Category: Uncategorized

Bruce Friedrich Spins Support for Animal Rights Terrorism

The Associated Press ran a story in February about People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals’ support for animal rights terrorism. The story centered around the Center for Consumer Freedom’s excellent work documenting PETA’s financial support for terrorist groups, including its donation to the Earth Liberation Front.

It is interesting to look at how PETA presents itself to the public when talking to reporters for articles like this compared to what it says when the audience is mainly other animal rights activists.

The AP reports, for example, that Bruce Friedrich told its reporter that PETA always carries out its activities legally and says of PETA’s critics,

They’re good at coming up with the best smear tactics that (public relations) firms can devise. At the end of the day, what PETA is fighting for is kindness.

But it was Bruce Friedrich who said at Animal Rights 2001 that while he personally doesn’t “blow up stuff,”

. . . I do advocate it, and I think it’s a great way to bring about animal liberation.

It was Friedrich, not the CCF, who revealed his thuggish nature when telling a reporter that PETA would protest at a church pig roast and added that,

I wouldn’t rule out turning over tables.

And, of course, it was Friedrich who wrote an essay several years ago defending the importance of “direct action” activities such as those carried about by the Animal Liberation Front saying,

I have found that Animal Liberation Front activities speak to people, regardless of their belief in animal rights. They “get it.”

. . .

Considering the power of our opposition, can you imagine where we would be without surprise direct actions and the secrecy required for so much of what we do?

Of course if I had repeatedly defended and advocated violence and thuggery, I’d probably not want to mention that to a reporter either and pretend that all PETA does is “fight for kindness” (gee, why didn’t he just throw in a line about defending Mom and apple pie while he was at it?)

Source:

Food industry questions PETA’s backing of violent activists. Associated Press, February 16, 2003.

Is Soya Milk Consumption Linked to Peanut Allergy?

Researchers at the Univerity of Bristol are reporting a possible link between early childhood consumption of soya milk and peanut allergies.

The finding comes as part of a study of 14,000 infants. Of the 49 infants in that sample who had peanut allergies, almost 25 percent hd consumed soya milk in their first two years of life.

Imperial College’s Dr. Gideon Lack told the BBC, “These results suggest that senisitsation to peantu may possibly occur . . . as a result of soya exposure.”

This is, however, obviously a small sample of children with peanut allergies and much more research needs to be done to determine if this is a real effect or simply a statistical artifact.

Source:

Allergy ‘may be linked to soya milk’. The BBC, March 11, 2003.

SHAC Activists Sentenced

The Earth Liberation Prisoners Information Bulletin recently reported that Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty Activist Nathan Brasfield plead guilty to a felony charge of theft of telecommunication services and was sentenced “to just over 12 months imprisonment.”

With time served, Brasfield will likely leave prison sometime in June 2003.

Also, according to the ELP, Jennifer Greenberg and Joshua Schwartz were both sentenced in January to one year in jail for their roles in an April 2002 protest at the home of a Marsh Inc. executive.

Source:

ELP Information Bulletin, March 10, 2003.

New Scientist on ‘The Greening of Hate’

New Scientist recently ran an interview with Betsy Hartmann saying what anyone who has read some mainstream environmentalists could have told you 30 years ago — a significant part of them cross over into misanthropy (which Hartmann incorrectly ascribes simply to a right wing tendency).

That this comes as some sort of shock to Hartmann or New Scientist and that is passed off as some sort of brand new “right wing” tendency is simply ridiculous. For example, consider this exchange between Hartmann and New Scientist‘s Fred Pearce,

Pearce: Aren’t these just political games?

Hartmann: It’s more than just that. There is an academic journal called Population and Environment, published by Kluwer, which is edited by Kevin MacDonald, an evolutionary psychologist who writes about a Jewish plot to liberalize immigration policies. In 1999, MacDonald appeared in court in Britain to defend the historical and holocaust denier David Irving. The journal’s advisory editorial board includes famous environmental scientists such as Paul Ehrlich, who wrote The Population Bomb, Pimental again, and Vaclav Smil, a professor at the University of Manitoba in Canada. Sitting beside hem on the board is J. Philippe Rushton, a psychology professor from the University of Western Ontario in Canada, who has a theory about how black people have small brains, low IQ, large sex organs and high aggression. What are environmental scholars doing getting mixed up with these kinds of people?

To which the best response is simply: well, duh!! Take Ehrlich. Ehrlich has never hidden his agenda. He wrote in The Population Bomb more than 30 years ago that,

A cancer is an uncontrolled multiplication of cells; the population explosion is an uncontrolled multiplication of people. Treating only the symptoms of cancer may make the victim more comfortable at first, but eventually he dies — often horribly. A similar fate awaits a world with a population explosion if only the symptoms are treated. We must shift our efforts from treatment of the symptoms to the cutting out of the cancer. The operation will demand many apparently brutal and heartless decisions. The pain may be intense. But the disease is so far advanced that only with radical surgery does the patient have a chance of survival.

