Alert: Environmental and Human Health Effects of Radiofrequency (RF) Radiation

Mike Vandeman writes:

On 27 Apr 2007 16:29:04 -0700, (Bill Z.)
wrote:

Mike Vandeman writes:


Right Then you shouldn't have any hesitation to put your head in a
microwave oven. Sure. I hope you are putting your money where your
mouth is, and flooding yourself with radiation. Do you use a cell
phone? WiFi?

Why can't you ever answer a question? You're obviously hiding
something.

Because whether or not I use a cell phone or wifi is simply none of
your f___ing business. We went through this last year when you whined
about me not answering such questions. You should know the answer by
now. My personal purchasing decisions one way or the other are not
relevant to the discussion: those decisions would be based on my
personal needs.

If you want to "dis" cell phones, why don't you talk about the
*real* risks? For example:

1. Smashing into something at 60 mph because you were trying
to type in a text message instead of looking at the road.

2. Yapping away in a loud voice in a movie theater while the
film is playing and while sitting next to a bodybuilder who
is feeling very aggressive due to all the steroids he is
popping, and who is none too pleased at the noise you are
making. A few teeth go down your throat along with the
phone.

3. Leaving an explicit text message from your girlfriend on
the phone and then giving the phone to your wife for the day
(that has probably happened to someone). The only question is
what hits you first - the cell phone, the rolling pin, or the
frying pan.

Playing such silly games just makes you look like a fool.

I suggest you learn to read in context (but you do this enough that
everyone thinks you are just dishonest). You mentioned "cell phones
and similar radiation threats" (which is begging the question). Cell
phones put out a fraction of a watt of power, and are not designed to
cook meat. Anything similar would also put out similarly low levels
of non-ionizing radiation.

(note the lack of a reply - he has none).

--
My real name backwards: nemuaZ lliB

Mike Vandeman wrote in
:

On 27 Apr 2007 14:13:07 GMT, Chris wrote:

(Bill Z.) wrote in
:

"Jeff Strickland" writes:

YOU, Michael J Vandeman, have been bombarded with RF energy for
your
entire life. If you haven't any brain tumors already, then RF isn't
going to harm you, if you do have tumors, that explains alot.

Global Warming is turning out to be a hoax, this is the next
alarmist
wail to come from the environmental lobby.

Vandeman's idiotic rantings aside, global warming is not a hoax,
although it may be somewhat of a misnomer. I even heard about it
years ago in a graduate-level course on E&M (Electricity and
Magnetism) where a quick estimate of the earth's temperature given
the
incident energy from the sun and treating the earth as a blackbody
came out too low (the oceans should have been frozen). The
properties
of "greenhouse gases", CO2 specifically, was mentioned as the reason
the estimate was off.

The reason it is a misnomer is that what we are really doing is that
we are introducing gases into the atmosphere that are changing the
transparency of the atmosphere to blackbody radiation at around 300K
but not at the much higher temperature for sunlight (close to 6000
K).
We really do know how this part of it works - we can measure the
properties of these gasses in laboratory experiments, and blackbody
radiation was beaten to death in the early 20th century
(understanding
it was very useful in the development of quantum mechanics, so there
was a lot of incentive).

What is far less certain is how the weather and climate will
respond. The models, however, are getting better each year, if only
due to have faster computers with more and more memory. If you hear
someone trying to discredit it by saying A said X and B said Y,
check
the dates. The more recent results will be the most accurate (all
else being equal) because each year, we can throw more and more
computing resources at the problem.

Unfortunately, if you take a "we aren't 100 percent sure, so lets
ignore the problem" approach, you should also keep in mind that
doing
nothing is basically gambling that nothing bad will happen when all
your eggs are in one basket. From a risk management standpoint,
that
is simply not the prudent thing to do, and if we wait until there is
a
real crisis, it might be too late to avoid a catastrophy.
Meanwhile,
there are plenty of good reasons to reduce our emissions of
greenhouse
gases. For example, if we substantially reduce oil dependency world
wide by developing commercially viable alternatives, we can let the
Middle East sink into obscurity. With no money involved, there will
be nothing to fight over that need concern us.


I agree Bill. Otherwise this will be the first in the series of 'oils
wars'.

