Exposing the Big Game

Forget Hunters' Feeble Rationalizations and Trust Your Gut Feelings: Making Sport of Killing Is Not Healthy Human Behavior

Exposing the Big Game

Monthly Archives: June 2016

Another Ridiculous Ridge — Western Wildfires Grow as US Heatwave Casualties Mount

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In Borrego Springs, CA at 10 AM this morning, the temperature was a scorching 116 degrees F. Temperatures today are expected to hit 122 degrees F (50 degrees C) for this California location — which would tie the all-time high for any date there. But it’s just a microcosm of the record-shattering heat that is now settling in over the US West. Heat that looks like it will remain in place for days and possibly weeks. Heat that is now resulting in tragic instances of loss of life even as it is sparking numerous massive widlfires, melting snowpacks, worsening droughts, and otherwise sparking conditions that are related to a human-forced heating of the globe.

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In Glendale, a suburb of Phoenix, temperatures rocketed to 120 degrees Fahrenheit (49 C or 14 degrees F above average) as numerous locales recorded temperatures well in excess of 120 throughout the region (see…

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This is What A Fossil Fuel Dystopia Looks Like — The Arctic Sea Ice is Breaking Up North of Greenland in June

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The Arctic sea ice is breaking up to the north of Greenland during June. It’s the fossil fuel burning global dystopia phrase of the day. Another cognitive dissonance producing instance of something that would have never happened without the added heat kick provided by human-forced climate change. But now, with atmospheric CO2 topping out at near 408 ppm during May of this year, it appears that all sorts of weather weirdness is currently possible.

Arctic Sea Ice breaking up north of Greenland in June

(1-3 mile wide cracks appear in the sea ice north of Greenland in this NASA satellite shot on June 19 of 2016. For reference, bottom edge of frame is 400 miles. Image source: LANCE MODIS.)

It was an odd break-up spurred by the onrush of warm winds rising up from Continental North America. These winds of climate change fueled record temperatures as they crossed the northern islands of the Canadian Archipelago over the past week…

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4 hikers die in Arizona as record-breaking heat scorches southwestern US/John Kerry just rode a boat up to the most stunning example of our changing climate

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4 hikers die in Arizona as record-breaking heat scorches southwestern US

By Jordan Root, Meteorologist
June 20, 2016; 8:00 AM ET

Heat will continue to plague the southwestern United States early this week after a brutal weekend that led to at least four deaths.

Four hikers died in separate incidents in Arizona where temperatures soared to record levels in some areas. One man is still unaccounted for in Ventana Canyon in Pima County, near Tucson.

Firefighters from the Lompoc City Fire Department take shelter behind their engine Thursday, June 16, 2016, as wind-driven flames advance from the Sherpa Fire. The flames were crossing Calle Real near El Capitan State Park in Santa Barbara County. (Mike Eliason/Santa Barbara County Fire Department via AP)

Pima County police issued a statement encouraging people to limit physical activities during “extreme temperatures.”

The heat also led to some travel delays. Minutes before landing in Phoenix on Sunday, a Mesa Airlines flight was forced to turn back to its departure point in Houston due to the heat.

Phoenix broke a daily record and recorded its fifth highest all-time temperature on Sunday, hitting 118 degrees Fahrenheit.

Extreme heat can affect airline equipment, making for unsafe landing conditions.

More: http://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-news/dangerous-wildfires-continue-a/58263804

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The Washington Post
Chris Mooney
Secretary of State John F. Kerry speaks during a tour of the Jakobshavn Glacier and the Ilulissat Icefjord, near the Arctic Circle, on Friday.© Evan Vucci/AP Secretary of State John F. Kerry speaks during a tour of the Jakobshavn Glacier and the Ilulissat Icefjord, near the Arctic Circle, on Friday. On Friday, John Kerry — who has led a push on climate change like perhaps no other U.S. secretary of state, culminating in the Paris climate accord late last year — visited perhaps the starkest indicator of the problem in our hemisphere: the enormous Jakobshavn (or Sermeq Kujalleq) glacier of Greenland.It was part of a far-northern tour that also took Kerry — who this year is leading the United States’ chairmanship of the Arctic Council — to the remote Arctic island of Svalbard, where he saw another glacier named Blomstrand. But it’s nothing like the monster of Greenland’s southwest coast, not far from the town of Ilulissat, one of the frozen island’s most populous settlements.

