May 3, 2008 archive

Cross-posted from THE ENVIRONMENTALIST

30 days after the Bush Administration removed Yellowstone’s Gray Wolves from the endangered list, a lawsuit has been filed by the Natural Resources Defense Council to stop the toll on the small population, which is now at 37 dead wolves and counting.

On the very day that these wolves lost their Endangered Species protection, a crippled wolf named “Limpy,” one of the most photographed wolves in Yellowstone’s famous Druid Peak pack, was shot to death when he ventured outside the park.

Another wolf was stalked for over 35 miles by snowmobile before being overtaken and shot. Another was found dead on the side of the highway, his still-warm body torn apart by bullets. And, tragically, at least four female wolves have been killed just prior to the denning season, which could doom some of the region’s wolf pups.

The Gray Wolf was taken off the endangered list earlier this year, after repeated attempts by the Bush Administration to remove them from the list, despite their marginal population.

More below the jump…

Who Remembers the Snail Darter case?

Or the Crazed Rabbit that attacked Jimmy Carter’s fishing boat in the 70’s?

This is the tale of the tragic flooding of the Valley of the Little Tennessee River, the heroic folks who fought the TVA action, the creative lawyers and law students who won the precedent setting supreme court decision, the brave settlers whose farms were taken and the stoic Native Americans whose homeland it was before – and the roles of the snail darter and the crazed rabbit.  And how it all comes down to – you guessed it – politics.

I meant to write this a couple weeks ago, but got distracted by my own environmental activism, Sierra Club monthly and quarterly meetings, showing William McDonough’s great film the Next Industrial Revolution, Earth Day events, lobbying in the state legislature for an increase in the coal severance tax, and an on-site with some other activists and OSM of a mountaintop removal site.  

I originally thought I might tie this up with a message about activism to effect change.  Don’t know that I’ll make it to that point, as I am certainly demoralized recently about my own local efforts. And am ready to take a break in my garden for the summer.  Maybe that’s change enough . . .

But the story of the snail darter case is a great one . . .

You know who is bitter in America? I am. Because shit-kickers voted twice for a retarded guy they wanted to have a beer with, and everybody else had to suffer the consequences!

-Bill Maher

The bubba vote? What a fucking hoot! Newsweek magazine just continues to amaze in their increasingly successful quest to become America’s predominant tabloid shitrag. This week’s cover story is laughingly entitled Obama’s Bubba Gap and flogs the latest Clinton slime machine storyline that the magical mulatto empty suit is failing to attract the same dumb motherfucker demographic who were largely responsible for giving us the eight year running pox on western civilization that is the George W. Bush soft dictatorship.

The following debate between Adolph Reed, Jr. and Melissa Harris-Lacewell on Democracy Now! is linked to here.  For those of you with about 120 megabytes of room on your hard drives, and have the mpeg 4 codec, you can download it here.  Reed thinks Barack Obama is incapable of getting elected to the presidency, on the grounds that he is a phony who won’t be able to withstand the inevitable Republican Noise Machine (though he thinks Hillary Clinton won’t be able to, either, for the same reason).  Harris-Lacewell takes the opposing point of view.

The debate begins exactly twenty-one minutes into the program, so if you’re impatient to get to the discussion that’s the point at which you’ll want to start.  I think this is a fascinating debate, and I wish we could see its like on the mainstream news channels such as MSNBC and CNN.  I posted the transcript of the debate at my forum, if you’d like to read it.

Thoughts a-jumble.  Mind in a twist.  Ideas mixed like succotash, vegetables that should never touch.

Weekend before finals.  I should be grading, but I am waiting for submissions.  Ever in hope, I extended the deadline to Sunday.

Questions of adequacy always arise.  Did I do right by my students?  One of the reasons for teaching in a small college like this is that I only have 33 students to be concerned about in three classes.  Some of them have given up.  Some of them never started.  What more could I have done to light the fuse that will detonate the desire to learn?

How did one of my students get all the way through Java I and Java II with me letting her think writing code consisted of copying code she had seen produced for her in it’s entirety  once before?  She asked, “When did you show us how to produce an interface for the final project?”  My response:  “The last two semesters.”

Escape the mundane.  Penetrate the surface…