We (America) need to invest in renewable energy sources now (wind,
solar, hydro) and as a stop gap (I hate to say this, but ......) we
need
to build breeder reactors. Breeder would ensure that we there would
be
an unlimited amount of fuel for the future and as an added bonus we
could reduce the stores of highly radioactive waste from previously
wasteful reactors

That only shows how ignorant you are. The first priority is to reduce
energy use. There is no sustainable energy source large enough to
maintain current energy use, no matter how much research you do..

Here is a simple exapmle to demonstarte that you sir need to do your
homework.

If we take the total amount money that have been used to date on the
Iraq/Afganistamn war (MORE THAN $400 BILLION DOLLARS
http://nationalpriorities.org/index....per&Itemid=182)
we could purchase solar cells, place them on the nuclear testing grounds
of the 1940 - 1970 and TOTALLY ELIMINATE importing all forign oil. We
could take all oil burning/natural gas burning/coal fired electrical
plants OFFLINE. Phase out the internal combustion engin and go
electric. All this could be done in the next ten years.


If you would like to see my analysis of this issue I would be happy to
share it with you. Anybody can do the calcualtion/research, it all
available on the net.

Instead, we (Americans) will do nothing except bitch.

I will grant you you staement about reduction of energy use, but why
put a bandaid on a problem, when we can heal it (i.e. eliminate of
dependancy on forign oil)






The best part would that we could tell the Middle East 'Go eat sand"

Just like Bush: always the diplomat!


--
Posted via a free Usenet account from http://www.teranews.com

On Sat, 28 Apr 2007 01:57:02 GMT, (Bill Z.)
wrote:

Mike Vandeman writes:

On 27 Apr 2007 16:29:04 -0700, (Bill Z.)
wrote:

Mike Vandeman writes:


Right Then you shouldn't have any hesitation to put your head in a
microwave oven. Sure. I hope you are putting your money where your
mouth is, and flooding yourself with radiation. Do you use a cell
phone? WiFi?

Why can't you ever answer a question? You're obviously hiding
something.

Because whether or not I use a cell phone or wifi is simply none of
your f___ing business. We went through this last year when you whined
about me not answering such questions. You should know the answer by
now. My personal purchasing decisions one way or the other are not
relevant to the discussion: those decisions would be based on my
personal needs.

You are obviously afraid to reveal this information. The question is
WHY? Are you embarrassed to be using a cell phone? Or NOT to be using
a cell phone, after insisting that it is safe??? The world would like
to know.

If you want to "dis" cell phones, why don't you talk about the
*real* risks? For example:

1. Smashing into something at 60 mph because you were trying
to type in a text message instead of looking at the road.

2. Yapping away in a loud voice in a movie theater while the
film is playing and while sitting next to a bodybuilder who
is feeling very aggressive due to all the steroids he is
popping, and who is none too pleased at the noise you are
making. A few teeth go down your throat along with the
phone.

3. Leaving an explicit text message from your girlfriend on
the phone and then giving the phone to your wife for the day
(that has probably happened to someone). The only question is
what hits you first - the cell phone, the rolling pin, or the
frying pan.

Irrelevant, since you already know that I don't have a cell phone (I'm
more honest than you).
--
I am working on creating wildlife habitat that is off-limits to
humans ("pure habitat"). Want to help? (I spent the previous 8
years fighting auto dependence and road construction.)

Please don't put a cell phone next to any part of your body that you are fond of!

http://home.pacbell.net/mjvande

On 30 Apr 2007 14:45:38 GMT, Chris wrote:

Mike Vandeman wrote in
:

On 27 Apr 2007 14:13:07 GMT, Chris wrote:

(Bill Z.) wrote in
:

"Jeff Strickland" writes:

YOU, Michael J Vandeman, have been bombarded with RF energy for
your
entire life. If you haven't any brain tumors already, then RF isn't
going to harm you, if you do have tumors, that explains alot.

Global Warming is turning out to be a hoax, this is the next
alarmist
wail to come from the environmental lobby.

Vandeman's idiotic rantings aside, global warming is not a hoax,
although it may be somewhat of a misnomer. I even heard about it
years ago in a graduate-level course on E&M (Electricity and
Magnetism) where a quick estimate of the earth's temperature given
the
incident energy from the sun and treating the earth as a blackbody
came out too low (the oceans should have been frozen). The
properties
of "greenhouse gases", CO2 specifically, was mentioned as the reason
the estimate was off.