Granted, it isn’t clear how close Kerry was able to get to the glacier, which lies at the end of the World Heritage listed Ilulissat Icefjord, which is often filled with a melange of huge icebergs. On board the HDMS Thetis, a Danish ship, alongside foreign ministers from Greenland and Denmark, Kerry put it like this:

So out of this particular ice fjord, the most active ice flow in the Northern Hemisphere there’s 86 million metric tons of ice each day flowing out into the ice flow, breaking off. I was told coming in here by the pilot of our airplane, who has lived here all his life, that there is enough water being emptied off the ice flow into the Arctic that it would take care of the city — and each day, there is enough water that would take care of the city of New York for an entire year. So this is gigantic transformation taking place and you can see it in the naked eye as you see where the ice has retreated from just in the last 15, 20 years, where the marks are still left.

The figure above, 86 million metric tons of ice per day, may sound impossible to believe. But actually, it translates into 31.39 billion tons per year, which is quite consistent with what one Greenland expert, Ian Joughin of the University of Washington in Seattle, told me about Jakobshavn for an earlier story. He said it’s losing 25 billion to 35 billion tons of ice per year.

And it could actually get worse.

Consider a 2014 study of Jakobshavn by Joughin and three colleagues, which called it “Greenland’s fastest glacier.” Joughin found that its flow speed in 2012 was “nearly three times as great” as in the 1990s. It also found that in just over a decade, between 2000 and 2011, Jakobshavn alone raised sea levels around the globe by almost a millimeter. That may not sound like much, but it means the glacier lost about 360 gigatons, or billion tons, of ice.

As the glacier loses ice in enormous iceberg calving events, it also retreats inland — and, in this case, into a deeper and deeper part of the fjord, where depths are above 1,300 meters. This, in turn, increases the flow speed further.

Thus, the paper predicted that the glacier’s speed could, at the extreme, increase beyond the current factor of three to a factor of 10 faster than in the 1990s, because of its travel through such an incredibly deep basin. In the process, it would retreat backward 50 kilometers (about 30 miles) and hurl forth additional millimeters of global sea level rise.

Last summer, Jakobshavn saw an enormous and possibly record-size iceberg calving event, suggesting that the rapid retreat continues.

According to news reports, Kerry was advised on the trip by David Holland, a professor at New York University who studies Greenland and the Antarctic. Holland has previously published research suggesting that Jakobshavn’s great increase in flow speed was triggered by warmer waters reaching its base. Per these reports, Holland said Jakobshavn could actually retreat 100 kilometers (about 60 miles) in the next century.

According to a recent lecture by NASA glaciologist Eric Rignot, Jakobshavn is one of “three major floodgates” for the Greenland ice sheet, which overall contains about 20 feet of potential sea-level rise. Out of this, Jakobshavn contains the potential to contribute almost two feet.

What’s really scary about Jakobshavn, though, is that it’s still nothing like what could happen in parts of Antarctica, where ice volumes are far greater, and glaciers can be even larger. Yet Jakobshavn, because of its size, still gives a hint of what really rapid ice loss could look like there.

Kerry signaled in Greenland that his thinking tends in this direction. Or as he put it:

I wanted to come up here today to both underscore the urgency but also to learn — and I did learn.  I learned more about the threat of the Antarctic, which in many ways is far greater than the threat of the ice melt here in Greenland, what I’ve learned today — and an area where we don’t know enough, where we need to do more research, and where we need to respond to greater effect.

No wonder that, floating amid icebergs unleashed by this giant, Kerry spoke bluntly about how just how big the climate-change problem is.

