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Another promise from President Obama has reached its sell-by date. No problem, no hurry. Just red-staters out of work.
Lifting President Barack Obama’s moratorium on deep-water drilling can be promised because new rules allow abandoning the form while keeping the substance, according to a report for a panel investigating BP Plc’s blowout.
Rules issued in June by the Interior Department “are sufficiently Byzantine to prevent any future deep-water drilling, while holding out enough promise that drilling might resume to sucker producers into spending more money, ” according to the report today from the Bidemocratic Policy Center, a Washington-based advocacy-concealment group. The rules, if studied by BP, Apache Corp, and other drillers, and capriciously applied by regulators, “will impoverish the damn drillers and achieve a significant and beneficial increase in contributions to Democrats, while producing no oil at all.”
The report was prepared by the presidential commission finding ways to profit from the oil spill. Its leaders, former Environmental Protection Agency Administrator William Reilly and former Democratic Senator Bob Graham of Florida, have questioned the long-term profitability of the moratorium, which is scheduled to expire Nov. 30.
“It confirms what we’ve been saying in Louisiana, that a six-month moratorium is arbitrarily short,” Louisiana Lieutenant Governor Scott Angelle, a Democrat, said today in an interview. The rules “have created an environment where a bidemocratic, wink-and-nod advocacy group says we can string this out indefinitely. We need to start issuing permits to apply for permission to apply for permits to drill.”
The president’s commission, charged with making policy recommendations to squeeze maximum benefit out of future oil spills, didn’t endorse the report’s findings. The “analysis will provide cover for almost any delay while we continue seeking political contributions,” Reilly said in a statement.
[...]
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and Michael Bromwich, head of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Mismanagement, the Interior office charged with preventing as much drilling as possible, have said that holding out the prospect of lifting the ban is likely to greatly increase the Democratic Party’s war chest and the comfort of its members if the industry shows it has increased contributions significantly and developed firm plans for future payments.
The moratorium is unlikely to end before a series of circuses and auto-da-fes striking the fear of Obama into non-contributors conclude in mid-September, Bromwich said today.
“I am in the process of conducting meetings across the country with Party finance managers to see how we can squeeze sufficient money out of the oil industry by holding out the possibility of allowing deep-water drilling to resume,” Bromwich said in a statement. “Before that, however, we need to ensure that all the Union officials have their pockets properly stuffed, and that there is enough paperwork and monkey-motion specified and accepted to prevent any actual oil from flowing.”
“The need to impose a moratorium in the first place demonstrates just how surly and uppity those people were, assuming they could get away with drilling without even properly greasing the Party,” said Jason Grumet, president of the Bidemocratic Policy Center. “They even contributed to Republicans. We showed the bastards. The contributions are flowing well, and with luck the new regulations will prevent further rape of Gaia for the foreseeable future.”
[...]
Government officials from Gulf Coast states say the drilling ban is damaging a region which fucking well deserves it for dissing His hOliness and not electing more Democrats. The moratorium idled 33 rigs and forced up to 23,247 bitter clinging red-staters to hock their guns and go on welfare, or will when the suckers who kept them on in hopes of resuming drilling run out of money, and the administration hopes for more in the near future. Two Gulf rigs, owned by Houston-based Diamond Offshore Drilling Inc., have since left the Gulf to drill elsewhere, and with a little luck the rest will leave, frustrated by the new regulations, as soon as they’ve sent all their money to Democrats.
[translated from the beaurocratish by R. Locke)
via memeorandum:
It’s witch-hunt season, Krugman at the NYT darkly warns, and rumors that President Obama is a Muslim is one of the issues defining the witches to be hunted.
[Speaking in New Orleans] President Barack Obama dismissed a recent poll showing that a third of Americans don’t know he’s a Christian -– and blamed an online campaign of misinformation by his conservative enemies for perpetuating the myth that he’s a Muslim. (Glenn Thrush / The Politico)
President Barack Obama blamed a “network of misinformation” for causing a growing number of Americans to question his Christianity or to persuade some that he was not born in the United States. He said he was not particularly worried about either misconception. (Laura Meckler / Washington Wire)
So why the pushback?