The reason it is a misnomer is that what we are really doing is that
we are introducing gases into the atmosphere that are changing the
transparency of the atmosphere to blackbody radiation at around 300K
but not at the much higher temperature for sunlight (close to 6000
K).
We really do know how this part of it works - we can measure the
properties of these gasses in laboratory experiments, and blackbody
radiation was beaten to death in the early 20th century
(understanding
it was very useful in the development of quantum mechanics, so there
was a lot of incentive).

What is far less certain is how the weather and climate will
respond. The models, however, are getting better each year, if only
due to have faster computers with more and more memory. If you hear
someone trying to discredit it by saying A said X and B said Y,
check
the dates. The more recent results will be the most accurate (all
else being equal) because each year, we can throw more and more
computing resources at the problem.

Unfortunately, if you take a "we aren't 100 percent sure, so lets
ignore the problem" approach, you should also keep in mind that
doing
nothing is basically gambling that nothing bad will happen when all
your eggs are in one basket. From a risk management standpoint,
that
is simply not the prudent thing to do, and if we wait until there is
a
real crisis, it might be too late to avoid a catastrophy.
Meanwhile,
there are plenty of good reasons to reduce our emissions of
greenhouse
gases. For example, if we substantially reduce oil dependency world
wide by developing commercially viable alternatives, we can let the
Middle East sink into obscurity. With no money involved, there will
be nothing to fight over that need concern us.


I agree Bill. Otherwise this will be the first in the series of 'oils
wars'.

We (America) need to invest in renewable energy sources now (wind,
solar, hydro) and as a stop gap (I hate to say this, but ......) we
need
to build breeder reactors. Breeder would ensure that we there would
be
an unlimited amount of fuel for the future and as an added bonus we
could reduce the stores of highly radioactive waste from previously
wasteful reactors

That only shows how ignorant you are. The first priority is to reduce
energy use. There is no sustainable energy source large enough to
maintain current energy use, no matter how much research you do..

Here is a simple exapmle to demonstarte that you sir need to do your
homework.

If we take the total amount money that have been used to date on the
Iraq/Afganistamn war (MORE THAN $400 BILLION DOLLARS
http://nationalpriorities.org/index....per&Itemid=182)
we could purchase solar cells, place them on the nuclear testing grounds
of the 1940 - 1970 and TOTALLY ELIMINATE importing all forign oil. We
could take all oil burning/natural gas burning/coal fired electrical
plants OFFLINE. Phase out the internal combustion engin and go
electric. All this could be done in the next ten years.

1. I don't think there's enough space there to provide that amount of
energy.
2. It is unfair to the wildlife to shade their homes like that. A MUCH
better solution would be to put those solar panels over all of our
roads, shading nothing but concrete & a few roadside plants.
--
I am working on creating wildlife habitat that is off-limits to
humans ("pure habitat"). Want to help? (I spent the previous 8
years fighting auto dependence and road construction.)

Please don't put a cell phone next to any part of your body that you are fond of!

http://home.pacbell.net/mjvande

Mike Vandeman writes:

On Sat, 28 Apr 2007 01:57:02 GMT, (Bill Z.)
wrote:

Because whether or not I use a cell phone or wifi is simply none of
your f___ing business. We went through this last year when you whined
about me not answering such questions. You should know the answer by
now. My personal purchasing decisions one way or the other are not
relevant to the discussion: those decisions would be based on my
personal needs.

You are obviously afraid to reveal this information. The question is
WHY? Are you embarrassed to be using a cell phone? Or NOT to be using
a cell phone, after insisting that it is safe??? The world would like
to know.

Vandeman, you are a moron. There is absolutely no reason for me to
divulge personal information about my purchasing decisions on a public
forum. Furthermore, I didn't even insist that cell phones were safe,
but rather just pointed out that your arguments against them were BS.
Finally, being "safe" is not a reason to purchase a cell phone and the
service you need to use it. That decision depends on quite a number
of factors that boil down to "am I getting enough to justify the
cost."

If you want to "dis" cell phones, why don't you talk about the
*real* risks? For example:

1. Smashing into something at 60 mph because you were trying
to type in a text message instead of looking at the road.

2. Yapping away in a loud voice in a movie theater while the
film is playing and while sitting next to a bodybuilder who
is feeling very aggressive due to all the steroids he is
popping, and who is none too pleased at the noise you are
making. A few teeth go down your throat along with the
phone.

