Seoulscapade

The Great Lights Kim Il-sung and his son Kim Jong-Il. They’re standing on the rim of Paektu Mountain. What few people know is that, as well as a cameraman, a sound recorder was on the spot to record pronouncements from the Great Orators. Although it was supposed to be later edited and dubbed, at the behest of the Great Fakers, some of what was really said was smuggled out of the country. Now, for the first time a translation has been made available, and here it is:

Dad: Look, Son, see all that. It’ll all be yours one day.
Son: That’s wicked, Papa. Thanks a lot.
Dad: See those work camps over there–all yours. You can work those bastards till they drop. Those camps are self renewing. We’ve got people who are born and die in there. It’s like a perpetual motion machine, only with humans. A constantly replenishing slave force.
Son: It’s like a factory farm, Papa.
Dad: Haha. Good one, Son. You’ve always caught on quick.
Son: Hey, I like that outfit. The Godfather, right?
Dad: You got it in one. Yeah, Brando, he nailed that part.
Son: Looks good on you. Kind of suits your, er, our business.
Dad: I thought so, too. But what the hell is that you’ve got on.
Son: This guy, a designer in Pyongyang, he said it’d impress the ladies.
Dad: Well, yes, it is time you found a wife.
Son: I know, but I’m worried about, you know, home life.
Dad: Oh, have all the affairs you want.
Son: You mean dancing girls are OK. They really spice my kimchi.
Dad: Haha. That’s my boy. Don’t be shy. They usually have the best asses.
Son: They’ll call me the Great Impregnator, won’t they Papa?
Dad: Hahahaha. A sense of humor just like your old man. Hahaha. Haha. Ha.
Son: Oh, yeah, I was at show the other night, you know, up on stage, and I told the one about getting free money and food by threatening nuclear war. Oh man, they loved it.
Dad: An oldie but a goodie. Sucks ‘em in every time.
Son: And I was up there doing the stirring the air with hands thing, you know, and swingin’ my hips like this, and everyone’s going “go Jongy, go Jongy, go Jongy.” Oh, man, I rocked the Kazbar that night.
Dad: That’s my boy.

As we knew all along, they were just Great Regularly Guys back in the day. But for the life of me, something about that photo fills me with loathing. Perhaps its the sense of pompous self-assurance and arrogance of people presiding over an Orwellian world controlled by fear, poverty, corruption and work camps.

Haw. Haw. Haw. Jolly good show!

At first I thought this guy might be a complete tosser—the one on the left, not the one on the right. (The one on the right looks like a tippling old codger rather than a tosser.) The one on the left is named Andrew, and a bad impression of him welled up in me when I stumbled across his blog.

It was full of conservative sentiment, a glorification of the Catholic Church, a devotion to monarchy, melancholic musings on passing traditions, rosy cheeked Norman Rockwell images . . . Hang on a minute, is this guy for real? Look at him: the paleness of the skin, untested by the elements, the softness of the hand, untrained for the operation of any tool (save the corkscrew and cigar lighter), the easy smile, uninhibited due to the smooth years of a sheltered upbringing—it should have clinched it for me that he really was a tosser.

I wasn’t convinced, however. There was something too . . . I don’t know . . . laughable about his content. That’s when it hit me. Of course! This is a parody site—this guy is a satirist! At that moment, my estimations of young Andrew soared. Suddenly I was appreciating the impeccable subtlety of his wit, the exquisite nuances in his observations, the comedy in his close-ups of the Pope. It was exceptional work, walking the finest of lines between satire and shame with such deft control, drawing out the conceit with such sustained poise. Nowhere were there any spoilers, nowhere the rehearsed hints, constant asides, or explained irony you get with blundering mainstream comics.

No, this was of a higher order. This guy’s talent was on another level—or so I thought. Then doubts crept in. Even in a work of such refinement, you’d expect to uncover at least one in-joke or two somewhere. But like I said, I couldn’t detect any sure sign or confirmation it was satire. And too much was adding up against that. On the left of his site were links to other sites advocating conservatism. The articles on religion and monarchy were too numerous, going on almost it seemed beyond a joke. All of it, in fact, was not even near a joke, I had to conclude.

My delight at stumbling across comic genius turned to despair. In realizing he was serious, I was jolted back across the line to the perception of lunacy again. With that shift in subjectivity, from apprehending lunacy to genius and back to lunacy again, in finally realizing he was serious, I was witness to how close an author, and indeed his work, can be to either genius or madness—naught but a hairsbreadth, a pinch, or a gnat’s twat. And how easy it was to cross from one side to the other, depending on the packaging. I doubt he realizes how close he is to producing sublime parody. Nor would he realize how easy it would be to redeem himself, by simply declaring somehow that his work is satire. Instead, he ruins its potential and puts it all to ill cause.

Yet what use has he of satire, of going against the grain? None, come to think of it. A life of pampered advances and easy choices combined with citizenship of the millennial generation must surely have resulted in endowing young Andrew with a gargantuan sense of entitlement. Why go against the flow? It is certain he orgasms daily at the thought of the enormity of the social machinery guaranteeing his current and future life of privilege. His is a world upheld by God, its great chain of being, fixed and immutable, allowing him to secure a rightful place on some lofty rung.

It it not just me who loathes his kind. I think there may be a whole world of loathing out there for Andrew, judging by the hilarious forward to his comment box. Never have I seen any blog provide such an elaborate guide for plebeians on how one should conduct one’s self when one is viewing a blog site. It is a most revealing and hilarious advisory.

PLEASE NOTE THE FOLLOWING:

• Do not leave comments that are rude, unconstructive, tawdry, name-calling, or that constitute ad-hominen attacks.

• If you notice an inaccuracy or something in need of correction, please either post a comment or send an email.

• If you have complaints about the content, nature, style, or tone of this website, please desist from visiting it and maintain a safe distance.

At all times, remember that you are a guest on this site and behave accordingly.

Right you are! I confess I came across this plea for propriety while looking for the nearest comment box, so that I could pour venom into it. When I saw this message, and after I had stopped laughing, I felt sorry for the guy. He has obviously been horribly harassed in the past. I declined to add my invective to the mix, since he’s heard it all before.

One thing I should concede, though. His writing is good. I certainly won’t take that away from him. At the end of day, however, he is just a pompous prat, the worse so for willfully pursuing a life of cliche, for not rising above the banal, for not seizing the opportunity to be a parody of himself.

You can visit Andrew’s site via the Morons menu.

I couldn’t resist noting an article I stumbled across that had me both despairing and chuckling at the same time. It relates to another report from earlier this year, as found here.

Animal cruelty-accused cites man’s ‘dominion’

By Vikki Campion
December 21, 2007 04:00am

A CANADIAN zookeeper who imprisoned a kangaroo in a tiny cage has drawn on the Bible to declare her own “dominion over animals” in court.

Shirley McElroy, owner of Ontario’s Lickety-Split Ranch and Zoo, outraged Australia when The Daily Telegraph exposed images of Tyson, a red kangaroo penned in a barren shed too small to jump in.

OK, for a start, I don’t know why Australians were so outraged when they apparently condone a huge roo-meat industry. Roos are shot in vast numbers, not just for pet meat but for supermarkets too, where you can find roo meat alongside beef and pork. If the shooter is good, perhaps it’s a better way to go for the roo than the torture of a life sacrificed to industrial agriculture prior to a trip to the slaughterhouse. But I digress.

