|
|
|
|
Baseball Primer Newsblog— The Best News Links from the Baseball Newsstand
Tuesday, February 06, 2007
The A’s want to build their ballpark and mall village on low-lying land west of Interstate 880, less than half a mile from a tidal channel. With ocean levels expected to rise as the globe heats up, the high tides that churn up that channel could turn the A’s ballpark into prime waterfront property—or into soup.
“You are talking about a meter rise of the sea level by the end of the century (around the bay),’’ said Will Travis, executive director of the Bay Conservation and Development Commission, which helps regulate shoreline construction.
But of course,
The A’s seem unfazed by the warming warning, saying they wouldn’t be proceeding with planning for a Fremont ballpark if they thought water was a worry.
Besides, said team spokesman Jim Young, “a century is a long way off, and I won’t be available for comment in a hundred years when it becomes a problem.’‘
100 years ago, Babe Ruth was already 12, the American League had existed for six years, and the Cubs had won their last World Series. Time goes by faster than people think.
|
Bookmarks
You must be logged in to view your Bookmarks.
Hot Topics
Newsblog: [OTP-May] Politico: Congressional baseball game, May 1, 1926 (4478 - 4:44am, May 26)Last: Joe KehoskieNewsblog: OT: NHL is finally back thread (383 - 3:51am, May 26)Last: BurlyBuehrleNewsblog: SB Nation: The Rotation: The worst baseball conversations (31 - 2:30am, May 26)Last: DJ Funky and the Smile Time Variety PlayersNewsblog: OMNICHATTER for MAY 25, 2013 (78 - 1:39am, May 26)Last: SnowboyNewsblog: OT: NBA Monthly Thread - May 2013 (1283 - 1:30am, May 26)Last: Meatwads stronger now, ready for the houseNewsblog: Flip Flop Fly Ball: Diamonds Aren’t Forever – Five Base Baseball? (9 - 11:21pm, May 25)Last: The District AttorneyNewsblog: Raissman: Could 2013 be last year for John Sterling and Suzyn Waldman on Yankees radio broadcast? (12 - 11:19pm, May 25)Last: Best Regards, L.M.Newsblog: Davey Johnson says he won't shave until Nationals start hitting (5 - 11:16pm, May 25)Last: Gonfalon BubbleNewsblog: Posnanski: KC and the little things (4 - 10:46pm, May 25)Last: Walt DavisNewsblog: Perry: Hawk Harrelson reacts to blown call by Angel Hernandez (29 - 10:44pm, May 25)Last: Petunia inquires about poniesNewsblog: FanGraphs: Cameron: The 2013 Cubs: Better Than We Think (46 - 10:31pm, May 25)Last: McCoy Wilfong for Money Newsblog: McCoy: Brandon Phillips playing to Joe Morgan's level? (17 - 10:21pm, May 25)Last: Non-Youkilidian GeometryNewsblog: Who Are the Top Baserunners in Baseball? | Articles | Bill James Online (28 - 9:40pm, May 25)Last: bobmNewsblog: HHS: Autin: Miguel Cabrera to the max (34 - 7:34pm, May 25)Last: MefistoNewsblog: Marchman: Why Even Have Baseball's Draft? (19 - 7:29pm, May 25)Last: YR Misses Reggie Bars
|
|
Reader Comments and Retorts
Go to end of page
Statements posted here are those of our readers and do not represent the BaseballThinkFactory. Names are provided by the poster and are not verified. We ask that posters follow our submission policy. Please report any inappropriate comments.
Besides, since teams seem to be able to con cities into subsidizing a new ballpark every 20 or 30 years nowadays, there should probably be enough time to make a strategic retreat in case another Bush gets elected....
And 100 years ago, the following current major league stadiums were already in existence:
[crickets]
Baseball's usual short-sightedness really isn't much of a problem in this case. The shelf life of a stadium is 20-30 years. Why worry about the end, the end of the century?
throws deck chair.
[crickets]
That's why I didn't link this when I say it while scoping out SF Chron updates...