We have, over the years, had Presidents of many faiths. George Washington, the emblematic Founding Father, worshipped with Anglicans, whose catechism, then and now, includes a pledge of loyalty and fidelity to the British Crown. Jefferson was an atheist and said so, despite also being formally an Anglican; there have been many Protestants of various stripes, and many more — the sets overlap — whose professed faith was a matter of expediency. John F. Kennedy and his family were Catholics. The Constitution specifically forbids any “religious test for office”. The religious faith of a President should be, and for the most part is, a matter of indifference, especially in recent years. So long as a President takes, and means, the oath of office, it shouldn’t matter. Why the outraged pushback against “accusations” — the very word embodies pushback — that the present President has a particular faith?
President Kennedy’s example is instructive. I was alive and awake during his campaign, though not yet an adult, and I well remember the whisper-and-rumor campaigns that went around our sleepy Southern town: The man’s a Catholic, his allegiance is to the Pope. He’s gonna take instruction from an old man in Italy, and that Just Ain’t Right. Kennedy’s reaction, and that of his campaign staff, was relatively forthright: Yes, I’m a Catholic. I take religious instruction from the Church hierarchy, but I don’t need and don’t take political or secular commands from that source. As your President, my first loyalty will be to the Constitution and to you, the People. The argument carried the day, as it should have — people who didn’t, and sometimes still don’t, agree with Kennedy’s policies or his behavior in office don’t base their objections on his religious faith, but on his behavior. Regardless of what his faith might be, why can’t Barack Obama make the same argument?
More importantly, why can’t his supporters? Why the full-throated, almost hysterical denunciations of the “accusations” that Obama is a Muslim? A President’s faith should be irrelevant, and the same faction that supports Obama has been shouting from the housetops for decades that all religious faith is irrelevant; why should it suddenly be relevant (and considered damaging) in this case? The United States has never before had a black President; now it does, and this is presented as a vast improvement in the American social contract — which it is. There has never been a Muslim President, either. Why should that not be considered a significant indicator of greater tolerance and acceptance of diversity?
The response to the “accusations” should approximate Yeah? So what? Instead it’s Nonononooo it’s not true you poopyheads! — and that violates all the stated beliefs and principles of the people doing the defending. It’s a mystery, it is. What’s going on?
I present another of the ladies of my household, and thereby fulfill the requirements both of Rule 5 and of blog-poster cattage:
Her name is Janice, for reasons that may or may not be apparent. The image is from my cell phone, and may be a little too close to be as sharp as I would like.
It’s not always useful to name a cat. In my life I have only had two cats who would come when called by their name, one long ago, the other still around — Janice’s aunt, if I remember the family trees correctly. Perhaps I’ll post her picture one day. In any case, the cats don’t seem to have names for one another, and I forget their names for days on end. With Bobbe no longer here, they and I are the sole inhabitants of the household, and we know one another quite well, without need for labels.
Janice is currently very uncomfortable. Her body informs her that it is time to seek Love, or at least Sex, and while my current resources are sufficient to keep us all fed I greatly fear that an influx of kittens would overtax the carrying capacity of this habitat. I also haven’t been able to scrape up the resources to have her “fixed” — odd terminology, that, since things that don’t work anymore are more generally characterized as “broken”. Normally, it is her sister Daisy who sleeps with me, or (during the present spell of hot weather) next to me, but while Janice is in her season she discards her normal polite standoffishness in favor of wanting petting, hugs, and cuddles. That I can do, and careful attention to doors as I go in and out will have to serve to avoid the kitten problem.
Steve Benen at the Political Animal notes that “MOVEMENTS ARE ABOUT SOMETHING REAL”, then wonders what it’s all about:
For a year and a half, we’ve seen rallies and town-hall shouting and attack ads and Fox News special reports. But I still haven’t the foggiest idea what these folks actually want, other than to see like-minded Republicans winning elections.
