The Mustangs And The Gas-Company

Wild Mustangs are being rounded-up and captured in Nevada and Colorado. The operation to remove about 2,500 wild mustangs from publicly held land started at the end of December 2009. The stated reason for the round up of the horses is that there are too many of them and that there is not enough food and water for all of them. Awww, so humane, moving horses to a better place where they can receive food, water and veterinary care.

But methinks that is not the whole story. For a start the horses are being scared into corals by the use of two low-flying helicopters - this according to people who know more about horses than I do, is a tactic that will panic the horses and may well lead to extensive injuries to the animals, or even death. Furthermore, doing this in the depth of winter increases the risk of respiratory diseases in the horses.

The horses are then trucked to a holding area where they will receive veterinary care and food and water. So far so good, we may question the appropriateness of the timing of the operation but surely rescuing horses from land that can no longer support their growing population is a humane and laudable thing to do?

Well maybe, but let us just look behind the scenes. Who says that the land cannot support the horses living on it? Whose land are these horses living on? Who benefits from a reduced horse population? Who pays for the capture and removal of the horses?

When I studied biology and ecology years ago, we had a theoretical framework that basically boils down to the fact that there is a system of checks and balances that will be applied by nature to the growth of a population of animals if there is no human involvement in the situation. The theory went like this - in this example we will use rabbits.

You have a rabbit colony living on a piece of land. There is plenty of food, water and there are the usual natural predators as well. The rabbit population will increase because there is plenty of food etc and will decrease depending on predator population as well to some extent. Then there was a hard winter and a dry summer. There is not enough grass, not enough water, pregnant rabbits miscarry and baby rabbits die because their parents are unable to feed them. The population goes down. It is a very simplified example, of course there are other factors to take into consideration, but normally the size of a wild animal species population will be controlled by naturally occurring shortages and gluts of food, water and other factors. It is only when man becomes involved in the situation that the system does not work so well.

And of course, man is involved in this situation. Biologists who have studied the range lands and the health of the wild mustang populations living there, say there is nothing to indicate that the land is unable to sustain the current population and can see no reason to remove healthy horses from the land at all. The land in question is publicly held land, i.e. it belongs to the citizens of the 5 states involved in the removal of the horses. It is also the tax payers of those states who are paying for their own wild horses to be removed. That answers all but the most crucial question at all. Who benefits from the removal of these wild horses?

Enter, the Bureau of Land Management and the El Paso Natural Gas Corporation of Colorado Springs, CO. Apparently the Gas Corporation has managed to somehow acquire a right of way in this ecologically critical unprotected wild land, to lay down what is known as The Ruby Pipeline.

In a written response to questions posed by the Office of Energy Projects (an agency within the Department of Energy), a Ruby natural gas pipeline project consultant, Dan Gredvig, stated that Ruby will work with BLM to minimize wild horse and burro grazing along the restored ROW (right-of-way) for three years. Possible management actions would be to . . . reduce wild horse populations following BLM policy in appropriate management areas.

So to recap, wild horses are being terrorized by helicopters, put at risk of injury, death and respiratory diseases, removed from publicly held land, at the expense of the tax payer, so that a gas company can protect 'its right of way' over public land and lay its pipeline. Why is it that the tax payer has to pay for a private company to have rights over land that belongs to the public in the first place and why does the Bureau of Land Management lie about the reason for removing the horses?

Maybe it is time that the public stands up for the population of authentic American Wild Mustangs, before another company comes along needing to have some sort of access or right of way over public land, and requesting that the taxpayer again foots the bill for the removal of the land´s original inhabitants. Do not let big business steal your heritage here, please.

I enclose links of interest for those wanting to do more research in this matter.


Links of interest:
Ruby Pipeline Information
(http://americanherds.blogspot.com/2009/11/crunching-calico.html)

http://www.trib.com/news/state-and-regional/article_ba4c941a-cded-51bf-a33c-c9a84de2a181.html

http://www.ferc.gov/for-citizens/citizen-guides/citz-guide-gas.pdf

Pipeline Map:
http://www.rubypipeline.com/docs/Ruby%20Overview%20Map.pdf

Western Watersheds Project
http://www.westernwatersheds.org/

American Herds
http://americanherds.blogspot.com/

Freedom’s Escape & Roundup Report: http://humanitythrougheducation.com/

Video Overview of Calico horses and current roundup
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-0OK3i1YFI&feature=channel
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gl0keG49kQU

12.28.09 USA Today: “Activists Decry Wild-Horse Roundups”
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/environment/2009-12-28-horses_N.htm

Mestengo. Mustang. Misfit.
America’s Disappearing Wild Horses
http://www.wildhorsepreservation.com/resources/wild.html

Your Naked Body And What Comes Next?

