Category Archives: Environmentalism & Animal Rights

Pope In An Intellectual Wilderness

Capitalism, Christianity, Communism, Environmentalism & Animal Rights, Intellectualism, The West

I once read a papal encyclical: John Paul’s. With his 1998 encyclical, Pope John Paul sounded a lone voice for both “Faith and Reason” in the postmodern religious wilderness. Who else spoke with unhectoring clarity about the errors of relativism in modern thought? Certainly not Pope Francis. He’s too dumb to consider such abstractions.

That Jorge Bergoglio is shaping up to be a bit of a bumpkin is no surprise. He hails from the Latin American strain of Catholicism. And he, Pope Francis, is threatening to undo what Pope John labored to achieve: “steer liberation theology away from the influence of Marxist social analysis.”

In the 2015 encyclical, the Holy See saddles the richest nations with the blame for the despoliation of the earth, when the truth is that the developed world’s advanced technology has helped clean-up the atmosphere, the oceans and the waterways. It is the developing nations—China, India—that despoil the earth and its creatures most. The earth looks like “an immense pile of filth” not in Canada, Germany, or the US (except for where illegal immigrants tread: see “Illegal Immigration’s Negative Impact on the Environment”).

The love for the earth, its creatures and our pets (parrots, dogs, cats) is a distinctly Western sensibility.

The Catholic Crisis Magazine can’t help but take a swipe at the anti-intellectualism of this pope’s “close advisors”:

… the hortatory Cardinal Maradiaga of Honduras said [this] with ill-tempered diction: “The ideology surrounding environmental issues is too tied to a capitalism that doesn’t want to stop ruining the environment because they don’t want to give up their profits.” From the empirical side, to prevent the disdain of more informed scientists generations from now, papal teaching must be safeguarded from attempts to exploit it as an endorsement of one hypothesis over another concerning anthropogenic causes of climate change. It is not incumbent upon a Catholic to believe, like Rex Mottram in Brideshead Revisited, that a pope can perfectly predict the weather. …

Intellectually, Pope Francis is no match for his predecessors. And that’s putting it kindly.

Recommended reading:

“On The Line: The Impact of Immigration Policy on Wild Life and on the Arizona Borderlands”

“Environmentalism in the Light of Menger and Mises” By George Reisman (The Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics)

American Pharoah Flogged To Victory

Environmentalism & Animal Rights, Ethics, Sport

They’re both superb specimen. The one, however, is whipped into victory. American Pharoah, a beautiful and brave racehorse, won the Belmont Stakes on Saturday. American Pharoah’s jockey, Victor Espinoza, is a demonic dwarf who is known for breaking the horse’s skin.

I imagine this deformed tormentor will be celebrated as a big money maker, and the real workhorse will not get so much as a sugar lump.

The other exceptional specimen is, of course, Serena Williams. Serena won the French Open, also on Saturday, “and claimed a landmark 20th grand slam title and third in Paris.”

Serena is a human being, so she isn’t ridden to victory; or beaten into championship. Should American Pharoah suffer indignities because he is a horse? How about it?

Government’s Critter Kill List

Environmentalism & Animal Rights, Ethics, IMMIGRATION

Central planners and their scientists, especially the liberal ones, like a perfect natural world. To that end, they’ve developed a utopian idea of the natural world and will kill, kill, kill to achieve Order at all costs. Thus, when a remarkable flock of conure parrots made San Francisco’s Telegraph Hill its home, radical environmentalists wanted this flock—which has a complex and highly evolved social life—exterminated because it was not indigenous. It took a remarkable man to save these precious parrots.

While animals may not deviate from the preordained natural order, unless part of the indigenous human population, established human populations must be destroyed by centrally planned, human mass migration.

Of course, bureaucracies under Republican are no different in the critter kill lists they develop. Via Mother Jones:

… Department of Agriculture’s tally of every animal it killed or euthanized over the last fiscal year [is] … 2,713,570 … from 319 different species. … The culling, conducted by the agency’s Wildlife Services division, is controversial. That’s because—much like the actual kill list—the USDA’s operations are shrouded in secrecy, prone to collateral damage, and symptomatic of an approach that often uses force as something other than a last resort. (A 2012 Sacramento Bee series explored the problems with the USDA’s methods in detail.) One of the problems with culling wildlife is that once you’ve gotten into the business of killing some animals to save other animals, it’s awfully hard to get out of it.
The contradictions can be glaring. To wit, the USDA killed cats (730) to save rats, but if you’re scoring at home, it also killed 1,327 black rats, 353 Norway rats, 74 Hutia rats, 7 Polynesian rats, 4 bushy-tailed woodrats, and 3 kangaroo rats. It slaughtered more than 16,500 double-breasted cormorants to save salmon. It’s shooting white-tailed deer (5,321) to save various plant species and the small fauna, like rabbits, that eat them. But the woods aren’t safe for Thumper either—the agency bagged 7,113 cottontail rabbits, plus assorted varieties of jackrabbits, swamp rabbits, and feral pet rabbits. The USDA killed 322 wolves and 61,702 coyotes to save livestock, perhaps in an attempt to atone for the 16 unspecified livestock it killed by accident.

Via RT: “The Obama admin accidentally killed 113 porcupines last year.”

And:

Avoiding controversy can lead to cover-ups.

Gary Strader, a former USDA employee, told the Sacramento Bee he once discovered a federally protected golden eagle dead in a trap.

“I called my supervisor and said, ‘I just caught a golden eagle and it’s dead,'” said Strader. “He said, ‘Did anybody see it?’ I said, ‘Geez, I don’t think so.’”

“He said, ‘If you think nobody saw it, go get a shovel and bury it and don’t say nothing to anybody.’ ”

“That bothered me,” said Strader, whose job was terminated in 2009. “It wasn’t right.”

Motherf-cker Mugabe’s Menu

Africa, Environmentalism & Animal Rights, Ethics, Race, South-Africa

Question: What do you call a “person” who butchers and barbeques baby elephant?
Answer: A motherf-cker.

Lowbrow Robert Mugabe, as Foreign Policy has reported, “celebrated his 91st birthday followed by a lavish party with an exotic menu, reportedly including barbequed baby elephant. The brazen celebration was yet another reminder of the stark contrast between the increasingly venal lifestyles of the country’s politically-connected nouveau riche and regular Zimbabweans, who are now poorer than they were when Mugabe came to power nearly 35 years ago.”

A much better analysis of Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe, in general, and the significance of the unqualified support Mandela and his predecessors have lent to Mugabe over the decades, in particular, can be found in “Mandela, Mbeki, And Mugabe Sitting In A Baobab Tree K-I-S-S-I-N-G,” the title of Chapter 4 in “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa.”

Read “Just A Girl With A Gun; Not A Gratuitous Killer,” for the origins of the quiz in the post’s lead.