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The Expansionist
Sunday, April 29, 2018
 
It's Not 'Global Warming' That Is Devastating Puffins
Today, April 29, 2018, the news and feature program CBS Sunday Morning broadcast an insanely despicable segment about declining numbers of Atlantic puffins (an adorable, colorful sea bird) in Iceland that blamed that decline on "climate change", less surreptitiously called "man-made global warming".  Oh?  The story admitted that puffins are HUNTED and EATEN by Icelanders, and even that a restaurant the CBS crew ate at offered puffin hors d'oeuvres!  But that couldn't possibly be what's causing the decline in puffin numbers, could it?
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Never mind that people have killed off every last member of various species, such as the dodo and passenger pigeon, and very nearly exterminated the American buffalo, which once numbered in at least the tens of millions.  Enlightened U.S. Government action not just saved the buffalo from extinction but also made it into a food source that in no way risks the creature's continued existene. Indeed, on a visit to the Dakotas, I not just saw buffalos in the wild but also ate a buffalo burger. It was quite a disappointment, because pretty much every ground meat — beef, turkey, buffalo, pork   tastes much the same; odd but, in my experience, true, especially if you punch it up with some ketchup, a pickle siece or relish, and present it on a litely toaested hambuger bun (which is NOT a bun for a patty made of ground ham — which it might as well be, because almost no one could identify the meat. Wikipedia has produced a list of 67 pages of species rendered extinct by human activity, and admits that the list is NOT COMPLETE.   No, "climate change" is killing off the puffin!  SURE it is.
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Why don't we now just rewrite history and make the dodo, passenger pigeon, bison, and dozens of other species victims of climate change?!  Then we can sit aside, and let Viking savages who KILL and EAT puffins escape blame for their monstrous misbehavior.
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Contrary to popular belief today, the climate when dinosaurs thrived was much hotter than today.  You can find articles online with headings such as "EcoAlert: Earth was Stifling Hot During Peak Age of Dinosaurs", but, grotesquely, the word "degree" DOES NOT APPEAR in that article, and many others.  Still, the point is that life reached its apex in the size of animals, and probably plants, when Planet Earth was much hotter than it is today.  And, today, the places on this planet with the greatest biodiversity and proliferation of life are HOT.  That should not astonish anyone.  Compare (or, more sensibly, contrast) the Siberian tundra and Brazilian rainforest.  But you don't have to go that far afield to see the real effects of temperature on life.  Just look around you if you live in a temperate or cold climate and you can see that life in the cold is hugely disadvantaged and reduced, and MOST of what we see in the summer is dead or dormant in the winter.
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So NO, it is NOT [man-made] climate change that is decimating puffins, but barbarous, criminal behavior by Icelandic savages.  So many people are so stupid and rapacious that they destroy not just the very species their own lives depend on but also innocent-bystander species.   Dolphins are killed in tuna fishing; sea turtles die from bowel obstruction when they mistake floating plastic debris for jellyfish, a staple of their diet, in vast mid-oceanic islands of floating plastic; abandoned commercial fishing nets trap and kill large numbers of fish that are not harvested.  Elephants are killed for ivory that could be harvested by tranquilizing adult elephants and harvesting one trunk each, so they could still use one trunk as they need to; and rhinoceroses are slaughtered for their horns, which idiot Chinese savages employ in  traditional medicine and, astoundingly, to fight sexual impotence!  Yes, that's right.  A country with 1.4 BILLION people needs to make heterosexual men "horn"ier, so that, in time, China might have 18 billion people!  That's what this planet needs, isn't it, billions and billions of Chinese, at the cost of eradicating all species not required as food for those predatory masses!  Mind you, China has abandoned its one-child policy, because it feels it NEEDS MORE PEOPLE!  All the while, CBS and other Western media that should know better make EXCUSES for criminal savagery.  If the puffin has to go extinct because Icelanders are barbarians, and if elephants and rhinoceroses have to disappear from everyplace but zoos — and even one European zoo has been attacked by poachers — well, that's just too bad, or, as Walter Cronkite, CBS's most famous news anchor, used to intone, "that's the way it is".  But that's not the way it has to be. 
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"Human" beings DO deserve blame for hugely adverse impacts upon this planet, but "climate change" is not one of them.

- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 10:50 AM
Saturday, April 28, 2018
 
World's Largest Six-Year-Old
Donald Trump is a six-year-old in a 71-year-old's body.  He is 6 feet 3 inches tall and weighs 239 pounds. So, folks, we have a new world's record, the biggest six-year-old ever on planet Earth!  Whoop-tee-DU!
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That Trump's mental age is 65 years retarded from his physical age should not matter.  A lot of our "leaders" are highly deficient human beings.  Democracy is not supposed to bring out the worst in people.  At least that's not what we thought would happen.  But, because the human race is, in large part, slime, and aggressively self-vaunting scum run roughshod over their moral and intellectual betters, we end up with one mental defective after another after another, from Donald Trump to Bashar al-Assad to Kim Jong-Un, regardless of the ostensible form of government.  Democracy does not keep the unfit from taking over from their betters.
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The working theory behind popular democracy is that the larger the number of people involved in making a decision, the more likely they will decide wisely.  One person's perceptions will be balanced out by another person's, and one person's prejudices will balance out another's.  That often works, but the process can be thwarted, as by our idiotic Electoral College, which all too often NULLIFIES the electoral result, substituting the judgment of the minority for the judgment of the majority.  It is urgent that the Electoral College be ABOLISHED, but the losers of unfair Electoral College outcomes PERMIT this unfairness.  Why?  Why would the winner of the popular vote accept the defeat of the people?  Why is there no DEMAND that the Electoral College be abolished.  Why are there no mass rallies, no demonstrations shutting down the center of major cities, no chanting, no ANYthing?  Accepting anti-democratic results to elections is criminally irresponsible behavior, an assault upon democracy, co-conspiracy in injustice.  It is incomprehensible that any political party would co-conspires in its own victimization.
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The greater good of the greater number is a reasonable standard.  But it needs qualification.  How much greater the good, to how much greater the number?  And WHICH people are disfavored? as against which people are favored?  What if the people disfavored start out worse off than the people favored?  That is, what if the richest 1% or 2% of the population benefit hugely from tax reform, while the 98% disfavored are only slightly harmed?  But what if 30% of the people injured by the new taxation regime are pushed over the edge into catastrophic poverty?  They lose their houses, cars, and all economic security in old age?  Would the Trump reform of the income-tax system have happened if Hillary Clinton had won the Presidency, not just the popular vote?  Of course not.  So the Democratic Party has co-conspired in the passage of a tax reform that will definitely increase gross disparities in wealth.  In combination with changes in the funding of campaigns, this tax system ensures that American society will become more and more unfair, and the rich will become more and more callous to their fellow-citizens.  We are in essence suffering an American Counterrevolution, the substitution of plutocracy for our progress toward a just society, which has at times suffered jerks and reverses but has, despite setbacks, later resumed the march toward universal fairness.
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I am not confident that we are going to resume this march now, because the institutions have been fundamentally altered to rig the system against social fairness.  It will take a monumental effort to reverse recent anti-democratic laws and institutions — either that or a series of assassinations that will scare the rich, would-be tyrants into yielding rather than dying.

- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 3:47 AM

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