Forget any arguments about the enviromental issues; the writers obviously must not be big baseball fans, if they're worrying about a baseball stadium lasting a hundred years.
[crickets]
Maybe, but English soccer stadia were (e.g. White Hart Lane) -- of course they're also being replaced with new models.
More accurate: global climate models or PECOTA? Discuss.
PECOTA hands down.
How do you measure this? Which more accurately predicts the number of "splash hits" in 100 years?
1)As Mr. Kaufman already pointed out, 100 years into the future might as well be forever from a stadium's perspective.
2)A meter of sea level rise is on the high end of predictions by the end of the century
3)The earthquake recurrence interval on the San Andreas fault system is such that, over a 100 year period, I'd be much more worried about that.
4)Citifield, in NYC, is in a much worse location w/r/t the ocean, since it's both low and located in an area of the LI Sound that could potentially see high storm surges in the right conditions
5)This article betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the consequences of sea-level rise. If sea-level were to rise a meter, there are steps that can be taken to preserve land less than a meter ABSL at the present day. See "Holland".
6)A substantial portion of the Bay Area (eg: much of the financial district of SF, the international airport) lie at or w/in 1m of present sea level. The stadium is the least of the Bay Area's potential losses in case of catastrophic SL rise.
A little back of the envelope calculation:
Area of the oceans (in million square miles) ~ 360
Area of landlocked ice ~ 18 (Antarctica - 14, Greenland - 2, the rest ~ 2)
So, for the ocean to rise one meter, 20 meters of every square km of landlocked ice must melt. That seems a pretty tall order
Forget the stadium, baseball won't last 100 years
Area of the oceans (in million square miles) ~ 360
Area of landlocked ice ~ 18 (Antarctica - 14, Greenland - 2, the rest ~ 2)
So, for the ocean to rise one meter, 20 meters of every square km of landlocked ice must melt. That seems a pretty tall order.
Warmer weather causes water temperatures to rise, causing water to expand. You see the same contraction/expansion with highway pavement. Icebergs melting adds to that, but wouldn't be the only cause of rising water levels.
Dzop, I hope your right, but I've grown less sanguine over the years.
It's kind of a shame that the most irresponsible people have essentially captured both sides of the global warming debate.
Equating the two extremes of this debate is pretty lazy.
Indeed.
Equating the two extremes of this debate is pretty lazy.
I don't think so. Given the uncertainties involved one could make a plausible case that the extreme of the doomsayers could cause more damage than the extreme deniers. I think it is clear that the climate needs monitoring (data collection at a far greater rate) and that, for a variety of reasons aside from the end of civilization, pursuing renewable energy makes sense. But the side that is supposed to be champions of reason and objectivity have essentially shut down debate on both the subject of causes and solutions, which, IMO is far more dangerous than sticking one's head in the ground.
Of course, I generally am far more critical of my side of debates than the other.
Eh...the best way to think of global warming is that there's a 99.5% chance that, while weird and different, it really wont be very costly. The reason it's scary is the 0.5% chance that something really terrible and unforseen happens, like the collapse of an icesheet or the desertifiction of some substanial region, or a big change in tropical cyclone frequency and intensity, and then its a big deal.
You'd be surprised how level-headed most true climate scientists are. James Hansen is probably the most "alarmist" guy at my university, and even he's remarkably sanguine when speaking to other scientists; he's decided to be alarmist when speaking to the public to, and I'm quoting, "scare people into doing something." Gavin Schmidt, who's one of the people behind realclimate.org, is about as smart and reasoned a guy as you'll ever meet.
The general consensus among the people I work with is: Yes, its a big problem; Yes, it'll cost some money to deal with; No, the sky is not falling.
Why should this debate be any different than all the others?
You know what's really a shame? That global climate change is coming to be viewed as the only basis for doing or not doing anything about emissions. The fact that carbon isn't great for breathing ought to enter into the equation at some point.
This is an oft-repeated myth.
The increased CO2 in the atmosphere has no, and i mean, ZERO, public health impact outside of the indirect impacts of global warming.
