Category: Uncategorized

With Halloween right around the
corner, the American |Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals|
released a rather sensible guide to keeping pets safe during the holiday,
noting that “there are plenty of stories of vicious pranksters who
have teased, injured, stolen, even killed pets on this night.”

But that sort of restrained warning
doesn’t go nearly far enough for some animal rights activists who insist
on spreading myths about large, well-organized Satanic cults bent on sacrificing
and mutilating black cats on Halloween.

A short release by |Education and Action for Animals| is typical. Without offering any evidence, EAA claimed
“the number of animals abused and sacrificed may increase by TEN
TIMES during the Halloween season.” Like other outlets, EAA warned
that black cats were in special danger because “they are highest
in demand for sacrificial purposes”; again, a claim made with no
evidence to back it up.

But that was nothing compared to
Mesia Quartano, who runs the Mining Company’s Animal Rights page.
To provide her readers with information on the horrors black cats face
from Satanic cults she provided links to ultraconservative Christian fundamentalists
who believe that a super-secret Satanic order called the Brotherhood has
infiltrated key position in government and the corporate world. This sort
of nonsense has been thoroughly debunked (see sociologist Jeffery Victors
excellent book on the topic, Satanic Panic, among others) but is
kept alive by an unlikely convergence of fringe elements in fundamentalist
Christian, radical feminist and animal rights circles.

And just in case further evidence
is needed on the credulity of people when it comes to animal deaths, a
recent news story distributed on animal rights lists provides ample evidence.
A large number of horribly mutilated animals were found in a city dumpster,
obviously put there by some sicko or perhaps a cult. Except, as
it turned out a few days later, the mutilated animals’ presence had a
rather mundane explanation. It seems the animals were, in fact, road kill
placed in the dumpster by a company contracted with by the local authorities
specifically to remove such animals.

An article in the Oct. 3 issue of
The Economist summed up the sad state of affairs Africa has once
again cast itself in by saying simply, “four conflicts at the heart
of Africa could suck in all their neighbours.”

Nearly a third of Africa’s 42 countries
are involved in an international or civil war and another 13 have sent
troops to fight in the various wars on the continent. The four wars The
Economist cites as particularly troubling include Ethiopia’s war with
Eritrea; Senegal’s dispatching of troops to Guinea-Bissau and South Africa’s
sending of its army into Lesotho; and the ongoing conflict among the nations
bordering on the Congo.

In addition, several regional conflicts
that had appeared to simmer down are on the edge of exploding again. Congo
and Sudan are cooperating now against Uganda. Angola supplied troops to
go into Congo in part to support an offensive against UNITA rebels, whose
end result has been to create whose end result might be to create an alliance
between UNITA and Congolese rebels. And the nation with one of the longest
running armed conflicts in the world, Sudan, seems about to intensify
its civil war. The government recently closed schools and universities
calling for a national mobilization of armed forces.

Once again Africa’s biggest problems
is not its population but that its governments that are more interested
in fighting each other rather than trying to find a solution to that continent’s
many problems.

Sticking with the water theme, Calpine
Corporation has been trying to build a geothermal power plant at Medicine
Lake, California. You remember geothermal power — an alternative power
source much cleaner than nuclear or coal generation that environmentalists
used to push as a safe and sane alternative to traditional power generation.
Not any more.

The proposed 50-megawatt plant
would pump 3 million pounds of water every hour into a pressure cooker.
The resulting steam would be harnessed to turn turbines and generate electrical
power. So why are the environmentalists opposed to it? Does geothermal
power create lots of pollutants? Minute traces of ammonia, mercury and
hydrogen sulfide are released, but even environmentalists aren’t claiming
those pose a hazard.

No, the big objection from environmentalists
is that the power plant isn’t very pretty. As Kyle Haines of the Klamath
Forest Alliance told the Christian Science Monitor, “People
might be less likely to recreate at Medicine Lake if they see a power
plant and plumes of steam [which the plant emits].”

There you have it. Coal causes
air pollution, nuclear uses radiation, and geothermal is just too damn
ugly. And environmentalists wonder why some of us consider them simply
unreasonable.

The classic argument that population
increase will lead to catastrophe goes something like this — more people
require more resources and as the population increases it will inevitably
strain the available resource base. Somebody forgot to tell that to the
United States Geological Survey which reported recently that from 1980
to 1995 both total and per capita water use in the United States declined
10 percent even though the U.S. population increased steadily during the
same period.

In 1980 almost 450 billion gallons
of water per day (bgd) were used for all purposes in the United States.
By 1995 that figure had fallen to 402 bgd. For freshwater, irrigation
was the number one use at 134 bgd. Thermoelectric generation was the larger
single use of water, however, when fresh water and saline water usage
are combined, with l90 bgd used for that purpose.