[Taxacom] Pro-natalism vs. biodiversity

[Kenneth Kinman]

Hi Fred,
      Well, we in the U.S. now have a more liberal executive branch than
we did a couple of years ago, so who knows what is possible.  Instead of
buying ten C-17 cargo planes for 2.5 billion dollars (which the Defense
Department says it doesn't need anyway), we could instead give 2.0
billion dollars that could help our disabled veterans get the help that
they sorely need, and still have half a billion dollars left over to buy
25 billion condoms for the poor women of the world.  And that is just a
single potential source of funds that are otherwise not really needed
except to make certain corporations even richer.    
        And as Obama noted in his recent speech, the Supreme Court has
now made it far easier for corporations to buy more Senate seats in the
future, and turn our legislative branch into even more of a circus that
gets even less done (other than making speeches).  Of course, we can
always hope that even a few of the many billionaires in the world could
privately step in and buy the same 25 billion condoms for 500 million
dollars.  It would go a long way to reducing human misery and also help
biodiversity in the long term at the same time.  It's not rocket
science, just COMMON SENSE.
        Then there are individuals who will spend over a hundred million
dollars on a single piece of metal that some people call "art".  That is
so removed from common sense that it is clearly a pathetic sign of how
wasteful and self-indulgent some humans can become and totally oblivious
to the world around them. It's not just the politicians, but those rich
people who spend money buying more politicians so that they can get even
richer and buy more so-called "art" to decorate their mansions.  The
only jobs that creates is for certain "artists" who are mostly already
rich themselves.  Wall Street must be overflowing with such art (much of
which many would label as a real rip-off).  Not to mention the creeps
who would treat people like crap and leave millions of dollars to care
for their pet dogs.  Capitalism could be "trickle-down", but it is now
so unregulated that it more often "trickle-up" with a little
"trickle-down" when they are forced to do so.  The poorest half of
humanity and a majority of non-human animals are just things such people
want to exploit even further.   
        --------Ken Kinman

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Fred wrote:
* sorry to rain on the parade, but our Conservative government has just
declared maternal & infant health to be its current motherhood & apple
pie issue, and when the minister responsible was interviewed about this
on the CBC this morning, the interviewer (who must share some
paraphyletic genes with Bull Dogs), went after her repeatedly on the
obvious correlates of maternal & infant health, but she couldn't get the
Minister to admit that family planning or any contraceptive or
abortion-like activities had anything to do with it. I've never heard
anything so persistently pronatalist, or, by extension, so
biodiversity-can-go-to-hellish. 
fred. 
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