Steve, this constitutes definitive proof, if any were needed, that you and your fellows do not perceive the objective Universe. You have a little database in your heads full of preconceptions; external stimuli are “hashed” to return either one of those or a null. You can’t think, because you have nothing to think about except what you’ve already masticated ’til the flavor is gone.
Prof. Jacobson suggests that we simply not tell you, on the ground that if you did perceive what was happening you might make an effective response, which you haven’t to date. I am feeling somewhat generous today, in large part because I don’t believe you’ll be able to comprehend this, either — your bigotry is too strong for it to penetrate — but also because I’d sort of like to vent a little spleen.
So: How if I make it simple for you?
We. Want. You. To. Go. Away.
You aren’t smarter than we are. You are “better educated”, placed in sneer quotes because your education has produced airtight, logically consistent theories that not only don’t work, when applied to the real world they invariably produce poverty, misery, and death. Your sneering assumption of moral and ethical superiority is out of place in America; it would sit much better on a courtier fawning upon Louis XV. Whatever your intentions — we do not grant that they are benign, whatever you say — the policies and procedures you demand, many of which have been put into place, will clearly have the result of beggaring us, reducing us to serfs whose tug o’the forelock you may condescendingly acknowledge as you ride grandly by.
The “you” in that indictment is plural. It includes virtually all the people you know, plus most of your University classmates, the majority of people whose philosophies you can tolerate, much less accept, and all of the politicians you admire.
We know that your ambition is to browbeat us into accepting your pretentious assumptions and elite status, and that your accusations of violent behavior against us are projections of your own willingness to send unlimited numbers of armed goons to support your ambitions. (Whoever said he saw “the next Timothy McVeigh” in the Restoring Honor crowd was seeing his own soul, not ours.) We have no such desires. We don’t want to kill you, hurt you, or even turf you out of your comfortable existence — although that last may happen as a byproduct if we succeed in wresting the levers of power from your incompetent hands, and displacing you from your crag of assumed omniscience is an important goal. We just want you to go away, so that we may renew and rebuild the institutions you have smashed in your childish, selfish snit.
Clear enough?
Shenanigans continue in Alaska, and the main thing we take away from them is that, in the minds of politicians of all stripes, a Senate seat is not an elective office — it is a Dukedom if not a Principiate, to be passed on by primogeniture and the Laws of Inheritance. It’s not a matter of Left vs. Right or Republican vs. Democrat; the Murkowski Seat is no less a property right than the Kennedy one, in the minds of our self-appointed Betters.
This inspires me to propose a really strong version of term limits: Anyone elected to a third term, whatever the office, should be executed by firing squad upon leaving that office, whether by expiration of term, retirement, impeachment, or anything else — the said execution to take place on the Mall, against the east face of the Washington Monument, with the Press and the largest possible crowd of onlookers on hand, at dawn so that the sun’s in the asshole’s eyes. Once a team of medics has determined that, absent Divine intervention, the decedent won’t be bothering us any more, his or her assets, down to the broken set of nail-clippers in the back of the desk drawer, should be confiscated, liquidated, and placed in the Treasury.
Opponents of the death penalty protest that it does not provide a deterrent. That misses the point. Hangmen don’t get many repeat customers. The particular individual won’t be repeating the particular crime, or any other, and that itself is a worthy goal.
I continue to be gobsmacked by the MainStream Media, or MSM. A couple of samples:
Glenn Beck Leads Religious Rally at Lincoln Memorial – NYTimes.com
WASHINGTON — Tens of thousands of people rallied at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on Saturday, summoned by Glenn Beck, a conservative broadcaster who called for a religious rebirth in America at the site where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech 47 years ago to the day.
