The Environmentalist's Handbook
                       

                                     or

        The counterinsurgency manual for the Environmental Movement


                A Compendium of clean answers to dirty ideas

                                     by

                                 Matt Giwer



                              The New Jingoism

             This is the beginning of the book and let me be damned 
        for it up front.  America has nothing to apologize for in 
        this world; not one slightest thing.

             America is the country every other country has tried to 
        emulate.  We are the only country in the world with 
        immigrants from all over the world.  I won't spend a moment 
        ennumerating the glories of America rather I will note the 
        tens of millions of people who have decided over the last 
        200 years that America may not be the perfect country but it 
        is better than all the rest.

             And, yes, that goes for all the people brought over 
        here as slaves.  Were it not for the slave trade they would 
        have been murdered and/or eaten.  There were many truly free 
        men among them who made the best of slavery or fought to the 
        death against it.  My hat is off to them and hope that 
        should a similar circumstance fall to me I would find their 
        courage in my heart.

             The United States is not now nor has it ever been 
        perfect.  At all times it has only been better than all the 
        rest.  Again, I am not going to prove that.  You simply ask 
        your ancestors why they came here.  If the United States for 
        all of its failings is indeed the worst of countries then 
        your ancestors were fools.  

             I take it you are not descended from fools but from 
        people who made the best choice at the time.  So did my 
        ancestors.  They did not come to a perfect country.  They 
        came to a country that was simply better than all the rest 
        AT THE TIME.

             And today, the United States is still the best of all 
        possible countries in the world.  The United States accounts 
        for 90% of the immigration in the entire world both legal 
        and illegal both separately and together.

             And what of the rest of the world?  Every country in 
        the world has the United States as its model either now or 
        in the past.  And most nations in the world consider the 
        United States their present day model in one way or another.  
        Yes, there are minor exceptions which are falling on their 
        face with failure because of those exceptions.

             The entire Middle East wants to imitate the United 
        States but somehow just does not want to part with this or 
        that part of tradition or culture and in the process fails.  



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             Japan is our most faithful imitator and with imitation 
        comes flattery.  Japan does well with its imitation of the 
        United States as it should.  We taught them all the know.  
        Were it not for us they would still be a backwater groups of 
        islands suitable only for the tourist trade taking pictures 
        of the quaint Samurai beheading a peasant for a one dollar 
        gift.  The entire concept of reverence for human life in 
        Japan was taught to them by the United States however 
        incompletely over a century and finally by the Atomic Bomb, 
        two of them, they are a hard headed lot.

             And is anyone trying to immigrate to Japan?  Is anyone 
        that stupid?

             Is this intended to be insulting to the Japanese 
        people?  If the shoe fits, wear it.  And tell it to your 
        immigrants.

             The list of countries is endless.  Most have the common 
        civlity not to call the kettle black.  However, where do 
        most of our detractors come from?  Right here in the good 
        old U S of A.  And why are they detractors?  Because they 
        are ignorant and stupid; because they get some sort of 
        emotional satisfaction from biting the hand that feeds them; 
        because they were kicked in the head by a mule as children.

             Speculation is easy.  Nothing explains the reality.  
        There is an impulse in this country always to do better, 
        always to do more, always to lead the world into new areas 
        of human freedom as this country always has and, God 
        willing, always will.  The blind hate detractors of this 
        country would have us believe that every failing they 
        percieve from Columbus forward is the fault of the present 
        day political system in this country.  And it matters not 
        what that political system is; it is always at fault.

             I will agree in principle.  The United States is the 
        worst country in the world, except when compared to all the 
        rest.

             What are the better countries in the world?  Sweden?  
        The wait for housing in Sweden is currently longer than the 
        wait for housing in Moscow.  OK, that is an exaggeration, it 
        is in truth slightly less than the wait in Moscow.  And 
        people tell is Sweden has the highest standard of living in 
        the world?  What standard?  What world?

             Evils in the United States?  What evils in comparison 
        to which country?  If for each evil you have to find a 
        different country then you are proving my position correct.

             Everyone who finds fault with the United States is not 
        doing to improve the United States, they are finding fault 
        to promote a political agenda of their own.  They are 
        attempting to create in your mind a great evil in hopes you 


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        will help promote the private evil they propose.

             And every private evil proposed requires they be in 
        charge of it and have the power over your life it will give 
        them to force YOU to do what they wish.

             A true American wishes no power to change the life of 
        anyone save for the preservation of freedom and the saving 
        from harm of the innocents.  Most citizens are true 
        Americans working for themselves in their own way and 
        looking only to prevent harm to others.  There are many 
        thousands out there today living off of the harm they can do 
        others for personal gain.  

             They are on the TV, in the newspapers every day.  They 
        seek to convince you of some terrible evil of this country 
        which can only be cured by making them dictator of the life 
        of this country.  They would have the country do what they 
        want because of some evil they imagine and make sound 
        believable.  They wish to impose their petty tyranny upon us 
        all.

             There is a time to say NO.  There is a time to stop it.  
        The time is now.  Yes, there are a thousand ways to improve 
        this country but not one of them seeks to destroy the great 
        triumphs of our past and replace it with an imagined future.

             We the People are the People.  The government exists 
        for our benefit and our benefit alone.  The government 
        exists only to do the will of the people.  The government 
        does not exist to make us do what is right in the eyes of 
        some nutball who buys the political clout.  We do not have 
        to put up with anything imposed upon us.

             We are the country.  We are the people.  And we are the 
        greatest country on the face of the Earth.  Ask your 
        ancestors if you doubt me.




















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             America
         consumpt

        
                                   Consumption

             The ingrates of the world constantly are trying to put a 
        guilt trip upon us like over-protective mothers.  "The US 
        consumes 99.9% of the world's whatever and only has 0.01% of the 
        world's population" and nonsense statements like that.

             In truth the United States consumes 99.9% of the world's 
        freedom and human rights and shoulders the same amount of the 
        world's responsibilities and return receives 0.01% of the world's 
        respect for doing so.  










































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        civrite

                   The United States Civil Rights Record

             The record of the United States on civil rights is one 
        that people in this country and around the world find in 
        their most self righteous interests to hold up to scorn.  
        The most self righteous have the least capacity for 
        thinking.

             Consider any other country in the world which as a 
        situation of peoples with even mixed national loyalties much 
        less mixed ethnic or religious origin not to mention mixed 
        racial origins.

             Mixed national loyalties, the island of Cyprus (ne 
        Crete) where there is still a United Nations force on duty 
        keeping the Greek and the Turkish loyalists from killing 
        each other -- again.

             Mixed religion?  Nothern Ireland will do for an 
        example, if you don't drive a car.

             Mixed ethnic groups?  The entire Middle East, the 
        tribes in South Africa, the Kurds in Iraq, the Kurds in 
        Turkey, the Kurds in Iran, the Kurds in Armenia (everybody 
        hates the Kurds.)  Armenians in Turkey and still a debate as 
        to the number of hundred thousands that died.  Chinese 
        descendants thrown out of Vietnam.  Koreans treated like 
        dirt in Japan.
             
             Mixed races?  Holy than thou England has been adapting 
        to its immigrants from India for a decade now with very 
        mixed results.  Asian merchants and land owners thrown out 
        of Zimbabwe.

             The length of this list is limited only by the time I 
        wish to spend recalling even the examples of the last ten 
        years.  

             The point of making the list is only to demonstrate how 
        small, how trivial, how insignificant have been the "mixing" 
        problems faced by other countries and how arbitrary, 
        immoral, and downright deadly their response has been when 
        compared to the United States.

             Compared to ANY other country in the world; compared to 
        EVERY other country in the world the United States has had 
        one hundred times more "mixing" than any other nation has 
        ever imagined, maybe a thousand times more.  And in return 
        the United States has NEVER had any response anywhere near 
        the magnitude of depravity of every other country in the 
        world.



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             No matter what problems the United States has had 
        mixing all groups of all types from every where and any 
        where, we are also the only country that has invited these 
        problems and we are the only country that has come even the 
        least bit close to suceeding.

             I am very tired of hearing about the faults of the 
        United States.  The United States was the first country in 
        the entire world to recognize and legally protect inherent 
        human rights.  The United States was the first country in 
        the world to define the term civil rights.  

             The United States accounts for 95% of the immigration 
        in the entire world.  The United States is the ONLY country 
        in the world that debates the AMOUNT of extra effort to be 
        made to accomodate immigrants whether legal or illegal.

             As to the civil rights record of the rest of the world, 
        some few that have followed our lead may some day in the 
        distant future reach the position of the United States fifty 
        years ago.  Maybe they will.  If they work very hard.

             We can grant the United States has problems with 
        mixing.  We can grant that every new group that arrives gets 
        its turn in the barrel as new comers suitable for hazing.  
        We also know that every group has come to mix completely 
        within our country.

             The only failures the United States has are in 
        comparison to accomplishments no other nation on Earth has 
        come close to even wanting to achieve.

             The United States consumes 99.9% of the world's freedom 
        and recieves 0.1% of the world's respect for it.

             So be it.





















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        consumpt.2


                  The fallacy of the Consumption Argument

             A more more common form of the statement is that I 
        parody above is that the US has only 5% of the population 
        (approximately true) and the US consumes some very 
        disproportionate percentage of something else whether it be 
        energy or raw materials or whatever the person creating a 
        simpleminded statistic wishes to discuss.  This is hardly 
        even to the level of a fallacy.  At least a fallacy presumes 
        some reason has gone into the statement but for some reason 
        it is wrong for a reason that is not obvious.

             Consider a more parodixical form of the same statement.  
        The US is only 5% of the population and consumes over 40% of 
        the illegal drugs in the world and poor little Jose has to 
        go to bed each night without a buzz on.  It would seem that 
        by our purported over consumption of illegal drugs we are in 
        fact saving little Jose from growing up a drug addict.  
        Similarly if our consumption of energy leads to our being 
        evil in some way then by so consuming we are saving other 
        countries from becoming the evil over consumers we have 
        become.

             But first the question must be asked, is there anything 
        inherently wrong or evil in consumption even if out of 
        proportion to the world population?  If it is evil for a 
        nation to consume out of proportion to its population then 
        Japan is truely evil for its consumption of raw fish, China 
        for its consumption of bamboo, and Italy for its consumption 
        of pasta.  There can be no inherent evil in consumption; it 
        is all a matter of taste.

             In fact it is difficult to point out very many things 
        the US consumes out of proportion to its population.  In 
        fact the two cited, energy and raw materials, are about the 
        only ones worthy of note.  The case must be made that such 
        consumption is evil in the first place.
















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        ecarthy.ws

                  The Roots of the Environmental Movement

                The Environmental movement is a suprisingly cohesive 
        movement.  It has no obvious single source or cause.  So how 
        can it be so apparently well organized?  Obviously it is not 
        organized in the usual sense as they do not all belong to 
        the same organization or wear the same T-shirts.  They do 
        however all supports each other's causes without question or 
        concern.  If there are any quibbles they are over tactics.

                Back in the late 40s early 50s there was a general 
        fear of world communism.  There was a man named McCarthy who 
        did not start it or lead it but rode the crest of it.  Today 
        there are literally millions of people who from many years 
        of experience have found personal reasons for being 
        concerned about their personal environment and about the 
        events they have read of in the papers.

                In the time frame around 1950 there were literally 
        millions of Americans who agreed with General Patton, to 
        draft the German Army and attack to the East.  Those people 
        had lived through the stories of the millions of starvation 
        deaths caused by the Communists, their brutal suppression 
        and had recently experienced their conquest of Eastern 
        Europe.

                Had American boys died to give Eastern Europe to the 
        Communists?  That was the Love Canal, Exxon Valdez and Three 
        Mile Island of the late 1940s all rolled into one.  And who 
        was next on the list?  The fall of Greece and Italy to 
        communism was narrowly avoided.  The Party was powerful in 
        France and even in England.  The Finlandic countries were 
        strongly Socialist.

                Out of this grew a serious American fear of 
        Communism.  Would America be next?  There was not a 
        significant Communist influence in America at the time but 
        there was some.  A real spy here and there, an organized 
        cell that met more for social reasons than political reasons 
        and yes, a real historic connection with Communism by many 
        people in their youth who were now in public positions.

                Yes, there was a little here and there but not much 
        to create an immediate threat.

                Consider the parallels between the environmental 
        movement and McCarthyism.

                  A general concern for the environment and a 
        general concern about communism.

                  There are isolated cases of serious damage to the 


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        environment and there were isolated cases of real communist 
        spies at work in the country.

                  There is no solid evidence of any coming global 
        catastrophe from any cause and there was never any solid 
        evidence of the imminent overthrow of the government by 
        communism, but there are arguable hints here and there.

                  The impetus of the environmental movement is based 
        upon predictions of future calamity and the impetus for 
        McCarthyism was predictions of future communist takeover.

             In both cases, for anyone who questioned there were two 
        answers:

                1)  There were just enough real communists and there 
        are just enough real local environmental problems to lend 
        some credibility,

                and

                2)  in both cases the predicted threat is so great 
        we dare not take the risk of NOT acting even if it is 
        untrue.

                There are many other parallels in history, the 
        McCarthy era fits the way it has happened in the US in the 
        past.  Another parallel with even more disastrous 
        consequences was the Jewish threat as perceived by Nazi 
        Germany but that was not in America.                 

             So, no, the Environmental movement is not an organized 
        political movement with a primary conspiracy behind it.  It 
        is a matter of a few people riding the crest of the wave and 
        a few million followers loving to be lead.

                And a final parallel to note.  In the days of 
        McCarthy if a person were to question the truth of the 
        imminent Communist subversion of America then one was 
        accused of being a Communist Sympathizer or Dupe or Fellow 
        Traveler. Today, if you question the environmental movement 
        in any way you are considered to be completely in favor of 
        destroying the environment and ending all life on this 
        planet.

                The environmental movement does not seek to persuade 
        people to its cause but rather it seeks to spread the TRUTH 
        of the GREAT DANGER and to condemn those who do not agree.  
        This was the great part of McCarthyism.  If you are not with 
        us then you are the enemy incarnate.  If you are not with us 
        then you are our enemy.

                As with McCarthyism, you must believe the 
        conclusions and never, never question the complete and total 
        lack of any reason to believe the conclusions of the 


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        environmental movement.
























































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             decision


                     Decision making under Uncertainty

                                     or

                             The Fright Factor

             Almost 20 years ago, Professors Tversky and Kahneman 
        published a landmark paper which has received hardly a 
        fraction of the attention it deserves.  It covered precisely 
        the topic of this section, decision making under 
        uncertainty.  It addressed the question as to how people 
        make decisions when all the information is not known, when 
        there is not enough information upon which to make a logical 
        decision.  

             Every one who has considered the immensity of the 
        problem of predicting or even coming up with a good guess as 
        to the future of the earth due to the activities of Man has 
        to admit one thing.  We do not have enough information now 
        and we may never have enough information to make a correct 
        decision as to the proper course of action or even to know 
        if the proper course of action is to do nothing at all.

             What these reseachers demonstrated in a manner that was 
        not emotionally loaded was simply that people when there is 
        not enough information to make a decision then they will 
        decide based upon the way the question is asked.
             
             For example, two questions.  Will you play the state 
        lottery for one dollar a day for one thousand days for the 
        chance of winning three hundred dollars?  Will you play the 
        state lottery one time for a dollar on the chance of winning 
        three hundred dollars dollars.  Most people will say no to 
        the first question and yes to the second question.  In truth 
        the former question is a statement of the odds for winning 
        money over a long period of time.  They are essentially the 
        same bet.  

             How does this apply to the New McCartyism?  If I told 
        you that eating potatos increased you chance of getting a 
        hangnail would you stop eating them?  If I also told you 
        that eating tomatos increased you chance of getting cancer 
        would you stop?  Remember, no other information than my 
        saying so.  People may not stop eating either but few would 
        give a second thought to their next potato but might look 
        sidewise at that tomato.

             This is an example of the Fright Factor in the 
        question.  When you were young would you walk through a 
        grave yard at night if thought you might fall down and get 
        hurt?  Perhaps.  But if you thought you might meet a ghost 


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        would you take that same walk?

             Why the difference?  The fright factor the fear of the 
        unknown.  This affects the judgment of well read people and 
        even of scientists.  Consider the impact on people who know 
        little to nothing about science.  For the most part this is 
        not their fault at all.  Science is barely taught in school 
        by people who barely understand from textbooks that are 
        exceedingly trite or exceedingly dense.  Few people realize 
        that science is not hard; science text books are hard.  

             Lets go back to that oncogenic (the proper name for 
        what the popular press calls carcinogic -- note laymen are 
        not even exposed to the proper words) tomato.  What if in 
        each case my reason for telling you was that I had examined 
        the entrails of a chicken?  Would your decision be the same?  
        Of course not.

             On the other hand, what if I had claimed the 
        information had come from a noted scientistic researcher?  
        You might be inclined to take it a bit more seriously.  What 
        if I then told you the researcher was noted for his crazy 
        idea?  Your opinion would change again. 

             What if I told you that many noted scientists believed 
        in oncogenic tomatos?  What then if you found that by many I 
        meant five and there were hundreds who disagreed?    What if 
        there were really no opinion within the community but rather 
        ongoing research and then I chose to say rather noted 
        scientists have determined tomato eating is responsible for 
        6000 cancers in this country yearly?  One final what if, 
        what if the real statement by the scientist was IF it is 
        true then "there are 6000 cancers per year" and that my 
        quote was only of the words in quotations?