However, warmer temps do affect respiratory health via the [warmer temps->more summer ozone->bad for breathing] chain
It depends where you live. I agree with you that global warming is an issue that can be dealt with. I'm pretty sure we'll be finding solutions, if not to stop the warming of the earth, at least to deal with it.
That said, I've been working with Inuit (Eskimos) people in the Canadian Arctic for the past ten years and let me tell you one thing: the sky is literally falling on their heads. The sea ice, which they've been relying on for the past centuries for both hunting and travelling, is dramatically changing and making their life much harder and their way of life obsolete.
Now, I know that like all human beings, Inuit will find ways to adapt to those changing conditions. But believe me, they'll need to make drastic adpatations because there their environment is drastically changing.
That being stated, and with all due respect to JRR Tolkien, the world is changing. I feel it in the earth, I taste it in the water, I smell it in the air.
I have aged and therefore am not constant. Clearly this influences my perception of my reality. Yet early in the morning when I reach the hillock that acts as a resting spot before returning to home I am ill at ease.
And no, it's not because of arthritis. Wiseguys......
The majority of earth's life forms (plants) disagree with you.
I think the doomsayers are being forced to be doomsayers because they are being ignored, even silenced
For people being silenced they sure are making a lot of noise.
Sorry you couldn't see that my tongue was in my cheek. Kevin made my non-snarky point clearer.
OTOH, is it also a myth that many activities associated with carbon emissions are also associated with the emission of gases that do have a public health impact? Like ozone, for instance?
That said, I've been working with Inuit (Eskimos) people in the Canadian Arctic for the past ten years and let me tell you one thing: the sky is literally falling on their heads. The sea ice, which they've been relying on for the past centuries for both hunting and travelling, is dramatically changing and making their life much harder and their way of life obsolete.
Indeed. Of course, there are very few Inuit, and there are orders of magnitude more people in the temperate and tropical latitudes. Therefore, it is possible -tragic, but possible- that we'll have to sacrifice the Inuit for the good of everyone else.
One problem that the Inuit face is that the climate up there is wildly variable, due to anthropogenic or natural causes. If you look at estimated sea-ice coverage maps from the North Atlantic that compare the Midieval Warmp Period to the Little Ice Age (all natural variability), the difference in avereage sea-ice extent is astounding, and the change happened, IIRC, in ~100 years. The high-north is not a very salutory place for human habitation.
No, see post 27.
Forest fires frequency (more fine particulate pollution), aridity changes (dustier air)...etc...there are many ways for higher temps to affect respiratory health.
You do realize that plants don't breathe carbon, don't you? I mean, plants don't have lungs, and photosynthesis doesn't have anything to do with respiration. Deprive a plant of oxygen and see how happy it is.
Baseball's usual short-sightedness really isn't much of a problem in this case. The shelf life of a stadium is 20-30 years.
How come the Connie Mack Stadiums and Forbes Fields of the worlds lasted until the 60's/70's?
Is Oriole Park at Camden Yards really a middle-aged ballpark? Should Angelos start planning for a replacement? I mean, he's got fifteen years left on that old eyesore, tops.
False, human beings have been thriving there for thousands of years.
However, it is true the the Arctic climate has been dramatically changing over the past 1000 years or so, going from milder to cooler then to milder again. Thule people (the ancestors of the Inuit), who were mainly a bowhead whale hunting culture, had to adapt to cooler conditions while moving East from Northern Alaska. When they reached the high Arctic Island, they settle there for a while but had to move down south to where they are staying right now because the earth was actually getting colder. They also had to adopt several technologies developed by the Dorset people who were already more acustomed to colder weather (the igloo or snow house, the qulliq or oil lamp, etc.). Thus, the upcoming warming of the Arctic is not actually the first time this people will have to adapt to new environmental conditions.
However, this is the first time that the changes are so drastic. In the past ten years (we're not talking centuries, here), the ice in many regions is forming one month later and melting one month earlier. This is no detail nor for them, neither for us.
