Government Reform

FROM THE SUBLIME TO THE RIDICULOUS

How often I have heard that phrase: how often I have used that phrase. Like so many enduring aphorisms (a terse saying embodying a general truth), we all too often think of it as something of recent vintage. It is becoming clear to me that this saying, in particular, describes government growth and manipulation that no doubt goes back centuries and even eons. I refer to the never-ending promise of help from government to gain some desirable result that can only be attained with more governmental power and money to spend. Unless there is constant vigilance by the citizenry, the new government powers invariably evolve into unimagined nightmares that either get worse or are ultimately reformed. This never-ending cycle is aptly described as something that “goes from the sublime to the ridiculous”. The only thing that slows or halts the cycle is determined citizen resistance to the abuses and harms that are always the result of individuals or groups wresting control of these “new” governmental powers for their own ends. The United States today is awash with such cyclical evolutions, especially in the “environmental/animal rights” arena where environmental and animal rights organizations are creating new governmental powers like widgets for sublime purposes and then extending them to increasingly ridiculous ends.

The definition of sublime is, “impressing the mind with a sense of grandeur or power; inspiring awe, veneration, etc.” Ridiculous is defined as, “such as to excite derision; absurd, preposterous, or laughable”. These two words exactly describe the evolution of “environmental” campaigns and legislation like the Endangered Species Act, the Wilderness Act, and the National Environmental Protection Act over the past 35+ years. Likewise they describe the simultaneously conceived and extended “animal rights” campaigns and legislation such as the Marine Mammal Protection Act, the Animal Welfare Act, the bi-purposeful Endangered Species Act, and a host of animal specific Acts that re-describe animals from either private property or natural resources into quasi-deities under absolute contrived governmental powers.

A terse summary of the “sublime” justifications for some of these laws and a few of their increasingly “ridiculous” results provides a picture of the harms being generated throughout our society far beyond the original “sublime” justification for their passage or the narrow societal impact imagined originally by casual supporters but certainly intended by zealous radicals.

ENDANGERED SPECIES ACT (Environmental aspects).

Sublime Justification: “Save species from extinction. Not only are eagles and elephants et al ‘in danger’; some species may contain the cure for cancer or other such uses important to mankind”.

Ridiculous Results (a few of literally thousands of such results):
-For the first time ever in our history, private property may be taken by government without compensation and not even for a public purpose thus abusing a basic tenet of our Constitution and serving as precedent for an onslaught of other such takings by government for everything from urban development to increased tax revenue for government.
-Governmental use of academics to dictate what plants and animals “should” be here and there. From “establishing Native Ecosystems” and “eradicating Invasive Species” to forcible introduction, spread, and protection of harmful and dangerous species like wolves and grizzlies the federal power begun with this Act has given government plant and animal bureaucracies powers beyond those of the Kings and Nobles that our forefathers fled centuries ago.
-The “Listing” of races and subpopulations of plants and animals and species of flies and mice and minnows to stop private property development and necessary societal improvements from dams to roads and hospitals to housing construction.


WILDERNESS ACT

Sublime Justification: “Set aside areas that will remind us of what certain areas of the country would be like without management and use of their natural resources.”

Ridiculous Results:
- Escalating numbers of and sizes of Wilderness Areas with each political election to get votes.
- Fires of increasing size, severity, harm, and cost that are blamed on everything except the “Wilderness” areas and the proliferating “Roadless” and “Corridor” and “Low Impact” areas they spawn nearby.
- The increasing reduction and destruction of logging, ranching, hunting, and rural economies.
- The disappearance of biodiversity that is conversely touted as a necessary reason for government to control private property with other “tools” like tax-subsidized easements and new legislation.
- Uses as diverse as providing runways for illegal aliens where law enforcement is all but impossible, to closing roads and access to areas slated for future government acquisition.



NATIONAL ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION ACT

Sublime Justification: “Assure that governmental actions consider and publicize their impact of the environment, so as to ‘balance’ societal activities and their environmental impacts”.

