Greetings puny Earthlings and welcome to another edition of DOUCHEBAGS OF THE WEEK.
Sorry it's late, but there's been just too much recidivist douchebaggery to choose from without repeating oneself lately. So here's the list.
NANCY PELOSI- For killing the Colombia free trade agreement to butter up Hugo Chavez and some corrupt and fat American unions, and then the unmitigate chutzpah to claim that it was all for the good of Colombian unions, even though Colombian unions supported the deal.
BILL AYERS- For having an easy privileged and prosperous life just handed to him on a silver platter, and repaying the favour with bombings, threats, and lefty grandstanding that's no doubt poisoning young minds at Chicago universities all because Daddy didn't hug him enough, and never being punished, or even called on his crimes until now, and only because it's favourable to Hillary Clinton.
ENVIRONMENTALISTS- From the yahoos of the Sea Shepherd society trying to kill men who are only trying to make a living in the North Atlantic, and then whining when they get arrested for it, to the ethanol and carbon credit crowd who are having needed farmland turned over from food production to inedible ethanol crops and eucalyptus trees. Thanks to you people, yes, real sentient human beings, will starve to death.
PS: When a ship is accused of deliberately bumping an ice floe that people are walking on, it can only be interpreted as an attempt to knock said people off said ice floe and to their icy deaths, the fact that no one was killed says more for dumb luck than intent. As for the seal hunt itself, I can't really bring myself to buy into the cute and cuddly image since I have actually encountered healthy seals in the wild, and they have tried to bite my face off without provocation.
And to explain further the whole carbon credit boondoggle, when you give Al Gore money, he gives a small part of that money to a farmer in a 3rd world country to stop growing food and to plant supposedly carbon sucking Eucalyptus trees that are inedible to anyone who isn't a koala.
Besides, as Ed Begley said about carbon credits: it's like a drunk driver tearing down the street in an SUV, and saying it's all right, because he tossed a handful of change at an AA meeting as he sped by.
And thanks for posting your pre-prepared comments, complete with news articles, I do not think that you are sock puppets trolling for blogs that mention environmentalists in any way, shape or form.
So, if you find yourself on this list, it means that...
Goodnight, and keep watching the skies, because we're watching you.
8 comments:
Pelosi needs to be tarred and feathered.
They are eating something called dirt cookies in Haiti now, a mix of flour, dirt and water. People are dying. How long before we are zipping around in our hybrid cars here, starving to death with a belly full of dirt? At least Al Gore will still have money for real food.
Sea Shepherd didn't try to kill anyone. Canada will grasp at anything if it even sounds possible. Before you open your 12 year old mouth and insert foot, how about getting your facts straight? How's that for a concept. Facts. Not alleged information, facts. Canada is so ashamed of what the sealers do they will do anything to prevent anyone from seeing it. Better... they should just give the money they spend defending the atrocity of skinning babies alive... which is all on video in case you think it's not a fact.
suite_mck (suite_mck) wrote in toxicswatch,
@ 2008-04-21 12:54:00
Silver Donald Cameron on Paul Watson
The Chronicle Herald
Nova Scotian
Paul Watson and the Armada of Death
DFO not covering itself in glory in seal hunt mess
By SILVER DONALD CAMERON
Sun. Apr 20 - 7:01 AM
Environmental crusader Paul Watson, of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, speaks to reporters in Sydney on April 14. (Mike Dembeck / CP)
LET ME get this straight. The Department of Fisheries and Oceans, aided by the RCMP, boarded and seized the Dutch-registered protest vessel Farley Mowat in order to prevent injury to sealers just a couple of weeks after DFO drowned four sealers itself in a terrifying display of incompetence.
And the European master and mate of the vessel have been jailed and charged with offences under a set of "marine mammal protection regulations" that were created specifically to stifle dissent by preventing protesters from approaching seals who are in the process of being slaughtered.
And all this hits the headlines just as the European Union debates whether to ban seal products from the EU completely. A triumph of Canadian diplomacy.
And the minister, Loyola Hearn, contributes to the calm and rational discussion of the seal hunt by sneering at the internationally-venerated Farley Mowat, who had the effrontery to put up bail money for the jailed officers. Hearn also excoriates Paul Watson’s Sea Shepherd Conservation society as "a bunch of money-sucking manipulators."
