1976 A Treaty/Convention Concerning Migratory Birds with Russia that took more US bird species from state authority and placed them under federal jurisdiction.

 

WARNING – If you are a modern snowflake in need of a “safe place”, read no further.  If you are someone quick to call others a racist or sexist, please go no further. I claim no animus toward “government-designated minorities” nor to females.  While everyone “knows” “they all say that, I can only point to a marriage of 50 years to a wonderful woman and two super daughters regarding my attitude toward females, plus many “government-designated minority” friends and associates in schools, the military, at work and on sports teams over more years than I can count knowing that they make no difference to many I am about to offend.  Beware, I am about partially blame EEO for the effects Professor Bainbridge notes in Lawyers, Law Schools and Laws resulting from EEO regulations, policies and practices and how that mimics what it also did to American Forest, Range and Wildlife Management and their associated entities and effects.

 

A.

EEO was implemented by mandating and rewarding with large and increased bonuses the “hiring, transfer and promotion of women and minorities”.  Minorities did not include Chinese or Australians.  Minority meant black or appearing black or calling yourself “black” and black was never narrowly defined.  Discriminating against any “woman” or (government-designated) minority was punishable with all manner of penalties up to and including jail and fines.  During the first three decades (1970, ’80 & ’90) any white male in federal service accused of discrimination or of making a “pass” at a woman considered “under” him had all the chances of being exonerated as a Japanese court gives anyone brought before it. (I just read this morning that Mr. Ghosn spent $20 million dollars to flee Japan to Lebanon because of Japan’s 99.5% court conviction rate.)

 

By 1975 all the natural resource agencies (Fish and Wildlife, Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, Park Service et al) heard loud and clear complaints from hiring officials unable to find “academically-qualified” (hrs. of classes, degrees, veteran preference. etc.) applicants and similarly it was “impossible” to transfer or promote employed women or minorities because of all the internal’ agency requirements (Regional experience, cross-Divisional jobs, Washington experience, etc.) for any job of any importance.  So, by 1980 all those requirements that weren’t eliminated (“why is that there?” “that’s not necessary”, etc.) were so watered down that a Bachelor or Associate degree in political science or sociology from a Community College was equal to a Masters in Waterfowl or a Doctorate in salmon fisheries for hiring, promotion or transfer purposes. The same thing was happening in USFS, BLM, and other resource agencies.

 

NOTE - Some agencies took decades to be brought to heel.  The General Accounting Office (GAO) was formerly a place of CPA-Certified Accountants.  The conducted Audits of Government Spending for Congress and were greatly feared by bureaucracies for decades.  They struggled through the 1980’s and ‘90’s to find, train and employ Accountants to no avail. I was involved in two GAO Audits in the 1990’s and one was done by a young lady that knew less than I did about auditing because I had taken an Accounting Class by correspondence about 8 years before.  In 1998 I worked with real Accountants from GAO to document the theft of $45 to 60 Million from state wildlife Excise Taxes by federal employees to introduce wolves into the West; something Congress had refused to authorize or fund.  I believe it was 2005 when I heard quietly that GAO had been renamed and now meant General “Accountability” Office and that their products had become “Accountability” Reports.

 

So, women and minorities filled most responsible positions, hired more and more people like themselves, were “bullet proof” toward anyone daring to anger them, and all this was duly noted by the aging white males concerned with holding their own career, marrying off daughters, paying college bills and lasting to retirement.

 

B.

Consider how this evolving preference-driven federal workforce coincided with and took advantage of all those “new” federal laws of the 70’s.  Set aside any mention of race or sex and imagine a federal resource workforce that is either totally ignorant of the duties and responsibilities of their job (i.e. GAO “Accountability” authors) or employees deeply opposed to the job (animal rights advocates, environmental extremists, imagine a Defense Department staffed largely by Quakers, etc.)