In the onslaught of bad press that followed, McElroy temporarily closed her private, backyard zoo and Tyson has not been seen since.

McElroy faced court in London, Ontario yesterday charged with possession of native wildlife without a licence and faces a $CAN25,000 ($29,000) fine if convicted.

Sounds fair enough to me, except that I would have liked to see some jail time thrown in for good measure. Now, here is where despair is mixed with chuckling, a rolling of the eyes, a sigh.

In her defence she attempted to turn the dock into a pulpit.

Representing herself in court, McElroy read Genesis 1:26, which refers to humans ruling over all animals, from a paperback edition of The Bible.

Justice Helen Gale told McElroy: “This court is not a podium.”

After attempting to interrupt McElroy, Justice Gale left the court, telling the clerk she would return “when she’s finished”.

McElroy soldiered on, saying the court wanted her to give up her “God-given right”.

When Justice Gale returned, she told the court: “With the greatest respect to Ms McElroy, this is not the appropriate forum for scripture to be recited.”

What a moron. This was not part of McElroy’s strategy of building up to an insanity plea. No, she was not that smart. She was actually serious. I do applaud the Judge here, first by actually leaving the room! I found that hilarious. Then the judge’s expression “With the greatest respect to Ms McElroy” is icing on the cake, since we understand it to really mean “Enough of the excreta you retard.”

Outside, activists from Friends of Captive Animals held placards reading: “Where is Tyson?”, “What is Lickety-Split Zoo hiding?” and “Zoos should not be prisons.”

The group has offered a reward for information on the kangaroo’s condition.

Spokeswoman Vicki Van Linden said the group feared Tyson was dead.

“If he’s buried somewhere, if there are any remains, we think his life should count for something,” she said. “He certainly suffered and he has become a flag-bearer for many other animals in Ontario we know are suffering just as much.”

Lickety-Split keeps lions, other big cats, ostriches, primates and monkeys as well as native species.

Zoos in Canada only have regulations for native animals such as bears or coyotes. Keepers have no rules for exotic animals, including lions, tigers or kangaroos.

The World Society for the Protection of Animals and Zoocheck Canada this year found Lickety-Split was one of the nation’s worst private zoos.

Right there, you have it, where it says “no rules.” When no rules exist like this, as is the case all over the world, that’s when you get the ignorant and the greedy doing whatever they like. Christians have for centuries have been using ideology to justify the cruelty and exploitation of animals. And it is still continuing because there are not enough rules and because morons are still breeding. When you put an idiot like McElroy together with “no rules,” you are asking for abuse.

The youngest activist, nine-year-old George Evans, made an impassioned plea to McElroy: “I want the animals to have more room to move around, to have good food and a happy life.”

WSPA spokeswoman Melissa Tkachyk said the group would continue the crusade for rights laws for exotic animals.

“McElroy was brought to court for her manner with native animals and unfortunately it has nothing to do with Tyson’s well-being,” she said.

“We are working to ensure the animals of Australia are protected and treated fairly.

“Whether Tyson is alive or not, there are animals kept in similarly terrible conditions. We are going to keep up the crusade until their rights are protected.”

Thank goodness there are people like this out there, on the spot and getting some action. Thanks to their efforts, there is cause for hope, as reported here.

The McGuinty government announced Friday (Aug. 31) it would toughen Ontario’s animal protection laws, a move animal activists are calling an “historic commitment.”

. . .

In an Ontario Government press release, officials said the government recognizes the need to modernize the Ontario Society for the Protection of Cruelty to Animals Act to regulate premises such as roadside zoos, make cruelty to animals a provincial offence and ensure there are serious consequences for people who abuse animals.

Yes, “modernize” is what it’s about, moving on from the dark ages, working towards the civilization we have yet to achieve.

I had to laugh at the beginning of a post from seoulbuffoon, entitled “White trash among English teachers,” on the latest antics of said trash in Korea. Here’s how he starts it off.

There they go again!
The white trash in Korea are hogging the headlines for all the wrong reasons, as usual.

Hilarious. He was responding to the following article from the joongangdaily website:

English teachers arrested on drug charges
September 06, 2007

Police are investigating 23 people, most of them foreigners who teach English here, for smoking marijuana and trafficking in the drug, the Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency announced yesterday.

The police detained three on trafficking charges: two Canadians, 28 and 30, and a Ghanaian, 34. They could be sentenced to 5 or more years in prison if convicted.

In addition, the police booked three Britons, five Canadians, 13 Americans and one Korean. The maximum penalty is a fine and 5 years in prison.

All 23, except for the Korean and the Ghanaian, are English instructors at hagwon, elementary schools or universities. The Korean is a girlfriend of one of the teachers.

“Some of the teachers were intoxicated while teaching students,” said Lim Chang-muk, an inspector at the agency. “Officially they made about 2 million won at schools, but they made as much as four times more outside of their regular jobs, which violates their E-2 visa guidelines.

With an E-2 visa, foreigners can only work at the organization that sponsored them. Most of the foreign suspects hold an E-2 visa.

The suspects obtained marijuana and hashish from suppliers introduced through their colleagues, police said.

The police said they confiscated 620 grams (1.4 pounds) of marijuana worth 13 million won ($13,860) and 0.7 gram of hashish.

What the . . . are these guys really making something like 8 million won (around $8000) a month? OK, I’m going to start looking for a teaching job. If they can make that much and still find time to party every night, that’s for me. But you know, I doubt it’s true—the money part, I mean.

As for the rest of it, I’ve got no doubt. I once knew of a guy who used to smoke dope before he went to work at Harrods of London. You think anyone’s going to be a little more responsible at a hagwon?

But let’s get back to our outraged poster. He’s got a few things to say about white trash, which I am delighted to present.

No wonder the entire clan of English teachers have very bad reputation here among Koreans.It just takes a couple of these assholes to tarnish their image. Although, if you believe some of the crap that is posted on the Internet ESL forums, young Korean girls are just dying to get into bed with them!

For this reason, there are frequent outbursts of public opinion to throw them out of the country, driven of course by the media stories.

I do not blame the Koreans for their extreme positions, especially when it comes to English teachers, but I personally feel that the government itself is to blame for allowing the white trash to find employment here without adequate qualifications. Once the “hagwon” education system is regulated, things are bound to improve.

Also the craze among Koreans to put their kids in hagwons and learn English from “blonde heads with blue eyes” has led to this unchecked mushrooming of fly-by-night operators who in turn employ anyone who is white to teach the kids.

If that does not happen, we will continue to see regular stories about their antics and the outburst by the public. In the meantime, the genuine English Teachers and other expats will continue to face a prejudiced public.

Having said that, I must mention that a recent survey by the Gender Equality Ministry found a marked softening in attitudes toward foreigners.

Grrr . . . those bad white trashers. This is what I love to see—lots of indignation and white trash biting the dust.

The Korean media love it, too. Here’s an excerpt from the koreabeat website about TV show on ESL teachers in Korea.

Foreign English teachers have been arrested for smoking marijuana before lessons and habitually using drugs in seedy areas.

The number of foreign English teachers who regularly use drugs is increasing.

One is a Canadian, “S” (24), who entered Korea intending to teach English in September 2004. S worked at an elementary school before being hired by an English hagwon in Gangnam, being paid W3,000,000 per month for six hours of classes per day.

Police say that since 2006 S has been using that money to procure Ghanian marijuana from drug dealer “A” (34) and regularly smoked it afterward.