“So what we did in Paris with the Paris accord on global climate change is critical now to be implemented, but it’s not even enough,” he said.

http://www.msn.com/en-us/weather/topstories/john-kerry-just-rode-a-boat-up-to-the-most-stunning-example-of-our-changing-climate/ar-AAhiBKP

 

Excerpt From John A. Livingston’s Rogue Primate

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From John A. Livingston’s Rogue Primate in the chapter “The Exotic Ideology:”

“As the rogue primate overran the world in the late Pleistocene and early10418292_778659628825562_4081410081902108848_n recent times, not all of the accompanying baggage was hardware. There were tools and weapons, to be sure, both of which improved to such an extent over time that the Pleistocene mega fauna before them. Destructive as the new hardware was, however, the new software—the accompanying knowledge of how-to-do-it –was downright devastating. Storable, retrievable, transmissible technique made the conquest possible, on any ‘natural’ timescale, virtually overnight. Technology, as an aspect of culturing, changed much more rapidly than the methods of avoidance used by prey species. It was no contest.

“After the peak extermination between 30,000 years ago and the most recent withdrawal of the ice, and after world human colonization was roughly complete about 1,000 years ago, the non-human world entered a period of relative calm. Humans having established their beach-heads (initially at considerable cost to the most vulnerable indigenous forms), there impact may have lessened—temporarily.  After the initial painful adjustments to the human presence, at least some elements of Nature, especially in extreme latitudes, appear to have been able to cope, for a while. This post-Pleistocene Camelot lasted about 500 years.

“By this time, the radiation of human populations into a variety of environments meant that cultural prostheses were now evolving independently of one another. Like Darwin’s Galapagos finches on the scattered and isolated islands of their archipelago, human societies had developed distinct differences. Cultural separateness, like reproductive isolation, produced new concepts. Descended as they were from a common ancestor, the various human populations (‘ecotypes’) retained their biological inheritance, including their domesticated dependence on how-to-do-it, but the particular content of their ideologies (including how to apprehend the nature of reality) became profoundly different from society to society.” …

North Idaho wolf pups killed at den; reward offered

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http://www.spokesman.com/blogs/outdoors/2016/jun/16/north-idaho-wolf-pups-killed-den-site-reward-offered/

Gray wolf pups. (Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife)Gray wolf pups. (Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife)

PREDATORS — Idaho Fish and Game is asking for the public’s help in determining who is responsible for removing and killing young wolves from a den in North Idaho.

The incident occurred in Kootenai County, about 15 miles from Coeur d’Alene, in the Sage Creek drainage, says Phil Cooper, department spokesman.   The incident likely occurred sometime during the week of May 16.

“Fish and Game manages wolves in Idaho as big game animals,” he said.  “There was no open season for wolves in the area when the juvenile wolves were killed.”

Fish and Game officers collected evidence at the scene and are following leads.

Information about the incident can be called in to the Citizens Against Poaching Hotline, (800) 632-5999.

“Callers may remain anonymous,” he said. “A reward is available for anyone providing information that leads to criminal prosecution of the case.”

Rapid Polar Warming Kicks ENSO Out of Climate Driver’s Seat, Sets off Big 2014-2016 Global Temperature Spike

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“What is happening right now is we are catapulting ourselves out of the Holocene, which is the geological epoch that human civilisation has been able to develop in, because of the relatively stable climate. It allowed us to invent agriculture, rather than living as nomads. It allowed a big population growth, it allowed the foundation of cities, all of which required a stable climate.” — Stefan Rahmstorf

A strong El Nino in 2015 helped to contribute to record hot global temperatures over the past three years. But with so much heat unexpectedly showing up in the global climate system, there’s clearly something else going on. And indicators are that the natural climate variability that human beings have grown accustomed to over the last 10,000 years may now be a thing of the past — as it is steadily overwhelmed by a stronger overall greenhouse gas based warming signature. One that…

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How Dare They Bite Back! Humanity’s Illogical Rage When the Beast Bites Back

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Commentary by Captain Paul Watson

A two-year old boy is grabbed by an alligator and dragged into a Floridian swamp and killed.

