An Explanation

If someone wants to dismiss me as a nutjob, so be it. People used to shout "faggot" and "pussy" at me and then knock me to the ground and kick and stomp on me, so if you want to call me a nutjob, you're a piker.

Any time someone points the finger at someone else I want to tear that finger off and stomp on it. Why? One scene that I saw in a few different movies was the angry mob gathering around someone who was peculiar. Then some woman, and in two or three different movies it always seemed to be the same actress, would pull a face, point a finger, and shout something like "Witch!" then the mob would storm their victim and pull him or her to pieces or throw them on a fire or something. This is a spectacle that is also arranged periodically in real life, to this day, as the public stoning, for example, of a girl who was raped by her male relatives, who complained about it to the police, then was convicted of adultery because after all she confessed to having sex with them.

The public stoning, public hanging, the dependency on ganging up on someone and showing his severed head around, these are anathema to me personally. They are indications that this society is going retrograde. Since around 1970 I have seen the signs of decreasing scientific literacy and competency, and similar problems with social skills. People work for less money and pay higher rent and utility bills. We have a lot fewer freedoms. The alleged misconduct of one person is used by our so-called legislators as an excuse to punish everyone who can be classed with that person, and we can't fight that by gang-beating someone who we identify as an offender because that won't stop the real ones and it definitely won't stop the ones that are put-up deals.

The evil ones, the animal liberation people who hate humanity and want us to die, depend on doing just this thing and it is easy to take away from them if we put away our desire to "go after" alleged animal abusers. I could give a crap what happens to animal abusers but it is not worth losing essentially everything that millions of people live for.

Think about that. People live for their animals. What kind of people live for their animals? Good people who do not deserve to be punished for the misdeeds of others who they cannot control in any way, shape or form. If the machinations of a few sociopaths end up punishing all of us severely, in the form of taking ruthless advantage of people who cannot afford decent attorneys, and we are reduced to shouting "Witch!" at a few animal abusers and perverts and burning them in a woodpile, we might as well not even bother to take out our anger. It's too little and too late. Every one of us who wants to attend that party would be a lot better off going home and cracking a few books, maybe some on science, on sociology and psychology, and some Chomsky for sure.

Not even the exercise of taking the most evil person on Earth, torturing him, watching his body being slowly eaten away by acid, poking him with icepicks, hearing his screams, would be better than that. Not even turning Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan into glowing craters will do your hearts as much good. Grow up, kiss your dog, open a book, and become a citizen again.

Landowners Killing Endangered Animals

On a recent episode of "The Mentalist" Patrick Jane got a man to admit to killing turkey vultures that were on his property because the endangered species laws would have prevented him from profiting from the oil sands that were buried there.

How could I possibly have sympathy for someone who would shoot, shovel, and shut up so that he and his family will have money for the rest of their lives? Maybe I've read too much Charles Dickens. Maybe I have a little too much sympathy for people whose lives have been ruined when jobs were sent overseas and the Department of Labor came up with tricky-dicky excuses for stealing their unemployment payments, including the young man who died in Kansas City in the fall of 2008 because he couldn't pay his utilities.

Wanting to be extremely wealthy is a logical and pragmatic extension of the desire to protect and nurture one's own family. A man in India shoots a tiger and lugs the carcass to a dealer, and if he doesn't get shot and does get paid, his family might eat for a couple of years on the tiny amount of money he gets. It's his family that he does it for. At the same time the law would force him to let the tiger walk unmolested through his village even though that is a far greater risk to human life than a tiger on a leash or in a cage.

Just one of the ways that an animal protection law can backfire is that if a citizen does his legal duty and reports that an endangered bird is living on his property, he may lose a lot of money because in spite of the law, they will take his land for public use without just compensation. So instead of reaching some kind of compromise where maybe the birds wind up moving, perhaps to an oil field that is being pumped but is fairly inactive, he either shoots, shovels, and shuts up, or accepts the fact that his family will not financially benefit from the land that he pays taxes on.

I'm not going to hold this against him. Everyone wants to make a small sacrifice to help the animals, and that definitely includes me. There is no need to sacrifice your family, your society, your technology, or your mind in order to help the animals. You can see how the people who gave up their minds behave. They would kill a man to save the turkey vultures. They would also starve him and prevent him from being able to pay his family's medical bills. That's what they really mean when they screech at anyone who makes money.

And on the other hand even a dirty, nasty, ratty dump of a place can save more precious lives than all of the refinement and high standards of an AZA zoo or a World Wildlife Fund project, neither of which have significantly helped any species. It's kind of inevitable because looking at a smattering of history there is a strong tendency to pretty but totally unproductive projects like the Necropolis. So if I were given a choice between a new 100 million dollar facility that looks really good or one that "mills" out the tiger cubs, I'm buying into the mill with all of its alleged mess and squalor because the mill will actually produce. The other choice is a high priced mausoleum whose exhibits are alive now but will not pass on their genes.