Police claim that S would even smoke marijuana into the early morning and then go to school and teach the students. Police explained that not only S but most of the foreign English teachers arrested taught English by day and smoked marijuana by night.

A source at the foreign affairs division of the Seoul Police Department said, “American and Canadian English teachers think Korea is a ‘land of opportunity.’”

They become hagwon teachers not only because there is no country which has much desire to learn English as Korea but because they believe they can make up to 1,000,000 won per month through illegal private lessons.

The source also said, “the majority of them find it easy to seduce Korean women and do drugs with them.”

Foreign English teachers see Korea not only as a ‘land of opportunity’ but also as a ‘perverted heaven’.

The case of “R”, a 26-year old American who smoked marijuana with his Korean girlfriend, is a typical case.

R, while living with his girlfriend “H”, a worker in her 20s at a foreign bank, is accused of going to bars and clubs in Hongdae and Itaewon after classes and regularly smoking marijuana.

The police investigation concluded that they were all working in local universities, Gangnam, Seocho, Yangcheon, Bupyeong, or Gwangmyeong in regular hagwons and were all exposed as having committed the same crime.

The police emphasized that to prevent the entry of these kinds of foreign English teachers inquiries have already begun into criminal convictions for drug use.

Police also emphasized that, “they had satisfied the requirement to receive an E-2 foreign language visa of having a degree from a four-year institution and there was no problem with their degrees. In the cases of other English hagwons it appears there are no problems.”

The number of drug users is increasing? Mmm . . . I don’t see any source for that? If it’s accurate, we can expect some more fun and games in the future. Every time I venture outdoors I’ll have Koreans checking my eyeballs. This could make me paranoid even when I’m completely straight. You naughty waegookin dope-heads! You’re going to ruin the “land of perverted heaven” for the rest of us.

But aren’t those broad statements by the authorities classics. I think they must have been lifted straight from Xenophobia For Dummies. The part about “using drugs in seedy” areas has me confused, though, because didn’t they state that teachers smoked dope before going to class? What are they imputing of hagwons?

Well, so long to the white trashers that got caught. You’re all replaceable—and I’m sure many your replacements will be just the same, since the criteria for gaining employment over here probably won’t be tightened up for some time to come.

Update:

Wow! They did tighten things up. Now you have to get a police clearance of some kind from your home country. I also heard something about a drug test.

Further to the argument against dominion over animals. . .

Just below you will see a depressing set of statistics that has left me a bit dumbfounded. Can it really be possible, I mean, really, that huge numbers of people on this planet are stuck in a kind of mental time warp, where they insist on uninformed thinking patterns that began to seem silly even 300 years ago? With all the information people have at their disposal, how can this result be possible. And what does this hierarchy of shame tell us? Are we to assume that education is seriously lacking in the countries at the bottom of the list? Or are we to assume that the humans there possess lower intelligence?

Need I have asked that last question when the US is at the bottom of the list? These statics came from an article in New Scientist on a survey conducted by Jon Miller at Michigan State University. And I quote:

Miller’s report makes for grim reading for adherents of evolutionary theory. Even though the average American has more years of education than when Miller began his surveys 20 years ago, the percentage of people in the country who accept the idea of evolution has declined from 45 in 1985 to 40 in 2005 (Science, vol 313, p 765). That’s despite a series of widely publicised advances in genetics, including genetic sequencing, which shows strong overlap of the human genome with those of chimpanzees and mice. “We don’t seem to be going in the right direction,” Miller says.

OK, so it’s not for lack of education, or to clarify, not for lack of the length of time people spend allegedly receiving an education.

There is some cause for hope. Team member Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education in Oakland, California, finds solace in the finding that the percentage of adults overtly rejecting evolution has dropped from 48 to 39 in the same time. Meanwhile the fraction of Americans unsure about evolution has soared, from 7 per cent in 1985 to 21 per cent last year. “That is a group of people that can be reached,” says Scott.

For “group of people” read mindless zombies.

The main opposition to evolution comes from fundamentalist Christians, who are much more abundant in the US than in Europe. While Catholics, European Protestants and so-called mainstream US Protestants consider the biblical account of creation as a metaphor, fundamentalists take the Bible literally, leading them to believe that the Earth and humans were created only 6000 years ago.

Behold, the culprits exposed! So, my second proposition, lower intelligence, was on the money. At the top of the hierarchy of the Great Chain of Dummies sit fundamentalists, dragging their country down in “signs of intelligence” charts. What is it about the US that makes fundamentalist Christians more abundant there? Is it the legacy of a Puritan past and the laughable belief that their country has a manifest destiny? Probably, but how do we sort out this debacle? Education, as always, is the solution–only, since it has increased over the years, it needs to be of a higher quality, perhaps of the sort Icelanders enjoy.

Miller thinks more genetics should be on the syllabus to reinforce the idea of evolution. American adults may be harder to reach: nearly two-thirds don’t agree that more than half of human genes are common to chimpanzees. How would these people respond when told that humans and chimps share 99 per cent of their genes?

Well, no, that isn’t the main issue here. It’s how are chimps going to respond when they are told they share 99 per cent of their genes with fundamentalists. I guess they’ll be as depressed as I am, since I share genes with those religious morons, too.

You’d be a fool to expect that women, society’s traditional nurturers, can be more trustworthy to do the right thing by other creatures sharing the planet. You’d be a fool to think they have a sense of moral propriety inherently superior to men. Some of them are just evil bitches, and you’d be a fool not to accept the fact. The following profile is about one of those.

I refer to the former Deputy Assistant Secretary for Fish and Wildlife and Parks in the US, Julie MacDonald, who resigned April 30, 2007, in the midst of a scandle and in disgrace. So what happened, what kind of things did she get up to?

Broadly, “Ms. MacDonald has betrayed the mission she swore to uphold,” as Wyden put it, a member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. It was a betrayal guided by self-serving powermongering and evil.

“It looks like another Bush administration official was protecting her own bottom line instead of protecting the public interest,” said George Miller, a senior member and former chairman of the Natural Resources Committee and a long-time proponent of the Endangered Species Act and Bay-Delta fish and wildlife issues.

THE WITCH AND THE WILDLIFE

A Department of the Interior Inspector General’s investigation found that she bullied U.S. Fish and Wildlife scientists, violated federal ethics rules by leaking sensitive government documents to friends, industry lobbyists and political allies, and illegally overturning scientific recommendations to stop protections for endangered species.

MacDonald repeatedly leaked internal Fish and Wildlife Service documents to business groups who opposed the Service and its environmental decision making in court. Some of these internal documents later surfaced as evidence in lawsuits filed against the Service.

She sent draft studies and preliminary discussions about application of the Endangered Species Act to the California Farm Bureau Federation and the Pacific Legal Foundation; to two people with e-mail addresses at Chevron; and to the father of an online role-playing game partner, who had no legitimate reason for access to internal Interior Department records.

An engineer by training, MacDonald had no scientific background. But she routinely phoned biologists to try to weaken protection for wildlife and force scientists to alter their findings about endangered species.

She was heavily involved with editing, commenting on, and reshaping the Endangered Species Program’s scientific reports from the field. She interfered with field reports such as the sage grouse risk analysis, a critical habitat decision for endangered bull trout, a designation of California’s northern and southern tiger salamanders as distinct populations, a decision about California’s delta smelt, and an analysis of California’s vernal pools as critical habitat.