             Now you might ask me why I make this statement when it 
        is still a matter of research and I would say, in light of 
        the potential danger involved I have chosen to make a 
        prudent statement.  Unfortunately prudence has no bearing 
        whatsoever upon the validity of any scientific theory.  

             In the new McCarthyism the potential disaster in the 
        statement is the reason for taking action.  The worse the 
        imagined disaster the more reasonable and prudent seems the 
        action they propose.  This is human nature.  

             There is an old story of the great emperor who was a real 
        clothes horse.  One day a great con man arrived in the 
        kingdom to make is fortune.  He convinced the emperor he had 
        the finest cloth in the world but only those of impeccable 
        taste in clothing could see it.  And the emperor not wishing to 
        be thought one with less than perfect taste in clothing 
        "saw" the fabric and ordered an entire wardrobe of new 
        clothes.



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             When they were ready, the emperor called for a royal 
        procession through the streets in which he would display his 
        new clothes.  The people not wishing to be thought so 
        uncultured not to see the clothes lined the streets oo'ing 
        and ah'ing over the clothes and complimenting the emperor.  

             Almost at the end of the procession there was a young 
        boy of innocense and without guile who looked at the emperor 
        and said, "but he doesn't have any clothes on."  And the 
        crowd laughed at the emperor and themselves and the emperor 
        retired to his castle in shame.

             This book is to point out the environmental emperor has 
        no clothes.  Environmentalism in all its aspects, in all its 
        forms, is as naked as a jaybird, parading down the street 
        with proud fancies and without substance.









































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             illitera



                             Who knows Science?

                                 Who cares?

             In my discussions with people on this subject I have 
        found very intelligent people who are working with the 
        enviro-nut pronouncements and trying to make sense of them.  
        In fact they are doing rather well at times putting together 
        what they hear.

             Take for example Mike S.  He had been hearing about 
        radiation poisoning and its effects.  Given that he believed 
        what he had been told about the effects he had come to the 
        conclusion that a radioactive atom continues to radiate 
        deadly particles forever.  In this light he was assuming 
        that one ingested atom of Plutonium meant ultimate death 
        from radiation poisoning or cancer.  Of course this is 
        absolutely untrue but he had been doing his best to make 
        sense out of the information presented to him.

             I find many cases of this.  People are begin bombarded 
        today with deliberate misinformation.  They do not have the 
        time or perhaps the inclination or perhaps no idea of where 
        to start to learn the truth.  How many know more than the 
        vaguest suggestion that there is something wrong with the 
        idea that a Plutonium atom would radiate forever?

             And why do I say it is deliberate misinformation?  I 
        would hate to think that otherwise apparently intelligent 
        individuals claiming to be working in a good cause would 
        maintain deliberate ignorance of what they are talking 
        about.  Give me an honest crook rather than a ignorant klutz 
        any day.

             What has brought this about?  We all know that science 
        education in this country is about at a standstill with the 
        National Education Association as the major roadblock to 
        making any change in that situation.  (This is Union Rules.  
        No one with a rare degree in science may be paid more than a 
        person with a degree in dirt common degree in English.  If 
        you even talk about it, they go on strike.  Thus they 
        prevent attracting science teachers for their own financial 
        benefit.)  We also know that we do not like to study 
        science.  It is too hard.  It is for other people.  

             However it is interstesting to note that were it not 
        for this scientific illiteracy there would be no 
        environmental movement.  People would be too well educated 
        to swallow any of this stuff and nonsense and certainly 
        would be many dollars richer for not sending their hard 
        earned money to mass-mailing hucksters.  People think Jim 


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                   all rights reserved

        and Tammy Bakker were bad.  The enviro-profiteers have raked 
        in tens of billions over the last ten years and produced 
        rallies, press releases, more mass mailings and well paid 
        staff positions.

             Are the leaders of these movements really lying to you 
        in their mailings?  Read the next one you recieve carefully.  
        It will say something like, "The earth may be coming to an 
        end unless ..."  Pardon me?  MAY be coming to an end?  That 
        is not a statement of fact.  It is exactly the same as 
        saying "The world may NOT be coming to an end unless ..."  
        Either statement is a correct statement.  The only question 
        is which is the most misleading?

             Consider again the famous lead sentence to the 
        statement signed by a few hundred scientists (at least that 
        is what they claim.  "Global warming MAY be inevitable 
        unless ..."  Have you ever opened you mail and read, "You 
        may already be a winner?"  Whenever you read one of these 
        environmental funds appeals in the future remember, "You may 
        already be a Warmer."




































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                   all rights reserved

             binding


                       Why worry about fringe groups?

             There are so many inter-related groups that support 
        each others causes that it would seem you could smell them 
        coming and not worry.  When someone condemns the eating of 
        meat you know they are to be pitied as mentally challenged.

             However, there is another side to their activities, 
        they willfully promote every half truth, exaggeration, 
        misrepresentation they can discover that supports their 
        intentions.  And they do this with barely a mention as to 
        their motivation for doing so.

             Take the Spotted Owl case.  What they really wanted was 
        to shut down the forests to logging so they could wander 
        through them for free, that is, increase your price for 
        forest products for their benefit.

             Who are the greatest promoters of every half baked 
        unduplicated study showing harm to your health from eating 
        red meat?  The vegetarians of couse; but they will never 
        tell you that up front.

             Who is in favor of every restriction that will slow or 
        stop economic growth?  Why those who are in favor of 
        socialism and want to prove free enterprise will not work.

             What we have here is a free wheeling proganda machine 
        with ulterior motives.  When someone tells you of some 
        horror they have imagined and asked for your money to stop 
        it, there are a few valid questions you should ask.  First 
        ask HOW they plan to stop it and second ask what that will 
        mean to you.  

             When you hear a TV commercial for EXXON gasoline you 
        know that EXXON has something to gain by it.  If you were 
        told that a warning against eating red meat were brought to 
        you by a vegetarian organization that would put an entirely 
        different light upon the subject.
             
             What we are dealing with here is a massive 
        disinformation campaign.  Propaganda for that is promoted 
        because it fits in with a completely different and hidden 
        political agenda.  If the ecology movement were to tell you 
        they are promoting the fairy tales for the purpose of 
        promoting a socialist government would you give them a 
        second listen?  

             Their motives are as diverse as they are insistant upon 
        promoting ideas, true or not, which support those motives.  
        Why are they against CFCs?  Because they are essential to 
        industry and they want industry stopped or made to 


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        expensive.  Why are they against the use of chlorine gas?  
        Because the other methods are more expensive.

             More generally, why do they invent terms like 
        bioaccumulative?  




















































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                           all rights reserved

             stravin.ws

         
             The popular culture often brings to the fore those who 
        provide sham instead of enlightenment.

             It has been said better, by Igor Stravinsky of all 
        people in a series of lectures given at Harvard in 1939 as 
        follows.

            "In every period of spiritual anarchy wherein man, 
        having lost his feeling and taste for ontology, takes fright 
        at himself and his destiny, there always appears one of 
        these gnosticisms which serve as a religion for those who no 
        longer have a religion, just as in periods of international 
        crises an army of soothsayers, fakirs, and clairvoyants 
        monopolizers of journalistic publicity." 

             These are the times for people like this to arise.  It 
        is not so much the loss of traditional values or religions 
        but the failure to make the effort to learn the new things 
        that have caused our loss of faith in the old.

             Darwin brought many to discard religion but how few who 
        discarded religion studied Darwin.  At times science has 
        caused many to discard religion but few have taken the time 
        to learn religion.  They have replaced something with 
        nothing.  As such they are willing to follow the first thing 
        that replaces what they have lost.

             People who once held and then abandoned a formal 
        religion are very likely to adopt some form of mysticism to 
        replace it.  Not that science or whatever supports mysticism 
        but note so many recent best sellers of pop science such as, 
        The Dancing Wu Li Masters.  These purport to show science is 
        nothing new, it has all been known before.

             Is religion abandoned because of the death of a loved 
        one?  How quickly will spiritualism be adopted with seances, 
        speaking with the dead, crystal balls and the whole nine 
        yards?
             
             Today we have a mass turning away from religion which 
        has always been easy enough with a reasonable excuse.  But 
        how many have replaced it with their reasonable excuse?  
        Very few.  So what do they turn to?  The easist thing that 
        comes done the street.  Anyone willing to instill a few 
        simple solutions to all of their problems is accepted 
        wholeheartedly.
             
             Of course, simple solutions only last for a short time.  
        What happens?  They move on to the next simple solution.  
        Yesterday vegetarianism, today the ozone layer, tomorrow 
        they will get around to saving the whales.



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                  Copyright 1990 and 1991 by Matt Giwer.  
                           all rights reserved

             This is why they appear to be so closely related.  They 
        are wanderers from cult belief to cult belief.  They have 
        old relations or perhaps future plans to belong to the other 
        organizations.  

             They have failed where reason is concerned.  They have 
        abandoned the intellect and reason and replaced it with pap.  
        They are the derelicts of the mind.  

             When you hear them speak realize this.















































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                  Copyright 1990 and 1991 by Matt Giwer.  
                           all rights reserved

                                  Climate

             warming

                                 Global Warming

             There are dire predictions, intolerably hot summers, the sea 
        level rising and flooding New York City and submerging Florida, 
        mass starvation, droughts, real Biblical proportion end of the 
        world stuff.  And it is just around the corner.  And even if we 
        stop right now it is going to happen anyway.  And, and, and ... 
        the list goes on and on.  Each terror more creative than the 
        last.

             What is the evidence for any global warming?  None.  Not a 
        thing.  For every bit of evidence for some local warming there is 
        equal evidence for local cooling.  It is a simple as that.

             What is the greatest cause of the fallacy?  It has been 
        commonly believed but never tested that CO2 is one of the reasons 
        for the current temperature of the Earth.  The folly is simply 
        that although it is widely believed it has never been tested.  
        This was even published as educational value material in 
        children's comic books in the 1950s -- I remember it well.

             Over the last 100 years there has been an uncontrolled 
        experiment (called the Industrial Revolution) increasing the CO2 
        content of the atmosphere.  The result of that experiment to date 
        is that there is NO direct relationship between the CO2 content 
        of the atmosphere and the temperature of the atmosphere.

             Simply we have fallen into a very old dangerous trap.  It is 
        better to know nothing than to know something that is not true.  
        What simply is not true is the CO2 concentration in the 
        atmosphere has a direct relationship to the temperature of the 
        atmosphere.  The test has been conducted and the theory has been 
        disproved.

             Our concern of the CO2 in the atmosphere is based upon our 
        belief in something that was never true in the first place.

             But have not 355 scientists signed a statement agreeing 
        there is global warming?  If anyone thinks that 355 scientists 
        have ever agreed on anything they do not know any scientists.  
        The "statement" actually said the possibility of global warming 
        should receive increased attention.

             Has not Europe agreed to work to limit CO2 emmissions?  
        Europe has chronic unemployment and a shrinking population.  If 
        Europe does nothing at all they will decrease their CO2 
        emmissions simply because their population is decreasing.  For 
        the US to do the same it would have to seal its borders and stop 
        ALL legal and illegal immigration immediately and start incentive 
        programs for small family sizes.



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                  Copyright 1990 and 1991 by Matt Giwer.  
                           all rights reserved

             co2


                     Where did all the coal come from?

             Just where did is all come from?  And all the oil for 
        that matter.  It came from plants and ultimately from the 
        air.  Coal from thin air?  Yes.  And in burning it perhaps 
        we are just returning the coal to the air.

             Is the really a threat to the human race to burn fossil 
        fuel?  Just what is fossil fuel?

             First off, fossil fuel is a bit of a misnomer.  A 
        fossil is something that was once organic that was 
        eventually replaced by stone.  Dinosaur bones you see are 
        not the bones themselves but rather the bones decayed and 
        left inadvertant "molds" in the ground that were filled with 
        mineral bearing waters that solidified into stone.  Dinosaur 
        bones are in fact really rock in the shape of bones.

             As such fossil fuel is not fossil at all.  It is the 
        original carbon from plants that once lived which over the 
        millions of years has become buried under the earth.

             The best available theory suggests that coal and oil 
        originated as plant life that was abundantly produced in the 
        world wide warm tropical climate that existed from between 
        800 to 200 million years ago.  Today if you want to see a 
        future coal seam, go visit a peat bog but not there are few 
        of them today.  I will come back to this point.

             In the early earth life divided into many forms of 
        surival.  Some to live off of thermal vents in the oceans, 
        some to live off of rare high concentrations of certain 
        minerals.  We find examples of these today but they are 
        quite rare.  

             Early two main forms adopted the life cycles that 
        permitted the greatest number of offspring and thus came to 
        dominate the life patterns on earth.  One drew its life 
        energy from sunlight through photosynthesis and became 
        plants.  The other lived upon plants and upon each other and 
        these are animals.  

             Not only do animals live directly off of plants for 
        food but also breath the oxygen given off by plants.  In the 
        life cycle of plants the take carbon dioxide from the air 
        and combined with other chemicals and sunlight produce what 
        they need to live and grow.  In the process they give off 
        oxygen.  

             The process of photosynthesis is slow and thus plants 
        exhibit little more movement than pointing turning toward 
        the sun during the day as it moves across the sky.  Oxygen 


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        1 copyright 1990 by Matt Giwer.  all rights reserved
                           all rights reserved

        consumption produces much more energy and permitted the 
        development of animals which move around.

             Back to coal. In photosynthesis plants consume carbon 
        from the carbon dioxide they take from the air.  Now we make 
        one assumption here.  Before the start of life, the amount 
        of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was a certain amount and 
        no more was added.  Certainly, volcanoes over the hundreds 
        of millions of years added some but they were random events 
        not part of the life process.

             So over a few hundred million years plants lived and 
        died and in many cases instead of being a constantly active 
        recycling layer of topsoil found itself in bogs and swamps 
        that eventually became thick and buried and turned to coal.
                  
             In this process carbon was removed from the atmosphere 
        NEVER to return until we started burning it for fuel.  In 
        other words, if the amount of carbon dioxide in the 
        atmosphere was fixed when life first began then the very 
        existance of life has REDUCED the amount of carbon dioxide 
        in the atmosphere.

             We are living in a world whose atmosphere is starved 
        for carbon dioxide as plants and geologic forces have 
        sequestered so much of it below the surface of the Earth. 

             Let us get back to the peat bogs.  The United States 
        has the world's largest proven reserves of coal with enough 
        for over 500 years consumption at the present rate.  That is 
        a lot of carbon that was permanently removed from the 
        atmosphere and permanently reduced the carbon dioxide 
        content of the atmosphere.  

             But rather the question is, if there is so much coal 
        today where are the future coal beds of the world?  Is the 
        world not creating any more of them?  Apparently there are 
        very few and they are very small.  The most commonly known 
        are the peat bogs of Scotland.  There are few others.  Why?

             Let us take a look at another phenomenon.  If plants 
        are raised in greenhouses where the carbon dioxide is 
        increased then the plants grow faster and larger.  This 
        indicates that plants are starved for carbon dioxide.  If 
        they have enough they grow faster and larger.  This is 
        leading us somewhere.

             I have a modest hypothesis.  The earth now has much 
        less carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than is needed by 
        plants to grow normally.  In fact every plant we see that is 
        not properly hothouse grown is a carbon starved plant.  If 
        there were more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere we would 
        have more and larger and faster growing plants.

             Back to the peat bogs.  Why are there not more of them?  


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        1 copyright 1990 by Matt Giwer.  all rights reserved
                           all rights reserved

        Why are there not more future coal beds in the making?  
        Because plants do not grow fast enough or large enough to 
        provide the raw material for future coal beds.  

             I propose that over the millions of years life was 
        doing quite nicely with a much high carbon dioxide 
        atmosphere however geologic forces and local climates caused 
        plants to be buried rather than recycled into the 
        atmosphere.  Thus over the millions of years the earth and 
        all of its plant life has become starved for carbon dioxide 
        as more and more of it has become locked away deep 
        underground.  

             This is why there are so few future coal beds being 
        produced these days.  The growth rate of plants is so 
        diminished by the carbon dioxide depleted atmosphere they 
        live in as produce an ecology where every excess bit of 
        plant waste is scarfed up by some organism or other.  There 
        is none left over to become future coal beds.
             
             The consequences of this?  Burning coal and oil is in 
        fact returning to the atmosphere exactly what was once taken 
        from the atmosphere and never replaced.  By burning these 
        fossil fuels we are in fact returning the atmosphere to the 
        condition it was before geologic forces interfered and 
        started burying it away from ever being returned to the 
        atmosphere.

             Far from destroying the earth, burning fossil fuels 
        will restore the early balance to the earth, increase plant 
        growth and food supplies and give us perhaps a somewhat 
        higher oxygen environment to live in.

             Long after nuclear power makes fossil fuel burning way 
        to expensive we will possibly continue to burn them just to 
        kelp restore the vegatative productivity of the earth.





















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                           all rights reserved

             plantlif


                           The Plant life Process     

             The life processes of plants are extremely relevant to 
        making some sense out of environmental misunderstandings.  
        From any introductory text you will find that plants need 
        water, light and nutrients and I presume most everyone knows 
        this.  Consider two lesser known facts two of those 
        essentials to plant life come from the air.

