It has been over ten years since Wisconsin endured a kind of deer holocaust. The terminal deer and elk disease, chronic wasting disease (CWD), descended upon its deer population with such vengeance officials declared “CWD eradication” zones in which fauns and does would be killed before bucks. Thousands of deer carcasses were stored in refrigerated trucks in La Crosse while their severed heads were tested for CWD.
The British government’s policy to rid England’s cattle of bovine TB by culling badgers is unravelling, falling to pieces bit by embarrassing bit as more information is disclosed. Last year’s pilot culls were meant to test whether killing badgers by controlled shooting would be “effective, humane and safe”. Not safe for badgers but for the public trying to prevent the killing.
I just substitute taught
music to kindergarteners
crazy wild-haired college teacher
radical journalist, fifty-seven
so many lamentations . . . .
“I was in that Mexican town
when it was just a sleepy
fishing village . . . or climbed into a cloud
forest in Vietnam when the f
was still in forest and c did
not mean contaminants … and
off Belize, you can’t imagine the lemon
sharks, before the Asians ramped up
shark-fin soup . . . .”
*-*
there were bongos
xylophones
tambourines
There is a de facto redefinition of “the economy” when sharp contractions are gradually lost to standard measures. The unemployed who lose everything…easily fall off the edge of what is defined as “the economy” and counted as such. So do small shop and factory owners who lose everything and commit suicide. And so do the growing number of well-educated students and professionals who leave…all together. These trends redefine the space of the economy. They make it smaller and expel a good share of the unemployed and poor from standard measures.
“I’ve looked at science and policies a lot in my career, and I think this is one of the worst policies I have ever seen.”
Most people would agree that England has a problem with bovine tuberculosis among its cattle. But many do not agree with the government’s view that badgers are to blame; that it is diseased badgers that are infecting the cattle; that the disease can be controlled by killing badgers rather than looking at farming practices; a view which ignores the science that says culling badgers will have little effect and may make matters worse.
On Friday, July 13, 2012, I looked into the face of evil. It was the third time in 6 months that the vivisection-state complex had ambushed me, slapped handcuffs around my wrists, and threw me into a cell. As I was led from the courtroom after having had a $500,000 bond placed on my head, my eyes met those of the sadistic dog-murdering vivisector from Wayne State University (WSU). Having accomplished his mission for the vivisectors at the University of Florida (UF), he smiled into my face with a sickening ghoulish grin I’ll never forget.
The UK Secretary for the Environment Owen Paterson, called by some the “worst Environment Secretary ever” because of his support for so many ecologically damaging initiatives, disappeared in February. Having been responsible for an expensive and highly unpopular badger cull, he became embroiled in the crisis that brought a lot of southern England to its knees – catastrophic flooding.
The British Government seems as determined as ever to pursue its policy of killing badgers to prevent TB in cattle. This despite the “complete failure” of the pilot culls to reach their targets, the leaked information from the as yet unpublished report from the Independent Expert Panel and the slow but steady fall of the incidence of TB in English cattle due, not to dead badgers, but to tighter testing and cattle
The hardest thing about doing what I do is trying to write relatively calmly about things that quite literally make the blood boil. Sometimes after I’ve written a piece, such as this one, I feel the need for a long hot shower, because you have to spend so long immersed in the vile excrement of the 1% that you wonder if you can ever be clean again. I’m sure that many others know what I mean.
Packed with distortions and outright lies, Mongolia’s privatized former state media called them the ‘enemies of Mongolia’. On 16 September 2013, the leaders of Mongolia’s Fire Nation (Gal Undesten in Mongolian), an environment and human rights coalition, organized a mass protest in front of the Mongolian Parliament. Decades of grassroots organizing to establish environmental protections were at risk: on September 16 the Great State Khural (State Parliament) gathered with intentions to dismantle the so-called ‘Law With A Long Name’ (LLN).