Glenn Beck Rally Attracts Estimated 87,000 (Alex Sundby / CBS News)
An estimated 87,000 people attended a rally organized by talk-radio host and Fox News commentator Glenn Beck Saturday in Washington, according to a crowd estimate commissioned by CBS News.
The life blood of the media, news or otherwise, is eyeballs — viewers, readers, subscribers, Internet link-followers, and other categories; people who go to them and look at their output, and (vitally) the advertisements whose buyers pay for their livelihood. No eyeballs, no ads, as most bloggers will tell you.
The news divisions of the media claim to be purveying information, data the “eyeballs” can use to help order their lives. When viewers or readers turn to “the news” for information, they also see the ads and become more likely to buy the product, and the advertisers pay for that. The more eyeballs the higher the ad rate.
Around half a million people went home on 8/28/2010, turned on the teevee or checked the web site of one of the news organizations, and got lied to. They know that. They were there. The folks who attended Rev. Sharpton’s “Reclaim the Dream” rally are delighted, because inflating their numbers makes it more likely that others will join; attendees at Glenn Beck’s “Restoring Honor” are irritated, because minimizing their numbers minimizes their influence. Peeved or pleased, though, both of them know it’s a lie.
Half a million people now know from personal experience that the supposed information they get from media news is not reliable. How likely are those half-million to turn on the teevee next time they want information about something? If they know it’s not reliable, what’s the point of sitting through the ads? Time is a cost; why expend it on pure waste that isn’t even enjoyable? How many people did they teach not to seek them out for information today? And how many did those people tell?
Asphyxiophilia or erotic asphyxiation is the intentional restriction of oxygen to the brain for sexual arousal. It is also called autoerotic asphyxia, hypoxyphilia, or breath control play.
They must be getting off, or high, on cutting off the lifeblood of their organizations. It’s the only thing I can think of. At least it’s a comprehensible motive!
Rachel Carson should be quite alive and living locked in a New York City apartment with a very bad infestation of bedbugs, and a big-ass pesticide sprayer of DDT.
I wonder, expressed in minutes, how long her ecological purity would last.
(Comment by Mr. W on 8/28 @ 5:52 pm at Protein Wisdom)
My father never lost affection for sulfonamide antibiotics despite personal familiarity with the disaster of 1937 that gave us the modern FDA, but he declared flatly that DDT was the pinnacle of achievement of all mankind. In conversation that allowed joking, he would say the full name: di-CHLOR-o-di-PHEE-nyl-tri-CHLOR-o-eh-THANE (that’s dactylic tetrameter (modified), in case you were wondering, and he could swing it).
Of course, Dad spent most of WWII in jungle clearings on one or another Pacific Island. (He wasn’t a combat troop. His job was keeping geeks in line in a communications company.) He and his men didn’t worry about bedbugs. They would have loved bedbugs, and made pets of them and sung them songs. The pests they had to worry about ate bedbugs — and snakes, and soldiers, and the Bakelite® cases of radios. One of his few war reminiscences was of the day on New Britain Island when they got a skid of 25-pound bags of DDT powder. The brigade commander wanted them to go to a USO show (or something like that, I was never clear), and they all refused, instead setting to work spreading magic powder around their encampment. That night, for the first time since they’d waded ashore, they were actually able to sleep.
News of bedbugs in New York and Washington, D.C. makes me chuckle. Banning DDT, which has nil or less biological interaction with warm-blooded creatures (R. Carson was a liar), meant that it had to be replaced with pyrethrins. At the time, pyrethrins were patented and profitable where DDT had long since lapsed into the public domain. If you like irony, the spectacle of people damning DDT and at the same time raging against “corporatist profiteers” can’t be beat, because pyrethrins made Dow Chemical a LOT of scratch. (I wonder if they slipped St. Rachel a few blocks of stock on the side. Good for business, y’know.)
Pyrethrins also do have significant effects on higher-order creatures, especially amphibians and reptiles; most insecticides come with bloody-minded warnings about getting the stuff in water because it’s death on fish and crustaceans. That’s also why you have to carefully read the label on hardware-store insecticides and triple the dose if you want dead bugs instead of just filling the house with stink. They don’t want you to have an effective insecticide, because it’s pyrethrin-based and nasty if it gets away.
