’s disease,
gene editing raises all sorts of
other troubling questions. Even
leaving aside people’s worries
about eugenics and genetically
designed superbabies bred for
certain looks or athletic skills,
there’s also the fact that gene
editing isn’t just another treatment
for an individual; it’s a process
that changes the human genome;
if successful, it will be passed on
to future generations and spread
through the population.
In some cases, that could be
a good thing. But there could
also be unintended consequences
that might more than offset any
positive effects. Gene editing
can accidentally change genes
other than those targeted in ways
scientists can’t foresee. Or, in the
case of the latest research claim,
The Associated Press reported
that the work involved disabling a
gene that allows HIV to enter cells.
The problem, it further reported,
is that people who lack the normal
version of that gene have higher
risks of dying from flu or falling
ill with West Nile virus. ... The
new research claim is especially
disturbing because, although the
father of the twins is HIV positive,
the chance of transmission was
small.
This experiment on human
children might or might not help
prevent a disease that they were
unlikely to have gotten anyway,
and which is preventable through
other means as well as treatable.
The ethical (and practical)
concerns raised by such
experiments are complex and far
reaching.
Of course, it’s hoped that one
day, when our knowledge of gene
editing and its consequences
is deeper, we won’t need such
restrictions.