3. Leaving an explicit text message from your girlfriend on
the phone and then giving the phone to your wife for the day
(that has probably happened to someone). The only question is
what hits you first - the cell phone, the rolling pin, or the
frying pan.

Irrelevant, since you already know that I don't have a cell phone (I'm
more honest than you).

I wasn't talking about you - any use of "you" in these examples was
clearly the "impersonal" use of the word, as a less stilted
alternative to "one".


--
My real name backwards: nemuaZ lliB

Mike Vandeman writes:

On 30 Apr 2007 14:45:38 GMT, Chris wrote:

Mike Vandeman wrote in
:

If we take the total amount money that have been used to date on the
Iraq/Afganistamn war (MORE THAN $400 BILLION DOLLARS
http://nationalpriorities.org/index....per&Itemid=182)
we could purchase solar cells, place them on the nuclear testing grounds
of the 1940 - 1970 and TOTALLY ELIMINATE importing all forign oil. We
could take all oil burning/natural gas burning/coal fired electrical
plants OFFLINE. Phase out the internal combustion engin and go
electric. All this could be done in the next ten years.

1. I don't think there's enough space there to provide that amount of
energy.
2. It is unfair to the wildlife to shade their homes like that. A MUCH
better solution would be to put those solar panels over all of our
roads, shading nothing but concrete & a few roadside plants.

LOL. Regardless of whether Chris estimated the land area accurately
enough, it sesm that our self-styled defender of animal rights wants
his beloved critters to live in an area with levels of radioactivity
that make them unsuitable for humans! :-)


--
My real name backwards: nemuaZ lliB

On 01 May 2007 17:31:29 -0700, (Bill Z.)
wrote:

Mike Vandeman writes:

On 30 Apr 2007 14:45:38 GMT, Chris wrote:

Mike Vandeman wrote in
:

If we take the total amount money that have been used to date on the
Iraq/Afganistamn war (MORE THAN $400 BILLION DOLLARS
http://nationalpriorities.org/index....per&Itemid=182)
we could purchase solar cells, place them on the nuclear testing grounds
of the 1940 - 1970 and TOTALLY ELIMINATE importing all forign oil. We
could take all oil burning/natural gas burning/coal fired electrical
plants OFFLINE. Phase out the internal combustion engin and go
electric. All this could be done in the next ten years.

1. I don't think there's enough space there to provide that amount of
energy.
2. It is unfair to the wildlife to shade their homes like that. A MUCH
better solution would be to put those solar panels over all of our
roads, shading nothing but concrete & a few roadside plants.

LOL. Regardless of whether Chris estimated the land area accurately
enough, it sesm that our self-styled defender of animal rights wants
his beloved critters to live in an area with levels of radioactivity
that make them unsuitable for humans! :-)

That's what it takes, to keep humans from invading their habitat. That
doesn't say much for us. Or you.

By the way, how come you didn't drop gratuitous physics jargon about
ionizing radiation, as you usually do? You are slipping!
--
I am working on creating wildlife habitat that is off-limits to
humans ("pure habitat"). Want to help? (I spent the previous 8
years fighting auto dependence and road construction.)

Please don't put a cell phone next to any part of your body that you are fond of!

http://home.pacbell.net/mjvande

On 01 May 2007 17:26:50 -0700, (Bill Z.)
wrote:

Mike Vandeman writes:

On Sat, 28 Apr 2007 01:57:02 GMT, (Bill Z.)
wrote:

Because whether or not I use a cell phone or wifi is simply none of
your f___ing business. We went through this last year when you whined
about me not answering such questions. You should know the answer by
now. My personal purchasing decisions one way or the other are not
relevant to the discussion: those decisions would be based on my
personal needs.

You are obviously afraid to reveal this information. The question is
WHY? Are you embarrassed to be using a cell phone? Or NOT to be using
a cell phone, after insisting that it is safe??? The world would like
to know.

Vandeman, you are a moron. There is absolutely no reason for me to
divulge personal information about my purchasing decisions on a public
forum. Furthermore, I didn't even insist that cell phones were safe,
but rather just pointed out that your arguments against them were BS.
Finally, being "safe" is not a reason to purchase a cell phone and the
service you need to use it. That decision depends on quite a number
of factors that boil down to "am I getting enough to justify the
cost."