             Nitrogen is the first and usually covered in texts.  
        Nitrogen is absorbed through the roots of plants.  It comes 
        however from the sky, from thunderstorms which create 
        various nitrous oxides and mild nitric acid that then rains 
        into the soil.  From there it is fixed by bacteria, that is, 
        used up by it and eventually it finds its way into plants.

             The second is rarely mentioned as it is not a 
        considered a nutrient, is it carbon.  Carbon is the 
        fundamental building block of life.  All life on earth is 
        based upon carbon.  Without carbon, no life.

             The carbon plants use comes from the carbon dioxide gas 
        in the air and only from there.  Plants take in carbon 
        dioxide and through the process of photosynthesis remove the 
        carbon and release oxygen.  Oxygen being of course the 
        essential gas for animal life.

             With animal life if there is a smaller than needed 
        amount of an essential nutrient the animal tends to become 
        sickly and die early.  For the most part with plants, if an 
        essential nutrient in in short supply, the plant simply 
        grows more slowly.  When all essentials are available in the 
        correct proportions and as much as the plant can handle, a 
        plant has its maximum growth rate.

             If you want to take a professional approach to growing 
        your house plants you will grow them in an enclosure called 
        a phytarium.  With it you can provide the plant with all the 
        essential nutrients in the correct proporations.  Guess what 
        happens if you increase the amount of CO2 in the enclosure?  
        Most plants grow faster.

             One more time in different words, for most plants the 
        amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is less than what 
        is needed for maximum growth.  Not only that, when you do 
        increase the CO2 they generally need less water for the same 
        growth.  A very good case can be made that the earth's 
        atmosphere is deficient in carbon dioxide.






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                  Copyright 1990 and 1991 by Matt Giwer.  
                           all rights reserved

             rainfor



                              The Rain Forests

             Today there is great shouting in the streets over the 
        destruction of the Brazilian rain forest.  Lets recount the 
        list of coming disasters (if we can remember them all.)  The 
        earth will run out of breathing oxygen.  There will be no 
        new drugs.  Millions of species will become extinct.  The 
        land will turn into a desert.  Dire enough for you?

             What will happen if they are cut down?  Some local 
        weather patterns may change; nothing more.  If they are not 
        cut down the economic growth of Brazil will grind to a halt.  

             But won't the Earth stop producing oxygen?  Just where 
        did that idea come from?  Some one invented it for the 
        purpose of making money as usual.
             
             If the rain forests were in fact a major planetary 
        source of oxygen then the oxygen concentration within the 
        rain forest would be massive.  If the oxygen concentration 
        rose above 22% the entire forest would go up in flames with 
        the first small fire.  At 22% oxygen content in the air 
        almost everything is explosively flammable.

             Lets put this in perspective.  The earth is only 20% 
        land. I don't have a number in front of me but let us make 
        the assumption that 20% of the land is forest.  That would 
        mean only 4% of the earth is forest.  Lets keep this simple 
        with a wildly high assumption that 25% of all forests are 
        rain forests.  That results in no more than 1% of the earth 
        being rain forests.  

             For 1% of the land surface to make any exceptional 
        contribution to the oxygen on the planet it would have to be 
        producing enough oxygen within the forest to burn it to the 
        ground with the first fire.

             For rain forests to be a major source of oxygen for the 
        planet when only being 1% of the land mass then it must be 
        pumping out oxygen at such a prodigious rate that the effect 
        would be directly measurable by the increased oxygen both 
        inside and down wind of a rain forest.

             The truth is, there is no such measurement, there is no 
        such increased oxygen content.

             Won't the land turn to desert?  Why would that happen?  
        They are using slash and burn land clearing tactics, 
        however that is the same technique that was used in clearing 
        the Great Eastern forests in the US and they are not 
        deserts.


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                  Copyright 1990 and 1991 by Matt Giwer.  
                           all rights reserved


             Millions of species will become extinct?  There will be 
        no more new drugs?  Let not answer that directly.  Lets 
        rather look at what the experts are doing.  Are the 
        pharmacutical houses sending armies of collectors to gather 
        specimens before the become extinct?  Are there armies of 
        naturalists descending upon the forest cataloging every 
        thing in sight?  NO!

             The experts are not acting as though these stories are 
        true.  

             There is nothing but the weeping and wailing of 
        environmental activists who prefer to issue press releases 
        than to do something constructive.  










































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                  Copyright 1990 and 1991 by Matt Giwer.  
                           all rights reserved


             warmodel


                 What do the Warming Models Really Predict?

             Announced in bold face and all upper case print or in 
        stentorian tones by the fund raisers, "Leading Scientists 
        predict temperature will rise [insert your favorite number] 
        degrees in the next fifty years.  This will result in the 
        end of all life on earth unless you [insert your favorite 
        home remedy] and send your contributions to me."
             
             Let me state the first rule of math modeling whether 
        with pencil and paper or with the fastest computer in the 
        world.  If the model does not explain the present then you 
        know one thing, the model is wrong.  

             As I have already discussed there is absolutely no 
        evidence of any warming on the global level having occured 
        in the last one hundred years.  That is in itself is a 
        strange finding but it is correct.  There is direct evidence 
        of increase CO2 in the atmosphere over the last twenty years 
        and there is indirect evidence going back about 100 years 
        more.

             Therefore, the models which link CO2 increase with 
        temperature increase are completely invalid.  They do NOT 
        explain why there is no indication of a temperature 
        increase.  They violate the first rule of math modeling and 
        in not being able to explain the present they are worthless 
        in explaining the future.

             But just for the sake of argument let us assume for the 
        moment that these models are valid.  Just what do they 
        predict?  They all predict a temperature increase in the 
        future they were predicting about 10 degrees F average 
        increase over the entire world over the entire year.  As the 
        models have become more refined, as they say, the predicted 
        increase is down to about 3 degrees F and some models as 
        little as 1 degree F.

             But in any event all of them predict an average that is 
        for the entire planet for the entire year.  However, that is 
        just the simple number use by those interested in selling  
        newspapers and those who are intent upon collecting 
        donations use.  Why do they use it?  Because it conjures up 
        images of broiling hot summers and deserts.  Because if they 
        explained it to you, you would be out there burning all the 
        coal and oil you could find.

             Why?  Because every prediction indicates the LEAST 
        temperature increase will be in the summer and in the hotter 
        climates and the MOST increase will be in the winter and in 
        the colder climates.  These increases will average out to 


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        copyright 1990 by Matt Giwer. 
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        whatever number they are predicting.

             So what does it really mean?  It means that in the 
        summer it will be slightly warmer and in the winter it will 
        be much warmer.  It means that this warming effect will make 
        the colder latitudes a little warmer in summer and a lot 
        warmer in winter.

             In practice this means at the equator there will be 
        little change at all.  It means the further North you go the 
        shorter the winters, the longer the growing season, the more 
        food produced.  It means the more snowfall and rain there 
        will be in the colder months, leading to more water in the 
        ground for the spring crops.

             Some have suggested this will lead to the melting of 
        the icecaps and the glaciers.  Whoever said that knows just 
        enough to get it wrong.  The size of a glacier is simply the 
        ratio of who much snow falls in the winter to how much melts 
        in the summer.  

             Let me first correct a common misunderstanding.  Cold 
        air causes rain and snow, it does not carry the moisture 
        that becomes rain or snow.  The colder the air the less 
        moisture the air can hold.  Rain or snow is caused when warm 
        air with a high moisture content meets a cold air mass.  The 
        cold air mass cools the warmer air so it can not hold as 
        much moisture.  The result is rain or, if cold enough, snow.

             Because of this the warmer the higher latitudes the 
        more snow will fall in the winter and add to the size of the 
        glacier.  Since the summer are going to be relatively less 
        warmer than the winter there will not be a balancing amount 
        of summer warmth to melt the extra snow.  The result?  The 
        glacier grows.

             Now I am not going to predict that global warming will 
        cause the next Ice Age, rather I am going to point out that 
        world wide moderate temperatures and growing glaciers go 
        together.  The Hollywood idea of freezing cave men and 
        glaciers is of no better accuracy than anything else 
        Hollywoood produces.  After all have you never wondered why 
        African climate mastadons and mammoths are found next to 
        glaciers?  With the stomachs full of plants?  Obviously the 
        climate was relatively warm.  And if anyone believes the 
        slight amount of fur on the Wooly Mammoth was enough to keep 
        them warm I will be happy to sell them a string teeshirt to 
        keep the warm next winter.

             What will this mean to us should it happen?  A longer 
        growing season world wide.  More food growing further North.  
        The Earth able to support a vastly greater population to the 
        point of obesity.

             Even if the predictions of the models are correct then 


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        everyone should go back to burning coal.
             























































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        copyright 1990 by Matt Giwer. 
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          glaciers

                  Growing Glaciers mean a coming Ice Age?

             Now this is a hard topic to address.  The comon wisdom 
        of the 1990s is that when the glaciers become smaller the 
        world is warming.  Funny thing, in the 1970s the common 
        wisdom was that when the glaciers grow larger it was a sign 
        of the coming Ice Age.

             What causes a glacier to grow or decline?  Glaciers are 
        NOT a measure of global temperature.  The rise and fall of 
        glaciers is simply the ratio of the precipitation to fall in 
        the winter to the melt off in the summer, nothing more and 
        nothing less.  If more snow falls in the winter than melts 
        in the summer the glacier grows.  If more melts in the 
        summer than falls in the winter, the glacier gets smaller.
             
             That sounds easy enough.  So if the coming winter cold 
        from the artic brings down all that snow that means it is 
        getting colder.  Right?  Completely wrong.  

             The colder the air the less moisture it carries.  The 
        cause of snow and rain is primarily warm air with a lot of 
        humidity meeting with cold air.  The cold and warm air 
        mixing causes an average cooling and the water vapor to fall 
        from the air as rain.  

             



























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              all rights reserved


             weather


               Short introduction to Global Weather Patterns

             This is in no way intened to be exhaustive or even to 
        cover more than a handful of points.  This is to provide 
        some background into how the world weather patterns are 
        generated and to give a working feeling to apply that 
        information to environmental discussions.

             To do with we start with the most simplified model.  
        The earth as a sphere revolving around the sun.  The equator 
        is warmer than the poles.  At the equator the air becomes 
        warmer and rises.  At each pole the air becomes colder and 
        falls.  

             In the most simple sense we have rising air in the 
        South and falling air in the north.  The the air circulates 
        from the poles to the equator along the surface and from the 
        equator to the poles at high altitude.  Add to this simply 
        that air north of the equator returns to the north pole and 
        air south of the equator returns to the south pole and the 
        understand the first order approximation to the earth 
        weather patterns.

             In this case you will note there is very little mixing 
        across the equator.  This is borne out by measurements of 
        the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere at the Moana
        Loa observatory in Hawaii.  Not only to the track the from 
        year to year but from month to month.  During the summer in 
        the north, when there is a lot of plant growth using up CO2 
        the concentration is lower than in the winter.  Since when 
        it is summer in the north it is winter in the south, the 
        concentrations track the seasons in the north.  If there 
        were signficant mixing across the equator there would be no 
        seasonal change of the CO2 content.

             This lack of mixing between the hemisphere is one of 
        the most crucial questions that have to be answered by those 
        who hold CFCs released in the north first show up in the 
        south.

             Where did the seasons come from?  The earth is tilted 
        on its axis with respect to the sun.  Through out the year 
        the amount of light and therefore heat falling on a one 
        hemisphere increases while decreasing in the other.  In fact 
        the tilting is such that the polar regions are alternately 
        have either 24 hours a day of light or of darkness.

             The atmosphere covering the earth is very thin so most 
        of the air over the poles is without light from the sun for 
        those same six months.  The arctic and antarctic circles 
        define the areas at sea level where there is no sunlight 


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        Copyright 1990 and 1991 by Matt Giwer.  
              all rights reserved

        during these times.  If they were redrawn about 60 miles 
        smaller they would define the area where the air is devoid 
        of sunlight for the same six months each year.

             Without the constant infusion of heat from the sun heat 
        is lost by radiation into space.  Thus during these times of 
        the year the air is cooling most rapidly.  The warmer coming 
        up from the south at high altitude cools most rapidly at 
        this time.  When you hear weather reports of a freezing 
        arctic air mass headed your way, this is where it got so 
        cold.

             If things are so simple why is are there cold fronts in 
        the first place?  Why not a simple constant flow of cold air 
        from the north?  This is where meteorologists at all levels 
        earn their pay.

             For one major factor is that the earth rotates on its 
        own axis.  Lets say you were trying to set a record for the 
        time to fly around the world.  If you trying to do it in one 
        day at the equator you would have to fly a bit over 1000 
        miles per hour.  Why?  The circumference of the earth at the 
        equator is about 25,000 miles and the earth rotates in 24 
        hours so to do so in one day would be 1,044 miles per hour.

             But why do it the hard way?  Why not go up to the north 
        pole and walk around it?  If you could find the exact 
        location of the pole you could walk around the world in a 
        few seconds.  
             
             It works out that the farther you get from the poles 
        the faster you have to move to complete the journey around 
        the world in one day.

             Lets take an arctic air mass moving south.  For it to 
        be moving directly south toward the equator it would have to 
        move faster for each mile south it traveled.  Air directly 
        in contact with the surface is sped up by the earth but the 
        higher the altitude the less acceleration.  This would seem 
        to give a nice prevailing breeze at all times.

             Unfortunately this is where the simple model breaks 
        down.  There are different affects over the oceans than over 
        land.  Mountains and plains on land have different affects.  
        There are major currents in the ocean of different 
        temperatures that change the local weather.  There are 
        thousands of factors that would have to be taken into 
        account to completely understand the world's weather.









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        Copyright 1990 and 1991 by Matt Giwer.  
              all rights reserved


             so2

        A


        Msg#:21796 *Elite*
        09/18/90 20:14:08
        From: MATT GIWER
          To: GABOR LAUFER
        Subj: REPLY TO MSG# 21779 (SO2)
                The article is not really that good.  Just a summary of the issue, no
        more information than I was talking about last year.  SO2 produces smaller 
        condensations that plain water in clouds making them brighter and they 
        reflect away more light.  Clouds with an SO2 content are brighter.
                However, one quote of interest in the article was from one of the 
        climate researchers, "We have been wondering where all the warming was." 
        Stating indirectly exactly what I have been saying all along.  There is no 
        warming.
                I do not intend to hang my hat on this issue.  I don't think in any 
        way SO2 explains why CO2 has had NO affect on temperature.  It would be 
        impossibly fortuitous that the sulphur content of fossil fuels is exactly 
        enough (in the proportions we burn it) to match the carbon content of the 
        fuels (again, in the proportions we burn it.)  The carbon content of coal per
        BTU vs oil is much higher.  The sulphur contents of both and the SO2 already 
        -More-
        mixed with some natural gas varies widely.  It would be an almost impossible 
        coincidence for them to exactly match to cancel each other.
                My point is we do not understand enough in the least about global 
        climate to begin to draw any conclusions as to what action to take.

        <->backward forward on message chain
        elete, gain, eply, ext, or top? 
























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        Copyright 1990 and 1991 by Matt Giwer.  
              all rights reserved


             cowhouse


                         Cows and Greenhouse Gases

             Cows are releasing greenhouse gases and causing global 
        warming and we should stop eating so much meat.  So all over 
        consuming, greedy, evil Americans should become vegetarians 
        or you will destroy the world.

             Lets us dissect this bit or raging nonsense.

             What is a greenhouse gas?  Heat reaching the earth from 
        the sun is in the form of infrared radiation which is light 
        of a longer wavelength than the color red.  If we could see 
        infrared with the same number of different colors as we see 
        visible light there would be at least another eight colors 
        within the infrared spectrum.  

             How is the earth warmed by the sun?  The sun bathes the 
        earth in the infrared colors which, if we could see them 
        would vary from red to violet.  Warming occurs when the 
        earth and atmosphere absorb this infrared light.  

             There are two interelated processes that cause the 
        earth to be warmed by the sun.  The first process is the air 
        is transparent to the infrared colors we would call blue and 
        violet and it absorbs the colors we would call red and 
        orange.  In absorbing the red and orange infrared the air is 
        warmed.  
             
             The second process is the earth itself, the land, the 
        plants, the oceans, being warmed by the blue and violet 
        infrared that reaches the surface.  Remember, infrared is 
        what we call heat and all warm bodies radiate infrared.  So 
        when the earth is warmed by the blue and violet it then 
        radiates red and orange infrared.  And it is this red and 
        orange that is radiated back toward the sky and through the 
        atmosphere.  

             The atmosphere which absorbed the red and orange 
        infrared coming in from the sun also absorbs red and orange 
        reradiated from the earth and causes additional warming of 
        the air.  

             After bearing with me this long here is what I have 
        been leading up to.  The air is composed primarily of 
        nitrogen, oxygen and carbon dioxide.  It is the carbon 
        dioxide that passes the blue and violet infrared and absorbs 
        the red and orange infrared.  Thus carbon dioxide is called 
        a greenhouse gas.

             Bear in mind the situation is much more complicated 
        than this but it will do for the purposes of this part of 


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        the discussion.  