 

Universities that formerly taught resource management saw what was happening so they “re-oriented” themselves and all manner of “environmental” degrees were ginned up where management was anathema and “natural” and “human-free” were the catchwords.  Scientific rigor and honesty went out the window, the Universities asked what answer you wanted in order to get the grant.  Faculties were corrupted and more and more unreal agendas were put into play to stop a pipeline or justify condemning private property for government takeover.  Dangerous and Deadly predators were painted as cuddly things necessary for a “balanced” and “healthy” “ecosystem”.  Hunting and guns were no longer needed.  Grazing and logging, like hunting and trapping were to be outlawed along with fur, wood, meat and rural society.  Catastrophic fires were due to climate change and the only answer was for the rest of us to return to caves and eat berries (in season). 

 

All these things were and are preambles to the Socialist/Leftist agendas we now see in Universities and Law Schools where gun control is demanded despite the 2nd Amendment.  Where religion, free speech, the right to assemble or for a free press are all being rejected despite the 1^st Amendment.  Where secret warrants from secret courts are used to spy on political opponents despite the 4^th Amendment. The return of double jeopardy and denying even the President of the United States the right to a speedy trial and due process and the taking of private property without compensation for no “public” Use are all around us and have become common despite the 5^th Amendment.

 

As with the resource agencies, the Law Schools housed in preference-first Universities, evolved largely as a result of not “women and minorities” but by women/minority/white/male/socialists/progressives of the 60’s and 70’s that by means of EEO and political influence “took over” the staffs at the University, the Law School, the Natural Resource Management Departments, The American Bar Association (that is also Leftist like the American Medical Association and the American Psychological Association), and the Fish and Wildlife Service, Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, and Park Service; and cleared them like communists cleared Eastern European and Chinese populations of anyone “not on board”.  Is it any wonder that a conservative President with a conservative agenda is having such an uphill fight to do what he promised the voters he would do for them? 

 

Today’s laws, lawyering and bureaucracies are not what your folks or grandparents once knew.

 

C.

Human Nature being what it is, put yourself in the shoes of these vastly “preferred” “women and minority” employees.  Most of us do not want to think we aren’t “qualified” or that we are only where we are at because we were given breaks denied others.

 

By the time that all the EEO mandates were forming tsunamis, along comes the 1976 onslaught of every cockamamie political pandering scheme since Rube Goldberg and PT Barnum was enacted and regulations and policies were being set in concrete.  Dozens of newly-rich NGO’s swarmed to take political advantage by getting fellow travelers “hired, promoted and transferred”.  This, in turn, steered all the new legislation (and future amendment opportunities) to wreck hunting on refuges, logging on National Forests, grazing and mining on BLM lands, etc.  Control of grants to states brought them to heel as federal bureaucrats took over more and more authority.  Waterfowl refuges bought with Duck Stamp funds were quietly managed to be “natural areas” with no waterfowl food or water management as mandated in their authorizing legislation.  The waterfowl organizations, like state agencies and Universities no longer opposed either the public or private lawlessness condoned by lawyers and perpetrated by feckless bureaucrats that masqueraded as wildlife or forest or grassland advocates while quietly turning such lands into inaccessible fire pits to feed what have become perpetual catastrophic fire fuel producers full of predators and danger.

 

You see this is how these new lawyers, professors, bureaucrats and “conservation” organizations justify their preferences and entitlement.  They were hired to bring this “new” agenda forward.  All those old, white, males with their antique degrees were making such a mess of things that we (actually “I”) deserve to be in charge and anything we (“I”)want to do is protected from any accountability or even anything that even makes me “uncomfortable”.  It is right and good that people like us (“me”) are above the law and in charge of these agencies or this Law School and the quicker we get rid of that 5% that are still employed in our (“my”) turf, the better. 

 

Take that Professor Bainbridge and Jim Beers!

 

Jim Beers

7 January 2020

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Fires, Birds & Government

 

I just read the mildly amusing article below about the latest hypocrisy from the “smart” people about climate change and why our only rights should be what they allow, or the world will explode.