Ridiculous Results:
- Stopping (along with the Endangered Species Act) everything from road construction and energy development to refinery construction and upgrades to the building of the boundary fence on our border with Mexico.
- Preventing any project with governmental involvement that does not meet with the approval of environmental or animal rights’ agendas. Some examples of their agenda items are to do things as diverse as tear down dams and prevent nuclear power plant construction, to eliminating irrigation, ceding more national sovereignty to UN bureaucracies, and creating more governmental controls on everything from where we may live, to what we may drive, what we may eat, and what we will be allowed to do.

ENDANGERED SPECIES ACT (Animal Rights aspects):

Sublime Justification: “Animals must be protected or they will become extinct and the ‘ecosystem’ will ‘collapse’”.

Ridiculous results:
- Wolves are forced into the Rocky Mountain states where they spread under federal protection to kill livestock and thereby close ranches; kill big game herds and thereby eliminate hunting; kill watchdogs and pets thereby making rural living and rural communities wither and more amenable to government control and eventual acquisition; and last but not least are a growing deadly threat to all rural humans.
- “Delisting” an animal creates a fiction of federal withdrawal but in reality is simply a contract into infinity for others to do what the federal government dictates regarding that animal.
- Certain species, like black bears in Louisiana and Florida that are in desperate need of reducing their numbers to minimize conflicts with humans can be indefinitely protected from hunting by lies and propaganda when they are “Listed” and academics continue to get federal “grants” and state agencies work for federal agencies and not state residents.

MARINE MAMMAL PROTECTION ACT

Sublime Justification: “Dolphins are dying in tuna nets and baby seals are being killed for their hides and polar bears and whales and seals are being hunted and they will all become extinct. Federal protection should be provided ‘until they reach’ (i.e. return to?) Optimum Sustainable Populations at which time management will be resumed.”

Ridiculous Results:
- Many whale species are at population levels that are having severe impacts on commercial fisheries worldwide. No research is done; no mention is made of this; and the US and other western nations with a few glaring exceptions refuse to consider any management or research into harvesting any whales.
- Seals and sea lion numbers are 5 or 6 times what they were or should be as they impact adversely everything from cod and salmon stocks to rock lobster fisheries and boat owners and water quality in places like Monterey Bay. There is no management of their numbers researched, mentioned, or even spoken about.
- We watch rubber bullets shot by bureaucrats at seals that only avoid the shooters at great expense to the rest of us.
- Killer whales are renamed “Orcas” as a way to obfuscate their behavior and, like wolves and grizzly bears, their harmful impacts on other whales and salmon and marine mammals that could be of use to men (like sea otters) are either unmentioned or denied if mentioned. Again no honest research from academia that “follows the federal money to create propaganda” like aquarium carp fed with crumbs from a footbridge.

ANIMAL WELFARE ACT

Sublime Justification: “Primates are suffering in medical laboratories as are dogs and cats. Federal controls and standards are the only hope of saving these animals from ‘needless’ suffering”.

Ridiculous Results:
- Rats and mice, that everyone denied would ever be covered by the Act because of the required bookkeeping, are now covered.
- Pets and pet breeders are now the subject of a “Bride of Animal Welfare Act” labeled the “Pet Animal Welfare Act”.
- Nearly all “clinical testing” a euphemism for medical testing with animals is being shipped off to India and China involving reliability issues and billions of dollars .
- Animal uses not approved by veterinarians and scientists that control Animal Welfare Committees at Universities and clinics are forbidden and therefore topics like trap testing and hunting trauma are little documented in order to continue their vulnerability to any and all propaganda to be used to eliminate them at future dates.

ANIMAL SPECIFIC ACTS

Sublime Justification: “ Bullfighting, dogfighting, cockfighting, horse slaughter, and breeding dogs ‘too frequently’ are all cruel and some communities and even some states might allow them because their residents would demand it. Therefore, only if the federal government supercedes state and local authority and declares the private property status of such animals to be merely a privilege granted by government can these cruel practices be stopped. Therefore, new federal laws should simply make these things illegal and the full force of federal power should be applied to either individuals or communities that do such things.”

