Tag Archives: Endangered Species

They killed Bambi, and now Mumble too

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Bambi meets GodzillaGenerations of American children have grown up witnessing Bambi orphaned by evil mother-killing hunters. In my theater seat, I was sure that deer stalking, as it’s called in England, would evolve the way of Neanderthals. The Happy Feet generation might have held the same hope for the survival of Emperor Penguins, but our George Bush Caligula has just given them a thumbs down.

In spite of the fact that the Academy Award for best documentary went to the March of the Penguins, which told of the heart-breaking travails of the Emperor Penguins, whose natural challenge is to face the most bitter climate on Earth.

Now Climate Change is pulling the ice from under their egg-nestling feet. Environmentalist groups want the Emperor Penguins declared an endangered species, to give clout to efforts to fight the causes of global warming, but the industrialists and fossil fuel companies are having none of it.

Remember the Rockhopper Penguin in Happy Feet, slowly strangling in his plastic six-pack necklace? He too was denied protection from the peril of melting ice and over-fishing.

I can’t visit a penguin exhibit at the zoo without thinking of Mumble, the Happy Feet star, gone crazy from confinement, at last breaking into the soft shuffle which enabled him to communicate with man, to pique man’s interest into his human-like behavior, and lure civilized man’s sympathy for Mumble’s kind, and their helplessness in the face of the human’s destructive fisheries.

At the Omaha Zoo, the scene on the ice with all the aimless penguins was so identical, I was certain the transformative scene had been filmed there, until I reminded myself that Happy Feet was a computer animation.

I was uncomfortable with the Stepin Fetchit quality of Happy Feet’s master-pleasing tap dance. It may have helped humanize black people in the eyes of racists, but it didn’t change white condescension.

Of course, neither penguins or polar bears can do a thing to slow the melting of their habitat. Their fate is in our hands. That was the message of Happy Feet, a message you might not have conceived could have gone over anyone’s head, even George Bush.

Nero fiddled while Rome burned, but Cheney masturbates to fantasy of WW3

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Bush to gut Endangered Species Act. EPA will shift its focus from protecting the environment to protecting corporate profits.

Because the last person who would ever vote Republican is an Iraq war veteran: Bush bans voter registration at VA facilities.

“No peace, ever” candidate expected to be next Israeli PM. Sieg Heil!

Surprise…or not. Israel’s hand behind Russia-Georgia war.

The real reason we went to war: It’s the War Profiteers, stupid!

Excerpts from Thomas McCullock’s notes Aug 12, thomasmc.com.

Anti-environmentalist Gale Norton visits

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Gale Norton resigned from George W.’s cabinet in the midst of the Jack Abramoff scandal, with good reason, and has been hired by Shell Oil to go after Colorado’s shale. During her five years as Secretary of the Interior, as frinktank put it, “she exposed government land in the west to oil and gas drilling, sent loggers into our nation’s forests, reintroduced snowmobiles to Yellowstone National Park, exhibited rampant disregard for the Endangered Species Act, desperately tried to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to the oil industry.” Gale Norton and George W. Bush
(They missed the “Clean Skies Initiative” and erosion of the Clean Water Act.)
Gale Norton co-founded the Council of Republicans for Environmental Advocacy (CREA) with Grover Norquist, described by the NRDC as “a group sponsored by mining, chemical and chlorine industries.” The REP called CREA a “green scam.”
 
On Monday April 7, Norton will be the keynote speaker at the Colorado College State of the Rockies conference. WTF? She speaks at 7:30pm at Armstrong Hall. Do CC students serve pie?

Magna Carta one-ply tissue unscented

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When I heard the Magna Carta described today as the basis for democratic freedom, in particular, as it set forth that no man is above the law, I worried about the symbolism. Someone will pay $21 million expressly to wipe their ass with it. Can I call it or what?

Magna Carta just so many wordsThe Magna Carta at Sotheby’s is one of only 17 copies drafted in the 13th Century by William Wallace’s oppressor. The other copies reside mostly at universities in the UK. The Smithsonian Institution, or the US National Archives, would like to have it in the name of the freedom loving American People. But I couldn’t help think of the aristocrats lined up in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Freshman, each eager to be the last man on earth to shoot, or eat, the last of whatever endangered species was on the menu.

The Magna Carta may be symbolic of common man’s hard won struggle, it launched the basis for our judicial system and English Common Law. But this document, certainly now, might hold special meaning to the better-than-thou sort. The entire Western world is seeing an eclipse of the commoner’s leverage over his rulers. We’re losing our rights and our rule of law. Having seen Habeas Corpus go the way of the Dodo, what could be next but the Magna Carta? “No man is above the law?” I’ll bet there is someone willing to pay 21 million dollars to use the Magna Carta as toilet tissue suitable for his noble ass. It will probably become a Skull and Bones requirement. Lo and behold, the buyer is David Rubenstein, the founder of the single most powerful, privately held, oligarch-only warlord club, The Carlyle Group.

They Don’t Care and the jumping mouse

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Rodent member of endangered ecosystemMighty Mouse or Mighty Myth? asks The Gazette of their readership today and yesterday in quarter page announcements in their paper. “Does the Preble’s Meadow Mouse really exist?” (Or did that evil environmental movement make it all up?)
 
The editorial board over at our loony local rag really is brain dead when it comes to environmental affairs. Just weeks ago they were also running an editorial expressing doubts about whether global warming was real. (Or did the evil environmental movement make the whole thing up?)

