Arizona Mountain Lions Given the Death Penalty

Three mountain lions were executed a few miles from the University of Arizona campus in Tucson on Tuesday morning, New Years Eve. The feline trio were found to be feeding on the remains of an unidentified human, probably a hiker on the popular Pima Canyon trail, although authorities say there is no evidence to show that the person was actually killed by the cats. 

The reasoning behind the killings was as usual. By feeding on human flesh, the mountain lions would acquire a taste for it and expand their diet to easily butchered men, women and children. Having some rudimentary form of communication with others of their species, it would be possible for these magnificent but evil carnivores to pass along the knowledge of human cuisine to them. Best idea is to just nip that in the bud.

It wouldn't make sense to stipulate that perhaps, as in other cases, there is an element of punishment involved. The cats ate a person. Wisconsin serial killers are incarcerated for that kind of behavior but would be shot if the law permitted it. Locking up the cougars, if they could even be captured alive, would be impractical. A zoo made up of man-eating carnivores might not appeal to the soccer mom contingent.

Leaving the remains of any mammal lying around is likely to attract almost any carnivore. If not the mountain lions, skunks, weasels, crows and vultures would, and in fact, probably did, gather a snack two from mr. or mrs. dead human. Nobody is looking for crows with human flesh on their breath, however. Nobody is worried about being killed by a crow.

  HuffingtonPost.com

But a mountain lion not only needs to watch its step around hikers, making a meal of a pet is also verboten. This cat, maybe, was feeding on a mixed-breed dog near bucolic Cascade, Idaho. It might be careless to let your beloved doggy family member roam about in cougar country but if it fails to return home it's not your fault. The problem is the cat, who should know that he's not to eat Lassie.  

Woman of the Year, Carole Ghosn

We don't know if Lebanese-Brazilian serial super auto executive Carlos Ghosn is any kind of a criminal or not. The Japanese could easily have an iron-clad case against the plutocrat. Nevertheless, his wife Carole is a modern-day heroine. According to various sources, including the man himself, his lovely wife engineered his escape from his house arrest that began in April after he had spent 120 days in detention. Ghosn had been released on bond of 1.5 billion yen or about $13.5 million, which will be confiscated.

His wife, from her home in the US, had hired a group of mercenaries who posed as a Gregorian band and smuggled Ghosn out of his Tokyo home in a musical instrument case and flew him to Istanbul and thence to Lebanon. It's refreshing to know that there are some women who are willing to assume risks themselves for their husbands, a practice that seems to have disappeared in the civilized world. 

Modern Technology

Isn't it interesting that the same society that can send objects far into space, communicate with and guide them and even return them to earth, uses 14th century technology that involves employing a rapid chemical reaction to drive a metal pellet through the body of someone who fails to obey the orders of a public employee?

The 1619 Project

The 1619 Project is an effort by the New York Times and associated historians to emphasize in education the role of slavery in the social, cultural and economic development of the United States. This has proven to be somewhat controversial, as this article in The Atlantic points out.

The long American intellectual hangover brought about by the peculiar institution, its ultimate rejection and its continuing societal influence is a daily feature of life across the fruited plain. One can't page through a newspaper or spend more than a few moments in other media without being reminded in no uncertain terms of white guilt in the commodification of blacks and their plight after their supposed attainment of liberty. 

No one, at least for public consumption, defends slavery today. Nonetheless, its residue, since the practice involved generally easily identifiable black Africans, seems to have persisted today in a negative regard for the descendants of slaves that is evident most of all in their economic status. The majority of blacks don't seem to have realized the American dream of financial success.

The ideas behind the 1619 Project, that date being selected because that's when the first slaves arrived on the continent, include their contribution to the nascent American economy as being crucial to the success of the country and that servitude was the impetus for the War Between the States.

It's accepted as a given that a shortage of labor existed in the colonies prior to the American Revolution and that compensation for this labor made slavery an attractive choice for southern agricultural pursuits. During their formative years, the colonies, which included the Dutch in the mid-Atlantic area, were a part of a nearly global explosion of ocean transportation driven by improvements in ship design and construction, new navigation techniques, exploration that included detailed maps, and demand for products found at other ends of the earth. The crews that manned these ships were exposed to dangers and living conditions unimaginable today. Square-rigger sailors reefed sails at night in torrential storms, walking out on pitching spars over seas where losing one's grip meant death by drowning in minutes with no hope of rescue. This was for low pay and terrible food. Press gangs circulated in European seaports to gather in drunken sailors to man both navy and merchant ships. Herman Melville accurately described life on the ocean in his books, one of which, White Jacket, led to congressional action on discipline in the US Navy. In other words, working the land was an attractive alternative to sailing the seven seas.