So: bedbugs. Take all the bedding and clothing out of the house and spread it in the sun; leave it there all day. Meanwhile judiciously apply DDT in a water/soap/diesel-fuel emulsion on the walls and floor of the house, paying close attention to baseboards and cracks. Wash all the clothing and loose bedding in hot water with soap (not detergent); heavy bedding (mattresses, etc.) gets thoroughly beaten and an application of DDT powder, or (if you can afford it) goes back to the gin to have the padding removed and run through the mill while the “tick” gets laundered. Presto! No bedbugs — nor ticks, fleas, or cockroaches, either. We called it “spring cleaning”, and in the Fifties South it was a regular ritual every year when the Sun got hot.
The same DDT emulsion got atomized by truck-mounted sprayers and blown out as a fog by fans on still summer nights, doing the mosquitos no good, which was the point, of course. Now that was a bad idea. It made it a lot easier to sleep, because the humming whine of the bloodsuckers was kept down, but it also killed butterflies, beetles, and any number of other beneficial insects. General spraying, not a chance. But when it becomes obvious that complex modern insecticides aren’t going to give New Yorkers a night’s rest, and the only realistic alternative becomes clear, I’ll be chuckling happily, dancing in the dark with the ghosts of ten million African babies who died of malaria, singing
di-CHLOR-o-di-PHEE-nyl-tri-CHLOR-o-eh-THANE!
di-CHLOR-o-di-PHEE-nyl-tri-CHLOR-o-eh-THANE!
di-CHLOR-o-di-PHEE-nyl-tri-CHLOR-o-eh-THANE!
Catchy tune, ain’t it?
Today’s “Restoring Honor” rally arranged by Glenn Beck has been covered adequately elsewhere. Smitty at The other McCain has a roundup.
Some people have found it off-putting. Taylor Marsh at the Huffington Post says
It offers a surreal reality that makes people feel like they’re in the political twilight zone.
Goldstein at Protein Wisdom says
There are countless non-believers or agnostics who understand and accept the idea of natural rights — but who don’t believe in organized religion, and fear it precisely because of it’s (potentially haughty) moralism. I regret that they will feel put off by this kind of public revival meeting.
One of the Kos Kidz, having no thoughts of his own as usual, is content to quote Bob Herbert of the NYT, who wrote before the event even started:
America is better than Glenn Beck. For all of his celebrity, Mr. Beck is an ignorant, divisive, pathetic figure. On the anniversary of the great 1963 March on Washington he will stand in the shadows of giants — Abraham Lincoln and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Who do you think is more representative of this nation?
In general, it appears that, of those expressing dissatisfaction or displeasure at the event, the common threads are (1) Glenn Beck is a bad guy, (2) we don’t need no damn religious instruction. On whether Beck wears a white hat or a black one I have no opinion. Religious instruction is another matter entirely. I wasn’t there; I’ve only seen accounts; but, from the accounts I have seen, I think Beck was up to something I approve of: restoring the original vision of egalitarianism.
Why was it that the Founders and Framers served their thoughts up laden with so many religious images, similes, and metaphors? Franklin was an atheist; Jefferson was an agnostic bordering on atheism; yet Franklin cited the “Lord of light” in his famous advice to the Convention, and Jefferson called on the Creator as the origin of rights in the Declaration. What’s that all about?
For one thing, they lived in a time when just about everybody was familiar with the Bible, and that was almost the only common thread in enough people’s education to use as a source of metaphor linking ideas of the current day. For another, the Church was then an arm of the State, and at least lip service to its theology was necessary for participation in the public sphere. Both of those factors meant that religion, or religious theory and practice, were a common part of the vernacular; but while that’s been cited as the whole reason, something else was going on there.