If money-sucking manipulation is now a crime under the Fisheries Act, perhaps we should send a few fisheries officers to call on The Right Honourable Brian Mulroney. Whether or not Mulroney’s skulking encounters with Karlheinz Schreiber were otherwise illegal, there’s not much doubt that they represented "money-sucking manipulation" on an Olympic scale.
But that’s not true of Paul Watson. Say what you will about Paul Watson and you can say, with some justice, that he’s intransigent, uncompromising, hyperbolic, pugnacious, rash and intemperate you cannot ascribe cynicism to a man who has spent his whole life charging whaling ships with rubber rafts, getting himself tear-gassed and beaten and jailed, and confronting armed and angry sealers and whalers far out on the cold and lonely sea.
But Hearn, who has spent his entire working life in classrooms and legislatures, says Watson is "gutless." Stunning.
Paul Watson is not a cuddly figure. He doesn’t mind risks, and he is not intimidated by the authorities. If they don’t give him a permit, he goes to the ice without one and takes the consequences. If he has to go to jail, he goes. If the authorities bar him from the ice, he organizes a shipload of others. If they harass his Canadian ship, he registers it in the Netherlands. If they tell him he can’t enter Canadian waters, he stays 13 miles offshore and lets the hunt come to him.
He is utterly devoted to what he’s doing. And his passionate commitment reduces DFO and its successive ministers to gibbering, frothing incoherence.
The truth is that two worlds are colliding every spring at the seal hunt. Loyola Hearn represents the fading world view which holds that human beings somehow rank above all other beings, holding dominion over the living whole and exploiting it without restraint. Watson, a vegan, represents the leading edge of a new world of people who recognize themselves as part of nature, responsible for their stewardship of the natural world, and no more precious than any other species on the planet.
Watson was speaking for that new world when he said that the deaths of the four sealers was a tragedy but the deaths of 270,000 seals was an even greater tragedy.
The striking outcome of that remark as I saw it on a CBC News poll was not that many people were outraged by it, but that perhaps two-thirds of the callers agreed with him.
When I first met Watson, I’m quite sure that the proportion would have been reversed that a single human life would have been considered far more valuable than the lives of any number of animals. That was in 1976, on the ice at the Front, north of Newfoundland. I was reporting on the seal hunt. Watson was there with Greenpeace, of which he was a founding member.
That year, the Front was covered by all the major American TV networks, the wire services, and influential papers like the Boston Globe. The gory images that flashed around the world were a disaster for the sealing industry and the Canadian government. Ever since then, DFO has worked implacably to prevent detailed coverage of the slaughter and it has largely succeeded. Except for Paul Watson.
In those days we hadn’t begun to grasp the damage that human beings had already done to the oceans. We didn’t know about the fury of destruction that has eliminated 90 per cent of the world’s large predatory fishes. We hadn’t watched while DFO "managed" the Atlantic cod and the Pacific salmon into commercial extinction.
But Watson understood in his viscera that we were confronting an armada of death supported by pliant and amoral authority. With growing support, he has fought them ever since and, with his fellow green warriors he has changed the world.
The truth is that two worlds are colliding every spring at the seal hunt.
The National Post Exposes the Truth About the Economics of the Seal Slaughter
Finally, at least one media outlet in Canada has the guts to print the truth about the economics of the Canadian seal slaughter.
Most of the Canadian media have been bullied into parroting the Canadian government party line that the seal slaughter is sustainable, humane and good for the economy. Mike Duffy on CTV has been so biased in his support of this ridiculous position that he has lost all pretense to objectivity as a journalist. And of course the CBC or the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation has for years been referred to by seal defenders as the Controlled By Canada network.
And for years the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society has been saying that the seal slaughter is a burden on the Canadian tax payer and little more than a glorified welfare project.
Finally the National Post has published an article on the economics of killing seals in Canada and this article details the funds the Canadian government is spending to keep the sealers in the barbaric style they have become accustomed to.
The article below is reprinted from their website and can be found online here.
The millions Ottawa spends subsidizing the seal hunt
By Murray Teitel
April 17, 2008
Whether you think killing seals is a bad thing or a good thing, whether you think it barbaric or humane, you should oppose Canada’s annual seal hunt.