Yet, even so, southern planters bought expensive African slaves to work their tobacco and cotton farms. The reality is that these slaves were looked at in the same light as horses and oxen. They were valuable assets, property, that could be bought and sold, as were farm animals. Their breeding and use added to the profitability of an agricultural enterprise. This was a feature of agriculture for millennia and remains so today in some places. It was hardly unique to southern North America.

The 1619 Project stipulates that opposition to slavery was the primary impetus to the War Between the States. This is by no means universally accepted as fact. The 17th century was an era of exceptional turmoil in Europe and beyond. The Reformation, beginning with Luther's posting of his 95 theses on the door of Castle Church in Wittenburg, Saxony, on October 31, 1517, upset the religious and cultural order of Europe, and the rest of the world, in ways that are still being felt today. 

English Tudor King Henry VIII took advantage of the Reformation to establish the Church of England, his method to secure an heir to the throne when Pope Clement VII refused to go along with his proposed annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. Later, beginning in the early 17th century, Puritanism became a major force in anti-Catholic activity in England. Much of the immigration from the UK to North America was made up of Puritans disgusted with what they felt was the licentious behavior of Stuart England. They established their capital in the Massachusetts Bay Colony and were willing participants in the War of the Three Kingdoms, Oliver Cromwell's subjugation of the Stuarts and their Cavalier allies. The reality is that the American Revolution was another, later episode in that war. New England, and particularly Puritan Boston, was the center of revolutionary thought and activity, although some southern colonialists could see the advantages of breaking with the UK and were willing to take the risk of opposing the British crown across the Atlantic, especially with the assistance of French and Polish adventurers.

During the pre-revolutionary era the New England Puritans were pretty much left to their own devices by the UK crown. They were less occupied in defying the British, embroiled in their own problems on the continent, particularly with the Dutch, than they were with the native Americans that surrounded them. Already decimated by European diseases for which they had no immunity, the remaining fragment of the native population was still a problem for the Puritans. Despite some efforts at education and religious indoctrination, the Puritans carried on Cromwell's policy of death and destruction in their relations with the original inhabitants. KIng Phillip's War from 1675 to 1678 was an especially gruesome episode. This became the standard operating procedure for the expansion of the new republic to the Pacific Coast and beyond. "Manifest Destiny", became the rationale for the technologically superior post-Puritan march across the continent, just as it had for Cromwell's conquest of the Irish.

Abolitionist sentiment in the ante-bellum years also radiated from New England, with  reinforcement from British figures like William Wilberforce. Although slavery was a contentious issue at that time there were many other factors involved as well. The principle issue was not existing slavery but its extension to new states, states that were being carved out of territory that once belonged to the native Americans, now considered as vermin. The War Between the States could be called the last engagement of the War of the Three Kingdoms. It could also be said that a major impetus to the War Between the States was Preston Brooks' caning of neo-Puritan Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner on the senate floor in 1856, as recounted here. The North's victory, ultimately resulting in the death of over 600,000 men and destruction of millions of dollars in property, led to freedom and citizenship for blacks who had been slaves. Some of these newly-freed slaves, the Buffalo Soldiers, were organized into military units set up to wage war against the natives. In the end the natives, once owner-occupants of a continent, were shuffled off to the most remote, inhospitable parts of that continent, the areas least desired by the European invaders, to make their way as best they could. They did not become legal US citizens until the 1920's. Even today the US government reserves the right to determine if a group of native Americans can refer to itself as a tribe and be treated as one. The Pamunkey tribe, that once signed a treaty with the British crown in 1646 and one of whose members was the famous Pocahontas, wasn't accepted as a tribe by the federal government until 2015. 

If there is any new focus needed on American history it should primarily be on that of the native Americans. African-Americans today include elected officials like the president of the country, successful businessmen, influential and popular entertainers and respected sports heroes. Native Americans occupy none of those niches.   

 

  

Changing What?

 Absolutely the lamest form of political campaign verbiage. Everyone wants something or other to change. Mealy-mouthed politicians like the above attempt to appeal to this universal without going into specifics that would alienate at least some of the intended audience. Good to see that this dope has failed in whatever mysterious change he had in mind.

Money Guru James Rickards Says:

Financial avalanches are goaded by greed, but greed is not a complete explanation. Bankers' parasitic behavior, the result of a cultural phase transition, is entirely characteristic of a society nearing collapse. Wealth is no longer created, it is taken from others. Parasitic behavior is not confined to bankers; it also infects high government officials, corporate executives, and the elite social stratum.

James Rickards, The Death of Money, Portfolio/Penguin, 2014, pg. 267.

  

A Presidential Opinion

The Kaplan Collection

If the savage resists, civilization, with the ten commandments in one hand and the sword in the other, demands his immediate extermination.

President Andrew Johnson in a message to the U.S. Congress in 1867.