In a number of e-mails and comments on the bull trout critical habitat decision, an agent of the IG’s office wrote, “MacDonald forced a reduction in critical habitat miles in the Klamath River basin from 296 to 42 miles.”

A former Endangered Species Director said that, “MacDonald did not want to accept petitions to list species as endangered, and she did not want to designate critical habitats.”

“In one case, she demanded that the determined nesting range of the Southwest Willow Flycatcher be shrunk from a 2.1 mile radius to 1.8 miles, so that it would not cross into the state of California, where her husband’s family owned a ranch,” said Wyden.

Which brings us to the conflict of interest issue. She improperly removed a California fish from a list of threatened species in order to protect her own financial interests.

She was actively involved in removing the Sacramento splittail fish from the federal threatened and endangered species list at the same time that she was profiting from her ownership of a farm that lies within the habitat area of the threatened fish, according to an investigative report published Sunday by the “Contra Costa Times” newspaper.

MacDonald’s financial disclosure statement shows that she earns as much as $1 million per year from her ownership of the 80 acre active farm in Dixon, California.

This only scratches the surface of the travesties she committed.

ILLEGAL ACTIONS COME TO AN END

Final she was stopped. “Julie MacDonald’s reign of terror over the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is finally over,” said Kieran Suckling, policy director of the Center for Biological Diversity, a nonprofit conservation group based in Tucson, Arizona. “Endangered species and scientists everywhere are breathing a sigh of relief.”

To redress the evils McDonald committed, federal biologists are going to reconsider several decisions affecting endangered animals that were improperly influenced by her. They will review and probably overturn eight decisions on wildlife and land-use issues. Among the decisions that could be reversed is the determination last year to slash 90 percent of the proposed critical habitat for an imperiled frog in California. In the East Bay, 99 percent of the proposed critical habitat for California red-legged frogs was eliminated.

But some conservationists say the scope of the review of too narrow.

“Although we are glad these species will receive consideration for additional protection, the list of decisions to be reconsidered is outrageously incomplete and appears to be a token effort designed for damage control and cover up, rather than an attempt to address the problem,” said the Center for Biological Diversity, CBD.

“Fish and Wildlife’s reconsideration of eight decisions tainted by former assistant secretary Julie MacDonald is a day late and a dollar short,” said CBD conservation biologist Noah Greenwald.

“Despite no scientific training, MacDonald interfered in dozens of scientific decisions concerning endangered species – only a full and transparent accounting of all the decisions tainted by MacDonald’s malignant influence can undue the damage she has done,” Greenwald said.

Greenwald says the list fails to include decisions to not list the Mexican garter snake, to potentially delist the marbled murrelet, and to sharply reduce critical habitat for the bull trout, even though regional directors of the Fish and Wildlife Service specifically requested that these decisions be reconsidered because of MacDonald’s influence.

The list also fails to include reconsideration of critical habitat for a fish called the Sacramento splittail, even though a story by the “Contra Costa Times” newspaper revealed that MacDonald may have illegally limited designation of its habitat to avoid an 80 acre farm she owns in Dixon, California.

“We welcome Julie MacDonald’s resignation,” said UCS Scientific Integrity Program Director Francesca Grifo, “but she represents a much larger problem of widespread political interference at federal agencies.”

“The real culprit here is not a renegade political appointee.” Grifo said. “The real culprit is a process where decisions are made behind closed doors.”

REDNECK POLITICS OVER SCIENCE

MacDonald’s actions sparked an outcry among agency biologists and environmental advocates and led to a series of hearings in Congress on whether the Bush administration was politicizing science.

Rep. Nick Rahall, chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, praised the Interior Department for “stepping up to the plate to begin addressing the ‘politics trumps science’ ploy endemic throughout this [Bush] administration.” His committee held a hearing on MacDonald’s actions shortly after her resignation was announced. Mr. Rahall added, “What we have learned to date raises concerns about political tinkering with science that has affected many endangered-species-related decisions — and goodness knows what else — that deserve further scrutiny.”

The conflict between science and political ideology has been a recurrent theme in Washington in recent years, with complaints arising from inside and outside the administration about decisions on oil exploration, timber rights, global warming and public health. Just last week, the former surgeon general Richard H. Carmona said top Bush administration officials had repeatedly tried to water down or suppress important public health reports for political considerations.

“But MacDonald was the administration’s attack dog, not its general,” Suckling said. “The contempt for science and law that she came to symbolize goes much deeper than a single Department of Interior employee.”

“It’s a travesty that a high-level political appointee with no training in biology is rewriting the conclusions of U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service scientists,” said Melissa Waage, legislative director for the Center for Biological Diversity. “The Bush administration has an unwritten policy to systematically deny protection to imperiled wildlife, dooming them to extinction.”

Thank goodness there are people out there that are combating such evil bitches. The problem is that people like that, who make life a little bit more like hell on Earth for living creatures, are everywhere in our midsts and in the corridors of power. What a shame they can only picked off one by one. What a shame they are not an endangered species.

Sources:

http://www.philly.com/philly/wires/ap/news/nation/washington/cabinet/8636542.html
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/jul2007/2007-07-20-04.asp
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/mar2007/2007-03-29-09.asp#anchor1
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/may2007/2007-05-01-03.asp http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/may2007/2007-05-21-06.asp
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/21/washington/21interior.html?ref=us
http://www.contracostatimes.com/news/ci_6432056

For more, see this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julie_MacDonald

“. . . not to know what has been transacted in former times is to continue always a child.”
Samuel Johnson

The opening of the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, represents yet another dubious addition to Christianity’s long history of misinformation. It’s more like a kiddies fantasy fun park than a place of serious scholarly record, although you can be sure many of its visitors are not the kid of people who can tell the difference. It looks second rate and highly artificial; nothing can hide the cheapness of a lie to people who know a lie when they see it.

To give credit where credit is due, I commend the way designers avoided showing Adam’s and Eve’s genitals by immersing them up to their navels in pond water. I trust there were no leeches in paradise. There were dinosaurs, though; the museum has lots of dinosaurs, as if their existence were an inconvenient sticking point in theology, as if it were compensating overmuch for their biblical absence. Dinosaurs even survived Noah’s flood, the museum will have you know, because they were right there on Noah’s Ark with all of God’s other creatures.

From The birthplace of the Christian resistance
Anne Marie Owens, National Post
Published: Saturday, June 02, 2007

Beyond the gates, thousands of believers were on hand for the opening of the grand, 5,600- square-metre museum built entirely around a literal and faithful interpretation of the biblical version of Earth’s creation, which holds that it all occurred within the course of seven days; that major geological formations such as the Grand Canyon were a result of the Great Flood that set Noah’s Ark afloat; that humans descended from Adam and Eve and not apes; and that dinosaurs co-existed with humans when the Earth was formed, less than 10,000 years ago, not the 4.5 billion years that science generally contends.”In terms of science, we should be laughing,” says Professor Cooper, who teaches biology at the University of Kentucky and, on this day, has joined a haphazard bunch of protesters scattered along the edge of the country road leading to the museum.”But if parents start bringing their children here, and they get affirmation as if this is the science behind their beliefs, they’ll grow up believing it ? By the time they come to us, we will have to deactivate everything they’ve been taught as science. “It’s already happening.”Indeed it is. One of those believers on the other side of the gates on this day is Jenny Pafford, a 20-year-old senior studying nuclear medicine technology in Nashville who has been waiting for this museum to open for years — even sending in sporadic donations to speed its construction — and who spends much of her time trying to disabuse her scientific colleagues of their notions around the age of the Earth, human descendance from apes and the like.She is wearing a T-shirt that proclaims on its front, “The Earth is 10,000 Years Old,” and on the back, below a picture of an ape, “And This is Not My Great-Great Grandmother.”"I consider myself a creation scientist,” says the fresh-faced Ms. Pafford, who is touring the museum, and holding court on the nature of how she reconciles faith and science, while her parents look on proudly.