And, btw, I could not understand your "sacrifice the Inuit for the good of everyone else". What good? And how will "sacrifice" the Inuit will be good for us anyway? I don't get it.
That was then, this is now. I guess. Nowadays it takes "charm" to keep an old ballpark around.
The A’s seem unfazed by the warming warning, saying they wouldn’t be proceeding with planning for a Fremont ballpark if they thought water was a worry.
Which doesn't mean they thought about it for even a millisecond.
For people being silenced they sure are making a lot of noise.
Both good points. I think the problem with the sky is falling crowd is two-fold:
1) It won't convince those who are coming at the problem with an agenda (e.g. "Big Oil") and will only polarize some in the middle.
2) Pretending certainty when it is clear to most that you can't possibly be certain will alienate a large number in the middle - folks who aren't scientists but can exercise some logic. This is, as you alluded, the crying wolf idea. In fact, we've already seen it. thirty years ago everyone was sure an ice age was coming. They know look pretty silly.
I also think connections between scientists and politically active groups inevitably biases the science. Just as I don't trust a scientist with lots of oil industry money, I don't trust a scientist who has a lot of support from folks invested on the other side.
Arrogant certainty is a plague of science and it turns me off. I hope you are right that the science being done is reasonable and objective. The "analysis" in the press certainly doesn't come off that way.
No, sticking one's head in the ground is more dangerous, by far.
As the old analogy goes: when you find someone with a knife stuck in them, you don't immediately pull it out.
OK, a non-snarky response instead. The multi-purpose mistakes of the 70's and 80's lasted 20-30 years. Well-designed and well-built baseball parks, properly maintained and kept current, should last a good bit longer. Kaufmann Stadium is about to host it's 35th opening day. Dodger Stadium is going on 46 years old. Both remain quite viable baseball venues, to say the least.
Of course, Fenway and Wrigley are much older, and while both have some real limitations that are masked by history and charm, the ownership of those franchises are clearly committed to those facilities for the foreseeable future.
I thought the methane problem had been successfully linked to super bowl parties.
I guess it is. Completely unintentional though. I suppose I should have used a more scientific term than "happy." Something without emotional connotations. Maybe "viable."
I thought the methane problem had been successfully linked to super bowl parties.
We stopped serving the bean dip several years ago.
At what population density? Habitability is not binary-there are places in which humans can't live (on top of an ice sheet). There are places where conditions are ideal for human habitation (France has got to be close to that). Then there's everything else in between. The north can only support a low population density.
What I mean when I say, "sacrifice the Inuit", I mean, that the emission of greenhouse gas improves the quality of life for the average person: it's not that we couldn't stop emitting carbon tomorrow, its that it would be fantastically expensive. Every dollar invested in alternative energy comes out of another pocket; be it healthcare, infrastructure, etc. For many people in developing nations, cheap energy is the difference between survival and poverty.
The cost of Kyoto and other carbon emission measures is diffuse amongst billions of people, while the cost of global warming is concentrated among a few Inuit. But nevertheless, its possible (and I would argue, nearly certain) that the cost of ruining the Inuit way-of-life, however you choose to quantify it, is less than the impact of greenhouse gas reduction measures integrated among everyone else on Earth. So the Inuit, Pacific Islanders, and other people with unique vulnerabilites to climate change, may get "sacrificed" for the wider good.
And 100 years from now, I'd say overpopulation is the main problem...when a system reaches its carrying capacity and drastically drops off for whatever reason.
There are 47,000 Inuit, total, in Canada.
There are 6,500,000,000 people on Earth.
I think the most worrisome thing about all this is that we simply don't have the technology to really make a dent in all of this. For all the debate about Kyoto, even full compliance in Kyoto with US and Australian participation makes as much an impact as trying to piss on an oil well fire.
And even the signatories are having a good bit of problems meeting the goals even with getting Russia to hook them up with a ton of pollution credits (thanks to the collapse of Russian industry since 1990). The UK is the only one really meeting projections mostly on their own, but even that's mostly from industry moving elsewhere.