According to Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) the justification for the hunt is to provide economic opportunities for Canada’s coastal communities. Last year, according to its Web site, this entire economic opportunity amounted to $12-million, the value of all seal pelts landed. They fetched on average $52 a pelt. According to evidence given to Parliament’s standing committee on fisheries and oceans on Nov. 6, 2006, half of that is eaten up by expenses, so we are talking, at most, $6-million that flowed to the sealers themselves: one-tenth of 1% of Newfoundland’s GDP. (This year it will be even less, because pelts of three to four week old “beaters” that make up 95% of the catch are selling for between $6 and $33.)
This $6-million costs Canadians at least 10 times as much and does so year after year. First of all, there is the cost of deploying the Canadian Coast Guard (CCG) to the seal hunt for seven weeks each year. Last year it involved 10 vessels, many of them icebreakers, helicopters and patrol planes. Nobody in government knows, even less wants to know, what this costs. DFO claims it costs nothing because the boats and aircraft are owned and the crews are on salary. Does it cost nothing to put out fires in Toronto because it owns the trucks and firefighters aren’t on piecework? Toronto hires firefighters and buys trucks based on the anticipated number and severity of fires. A significant part of what CCG does is rescue sealers. Some 24% of its 2003 fishing vessel rescues derived from this hunt. Without it, CCG’s annual budget could be significantly reduced. One hunt-deployed icebreaker, the Amundsen, costs $50,000 per day to operate in winter. Given DFO’s lack of transparency, one can only estimate the annual CCG cost attributable to the hunt at $5-million.
Secondly, every year some disaster occurs. Last year, it was heavy ice that trapped sealers for days on end. Some even ran out of cigarettes! DFO calculated the extra CCG costs due to heavy ice at $3.41-million. It also paid $7.9-million to owners of boats damaged by ice. This year, it is the drowning of four sealers and the near drowning of two while being rescued by CCG. This resulted in the cost of an unsuccessful week-long 2,800 nautical square mile search for one of the drowned and his boat involving patrol planes, helicopters and three icebreakers. The inevitable lawsuits and legal bills will easily cost more than $6-million.
Thirdly, millions are spent every year trying to counter bans on the importation of seal products. Our NAFTA partners and four European countries have imposed bans. Four countries have announced intentions to do so. Italy and Luxembourg have suspended imports. The European Parliament resolved to impose an EU-wide ban. The Council of Europe has called on its 46 members to do so.
Canada has taken Holland and Belgium to the World Trade Organization in Geneva. Aside form being terribly expensive, it jeopardizes a relationship with two countries with which Canada has a trade surplus. $5.2-million of raw seal products constitutes less than 1/1,000 of what we export to Europe.
The DFO, since at least 2003, has been flying high-level delegations to Europe to argue against the bans. Last year, there were at least six such junkets. For example, on March 27, 2007, a 17-person delegation was dispatched to the British Parliament for a meeting attended by only five British MPs. Last month, seven Canadians, including Loyola Sullivan, ambassador for fisheries conservation, the Premier of Nunavut and a Newfoundland Cabinet minister flew to four European capitals for a week.
Unfortunately, they seem to use a travel agent who excels at finding the most expensive fares available. When Mr. Sullivan flew on seal business to five European capitals this January, the airfare alone was $10,270.80. The DFO’s Kevin Stringer flew to Paris for $4,459.65 on Sept. 5, 2007. Of course, this is nothing compared with the $16,025.25 spent on airfare to Australia and New Zealand by the DFO’s director general of economic analysis whom I wish would do an economic analysis of his own expense accounts. With hotels, wines, meals and support staff, this adds up.
They have as much chance of stemming this tide as Germany did of stopping the Allies after D Day. The battle is lost. But because of ideological fanaticism they keep fighting, secure in the delusion that the Canadian taxpayer, like the cod, is an inexhaustible resource that will forever fund this foolishness that only benefits the high-end European tourism industry.
Fourthly, there is the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) led boycott that is largely responsible for the inflation adjusted $465-million drop in the value of Canadian exports of snow crabs — the main seafood export to the United States from Canada’s sealing provinces — since April, 2005. The value of 2007 snow crab exports is 44% lower than it was in 2004, the year prior to the boycott.
HSUS has to date persuaded almost 3,600 U.S. businesses to participate, including heavy hitters Publix (annual sales $24-billion), Whole Foods ($7-billion), WinCo Foods, Lowe’s Foods, Harris Teeter ($3-billion each) and smaller, seafood-driven ones like Legal Sea Foods ($400-million). Sealing creates less than 1% of the value of the sealing provinces’ fishery. Sacrifice 99% for the sake of 1%. Now there’s a business plan!