She has just finished having her picture taken in front of the display in the museum’s entranceway, an intentional, stopin- your-tracks scene showing a life-like child cavorting in lush greenery with dinosaurs. It is but a prelude to the showstopper around the corner, which displays Adam and Eve in a Garden of Eden abundant with dinosaurs.

Creationism for Dummies

This, quite clearly, is no average museum of natural history. This is a site of resistance in the ongoing, and surprisingly intense, fight over evolution and creationism in America.
“I don’t know if it’s going to make any more people believe just because they’ve come,” says Ms. Pafford, “but the people who believe often feel as if they can’t make a stand because they don’t have the information — this gives them the information to make their stand ? What they’ve done here is they’ve filled the void in providing scientific information for creation.”This is the one point that she and Prof. Cooper agree upon, that the Creation Museum fills some kind of knowledge gap. From Prof. Cooper’s perspective, however, the gap being filled is a troubling educational one, and in particular, a lag in scientific literacy, which he argues allows these unproven theories to take hold: “If the quality of teaching, of schools, is already getting lower in quality, that will form a vacuum, and the vacuum will be filled with this nonsense.”He says Kentucky is fertile ground for such controversial theories, which gain currency here because educational levels are among the lowest in the country, science knowledge among the worst, and religious groups like the one behind this museum — Answers in Genesis –hold a great deal of sway.Prof. Cooper did his postdoctoral work a decade before coming here at the University of Toronto, and he says a museum such as this one — which cost US$27-million to build, drew 5,000 people on its first day, and had its animatronic displays and special-effects shows overseen by a Disney designer — is almost unthinkable in Canada.

Literal Interpretation of the Bible

Everything about this place is an overt testament to this literal reading of the Bible. “Prepare to believe,” says the slogan at the entranceway. The Six Days of Creation Theatre spells out the daily countdown of the Earth’s origin; the Ark Construction Site room is a wood-panelled replica detailing what it claims are the exact measurements of Noah’s vessel; the Special Effects Theatre delivers sprays of water and quaking chairs as it spells out the story. There are fossils, explained not by the passage of time, but by the effects of a weather change as sudden and intense as in the Great Flood; ditto for the Grand Canyon, according to detailed charts explaining its formation. . . .There is a comparison of family trees, with one set out under “Human Reason” and the other according to “God’s Word:” One shows the first ape about 20 million years ago, branching up to various apes, and over to the famous Lucy, believed to be the bridge to humans; the other shows God making “the beast of the earth after its kind,” with apes branching up to apes, including Lucy, and, on a separate tree, “man created in God’s image.”During a pause to take it all in, a mother taps her young son on the top of his head and tells him to look at the ape in the picture. “Does that resemble you, Luke?” she says playfully, as if such a notion is all nonsense.

Clash at the Center of Ignorance

The vision behind this is Ken Ham, an Australian who moved to the U.S. two decades ago, founded his mission group, and ever since has been proselytizing that the true story of the Earth’s creation lies in the Book of Genesis.His aim with the Creation Museum, about 13 years in the making, is multi-pronged: to reach non-Christians with the Bible’s message; and to equip Christian families with the answers they need to explain creation science when their children come home from school asking about evolution, the advanced age of the Earth’s geological rock formation, and so on.He was originally fighting to have the museum set up near Great Big Bone Lick State Park, not far from here, where early nomadic humans hunted and co-existed with giant woolly mammoths and mastodons. Such proximity would have made an easier sell of his whole humans-coexisted-with-dinosaurs message.Rev. Mendle Adams, a United Church pastor from nearby Cincinnati, was among those who drove the group from that site, and is here on the museum’s opening day to show his displeasure.Back then, he recalls, they described themselves as an operation so small that all their materials fit into a single bucket. These days, however, Answers in Genesis is a huge radio, television and publishing powerhouse, and the museum gift shop — with its US$39.99 T-shirts, its US$59.99 Pilgrim’s Progress hardcovers, its shelves filled with DVDs and specialized home-schooling materials — abounds with evidence of a vibrant commercial operation.”What makes this dangerous,” says Rev. Adams, “is that this doesn’t just stay in this one spot. People expect this to be taught in the schools, but there’s nothing scientific about it at all. I think it’s important for people like me to say, ‘You can be religious, and not believe this stuff.’ “Another protester nearby has a sign that captures the sentiment: “Creation Museum: Bad Science. Worse Religion.”

From In the Creation Museum, it’s all by the Book
San Francisco Chronicle Laughing at Kiddy Science

The text below the display case says scientists are “puzzled” by the varieties of finches. “The Bible provides the explanation,” the text continues. “In the beginning of time, six thousand years ago, God created every kind of bird, including the finch kind, and He gave them the ability to ‘multiply on the Earth.’ “. . .Because history began only 6,000 years ago, they argue, dinosaurs discovered in the fossil record must have coexisted with humans. In the diorama that greets museum visitors, models of baby T-rexes cavort among animatronic children clad in buckskin.Dinosaurs, in fact, are all over the Creation Museum: Visitors can plunk down $29.99 for a plastic apatosaurus in the gift shop. Their kids will be able to saddle up on the back of a model triceratops by the coffee bar.”Kids are fascinated by them,” said Ken Ham, president of Answers in Genesis, who says the creatures have too long been used as propaganda for the evolutionist cause.”We like to say, ‘You’ve captured them for evolution, and we’re going to take them back,’ ” Ham said.The museum, with its flat-screen TVs, coffee bar and special-effects theater, is an attempt to go mainstream with an idea that has been widely discredited by modern science. And that is a concern for defenders of evolutionary theory. Campaign to Defend the Constitution, a project of the Tides Center that advocates science education and the separation of church and state, recently compared the museum to cigarette ads focusing on the young.

“This is to science what Joe Camel was to health — a crass marketing ploy that cynically preys on the impressionable minds of children,” campaign co-director Clark Stevens said in a statement.

Ham, a former Australian schoolteacher who founded his ministry in 1979, said he simply wants people to “think about the origins issue” in a new way.

“You have secular museums in every major city that treat evolution as fact, and public schools around this nation treating evolution as fact, and they’re worried about one Creation Museum?

“If evolution is so obvious,” he said with a smile, “why are they so worried?”
(I’ll take a stab at that one: because ignorance breeds ignorance?)

. . . scientists such as Lawrence Krauss laugh out loud.

“. . .remarkable,” said Krauss, a physicist and astronomer at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. “Any child knows that when they make up a story, and unfortunately make up the facts, they have to make up more and more excuses to justify those facts.”