What caught my eye and the reason I am forwarding this is the four links in the middle of the article (Marked with an *) concerning all the corruption and faux science employed by crooked bureaucrats and politicians in Europe and North America to subsidize and justify the construction and expansion of wind turbine fields that are killing and have killed (as I have said for years) billions of migrating birds and bats. 

As you consider this cover-up by governments, the media, and “science” read and watch the current “stories” from Australia that billions of animals have been killed by the catastrophic fires and that 183 Australians have been arrested for “starting” fires.

The Australian fire “starters” and climate change “deniers” worldwide have much in common. They are both scapegoats for government laws and policies that create these massive problems (catastrophic fires, plummeting bird and bat populations, and eventually species).

Catastrophic fires are first and foremost a product of excessive fire fuel accumulation.  Control the available fuel and you have gone a long way in preventing and stopping “catastrophic” fires. In Europe, North America and Australia governments have increasingly, on both government and private land, prohibited burning, logging and grazing – i.e. management of fire fuel – to coddle their environmental “partners” and supporters with their modern urban fantasies from climate change to their distorted visions of the “ecosystem”.  Thus when the fires begin and common sense rural residents and landowners see the threat of fires to themselves, they defy the absurd government mandates and try to quickly burn the fuel that has accumulated near and around their residences and property,  For this it is inferred that they are match-happy arsonists that should be barred from human society when they are merely the latest common-sense rural demographics to be persecuted by dystopian urban leaders and their underlings. Thus are we told the fires are due mainly to fire “starters” and (drum-roll please) Climate Change!

Plummeting migratory bird and bat populations in the last three decades are primarily due to strategically (based on prevailing wind currents) placed wind turbine farms that coincide with the migratory bird flyways used for millennia and the soaring/hunting airspaces used by eagles, hawks and bats et al.  The US Fish and Wildlife Service has had primary jurisdiction over the migratory birds since 1917 with eagles, hawks and owls added opportunistically to that authority by subsequent Treaties and legislation.  Bats were always under State authority until they began disappearing and US Fish and Wildlife Service began “Listing” them by species. Think, at this point, about how current Presidential candidates are falling over each other about how good it will be to shut down all fossil fuel energy and put “millions” (their word, not mine) out of work to one day go to work for subsidized wind turbine and solar mirror quasi-government “companies”.   Do you remember USFWS fighting to minimize or prevent bird mortality due to government-subsidized wind turbines?  Me neither.  Do you remember the “environmental” Universities and professors going to the mat about bird deaths and other wind turbine effects on birds and bats?  Me neither.  Do you remember the media or all the (send-us-your-money) Bird Non-Government Organizations fighting the USFWS and Universities about protecting birds and bats from wind turbines?  Me neither.  No, all we are told when Christmas Bird Counts repeatedly find fewer birds and we are buying more mosquito repellent that it is all “due to habitat loss” and (drum-roll please) Climate Change.

Bird and bat population declines, like catastrophic fires, are caused by self-serving government (politicians and bureaucrats) in cahoots with self-serving NGO’s, the media and Universities.  They sell us story after story about why these things are happening with the accompanying audacity that only more laws and more funding and more government employees and more government owned/controlled land etc. are the answer! 

For instance:

• When moose declined in Minnesota as government-protected wolves (endangered/threatened??) increased and moose hunting was no longer possible; we were told it was not due to wolf predation but to ”unknown diseases”, “inadequate research” and (drum-roll please) Climate Change.
• While USFWS was charged with and paid to prevent the importation of “Injurious” Wildlife they failed to stop the importation of snakehead fish and Asian carp that have ruined thousands of square miles of US rivers and lakes and are currently, in an effort doomed to failure, spending millions to keep these fish out of the Great Lakes.  Send more money and more employees, please.