             Now why would we be concerned about greenhouse gases?  
        The simplest point of view (which is all we are considering 
        now) is that an increase in the greenhouse gases will result 
        in an increase in the amount of red and orange infrared 
        captured by the atmosphere.  Right away we see the first 
        complication.  If all the heat is already captured by the 
        present amount of carbon dioxide what do we care if there is 
        more carbon dioxide added by burning fossil fuel?  The 
        atmosphere can't capture more heat than all of it.

             Now lets get back to the question is regarding 
        greenhouse gases being released by cattle.  What is that 
        gas?  It is plain old bovine flatulence, the same gas drives 
        flatulence in most all animals.  It is the gas that drives 
        the breaking wind in humans.  It is the gas methane perhaps 
        better known as natural gas, the same gas we use for heating 
        and cooking and making fertilizer and a host of other 
        applications.

             Would you like to become a multi-millionaire?  It is 
        estimated the amount of methane released as bovine 
        flatulence is approximately equal to the amount consumed by 
        this country for energy and other uses.  The only problem of 
        interest is its collection.  Several rather humorous 
        inventions suggest themselves ...

             Back to the subject.  Methane is one of the gases that 
        does like carbon dioxide, pass the blue and violet infrared 
        and absorb the red and orange.  In considering whether or 
        not this is a problem we have to ask two questions.  One, is 
        it longlived in the atmosphere?  Two, is the production of 
        it by cattle a change from the conditions precattle?

             Remember a point from the discussion of 
        chloroflurocarbons and the ozone layer.  The as yet unproven 
        potential for CFCs to damage the Ozone layer was the fact 
        they are long lived and stable in the atmosphere.  That is 
        they are not chemically reactive with the other gases in the 
        atmosphere; they will not change to simpler gases before the 
        rise as high as the Ozone layer.

             Carbon dioxide is not long lived in the atmosphere.  
        plants breathe it and use it up.  Animals eat the plants and 
        breath in oxygen and breath out more carbon dioxide.

             Is this true for methane?  Not at all.  Not in the 
        least.  Methane is natural gas.  It burns.  But burning only 
        means that it joins with oxidizes, it chemically joins with 
        oxygen to produces simpler compounds, in this case water and 
        more carbon dioxide.  We rarely see iron burn but iron 
        rusts, or rather oxidies.  Methane is constantly 
        deteriorating in the atmosphere whether caused by simple 
        sunlight or by the lightning in thunderstorms.  Methane is 


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        NOT long lived in the atmosphere.
             
             But then, it does deteriorate into carbon dioxide which 
        adds to the carbon dioxide which could still be a problem, 
        right?  This leads to question two.  Is the cattle industry 
        in this country any different from the conditions that 
        existed prior to our arriving here?

             We first should consider the earliest descriptions of 
        the plains of what are now the midwest and western states 
        regarding the buffalo.  Consider specifically the 
        description that the buffalo herds stretched from horizon to 
        horizon.  I have yet to hear anyone describe any cattle herd 
        in those terms, even on the Ponderosa Ranch.

             How many buffalo were there?  That we do not know.  We 
        do know that buffalo are grazing animals just as cattle are 
        grazing animals.  Both have a strong tendency to the 
        flatulent release of methane.  And this is only speaking of 
        large grazing animals.  

             In fact little has changed due to the development of 
        cattle ranching regarding methane production and even if so 
        it has always been with us.  Right from nature.

































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             Energy

         ..SUNPOWER.WS      

                      The Practicality of Solar Power

             So many seem so completely convinced that solar power 
        will solve all of the world energy problems forever that it 
        is about time to give this some serious consideration.

                Given:  Solar power will replace without other 
        impact the power requirements of our homes.

                Given:  At Noon, at sea level at the equator on 
        either of the Equinox the solar power at all frequencies 
        (infra-red, visible, UV) is approximately one horsepower or 
        750 watts per square meter due to insolation.  Insolation is 
        the proper term for impacting sunlight.

                In all cases assumptions will be made that are in 
        favor of solar power.  Therefore we will assume 750 watts 
        per square yard rather than which is 20% in favor of solar.

                The no impact power requirement.

                The standard for a household is 100 amp service up 
        from 50 amp service of 40 years ago.  The actual household 
        need is more like 75 amps but the given that there will be 
        no other impact means to use 100 amp service.  100 amps * 
        120 volts = 12,000 watts.  So at 750 w/sq yd that is 16 
        square yards at 100% conversion efficiency.  That is a 
        square 4 yards on a side or 12 feet on a side.

                Solar cell efficiency.

                The best reported solar cell conversion efficiency 
        reported is around 20% and that only with mirrors 
        concentrating the light.  But since we err in favor of solar 
        power we say 50% conversion efficiency. It is useful to note 
        here that almost NO power conversion is that efficient.  
        Electric power plants are on the order of 28% efficient 
        after decades of development; MHD power conversion under 
        development is something like 32% efficient.  So the size of 
        our solar panel is now 32 sq yd.

                Day and night.

                Since the sun is not out at night we have to again 
        double the size.  Note that this presumes the solar panel is 
        not fixed but rather turns to point exactly at the rising 
        sun, tracks it across the sky all day until it is pointing 
        at the setting sun.  A rather large and expensive mechanical 
        device would be required to do this without one cell shading 
        the other.  We are up to 64 sq yd or 24 feet on a side.  We 


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        ignore that rather large cost and all other costs.  This is 
        not a cost trade off.

                At this point we are at the outside limit of an 
        apartment on the south side of the building.  Considering 
        the North side needs power and east and west sides needing 
        power that would increase the size requirements by about 
        three.  But enough of apartment buildings.

                Latitude.

                Lets move up to about the latitude of Wash DC and 
        decrease the insolation by another factor of two.  Granted 
        it is not cut in half on June 22 but on Dec 22 it is much 
        less than half.  The requirement is now 128 sq yd of solar 
        cells.

                Summer and winter.

                Not only does the angle change with latitude but 
        also the amount of sunlight per day.  So for ease of 
        calculation we move a bit north of Wash DC to where the 
        worst case is 8 hours of sunlight on Dec 22. Thus we need a 
        1/3 increase is the solar cell area to compensate for this 
        or about 170 sq yd which is a square about 60 feet on a 
        side.

                At this size we have eliminated town houses from 
        having their own solar panels.

                One can agrue that winter heat could be supplied by 
        natural gas rather than electricity but the major 
        requirement for increased power in the home has been summer 
        electricity.  It is granted that there in the most 
        insolation when it is the hottest (almost true, a 90 day lag 
        occurs due to the thermal constant of the Earth itself) but 
        then that still leaves us with air conditioning being one of 
        the major draws of electric power.

                Energy storage.

                Assuming simple DC from the cells to battery storage 
        and another 50% efficiency we have 340 sq yd of cells.  Note 
        that charging any known battery is more like 15% efficient.

                Energy recovery.

                Assuming again direct draw from batteries there is 
        another 50% efficiency and again noting the power discharge 
        is also in the 15% range for all known real batteries.  This 
        gives us 680 sq yd of solar cells or an 80 foot square of 
        them.  Note at this point we are also around 6000 sq ft 
        which eliminates houses in the near in suburbs from having 
        their own solar cells.



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                Up conversion.

                It could be argued that everything in the house 
        could be converted to 12 volt DC operation.  However, 
        because of the low voltage these devices are much less 
        efficient than devices which operate on 120 V.  Now again to 
        be fair, inverters achieve 80% efficiency so we are only up 
        to about 800 sq yd.

                Power transmission.

                Since we have eliminated all apartments, all town 
        houses and the high density houses in the near suburbs from 
        having their own solar cells we have to consider power 
        transmission from a remote solar farm.  3/4 of all power 
        generated is lost in the transmission process. Thus we need 
        4 * 800 sq yd or 3200 sq yd per household of solar cells or 
        around 30,000 square feet or approximately 3/4 of an acre 
        per household.

                Since this is not a discussion of the potential of 
        superconductors and the like 25% efficiency for existing 
        power transmission methods is within the guidelines.

                Total requirements.

                For the Wash DC area with approximately 1 million 
        households this will require some 750,000 acres to be 
        devoted to solar farms and the ground on those farms will 
        not recieve ANY direct sunlight ever as it is assumed that 
        the solar cells recieve all of it.

                This will provide power only for homes.  Wash DC is 
        a unique example as it has little to no industry; Xerox 
        machines are a major power drain in this area.  So lets take 
        a more normal area and suggest the requirements of industry 
        are at least equal to home requirements.  A normal city this 
        size would need 1.5 million acres or something like 22,500 
        square miles, or an area somewhat greater than 1/4 the state 
        of Ohio for each 1 million households with equivalent 
        industry to go with it.

             The intent of the above is not to reject all 
        consideration of solar power.  Rather to put solar power in 
        perspective and demonstrate that we have a long time to go 
        and a lot of other existing technologies to improve all at 
        the same time before solar power is going to be in any way 
        practical.  It is not something that is just over the hill 
        or something that is being suppressed by anyone.  

             Solar power is just one small possibility that may 
        become a component of the power generation needs of the 
        country in the next few decades.  It should not be dropped 
        but neither should it be elevated as the salvation of the 
        would.


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             Pollution

             ozone
             
                       Ozone:  The Hole with a Difference

             Man made chemicals are destroying the ozone layer and there 
        is a hole over Antarctica to prove it.  The chemicals are chloro-
        fluro-carbons (CFCs) such as are used in home and automobile air 
        conditioning.

             What is ozone?  The gas oxygen is an atom.  It is the gas in 
        the air we need to live.  In the air, oxygen exists as a 
        molecule, two oxygen atoms joined together, chemically expressed 
        as O2.  If you have a strong ultraviolet light or an electric 
        spark, ozone will be formed.  Ozone is simply three oxygen atoms 
        in one molecule to make O3.  Ozone is the fresh smell after a 
        thunderstorm.

             In the upper atmosphere ultraviolet light coming from the 
        sun converts some of the normal O2 into O3.  In doing so, the 
        ultraviolet light is used up.  Thus the ozone is not really a 
        shield against ultraviolet light at all but rather O2 is the 
        shield, O3 is created by absorbing the ultraviolet light.  The 
        production of Ozone rather than Ozone itself it the shield.  
        Ozone is not stable like O2.  It breaks down into normal O2 
        rather rapidly which is why the fresh air smell after a 
        thunderstorm goes away rapidly.

             Where is the Ozone layer?  It is some 50 miles above us and 
        all over the world.  

             What are CFCs?  Carbon is an atom that easily forms into 
        long chains with other carbon atoms.  When in the long chains it 
        easily adds other atoms to its chain.  If those atoms are 
        hydrogen we have hydrocarbons, gasoline, kerosene, diesel oil 
        being examples of them.  If the other atoms are chlorine and 
        flurine we have CFCs.  Nothing magic about them.

             CFCs are primarily industrial chemicals which are also used 
        in air conditioning.  They are produced and used primarily by the 
        industrialized nations.  We note in passing the industrialized 
        nations are primarily in the Northern Hemisphere.  We can 
        comfortably estimate that 90% of the usage is in the Northern 
        Hemisphere.

             In themselves chlorine and flurine are extremely chemically 
        active and in the free state would rapidly join with some other 
        atom.  Chlorine is common household bleach.  It joins with other 
        atoms which may have color and appear as stains and produces a 
        colorless, bleached, compound.

             Back in 1973 in the laboratory it was found that free 
        chlorine and flurine caused O3 to break down more rapidly.  How 


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        could that ever matter?  Chlorine and flurine are very chemically 
        active and could never survive alone to reach the ozone layer 
        above us.  As a component of the gas CFC is might reach that 
        high.  Keep in mind despite numerous efforts no one has ever 
        measured CFCs up in the ozone layer. 

             But there is a hole over the Antarctic to prove it, isn't 
        there?

             Lets look at some facts about that hole.

             First, the hole was discovered only three years ago.  It has 
        only been present in two of those three years.  There was a year 
        without a hole, but there was not a year without CFCs.

             Second, the hole occurs during the Antarctic winter, the 
        time when there are 24 hours a day of darkness.  Ozone is created 
        by ultraviolet light coming from the sun.  During the winter 
        there is no sun and ozone breaks down normally without sunlight.  
        So rather than being a sign of CFC effect it is rather what one 
        would expect, no sunlight, no ozone.

             Third, in the two and only two years of observation of the 
        Arctic during the days of 24 hours of darkness there was no hole 
        found.  It may be there occasionally.  It has only been looked 
        for in the last two years and it has not been there either year.  
        One had to ask, if 90% of the CFCs are in the northern hemisphere 
        why has not hole been observed?  In Antarctica were there are the 
        least CFCs there has been a hole two out of three and in the 
        Arctic where there are the most there are no holes for two years.  
        Everything points to the Antarctic hole having nothing to do with 
        CFCs whatsoever. 

             Why should one be skeptical that CFCs are causing the hole?

             First, more than 90% of all the CFCs are used in the 
        Northern Hemisphere.  Antarctica is as far from the North 
        Hemisphere as you can get on this planet.  Why do all the CFCs 
        race to the South Pole to do their damage?  Those are some smart 
        CFCs we are using.  Why in the world would CFCs, or any gas for 
        that matter, move to the South Pole?  There are no particular 
        wind patterns that move air from pole to pole.  In fact the world 
        wide wind patterns move air from each pole to the equator and 
        back again.  There is very little mixing between the hemispheres.

             Second, since 90% or more of the CFCs are in the northern 
        hemisphere why is there no hole over the north pole when it is in 
        24 hours of darkness?  Granted we have only been looking for it 
        for two years but since the impact in the north should be at 
        least ten times greater than in the south, it should have been 
        observed.
             
             Third, if the effect of a thinning ozone layer is to 
        increase the amount of ultraviolet light reaching the surface, 
        where are the measurements?  Measuring the amount of ultraviolet 


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        reaching the surface can be done with very simple instruments yet 
        no one has found any reduction.

             What are the ultimate consequences of increased ultraviolet 
        in any event?  Honestly, no one knows.  

             The cries of the destruction of the ozone layer are very 
        premature.  If all is true as is discussed we are talking a 
        reduction only of the ozone layer by how much, I will grant I do 
        not know but then I will also insist, neither does any one else.

             Certainly people will be able to get a tan more quickly in 
        the summer and perhaps all year round.  There is certain to be an 
        increase in skin cancer but skin cancer, although the most deadly 
        if not treated, is also the most easily treatable of all cancers 
        usually done right in the doctor's office.  President Reagan had 
        two of them removed while in office.








































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             ionized

        Why would that happen". The person looked up and said: It gets ionized
           and the magnetic pull takes it there". It sounded like bullshit, but I
           just couldn't counter it.
           Advice: Address this aspect.


















































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             toxic

                          Amateur Toxicology at the EPA

             What is toxicology?  It is a study of poisons based upon the 
        following observation.  If a dose of X is the minumum amount to 
        kill a person then, all else being equal, if one half that dose 
        is given to each of two people then both will live.  The practice 
        of toxicology is to determine what amount of a substance is 
        lethal and to determine all the intricacies of the above 
        assumption, "all else being equal."
             
             In pursuit of pursuit of what makes things unequal we find 
        that body weight is most important such that dosages are measured 
        in milligrams per kilogram of body weight.  The activity of most 
        all drugs, poisons, toxic substances are measured in this way.  

             However, there are many other variables that are not worth 
        the effort to identify.  Because of this there is the concept of 
        the half lethal dose, or the LD50.  The LD50 applies not only to 
        deadly dosages but also to the level where one half the test 
        subjects develop dangerous side effects, cancer for example, and 
        continuing to assume "all else being equal."

             A typical cancer test is conducted on a group of genetically 
        defective albino rats, commonly refered to as white rats.  A 
        dosage level will be established where one half of them develop 
        cancer or some other serious side effect.  In normal usage this 
        level is compared to the normal exposure level.  If the LD50 is 
        close to the normal exposure level, such as in a medicine, the 
        drug will not be approved.  If the normal exposure level is much 
        lower than the LD50 the substance will be declared substantially 
        harmless.

             Or it should be so.

             Comes the EPA with a new theory.  Let us take a common 
        example.  In the LD50 case there is a dose of arsenic that would 
        have kill a person.  If two people were given one half of that 
        dose both would live.  The EPA makes a different assumption.  To 
        wit, if there is a lethal dose of arsenic for one person then if 
        one million persons were given one millionth the dose then one 
        person in that million would die.  This is patently absurd.  
        There are thousands of substances we ingest daily that are vastly 
        greater than the one millionth level, table salt for instance 
        even by those on a salt free diet, such that people would be 
        dying of poisoning every day from normal living habits.

             There is absolutely no basis for that in the entire science 
        of toxicology what so ever.  The EPA assumption springs solely 
        from statistics.  In this regard they will study people who have 
        a higher than normal exposure to a substance for many years.  
        Then if they find a higher than normal incidence of some disease 
        they will say that even low level dosages are harmful. 


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             The statisticians make one very fatal error in this.  They 
        assume that ALL of the people in the study had exactly the same 
        average exposure and never in their entire job history EVER 
        recieved a higher exposure than that and NEVER were exposed to 
        anything else.  It is absurdly similiar to the case of studying 
        traffic accidents and saying that EVERY driver and passenger has 
        a specific chance of dying while totalling IGNORING people 
        driving while drunk or on drugs or without seatbelts.

             The EPA has invented this concept of low level exposure 
        being deadly out of the whole cloth of statistics and from 
        nothing else.  Existing laboratory methods make it impossible to 
        ever prove the validity of this concept.  Thus the EPA has 
        created out of whole cloth without laboratory proof the concept 
        of a danger from low level exposure.