The announcement suggesting that it was all “mighty myth” that another wild animal was endangered, was part of the announcement to invite people to a Right Wing think tank presentation at the U. of Colorado-Colorado Springs campus, all designed to push for the virtual annulment of the Endangered Species Act. So I headed over there at noon to show my support for the jumping mouse and Yogi the Bear vs the real estate and construction magnates. Nature vs more crappy development was my message. It’s not just about the jumping mouse. It’s about whether we destroy all nature’s natural habitats or not.

Well, it turns out that my sign saying,
—They don’t care
—Developers just want to pave over nature and
—DAMN THE WILDLIFE!
provoked some interest as I parked myself inside next to some buffet items as the developers broke for lunch.

First, I was berated by some of the overly dressed crowd for having missed the morning presentations by the all Right Wing panel. Actually, they had one lonely environmentalist who had not made it yet from Denver. But how dare I have an opinion about the mouse without hearing all their important commentary?!!! My response was to just shuck it off. I told them I thought the whole thing was about the spotted owl, and I had heard enough about that rare bird already while living in Washington. Jesus, you tell me I came all this way about a mouse?

It turns out that some of the developers took my sign personally. So I had to discuss whether they were evil people or not. And then the two campus cops showed up, and I thought I might get scanned to see if I was a threat to Homeland Security. But Professor Null, jefe of the Right Wing think tank sponsor, said that he would vouch for me, and even offered me lunch. I thanked him, but told him I wasn’t sure whether their food was organic or not. But that I might come in and listen to their accumulation of proof that nature’s wetlands really were no longer necessary to preserve. Full speed ahead!

I only stayed 2 hours. I did get to hear the last panelist, the liberal who could make it from Denver. I also got to shake hands with Craig Manson, Bush’s creep who had formerly been put in charge over “our nation’s critters” to dismantle the Endangered Species Act. He was still working on it as I could see. Nobody quite like him since James Watt had been in charge. He was definitely the big wig invite for sure. I told him that I was sorry I had missed his work in the morning, but that I had read some interviews he had done online, and that “they were quite interesting,” as I politely and sarcastically put it.

One of our CS city councilman recognized me from the city council picnics we sometimes do together. We had a nice cheerful talk about torture, in which he told me that he believed that it did not exist. Then, ala Cheney, he told me that he was for it, except it did not exist! lol…. These White Men speak with forked tongue. He told me that he had family in the military, so that was why he had forked tongue. I will withhold his identity in order to protect the guilty.

I did have a few who came up and whispered that they were in agreement with my sign. But they kind of looked worried that they might get fired for fraternizing if done too openly. So was I too hard on the hard working real estate developers, as some of them had told me? “We’re not all bad.” Well, look at this list of the folk on the board of the Right Wing think tank co-sponsor of this event with The Gazette. Scroll down and check out the many developer folk at The Center for the Study of Government and the Individual

Bullshit artists

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Penn, Teller, corporate AmericansOne of these likable dweebs may not be a complete asswipe.
 
But it isn’t Penn Asswipe Jillette.
 
I just caught an episode of BULLSHIT in which the dynamic duo was poking fun at the Endangered Species Act. The ESA is complete bullshit apparently because it doesn’t protect animals which may or may not be endangered, rather it protects land to which property rights advocates may feel they are entitled.

The Laurel to this Hardy is silent throughout, so it’s hard to accuse little Teller of the damnable untruths spewed by his well fed partner. This was an unforgivable attack on nature at risk. This was crapola from guys who have shown themselves on other subjects to know better.

Am I being too Politically Correct? Let me show you how PC works. Nothing’s inviolate, fine, but suffer the consequences for making light of defenseless animals in dire need. Nothing you can ever do will redeem you for minimizing the problems of your fellow beings who cannot speak for themselves.

You concluded your segment with Jerry Springer-like soft advice about animals facing extinction: “yes worry about them, but don’t pass laws, that doesn’t help anything.” Really you corporate prigs? You small minded, otherwise hip-sounding, gutless asswipe agents of corporate culture. Nothing you ever have to say will redeem the swill you have pitched here.

“Ninety nine percent of all creatures who’ve ever lived on earth are now extinct.” Really? Isn’t that kinda like saying one hundred percent of everyone who lived before us has died? Not a figure that tells us anything. How about saying, in the span of several billion years for which Earth has been in existance, twenty five percent of all extinctions ever have occured in just the last one hundred years? That might be more helpful, if hopefully also alarming. Yuk yuk.

And then to suggest at the very end of the show, not just that man might someday endanger himself and disappear, but that he might be replaced -ha ha- by one of the species currently endangered, is the height of cynicism. You goddamn twit. You know better, that’s what makes your message damnable. You call Paul Watson an asshole for ramming (illegal) fishing vessels, you accuse the Endangered Species Act proponents of using tear-jerk emotional manipulation, and yet the only example you give of the downside of the ESA is a crippled girl who has to shower outside at her friend’s house because she cannot build on the lot of land she has purchased because it is protected sanctuary for a protected bird.

You couldn’t have been more repulsive if this EPA segment had been satire. Instead you were part of the well-funded corporate lobby against nearly the only tool the environmental movement has ever had. And you portray California Representative Richard Pombo, the congressman with the worst environmental record ever, not to mention being an Abramoff and DeLay crooney, as some kind of folk hero.

It is true that the EPA is less about the species and more about land use control. Of course it is. The real story is why environmentalists cannot fight the corporate rapists on their own terms and have to couch their efforts in the language of saving the species.

By the way, is the Endangered Species Act by some coincidence facing an attack in congress right now? Yes.