New Wave environmental/animal rights federal resource agency managers and employees are currently hard at work closing all federal lands to forest management, range management, wildlife management and generally clearing rural America somewhat like the English Land Clearances in Ireland and Scotland centuries ago that still linger in the memories of residents of those lands and their relatives since spread around the world.  How ironic that those poor people knew, saw and recognized what was going on and for what reason as everything was taken from them.  Yet we moderns with our computers, college-for-all, and instant communications face the same sort of tyrants burbling political lies, bureaucratic “processes”, faux “science, and TV “Documentaries’ sell us  these childish tales and we believe them, hoping they will deliver us.  Then as fires come over the horizon and birds and bats disappear, like baboons faced with a deadly threat, we cover our face with our hands and meekly wait for the deadly blow hoping for one more second of freedom and happiness.

 

Jim Beers

9 January 2020

 

Do we really face a climate cat–astrophe?

Must we put up with yet another eco-cataclysm fabricated and exaggerated by ruling elites?

Duggan Flanakin

One day I will write a book: 111,111 ways our saviors have proposed to save the planet from the coming climate-driven catastrophes and extinctions. Meanwhile, here’s one you may not have considered.

At my cat-loving daughter’s house the other day, I ran across one of her books – How to Tell If Your Cat Is Plotting to Kill You (by Matthew Inman). A little later, I saw this headline: “Hollywood Celeb Emma Thompson: Eat your pets to survive ‘climate crisis.’”

My first thought? “Emma must have read this book!” But I read the article and did other research. It turns out that Ms. Thompson has repeatedly warned the world that the supposed climate crisis means we must expect “crop failures, water contamination, damaged houses, and ruined lives.” She now says we may even have to eat our own pets in order to survive the coming climate apocalypse.

That means it’s not just a crisis. It’s turning into a bona fide cat-astrophe! A furr-ocious cat-aclysm rooted more in dog-ma than in science or actual weather and climate evidence! But a rallying cry nonetheless.

Despite what Ricky Gervais said at this year’s Golden Globe ceremonies about Hollywood types being “in no position to lecture the public about anything,” Emma certainly thinks she knows what she’s talking about. She has won two Oscars! And two Golden Globes! And in 2018 Queen Elizabeth named her a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire! So she is now officially Dame Emma.

Moreover, as of December 2019, she even has an award named after her, though perhaps not one she will brag about. In its inaugural competition, the London-based climate policy NGO, the Global Warming Policy Forum (www.TheGWPF.com), announced that it is naming its annual World’s Greatest Climate Hypocrite Awards “The Emmas,” after Dame Emma.

Noting how she had flown first class across the Atlantic to attend a climate protest in London, then jetted back the same way, champagne glass in hand, GWPF director Dr. Benny Peiser said her “shamelessness” and “lack of self-awareness” have “propelled her to the very top of the field. There are brass-necked business people and sanctimonious politicians aplenty, but none can match our Emma; she really is a worthy first winner of our prestigious new award.”

Former President Barack Obama won the eco-hypocrite prize in the Politician category, while Richard Branson took home the Business class laurels. But at least Dame Emma flew commercial. Leo DiCaprio is notorious for taking private jets and limousines to lecture us lesser mortals about how we must reduce our living standards to save the planet, while former VP Al Gore prefers private jets and SUVs to do so.

But don’t get your dander up about Emma. Turns out she is rather late to the game. 

Back in 2017, the online journal PLoS ONE published a report on research by UCLA scientist Gregory S. Okin: “Environmental impacts of food consumption by dogs and cats.” In the USA alone, Okin asserted, 163 million dogs and cats have a hugely detrimental impact on the environment, from the food they consume to the waste they produce. 

Okin found that US dogs and cats “consume as much dietary energy as 62 million [human] Americans” – and are responsible for 25-30% of the environmental impact of meat consumption in the USA. If these four-footed friends were a separate country, Catdoggia would rank fifth globally in meat consumption. Getting rid of dogs and cats, Okin gushes, would be “the environmental equivalent of removing 13.6 million cars from the road.”