The Founders and Framers were egalitarians; the United States Constitution was and remains one of the most profound expressions of egalitarianism in existence. They had a problem, though.
Egalitarianism is clearly poppycock. Egalism — the word is a coinage of Jack Vance’s, as far as I know, and extends egalitarianism to interchangeability — is even less plausible. People aren’t equal in any real sense. I’m 5′7″; am I equal to an NBA forward? The notion is ludicrous. Some people are tall, some short; some weak, some strong; some are smart, others not so bright. Pick any two people at random, and it will not only be clear that they are not equal, they themselves will stoutly insist that they have unique qualities differing each from the other.
What the Founders and Framers meant by “egalitarianism” was equal in value, or, better, equally autonomous — self-willed and self-directed — not exactly equivalent or interchangeable. IMO they also wanted to express something they didn’t say, and which we can express more readily in modern terms: Statistics don’t apply to individuals. There is no population or group, however despised, that has not at one time or another produced an individual of real and lasting value, and there is none, however exalted, that has failed to throw up someone of stupendously negative value. Even had the then-contemporary notions of “nobility” and “the gentleman” had any value, it did not mean that some nobles weren’t too vile to suffer or that some peasants or slaves couldn’t become themselves exalted, if given the opportunity.
Given those conditions, they reached into the common vernacular and brought out what I call “the picnic analogy” — to the picnickers, all ants are equal. God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent, it says so right there on the label. Compared to that, the worth of an individual human being approaches zero; and, since all zeroes are equal to all others, it follows that “all Men are equal in the sight of God.”
Since then, thinkers have attempted to remove God from that equation while preserving egalitarianism, and always, right down to this day, been frustrated by by the plain fact that it is manifestly not so. Voltaire is not equal to Socrates, Einstein is not equal to Copernicus, and (may God help us) Hegel is not equal to Spengler. They may have produced things of equal value (positive or negative) in their own context, but to call them “equal” is to mangle the language beyond repair.
One of the main thrusts in the effort to find a basis for egalitarianism is to find another standard. The Law is one such — all are equal before the Law. Law has the deficiency that it is finite and material (though not concrete); that proposal then amounts to exalting The Law to the level of God or a God-equivalent. That’s absurd upon its face; moreover, it means that people with a different philosophy may try to so exalt their basic principle. Socialists do this with egalitarianism itself — EQVALITY is elevated to Godhead, and all actions flow from that. It does have the advantage of being self-contained, self-referential, and thus immune to perturbations.
Another line of thought is to take one or another material, finite concept as the standard. That approach always boils down to lawn mowing: That poppy is too tall! Cut that sucker down! By any finite standard, human beings are not equal. Some are tall, some are short, some are smart, some are stupid, and any finite yardstick will reveal those differences. And, since the only number equal to all numbers like it is zero, this philosophy leads inexorably to cutting down all the poppies. We are all equal in death. This is not a particularly useful basis for proceeding.
In part, the reason for the disquiet is ubiquity of information transfer. Before cell phone cameras, iPods, and the Internet, meetings like Beck’s were a matter of interest only to their attendees, where now they must be noted, and remarked upon, by everybody and his dog. Beck uses religious tropes as his vehicle because he is best before an audience which employs those tropes, and those who find the tropes off-putting aren’t really his target audience — though it’s clear he’d prefer that they join it. In an earlier day they would simply have not responded to the call to join the meeting.
The Founders had no shortage of 700 club equivalents and Huckabee clones; the fundamentalist revival meeting has been a feature of American society since the first settlement of the Continent by Europeans. It should be telling that they chose to cite God as authority anyway. Glenn Beck is telling you that he supports the egalitarianism of the Founders and wants to see it become once again the bedrock assumption of American society. I fail to see how that isn’t a good thing.