The response is murderous retribution towards every alligator found in the vicinity. So far five alligators have been killed despite failing to identify the alligator involved.

A nine-year old boy falls into a gorilla enclosure at a zoo. The gorilla does not injure the boy yet is killed nonetheless as a precaution.

A grizzly bear kills a hunter and is in turn hunted down and slain for its “crime.”

A spearfishing woman is killed by a shark and the Western Australian government immediately initiates a policy of extermination of an endangered shark species.

In a world dominated by humanity, animals are enslaved, slaughtered, tortured, abused and treated like expendable material property without consideration that they are living self aware sentient beings.

Their lives have no intrinsic value outside of the value we decide to place on them.

Humans refuse to acknowledge intelligence or emotions in animals yet we perveresly hold animals directly responsible for their actions.

The killing of a two-year old boy is a sad tragedy in human eyes of course,10917819_10205697179298480_7313359493599094694_n but what does a vendetta against alligators accomplish? The child is sadly dead. The alligator simply did what alligators do. Killing five alligators or more in retaliation is an illogical and murderous expression of outrage at the fact that a non-human did not acknowledge the “superiority” of humanity.

We humans have fashioned ourselves as special and extraordinary, better than all other animals, endowed with unlimited privilege and entitlement.

As humans we have defined ourselves as the “master species” and to most animals, all humans are Nazis.

We slaughter 65 billion domestic animals each year and many more billions of fish, we massacre tens of millions of wild animals, torture millions of animals in labs, enslave millions more in cages and tanks, lay waste to thousands of square miles of life supporting habitats, yet when one of us is killed, and usually because of our own stupidity, we become irrationally and violently outraged.

In the minds of the majority of human beings, animals have no rights that any human being is obligated to respect. We own them, we dominate them and we hold total, ruthless and lethal dominion over them and as such we are under no obligation to acknowledge that they feel pain, that they suffer, that they have emotions, that they can think and reason, dream and are self aware sentient beings. We simply deny all these things to justify our anthropocentric dominance.

Being killed by an alligator, a shark or a bear is no different than being struck by lightning, drowning in the surf or having a coconut fall fatally upon your head. These tragic things happen but for some irrational reason when the cause of the incident is a sentient being, we are enraged and we demand retribution. We don’t chop down the coconut tree, but we do slay the shark.

We have made the rules that the animals must abide by even if they are unable to understand the rules.

What we are saying is that animals have no rights that we need to respect but animals are obligated to respect human lives and property even as we acknowledge they possess absolutely no moral or ethical basis for such an acknowledgement.

How many babies are snatched by alligators, how many people are killed by sharks how many people are slain by bears? Not many, and in the case of gorillas, not even a single human has died.

Humans on the other hand slay millions of other humans. Millions more die in accidents involving cars, planes, boats and other human made objects. More hunters are killed by other hunters than by wild animals.

Yes some innocent people are indeed killed by animals, it happens, but tens of millions of innocent animals are slaughtered by humans.

Sharks kill an average of seven people every year despite the fact that some two hundred million people enter the sea each and every day. If sharks were intentionally killing humans, the numbers would be in the thousands. Shark kills are rare and accidental yet humans kill over seventy million sharks every year. That’s the equivalent of exterminating the entire population of France in one year.

And many human victims of attacks by animals are also not always innocent. A hunter killed by an elephant or a lion, a bear or a wild boar cannot be described as an innocent. Nor can a matador, a spear fisherman or even an Orca trainer.

Despite this, the human response is an indictment of the animal in virtually every case, be it a matador or a child, and that indicates a special kind of illogical rage. The response is always equal no matter if the victim is innocent or guilty, if the attack was provoked or unprovoked. The human is always in the right, the animal is always in the wrong and that is because in every case the animal is considered an inferior to any human for any reason no matter the circumstances.

At the same time humans do grant special dispensation to some animals. People have an aversion to seeing a dog being killed in a movie but there is very little effective protests to stop the hundreds of dogs being boiled and spit roasted alive at the Yulan dog meat festival this month. We love our horses until they break a leg, after which we put a bullet in their head. We pet our cats and dogs as we eat cows and pigs and get arrogantly defensive if anyone points out the contradiction.