             No where is this more apparent than in low level exposure to 
        carcinogens.  At the moment the country is wasting tens of 
        millions of dollars over radon, asbestos, cigarette smoke, you 
        name it, all invented by that "damn lie," statistics.

             Massive changes in public policy are being made over second 
        hand cigarette smoke.  What basis is there for this?  A simple 
        (simple to the point of fallacious) assumption is made.  That the 
        amount of smoke inhaled by a smoker and the smoker's risk of 
        smoking related diseases can be calculated down to the second 
        hand smoke.  It is saying that if 400,000 smokers die per year 
        then if non-smokers inhale one thousandths of that smoke that 400 
        per year will die from second hand smoke.

             For some reason this seems an irresistable conclusion 
        although it is just as absurd as saying that one person in one 
        million, all else being equal, will die from one millionth of the 
        lethal dose of arsenic.






















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             toxic2

                             Toxic Recreations

                                     or

             Just what is the Environmental Protection Agency?

             To understand what the EPA is it is most important to 
        understand the one very important fact.  The EPA is not now 
        nor has it ever been a scientific organization.  The EPA is 
        run completely by lawyers without the slightest scientific 
        training whatsoever.  If you ask them, they are proud of it.  
        They are proud to tell you they ignore science when it comes 
        to making regulations.

             In line with this you must realize that it is the 
        deliberate intent of the EPA to subvert science toward 
        regulation.  They see thier mandate (they lobby Congress for 
        authority to regulate a substance, Congress passes the law, 
        the EPA says "We have to do it, Congress passed a law") as 
        laws passed by Congress.  And their objective is to create 
        regulation even in the complete absense of any scientific 
        basis for doing so.  And they are not above lying to do so.

             Therefore it is not surprising when a group of 
        scientifically ignorant attorneys latch onto any fantasy 
        that would permit them to sound like they had some basis for 
        what they want to do in the first place.  

             The idea of the millionth dose discussed above is one 
        of the intriguingly simple ideas that one would expect 
        scientific illiterates to run with.  It has just enough 
        intellectual (though not scientific) standing, requires at 
        least a high school understanding of statistics, and sounds 
        so precise that it would be attractive to people who look 
        better wearing Dobermans than three piece suits.  

             As a matter of history the Environmental Protection 
        Agency was created not by law but by Executive Order.  It 
        was immediately staffed by lawyers at the highest levels.  
        Scientists are found at the lower levels only to provide 
        advice to lawyers who are totally and completely incapable 
        of comprehending what is said to them.

             The first actions of the EPA were to issue regulations 
        the required the reduction by half of all the substances 
        that were currently held guilty by the pop scientists, the 
        cranks, and the hippie love children.  In other words they 
        did absolutely NO scientific review of the substances or 
        their relative dangers.  Some substances certainly needed to 
        be reduced by much more than half others certainly by much 
        less than half.  But it suited their scientifically ignorant 
        minds to order them all cut by one half.


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             From that sallow beginning and foolish precedent it has 
        only gotten worse.
             
             As a side note, the Headquaters Office of the EPA have 
        some of the worst indoor air quality of any office building 
        in the nation.  In fact, were they a private organization, 
        the EPA would have them in court.  The employees have been 
        complaining for years.  The EPA either does not care about 
        its employees or does not believe its own lies.

             For all of its work in regulation it does not have even 
        one decent scientific library for its scientists to use.  
        But who cares about the scientists?  There is nothing new in 
        science.  It does have a massive law library however.  But 
        then there is always something new in the law.  

             Consider after 20 years the EPA still promotes the 
        charlatin science contained in the Delaney amendment.  Yet, 
        that makes things so easy.  It doesn't require thinking.  No 
        judgment need be used.  And the science?  What do they care 
        for science?  They find it easier to legislate the reality 
        than to think to understand it.

             But look at all the great benefits the EPA has given 
        us?  There is the asbestos scare.  There is the radon scare.  
        There is the second hand smoke scare.
             
             It took the EPA almost ten years even to admit there 
        are several kinds of asbestos (something that had been known 
        for centuries by nonlawyers) and that only one of those 
        kinds causes a health problem.  It took a few more years 
        before those mental giants admitted, privately at least, 
        that tearing it out is more risky than leaving it in place.  

             Here the EPA has NEVER proposed measuring the amount of 
        asbestos in the air as there is little to none in the air 
        where it can be breathed in most places they are almost 
        demanding it be removed.  (As we will see they want Radon to 
        be measured.)  Their recommended procedure is visual 
        inspection; if you see it, it has to be removed.  

             Of course tearing it out puts more asbestos into the 
        air than there was before.  So the EPA recommendation is to 
        make the problem of asbestos worse.  That is, the EPA 
        specifically recommends damaging the health of people by 
        exposing them to asbestos.

             To thier neverending shame now that they are faced with 
        the possibility of having to admit they deceived the nation 
        they are saying it is all the fault of the removal 
        companies.  Those filthy profit making companies have 
        inspired all the panic.  I would hope they are able to 
        recall ALL of their literature on this subject before 
        someone takes them to court over it.


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             But now the radon scare.  The EPA holds, publishes, 
        shouts from the rooftops, makes press releases proclaiming 
        there are 20,000 deaths from lung cancer per year due to 
        Radon.  To date the EPA has not produced on autopsy report, 
        has not produced on body, has not found any reason to 
        suggest that any person has ever contracted lung cancer from 
        Radon.  However they have this thing about Radon.  Maybe the 
        don't like the spelling.  I don't know.  They have never 
        said.  But Radon is on the hitlist at EPA.

             Radon is a naturally occuring radioactive gas that can 
        accumulate in a basement if there is little ventilation.  It 
        has the capability of causing cancer.  And here the EPA 
        recommends measurement before taking action.  

             Why?  Well because it is an odorless and colorless gas.  
        And because there is not the slightest bit of evidence that 
        radon in any basement has ever caused any cancer.  The 
        nation is being studied for Radon and for cancer in the same 
        places.  Absolutely no relationship has been found.  Canada 
        and England have conducted similar studies and they find no 
        connection either.

             In absense of any evidence whatsoever Radon causes any 
        cancer what does the EPA do?  It redoubles its efforts to 
        condemn Radon and any zealot without a reason would do.  The 
        EPA even ranks Radon as a cause of lung cancer even in the 
        total absense of evidence that it has ever cause even one 
        lung cancer.  

             And as a matter of continuing and ongoing interest, 
        they rank it ahead of second hand smoke as a cause of lung 
        cancer.  If you are still in need of a further sardonic 
        chuckle, the EPA ranks asbestos as the greatest 
        environmental source of lung cancer.

             So after discussing two imaginary problems created by 
        the EPA we get to the third on their list, second hand 
        tobacco smoke.

             There is a study that quite clearly demonstrates the 
        children who were subjected to second hand smoke from their 
        parents from birth through age six have a reduced lung 
        capacity compared to children their age when they reach High 
        School.  This presumes they spend most of their time for 
        those first six years in the presense of smoking parents and 
        recieve the a full 24 hours per day of second hand smoke.

             Therefore ... sorry, I forgot to tell you something.  
        That is the only solid information on the subject of second 
        hand smoke.  It is the only one that exists showing 
        anything.  Not one study shows any case of cancer.

             But does not the EPA claim it causes lung cancer?  


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        Certainly, by the millionth dose rule of charlatan science.  
        People who do smoke get more lung cancer than people who do 
        not.  People who do not smoke also get lung cancer.  
        Therefore, by calculating backwards and divvying up the 
        cases of lung cancer among asbestos, radon and second hand 
        smoke they publish a real scary number; 3,700 to be exact.  
        I presume it is only modesty that prohibits them from 
        claiming 3,704.

             What continues to amaze me is the continued gullibility 
        of the average American on these matters.  But more on that 
        elsewhere.  Only a very few have publically attempted to 
        call the EPA to book for their continuing stream of outright 
        lies, fraud, and deception of the American Public.

             Remember, we are paying for this garbage being spewed 
        out by lawyers.  They not only do not care in the least if 
        what they are saying is true or not, that would be bad 
        enough.  Rather they deliberately mount a scare campaign 
        about things they know are absolutely false.  Goebbels was 
        not half so convincing as these folk.
             
             And all this time you thought they were scientists you 
        could trust?

             They are scrounging, greedy lawyers as we have all come 
        to know and hate.






























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             exxon

        Reprinted from the Chicago Tribune, "An army of cleanup workers did more
        last damage to some parts of the Alaskan wilderness than the 11-million
        galleon Exxon Valdex oil spill did in 1989.
        That was the assessment of a federal expert as Exxon Co. wrapped up its
        second season of beach-cleaning operation in the Prince William Sound over
        the Weekend."

















































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             gastax

                              The Gasoline Tax
                                     or
                              The new Sin Tax

             First let us consider the general class of sin taxes as 
        they are refered to in this country.  The implied purpose of 
        a sin tax on alcohol and tobacco is to discourage thier use.  
        In practice the worst thing for a sin tax to do would be to 
        be successful and then there would be no tax money.  
             
             The purpose of a sin tax is to raise money from 
        something that people will do regardless of the taxes and 
        the amount of taxes can't be too high else bootlegging will 
        be encouraged.  Simple as that.

             So what of a high tax on gasoline to discourage the use 
        of automobile?  Sounds good doesn't it?

             Let me ask you this.  Just how much gasoline do you use 
        that is not for essential purposes like going to work, the 
        grocery store, the doctor?  If you are like most people your 
        answer will be "very little."  There still seems to be a 
        fantasy running loose among our brain dead environmentalist 
        friends that people do nothing in their spare time but drive 
        around the country side in order to burn up gasoline.

             The majority of gasoline consumption is in getting to 
        and from work and to essentials like grocery stores.  Yet 
        what do the flatliners demand?  A $20 a gallon gasoline tax 
        of course.  Well, not quite $20, maybe only $10.  Lets not 
        push it, how about just $5 a gallon?  Personally, I don't 
        think those folks are in Kansas any more.

             It is obvious that any adult wishing to conserve 
        gasoline can simple put an extra $5 per each gallon he buys 
        into his personal savings account and take this self imposed 
        tax as a personal benefit.  There is no apparent reason why 
        the money should be paid to the Federal Government when the 
        only thing the Fed will do with it is increase the defict by 
        $7.50 for each $5.00 collected.  If there is any objection 
        to this idea, that individuals will not have the self 
        disciplne to save the money consider rather the Federal 
        Government has a proven record of absolutely NO discipline 
        in overspending tax monies collected.

             So it must be admitted by any honest person the result 
        of a ridiculously high tax on gasoline will not be to reduce 
        consumption but rather only will increase the national debt.

             So why an outrageous tax on gasoline?  The next most 
        common answer is the rest of the world has a high gasoline 
        tax on gasoline.  I do not see what that means.  Comparing 


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        the details of tax law across nations is something best left 
        to the academic person who has a very high tolerance for 
        conflicting ideas.  Certainly, Germany and Japan have very 
        high gasoline taxes but also they have no capital gains 
        taxes.  So which should we emulate?

             What is the next excuse for higher gasoline taxes?  It 
        will reduce air pollution.  How can that be since there are 
        so few non-essential miles driven?  And in any event, why 
        should the essential and nonessential miles be taxed 
        equally? 
             
             If the real purpose were to reduce air pollution then 
        the obvious solution to that would be to simply change to a 
        four day ten hour work week.  Since people would only be 
        going to work four days a week instead of five that would 
        immediately eliminate 20% of the gasoline consumption in 
        this country that is used for getting to work.  Air 
        pollution would immediately be reduced by that amount and 
        there would be peace on earth and good will toward men and 
        the millenium would begin.

             What air pollution?  

             Why the smog in Los Angeles of course.  

             But I don't live in Los Angeles.  

             You just don't care about the people who die in Los 
        Angeles when the pollution gets bad, you nasty, evil person.

             Most large cities in this country did have a problem 
        with air pollution and it was solved with automotive 
        technology (and in the process destroyed Detroit and gave 
        the market to Japan but that is another story.)  The problem 
        was not solved by less gasoline consumption, it was 
        catalytic converters and engine design and making smaller 
        cars.  It doesn't matter how much easier it is to die in an 
        accident in a small car; who would not give his life to save 
        the planet?

             The problem is solved to 99 percentage points.  If Los 
        Angeles still has a problem then it will be cheaper to round 
        up all the people with breathing problems and send them to 
        Lake Tahoe all expense paid every time there is an air 
        quality problem.  This will be a hundred times cheaper than 
        changing over the entire country to higher MPG cars.  

             (I like that idea.  I feel my asthma coming on, better 
        move to LA real fast.)

             Go outside folks and look at your polluted sky and 
        breath that polluted air.  If you live any place by 
        California you have to read the worst of the gloom and doom 
        people to believe there is a problem.  But then don't go 


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        outside and breath the air else it might shatter the 
        illusion created by the gloom and doomers.  After all, how 
        could they write so well while suffocating.






















































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             masstran

                           Transitting the Masses    

             If ONLY we could get dirty, smelly people out of their 
        dirty, smelly cars we could save oil, clean the environment, 
        end world hunger, bring about peace on earth, and end navel 
        lint forever.

             Now words to that effect I have heard more than a 
        couple of times.  It is only people who are the problem; 
        people in thier automobiles.  People doing such unnecessary 
        things as driving to work, buying food, taking children to 
        school.

             But since mass transit is considered the salvation of 
        the world lets take a good, hard look at mass transit.  By 
        mass transit we mean a way for people to get to and from 
        work and necessary businesses such as grocery stores that is 
        not the private automobile.

             The first and most important thing to consider is that 
        all mass transit system run at a loss.  Were it not for 
        local, state, and federal subsidies everyone of them would 
        be out of business.  

             The extent of these subsidies is not readily apparent.  
        The most obvious subsidy is the money put into the systems 
        to make up for the fare being less than the cost of 
        operation.  But there are other indirect subsidies.  What if 
        they were privately owned rather than run by the local 
        government?  They would have to pay local, state and Federal 
        taxes.

             To keep things simple, lets say the average fare is one 
        dollar.  Subsidies run about one third of money taken in 
        from fares.  Thus exclusive of all taxes and profit the real 
        fare just to break even would be 150%, or $1.50.  

             Now where does the subsidy come from? or better yet, 
        why is there a subsidy?  Obviously the subsidy comes from 
        tax money, all our taxes.  Even cab drivers pay tax money to 
        make the competition cheaper so they can earn less money and 
        pay less taxes and work 80 hours a week to live near the 
        poverty line.

             Whg is it subsidized?  Now that is a very good question 
        and the ONLY real answer is that if it were NOT subsidized 
        there would be fewer riders and it would require an even 
        greater subsidy to keep the system in operation.  In other 
        words mass transit is subsidized in order to have something 
        to subsidize.  

             It is something like the family that buys a pleasure 


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        boat.  A boat is a hole in the water to pour money into.  
        Mass transit is a hobby system which a city buys in order to 
        have something to soak up all the excess tax money it 
        collects.  Or to have an excuse to raise taxes again.  Mass 
        transit is a money loser everywhere.

             But why is there mass transit running at a loss?  For 
        this there are a myriad of reasons proposed but in fact not 
        one of the reasons is ever borne out in practice.  

             The Paternalistic Reason:  The poor need it to get to 
        work.

             Really?  If they are working they are not poor.  
        However, mass transit does not go everywhere to every 
        available job.  Where there is good mass transit service the 
        jobs are taken.  Where there is poor service jobs go begging 
        because people can't get to them.  As we shall see, the well 
        off were the ones that lead to mass transit subsidies.

             The Environmental Reason:  It reduces air pollution.

             No one who has ever been bathed in the black smoke of a 
        bus can hear that reason without thinking how stupid some 
        people are to believe that reason.  In any event, long 
        before people could spell air pollution there was a push for 
        mass transit subsidies.  This is only the currently popular 
        (as of 1990, one has to date the reasons, they change so 
        rapidly) reason for pushing for mass transit.

             The Futurist Reason:  Mass transit is the wave of the 
        future.

             Sorry folks, mass transit is the wave of the past.  It 
        is an idea that has come and gone.  It had its time in the 
        limelight and now it is continuing on the life support of 
        subsidies.

             The case can be made that no one has ever made any 
        money operating a mass transit system.  The only money to be 
        made was in the building of it.  Even the vast rail system 
        of the US was ONLY made practical when the government gave 
        away massive amounts of land to the railroad companies.  The 
        potential of that land made up for the losses in building 
        the railroads.

             Back in the good old days when cities were really 
        cities and people walked a couple blocks to work no one 
        needed mass transit.  A generation later came the industrial 
        revolution where factories required a large labor force that 
        could not conveniently live within walking distance.  

             At that time a transit system became practical.  But 
        keep in mind that where you lived determined where you 
        worked.  You either walked to work or the trolley took you 


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        there.  There was no freedom to work across town.  This was 
        one of the underlying reasons for the union movement and the 
        accompanying riots.  People either worked in the 
        neighborhood or did not work at all -- and there was no 
        welfare system in those days.

             Came the automobile and freedom to average worker, real 
        freedom.  If the wage is higher across town where there is 
        no bus route then drive to the new job.  In very old cities 
        this is still considered rather a rather strange thing to 
        do.  In the modern city driving across town to a job is 
        hardly considered reason to move to a residence near the 
        job.

