@enhydra lutris

we could consider the ancient wisdom:

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it" - Upton Sinclair

#2
selective and unidirectional. There are topics and ideas that are officially off limits there, end of story. It is officially and explicitly a propaganda site. One can have non-political or apolitical discussions and interactions, but one has to always be aware of all of the lines one cannot cross and things one cannot say, which is stultifying.

During the 2016 primary era, and for some time thereafter, Kos permitted enforcement of his poorly expressed rules to be taken over by roving mobs of censors looking for the slightest hint of incipient heresy, who would attack any poster of such with vindictive attacks on the posters intelligence, rationality, veracity, morals and ethics and wantonly throw slanders about racisim and sexism. Almost all of those folks are still there and, afaik, still act in that fashion, though a bit more circumspectly now.

The end result is that it is impossible to conduct an intelligent, rational discussion of a great many things there. It is like being in a small community exhibiting all of the worst excesses of all of the most repressive narrow-minded churches and ideologies in history. It is fine for swapping recipes or non-controversial information about scientific or similar information, but that is about it. I seriously doubt that it is capable of being converted to a venue for free and open discussion, such as c99p is, even if Kos were to suddenly have some sort of epiphany and try to bring that about. It has developed a culture of ideological repression that is a simple reflex on the part of far too many of its members.

@enhydra lutris these chemicals have a whole range of effects not just cancer. We know these chemicals are awash in our newborns. "A study of blood from the umbilical cords of newborns found their blood tainted with traces of nearly three hundred synthetic chemicals".

Many of these pollutants have been found to be toxic, to cause or contribute to what is increasingly understood as an epidemic of serious chronic childhood illnesses. Among environmentally linked health problems are birth defects, several forms of cancer, asthma, and a range of neurological illnesses that include lower IQs, learning disabilities, attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, and autism. The rising incidence of reproductive problems, including infertility and miscarriages, are also understood by many scientists and physicians to have environmental roots.
from Poisoned Profits: the toxic assault on our children by Philip Shabecoff and Alice Shabecoff

#3
look at all aspects of health, birth weights, the average age of puberty, average fertility of adults, etc. I personally think that we are too focused on cancer, that if we started seeing large numbers of persons born with missing limbs our medical and epidemiological professionals would simply note the lack of cancers and move on.

@dystopian right on and thanks for those links, I will read more tomorrow. It is late for me but I wanted to post this in today's thread. Dumping a ton of rodenticide in the Pacific food chain doesn't seem so smart right now, if ever. I don't know.

Searching for Balance in an Underwater World Gone Upside Down

For many locals in our Northern California community, reading that we are in the midst of a devastating imbalance within our Pacific coastal intertidal zones will not come as a surprise. This is due to a chain of events spanning almost 200 years. This story is one of ripples, spreading ever outward: one imbalance leads to another, and another.

To learn the history of Fort Ross is to know the plight of the sea otter and to understand how the effects of our human practices can have long term, sometimes catastrophic results. The Sonoma Coast has had a regional extinction or extirpation of sea otters for the last 100+ years, since the Russian, American, and British over hunted the animals. These furs were so valuable that a hunter could earn a year’s salary with just one pelt.

The sea otter is an apex predator. It consumes 20 to 30 percent of its body weight daily, helping to keep other species under control. The sea otter has been gone from the Sonoma Coast for over 100 years, but it was a series of subsequent events that caused our ecosystem to crash.
...

“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.” -- John Muir

good luck

#4 I agree the guv poison and killing programs for coyotes and such (wolves, grizzlies) is out of bounds and control. It is merely doing sagebrush rebellion ranchers bidding for them. Rodent removal on seabird nesting islands is not comparable.

This following sentence in the quote doesn't make sense:

For hundreds of years, mice have called the Farallon Islands home and the invasion population of rodents there is now extreme.

An invasion population is generally non-native, how can a population that has been there hundreds of years be an invasion population? I think might be a native sps., but the problem is from non-native invader?

Rodents, generally introduced rats, but others like mice have been one of seabird breeding colonies greatest problems. All over the world it remains one of seabird's biggest problems. Cats, rats, goats, pigs, etc., all are everywhere man went, of curse, pun intended, and have wiped out many birds, including seabird nesting colonies, all over the world. There are many success stories of birds being found on an offshore islet or stack that the rats didn't get to, and that being all that ended up saving the species (Bermuda Petrel). Removing (usually non-native) cats, rats, mice, some places it is mongoose, is critical to saving many species.

In socal at the Channel Isls., Anacapa Island has had great success with their seabird nesting since removing the rats. They were wiping everything out. To me the native species have priority. They are the part of the ecosystem that belongs there. The introduced non-natives are invariably invasive (see kudzu, fire ants, etc.) pests if not outright disasters. We screwed it up by bringing a pest into the ecosystem, we should remove it to restore the balance of nature.

Several groups fought the removal at Anacapa Isl. of non-native rats that are decimating native animal populations because rats I suppose are cuter than Cassin's Auklets or Xantus's (now Scrips's) Murrelets. The Anacapa project was aerial dropping of rodenticide. It worked. As it has on many islands. Save the rats means kill the birds where nesting colonies on islands.

Note at the Pribilofs in Alaska another great seabird colony site, it was all hands on deck when ONE rat was seen. Thankfully it was later found dead. That bullet appears dodged.

The Farallons are awesome, I have been to them twice. I was a guide around the socal channel islands for many years. Glad to see the rats go!

https://www.islandconservation.org/

soemthing here about the Anacapa rat removal...
https://www.nps.gov/chis/index.htm

https://www.nps.gov/chis/learn/news/anacapa-island-recovery.htm

https://www.latimes.com/local/la-xpm-2013-mar-07-la-me-0308-rats-anacapa...

https://www.islandconservation.org/anacapa/
===
http://www.issg.org/pdf/publications/Island_Invasives/pdfHQprint/1Witmer...

a snippet

Introduction
Introduced rodents pose a serious threat to the native flora and fauna of islands (Moors and Atkinson 1984; Veitch and Clout 2002; Engeman et al. 2006). Rodents can be prolific on islands where they have few or no predators. Their omnivorous foraging has led to the endangerment or extinction of numerous island species (Moors and Atkinson 1984; Witmer et al. 1998; Veitch and Clout 2002; Engeman et al. 2006,). Most seabirds that nest on islands have not evolved to deal with mammalian predators and are very vulnerable to introduced rodents and other species introductions. There has been a concerted worldwide effort to eradicate introduced rodents from islands with numerous successes (Howald et al. 2007). These efforts have relied heavily on the use of rodenticides (Howald et al. 2007; Witmer et al. 2007c). In this paper, we review the strategies and methods used and success with rodent eradications from islands in the USA.
We also provide the first comprehensive list of attempted eradications.

@enhydra lutris

after 370 years of the Romans hiring foreign mercenaries to do their dirty work "Vortigern" says "great idea! what could go wrong with that?"

#10
England for 370 years, and then bailed and fled. The Scots (Stuarts) ruled all of it for about 110 years, and stayed, though sometimes unwillingly. The Roman legacy is some oft weird common law and assorted Latin place names. The Scottish legacy is a pretty fair imitation of the Irish uisce beatha, da kine mo bettah, IMO