The polar bear disaster

A sidelight on the strange world of climate hysteria and what Official Science has done to us ....

The "endangered polar bear" fiasco is an example of the madness of manufactured ignorance. The new Bush administration position, putting forth polar bears as endangered but attempting to not invoke the full regulatory apparatus of the Endangered Species Act, is an incoherent piece of cynical political maneuvering. The decision should be rescinded immediately.

For one thing, the decision puts us in immediate conflict with Canada and other Arctic-bordering countries. Polar bear numbers are healthy, and there are more than a few decades ago. ("Endangered" means populations so small they risk not being able to reproduce themselves.) Instead, the new policy is based on speculative judgments about the Arctic ice shrinking, in spite of the facts: the polar bear population is growing, most of the Arctic ice is not shrinking, the Antarctic is cooling and icing up, and polar bears range mainly along shorelines. There's no scientific basis for considering them endangered.

Here's another case of the authoritarian mummery of Official Science putting science and scientists into conflict with policy. What do they say? What they know (polar bears aren't in danger)? Or, what they're supposed to say? Climate hysteria has loaded a wide range of scientific subjects, journals, scientists, and professional societies with this dilemma. Go with the politics, be a "player" - or stick to the science? As scientists, what do we traffic in: authority, or knowledge?

The Bushies seem to think this will mollify some people, but without giving the environmentalist wackos a powerful new legal lever to start demolishing industrial civilization in the US. Here again, we see a breakdown of governmental sovereignty, how government's power, especially under a weak president, becomes fragmented, taken over by narrow interest groups, and abused at the expense of society as a whole. The situation is frightening, opening up a limitless dictatorship over everyday life by environmentalist and legal fanatics.

Kangaroo au Canadien

Friends have asked me about the Kafka-esque proceedings going on next door in Canada concerning Mark Steyn, accused of "intolerance" towards Muslims for excepts published from his book, America Alone. I haven't blogged about it because I don't have much to add.

The case is frightening. Canada has ludicrously misnamed "human rights" commissions (originally formed to investigate prejudice in employment and housing) that have been spending the last few years issuing "gag" rules against public figures whose statements are deemed "hate speech." They aren't real courts of law, they have none of the usual legal procedures for protection of the accused, and so on. But their rulings have the force of law nonetheless. In a next-door, supposedly democratic country, free speech is a light that is going out. The commissions have a 100% "conviction" rate, so it's unlikely Steyn has any future journalistic career in Canada. Fortunately for him, he lives in the US and can still publish here.

Nothing could illustrate better the difference between PC "tolerance" and "human rights," on the one hand, and human rights on the other. The case was originally brought by the Canadian version of the same Islamic front groups familiar (although less powerful) here, like CAIR, all sponsored by big money from the Persian Gulf. In Britain and other countries, lawsuits and bureaucratic rulings of a similar type and with similar motives and goals have been brought against truth-tellers.

Americans should count themselves very lucky to have the First Amendment speech protections that they do. Even other democracies have generally weaker (sometimes much weaker) protections. Legalized harassment and repression have already come to a country next door - let's hope they don't land here too.

If the generally boobish American news media had anything serious to say, they'd be all over this stunning threat to free speech. But the media, for the most part, is no longer interested in free speech - they're interested in suppressing the free speech of others and generally acting on the side of the powerful. Many of them today are no longer journalists, but would-be court flunkies.

Jihadi groups can't win except through force or the threat of force. We've proven we can match force against their force, even if we can't seem to aim straight at times. But conflicts like this are ultimately and always political at bottom. Court victories, "human rights" commissions harassing journalists, speech suppression, all on behalf of jihad, are just as much defeats for us as some idiot blowing himself up on a subway or killing "deviant" Muslims. The means are different, but not the end.

It might be time for some Canadians to consider emigration or civil disobedience. Normally, we associate "Canadian" with being nice, not thuggery like this.

Oh god, she's done it again ... :)

Our polar correspondent, Jen of Nunavut, after a long, hard winter, joins the Inuit in doing more un-P.C. things with polar bears.