I see: you didn't want us to interpret your failure to use a cell
phone as an admission that you consider them, in spite of appearances,
harmful.
--
I am working on creating wildlife habitat that is off-limits to
humans ("pure habitat"). Want to help? (I spent the previous 8
years fighting auto dependence and road construction.)

Please don't put a cell phone next to any part of your body that you are fond of!

http://home.pacbell.net/mjvande

Coal Interests Fight Polar Bear Action :: Unequivocal, Mike Vandeman,
"warming of the climate system is unequivocal"

http://www.statesman.com/blogs/conte...interests.html
Coal Interests Fight Polar Bear Action

An organization representing companies that mine coal and burn it to
make electricity has called on its members to fight the proposed
listing of the polar bear as an endangered or threatened species.

"This will essentially declare 'open season' for environmental lawyers
to sue to block viirtually any project that involves carbon dioxide
emissions," the Western Business Roundtable said in an e-mail.

To settle a lawsuit by environmental groups, the Department of
Interior announced last month that it would take a year to consider
whether global warming and melting Arctic ice justifies declaring the
bear "endangered" or "threatened" under the Endangered Species Act.

"This seems a little unfair, pitting all those big coal companies and
power companies against the poor polar bear," sniffed Frank O'Donnell,
president of Clean Air Watch.

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/20...urce=whitelist

Inside the secretive plan to gut the Endangered Species Act

Proposed regulatory changes, obtained by Salon, would destroy the
"safety net for animals and plants on the brink of extinction," say
environmentalists.

March 27, 2007 | The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is maneuvering to
fundamentally weaken the Endangered Species Act, its strategy laid out
in an internal 117-page draft proposal obtained by Salon. The proposed
changes limit the number of species that can be protected and curtail
the acres of wildlife habitat to be preserved. It shifts authority to
enforce the act from the federal government to the states, and it
dilutes legal barriers that protect habitat from sprawl, logging or
mining.

"The proposed changes fundamentally gut the intent of the Endangered
Species Act," says Jan Hasselman, a Seattle attorney with
Earthjustice, an environmental law firm, who helped Salon interpret
the proposal. "This is a no-holds-barred end run around one of
America's most popular environmental protections. If these regulations
stand up, the act will no longer provide a safety net for animals and
plants on the brink of extinction."

In recent months, the Fish and Wildlife Service has gone to
extraordinary efforts to keep drafts of regulatory changes from the
public. All copies of the working document were given a number
corresponding to a person, so that leaked copies could be traced to
that individual. An e-mail sent in March from an assistant regional
director at the Fish and Wildlife Service to agency staff, asking for
comments on and corrections to the first draft, underscored the
concern with secrecy: "Please Keep close hold for now. Dale [Hall,
director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service] does not want this
stuff leaking out to stir up discontent based on speculation."

Many Fish and Wildlife Service employees believe the draft is not
based on "defensible science," says a federal employee who asked to
remain anonymous. Yet "there is genuine fear of retaliation for
communicating that to the media. People are afraid for their jobs."

Chris Tollefson, a spokesperson for the service, says that while it's
accurate to characterize the agency as trying to keep the draft under
wraps, the agency has every intention of communicating with the public
about the proposed changes; the draft just hasn't been ready. And, he
adds, it could still be changed as part of a forthcoming formal review
process.

Administration critics characterize the secrecy as a way to maintain
spin control, says Kieran Suckling, policy director of the Center for
Biological Diversity, a national environmental group. "This
administration will often release a 300-page-long document at a press
conference for a newspaper story that will go to press in two hours,
giving the media or public no opportunity to digest it and figure out
what's going on," Suckling says. "[Interior Secretary Dirk] Kempthorne
will give a feel-good quote about how the new regulations are good for
the environment, and they can win the public relations war."

In some ways, the proposed changes to the Endangered Species Act
should come as no surprise. President Bush has hardly been one of its
fans. Under his reign, the administration has granted 57 species
endangered status, the action in each case being prompted by a
lawsuit. That's fewer than in any other administration in history --
and far fewer than were listed during the administrations of Reagan
(253), Clinton (521) or Bush I (234). Furthermore, during this
administration, nearly half of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
employees who work with endangered species reported that they had been
directed by their superiors to ignore scientific evidence that would
result in recommendations for the protection of species, according to
a 2005 survey of more than 1,400 service biologists, ecologists and
botanists conducted by Public Employees for Environmental
Responsibility, a nonprofit organization.