When humans are killed by humans we make the distinction between those we consider to be “bad” humans being killed and the “good” humans doing the killing. One side simply dehumanizes the other side to justify the killing.

This is made all the more easier with animals who are dehumanized by reason that they are not human already.

All of this is irrational behavior that defies logic.

How many more alligators must we kill in Florida before we feel justifiably revenged?

How many more sharks must be massacred until we achieve retribution?

How long will it be before we can replace primitive, vengeful retribution with a logical, rational and compassionate understanding of the relationship between humans and other species.

How long will it take before we can honestly describe ourselves as “mankind?”

 

 

Facebook:  Captain Paul Watson, SeaShepherd

<a href="https://www.facebook.com/captpaulwatson/photos/a.443115070931.234296.155430570931

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5 Reasons We Can’t Afford to Ignore the Issue of Animal Rights Any Longer

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by Robin Raven

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robin-raven/5-reasons-we-cant-afford_b_10509714.html

10917819_10205697179298480_7313359493599094694_n

The fate of Harambe, the 17-year-old gorilla who was shot dead in a Cincinnati zoo on May 28, has inspired much debate. Some adamantly defend the zoo workers’ actions, while others point to the hypocrisy of outrage when many sentient animals are killed each day without drawing any attention whatsoever. Seeing Harambe’s face as an innocent animal who was so quickly sacrificed has undeniably struck a chord with many. So, despite some claims that animal rights is the least important issue, the attention that the gorilla’s life received indicates that people are ready to hear the truth: Non-human animals are sentient beings with lives that do, in fact, matter.

All this is another indication of how interest in the issue of animal rights has grown significantly in the past half-century. According to a 2015 Gallup poll, nearly a third of Americans now believe that non-human animals should be given the same rights as people. That’s a considerable increase since 2008, when only a fourth of Americans shared this view.

Taking full consideration of this is pretty awe-inspiring. I chose to be vegetarian as a kid because I felt motivated to protect animals, and so much has changed since I felt like I was the only vegetarian in the world as I grew up in the 1990’s in small town Alabama. We’re quickly making progress, yet animals are literally being tortured to deliver meat, poultry, dairy, eggs, and fish to dinner plates. Even worse is happening to some for fur and other animal byproducts that humans can easily and comfortably live without. It’s clear that people are concerned, and the following reasons show why animal rights should be a central topic of debate.

Established Sentience in Non-Human Animals

Imagine desperately needing to move, yet you were confined to a cage where you had to live in your own urine and feces, never experiencing simple pleasures beyond fear and pain. Many farm animals experience that and worse tortures. Being sentient beings, they are aware of their needs and wants; they fight for their lives to the end.

This isn’t simply imagining what it would be like. Animal sentience is an established fact. Psychology Today reported in 2013 that we’ve had plenty of data for a while to declare that non-human animals are sentient beings. The prominent scientists at the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness declared that many non-human animals are conscious. It’s been shown that animals can worry and lose sleep. Like people, non-human animals will fight to live, and many species have problem-solving capabilities.

A Staggering Number of Beings Who Suffer

If you’re like me, you get upset and even outraged when you see just one person suffer, and you do what you can to help them. Now imagine that happening a billion times over. Given that the sentience of many non-human animals is widely accepted, people should care deeply about preventing the massive amounts of suffering that are currently being inflicted on animals. In the U.S. alone, each year more than 78 billion sea animals and over eight billion land animals are killed for food. That’s not millions, but billions. That ends up to a tragic, extreme amount of suffering among sentient beings every single day in the country.

Interconnected Issues

No one issue facing the world is entirely independent of the others. The case for animal rights also stands alongside other forms of prejudice as an issue that needs to be addressed. Having prejudice against others for their citizenship, race, sexual orientation, gender, or species can have far-reaching effects on society.

