I have recently been collecting links to articles about organizations like ACORN and other tax-exempt organizations, many funded by billionaire George Soros. Looking at how extreme left-wing Marxists (like Van Jones) seem to be appearing, often without Senate confirmation, within the upper levels of the federal government made me think of a book that I read many years ago about the vast array of strategies that wasps have developed for producing larvae within the living bodies of other organisms, including their own kind. Eventually the larvae destroy the organism within which they hatch but a horrifying variety of deceptions occur in order to ensure that the wasp life-cycle is perpetuated.

As I recollect, a certain female wasp seduces a male and then reaches around behind the male with her long tail and injects her eggs into her partner. Thus, the elegant cpmmencement of the male’s slow demise occurs during the sex act while in in flight! There ware many more scenarios that cover a bewildering variety of wasps existing in every conceivable natural environment upon the earth. I was looking for the book when I came across the following article at the Jerusalem Post’s website:

REGARDLESS OF their huge size and fearsome appearance, tarantulas are themselves the prey to a specialized and efficient predator, the spider wasp. Sometimes called tarantula hawks, they are solitary wasps belonging to two genera: Pepsis and Hemipepsis. These insects are large and conspicuous. Most species have bright red, yellow or orange wings with iridescent black or blue bodies. They are impossible to miss.

Several times I watched female Israeli spider wasps of the species Hemipepsis brunnea search for and find a tarantula, sting it with their paralyzing venom and then drag it to their lairs where they deposit an egg onto the still living, but paralyzed spider. The wasp then closes the lair and in some cases camouflages it. The egg develops into a larva that feeds on the living spider. The stuff of horror movies.

In a variation of this story, David Ward and Joh Henschel from the University of British Columbia in Canada studied a different spider wasp (Pseudopompilus humboldti) that lives in the Negev. They found that these wasps placed their paralyzed spider at the entrance of the spider’s own nest, exposed to birds and other animals which sometimes ate them. Why would the wasps not do more to protect their developing progeny?

Ward and Henschel hypothesized that temperatures in the Negev were so high that if the wasps didn’t place them thus, their larvae would be unable to develop. Sure enough, when the scientists moved the paralyzed spiders to a deeper, more protected area of the nests, the wasp larvae became too hot and died. It was better to risk some predation than the certainty of their larvae dying from excessive heat.

BUT THE adaptations of these wasps are dwarfed by Hymenoepimecis argyraphaga, another solitary wasp studied by Dr. William Eberhard of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Costa Rica. He found that this wasp actually changes the behavior of the spider for its own benefit. These wasps don’t paralyze the spider, instead they stick their egg on an active spider and the wasp larva feeds on the spider’s juices, much like a tick sucks blood. However, right before the larva is about to build a cocoon so that it can metamorphose into an adult wasp, it injects the spider with a drug. Suddenly instead of building a typical web, the spider builds a tangled structure that is devoid of the sticky threads normally used to catch insects, and is instead perfect to carry the wasp’s cocoon. After doing the wasp’s bidding the spider dies.

So the wasps prey on the spiders, sometimes with extraordinary powers, but what preys on the wasps? It turns out nothing preys on these creatures; they live la dolce vita at the very pinnacle of the food chain.

Even if we suddenly had a new administration tomorrow, the larvae of a new kind of politician has hatched within the party machines and within the bureaucracy itself. The body of the host organism- the American people and our political leadership- has lost the ability to formulate reasoned policy responses in the face of a number of challenges, any one of which threatens our continued existence. The news media lack the will to report many of the threats. Maybe due to anxiety about obtaining stimulus money when the “mainstream” news media’s house of cards crashes.

A case in point is the way in which ACORN now receives billions in federal stimulus money- no one is even sure exactly how many billions! Nevertheless, ACORN which agitated for affordable housing via loans to low-income, high-risk borrowers, is one of the biggest recipients of the largesse distributed by the Obama Administration. The funds are going to encourage “community organizing” at exactly the time that the housing bubble created by ACORN’s allies in Congress (along with Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac- Government Sponsored Entities overseen by Chris Dodd and Barney Frank) has reduced the American financial system to a state of helplessness. Now the introduction of more affordable government sponsored health care is being sold as a cure for the current economic ailments. Enuf said?