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Eek!ocide Secular Apostate

The Latin -cide is used in many compound words to mean killer or act of killing. Obvious examples are suicide, homicide, genocide, matricide, etc. In fact, the first crime in the book of Genesis was homicide (or fratricide, take your pick) when Cain killed his brother, Abel.

In all of these variations of -cide, there is one common element: a dead body (or bodies).

But in our Progressive postmodern world, one should not be surprised to find that the eek!olawyers are attempting to redefine this most ancient of crimes. According to The Guardian, an extreme Left British newspaper whose readership tends to broadcast in the psychotic band of the Progressive spectrum, a new -cide ecocide is waiting in the wings for a police state to enforce it:

The proposal for the United Nations to accept ecocide as a fifth crime against peace, which could be tried at the International Criminal Court (ICC), is the brainchild of British lawyer-turned-campaigner Polly Higgins.

Although most of us have seen a dead body, and, barring unusual circumstances, its fairly easy to tell whether a body is in fact dead or not, I have never seen a dead eco. In fact, I have never seen an eco at all. Ecos, like unicorns, seem to appear only to a select few of the most committed acolytes of the Church of Gaia.

Consider, for example, the concept of ecosystem. I can easily understand the planet as a system. Its not a closed system, of course, as it has many external inputs. But one can more or less draw a reasonable line at the outer limit of the exosphere. But with other ecosystems, its difficult to draw a line, is it not? For example, where are the limits of Pacific Northwest ecosystem? At best, one must draw a very, very fuzzy line. So is the Gobi Desert inside or outside the Pacific Northwest ecosystem? In 1998, the Asian Dust Event affected atmospheric aerosols and left chemical fingerprints as far east as Minnesota. The winds that blow over the Gobi, by and large, eventually end up over Seattle. Inside? Outside? Well, it depends, doesnt it?

In reality, the limits of ecosystems depend on, and are normally assigned for, legislative and legal reasons. The notion of a hard and fast system limit, delineating what is inside and outside the system, simply doesnt fit with the fuzzy, interlocked realities of nature. But it is a necessary scientistic (i.e., the appearance, or illusion, of scientific validity and reliability) fiction for the assignment of liability, regulatory efforts, and propaganda purposes.

And the propaganda purposes are extremely important, as we see from the Guardian article:

Supporters of a new ecocide law also believe it could be used to prosecute climate deniers who distort science and facts to discourage voters and politicians from taking action to tackle global warming and climate change.

After all, the eek!opolice need something to do between five-alarm spasms of gallivanting about the planet to find dead minnows.

Once one invents a crime, one needs a means of enforcing compliance and punishing breach. The UN is obviously the perfect place to pitch this ecocide insanity, and guess what:

After a successful launch at the UN in 2008, the idea has been adopted by the Bolivian government, who will propose a full members vote, and Higgins has taken up her campaign for ecocide.

This would be the same Bolivian government run by the narco-dictator Evo Morales, comrade-in-arms with Hugo Chavez and the Castro brothers. All of whom have excellent credentials in enforcement and organizing police states.

And what better court to try cases than the ICC in the Hague? The Heritage Foundation observes that

[T]he system of legal due processes adopted by the ICC differs radically from the due process guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution. [ital added -ed.]

Is that just perfect for a police state, or what? They go on to say

The right to trial by jury is conspicuously absent. Justice Joseph Story wrote in 1833 that the purpose of explicit constitutional guarantees of trial by jury was to secure the party accused from being dragged to a trial in some distant state, away from his friends, and witnesses, and neighborhood; and thus subjected to the verdict of mere strangers, who may feel no common sympathy, or who may even cherish animosities, or prejudices against him. If the security of basic legal rights cannot be entrusted to the integrity of elected and appointed American judges, how much more should the U.S. be wary of democratically unaccountable foreign judges who are uninhibited by constitutional restraints?

Even the Chinese are wary of the ICC and refuse to join. And its clearly not because the Chinese government is morally above torture and indefinite incarceration for thought crimes. Maybe they just dont like kangaroos.

Anyway, the notion of ecocide obviously appeals to the dictators and would-be dictators among us who fear public disagreement because it has such fuzzy dimensions and infinite elasticity. Is pissing on the fencepost ecocide? Well, I dunno. Lets ask the representative from Zimbabwe.

But there should be a real crime prosecutable in the Court of Public Opinion, and Im going to call it eek!ocide.

And, as I will show you, there are real dead bodies to be found.

The most egregious eek!ocide ever committed was the brainchild of Rachel Carson and the match that ignited the Gaian religion.

Rachel Carson wrote a book called The Silent Spring which purported to prove that all the birds were dying because of DDT. Gullible people, including myself, sucked up this heartrending argument and began to fear the Silence of the Meadowlarks. All those joyful little feathered bodies quivering in their death throes and it was going to be my fault.

But things really took off in America when the claim emerged that the iconic American megafauna, the Bald Eagle, was being threatened by DDT. The chain of reasoning that led to the doorstep of eagle aeries was work done by the US government. This research was similar in quality to the governments rain follows the plow settled science that resulted in the American Dust Bowl and the brilliant introduction of kudzu into the Southeastern states.

Joel Bitman, PhD, Dept of Agriculture scientist, and physiological chemist, did some work with quail purporting to show that DDT in the diet of quail resulted in thinner eggshells. This work was published in two major journals, Nature and the AAASs Science. Bitman, no longer a bit-man, had hit the big-time. But lest you think that peer review shenanigans were a recent symptom of the global warming cult, note that Bitman was forced by criticism to acknowledge that his experimental quail diets had actually manipulated two variables. His quail with the thin eggshells were also on a restricted calcium diet. Well, whodathunkit?

But the science was so settled that when Bitman courageously published an article recanting his previously published data, the only venue he could find to squeeze by the peer review process was the journal Poultry Science. Now theres a journal thats on the tip of everyones tongue, eh? Back to being a bit-man, as it were. Nature and Science wouldnt touch it because well, you figure that out for yourself. According to Dr Thomas Jukes (UC-Berkeley), Sciences editor, Dr Phil Abelson, told Jukes he would never publish anything that was not antagonistic toward DDT.

body

Since the religious jihad against DDT really took off with the EPAs ban on the chemical during the Nixon Administration, literally tens of millions of people have died worldwide from malaria. And that doesnt even count other insect-borne disease. Thats just malaria. There are real bodies to be found. Of course, the bodies have been in picturesquely poverty-stricken developing countries and not in the effete salons of Manhattan, DC, and San Francisco.

Steve Milloy calls it a Legacy of Death. Why not call it eek!ocide?

This entry was postedon Tuesday, April 13th, 2010 at 11:00 amand is filed under politics, rapture science.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.