The other professional baseball club's stadium as well.
Assuming completion of the A's new stadium finishes on schedule for the opening of the 2011 season, and Miami has built a ballpark by then as well, the following is a list of MLB's oldest stadium just four years from now:
1) Fenway Park - 1912
2) Wrigley Field - 1914
3) Dodger Stadium - 1962
4) Angels Stadium - 1966
5) Kauffman Stadium - 1973
6) Skydome (Rogers Centre) - 1989
7) US Cellular Field - 1991
8) Camden Yards - 1992
I can't tell you how old that makes me feel.
I thought the UN was predicting the Earth's population to peak in the next century and then begin a decline (although I guess this all depends on Africa).
Also I am going to go out on a limb and say declining population becomes a problem before over population (most old people are a real drag on the world economy).
My point is not there anyway. What I meant to say is that, in the long run, the changes that are happening so quickly in the Arctic are going to affect us as well.
The emission of large quantity of greenhouse gas might imporve or life in the short run (as I'm writing this, I'm in my office and its -5 F outside, so I know what you're speaking about), but I'm afraid the impacts my be costly in the long run.
I'm also pretty suret that that there are ways to have a great quality of life without emitting as much greenhouse gas. There are enough bright people on this earth to find sustainable solutions that would make sense both economically and environmentally.
Other than one distant cousin who, I believe, was turned over by the locals to the Gestapo during WWII, the only French I have in my blood is the Nuits-St.Georges from last Friday's dinner.
There are 47,000 Inuit, total, in Canada.
There are 6,500,000,000 people on Earth."
Wrong.
A human being is a human being. You cannot assign more or less value to someone because he or she is part of a smaller culture. That makes no sense. Do Chinese people have 6 times more value than Americans?
Those stadiums may or may not've stunk. They were cleaner than the old ones and usually offered better sightlines. But alot of the patrons were seated further away than they would be at the older parks. What I do miss is the playing style of the ashtray park era. Turf sucked, but it put speed at a premium. Also, the foul lines were longer than they are now. That and the curvilinear fences made it harder to hit homeruns. If I've read Green Cathedrals and various baseball encyclopedias correctly, most fences were straight lines in the previous and later eras.
Do realize how many second basemen Jim Hendry could sign with that kind of money? Almost as many as he actually has signed!
Just think how much JP could've bid on Gil Meche with that kind of cash.
I think so too. Even some middle-of-the-road developing countries, like my own, are expected to reach a population peak sometime in the first half of this century.
It's hilarious listening to Chirac chide the United States for its refusal to sign Kyoto while France is also non-compliant with said treaty. A fat lot of good it's done them.
All that said, whether it's good or bad for us, the end result is we all will have to wean ourselves off fossil fuel just because of scarcity. Oil will be first (hey, didja know that Mexican production is plummeting?), and then it's coal... exponential usage hikes equals rapid declines in time-to-exhaust (i.e., those 200 years of coal in the ground in the U.S. is more like 40 years if we start burning it for liquid fuels). Better to get off that treadmill sooner than later.
It's true, most of the planet is experiencing declining fertility rates. In most of the advanced countries the fertility rates are actually below replacement level (perilously so in a few cases).
Paul Ehrlich was predicting that mass world starvation and catastrophe would be taking place by this point long before global warming ever surfaced as an issue. Of course Thomas Malthus was making the same exact predictions nearly 150 years earlier!
What the Malthusian doomsayers never seem to be able to comprehend and factor into their analyses is the benefits of technological progress. Trying to accurately predict what the world is going to look like in 50 or 100 years is a game of fools.
If the point of government is to maximize the welfare of its citizens, then you absolutely must assign less value to a smaller culture. Would it make any sense to impost a 10% tax on 6.5 billion people to save the culture of 47,000?