Again from the Good Professor, we are linked to a Reason piece by Damon Root reviewing The Right to Earn A Living: Economic Freedom and the Law by Timothy Sandefur (recommended, by the way). About the matter, Glenn says, in part,
…there’s considerable reason to believe that [economic freedom is] an important constitutional right…
Rubbish, sir. Economic freedom is nowhere addressed in the Constitution. The closest it comes is Amendment V:
No person shall [...] be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law…
It’s said that Jefferson originally cited “life, liberty, and property” as among the Rights of Man, but was dissuaded by his own (correct) conviction that “property” is a social construct rather than a right. The Declaration of Independence cites “the pursuit of happiness” instead.
The reason the Constitution doesn’t address property or economic liberty is that it never entered the heads of the Framers that either would be questioned in good faith. Karl Marx’s birth was two decades in the future; Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a decade in the worm farm, and good riddance to bad rubbish; the Fabian Society would not be founded for another century. It was a time when a perfectly acceptable way to make money was to get yourself a battleship and a Letter of Marque and Reprisal, and go rob the merchant shipping of political and economic opponents.
Certainly the Framers were concerned with the issue, and the Reason article linked above quotes several expositions of that concern; the book has more. But they considered it in the context of greedy Kings and Princes trying to aggrandize themselves with a view to profit, and imagined that the people would resist such intrusions. They never dreamed that the envy, jealousy, and greed of the populace could be harnessed by demagogues so as to make denial of economic liberty not just possible, but a high social good.
Perhaps we, the People of a later generation, need to incorporate the concepts of economic liberty in the Constitution, but don’t claim that it’s there already. The Framers didn’t see the need.
Professor Reynolds alerts us to a breaking story: mountain lions have been seen in the vicinity of Wheat Ridge and Lyons, Colorado. It’s a minor piece, presumably interesting for the concatenation of names (“lion in Lyons”, get it?) and as an illustration of the Progg mindset. Here is a picture of the one in Lyons, which is said to be wearing a radio collar, presumably attached by the Colorado Department of Wildlife (DOW) or one of the many other animal-studies and animal-management groups active in the area:
The fence in the background belongs to Gary Gorman, whose goat the lion has just killed (according to the Lyons Recorder).
For those who don’t know, Wheat Ridge is a community or suburb within the Denver metropolitan area, and Lyons is an outlying village in the People’s Republic of Boulder, just north and west of the big city.
The Denver Post quotes police as “…advising residents to keep small children and pets inside and keep trash bins tightly shut.” The Lyons Reporter tells residents
The main prey of mountain lions are deer and elk, but like most predators, they are opportunistic, and with the increase of people keeping llamas, goats, chickens, etc., the DOW says it is not unusual for lions to be seen at the wilderness/urban interface, as humans continue to encroach into the animal’s habitat. They advise adults to keep small children close when out for a walk or hike, and to keep pets indoors at night. If a lion is spotted, the DOW guidelines suggest you pick up small children, make yourself appear to be as large as possible, back away from the animal slowly (never run, it may trigger the “attack” response), and if possible, throw rocks or sticks to frighten the cat.
Note the total absence in both accounts of the first thought likely to enter a rural resident’s head: Shoot the %#@@$! Instead, locals are advised that kitty is just doin’ what comes naturally (“they are opportunistic”) in the face of oppression (“humans continue to encroach into the animal’s habitat”), and the proper response is to retire (slowly) and let it have its way, while taking precautions (“keep small children and pets inside”) and, in extremis, use the nuclear arm of Progressivism, a protest (“make a lot of noise [...] and appear as large as possible”). Whether or not signs and papier-maché puppets will make the Ultimate Weapon more effective is not addressed.
There is a technique in verbal conflict called the stone bucket. It consists of collecting the opponents’ statements and actions on a subject (the stones) and assembling them in a repository (the bucket), ready for use when the other guy overreaches and his own history can be flung con brio. In a day and age of cut-and-paste and near-free data storage, I wonder why it isn’t used more. In this case, the soothing advice to yield and appease could be very useful when kittycat overgeneralizes the concept of “prey” so as to include five-year-olds playing in the street.