An intersectional approach to animal rights is key. Social justice advocate and writer Christopher-Sebastian McJetters recently stated, “Intersectional justice isn’t some ‘sect’ of veganism. Framing it as such is reductive and overly simplistic. Intersectionality is an analytical approach that challenges the root causes of oppression through the lens of people who live daily with multiple intersecting oppressions…people who often lack the social, sexual, economic, and academic mobility of those who needlessly antagonize and harass them.”

Public Health

It’s not just animals’ lives that are at stake when we disregard animal rights as a core issue. Life on earth as we know it is at stake. Livestock production is posing a rather big risk to human health through the overuse of antibiotics. When bacteria become resistant to the antibiotics because of their overuse, the effectiveness of the medicine is compromised. Also, the high amount of pollution of both water and land caused by livestock production threatens human health.

The Environment

The damage that’s being done to the planet by animal agriculture is extreme. Environmental advocates like Al Gore and James Cameron decided to go vegan because of this staggering harm. Approximately 30 percent of the world’s ice-free land surface is used to farm chickens, pigs, and cows for slaughter and human consumption. Furthermore, this livestock production, which includes eggs and dairy, takes up more than a third of the fresh water in the world. Time reports that livestock production has a bigger impact on Planet Earth than any other activity humans do.

At least 18 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions come from livestock, according to a report that was released by the United Nations. That’s more than the combined emissions from all forms of human transportation, including cars, planes, and trains. Since it’s widely believed that we need to act soon before there’s no turning back on global warming, this is a solid reason all need to be concerned about the harm caused by a disregard for animal rights.

Where We’re at Now

Some leading politicians seem to be getting the message about the importance of animal rights, but we have a long way to go. No current Republican Presidential frontrunners seem to have addressed the issue of animal rights in a serious way, although Donald Trump did seem to mock the cause in a Tweet, stating, “Ringling Brothers is phasing out their elephants. I, for one, will never go again. They probably used the animal rights stuff to reduce costs.” Hillary Clinton’s campaign website claims that the way our society treats animals is a reflection of our humanity, even going on to state, “Hillary has a strong record of standing up for animal rights.” Meanwhile, the website of Bernie Sanders doesn’t address the issue, but Zach Groff, a protester who interrupted Bernie’s May 2016 rally in California said, “He claims to be a progressive, but you cannot be a progressive if you oppose animal rights.” Sanders did receive a recent 100 percent rating for his voting on animals in a Humane Society report.

It’s clear that animal rights should be a core national moral issue, not a side topic that’s viewed as less important than the current topics of debate. Activists, animal rights organizations, and others will need to continue raising awareness and bringing these facts to the forefront of debates in order to ensure that it becomes a core issue.

 

Wild and Free

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Born on a mountaintop

my life in my hands

Don’t try to tell me

what I should be

Got a feeling inside of me

a love for the land

the air that I’m breathing

is wild and free.

 

No Church could hold the peace I feel

beside these roaring streams.

And no book could hold the secrets

stored inside the evergreen.

 

by Jim Robertson circa 1979

copyrighted-wolf-argument-settled

 

Al Gore’s Revenge — Internal Combustion Engines Stink and This Ridiculously Powerful Electric Turbine Truck Proves It

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robertscribbler's avatarrobertscribbler

As of yesterday, Nikola Motors announced the performance specs and preorders for its new hybrid electric long-haul truck. It’s a ridiculously awesome design — one that boasts across the board superior performance when compared to internal combustion engine based trucks that are currently available. The company producing this amazing feat of electrical hybrid vehicle engineering calls its new vehicle the Nikola One. But we’re going to have some fun at the expense of climate change deniers and electric vehicle detractors both here and call this thing Al Gore’s Revenge.

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Nikola One

(Nikola One aka Al Gore’s Revenge. It’s big, it’s red, it’s mean, it’s electric — and it’s about to eat internal combustion engine based trucking market share for lunch. Image source: Nikola Motor Company.)

If there’s ever been a name that climate change deniers tried to turn into a nasty joke, it’s Al Gore. Back in the late…

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