From Inside the Creation Museum
Salon NewsThe World According to Ham

At the ribbon cutting, Ken Ham told the enthusiastic crowd that the Creation Museum will … “show that belief in every word of the Bible can be defended by modern science.”. . .As Ham later tells me, the conclusions of modern science are not to be trusted, as they are biased by the fickle reasoning of man and a modern antagonism toward faith. On the other hand, he says, the Book of Genesis is true “from the first word to the last.”The museum is situated in . . . an area chosen in large part because it’s within a one-day drive for two-thirds of the country or 200 million Americans. Recent polls show that 40 percent of all Americans would feel at home with the views put forth in the Creation Museum. Only about an equal percentage accept the underlying message of the country’s mainstream science museums. Only 39 percent answer yes to the question, “Do you believe that human beings as we know them developed from earlier species of animals?”The museum’s 49 acres of carefully landscaped grounds are encircled by a tall metal fence. Visitors tempted to enter without paying will be discouraged by armed guards in black state-trooper-like uniforms and attack dogs. On Monday, just outside the fence, a group of 50 die-hard atheists and skeptics are gathered in the light rain under a “Rally for Reason” banner. Overhead, a small airplane pulls a sign that says, “Thou Shalt Not Lie.” Edwin Kagin, national legal director for American Atheists, explains that as far as he’s concerned, AIG “can teach that things fall up if they want. But we want to make it clear that this nonsense is not accepted by those who do not share its fundamentalist religious views. They are trying to drag us back to the Dark Ages.”Among the damp roadside protesters is Lawrence Krauss, author and physics professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, and a member of the advisory board of Defcon: Campaign to Defend the Constitution, the group that paid for the airplane tugging around the Seventh Commandment. Krauss calls the museum “anti-science” and says it reflects an erosion of American science education, posing “a threat to American kids already struggling just to get the basic concept of what science is and how it works.”. . .Mark Looy, co-founder of Answers in Genesis, is walking me through the museum. He explains that the great flood is responsible for the fossil record. Plants and animals are distributed in different strata based not on the time of their formation, but on where the flood waters moved them before receding. Those areas where no thorns or other defensive or hostile plants are found, he explains, are pre-flood forms.

Later Ham tells me that his skeptics, who cling to the “millions of years” theory, are wrong about when dinosaurs stalked the Earth. He cites a recent discovery of intact blood vessels in some T. rex tissue, suggesting that the finds are only thousands of years old, not 65 million, as paleontologists say. “They will try to come up with an explanation to keep the fossils old,” says Ham, “but we don’t need to. The explanation of their age is already right there in the Bible.”

For generations, paleontologists have shown that dinosaurs and humans never trod the Earth at the same time, that in fact with the exception of birds (modern-day dinosaurs), they never got within 60 million years of each other on the timeline of natural history. Not so, says Looy. “They all had to exist at the same time because they were all made on the same day. There may not be any fossil evidence showing dinosaurs and people in the same place at the same time. But it is clearly written that they were alive at the same time.”

In the Garden of Eden in Genesis, says Ham, when everything was still perfect, animals weren’t predators or prey, so the museum’s designer, Patrick Marsh, is able to crowd grizzly bears, wildcats, zebras, kangaroos, an iguanodon and several other dinosaurs into the same little chunk of primeval Eden. After the fall, such a scene would result in a bloody mess.

. . .

The Garden of Eden presents a series of scenes down a “trail of life.” In the first, a bearded, dark-haired Adam beckons to a mountain lion with one outstretched arm, while the other is wrapped around a little lamb. Smaller animals appear drawn to Adam, who is perhaps naming them, God’s first assignment for him. A bit farther along we’re introduced to Eve, looking like a great big brown Barbie and staring intently into Adam’s eyes. Adam and Eve are naked, and Maggie and Tom Thorne, a pair of Christians visiting from Michigan, are smiling at the scene. They agree it seems a little unfair for God to expect two such well-designed specimens not to get around to sinning pretty quickly. A few yards further we see Adam and Eve again, this time standing in a pool of water, their genitals coyly obscured by lily pads. Now they definitely appear to be grappling with the chemistry that will get them in big trouble.

An oversize cobra-like snake makes an appearance, and before you know it, Eve is holding grape-size, blood-colored fruits in her outstretched hand, offering knowledge of good and evil to a flummoxed-looking Adam. “We’re not sure what kind of fruit it was, but we do know it wasn’t an apple,” says Looy, perhaps to demonstrate the kind of questions the several Ph.D. researchers at the museum are now toiling over in the labs behind the walls of the exhibition space.

In the next scene, after the fall from grace, Adam and Eve, looking far less happy than before, are standing next to two lambs they have slaughtered on a sacrificial stone table. The sacrifice has a practical value — the original couple are now wearing lambskin suits and the lambs are skinless — and a spiritual one; the lambs are sacrificed, a visitor explains to me, in partial payment for the debt incurred by Adam and Eve for eating the fruit of knowledge. I tell the visitor it seems unfair for the lamb to pay for their mistake. “Well, it wasn’t enough,” he says. “God had to send his only Son to pay the ultimate price for their sin.” When I tell him that sounds kind of extreme, he looks at me and shakes his head slowly a couple of times before moving on.

Inside the Garden of Eden, Nancy Senai, who is visiting from Lansing, Mich., tells me, “It feels pretty nice to have something that is for God and about God, instead of all the evolution in other places.” I ask her if she thinks the history presented here is true. “God said it clearly, and I believe it the way he said it,” she says. “Everything else is uncertain.”

The great flood, which washed away all life on earth, is the key to understand the Catastrophe exhibit and the museum’s version of natural history. After Adam and Eve’s original sin, God told Noah to build an ark. He sent him two of every kind of land animal to repopulate the earth. Visitors to the museum walk among robotic representations of Noah and his building crew as they construct a supposedly full-scale section of the boat. After Noah has invited his sinning neighbors onto the ark and warned them of the coming flood, they mock him or are dissuaded from heeding his advice by the small pressures of daily life. The door slides shut and they are left behind to drown in the 40-day deluge that formed everything we see on Earth today, from Mt. Everest to Death Valley.

In Ham’s view, the great flood explains not only where scientists find fossils today but also the topography of the modern world. The Grand Canyon, he informs me, was made in a matter of days or weeks as the waters of the flood rushed away and the land was reclaimed. In the exhibit, you walk through a winding canyonlike corridor with spinning, dizzying lights into a wide-open room with videos, exhibits and diagrams explaining the hydrology of instant canyon-making. Ham says that instant canyon-making is based on the fact that volcanoes, such as Mount St. Helens, created reservoirs of water for a time in their altered topography. When those reservoirs breached, deep grooves were cut by the flowing water, leading to the fast formation of canyons.

After the flood, Noah’s descendants multiply again on Earth, but not quickly or broadly enough to satisfy God, who then introduces a slew of new languages to drive people apart, resulting in their dispersal around the globe. The ensuing C-for-Confusion theme is represented through a gritty and menacing back alley postered with newspaper headlines about the rise in abortion, drug use, homosexuality and teen suicide.

The entire exhibit, in fact, is awfully grim. A montage slide show of fetuses, starving kids, swastikas, tourniquet-bound arms ready for the needle bombard the wall in a room with a soundtrack of blaring sirens, boots marching in unison, and crying kids. In the middle of this urban mess is a big wrecking ball with the words “Millions of Years” carved into it. Ham blames the notion that the Earth is quite a bit older than the Bible suggests for just about all the world’s problems. Evolution, which requires large amounts of time for small changes to accumulate into larger ones, makes it far too easy for people not to believe the Bible, he says. And that loss of belief “is at the root of modern evil.”

Inside the Confusion exhibit, I strike up a conversation with Tim Shaw, a high school student visiting from Florida. “I don’t care how long it took to make the Grand Canyon,” he tells me. “It’s not how old it is that matters to me. What matters is being right with God. Darwin’s theory has no God. It can’t be right. I don’t know if this story is truer than Darwin’s theory, but I do know it’s better.”

