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NFC: Congress is at it again...whoopie! :-(
Hi all,
Tired of politics? Yeah, me too. Truly jaded, and just about fed up.
Unfortunately, the 535 braindead leeches on the Potomac have no such
threshold of boredom, so they are at it again. Grrrr!
SERMON MODE <ON>
See http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,24358,00.html for a short
description of current action and debate on endangered species.
The debate is so unbelievably ignorant, on both sides, that I despair of
finding any way to inject common sense into this process. The avowed
statists (both major parties, and at least two minor ones) have a
"prohibitionist" mentality about everything they do. That approach is so
radically opposed to free human life, that it injects strong poison into
each program it touches. More often than not, the opposite to the intended
effect is achieved, so even more drastic action is then called for.
[See my resurrected 70-yr.-old .sig, below for just how it works.]
Gun prohibition laws disarm only victims and lead to major increases in gun
crime. John Lott proved that conclusively. We still go after fictional
devices like "assault weapons." Racists particularly adore bans on "Saturday
Night Specials," the only self-defense weapons likely to be affordable by
victims in the projects. [Gang-bangers use drug-profit-purchased $600 Glocks
and Brownings.]
"War on Drugs" programs turn into profitable government price supports for
"crack" and "pot" and a huge *increase* in drug use/abuse (just as alcohol
prohibition did in its day). The resulting increase in ancillary inner-city
crime is simply enormous. Corruption in the police and federal enforcement
agencies is well beyond simple scandal levels.
The "War on Poverty" has taken poverty and homelessness to unprecedented
levels, despite an exceptionally strong economy!
Except as PR tokens, like the gray whale and peregine falcon, the process
will never remove endangered species from the lists. An entire
enforcement/academic grant industry is too dependent on the expansion of the
lists to ever permit that, just as our entrenched social-welfare industry
needs the homeless to survive.
Debates over increasing/decreasing funding for listing-studies/enforcement
are like debating whether it is better to have apples or oranges, only so
long as both are heavily laced with cyanide. The process is inherently
poisoned. The more cynical in congress know that and are exploiting it to
their own political advantage.
Nature Conservancy didn't cause the "Kill the Pupfish" bumper stickers in SW
NV, by buying out ranchers and agribusiness using the water. Enforcement
attempts of the 1973 Endangered Species Act did that.
Folks, until we turn around the "enforcement" notion that people are only
there to be controlled by government, we may well never be rich enough or
knowledgeable enough to protect our endangered species. We certainly will
deserve to look exactly like Romania -- a stark wasteland.
We need educated, concerned, affluent people at the grass-roots level to do
anything really worth while about small non-economic critters that are doing
no one any harm and that may be sort of interesting in their own right.
The current "War on Wetlands Disturbance" has already wreaked havoc in many
places. Expect it to take a lot of interesting species under, if it
continues in its present form. DU did a brilliant end run by sequestering,
through purchase, a lot of Canadian nesting grounds for migratory birds. The
Nature Conservancy has done wonders by swapping donated city land for refuge
space in many places.
No one was forced. No one had to do it. It was enlightened folks preserving
what was important to themselves. We need to contact our congressfolk and
start educating them to the fact that police-state approaches are not wanted
in a free society. No. We should start insisting on it.
Voluntary groups, like ours, educating folks through programs like
"Adopt-A-Tank" can accomplish far more for the environment than any dozen
brigades of "jack-booted storm troopers." If just 1/10th the money proposed
for the enforcement program was removed entirely from government hands and
flowed through voluntary educational activity, we probably could turn the
current loss of species rate around in less than a decade.
The folks here in our group know enough to make that happen. What say we try
to find a way?
SERMON MODE <OFF>
Wright
--
Wright Huntley, Fremont CA, USA, 510 494-8679 huntley1 at home_com
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and
thus clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series
of hobglobins, all of them imaginary." -- H.L. Mencken
http://environmental.networkroom.com/
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