George Rebane
We watched a DVRd recent ’60 Minutes’ piece on a fifty year program by Texas ranchers to conserve over 150 African game species on their own range lands. Through their own efforts they have taken contributions from the nation’s zoos and built up the herds/flocks, in the process saving many species that were on the brink of extinction in their native Africa. The ranchers help pay for this by providing controlled hunting under the aegis of state and federal laws. The animals are thriving and the enterprise has been a win-win-win all around.
Enter the eco-idiots, a breed that marbles our nation like a disease. There is a faction that has been working diligently to make hunting of these animals illegal. Their imminent success promises to shut down the entire conservation program/business. Their only ‘reason’, besides rank insanity, is that the animals should be taken back to their native Africa and put on nature conserves where dysfunctional governments will allow poachers to kill them off. In short, the animals should only live in their native habitat that can no longer protect them from extinction – period.
The program's nausea factor was increased by the female correspondent continuing to ask each rancher interviewee ‘If you love and want to save these animals, then why do you allow hunters to come and shoot them?’ The obvious economic answers washed off her little brain like water off a duck’s back. Now consider the millions of like-minded viewers out there for whom such reportage makes sense. Pass the barf bag please.
Anthony Watts has published another substantial summary of the scientific controversy over the now notorious temperature ‘hockey stick’ cooked up by Michael Mann over twelve years ago. Locally, Russ Steele has been tracking the political controversy over anthropogenic global warming (AGW) that has become a public policy control tool for Agenda21 politicians, and article of fervent faith to the scientifically dimwitted. The review of Mann’s latest book on this controversy again illustrates the sleaze in ‘the debate (about AGW) is over’ that is promoted by the politically correct grant hungry ‘scientists’ and their government handlers.
It is remarkable that the AGW question has not been submitted to a small panel of acknowledged experts who are independent of the government gravy train; a panel similar to the one assembled after the space shuttle Challenger disaster. The amount of draconian public policy that has already been made by nations, and the more that is contemplated has all been done in the face of a constant stream of evidence that shows the error of the original and revised AGW conclusions. Would such an issue of global importance be swept under the rug if it were not the only game in town that allows the socialist one-worlders to impose their diktats on the rest of us while we destroy thriving economies on the road to their new world order?
We are attending a Mercatus Center conference in Scottsdale. As supporters of that institute at George Mason University, we have benefitted from their research into public policy issues that seek to buttress the preservation of rights summarized in The Bastiat Triangle (q.v.). Of late I have become more and more impatient with what conservatives have traded for progress – namely, preaching homilies to the choir when they assemble (see my ongoing hissy fits about ‘Candyass Republicans’). At these meetings we are regaled with speeches and presentations that document and memorialize noble accomplishments of free enterprise achieved under the umbrella of liberty. We are again told how the future would be brighter for all, were we to successfully contain the many-headed monster of collectivism. But everyone attending such conferences already knows this material chapter and verse, and that is why they wind up only being kumbayahs for conservatives.
This time, instead of having our bellies rubbed one more time, I would like to hear of some, or even any smidgeon of progress made in halting socialism and successfully educating our electorate, then students to reject the ‘solution by redistribution’ messages that originate from the Party of the Fixed Pie and wash across the land. And if there is no such good news to report, then tell us what we can do to advance liberty and change direction. Absent that, why gather us together to attend what can only be characterized as the moral equivalent of a wake?
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