They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. ~Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania, 1759

I have been wrestling with this post for more than a week now, and fear I will not be able to do it justice, because the topic is so complex and so large that it might take a whole book or more to do it justice. But I really need to write this post, because this concerns our most precious human right, our Liberty.

There are overwhelming contradictions in the story about the so-called 'Underwear Bomber', with the FBI changing its story about four times about how many people were involved and arrested, and the testimony of eye-witnesses on the airplane not being widely published, certainly not in the lame-stream press. There is grave doubt that the man being held is really a bomber, he is almost certainly a ´patsy´, set up in order to make the public so frightened that they will accept the most draconian of measures to ´protect´them from whatever terror their benevolent government says will come next.

But let us suppose for a moment that the man on the airplane was really a terrorist, and that he had really planned to blow up the airplane. Obviously he had not done his research very well, or he would have known that he could not get the explosive to explode unless he had a detonation cap, which he did not possess. So all he managed to do was warm up his own genitals. Now let us suppose he had been led through the ´new´scanner which is already available at Amsterdam Airport. According to people involved in the research and development of the scanner, the new technology would not have picked up the ´bomb´because it was made of light plastic (a syringe) - so the new naked body scanner would have let him pass, and our would be bomber would have been allowed to board the plane unhampered.

Therefore it beggars belief that in response to the 'underwear bomber' governments worldwide have declared that they will now install the new 'naked body scanners' at all airports. Not only that, no sooner had they declared this, but two days later the scanners are installed at so many airports that one can only assume they were already there and were just waiting for an 'incident' to make us accept that we have to have this technology.

Now, being a nurse, I am no prude. I have seen so many naked bodies that they mostly fail to interest me at all. And this is where critics of the scanner are making a fatal mistake. They are appealing to the public´s ´prudishness´and warning them that their children and spouses will been seen by ogling airport personal with genitals marked out in full detail, which is of course true. But that is NOT the big issue. When I was a child just after the second world war, I remember seeing pictures of naked prisoners lining up to get into the gas chambers, and as a child I could not believe that they would not have been ashamed to be seen naked by other people. But again, that was not the issue. The nakedness was just a small part of the terrorisation and humiliation. What happened next, the entry into the gas chamber with your child in your arms, and the slow suffocating death by Zyklon B is what mattered. The nakedness was unimportant in comparison with the next event.

And so it is with the new naked body scans. Yes of course, we would all prefer that our naked bodies are only seen by a limited number of people, and that we can control who sees us naked. But it is not the nakedness that is at issue here, it is the CONTROL by others ´for our own good' and 'our own protection' that matters. We are giving up an essential liberty, that of being a private person and protected by our clothes, by standing in line waiting for the next event. The next event is the total mapping of our body image, so that in addition to thumb and face scans, there now is a 360 degree image of our body, which even though we all outwardly are similar, is unique to each of us. These images will be stored and labelled with our names, contrary to what has been reported in the lame stream media.

In addition, the body scanning technology is not without medical risks, some of the people involved in the development of the scanners have stated that the radiation of the scanner can actually damage the DNA structure of the person being scanned, which has grave health consequences and may lead to various types of cancer.

At the moment, apparently only about one in 10 people travelling will be made to go into the scanner, but this figure is forecast to increase to the point where all travellers will have to pass through the scanners. Why am I reminded of animals waiting to be slaughtered and of prisoners of war waiting for their 'showers'.? Wake up and smell the coffee, this is nothing to do with your protection, this is to do with making a database of everyone, storing their 360 degree body scan and adding yet another layer to Big Brother´s surveillance methods. I shall not be scanned, not because I am ashamed of my body, but because it will not protect either you or me, it may cause illness, but most of all, because I will not give up my right to liberty for a supposed safety.