             But there was another change that made the somewhat 
        profitable bus companies of the cities obsolete.  After 
        World War II there was an amazing invention, the Suburbs.  
        Looking back on it from our homes in the suburbs it is hard 
        to realize just what a massive difference this really made 
        to the world around us.

             First and foremost the suburbs would not have been 
        possible without the automobile.  To this day city dwellers 
        laugh at the idea of living way out in the country even when 
        the population of the suburbs is easily triple that of the 
        city.  Back when they were starting to be built is was most 
        commonly predicted they were become the future slums of 
        America, to be deserted as soon as people came to their 
        senses and moved back to the city.

             But things did not turn out that way.  And since it was 
        the automobile that made the suburbs possible, there was no 
        consideration for building them to make mass transit 
        practical to serve them.  But still the for profit bus 
        companies did make some attempts to get some of the business 
        from them by creating routes.  Few were very successful.

             Came the local government into the act with its demands 
        that the transit companies provide service to the suburbs.  
        And the transit companies came back with a demand that the 
        local governments pay for it.  This is compressing a lot of 
        history into a few words but in fact political pressure was 
        the instigator of mass transit subsidies, not any concern 
        for the poor or the worker.

             And what was the political pressure?  "I grew up with 
        good trolley service and I want it out here where I live 
        also.  How can my wife get to the grocery store?  We only 
        have ONE car you know."  One car?  How quaint.  Wife not 
        wroking?  How archaic.

             Push came to shove and there were subsidies.  And with 
        subsidies came politicians making vote grabbing points.  
        "The bus company is gouging the city by demanding such a 
        huge subsidy."  Of course, it was the city who demanded 


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        service to unprofitable areas in the first place.  
             
             But in a larger sense, since there were to be subsidies 
        there had to be a negotiation of the amount.  In any 
        negotiation there were two sides, the bus company trying to 
        get as much as possible hoping to at least break even and 
        the city offering as little as possible hoping to save a few 
        dollars for other pet projects.  

             In any event, when the subject is politics the subject 
        is never good faith negotiations by politicians.  Certainly 
        in private a politician may love his family and be nice to 
        the cat but that does not win votes in a large city.  When 
        the choice is between good faith negotiations and a vote 
        getting issue there is no choice, no second thought; a 
        politician without the votes is no longer a politician.

             To compress a couple more decades into a few words, the 
        cities used emminent domain to confiscate the transit 
        companies.  In reality the companies asked for it by 
        submitted to city presure and accepting city bribes (about 
        time we call a subsidy what it really is) in the first 
        place.  In the real world one avoids all confrontation with 
        the local bully who holds all the cards as eventually you 
        loose everything.  So it was with the transit companies.

             Some did rather well by it however.  Roy Chalk sold out 
        (rather had his Washington, DC bus line stolen from him by 
        the local council of governments) and went on to buy the 
        small but marginally profitable Allegheny Airlines.  Today 
        we know it as USAir.  Now if the Council of Governments had 
        not been so interested in politics and had bought Allegheny 
        Airlines...  No way. People make money.  Governments throw 
        it away.

             Today we have most all cities owning the mass transit 
        systems.  (Note how they were the transit companies until 
        the socialist impulses of the cities started calling them 
        the transit system for the masses.  Marx would love it.)  We 
        also have every one of them running at a loss.  In every 
        city the average tax payer pays for a system for those lucky 
        or dumb enough to be use it.

             And just what is the future of mass transit now that it 
        is in the hands of the goverment?  Why obviously more of the 
        same.  And idea that saw its time in the spotlight of 
        history and was outmoded with the success of the automobile 
        is considered to be the wave of the future.

             My friends, if you give me unlimited government 
        subsidies and I can make the horse and buggy the wave of the 
        future.  





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             Animals.

             spotowl

                                Spotting the Owl

             It is interesting those promoting the Spotted Owl over human 
        beings is a currenly popular fad.  The image is of a subspecies 
        of owl only being able to live in very old forests.  
        Unfortunately this is somewhat different from the truth.
             
             The Spotted Owl makes it nest in dead trees from which it 
        obtains a significant amount of its food.  Otherwise it eats 
        almost anything.  For the Spotted Owl to survive along with 
        forest harvesting one need only leave the dead trees standing.

             As a matter of further interest it is noted the Endangered 
        Spieces Act incorporates the idea of subspecies.  What is a 
        species in the first place?  The separation of one species from 
        another is simply they are mutuall infertile.  They may mate but 
        they can not produce offspring.

             What is a subspecies?  A subspecies is an idea that was 
        discarded by the scientific community sixty years ago.  If we are 
        to continue the analogy, Oriental, Amerind, Negroid, Caucasian 
        and every other identifiable variation upon the human species is 
        a subspecies.

             Are the scientists not being quoted in the environmentalist 
        press releases concerned?  Not in the least.  In fact those being 
        quoted are not concerned either unless they are activists and 
        that is contrary to being a scientist.  The idea of a subspecies 
        is a discarded concept on the trash pile of science.























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         .. write REDSQIRR























































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         .. write SNAILDAR
























































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             extinct

                     The Big Lie of Species Extinction

             Have you ever heard the very old story that man is 
        destroying some number of thousands of species every year / 
        month / week / day or what ever the gullibility limit of the 
        speaker and or listener is?
             
             There is absolutely no truth to that statement in the 
        slightest.  It is an imaginary number.  It is a lie repeated 
        over and over until we accept it without question.

             Let us look at reality.  The EPA requires months of 
        study, some times years before having enough data to 
        recommend putting any species on the threatened or 
        endangered list.  And that is simply to establish the 
        numbers are decreasing.  And even when done the results are 
        debatable rather than unanimous.  And often subject to 
        limitations of research.  Consider after years of the snail 
        darter holding up a TVA project it was found fluorishing 
        quite nicely a few miles away.  And all of this only one 
        species at a time.

             If the mass extinction idea is correct we are 
        implicitely accepting there are armies of naturalists out in 
        the field collecting data on each species that becomes 
        extinct.  They are implicitely watching the last of the 
        species as it breaths it last.

             There is no army of naturalists doing this.  The 
        statement of mass extinction is specious, it is propaganda, 
        it is a lie.  It was made up to serve a political purpose.

             There is a grain of truth in it.  Simply in a 
        multimillion year evolutionary sense we are in a period 
        where the number of species is declining rather than 
        increasing.  This is one of many such periods in the history 
        of the Earth.  

             It seems to be a long term cycle in the evolutionary 
        process.  There is exactly NO implication in this concept 
        that Man is the cause of the extinctions.  Consider that in 
        the last 100,000 years six species of pre-humans have become 
        extinct and perhaps Neanderthal Man can be considered also 
        to have become extinct.  Man can hardly be both the cause 
        and the victim at the same time.

             The number itself is an estimate only and it is based 
        upon the long term multimillion year evolutionary cycle.  It 
        has nothing to do with us or any thing we are doing today.

             Consider the land that is today the United States.  As 
        little as 200 years ago there was one continuous forest that 


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        stretched from the Eastern Seaboard west to the 
        Appalanchians in the North and Central states and in the 
        Southern states to what is now the state of Texas.  Consider 
        that what is now the breadbasket of the US was in those days 
        mainly Buffalo and Plains grasses.

             In the intervening 200 years that ecology has been 
        completely destroyed, wiped out, it is gone.  I point out 
        there was no great ecological catastrophe because of that.  
        A land that perhaps sheltered perhaps 2,500,000 humans at 
        most now feeds to the point of obesity 250,000,000.  How 
        many species extinctions were there due to this complete and 
        total destruction of the original environment?  The answer 
        is easy, the Passenger Pidgeon.  One bird for all this 
        massive total change of the ecology.

             Is this any where near 10,000 per year? or 1000 per 
        year or even one per year?  It is an averge of 1/2 species 
        per century.

             These nebulous predictions of doom for the destruction 
        of an ecology have no basis in human experience.  I mean, if 
        they had happened before, would they be near as frightening?  
        If the objective is to instill fear, then one must foretell 
        disaster of truly Biblical proportions in order to get your 
        contributions.































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             rangland























































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             Animal rights

         ..ANIMRITE         

        
                         Animals Rights and Wrongs

             Animal rights.  It is a statement of a truth that only 
        exists upon challenges to it.  It does not exist from any a 
        priori position. 

             This is a difficult point to make but bear with me.  
        Since the beginning of recorded history until only a few 
        centuries ago there existed no concept of human rights.  
        There was family rights, there were rulers rights and there 
        were obligations for each.  These rights and obligations 
        were either traditional or negotiated through treaty. 
             
             Some four hundred years ago there arose the idea that 
        humans had intrinsic rights independent of family and 
        allegiance that each person had simply by being a human 
        being.  For a couple of centuries philosophers nibbled 
        around the problem and arrived at the idea of a social 
        contract.  Humans have rights because they respect the 
        the same rights in other humans.  It devolved to 
        essentially, the mutual exchange of rights.

             It is of note that no such a priori basis exists for 
        animal rights.  The entire debate of the pro animal rights 
        folk revolves around I say animals have rights and you prove 
        me wrong.  It argues from analogy and from common 
        expressions in the language.  

             Those who propose animals have rights lean heavily upon 
        the presumption that all the arguments of preexisting human 
        rights apply equally to animals UNTIL PROVEN OTHERWISE.  The 
        burden of proof is shifted to the person who disagrees.
             


















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                              The Humane Laws

             One common expression of this is to suggest that humane 
        treatment of animals is an expression of animal rights.  On 
        the contrary the humane laws are a restriction upon human 
        actions.



















































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                   The intentions of Animal Rights types

             The stated intention is to stop the suffering of all 
        animals.  No it is not.  The real intention is to stop all 
        real and imagined suffering of animals caused by man with 
        very heavy emphasis upon imagined suffering.

             Let us take for example two examples.  The humane 
        slaughter of a cow for food and the killing of a deer in the 
        wild by wolves.

             In a slaughter house the cow is lead to the 
        slaughtering area and a .22 bullet is fired at its head.  
        The shock of impact of the bullet dazes the animal and it is 
        quickly hoisted up and the throat cut.  What is left of the 
        animal's consciousness ends in less than one minute and 
        clinical death occurs in less than four minutes.

             In the wild a deer will be chased by wolves until it 
        slows enough for an individual wolf in the pack to catch it 
        and rip some meat off of it.  That wolf then stops to eat 
        that bit of food while the deer continues to try to escape 
        but more slowly now.  Another wolf will tear away more flesh 
        and stop to eat it.

             Eventually enough flesh has been torn from the deer 
        that it can no longer flee and it falls.  At which point 
        those wolves which have not eaten will tear off some flesh 
        and eat.  The deer is rarely dead at this point.  The 
        feeding process continues until the pack is fed.  At some 
        point in the process of being eaten the deer dies but not 
        until it has watched its own flesh being eaten.  Effectly a 
        deer is eaten alive by wolves.

             Among large predators in the wild only a very few 
        kill their food before they eat it.  The most common 
        examples of the kill before eating method are in the cat 
        family.  This is merely an evolutionary specialization where 
        cats have very specialized claws on their hind legs which 
        permit ripping open the gut of their prey.  This is one of 
        the primary survival characteristics of the cat family in 
        that it permits a single animal to make a kill rather than 
        having to rely upon a large pack to make a kill.  

             The anthropologic record indicates humans as large 
        predators made up the lack of killing claws and teeth with 
        the use of clubs and hand axes going back twenty to fifty 
        thousand years.  The most effective use of either is to stun 
        the animal with a head strike and then kill by throat 
        slitting.  It is interesting to note how little changes over 
        the millenia.  This is essentially the same slaughtering 
        technique as is used today.

             If the criteria for judgment of eating meat is a moral 
        consideration regarding the pain experienced by the animal 


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        then Man is superior to predators in the wild in that man 
        does kill his food before eating it and by the oldest tools 
        and implicite usage man renders the prey unconscious before 
        the killing action.  The big cats come close but the prey is 
        fully conscious of the cat's teeth holding it and the hind 
        legs ripping it apart.

             By the criteria of minimum suffering, Man is the moral 
        superior of any animal.

             Why do I limit this to the larger predators?  Simply 
        because they prey upon the grazing animals.  And for the 
        most part these animals are larger than the predator.  A fox 
        can attack and kill a rabbit rather easily as it outweighs 
        the rabbit several times over.  The method of killing the 
        prey involves vastly superior size and strength.  A fox can 
        crush a rabbit's skull in its mouth or shake it until the 
        neck breaks.  No wolf can pretend to do that to a deer.







































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                               Why eat meat?
             
             First off, why not eat meat?  The alternative is called 
        vegetarianism.

             Meat causes diseases and cause you to die young.  That 
        sounds good with all the medical studies coming out these 
        days.  But one must remember that vegetarianism is a food 
        fad that has been around for thousands of years.  The idea 
        that a few recent medical studies support the idea has no 
        bearing the fact it always has been a food fad.

             The recent medical studies are perhaps correct as far 
        as they go.  Certainly the substances in meat have been 
        linked with many fatal diseases.  However, there is a point 
        rarely mentioned.  Even though vegetarians die of these meat 
        related disease much less often, they don't live any longer 
        than meat eaters.  They die of different causes but they die 
        nevertheless.

             The choice to eat as a vegetarian only changes the form 
        of death not the time it will come.  Vegetarians do not live 
        any longer than meat eaters.

             The most recent outbreak of medically induces food fads 
        has been cholesterol.  And every popularized word about the 
        subject has been a lie.  All of the studies have been of 
        diets high in both cholesterol and fats.  There have been no 
        studies of diets with the same fats but with and without 
        cholesterol.
             
             As any researcher in the field will tell you, it is the 
        fats NOT the cholesterol that causes the problem.  And just 
        what does "NO Cholesterol" mean on the package label?  It 
        means the fats are from vegetable sources as only animal 
        sources have cholesterol.  So what does a vegetarian diet do 
        for you?  Nothing regarding the medical reasons which might 
        have lead you to stop eating meat.

             But did you stop eating meat to reduce the pain and 
        suffering of animals caused by Man?  No, as most people 
        could care less about vegetarians or animal rights types and 
        continue to eat meat.













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        Cosmetic Testing

             A lot is lumped under cosmetic testing and I assure you 
        it is not all just a different shade of some color of eye 
        shadow.

             Mascara is a primary item for test.  Studies have 
        indicated that some types and some uses can lead to 
        blindness.

             Hair coloring is the big.  Some of them in the eye can 
        lead to blindness.

             I for one would rather seem a million blind animals 
        than one blind human.

             Now if someone wished to ban cosmetics in the first 
        place that is one thing.  But as long as they are being 
        developed and sold, I do not want my wife or daughter to 
        loss their sight in order to be prevent the same from 
        happening to some animal.  




































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         ..ANIMTEST         

        
                          Animals as test Subjects
             
             It may surprise you to realize that every researcher in 
        the world who uses animals would like to find a better way 
        than animal testing.  And this is for reasons wholely 
        different from any concern for animal rights.

             Let us take a typical animal test.  Lab animals are 
        very difficult to deal with.  They do not survive very well 
        in the laboratory.  A large and significant test might begin 
        with 100 rats and at the end of the test there may not be 
        enough alive to draw any conclusions.  Consider the problem 
        yourself of keeping 100 rats in separate cages for a couple 
        of years if you think this is easy.

             And even if enough live, they may be disqualified from 
        the test for other reasons such as developing some other 
        disease.  (It is not commonly know but the lab rat comes in 
        many varieties even though all are white albinos.  The 
        variety chosen is selected to be suseptable to the study at 
        hand.  This is done to induce enough of the problems being 
        studied to yeild any useful results.)  If a rat is being 
        used to test for cancer and it develops another disease, it 
        is invalidated from the test results.

             That large test starting with 100 rats will be lucky to 
        end with 20 that can be used in the final report.  And 
        without going into to details right now, that makes for some 
        very carefully done statistics to suggest any conclusions.

             Why the problem with the test animals?  To run any test 
        the test subjects must satisfy the criteria of being as 
        close to the same as possible.  Obviously if one test were 
        conducted with a mixture of dogs, cats, fish, lizards, and 
        birds the test would have no meaning.

             What few realize is the immense variability within even 
        a single species or even within a single variation within a 
        single species.  One white rat may look just like another to 
        the layman but in fact there are dozens of strains of 
        variations upon the white rat; each bred for its 
        susceptability to a particular disease.

             Not only that the white rat is not a white colored rat, 
        it is an albino rat with pink eyes and the whole nine yards.  
        The laboratory white rat is a genetically defective albino 
        to begin with.  On top of this each strain used for testing 
        is particularly susceptable to the disease to be tested.  

             Is the test for a carcinogen (a cancer causing 
        substance)?  Then researchers will use a particular 


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        substrain of rat that has been bred because it gets cancer 
        easily.  This is the world of animal research and this is 
        only the tip of the problem.  

             To get any results from any humanly conductable 
        research program strains of rats that will get the disease 
        even if never tested have to be used.  Take a carcinogen 
        test for example.  The test is for a particular type of 
        carcinogen and the strain chosen gets cancer easily.  20% 
        are going to contract cancer whether they were tested or not 
        and die from it long before the test is complete.  And if it 
        is one of the common cancers they get they are discarded 
        from the test.