Rock the casbah

This posting isn't really about that venerable song by the Clash ... but it sounded cool :)

This weekend's Wall Street Journal had a very interesting article on the possibility of an independent and critical scholarship of the Qu'ran, similar to the sort of thing that Christian and, later, Jewish scholars achieved in the last 300 years with regards to the Hebrew and Greek scriptures that make up the Bible. German scholars at the forefront of "Oriental" research made a start from the end of the nineteenth century, until the rise of the Nazi regime. The project was suspended and much of its materials (photos of old Quranic texts taken in the 1920s and 30s) apparently lost during the war. The subject is also, of course, one of extreme sensitivity in the Muslim world. Nine years ago, the Atlantic Monthly published a prescient article on the subject, and the politico-religious minefield around it, available if you can find a print or online database copy of their January 1999 issue. (It's available on the Atlantic site only to their subscribers.)

The Journal article announces a stunning discovery: the photo archive was not actually lost. It survives and has been made publicly available. See here and here for more.

POSTSCRIPT: Here we go again with the mindcrime of publishing the Danish-Muhammad cartoons, accompanied by the same weird mixture of the medieval and the postmodern (charges of blasphemy mixed with bogus charges of victimhood). See the brilliant videos from the ludicrously misnamed Ontario "Human Rights" Commission here.

No Danes or Canadians have committed violence against Muslims because of the cartoons.

Now we know who's coming to dinner

Now I've done it: my Nunavut correspondent has decided to go all the way with polar bear meat. I feel somehow responsible - hope it was good :)

POSTSCRIPT: Bears hunting humans, humans hunting bears ... somehow, it all evens out. It's part of the circle of life :)

Guess who's coming to dinner?

So here's the rest of the story about polar bears (ursus maritimus), the parts never mentioned on the boob tube.

A warming of the Arctic (at least a mild warming) would be a boon for the bears, since they range mostly over land and feed on aquatic creatures along the shore, like fish and seals. Less ice -> more food for the bears. The warming trends are ambiguous: no sign of ice loss or warming on the Canadian/Greenland/Atlantic/European side; some signs on the Asiatic/Pacific side.

The Inuit (Eskimos) of the Arctic are permitted by the US and Canadian federal governments to hunt polar bears, to an extent. Polar bears are not currently listed as endangered - for one thing, their population is increasing. It's not clear to me why that is. The Inuit population of the Canadian north is increasing rapidly. With more humans, there's a lot of trash 'n' stuff for bears to feed on, and they, like their more southerly brown and black bear cousins, have definitely lost their shyness around humans. They routinely come to town looking for, and finding, things to eat. Right now, there's no reason whatever to think that polar bears are in any long-term danger.*

Environmentalists and the media systematically ignore or hide the full truth about polar bears. They are incredibly dangerous to humans, and anyone living in the north is permitted to shoot and kill them in self-defense. Such shootings run at a few hundred a year. Unlike their temperate cousins, polar bears hunt humans for food. The reason is simple: polar bears hunt seals for food - seals are soft, hairless, and blubbery, and make a fine extended meal. Humans are soft, hairless (mostly), and blubbery too.** Not for nothing are polar bears referred to as "land sharks." (For an example, see here.) Read more about them here from a Canadian living in the Arctic.

Posters like this are common in Nunavut, the Canadian province newly created from the Northwest Territories for the Inuit. The strange symbols are a modern alphabet for the Inuit language. A polar bear wandering through town was recently shot dead in Cape Dorset (Baffin Island) by a teenage Inuit boy.

The Inuit are permitted to turn polar bear skins into pelts, blankets, and rugs. Hunting tags are free for them. For outsiders, they cost about $30,000. There's some trade in these items, although restricted by both US and Canadian law. A full polar bear skin costs about $20,000.
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* Endangered means population below a certain size and greatly shrunken habitat. The polar bears are not close to this. The doomsday scenarios are hysteria built on speculation built on hysteria. The "global warming" craze as a whole resolves down into many such deceptions and half-truths.

** Which just adds one more support for the "aquatic ape" theory about humanoid ancestors - even though most biologists don't like the theory or aren't even aware of it. Do polar bears know something biologists don't?