The Environment

I apologize for the brevity of this area. Though this is the single most important issue of humanity, I can find very little either funny or witty about it to comment upon. Sadly, it is a  problem concerning our short-term vision which is sure to do us all in.

    Wise Use

The largest block of PAC money to GOP House members - $7.5 million - comes from anti-environmental businesses.

The term Wise Use was coined by Ron Arnold in the late 1980’s for what he admits is “its ambiguous sound bite quality.” Arnold, a disgruntled Sierra Club member moved to the hard Right in 1981 co-authoring At the Eye of the Storm, an anti-environmental book overflowing with endorsement of then Interior Secretary James Watt. In 1989 Arnold teamed up with the premier conservative fundraiser Alan Gottlieb and together they began funding the Wise Use Movement and it’s three basic tenants: 

1)      Removing present environmental protections.

2)      Preventing future environmental legislation.

3)      To benefit the economic interests of it’s members.

Wise Use is not an organization but an umbrella movement networking over 400 individual anti-environmental groups many of which masquerade as pro-environmentalists to both confuse the issues and to get contributions from people who are unaware of what they are really up to. So be careful where your environmental donations are going. Do some research.

The most well known spokesperson for Wise Use is a piggish radio propagandist who has spent literally thousands of hours on the air defining environmentalists as Marxist Whackos out to destroy capitalism, democracy and our American way of life. The hum of the attacks dwell on the new pejorative concerning the word watermelon: Green on the outside Red on the inside. This keeps it all in step with the overall conservative outlook; anyone who cares about anything other than themselves is defined as an anti-American socialist.

Their next ace in the hole was Limbaugh’s anti-environmentalist mentor, the now good and dead premier anti-environmentalist in America, Dixy Lee Ray, who once headed the Atomic Energy Commission and was once governor of Washington. Her books and speech titles portend a pro-environment outlook while the body of her work is always in unwavering defense of the timber, mining, chemical, cattle, corporate-farm and fishery industries.

There is a great deal of similarity between wise use and creation science, though the latter is based upon anti-science and the former on pseudo-science, their common denominator is they attack science/scientists by painting them as evil know-nothings in a conspiracy to destroy the American way of life. Ray, Limbaugh and a host of conservatives dwell on two aspects concerning the environment in the same way Creation Science advocates use. Just as scientists cannot prove evolution in the absolute, neither can science prove the actual mechanism of global warming or ozone depletion in the absolute. Then they both use the anti-scientific method to come to their already arrived at conclusion; evolution, global warming, and the ozone hole are not only lies, but nonsense.

I am sure many of you had never heard of Wise Use before, but it’s largest most successful and most funded facet you see most everyday. Full page glossy ads in magazines, major spots on television and PBS credits from the most grievous polluters on the planet, all telling us how environmentally aware they are. They sink a million dollars in publicity to help some single popular cause while doing billions of dollars in environmental damage in a hundred other areas. These large corporations also feed so much propaganda and fear of environmentalism into their millions of employees, that they too have become anti-environmentalists in the hopes of hanging on to their jobs, when by far their greatest worry should be losing those jobs when the corporation kicks them out the door on their asses to move the operation offshore.

How can the intelligent American public fall for all this crap? The idea of Wise Use hit the conservative think tanks with Reagan and Watt in the early 80’s; it became an organized entity in 1989 and reached the billion-dollar mark in funding in 1991. Here follows what I hope is the blow you away fact of their success.

TIME/CNN POLL: Have environmentalists gone too far?

·        1991 17% answered yes.

·        1992 51% answered yes.

Follows a partial list of some of the national players and their funding, beware there are many more local and national hard-core anti-environmental organizations flying the banner of environmentalism to confuse the American public:

·        THE ABUNDANT WILDLIFE SOCIETY - Cattle

·        ALLIANCE FOR AMERICA - Timber/chemical/mining

·        ALLIANCE FOR RESPONSIBLE CFC POLICY - CFC makers

·        AMERICAN FREEDOM COALITION - Unification Church

·        AIM - Reed Irvine - Timber/chemical

·        CATO INSTITUTE - Libertarian Timber/chemical

·        CITIZENS FOR THE ENVIRONMENT- Timber/chemical

·        CHRISTIAN COALITION - Pat Robertson

·        COMMITTEE FOR A CONSTRUCTIVE TOMORROW - Nuclear

·        CONSUMER ALERT - Timber/chemical/mining front group

·        ENVIRONMENTAL CONSERVATION ORG - Land developers

·        FRIENDS OF THE RIVERS - Off road vehicles

·        EVERGREEN FOUNDATION - Champion Paper

·        GLOBAL CLIMATE COALITION - Myth of Global warming

·        HERITAGE FOUNDATION - Coors, chemical, GM, GE

·        INFORMATION COUNCIL ON ENVIRONMENT - Mining

·        INSTITUTE FOR JUSTICE - Land developers

·        KEEP AMERICA BEAUTIFUL - Packaging

·        LYNDON LAROUCHE - Rabid Anti-environmentalism

·        NATIONAL WETLANDS COALITION - Land developers

·        PEOPLE FOR THE WEST! - Mining/cattle

·        PUTTING PEOPLE FIRST - Rabid Animal Rights haters

·        THE REASON FOUNDATION -Libertarian anti-environmental

·        SAHARA CLUB - Off road vehicles

·        SEA LION DEFENSE FUND - Alaskan fisheries  

   Pope-ulation

“Population growth is the primary source of environmental damage.” Jacques Cousteau