             (Aside one.  Given this tremendous variability even 
        within animals that are outwardly identical is it any wonder 
        the idea that an owl with spots on it chest or a squirrel 
        with a reddish tinge can't be taken seriously as anything 
        worth protecting?)

             (Aside two.  Given the hundreds of tests conducted on 
        rats that are bred to develop cancers at the drop of a hat 
        is it not interesting that NEVER has a lung cancer been 
        caused in a lab rat with cigarette smoke?)

             So why do researchers continue using animals?  Because 
        nothing so far is better.  Computer models?  They only can 
        be used when the results of animal tests are fed into them.





























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             Animal Saving

             foodfad

                        Food Fads for fun and profit

             What is proper nutrition?  What constitutes good and 
        bad food?  No one knows where it started but there is an 
        Eygptian papyrus setting forth dietary rules, a raw onion a 
        day tops the list of recommended foods.

             People have pursued dietary fads for centuries.  Every 
        time there is at least a choice of foods beyond subsistance 
        it is almost a badge status to choose one over the other.  

             Are there possibly such things as good and bad foods?  
        Consider the human race which exists on just about every 
        conceivable possible variation of diet that can be imagined 
        from near total vegetarianism to near total high fat red 
        meat.  

             The first professional peer group Journal of Nutrition 
        was originally scheduled for its first issue in 1987 by 
        Tufts University.  To the best of my knowledge it has still 
        to have published its first issue.































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             vegetari


                            The Vegetarian Craze

             Let us specifically consider vegetarianism as a 
        currently popular fad.  Rest assured in times when there has 
        been a real shortage of meat no one was pushing 
        vegetarianism.

             The funniest thing about the discussions of this 
        subject on both sides of it is the constant comparison 
        between carnivores and herbivores and arguing which type 
        humans were "meant to be."
             
             Funny?  Simply that with the exception of herbs used 
        for seasoning no human can digest what is on a herbivore 
        quick weight loss diet or any other herbivore diet.  Humans 
        do not eat grasses or leaves which is the herbivore diet.  
        It is flat out impossible for humans to digest such a diet 
        in any quantity that might approach sustaining life as it is 
        similarly impossible for herbivores to digest meat.   

             Humans are a third group entirely along with many other 
        species including of course the apes, crows, pigs, and a 
        host of other animals that eat meat, fruit, grain and 
        vegetables to varying degrees, usually according to what is 
        in season or what can be found or caught.  Membership in 
        this group is not permanent or fixed for the life of the 
        species.  

             Dogs and cats are unarguably carnivores.  Yet the 
        average dog can survive quite well on a 40% vegetable (not 
        plant and leaf) diet and cats on about a 10% one.  And the 
        percentage mix of the diets these animals can survive on is 
        varies greatly for individual animals.  It is presumed that 
        since dog remains have been found with prehistoric man and 
        since cats sort of appeared in Eygpt within historic times 
        that dogs have had more time to evolve toward surviving on 
        the same diet as humans.  Further, in prehistoric times 
        surviving on the same diet as humans had a greater survival 
        value as prehistoric man can not be presumed to have gone 
        out to catch a meat animal specifically for the dogs.  In 
        civilization, it is more likely humans catered to the 
        carnivorous tastes of cats and thus there was little 
        survival presure for cats.

             We are definately not herbivores.  We do live upon just 
        about any other food that comes along and in one way or 
        another thrive upon it.  The question becomes, is there any 
        particular advantage to any particular mix of food sources 
        and if so just what is that advantage?

             The primary advantage to our omnivorous digestive 


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        tracts is survival.  We can live off of most anything that 
        comes along which does not eat us first.  Thus the question 
        as to whether there is any advantage to any particular mix 
        of food sources has to be asked in light of the presumption 
        there is enough of both animal and non-animal foods 
        available to make a choice.  Unaided by farming, humans 
        could not survive the winter without being able to eat meat, 
        there are no fruits, grains or vegetables and man can not 
        survive on tree bark nor hibernate.

             After the presure of survival is removed by farming and 
        food preservation technology as happened some eight to ten 
        thousand years ago the mixture of foods is simply the 
        optimization of food production per unit of labor.  It makes 
        no sense to expend more energy raising food than the 
        nutritional value of that food.  

             Since we can live off of grains it does make sense to 
        keep and raise cattle which can live off of the straw, what 
        would otherwise be waste for us.  The tattered arguement 
        that the same land could be used to grow food for the 
        starving masses again fails to realizes the only starving 
        masses are those that have failed to blow away the local 
        dictator making them starve.

             No matter how much land is used to grow grains for 
        human consumption is still makes sense to raise cattle to 
        use the straw which is otherwise waste from grain 
        production.  In fact the more grain produced the more cattle 
        should be raised.

             People who are concerned about the US diet of meat 
        should rather be more concerned about their own state of 
        ignorance of reality.























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             animfood


                            The US eats MEAT!!!!

             How many times have the vegetarian types and the partly 
        vegetarians and the sorta might like to be one some day 
        vegetarian types condemned the United States for wasting so 
        much food producing land to raise meat animals?  If you are 
        like me at least once a week.

             Why to they say this is so terrible?  Because people 
        are starving in China.  (They sound a lot like my mother 
        when I was a child.)  But they do not say starving Chinese 
        but rather they refer to the rather more nebulous, global 
        hunger.

             The most important point to remember is that there have 
        been very, very and then very limited examples of starvation 
        in the last 100 years that were not caused by the government 
        of the country of the starving.  It is hardly necessary to 
        point out the ten to twenty million starved to death by 
        Joseph Stalin for political reasons.  It is rather more 
        instructive to discuss India.
             
             India of the post British colony era adopted socialism.  
        One of their policies was to artificially increase the price 
        of seed grain and fertilizer while mandating the selling 
        price of the food grown.  The result?  Massive shortages of 
        food in the cities.  India was a food importing nation.

             The common sense finally got through to the country and 
        they let the free market govern prices.  Within three years 
        of that happening India became a food exporting nation and 
        more than enough food for it people.

             The starving countries in Africa today are starving 
        because the government wants to starve them out as part of a 
        civil war.

             Given this situation just what does the choice between 
        raising grain or meat in the US between grain and meat have 
        to do with world hunger?  As my mother never pointed out, 
        surplus food in this country does not get it into the hands 
        of the hungry.  And if the government of the country of the 
        hungry does not want them to get it, they will continue to 
        be hungry.

             It is said that if the US would stop raising cattle and 
        use the land to raise grain then that grain would 
        automatically get into the mouths of the hungry.  The US can 
        raise more grain than it can consume or sell or even give 
        away around the world.  It is only since about 1984 that we 
        have a system that does not require us to store all the 


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        excess production until it rots.

             However, could we give it away to countries which are 
        poor?  No way in hell the governments of those countries 
        would let it happen.  Back when there were many net food 
        importing countries and the US was a major supplier to the 
        world in the early 80s the delivered price to a foreign 
        country might have been on the order of 22 to 25 cents per 
        pound.  That included all costs and profits.  The selling 
        price within the country would have been typically 50 to 60 
        cents per pound.

             Why?  The government of the country took its share of 
        the profits (read corruption.)  In Latin American companies 
        the honor of making a US grain deal was doled out as the way 
        a young man made his first stake in life with the profit he 
        could keep personally -- but if he did not share he was most 
        commonly shot.  

             The gov could not allow our grain in at its real cost 
        as it was cheaper than home grown grain and that would put 
        local farmers out of business.  There were a myriad of 
        factors but the most important point is simply that growing 
        more food in this country does not in any way get into the 
        mouth of anyone else in the world.

             So why not raise cattle?  It is not as though the US is 
        short of grain for eating.  Back when the best price the 
        farmer could get for corn was 12 cents a bushel, corn based 
        breakfast cereal sold for almost 2 dollars a pound.  When a 
        one pound loaf of bread sells for 60 cents the wheat that 
        goes into it is less than one cent.  If there were so much 
        grain in this country that it were free the price of 
        products on the shelves would hardly change.

             The amount of cattle the US raises bears no significant 
        relationship to the price of food in this county nor to the 
        number of hungry people in the world.  The US production of 
        meat for its diet as a matter of choice has no relationship 
        to the anything else in the world.

















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             Environment

             balance

                         The Natural Balancing Act

             The balance of nature is something we have been hearing 
        about since the first Disney nature specials at least.  The 
        word balance is often preceeded by the word delicate just as 
        the term environmental scientist is always preceeding by the 
        word leading.  There are no second string environmental 
        scientists and if one so much as steps on a wild flower the 
        earth is doomed.

             The image presumed by the term delicate balance 
        conjures up walking a tight rope.  It is presuming the 
        balance of nature is like a boulder perched upon the peak of 
        a mountain; the slightest touch will send it crashing into 
        the valley.  The environmentalists prefer this image.

             Real science does not talk about balance.  Real science 
        talks about equilibrium.  And in using the term equilibrium 
        it defines many, many types of equilibrium.  There are two 
        basic classes of equilibrium, static and dynamic.  Within 
        these there are stable and unstable equilibrium.  There are 
        more type than this and all of these types have been 
        observed in nature.

             Which type does the environmental movement presume 
        exists with the term delicate balance?  Static and unstable 
        equilibrium.  This is the type illustrated by the boulder on 
        the top of the mountain, the slightest touch (by evil man) 
        will destroy the environment nature has spend millions of 
        years creating.  
             
             One the face of it this is not the kind of equilibrium 
        of nature.  By even the simplest considerations such as, 
        there once were dinosaurs we know that nature is not static 
        and has had no goal in mind in creating a particular 
        environment.  In fact obviously there can have been no 
        intent to creation without presuming intelligent purpose in 
        creating a swamp.

             So on the simple face of it we have dynamic rather than 
        static equilibrium.  Dynamic equilibrium means simply that 
        there have been changes, there are presently changes 
        occuring and that changes will occur in the future and with 
        each change a modified environment will develop.  No part of 
        the Earth is as it was a million years ago.  Many places 
        have changed in as little as 1000 years without the 
        influence of man.
             
             Take for example both this country and Europe about 
        1000 years ago.  In this country the Great Eastern forest 


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        extended to the Mississippi River.  However about 1000 years 
        ago the country started to get drier and the forest 
        retreated to the Appalachians.  They were replaced by plains 
        grass.  Indian cliff dwellers in the American Southwest 
        moved out as the land became drier and not suitable for 
        farming and the game animals moved further away.  About this 
        same time in Europe the famines and plagues started with 
        massive crop failures.  No one knows why this change 
        occured.

             It is only our very short term and limited perspective 
        that gives us the impression of unchanging nature.  

             So what does this have to do with dynamic equilibrium?  
        In the face of changes the environment shifts, moves, 
        changes into something different.  It does not collapse, 
        fall to ruin, change to a spreading global disaster.

             As we can see, nature is an example of dynamic 
        equilibrium.  The next question is, is it unstable or stable 
        equilibrium?  Is it unstable as with the boulder on top of 
        the mountain peak?  Rather the other alternative is nature 
        is a boulder down in the valley and to make any change it 
        has to pushed up the side to make any change.  And like that 
        boulder it takes effort to keep it changed.
             
             The most obvious example is a home garden.  The garden 
        is not natural, it takes time and effort to maintain a 
        garden.  Were the home gardener to give up for a moment 
        nature would reassert itself and weeds would take over the 
        garden.  This is an example of stable equilibrium, it takes 
        work to maintain a change from weed status to garden status 
        and it takes a lot of work.

             Nature is in fact an example of dynamic and stable 
        equilibrium.  It is difficult to make purely human changes 
        in nature.  The kind of changes that can be made are to 
        introduce a different form of plant or animal life into an 
        area, the natural growth and reproductive capabilities of 
        the plant or animal doing the work for us, and then watch 
        the dynamic equilibrium point shift.

             This is how nature really works.  It is not a delicate 
        balance in any sense of the imagination.  The equilibrium of 
        nature is both dynamic and stable.  Change is normal to 
        nature.  Making a change to nature requires more than a 
        little effort.

             Change is the very essense of nature and of evolution.  
        Nothing in nature is unchanging.  The presense of Man in the 
        scheme of things changes things not one wit.  It takes 
        massive efforts for man to make changes to the environment 
        not only in capital investment but in constant annual 
        maintenance to prevent nature from reasserting itself.



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             fragile

                 ..fragile

                               Fragile Nature

                  How many times have I read the term fragile 
        nature.  Certainly I have read it a thousand times more 
        freqently than I have read of killer hurricanes and 
        tornados.  I certainly have heard more about fragile nature 
        than I have about the volcano Krakatoa that blew away half 
        an island and caused the entire world to have a year without 
        a summer.

             Lets take some recent examples.             

             In 1974 (???) Hurricane comes ashore and dumps its 
        water over Pennsylvania and manages in a few days to turn 
        Chesapeake Bay into fresh water and do what several 
        centuries of fisherman had never accomplished, wipe out the 
        brackish water catch, for three years that is, not 
        permanently of course.

             In the Spring of 1970 Mt. St. Helens blew its top and 
        wasted two hundred square miles of nature in one swell foop, 
        a very large and loud foop.  Fragile Nature struck again.  
        More damage than humans could do in a lifetime. Not just the 
        trees are dead but everything is dead, plants, animals, even 
        one scientist who was monitoring the peak when it blew.  
        When Nature wants to demonstrate its fragility it sure knows 
        how to do it up right.

             And is that land dead forever?  One of the most 
        interesting discoveries was that plant life started making a 
        comeback in only a few months.

             One point has to be made in this.  Mount St. Helens was 
        a piker when it comes to being fragile, a rank amateur.  
        Early in this century San Francisco was given a taste of 
        fragile nature when the city was almost completely destroyed 
        by an earthquake.  In the last 20 years, the human deaths 
        alone from earthquakes easily tops one million.  Fragility 
        at its best.

             Yellowstone has a forest fire and tens of thousands of 
        acres are laid waste in another demonstration of fragility.

             So what does anyone have any rJB/   Well Gary, Sadham could certainly be PLANNING to make us look
        JB/silly, but do I interpret your question correctly, If he would leave
        JB/Kuwait now, would we still have enough support to have a war?

            If he leaves Kuwait we will either simply move our troops from
        the permanent station in Germany to a new permanent station in Saudi.



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        DRAFT version for Rush Limbaugh

            The reason is simple.  He pulls back 100 miles, we pull back 8000
        miles.  He moves south 100 miles, we return 8000 miles.  This going
        on forever.

            So do we kill him now or spend 20 years or more with a few
        hundred thousand men on station?

        JB/   Did you see Brezinski on the news last night? He was saying
        JB/that we should try to avert a war at all costs, because a war
        JB/in the middle east is not in our best interest.

            As was said in the first week by me if by no one else.  Those who
        seek personal political benefit would quickly take the stage away
        from Bush.  It has been happening since about the third week of
        non-war.

        JB/he thinks we are paying way too much attention
        JB/to Iraq, and letting Europe go unnoticed. Life in the 90s,eh?

            Nope.  Life in the 50s.  Europe is certainly capable of taking
        care of itself.  The fantasy that Europe needs us is one that should
        have ended ten to fifteen years ago.



        T/Mail : * FORT MOUNTAIN BBS * Chatsworth, Ga. * 404 695 8703 *      c                              31311  12-10-9020:22MATT GIWER               MARTIN KROLL             HYPERSENSITIVE TO WORDS                     0     3agaging in an illegal activity, an organized conspiracy to 
        do what would put a human in jail.

             Ah but back to fragile nature and the fragile beaver 
        who is remaking the swamp to his liking.  What is the 
        difference between the two?  The beaver does it out of 
        instinct and evolved behavior.  Humans make changes out of 
        reason.

             Is nature really fragile where human are concerned?  It 
        took the concerted efforts of tens of millions of people two 
        hundred years to convert the country from f




















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             export

                          Loggers and the Wildlife

             It is interesting to note the historical inaccuracies 
        of the anti-logging movement, under the guise of the Spotted 
        Owl or whatever.  The allegations against the logging 
        industry include their sending timber to Japan.  It seems 
        expoert of timber harvested from National Forests was 
        outlawed in 1986.  Oregon state added itself to that 
        movement by banning the export of timber logged from state 
        owned lands in 1988.  

             One of the primary objections to harvesting forests and 
        replanting them is the replanting results in a monoculture.  
        What is a monoculture and why is it considered wrong?  It 
        happens in nature with trees all the time.  Why is there 
        such a term as "redwood forest" were it not that one type of 
        tree has come to dominate.





































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             Examples


                         Ecology as the True Faith

                                     by

                                 Matt Giwer
         
             The following was found as a text file on a computer 
        network, the name of the network is not relevent.  This is 
        an example of the unqualified nonsense that it spreading 
        around the country.

             The first problem I have with such a position is that 
        it asserts as true so many things that are only popular 
        misconceptions and then plays upon them.

             This person makes ridiculous and outright irrational 
        claims and to answer them tedious arguments must be made 
        upon each point and they must be upon the facts of the 
        matter which are never stated but can only be infered.

             This exercise is intended to mix the two approaches.  
        First to answer the wild and irrational assertions on their 
        own level and at times to point out or at least declare as 
        lies the assertions made.  The latter is easy, as the 
        following document is replete with lies and half truths and 
        is in no way grounded in valid scientific knowledge of the 
        world as we perceive it.