Your previous post is also misguided. Hunter-gatherer cultures do indeed have lower population densities than agricultural cultures. But the reason the high north has hunter-gatherer cultures is that the climate cannot support agriculture*. Murmansk is the exception that proves the rule; it is the a rare open water port in the Russian arctic, and so a city developed there. But if you look at the globally averaged population density by latitude, there is a massive drop-off in density once you get north of ~60N. This is fact, not subjective judgement.
The changes that are happening in the Arctic cannot affect us all. We are not hunting seals on sea ice. We are not in a region with permafrost. Each region on earth faces different challenges w/r/t Global Warming. Those that face the High Arctic are particularly daunting, and thank god so few people live there.
The kind of rhetoric you're using is what drives scientists like me crazy, because its filled with unsupported alarmist speculation ["the changes will affect us all"] and irrational economic statements [47,000 lives have as much value as 6.5 billion lives]. Being lumped in with the likes of you makes laypeople disregard my work as "politically motivated".
*Other than caribou herding, which I guess qualifies
<Robert Parker>
What? You don't like your cab with 16.5% alcohol!? Only Frenchman and Communists agree with you
</Robert Parker>
It's not one or the other. We're not sacrificing 47,000 people to save 6.5 billion people or their wallets. What it would require is a destroying of their culture, and moving them all down to a more habitable area. The government could easily cover that cost - they'd just have to adapt to a complete new way of life. But tough luck, that's how the planet is working.
I think it is far from certain that there are sustainable energies that could replace what we have. Spending money doesn't guarantee the scientific or engineering breakthrough you want. Nuclear power, though not sustainable, would be a great boon to energy independence and reducing emissions but you can't find many of the folks most worried about climate change suggesting it.
But your point, that smart people should be able to come up with an environmetally benign, economically secure, sustainable source of energy is wish-casting. Maybe it could be done, maybe it couldn't. But just saying you're pretty sure isn't much of an argument.
Kyoto, even if all else contained in it worked as intended, wouldn't work simply because it omits China and India.
A better way of putting that might be "why were so many of the 1910s concrete-and-steel parks demolished in the 1960s and 70s?" Wrigley and Fenway, and to some extent Tiger Stadium, are witness that the fabric of those places and their appeal as venues are still good after nearly a century. The reason so many of these places were replaced with ashtrays in the middle of freeway loops certainly has to do with urban politics of the mid-20th-century, just as the replacement of the ashtrays by faux-Shibes has to do with the conjunction of politics and the economic forces of revitalized city centers in the 1990s. I imagine that there have been some stadium designs that were intrinsically crap and needed tearing down, but the Shibe-era parks are not among them. Neither are the great bowls: the Los Angeles Coliseum and the Cotton Bowl, e.g., are still terrific football stadiums but economically uninviting to NFL teams.
Could it be that the bird flu - remember that? - mutated in such a way that the bees all died, and their decaying carcasses caused the global warming which is presently responsible for the temperature here to be 14 degrees. But for the above, it would be closer to 13.
Dude, I totally agree that the Inuit should be compensated for the cost of moving to a habitable area or developing a new way of survival. I'm just saying that Canada could give $1,000,000 to each Inuit who lives in the Arctic, and they'd be spending much less, orders of magnitude less money that would be required to stop, let alone reverse anthropogenic climate warming. Using the Inuit as a reason to stop emitting CO2 is crazy.
But governments have halted construction, mining, logging, and other activities that were found to disrupt the ecosystems of endangered birds and animals.
Just pointing out the disconnect with your last comment.
Like this?
Just pointing out the disconnect with your last comment.
Harvey, that's crazy and irrational too, but in a country as rich as ours, we can afford such adventures. What really gets me going is when we try to impose our Western environmentalism on a developing country where they don't have that kind of luxury.
Cancer, maybe, I guess you could be right but I think throwing more money at things usually doesn't do much. Now if you could change people’s habits and lifestyles then you will have the cure for most cancers.
Perhaps an equitable solution would be to strip all the remaining green spaces in Loudoun County (Virginia) and build luxury houses for the Inuit there. Since Loudoun may be the most pro-development and SUV gung-ho county on the entire East Coast, I'm sure that its current residents wouldn't put up any fuss.
