Saturday, August 7, 2010

Rocky Mountain High

VICTORY in federal court restores full protection under the Endangered Species Act to wolves in Montana and Idaho. A federal judge ruled Friday that that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service acted illegally when it removed wolves from the endangered species list in Idaho and Montana but left them on the list in Wyoming, splitting the population along political, rather than biological, lines.



Conservation groups argued that the government’s determination that 300 wolves constitute a recovered wolf population in the northern Rockies ignored current science. Independent scientists have concluded that 2,000 to 5,000 wolves are necessary to secure the health of the species in the region.

Press Release from Center for Biological Diversity.

Meanwhile the barbarian Scandihooligans are slaughtering their miniscule wolf population at an unconscionable and unscientific rate. Sweden with approximately 200 wolves killed 27 in this years massacre, and the Norwegians have in recent years murdered a third of their part of the population (in 2001, out of 28), 25% in January 2005 (out of about 20 wolves), and have been picking them off one by one throughout this year... Despite the population suffering from severe inbreeding depression and founder effect... Ignorance springs eternal.

Sunday, August 1, 2010

Steady-State Economics

Too lazy to read Herman Daly's "Steady-State Economics" (http://amzn.to/bZOd7z)?

Try this instead: "Nothing grows forever" (http://motherjones.com/politics/2010/05/peter-victor-deficit-growth?page=1#comment-756881).

Clearly, work is the root of all evil. This follows from the Second Law of Thermodynamics: increases entropy. Just look at the world: work leads to bad shit... Of course, in the logical extreme, when entropy has increased to the point where the world is all non-differentiated high-entropy heat, no work is possible and neither is evil.

Two things you can do to save the world: don't buy from the large corporations, and don't go to work for them.


"I shall argue that it is the capital stock from which we derive satisfaction, not from the additions to it (production) or the subtractions from it (consumption): that consumption, far from being a desideratum, is a deplorable property of the capital stock which necessitates the equally deplorable activity of production: and that the objective of economic policy should not be to maximize consumption or production, but rather to minimize it, i.e. to enable us to maintain our capital stock with as little consumption or production as possible."

--Kenneth Boulding, 1949