             One may ask, who am I to presume to criticize such a 
        pronouncement as this.  I ask you in return just who is the 
        author of this bit of propaganda? There is one name 
        mentioned; no authorship is given. I would be embarassed to 
        have my name connnected with this nonsense also.  If the 
        coward who wrote this would like to step forward and deal 
        one on one with me I would be most happy do deal with him or 
        her as the case may be.  But folks, I sign my name to what I 
        write.  No one takes credit for this.

             With such a preamble I begin.



        Topic 151       CLIMATE CONTROL FACTSHEET earthday      
        earthday.genl   10:52 pm  Mar 22, 1990

        CLIMATE CHANGE FACT SHEET

        This fact sheet was prepared with the assistance of the 
        World Resources Institute.  Gus Speth, WRI's President, is a 
        member of Earth Day 1990's Board of Directors.



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        !     And just who is the author I ask.  [MG]

        What Is Global Climate Change?

        Over the past century, the human species has turned the 
        Earth into one huge unplanned experiment.  By releasing 
        unprecedented amounts of greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide, 
        methane, chlorofluorocarbons, nitrous oxide and gases that 
        create tropospheric ozone) into the atmosphere, we have in 
        effect, turned up the global thermostat.

        !        This is a lie which I will address later.  But for 
        now, despite all of that there is NO measurable affect from 
        all of it.  [MG]

        Greenhouse gases act in a fashion similar to the windshield 
        of a car parked in the sun, allowing light-energy to pass 
        through, but then trapping the re-emitted heat.  The 
        greenhouse effect occurs naturally and without it the Earth 
        would be ice-covered and uninhabitable.

        !        Now this is patently an absurd statement.  The moon 
        is the same distance from the sun as the earth and it is not 
        frozen in the least.  It has temperature swings from 250 
        above to 250 below freezing.  The primary mitigator of the 
        temperature of the Earth is the oceans.  [MG]

        However, over the past century, human practices have led to 
        an increased buildup of greenhouse gases.   Scientists 
        already have detected a 1 degree F temperature rise, which 
        may be due to the greenhouse effect.            
        ~~~
        !        Later has come.  This is also an absolute lie.  No 
        one has detected any increase in temperature whatsoever on a 
        global basis.  There has been one and only one discredited 
        study that NEVER pretended to show global warming in the 
        first place.  There are a few recent studies which may or 
        may not show warming but they in no way link it to any human 
        activity.

        !        But notice the weasel word "may" is highlited.  
        Note it may also NOT be due to the greenhouse effect.  But 
        since the ONE study has long since been discredited, who 
        really cares?  Recent studies to say NAY also but always 
        note there is no direct connection indicated.  [MG]

        They predict a further increase of between 4 and 9 degrees F 
        by the middle of the next century if greenhouse gas 
        emissions grow at expected rates.

        !        Absolutely untrue.  Notice it is "they" not people 
        by name and references to published literature.  It is only 
        the nebulous and paranoic "they" who predict something.  In 
        fact in the early days of making predictions there were 
        guesses as high at 9 degrees F.  As every model has been 


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        improved with time and experience the prediction has 
        decreased.  Today the best guess is 1 1/2 degrees F and that 
        best guess prediction is decreasing with every published 
        paper.  [MG]

        The 6 warmest years of the century have been in the 1980s, 
        with 1987 and 1988 being the hottest on record.

        !        Another set of lies.  This is simply not true.  
        1988 did have a very long and hot summer on the East Coast 
        of the US but everywhere else in the world it was not much 
        different from normal.  In fact in the official measure of 
        "degree-days" in the Washington DC area which had the long, 
        hot August that year, when the final tally was in on 
        December 31st, the year was completely average.  In other 
        words, the author of this work is either making it up as he 
        goesk along or has failed to even read the newspapers.  [MG]

        As world population and fossil fuel use grow, greater 
        quantities of greenhouse gases will be released into the 
        atmosphere.  Although the U.S. has only 5 percent of the 
        world's population, we are responsible for 25 percent of the 
        carbon dioxide that is released from burning fossil fuels.

        !        That is also completely irrelevant to the subject.  
        Regardless of population, someone out there is producing 75% 
        of the greenhouse gases and if anyone has to be convinced it 
        is them.  Second, it is absolute and total nonsense.  
        The CO2 production from all fossil fuels worldwide is only a 
        minor contributor, about 1/2 of 1% per year of the total CO2 
        as measured by the observatory in Hawaii.  [MG]

        Carbon dioxide (which accounts for approximately half of the 
        greenhouse effect), nitrous oxide and tropospheric ozone are 
        by-products of burning fossil fuels (coal, oil and gas) and 
        wood.  It is important to note that burning natural gas 
        releases 70 percent as much carbon dioxide per unit of 
        energy as oil, and half that of coal.  Forests and oceans 
        are natural sinks for carbon dioxide, but are unable to 
        absorb the quantities currently being emitted.

        !        Totally untrue but then I hesitate to digress into 
        science and reason as the author has yet to provide an 
        example of either.  Natural gas produces the least CO2 per 
        amount of heat, oil is second and coal produces the most.  
        Fact, NO ONE knows the amount of CO2 that can be used by ALL 
        GREEN plants not simply forests (which release about as much 
        as they absorb.)  As to nitrous oxide, it is a gas produced 
        by thunder storms and is the ONLY natural source of nitrogen 
        for plants.  During a rain the gas combines with the water 
        and produces dilute nitric acid which then permeates the 
        soil and provides nitrogen.  There is no other natural 
        source of nitrogen for plants.  If fossil fuel burning 
        provide free fertilizer for food crops then so much the 
        better.  [MG]


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        Deforestation releases large quantities of carbon dioxide as 
        well as methane, carbon monoxide, ozone and nitrous oxide.

        !        Absolute and irrational and stupid nonsense.  
        Cutting down a tree does none of the above.  IF he is 
        presuming burning the forest then there is no more carbon 
        dioxide released than the forest consumed.  In fact, in a 
        forest fire the surprising truth is how little actually 
        returns to the atmosphere.  The famous Carl Sagan, et al. 
        nuclear winter fell when by actual measurment only about 10% 
        of the mass of the vegetation during a forest fire actually 
        was converted to carbon dioxide.  [MG]

             Methane, which accounts for 18 percent of the 
        greenhouse effects, also is produced by swamps, cattle, rice 
        paddies, landfills, termites, swamps and fossil fuels.

        !        Termites account for 85% of the world's methane 
        production believe it or not.  Cattle are irrelevant to the 
        subject as they are raised where wild herd animals have 
        grazed in the past.  For example, the finest cattle land is 
        where he buffalo once roamed the buffalo flatuance is no 
        different from cow flatulence. The human contribution to 
        this is so small as to be unnoticable.  [MG]

        Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), used in refrigerators and air 
        conditioners, as foam blowers, as circuit board cleaners and 
        as aerosol propellants, account for 17 percent of the 
        greenhouse effect.

        !        This is a new fantasy these folks have dreamed up 
        recently.  Since there is not now nor has there ever been 
        any observed greenhouse effect this seemingly precise 17% 
        figure is a joke to say the least.  It is in no way 
        different from saying 17% of all witchcraft is caused by 
        sorcerers rather than witches.  CFCs have NEVER been 
        implicated in the imagined greenhouse effect by any 
        scientist anywhere at any time.  [MG]

        Scientists predict that as global temperatures rise, life on 
        Earth will face a series of potentially disastrous threats.  
        Precipitation will decline in some areas, leading to crop 
        failure and expanding deserts.  Elsewhere, rainfall will 
        increase, causing flooding and erosion.  Changes in habitat 
        could lead to mass extinctions of plants and animals that 
        are unable to migrate to more compatible climates.  And sea 
        levels will rise, flooding coastal areas and causing salt 
        water intrusion into coastal aquifers.

        !        Unfortunately for this dummy's position, there are 
        NO such assertions in the Scientific literature.  No 
        scientist has put his reputation on the line to say things 
        like this.  What they do say is "the models predict such 
        things" but they know as well as I their models are invalid 


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        as they can not explain the present.  But in hindsight 
        scientiests do consider the possibilty of making 
        predictions.  However, none have even remotely gone so far 
        as to say, THIS WILL HAPPEN.  And there there are equally 
        many if not more who say nothing whatever it going to 
        happen. [MG]

        "Global climate change is one of the gravest threats facing 
        our planet.  The buildup of carbon dioxide and other heat- 
        trapping gases in the atmosphere threatens to damage 
        agricultural lands, forests and wildlife, and coastal 
        regions.  Although there is increasing awareness that our 
        environmental problems are very serious, only modest efforts 
        have been launched to deal with them.  Earth Day 1990 offers 
        an opportunity for unprecedented individual action as well 
        as national and international efforts on a scale equal to 
        today's challenges."    -Gus Speth, President, World 
        Resources Institute

        !         I do not know Gus Speth.  I have never met him.  I 
        have never heard of him.  I feel certain that if I could 
        identify the author of this shallow bit of incompetant 
        propaganda Mr. Speth would certainly wish to sue him for 
        appending his name as a seeming endorsement to this garbage.  
        I can presume Mr. Speth is not stupid enough to believe a 
        word of this nonsense.  [MG]

        !        This is a typical example of the nonsene spit out by 
        those who have a belief and only want to bend every bit of 
        reality to those beliefs.  [MG]

        !        It is all lies and nonsense.  If you are taken in 
        by it, more the fool you.  [MG]

        [Author's note:  No copyright notice nor reference to 
        authorship was found on the original document.]





















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         ..CHIPMUNK          

        Msg#:21554 *Elite*
        09/13/90 21:10:37
        From: MATT GIWER
          To: SCOTT HOUTS
        Subj: REPLY TO MSG# 21486 (ECO POLITICS)
                What did the cave man do with his trash?  Obvious.  It was disposed 
        of without concern for the environment which is what lead to his extinction 
        and explains why us chipmunks have inherited the Earth.

        <->backward forward on message chain
        elete, gain, eply, ext, or top? N


         ..CHANGES           



                           Changes in the weather


             "Back when I was a boy there were more white 
        Christmases back then and therefore..."

             In fact back when I was a boy in the 50s* everyone was 
        certain the weather was changing, due to those atom bomb 
        tests in the atmosphere.  


        _____
             *  June 20, 1945, 8:01 am, Cincinnati Ohio  --  The 
        replacement for WW II.

         ..LAWS              

                            The Law and Reality

                Lets see, the 60 years ago discarded idea of a sub-
        species emboding 
        into law.  That is an absurdity that should be removed.

                The Delany amendment creating in law what is a 
        carcinogenic substance
        rather than relying upon people who understand what they are 
        talking about. 
        That is an absurdity that should be removed.

             Does the law have anything to do with reality?  Where 
        did the idea come from that law can control reality?        

         ..ATHORITY         




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                            Who is an authority?

             Have you ever noticed that there are only "leading" 
        environmental scientists?  Just who do we go to to find a 
        considered and intelligent opinion on environmental issues?  
        Who does the press go to?

             This is an important question as the majority who get 
        their information on the subject get it from the news media 
        and we have a right to expect well researched information or 
        at least sources who have done their research.  
        Unfortunately this rarely happens.

             In early September 1990 the study of cancer rates 
        around Three Mile Island conducted by scientists was 
        released.  It found NO increased incidence in cancer 
        whatsoever.  The press found one person to comment on it.  
        This person was a lawyer who was representing those with law 
        suits against the TMI company.

             Up front it shows the depth of faulty reporting that 
        anyone would consider asking a lawyer his opinion of a 
        scientific study.  I do not know the particular lawyer 
        involved but in general to consider a lawyer to be capable 
        of commenting upon a scientific work is ludicrous to say the 
        least.

             The foolishness of quoting a lawyer was adequately 
        demonstrated by the lawyer.  He questioned the study not 
        with reason but with the observation the scientists involved 
        would financially benefit from the restoration of the 
        nuclear industry.  And with the implication of financial 
        benefit dismissed the entire study.

             The press did not note this lawyer stands to gain 
        millions from the lawsuits he is representing.  The press in 
        not recognizing this and in presenting this as the only 
        source of criticism did the worst disservice to its readers 
        it could, it put ALL opinion on a level playing field.


             Let us look at the reality of science and scientists.  
        A scientist specializing in one field will NOT speak out on 
        the subject of another field even if closely related because 
        he knows most assuredly that he knows less than the people 
        in that field.

             With this in mind, why did the press see fit to portray 
        the scientists in the study as implicitely legal adversaries 
        in this matter?  By implication of the people they have put 
        in opposition with each other the press holds a truely 
        egalitarian concept that because all people are equal 
        therefore all ideas of all people are equal.  

             This is the attitude that in the reverse would hold 


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        that a scientist's opinions on the law are equal to those of 
        an attorney on the law.  In this specific case it was bad 
        enough to posit one person making money off of the issue 
        against another person making money off of the issue.  In 
        general this is the trend of the press and in the public 
        mind.  All opinions are equally valid.

             This is not to argue in the least for an elitist 
        position for scientists any more than it is to argue for any 
        elitist position for anyone.  Rather it is to point out 
        there are legitimate authorities in particular fields to 
        deal with particular questions.  

             So back to the original question, who can we listen to 
        for a legitimate and intellectually honest position upon the 
        environment?  Shall we listen to non-scientists?  Why not?  
        My degree is in physics which makes me a scientist but I do 
        not make the claim that "I am a scientist therefore listen 
        to me."  That happens to be my degree field only.  It has 
        nothing to do with this work.  Regarding this work, I do it 
        as a non-scientist.

             But who is the press listening to?  Rarely from 
        scientists and if they do never from what they speak on the 
        record as scientists.  On the record scientists are 
        professionally very careful about what they say and do not 
        indulge in gloom and doom predictions.

             Shall we listen to the spokesmen for public interest 
        groups?  Why should we?  Thier purpose in life is to make a 
        living as it is for all of us.  It is not to suggest any 
        belief their cause is not just nor worthy of additional 
        contributions.


         ..ANIM1            

                          Animal rights "thinking"
             
             The author of the following will be permitted to 
        merciflly remain anonymous.


             "I ought to say, "I'm not pantheistic, I'm a 
        Universalist".  I'm not saying, hey, let's all get together 
        and go prostrate ourselves communally before snails, 
        aardvarks and blueberry bushes (although we'd probly make 
        the five o'clock news for that); I'm simply advocating the 
        sanctity of life, and that all life is in some way sacred 
        and we should at least be responsible for our actions toward 
        that life force.  

             "I would like to see a return to the ancient "all life 
        is sacred" attitude that modern, industrial, utilitarian 
        society has forsaken.  I'm not in to Darwinianism at ALLL.  


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                           all rights reserved

        Instead of taking man down a peg, I would bring other life 
        entities up to a "worth while as a form of consciousness" 
        level.  

             "I think that "use" orientedness will only destroy the 
        planet eventually and we need to re-orient society toward 
        recognition of the sacred life force of which we all are a 
        part.  Oak groves used to be considered sacred, but were not 
        adored as Gods themselves.  Universalism is not Pantheism, 
        it's a belief in love of life/being for itself, an attempt 
        to re-orient society toward a true attitude of respect for 
        all life forms."

             It is interesting to study such words carefully.  Note 
        the reference to a "life force."  This is an idea that had 
        some intellectually currantcy around the year 1800, some two 
        centuries ago.  In fact electricity was the prime candidate 
        to be the life force.  If you have even seen the classic 
        movie, Frankenstein, you have seen an example of the idea of 
        the life force in action.

             Also the reference to the sanctity of life.  She does 
        not mean human life she means all life.  A rather mystic 
        notion that when carried to its logical conclusion requires 
        on to always walk examined where your footsteps will fall to 
        avoid crushing insects and to alway keep your mouth and nose 
        covered so as to avoid killing a flying insect.

             There is reference to an ancient "all life is sacred" 
        attitude.  Unfortunately the few that ever held that 
        attitude were just as much fringe cases and nutballs as are 
        its believers today.  It is not all that ancient in fact.  
        The examples are from between 1000 and 2000 years ago.  
        Exactly what they entailed was the ritual sacrifice of the 
        most perfect specimen of an animal before engaging in the 
        slaughter of the rest.

             It is implied that the all life is sacred idea did not 
        kill.  In fact, it simply made the priests who conducted the 
        sacrifices rich in much the same way as today expressing 
        concern for animals makes the movement heads rich.
             
             Next we come to a condemnation of a "use" oriented 
        society.  How, pray tell, is anyone to survive without using 
        what is on the earth?  And destroy the earth?  Despite our 
        rather egocentric notions, we do only a small fraction of 
        all the eating on earth.  If humans were to stop consuming 
        animals tomorrow no other carnivore would do so.  When it 
        comes to using animals as food we are not even on the 
        scoreboard.

             This is a typical example of the feel good mixture of 
        ideas that runs loose in the heads of these people.  If any 
        one of these ideas had any validity in the first place, if 
        any of them meant anything like what she thinks they mean, 


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                           all rights reserved

        there just might be a case for her position.

             However, she does not know the truth of what she 
        professes to believe.  She believes in things that were 
        found to be outdated a century ago.

             And yet, what is her goal?  To reorient society along 
        the lines of her beliefs.  Whose society?  Yours and mine of 
        course.  She is not satisfied to privately practice what she 
        believes.  She and thousands like her will be working to 
        spread every exaggeration, misrepresentation and half truth 
        they can find or imagine in order to convince you to their 
        way of thought.  

             And if they can achieve a majority, they will cause it 
        to happen by force.









































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