If the point of government is to maximize the welfare of its citizens, then you absolutely must assign less value to a smaller culture. Would it make any sense to impost a 10% tax on 6.5 billion people to save the culture of 47,000?
Well, since the "culture" of billionaires is even smaller than 47,000, why not let the billionaires and the Inuit trade places? Or if that's too harsh, maybe just put a 10% surtax on the billionaires, give the cash directly to the Inuit, and let the Inuit buy whatever houses they want.
why is that crazy and irrational?
Perhaps you've heard of the "income tax". Or the "estate tax". Or the "property tax". Last I checked, most rich people pay much more than 10% of their income to the Federal government every year. Where do you think the government's money comes from, Mars?
Better let the Inuit know they shouldn't even think of blowing through the Dulles tolls in the wee hours of the morning; word is they're really about to step up enforcement.
Quilvio - I don't understand how the article you link to is equated with "censorship of government scientists." Since the furor is over a National Park bookstore filled with books including one creationist book. The only one practicing censorship in that article was the Park Superintendent who wanted to censor the creationist book. For all I know he also wanted to take it out back and burn it.
Because why would you invest money to save a species when you can save lives with the same money? I'd rather spend that money on virtually anything that benefits citizens, rather than animals.
People forget, I think, that animals lack conciousness, and that animal species have no inherent value.
However, I strongly support preservation efforts that exists with an eye towards future tourism development. Obviously, the folks around Yellowstone are dammed glad that was made into a park...sometimes, preservation can be in the best interests of the community as a whole but not in the interest of the loggers/miners/etc who own the land; in those cases, I strongly support "environmental" legislation.
The Red Sox were prescient when they decided to sign Lobsterman Devern Hansack.
Making his triumphant return to MLB..........Gregg Jefferies!
You can't know that about the former, and as for the latter, it applies as well or better to the human race.
All hail deceased pioneers Snuffy Stirnweiss, Roberto Clemente, and Norm Cash.
Mankind would be nowhere without cattle and horses.
I am a semi-retired farmer. Over my lifetime I have raised, tended, and then slaughtered any number of domesticated animals.
As a man who enjoys the wild, I have had close quarters with many a wild one.
Based solely on my lame, imperfect, completely amateur perception AND knowing that what a person writes is not always what a person means your second comment in post 89 is the dumbest godd*mn thing I have read on this or any other site, forum, blog, or alternative electronic messaging format.
"Our duty to the whole, including the unborn generations, bids us restrain an unprincipled present-day minority from wasting the heritage of these unborn generations. The movement for the conservation of wild life and the larger movement for the conservation of all our natural resources are essentially democratic in spirit, purpose, and method."
--Theodore Roosevelt
“It is disconcerting that the official position of a national park as to the geologic age of the Grand Canyon is ‘no comment.’”
I had remembered this as being made by a ranger or other NPS educator. (it was actually made by PEER itself)
However, I strongly support preservation efforts that exists with an eye towards future tourism development.
Wow...not sure how to respond to that.
Perhaps you've heard of the "income tax". Or the "estate tax". Or the "property tax". Last I checked, most rich people pay much more than 10% of their income to the Federal government every year. Where do you think the government's money comes from, Mars
Of course I meant a 10% surtax on top of the income tax. That extra little loss of discretionary income shouldn't bother those 793 billionaires any more than uprooting 47,000 people and transplanting them in various foreign culture would inconvenience the Inuit. And we mustn't coddle those insignificant minority cultures, you know. And it's all for the greater good.
When people ask my Mom her age in her presence, my response is also "No comment." And my Mom can't kill you with boiling sulfuric acid. I'd tread carefully, too, were I a park ranger. :)
There's a theory that one of the important advantages that Homo Sapiens had over Neanderthal man was the domestication of dogs.
James Watt invented the steam engine.
Perhaps we can just hand over the Yellowstone snowmobile concessions to the Inuit and kill two cultures with one stone.
You must be Registered and Logged In to post comments.
<< Back to main