Finally, there is the cost of the DFO seal-hunt bureaucracy, which alone has to cost more than the sealers earn: license issuers, accountants, typists, file clerks, inspectors, quota setters, regulation drafters, “scientists,” “statisticians,” “economic analysts,” speech writers, media relations officers, anti-boycott propagandists, writers of replies to angry letters, arrangers of tours of European journalists (when the seal hunt is not taking place), all in the service of what DFO says is 5,000 to 6,000 (more like 2,000, I believe) people averaging $1,000 a year from killing 275,000 seals. There is a conflict of interest in the DFO having jurisdiction over the Coast Guard. If it were controlled by the Minister of Defence, he’d immediately see that for what he is spending on the seal hunt, he could outfit an artillery regiment.
Enough already. This is a colossal waste of taxpayers’ money. And the sealers? Sealers should prefer these monies be used to train them for jobs in the 21st-century economy, rather than to preserve them as relics of a hunter/gatherer one.
YOUR the douchebag xran no one else, just you.
What a moronic name and childish site, even for a 12 year old.
I'd love to launch into a rant about ethanol but and since others have already gone into rant territory I might as well.
The world food shortage is from lower than expected crop yields from bad weather. (We can't blame weather that isn't consistent with global warming, can we?) And also lower crop yields around the world because fuel and fertilizer (which indirectly is related to fuel costs) have become too expensive for some farmers who have cut back on them.
As for ethanol, yes it is taking away from possible food production. But as things were forecast, that shouldn't have happened. It is really more a unfortunate coincidence than a direct cause.
We've had world food shortages before, but never so quick have some come out to blame US crop usage with such zeal. We use plenty of farm land in ways that don't contribute to food production or efficiently to food production. Yet they rarely if ever get mentioned.
For example land used for tobacco or corn used in spirits could be used to grow food. Have they ever been vilified? Beef production is extremely inefficient use of corn and also the main consumer of corn. Only the biggest flakes have proposed us stopping Beef production.
Do we really want to set this standard? That we should let the rest of the world's inability to produce food dictate US crop usages? Because if we do it for ethanol, we'll be doing it more and more.
What we have here is ethanol detractors taking advantage of a short term food shortage to further disparage ethanol.
Why the hate?
Ethanol is an alternative to gasoline that's here today. It works with almost no impact on a car's capability or cost. With corn, it doesn't make financial sense. But there are new processes making the transition right now from theory to practice. These processes don't use sugar and therefore DON'T require sugar producing farmland, have a substantially lower net CO2 output [personally don't care about that one], and is cost effective with gas at $3 or more a gallon without subsidies.
So why the Hate?
Environmentalist hate ethanol now. Talking up alternatives is all well and good when they are a distant fantasy. But when it became clear car makers could easily adapt current cars to ethanol for almost nothing, environmentalists lost interest. You see environmentalist don't care about shaving 10%-20% of C02 emissions really. They want you to stop driving cars altogether. If an alternative makes a car more expensive or less fun, they are all for it. An alternative that lets us keep our current lifestyles, they hate.
The other haters are obvious. There's a few segments making a lot of money from the oil/gas situation. Allowed mergers and regulation have taken competition and capacity away from gas production. Commodities trading and cartel style production control have bid up the price of oil well beyond what it costs to pull from the ground. Ethanol would be actual competition for a change. You can figure the rest.
So in order to maintain the status quo in oil, we are willing the set the precedent that US farmland should be used to satisfy world need. Eventhough that need has as much to do with high fuel prices as anything else.
CPM100, why the hate? Simple, ethanol subsidies are causing corn fields and wheat fields that would normally be used for food to be used for a much less efficiently produced form a gas that saves *nothing* on emissions. So we pay more for food, more for meat (the same corn fed beef too) and ignore huge oil fields that can drop the price of gas back to a buck or so per gallon if we'd only drill for it and refine it. All in pursuit of the fantasy of ethanol. Worse, none of the politicians have the guts to call it like it is and kill the subsidies.
Anon: No one who quotes an environmental group has any credibility on anything up to and including wiping one's rear let alone seal hunts. You lost the arguement as soon as you quoted the envirofreaks.
You are an unertertaining douche. I do like your moving background though. I had the same one on my myspace page 8 years ago.
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