And Hartmann would have us believe that it is just now that it is becoming apparent that some of these environmentalists have political views that are just this side of fascism? Give me a break.

Someone also needs to point out that while her fellow feminists and left wingers were putting Ehrlich and those like him on a pedestal and viciously attacking anyone such as Julian Simon who dared disagree, it was the right wing conservatives and libertarians who were telling anyone who would listen that these folks were dangerous statists. Hartmann admits this was the case with what she calls the “liberal” population establishment, but it was also the case with the Left that she is a part of which blindly latched on to this view because of its pro-state, anti-market features.

Hartmann portrays this as right wingers trying to infiltrate the mainstream environmental movement, but the mainstream environmental movement has always had it share of top down control freaks who see people as merely means to a greater environmental end. What she might better ask is why such an odious view of the world is so popular with liberals and leftists.

Source:

The greening of hate. New Scientist, 2003.

Ronald Bailey’s Excellent Overview of the Problem with Water

Ronald Bailey wrote an excellent overview of the current water crisis, Water, Water Nowhere?, that identified a major cause of water shortages around the world — the lack of markets for water which tend to lead to gross misallocations of water. Bailey opens his article with a typically absurd example of the way water is price when it is controlled by political systems rather than markets,

One thousand Arkansas rice farms have just about pumped away all their ground water. Naturally, they are looking to taxpayers for relief. Specifically, they are clamoring for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the federal agency responsible for America’s waterways, to spend $200 million on a new system of reservoirs, canals, and pumping stations to divert water to their farms from the nearby White River . . . Resource economist Delworth Gardiner, a professor emeritus at the Brigham Young University, has calculated that the total cost to society of a typical federal irrigation project is $400 per acre-foot of water (and acre-foot is the amount of water it takes to cover one acre to a depth of one foot). The market value of the water ranges from $50 to $100 per acre-foot, but farmers usually pay the Bureau of Reclamation about $20 to $30. If such irrigation projects were evaluated on a true cost-benefit basis, says Gardiner, “there would be no new federal water projects at all.”

But because water allocation is dictated by political rather than market forces, there are numerous such federal water project whose main purpose is to charge taxpayers exorbitant funds to misallocate limited water supplies.

One of the main problems in getting around these existing situation is precisely that the farmers who are on the receiving end of this largesse have political clout that makes simply charging them the true value of the water they use all but impossible. But Bailey offers an interesting way to deal with this while establishing water markets through the back door. Bailey writes,

One ingenious end run around the political problems posed by subsidized water allocation is a “charge-subsidy” scheme that would involve allocating a base property right to a certain amount of water, taking into account its historical use, to individual farmers or groups of farmers. If they used more than their base amount, they would pay market prices for the additional water. If they used less, they could sell the water they saved at market prices to other users, such as cities and industries. This arrangement would strongly encourage water use efficiency and establish water markets between farmers, urban dwellers, and industrial users.

In the case of federal water projects, farmers would receive their initial allocation of water at, say, $20 per acre-foot. If they needed more, they’d pay $100 per acre-foot. If they saved water, they could sell it to city dwellers for $100 per acre-foot. In fact, it might be more profitable for some farmers to stop farming and sell all their water to other users. Such a system would not be perfect, but it would be better than the mess we find ourselves in now.

Such creative solutions are, of course, almost impossible to get past the various interest groups that lobby the government on issues like water allocation, but without some sort of market-based allocation of water, it is going to become more scarce and produce ever more convoluted political systems to allocate it in the face of government-created inefficiencies.

Source:

Water, Water Nowhere? Ronald Bailey, Reason, November 13, 2002.

Inquest Complete on Barry Horne's Death

A British jury recently completed an inquest on the death of animal rights activists Barry Horne who died while on a hunger strike in prison. Horne had een sentenced to 18 years in jail after being convicted of numerous acts of arson in a two-year firebombing campaign he carried out in the United Kingdom.

The inquest’s purpose was to ensure that Horne was of sound mind and body and free from coercion when he made the decision to die.

The jury heard evidence that Horne was not mentally ill when he commenced his final hunger strike and that he had left written instructions that he was not to be fed. The report of a psychiatrist who interviewed Horne said that the animal rights extremist thought he “would win by dying,” apparently believing that his death would force the British government to ban medical research with animals.

Sources:

Open verdict on hunger strike. ICCoventry.Co.Uk, March 11, 2003.

Hunger striker’s inquest. Sky News, March 11, 2003.