Some cat lovers might note that his analysis emphasizes canines and conclude that the world is once again going to the dogs. The ever-grumpy Garfield certainly isn’t happy about that.

 

*Note the 4 “here” links at the end of these three sentences for an alarming background and update on what wind turbines and perfidious bureaucrats and politicians are doing to migratory birds and bats worldwide.. Jim

Indeed, back in 2013, utilizing a 3-year U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service funded study, researchers found that previous estimates that cats kill hundreds of millions of birds a year were very low. Cats actually kill between 1.4 billion and 3.7 billion birds annually, they reported, plus between 6.9 billion and 20.7 billion mammals – mainly mice, shrews, rabbits and voles. Not even wind turbines wipe out that many birds (and bats) annually: see here, here, here and here. 

 

Then there is top New Zealand economist and self-styled environmentalist Gareth Morgan, who created a foundation to promote his cat-killing ideas. Morgan demanded that New Zealand register and neuter all cats, raise the bar for “allowing” cat ownership, encourage citizens to cage-trap loose cats and turn them over to local authorities, euthanize all unregistered cats, fine all registered owners (!), and require that those same local authorities “dispose” of cats for free.

It’s been reported that Morgan is the local hero of the New Zealand Mouse and Rat Protective Society. But even Morgan is a piker.

Writing in the German leftist Neues Deutschland (New Germany), Katharina Schwirkus argued that, “In addition to their disgusting excretions, pets are also bad for the climate – because they eat meat and thus contribute to the emission of carbon dioxide” (and methane, we would add). Schwirkus says the ecological footprint of an average German cat is as large as that of a human Egyptian.

“If you want to do something good for the climate, you shouldn’t buy a dog or cat,” she insists. “The breeding of four-legged friends should be stopped in the long term…. [T]he romantic picture of pets must finally be deconstructed. Children should be made aware from a young age that it is absolutely selfish to keep a dog or a cat in a city.” People needing “comfort animals” will not be happy.

Meanwhile, according to “ethicist” William Lynn, writing in The Conversation, in 2015 the Australian government declared a war on feral cats, with a goal of killing over 2 million felines by 2020 via shooting, trapping, and “humane” poison. Lynn argued that there was no scientific basis for the government’s estimate of 20 million feral cats in Australia, nor for killing a tenth of that alleged number.

He instead argues that individual animals have a moral value, and that cats are themselves victims of human ecological errors. Lynn also questions the moral legitimacy of climate extinctionists who advocate for lethal management, which he says rests “on the assumption that individuals don’t matter – but ecosystems do. He concludes by saying “it is human beings [not cats] who bear direct moral responsibility for the ongoing loss of biodiversity in our world.”

(If you need some amusement and a break from the endless asserted and predicted climate catastrophes ... that don’t involve cats ... check out this 50 years report, other recap articles like this one, the outdated but enlightening and entertaining WarmList, and the WUWT Climate Craziness of the Week section.)

It is those same certain human beings – certainly not cats – who are spreading irrational fears about human-generated, plant-fertilizing carbon dioxide somehow, recently replacing the Sun other power natural forces in driving climate and weather fluctuations. Those climate crisis proponents insist that any climate and weather different from what most of Earth and humanity may have experienced over the last 50-250 years is unprecedented and will be cataclysmic.

They trumpet and bemoan the alleged coming climate extinction crisis – and produce massive volumes of “studies” and scare stories – telling everyone else what we must do to save the planet, while they the wannabe ruling elites tour the planet first class or in private jets, stay in five-star resorts, and demand that we eliminate just about everything that brings joy to the world of regular human beings.

Ricky Gervais is right. They are in no position to lecture us about anything. So enjoy your cat, dog, steak, car, overseas vacation and whatever else helps you enjoy your short sojourn on this wonderful planet.

Duggan Flanakin is Director of Policy Research at the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org)