* * *

Thanks kid—by example, you help to show exactly what I’m trying warn everyone about.

Jo Ann Smith rose high in beef industry. It’s been good to her and she’s done a lot to advance its cause. That’s not to say she’s done a lot to lessen the suffering of the victims of that industry, the animals themselves. Far from it. Her life was devoted to increasing meat consumption, not improving animal welfare. Suffering is not the point, making money is the point, and that is why she was and is lauded throughout the industry.

She rose high in the meat industry and then high in government. It all started 70s. She was a fifth-generation cattle rancher, who climbed the ranks of the National Cattlemen’s association. In 1985, she became the first female president of the that Association, and went on to be regarded as one of its most effective leaders ever.

She believed her calling was to “express the positive story about beef,” as she said in her NCA acceptance speech, and “that’s what I do best.” Then she set out to aggressively promote the beef industry, traveling from one end of the country to the other. Following her term as NCA president, she continued her promotion campaigns based on the famous slogan “Beef. Real Food for Real People.” Yes, promoting was her thing, and in fact, she is probably best known as the founding chair of the Cattlemen’s Beef Promotion and Research Board.

With the meat industry behind her, Smith gained the position of assistant secretary for Marketing and Inspection Services of the U.S. Department of Agriculture from 1989 to 1993. I guess it is equivalent, if you will forgive the old cliche, to putting Dracula in charge of a blood bank, or a lunatic in charge of the asylum.

It’s a fair question to ask, the question Gail Eisnitz puts in her book, Slaughterhouse, concerning a conflict of interest here.

Would the beef industry’s top spokesperson, an individual whose life’s goal was to increase beef consumption, really make an appropriate candidate as the nation’s chief watchdog ensuring compliance with regulations in federally inspected plants?

One of the first things Smith set out to do was “stretch” the definition of meat. She authorized that beef trimmings and cartilage could be labeled as meat. This stuff could then end up in “beef” patties and the like. The move increased the value of a carcass, no doubt to the cheers of all cattlemen across the US.

Consumers however had nothing to cheer about. This stuff now allowed to be called meat is in fact a solid fat that gets colourized. It has proteins, but they are useless because our bodies cannot use them. What is more, this “meat” is perfect for breeding bacteria:

. . . two years after JoAnn Smith became assistant secretary you had all of these outbreaks of bacteria–they’re directly attributable to that kind of disregard of health issues.

But she made the beef industry more money, and that’s what counts, apparently. On the other hand, increasing profits wasn’t really her entire job at the USDA. Her job was also to protect consumers. In reality, however, the meat industry runs the USDA in the US because major appointees are also major figures in the meat industry, just like Smith was. See the paradox?

. . . the very same officials who are charged with promoting the sale of agricultural products are also supposed to protest the consumer from filth and unscrupulous practices.

The best of luck to all consumers out there.

I’ll get back to this conflict of interest. What concerns me foremost at the moment is another kind: the conflict between the enforcement of the humane treatment of animals and increasing of profits for the meat industry.

According to Eisnitz, Smith’s family cattle operation probably sold it’s cattle to Kaplin, one of the largest beef slaughterhouse operations in Florida. Kaplin, like so many slaughterhouse operators then and now, was operating under substandard conditions. OK, enough with the euphemisms, I’ll state it plainly.

At Kaplin Industries back in the late 80s, they were skinning cattle while they were still alive. The problem with cattle slaughtering, as people in the meat industry know, is that cattle often aren’t killed by the “knocking gun,” for what might be a whole host of reasons, and are then shackled up and sent on down the line, alive.

If strung-up cattle arrive at skinner’s station still alive, after having been stabbed by the sticker to bleed them, they might start kicking. To remedy this inconvenience, the skinner will knife the cattle in the back of the head to paralyze them. This doesn’t make the animal unconscious or immune to pain, it just stops them from kicking.

The key to job survival at Kaplan and, of course, the bottom line, profits, was to keep the line moving. Even when violations such as what is described were pointed out, nothing was done about it.

So what did we have here? We had family operation of the assistant secretary for Marketing and Inspection Services of the U.S. Department of Agriculture–the most senior official at that department responsible for enforcing the Humane Slaughter Act–selling cattle to Kaplin Industries where cattle were being routinely skinned while alive.

Sadly, the Humane Slaughter Act was not being enforced, which shouldn’t surprise anyone because the USDA was opposed to it, even through it was actually charged with its enforcement. Couldn’t any of the knuckleheads in government figure how that was going to pan out?

One thing is for sure, with JoAnn Smith at the helm, nothing was any better for the animals. It wasn’t any better for consumers, either. While Smith, the nation’s chief meat inspector, was in the USDA new lows were reached in standards for the inspection of meat.

Smith was around when the USDA began relaxing meat inspection procedures and standards and when line speeds had skyrocketed. The USDA had approved so-called streamlined inspection methods, first introduced in the poultry industry and then the cattle industry. Here’s how it works: inspectors were reduced and striped of their authority, especially of any authority to stop the line. What you ended up with in the cattle industry was about 1 in every 1000 cows being inspected, yet 100% were stamped as inspected.

So, while the USDA did not enforce the humane slaughter of animals, it was also not enforcing proper inspections of meat. These resulted in a rise of rates of E. coli 0157:H7 infections. E. coli is a pathogen like salmonella that lives in the intestinal tracts of livestock and it contaminates meat through high-speed slaughter and processing operations.

What they are calling meat poisoning now, since it’s becoming more common, is hamburger disease. It generally kills children and the elderly.

You’d think that the USDA, or someone would act. What happened was that the USDA instead began working out allowable levels of fecal contamination on meat. I suppose that was their only option, since with high speed lines and deregulation, there was no way to stop contamination.

It is spread by the process. Cows that were cancerous, that have abscesses full of pus, that are covered in feces and urine, that have mud, grease and blood on them are processed with only cosmetic cleaning. Some of that stuff gets embedded from the high pressure carcass sprays and otherwise just spread around through rinsing processes.

I’m not pinning it all on Smith, but she was the head of the USDA when all of this crap was going on, the so-called “First Lady of American Agriculture.” As the website for the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services states:

In this position she set policy direction and managed multiple agencies under the jurisdiction of the USDA. She brought to the office an atmosphere of openness and professionalism and proved herself to be a woman of action on behalf of agriculture.

Yeah, right. JoAnn Smith worsened the situation for animals. She increased their suffering and reduce any recourse for justice and humane treatment. She was a huge part of the problem and nothing to do with the solution.

She’s a classic example of the kinds of people behind the meat industry and its regulation. I’m not just talking about the US either. The USDA like other organizations of its kind are everywhere, full of people who are part of the problem, who just go along, including those you’d think would want to improve things, like vetenarians, but don’t. When you have a pack of meat industry cronies running the show, nothing will bring justice and fair treatment to those without a voice.

Smith is one of the many who has contributed to making life a hell on Earth for millions upon millions of animals.

Ted Nugent stands for just about everything I hate, and no doubt the same would be true of me for him. But you know, he has good qualities, such as being a no nonsense kind of guy, and you can’t say he doesn’t have conviction. It’s just the killing animals thing, and all of the lame connecting-with-nature claptrap he goes on about–all of that makes Ted one of the bad guys to me.