There are many problems in the World today, but put them all together and they don’t hold a candle to this one. Because of this, there is no greater human enemy to the environment than the Pope (any Pope), who with malice aforethought not only decrees no birth control be used by his billion constituents, but tells Catholic families to have as many children as they can resulting in the starvation of millions and social upheavals killing millions more. Look pal, if you feel you must wear a dildo on your head, at least but a rubber on it

    The World in a Nutshell

“At least if we don’t close down the Environmental Protection Agency, we at least put a snaffle bit on them and ride the pony down. (Dick Armey (R-TX)

I no longer know where I got this but felt it important to include. If we could shrink the Earth’s population to a village of precisely 100 people, with all existing human ratios remaining the same, it would look like this:

·     There would be 57 Asians, 21 Europeans, 14 from the Western Hemisphere (North &    South) and 8 Africans.

·     51 would be female; 49 would be male.

·     70 would be nonwhite.

·     70 would be non-Christian.

·     50% of the entire world’s wealth would be in the hands of only 6 people and all 6 would be from the United States.

·     80 would live in substandard housing.

·     70 would be unable to read.

·     50 would suffer from malnutrition.

·     1 would be near death.

·     2 would be near birth.

·     1 would have a college education.  

   Global Warning 101

The United States with 5% of the world population and is responsible for 25% of the pollution.

The Sun sends out infrared radiation which warms our planet. Water vapor (clouds and humidity) and carbon dioxide are responsible for holding in the vast majority of heat along with much smaller amounts of methane and such, these are what we call greenhouse gases. Through the process of photosynthesis ocean plankton, forests and crops remove carbon dioxide from the air and turn it into oxygen (contrary to what Ronald Reagan may say) while in turn giving back carbon dioxide through the process of respiration. Clouds, humidity, volcanoes and the working of plant life make up about 98% of the Greenhouse gases that there is nothing to be done about, The remaining 2% is driven by humans which there can be something done about. I would suppose the conservative thinking on the matter is that that 2% doesn’t matter unless it represents a tax reduction for them.   

Carbon dioxide has almost doubled in our atmosphere since the industrial revolution. And the planet’s temperature has risen about one degree with a subsequent seven-inch rise in sea level. All glaciers are melting at an accelerating rate. It takes about a hundred years for carbon dioxide to dissipate in the atmosphere. So we are left with the old serious worries; weather changes, agricultural disruption and rising sea levels displacing perhaps a billion people in a few hundred years, to the new serious worry that projections regarding the recent acceleration of the processes may cause havoc in a few years.

Conservatives will do their best to try and deny even the proven facts of the matter, so you can imagine what they do with conjecture regarding computer models. 2500 scientists from around the world with no ax to grind other than giving a shit about something other than their portfolio, stand by the facts of the matter, and the logic behind it. It is not all that complicated; reduce the rate of greenhouse gas emissions to that of 1990. This means that we will have to reduce it by 10% over the next five years.

Japan and the European communities are asking that it be reduced by 15%. Republicans and the oil lobby are making a big stink. They say it will not only destroy our economy, but it is not fair to allow developing countries a more gradual reduction rate than the industrialized nations (read non-Christian non-White). They have won of course as one of the very first things Cowboy George did was pull the United States (the greatest energy user and polluter in the world) out of the Kyoto Treaty.

This is all very reminiscent of the tobacco lobby and their denial that nicotine is addictive. The oil and auto industries are going to deny global warning from their high-rise offices even as waves lap against their ankles.

Global warming is not only about rising sea levels, and changes in the weather patterns, but the subsequent increase in infectious diseases such as malaria, cholera and yellow fever, which kills mostly children. Anyone who would shill against saving the lives of sick children can be referred to as a Baby Murderer.  

   Where’s Dorothy?

“It isn’t pollution that’s harming the environment. It’s the impurities in our air and water that are doing it.” Vice President Dan Quayle

The characters are beginning to define themselves. Our new national environmentalist, Gail Norton is the Wicked Witch of the West directing her swarm of cadaverous flying monkeys to sell lead paint, remove wheel chair ramps, and destroy forests. The two now in charge are a Straw man in need of a brain and his underling Tin man in dire need of a heart. Where’s Dorothy with a couple buckets of water and a match?

    Our Friends the Animals

For the well being of our planet it is imperative that we keep our environment sound. We must conserve our energy and water, reduce our use of chemicals and pollutants, and most importantly, hold to the ecological balance of our planet by ensuring the well being of our animal life. Whether they be butterflies, wabbits, bears, rats, skunks, garden slugs or conservatives, we must both protect them and keep them from destroying that balance by over population.

After recently doing a study of the animalistic nature of conservatives, I sat down in front of the television with my pal Mr. Beam and surfed the talking heads with the Houston Chronicle and a Newsweek in my lap. At first it was uneventful, I would shake my head repeatedly thinking this and deciphering that, but as Mr. Beam leveled down, so did my brain. I was soon making emotional responses to whatever the issue happened to be. Along with many growls and spits, I found myself zinging off guttural snarls of: Fuck them, Screw them all, Shoot the bastards, inject the SOB, bomb the shit out of them, why should I care, damn smart people and my tax money. Once I even found myself standing up and singing America the Beautiful. So the question arises, are half the people in American just drunk on the first Tuesday of November or is this a more serious matter?

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