"We are not allowed to be honest and forthright, we are expected to
rubber stamp everything," wrote a Fish and Wildlife Service biologist
as part of the survey. "I have 20 years of federal service in this and
this is the worst it has ever been."

The agency has long seen a need to improve the act, says Tollefson.
"This is a look at what's possible," he says. "Too much of our time as
an agency is spent responding to litigation rather than working on
recovering the species that are most in need. The current way the act
is run creates disincentives for people to get involved with
recovering species."

Kempthorne, boss of the Fish and Wildlife Service, has been an
outspoken critic of the act. When he was a U.S. senator from Idaho in
the late 1990s, he championed legislation that would have allowed
government agencies to exempt their actions from Endangered Species
Act regulations, and would have required federal agents to conduct
cost-benefit analyses when considering whether to list a species as
endangered. (The legislation failed.) Last June, in his early days as
interior secretary, Kempthorne told reporters, "I really believe that
we can make improvements to the act itself."

Kempthorne is keeping good on his promise. The proposed draft is
littered with language lifted directly from both Kempthorne's 1998
legislation as well as from a contentious bill by former Rep. Richard
Pombo, R-Calif. (which was also shot down by Congress). It's "a wish
list of regulations that the administration and its industry allies
have been talking about for years," says Suckling.

Written in terse, dry legal language, the proposed draft doesn't make
for easy reading. However, the changes, often seemingly subtle,
generally serve to strip the Fish and Wildlife Service of the power to
do its stated job: to protect wildlife. Some verge on the biologically
ridiculous, say critics, while others are a clear concession to
industry and conservative Western governors who have long complained
that the act degrades the economies of their states by preventing
natural-resource extraction.

One change would significantly limit the number of species eligible
for endangered status. Currently, if a species is likely to become
extinct in "the foreseeable future" -- a species-specific timeframe
that can stretch up to 300 years -- it's a candidate for act
protections. However, the new rules scale back that timeline to mean
either 20 years or 10 generations (the agency can choose which
timeline). For certain species with long life spans, such as killer
whales, grizzly bears or wolves, two decades isn't even one
generation. So even if they might be in danger of extinction, they
would not make the endangered species list because they'd be unlikely
to die out in two decades.

"It makes absolutely no sense biologically," wrote Hasselman in an e-
mail. "One of the Act's weaknesses is that species aren't protected
until they're already in trouble and this proposal puts that flaw on
steroids."

Perhaps the most significant proposed change gives state governors the
opportunity and funding to take over virtually every aspect of the act
from the federal government. This includes not only the right to
create species-recovery plans and the power to veto the reintroduction
of endangered species within state boundaries, but even the authority
to determine what plants and animals get protection. For plants and
animals in Western states, that's bad news: State politicians
throughout the region howled in opposition to the reintroduction of
the Mexican gray wolf into Arizona and the Northern Rockies wolf into
Yellowstone National Park.

"If states are involved, the act would only get minimally enforced,"
says Bob Hallock, a recently retired 34-year veteran of the Fish and
Wildlife Service who, as an endangered species specialist, worked with
state agencies in Idaho, Washington and Montana. "States are, if
anything, closer to special economic interests. They're more
manipulated. The states have not demonstrated the will or interest in
upholding the act. It's why we created a federal law in the first
place."

Additional tweaks in the law would have a major impact. For instance,
the proposal would narrow the definition of a species' geographic
range from the landscape it inhabited historically to the land it
currently occupies. Since the main reason most plants and animals head
toward extinction is due to limited habitat, the change would strongly
hamper the government's ability to protect chunks of land and allow
for a healthy recovery in the wild.

The proposal would also allow both ongoing and planned projects by
such federal agencies as the Army Corps of Engineers and the Forest
Service to go forward, even when scientific evidence indicates that
the projects may drive a species to extinction. Under the new
regulations, as long as the dam or logging isn't hastening the
previous rate of extinction, it's approved. "This makes recovery of
species impossible," says Suckling. (You can read the entire proposal,
a PDF file, here.)