Ted keeps coming out with the same old spirit of the wild stuff, the same old huge collection of cliches, because he’s competent with cliches. He’s had a lot of practice living by them. For example, it is easy to grasp where he is coming from, although it’s kind of airy and vague as a definition, when he says that he follows a “powerful, natural, common sense, American way of life.” Redneck doesn’t sum it up for me; evangelical fascism is what I’d call it.

What disturbs me about the sentiments Ted expresses and represents is that they are all part of formula for behavior, a philosophy for a ready -made identity. Except for the American part, the kind of sentiments he expresses and his simple getting-back-to-basics prescriptions kind of remind me of what the Nazis envisioned for themselves and used to justify a lot of their excesses. Those kind of emotive terms are very easy to cast about and they can mean plenty of things to plenty of people in plenty of circumstances. You can always rely on “nature” as an argument to justify whatever you like. Very handy, come to think of it.

I once bought one of his records, I’m ashamed to say, but in my defense, it was based on the front cover and after listening to it, I lost interest. It wasn’t my thing–it all seemed much the same and was, how shall I put it, not your sophisticated kind of rock and roll. Pretty basic chords and riffs, that was the sum of it.

I remember as a kid reading how he sucked the electricity grid in some city to power his show and played louder than any band to tour there. That was a cool thing for a teenage kid into guitars and rock to hear. It was cool like the girls and booze and everything else that goes along with a rock and roll life. But now the rock and roll heart in me feels betrayed.

It didn’t strike me then that Nugent’s drive for volume was anything more than part of a guitar guy living a rock dream. Now, with experience and being more informed, I suspect that it wasn’t just a matter of rocking out. Nugent is a guy that clearly likes to dominate his environment. Making noise was a symptom of it, the more noise the better. Trying to dominate the environment around him is where he is still at, not having significantly progressed, it would seem.

In the old days, guys like that might be admired as a go-getter, a trail blazer out there conquering the world. Actually, he’s still portrayed like that in red neck circles, and let’s face it, red neck circles love guys like him. Take a look at his website, if you can stomach it, you’ll get the idea. His fan base would be looking pretty thin without their ranks. Nugent the hunter; Nugent the man on the land; Nugent the patriot; Nugent the responsible family man; Nugent the Christian; Nugent the all American. For me, it doesn’t get much worse.

A desperate need to identify with strength is integral to people who see themselves a great white hunters. Invariably, they’ll identify with hunters in the animal world, employing the imagery and stirring language to imply some association with dominating creatures like the wolf, the eagle, the tiger, and the rest. Behind it all is the mistaken belief that hunting and killing represents something the fartherest distance from insecurity. Hemingway made the same error.

Evangelical in his need to convince and persuade and win over, Ted’s like the a born-again obsessed with the need to shore up the delusion from collapsing. Harping on about life’s cycle of life and death or “honest lessons in life’s cycle of reality,” as he humourously puts it. Your reality Ted, not mine. You needed to write “bias propaganda on my cycle of reality,” if you are seeking to get in touch with the truth–just a tip for you. Although, I realize you’re not the type of guy open to advice.

Most people would realize that when Ted’s in full flight, raving on about some issue–those cliches tumbling out over each other. Take his use of a bow and arrow, his preferred technology to kill animals. Would I be wrong in saying that this method causes more distress and suffering? It’s not like you could perform a clean headshot for instantaneous death. No, he’s not a man who’ll change. His whole manhood depends on the hunt and what he hunts with, it seems.

“That any thinking person could possibly find fault with another’s chosen method of hunting is clearly an indictment to the foolish, soulless selfishness of some small mind elitists who, for some bizarre mental derangement, could possibly think they have the right, power or authority to dictate how a hunter chooses to kill his or her game. It’s pathetic, really.”

Mmm … them’s fighting words. Actually, I’d like to see all of your weapons taken away from you entirely, Ted, together with whatever hunting licences you have. I guess that’d make me even worse than a foolish, soulless, selfish, small minded, mentally deranged, pathetic elitist. Actually, I’m also one of those “maniac” vegetarians, to top it off.

In my small minded, deranged way, it concerns me that Ted evangelical zeal to dominate and indoctrinate is going to contribute to another generation of redneck killers. Ted runs a so-called Kamp for Kids, where they are taught to appreciate the outdoors–while heavily armed, of course, as it should be appreciated. I can just imagine one the camps and its timetable of screwy antics. I’m picturing a camp like the one on the documentary “Jesus Camp,” where manipulation and brainwashing are seen as valid tools for forging a preteen army for Christ. Bending kids’ minds doesn’t take much apparently.

They all seek approval. That’s what makes them suckers. The following is how it was for a kid at home with Ted. And it’s interesting to see someone reveal themselves in their own words in a way that is quite the opposite to what was intended.

“Most importantly, I did not push my children to hunt. I always made it available to them, even gently prodding and encouraging them to join me everytime I went afield, but never to the point of force or pressure. I shared the thrills of each and every hunt in stories and photos, and made it a point to let them know every night at the dinner table, “you should have been there! It was really cool!”

. . .

“Over the years, I tried to get them to join me on the easier maneuvers. Break them in gently.”

(http://www.tednugent.com/hunting/kamp/inspiration.aspx)

“Did not push”? Well, not physically, at least. But I think you’ve given us more than enough, Ted, to know how they were “broken in.” The word you were looking for was “manipulation.” To sound convincing, you needed to say, “I did not manipulate my children into going hunting,” then you would have been stating, well, pretty much the opposite of what actually comes across. You might have prevented the embarrassment of self incrimination, of the kind that appears to characterize everything you write.

Ted is pretty typical of the hunting crowd, even if he does appear to have some wits about him. They all strike me as such an uneducated bunch. I’ve looked around a few of their websites and that’s what jumps out at me, the lack of education–revealed by the cliches, uncovered by the self-deception.

Typically, you’ll find these people trying to build up the qualities of the wild animals they kill. They like to call them wily, cunning, fast, elusive. By implication, the person that tracks them down and kills them must have those qualities, too, in abundance to have come out victors. High tech gear, gadgetry and every comfort appear not to be factors. No matter how much they build up their victims’ powers, the odds are always in their favour. Where can there be pride in it, then?

The photographs these people have taken of their proud poses with their kills before them have a long tradition. But the one difference from yesteryear is that people in them, their kills propped up beside them, are now aligning themselves with conservation causes, helping the poor, improving the environment, controlling wild-life numbers, and even ethics. The way some of them go on about righteous and ethical hunting, you’d think you were hearing wisdom read from Buddhist scriptures, save for the parts about slaughtering, which kind of deflate their highfalutin pretensions.

Let’s cut through the crap: the animals these people kill are defenseless. What have they got to defend themselves against high velocity projectiles shot at them from tens of meters away. Where is the skill in hunting animals that have no more than naked bodies for protection, who can only charge and bite or flee? What challenge can there possibly be in it?

What psychological triggers are behind the compulsion to live the delusion of a kinship with wild? Isn’t is just all about feeling powerful through dominating another living thing?

These people don’t fool me, and neither do you Ted: finding the beast within, connecting with nature, spirit of the wild–that’s all bullshit. When you go beyond the pavement, why don’t you really go beyond it, I mean, properly. Get rid of the trappings of modern life, get rid of your vehicle, get rid of your equipment and weapons and make your own, get rid of your clothes and get rid of your high tech communications. Then you can really feel the spirit of the wild, the way animals have to live it.

Only then would you be hunting on level ground to survive. Only then could you even come close to earning any respect from me, you pussies