My Attitude and The Gallary of Grim News

The Gallary of Grim News: Progressive?

Since 2003 I've been following progressive media. They don't hesitate to report on the real issues that the main-stream media ignore at the behest of their corporate masters. You can find them on my Sources Page under "Alternative Media."

If your life is going well and you have achieved the American Dream, there's a chance you might not keep it for very long. Most of us have already lost.

I hear that my only recourse legally is voting, but I also hear that voting has been rigged. I hear the call for rallies and protests, but rallies and protests are met with violent opposition and police action.

I hear that outspoken activists get death threats and are potentially blacklisted from employment opportunities. I hear about all the things corporations get away with at the expense of their own workers and the taxpayers. I hear how politicians are legally bribed. I hear about possible threats to protected classes of people.

All I can do is cast a vote, crawl into a hole and pray. Listening to these people fills me with a sense of hopelessness. I was being ground into the dirt, but then I realized something. These people make a living doing what they do. They have an incentive to make things seem as bad as possible, not necessarily as bad as things really are.

They may be telling the truth, but are they exaggerating? Is most of it hyperbole? Do they spend as much time reporting the facts as they do speculating about the outcome? Not really. Many of them make all manner of extrapolation.

I'm cutting myself off from this clutch of Chicken Little Lefties, but I'm not going to join the Pollyannas on the right either. How many times over the last decade has some politician claimed there was a constitutional crisis or an eminent economic collapse? Too many for me to listen anymore.

Burning Ivory

Looking at these two images, what sort of thoughts emerge? Justice for poaching elephants for their ivory tusks? It seems like the right thing to do. Now imagine the perspectives of those who came to possess the ivory in these images. Those who still possess products made of ivory are reaping the reward of diminishing supply, not only because elephants are on the verge of extinction, but because the ivory seized from poachers is being destroyed. Does it now make sense to destroy the stockpiles of ivory seized by poachers?

Elephants are an intelligent and endangered species, I'm not advocating poaching elephants, I'm merely suggesting that storing seized ivory instead of destroying it might actually create a disincentive for poaching because its value will decline as the supply increases.

The futility of this thought exercise is that the value of ivory is so extremely high that it doesn't really matter much what happens to seized ivory. Destroying ivory seized from poachers has more of an emotional reward than an economic reward.

But what about those who own ivory, even passed down through generations? What kind of person would have the gall to continue to keep or display anything made of ivory? Would it even be socially acceptable to say the animal from which it came died of natural causes? Would it even be socially acceptable to display anything that was dead? It seems rational for hunting and fishing of species that are plentiful, at least among others who hunt and fish, but not so much anymore by most people.

It's fast becoming unpopular to capture and display live animals too. Would you seriously imagine yourself comfortably living in a zoo? Imagine what the animals must be experiencing. Some people think the animals don't know the difference, but those people don't understand the size of the animals natural habitat. Zoo animals are suffering.