Ridiculous Results:
- A legal precedent that permits federal intervention to prevent “cruelty” to a chicken or to slaughter a privately owned horse is now established to have the federal government “intervene” to prevent “cruelty” to pets or trapping furbearers or crippling or wounding or field-euthanizing wounded birds or deer or elk.
- American families that have, for over 200 years, raised, bred, and fought chickens are marginalized and criminalized.
- Immigrants that have centuries of family involvement in gamefowl or bullfights are similarly and summarily denied their traditions and interests in a “free” country.
- Private animal property (like the real estate private property taken for the past 35 years by the Endangered Species Act) is now merely a privilege or whim granted by a benevolent or cruel government to favorites and no longer an “unalienable right” of the men and their descendants that founded a limited government to protect THEIR RIGHTS.


Driving all these Acts is an alliance of radical agendas. Mostly it is the destruction of the rights of American citizens to be replaced by the establishment of a society controlled by a few. They are moving toward this end by eliminating any management and use of the environment or animals. The power they are using to do this is generated for “sublime” ends and then used for “ridiculous” results. By eliminating hunting and guns and roads and pets and trapping and use of fur and logging and ranching and energy development and a whole host of other human activities, the controllers take hold of where you live, what you eat, how you get around, etc. The enforcers and regulators are like the religious courts given power in Middle Eastern countries: they take the pressure off government and keep the populace under control. The academics and bureaucrats, like Shariah courts, establish the violations and the penalties. There is no difference between prison for protecting yourself or your family or you property from wolves and lashes and prison for a young woman raped by a gang in Saudi Arabia. There is no difference between arresting someone for watching his own chicken fight another man’s chicken and calling for the lashing and imprisonment for an old lady that let her class call a Teddy Bear what they will. They are all overwrought ideologies enforced unjustly on others. While we are quick to proclaim them as improper abuses in other lands, we turn a blind eye when it seems to fit with OUR OWN PERSONAL LIKE AND DISLIKES.

So what can you do in a Republic when such poison corrodes the legal system and the Courts? When societal harms go beyond “ridiculous” and become a cancer on the body politic? When the original “sublime” cause becomes a perverse caricature much like our relationship with King George and an arrogant Parliament?

The only model, short of revolution, is Prohibition. All of these new laws should have been required to be based on Constitutional Amendments. They created powers that were not in the Constitution or conflicted with what the Constitution said. It is important to remember that all these were passed as the US Supreme Court also declared heretofore unnoticed “penumbras and emanations” in the Constitution that guaranteed “privacy” and (therefore?) a right to abortion. Creating new rights while destroying others creates precedents and tolerance for mob (majority) rule in spite of Constitutional wording that is very dangerous. But back to Prohibition: it was justified to “reduce liquor intake and thereby all the harms of alcoholism in society”. The results were increased alcoholism, corruption of government on a massive scale, increases in crimes from murder to prostitution, and the control of government by evil forces. Since that law was only possible because of a Constitutional Amendment, the power to overturn the law required that the Constitutional Amendment be repealed (a difficult process to say the least and far more difficult than repealing laws). If our forefathers could REPEAL PROHIBITION; it should be far less difficult for us to repeal the laws we are concerned with here. Replacing them with limited and more sensible animal and environmental management programs (that we then keep a watchful eye on) that support American communities and protects those “Sublime Justifications” while respecting American citizens and their rights and freedoms and property and traditions is something all good Americans can support.

Why then are we still letting our selves remain hostage to those who would destroy us?

Jim Beers
24 December 2007
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- Jim Beers is a retired US Fish & Wildlife Service Wildlife Biologist, Special Agent, Refuge Manager, Wetlands Biologist, and Congressional Fellow. He was stationed in North Dakota, Minnesota, Nebraska, New York City, and Washington DC. He also served as a US Navy Line Officer in the western Pacific and on Adak, Alaska in the Aleutian Islands. He has worked for the Utah Fish & Game, Minneapolis Police Department, and as a Security Supervisor in Washington, DC. He testified three times before Congress; twice regarding the theft by the US Fish & Wildlife Service of $45 to 60 Million from State fish and wildlife funds and once in opposition to expanding Federal Invasive Species authority. He resides in Centreville, Virginia with his wife of many decades.