Gutting the Endangered Species Act will only thicken the pall that has
hung over the Fish and Wildlife Service for the past six years,
Hallock says. "They [the Bush administration] don't want the
regulations to be effective. People in the agency are like a bunch of
whipped dogs," he says. "I think it's just unacceptable to go around
squashing other species; they're of incalculable benefit to us. The
optimism we had when this agency started has absolutely been dashed."


http://www.earthjustice.org/news/pre...otections.html
Bush Administration Rewrite of Endangered Species Act Regulations
Would Gut Protections

Hush-hush proposal "a no-holds-barred end run around one of America's
most popular laws"

Washington, DC -- A secret draft of regulations that fundamentally
rewrite the Endangered Species Act was leaked to two environmental
organizations, which provided them to the press last night An article
in Salon quotes Earthjustice attorney Jan Hasselman saying, "The
proposed changes fundamentally gut the intent of the Endangered
Species Act."

The changes are fiercely technical and complicated, but make future
listings extremely difficult, redefine key concepts to the detriment
of protected species, virtually hand over administration of the act to
hostile states, and severely restrict habitat protections.

Many of the changes -- lifted from unsuccessful legislative proposals
from then-Senator (now Interior Secretary) Dirk Kempthorne and the
recently defeated congressman Richard Pombo -- are reactions to
policies and practices established as a result of litigation filed by
environmental organizations including Earthjustice.

"After the failure of these legislative proposals in the last
Congress, the Bush administration has opted to gut the Endangered
Species Act through the only avenue left open: administrative
regulations," said Hasselman. "This end-run around the will of
Congress and the American people will not succeed."

A major change would make it more difficult for a species to gain
protection, by scaling back the "foreseeable future" timeframe in
which to consider whether a species is likely to become extinct.
Instead of looking far enough ahead to be able to reasonably determine
whether a species could be heading for extinction, the new regulations
would drastically shorten the timeframe to either 20 years or 10
generations at the agency's discretion. For species with long
generations like killer whales and grizzly bears, this truncated view
of the future isn't nearly enough time to accurately predict whether
they are at-risk now.

"These draft regulations represent a total rejection of the values
held by the vast majority Americans: that we have a responsibility to
protect imperiled species and the special places they call home," said
Kate Freund, Legislative Associate at Earthjustice.

According to several sources within the Fish and Wildlife Service
quoted by Salon, hostility to the law within the agency has never been
so intense. "I have 20 years of federal service in this and this is
the worst it has ever been," one unnamed source is quoted as saying.

In addition, the proposal would allow projects by the Forest Service
and other agencies to proceed even if scientific evidence suggests
that the projects might drive species to extinction so long as the
rate of decline doesn't accelerate owing to the project.

The Bush administration's antipathy to the law is shown by the numbers
of species it has protected, in each case as the result of litigation
-- 57. By comparison, 253 species were listed during the Reagan
administration, 521 under Clinton, and 234 under Bush I.

The administration reportedly had expected to reveal the new
regulations in a few weeks. The draft regulations must be published in
the Federal Register for public comment before they can become final,
which is likely to be at least a year off.

Contact:

Jan Hasselman, Earthjustice, (206) 343-7340, ext. 25

Mike Vandeman writes:

On 01 May 2007 17:26:50 -0700, (Bill Z.)
wrote:

Mike Vandeman writes:

On Sat, 28 Apr 2007 01:57:02 GMT, (Bill Z.)
wrote:

Because whether or not I use a cell phone or wifi is simply none of
your f___ing business. We went through this last year when you whined
about me not answering such questions. You should know the answer by
now. My personal purchasing decisions one way or the other are not
relevant to the discussion: those decisions would be based on my
personal needs.

You are obviously afraid to reveal this information. The question is
WHY? Are you embarrassed to be using a cell phone? Or NOT to be using
a cell phone, after insisting that it is safe??? The world would like
to know.

Vandeman, you are a moron. There is absolutely no reason for me to
divulge personal information about my purchasing decisions on a public
forum. Furthermore, I didn't even insist that cell phones were safe,
but rather just pointed out that your arguments against them were BS.
Finally, being "safe" is not a reason to purchase a cell phone and the
service you need to use it. That decision depends on quite a number
of factors that boil down to "am I getting enough to justify the
cost."

I see: you didn't want us to interpret your failure to use a cell
phone as an admission that you consider them, in spite of appearances,
harmful.

What you "see" simply proves you are a complete and utter idiot!



--
My real name backwards: nemuaZ lliB